New History and Also New Mythology

12 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation That Israel Was Founded On Ethnic Cleansing

Anti-Zionist activists often claim Palestinians were victims of ethnic cleansing during Israel’s War for Independence, and this is why the land is “stolen” and also why Israel is an illegitimate state which should be replaced.

It’s true that after its 1948 War for Independence, Israel mythologized its actions during the war. In this founding myth, Israel exaggerated its own weaknesses and hid its own role in the Palestinian Nakba, claiming Arab leaders broadcast an evacuation order to the Palestinians, leading them to leave voluntarily to wait out the war.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, an Israeli scholar named Benny Morris along with a few other “New Historians” gained access to documents contemporary with the war and demonstrated the falseness of this mythology. Their work effectively overturned the initial Israeli narrative that Palestinians simply fled of their own volition during the war because of Arab radio broadcasts telling them to. I think there’s real merit in this work, and you’ll notice in my history of the conflict I didn’t say “Palestinians fled”. What I said is the early Israelis, many of whom were survivors of the holocaust and of Arab pogroms, didn’t want to live with neighbors who were Nazi sympathizers and those who supported the Arab violence in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s, hence they created many refugees.

Go deeper on Israel’s role in the Palestinian Nakba with Benny Morris:

Benny Morris on 1948, Part 1

Benny Morris on 1948, Part 2

That said, there is also no dispute that many Palestinian Arabs simply fled out of general fear and from rumors. Many of these rumors were spread by Arab leaders, and at least some Palestinians were in fact urged to leave by Arab leadership “until the war was over” and also to take up arms. The Arab radio broadcasts, from multiple Arab parties, urging the Palestinians to leave their homes are also well-documented, with many contemporary testimonies from Palestinians that they were following those broadcasts. Arab leaders themselves were frightening others to leave by spreading lies and exaggerations about Israeli actions. They did this partly because they thought Palestinian civilians would be in the way during the fighting and partly to try to get as many of them as they could angry enough to take up arms and join the fight.

What Benny Morris concludes is that any beliefs about degrees of causality does not include any systematic attempt at ethnic cleansing. Rather, he concludes the Nakba was the result of the “fog of war”, which included many factors: tactical moves by Israelis to win battles, fears of Palestinians about what might happen if they stayed based on rumors, revenge operations by certain Israeli regiments, and actions by Arab leaders backfiring, which were designed to arouse the Palestinian population.

A cadre of scholar activists who came out of this group of New Historians such as Norm Finkelstein, Illan Pappe and the other “Post-Zionists” who are mostly political advocates, and mostly Marxist activists who are posing as scholars and falsifying and warping historical records for their political ends. They begin with conclusions and find ways of telling the history which support what their audience wants to hear.

We have a concrete example of this in the massacre at Tantura. An Israeli grad student, Teddy Katz, working on a master’s thesis, elicited testimonial evidence of a massacre and mass burial in the village of Tantura ( which did happen during the war ). Israel tried to suppress this finding but the evidence is pretty good that something bad happened. The evidence is also good that Katz’s witnesses either falsified or exaggerated its size through stories told decades later ( the truth seems to be about a dozen people killed, and not the systematic massacre of a village as claimed by Palestinians Katz interviewed ).

What does get suppressed by Palestinian activists though is the nature of the best evidence, which is hardly ever cited ( instead citing eye witness accounts, mostly by Palestinians, taped by Katz decades later ). This evidence consists of diary entries by actual Haganah ( the precursor to the IDF ) soldiers made contemporaneously with the killings. This contemporaneous diary evidence describes a handful of rogue soldiers who were holocaust survivors or whose families had been killed by Arabs, in the words of the diarist, murdering some of the citizens of Tantura as revenge killings. The other soldiers were not happy about it but “understood their actions” and helped to bury the bodies and cover it up.

This is good evidence because it is written, contemporaneous and from a private diary, where there would be no political motivation to modify or falsify the story.

The post-Zionist/New Historian conclusion about Tantura is that “the IDF carried out a village massacre” while the historical evidence actually supports “rogue soldiers carried out a revenge shooting of a dozen or so people and other soldiers helped them cover it up”. Post-Zionists like Norm Finkelstein never, ever cite this contemporaneous diary evidence.

