Every 15 May is a trigger for a journey back in time. And for an unfathomable reason each such journey conjures up a different aspect of the Nakba, the “Catastrophe” that saw the Palestinians dispossessed from their homes in 1948. This year, more than anything else, I am preoccupied with the continued apathy and indifference of the Western political elite and media to the plight of the Palestinians. Even the horror of the Yarmuk Refugee Camp in Syria has not associated in the minds of either politicians or journalists the possible connection between saving the refugees there and their internationally recognised right of return to their homeland. Israel's medical treatment of Islamists fighting the Al-Assad regime in Syria, healing them and sending them back to the battlefield, has been hailed as a humanitarian act by the Jewish state. But the latter's exceptional refusal, when compared to all the other, and much poorer, neighbours of Syria, to accept even one refugee from the Syrian mayhem has gone unnoticed. It is this international exceptionalism and intentional blindness that throws me back to 1948 and to the period between June and October of that year. On 11 June a truce was announced by the UN between the Zionist forces and the units of the Arab armies that had entered Palestine on 15 May. The truce was needed for both sides to rearm, and it benefited the Jewish side and disadvantaged the Arab side, as Britain and France had embargoed arms shipments to the Arab states, while the former Soviet Union and the Czech Republic had rearmed the Jewish forces. By the end of the truce it had was clear that the all-Arab initiative to salvage Palestine was doomed to fail. The truce enabled UN observers to see for the first time and at close hand the reality on the ground in the wake of the organisation's peace plan. What they saw was ethnic cleansing in high gear. The principal preoccupation of the new Israel at that moment was to use the truce to accelerate the de-Arabisation of Palestine. This began the moment the guns were silenced and was enacted in front of the eyes of the UN observers. By that second week of June, urban Palestine was already lost and with it hundreds of the villages around the main towns were gone. Towns and villages were emptied by the Israeli forces. The people were driven out, many of them long before the Arab units entered Palestine, but the houses, shops, schools, mosques and hospitals were still there. What could not have escaped the UN observers was the sound of bulldozers flattening these buildings and surrounding landscape, now that there was no clatter of shooting around them. What they heard and saw was adequately described as an “operation of cleansing” by the person appointed by the new regime to oversee the whole operation, the head of the Settlement Division in the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Yosef Weitz. He duly reported, “We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the land for cultivation and settlement. Some of these [villages] will become parks.” He proudly scribbled in his diary his amazement at how unmoved he was by the sight of bulldozers destroying villages. This was not an easy or a short operation. It continued when the fighting resumed for ten days at the end of the first truce, during a second truce, and in the final stages of the war when the troops that had come from Iraq, Syria and Egypt were retreating, wounded and defeated, back home. The war in the autumn of 1948 was prolonged because Palestinian villagers, volunteers from Lebanon and some Arab army units tried in vain to defend isolated Arab villages in the north and south of Palestine. Thus, more villages came under the boot of the JNF and were placed at the mercy of its bulldozers. The UN observers recorded quite methodically the dramatic transformation of Palestine from an Arab eastern Mediterranean country into a kaleidoscope of new Jewish colonies surrounded by European pine trees and huge water systems draining the hundreds of creeks that flowed through the villages, thereby erasing a landscape that can only be imagined today from several relatively untouched corners of Galilee and the West Bank. By the beginning of October 1948, the UN observers had had enough. They decided to write a report to the organisation's secretary-general, summing up the situation in the following way. The Israeli policy, they explained, was made up of “uprooting Arabs from their native villages in Palestine by force or threat.” They recorded the process in full, and their report was sent to the heads of all the Arab delegations at the UN. The observers and the Arab diplomats tried to convince the UN secretary-general to publish the report, but to no avail. However, one American diplomat, Mark Ethridge, the US representative to the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) — the body set up under UN Resolution 194 from 11 December 1948 in order to prepare a peace plan for post-Nakba Palestine — tried desperately to convince the world that some facts on the ground were still