The distinction between the two interpretive conclusions above isn’t small. The post-Zionist claim is used as evidence that the Haganah was systematically exterminating Palestinians, as part of a larger Zionist project to ethnically cleanse the population. The actual event supports the claim that the IDF soldiers were not supposed to be harming civilians, but war is hell and emotional, and soldiers cover for each other.

And then there is the history which the anti-Zionists leave out. Who were the Palestinians who killed the Jewish soldiers’ families? How many such killings were there? What impact did that have on soldiers who were fighting? Why did holocaust survivors fighting in the Haganah so easily identify the Arabs with Nazis and Nazism ( and treat them accordingly )? The answers to these questions, if anti-Zionists would ever ask them or seek answers, make the issue of Al-Hussayni and his ideology important.

Even the anti-Zionist historical narrative of the Nakba acknowledges there were no orders to expel the Palestinians. And, in fact, subsequent history has shown that the Palestinians who did not leave were not exterminated, were eventually given Israeli citizenship, and were in no way made into an apartheid people inside Israel. Yet, the anti-Zionists make the leap that “orders were not necessary” because “everyone in the Israeli defense knew what was expected.”

This is just ascholarly and ahistorical and does not pass the smell test. The leap from “there was no order” to “but everyone just knew what to do” is political fabrication to further a pro-Palestinian narrative every bit as false as the initial Israeli one it is trying to replace.

Palestinian Guerilla Forces and the Nakba

There is another and pretty well-documented account of the same events. Plan D, the Haganah document for the contingency of clearing Palestinian villages, was one of several contingency plans created by the Haganah ( again, the predecessor to the IDF ) to achieve the strategic imperative of mobilizing Israel’s young army. Recall in 1948, Palestinian forces laid siege to Jerusalem prior to the invasion of the Arab League armies. While early in this civil war Zionist forces had won battles with Palestinian guerillas and irregulars at villages along the Jerusalem/Haifa corridor, they tended to become bases for Palestinian forces again once Zionist forces departed. Importantly for later decision making, these paramilitary irregulars came from the Palestinian populations of the villages where they were fighting.

The Jewish forces needed to break the siege in a sustainable way. Consequently, Plan D was an alteration in military strategy in the battle for Jerusalem, moving from an ad hoc method of using supply convoys to outlast the siege on the city to a strategy of mobilization and conquest to occupy strategically important territory, which would protect supply lines into Jerusalem and to Jewish forces.

Palestinians were most often expelled because this was the only way to ensure these gains could be maintained and that Palestinian villages wouldn’t slip back into being bases for irregulars or for the eventual invading Arab armies. If such slippage kept happening, the Israeli army would be stuck hopelessly fighting rearguard actions at the same time it was trying to fight the invading Arab League at the front(s).

The battle for Jerusalem happened during the lead up to the war with the Arab League, but there was an understanding that Arab states would eventually invade. When advocates repeat anti-Zionist propaganda about the Nakba starting before the invasion of the Arab League, saying that is evidence of premeditated ethnic cleansing, they leave out the relevant context that the fighting had begun internally as a civil war before the invasion of external armies and that the Israelis had to prepare for the foreign invasion they knew was coming.

Leaving that out and saying Israelis “started expelling” Palestinians prior to the war and therefore planned to ethnically cleanse the area all along is just plain propaganda. More accurately, the war began before the external armies invaded, and it was largely a civil war between the Haganah and the Palestinian militias composed of Arabs already living along the Jerusalem-Haifa corridor. The pre-war “expulsions” were done to gain a tactical military advantage, to secure the supply lines into Jerusalem against guerilla fighters from those villages and prepare for the impending invasion.

This strategy spread to some of the other parts of the country with the Haganah and later the Israeli army conquering strategically important areas and often expelling Palestinians, but leaving intact many other villages in areas not deemed critical for the war effort. It was not widespread and theses efforts account for only a fraction of the displaced Palestinians.