reversible and that one of the means of stopping the transformation was the repatriation of the refugees. When the PCC convened a peace conference in Lausanne in Switzerland in May 1949, Ethridge was the first American diplomat to point clearly to Israeli policy as the main obstacle to peace in Palestine. The Israeli leaders were arrogant, euphoric and unwilling to compromise or make peace, he told John Kimchi, a British journalist working for the newspaper Tribune at the time. Ethridge did not give up easily on the issue of repatriation, and he had some original ideas. He thought that if he could satisfy Israel's territorial appetite, this would enable some sort of normalisation to take place in post-Mandate Palestine. He suggested that Israel could annex the Gaza Strip and cater for the refugees there by allowing them to return to their homes in the villages and towns of Palestine. Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion liked the idea, as did most of his ministers. The Egyptian government was also in favour. One doubts whether Ben-Gurion would have allowed the refugees to stay in Gaza, but of course there is no telling. Encouraged, Ethridge asserted that now his government could convince the Israelis to repatriate a significant additional number of refugees. But Israel refused, and the Americans denounced the “obstinacy” of the Israeli politicians. The Americans decided to suspend the peace effort altogether, unless Israel changed its mind. This is hard to believe today. The Israeli foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, was worried about the American pressure that was accompanied by a threat of sanctions and suggested that Israel accept 100,000 refugees but drop the Gaza proposal. What is remarkable here in hindsight is that American diplomats regarded both numbers, the 250,000 refugees in Gaza and the 100,000 offered by Sharett, as insufficient. The US diplomat George McGhee genuinely wished to see as many refugees return as possible since he believed the reality on the ground was still reversible. However, the months went by, and by the end of 1949 US pressure had subsided. Jewish lobbying, the escalation of the Cold War around the world and a UN focus on the fate of Jerusalem as a result of Israel's defiance of its decision to internationalise the city were probably the main reasons for this. It was only the Soviet Union that kept reminding the world, through its ambassador to the UN, and Israel, through bilateral correspondence, that the new reality Zionism had created on the ground was still reversible. By the end of the year, Israel had retracted from its readiness to repatriate the 100,000 refugees. Jewish settlements and European forests were hurriedly planted over the hundreds of villages in rural Palestine, and Israeli bulldozers demolished hundreds of Palestinian houses in urban areas to try to wipe out the Arab character of Palestine. Israeli bohemians, yuppies and desperate newly arrived Jewish immigrants then “saved” some of these houses, settling in them and having their possession approved in retrospect by the government. The beauty of the houses and their locations made them excellent real estate investments, with rich Israelis, international NGOs and foreign legations favouring them as their new headquarters. The daylight pillage that began in June 1948 moved the representatives of the international community, but it was ignored by those who sent them, whether the editors of journals, the captains of the UN, or the heads of international organisations. The result was a clear international message to Israel that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, illegal, immoral and inhuman as it was, would be tolerated. The message was well received in Israel and immediately implemented. The land of the new state was declared exclusively Jewish, the Palestinians remaining on the land were put under military rule that denied them basic human and civil rights, and plans to take those parts of Palestine not occupied in 1948 were put in motion. When these were occupied in 1967, the international message was already incorporated into the Zionist DNA of Israel: even if what you do is watched and recorded, what matters is how the powerful people in the world react to your crimes. The only way to ensure that the pen of the records is mightier than the sword of colonisation is to hope for a change in the balance of power in the West and in the world in general. The actions of civil society, conscientious politicians, and emerging new states have not yet changed that balance, however. But one can take courage from the old olive trees of Palestine that succeed in reappearing beneath and between the European pine trees and from the Palestinians who now populate exclusive Jewish towns built on the ruins of the villages in the Galilee. One can also find inspiration in the steadfastness of the people of Gaza, Bilin and Araqib, and hope that the balance will one day change for the better. The writer is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK.