Instead of blaming Israeli forces and leadership for the expulsion of Palestinians, historians in this camp focus on the fragility of Palestinian social cohesion, and how Palestinian leaders (much as they had done in 1936) quickly departed the country in hopes of riding out the war. The rapid departure of leaders led to societal collapse and states of intense panic among Palestinians prompting flight even when there was no real threat. In fact, panic due to the fog of war was likely the cause of the majority of Palestinian flight, which is just human nature during times of war.

The case of Haifa, where Palestinian residents chose to leave after losing the battle for the city despite seemingly being implored to stay, is often held up as an example of Palestinian self-deportation, as is Ben Gurion’s (the leader of the pre-state Jewish community and future first prime minister of Israel) shock and seeming dismay at seeing the Arab population’s departure.

As for massacres and other war crimes, almost everyone admits that Jewish forces committed more war crimes including rape than Palestinians or Arabs in the 1948 War. However, there is an important nuance to add: the Haganah/Israeli army had many more opportunities to commit such crimes as they were the victorious army, and the statistics for the occurrence of these crimes was relatively low for wartime and especially for a civil war.

The actual numbers of forced expulsions the New Historians document is small relative to the total refugees, and things like soldier diaries and contemporaneous testimony speak a great deal about revenge killings ( like above ) and rogue soldiers rather than a systematic project. These are the sorts of war crimes you would expect in any civil war and the evidence for systematicity is very weak, requiring an induction from a small number of documented cases.

What’s more, the Nakba displaced somewhere around 750,000 Arabs ( by the most generous estimates, but probably closer to 450,000 Arabs by more realistic estimates ), most of them after the Arab League invaded when the Israeli forces were …. busy with other things. The Israeli defense was actually fighting a war against multiple invading armies at the time and it’s never been explained how the small Israeli force could have managed such a massive systematic program while also fighting the Arab League’s five armies.

If the numbers of expulsions were driven by tactical war considerations, and were very small compared to the total refugees, where do the anti-Zionist accusations come from? In Israel’s war archives, which were opened in the 1980’s, Arab villages are marked as having been targeted for “clearing”, i.e., for tactical removal of the Arab population, or as having had “military engagement” or are unmarked ( implying they were spared war activity ). Military engagement means some sort of fighting. With five armies attacking and a civil war going on, there was some sort of fighting in a lot of villages.

The populations of the villages marked for clearing represent a small fraction of the total refugees displaced during the war, so the anti-Zionists treat both these demarcations as the same. The anti-Zionists claim without evidence that any village where there was military activity, even if it was not marked for clearing, was in fact being ethnically cleansed.

The topic of the 1948 war and the creation of the displaced Palestinians is vast and nuanced. If you wish to get a better start on it, I highly recommend the resource below, which not only describes it well but will point you to other even more detailed scholarly work. A very helpful element of the Go deeper resource below is it quotes some of the many Arab reports written at the same time as the war or soon thereafter, which support the version of events provided here.

Go deeper: The war of 1948 and the creation of the Palestinian refugees

In conclusion, the version of history Palestinian activists repeat is as much propagandized mythos as the original version of it the Israelis produced in 1948. It’s a political story, not a scholarly one.

And it doesn’t address the key question: What were the Israelis supposed to do? The Palestinian militias they were fighting prior to the war really existed. A significant number of the Arab natives really held to Al-Hussayni’s Nazi exterminationist ideology. The five armies of the Arab League really did invade. They really did brand their invasion as a “war of extermination of the Jews”.

All that really happened. There is no version of international law or moral law in which the Israelis would be normatively or practically compelled to do anything other than exactly what they did for their own survival.

The charge that Israelis “stole” the land comes from the fact that Palestinians were not allowed to return after the fighting stopped. But this charge ignores that the end of the War for Independence was not the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There were no peace treaties. The enemy had not been destroyed nor had it surrendered. Israel had a short time to prepare a government and a state before the inevitable next attack, and the same Palestinians who fled were mostly the source of guerrilla fighters fighting on the side of the Arab Armies against the Jewish Israelis and threatening them with extinction.

Allowing their return would have been suicidal madness. In the best case scenario, it would have ensured Israel would become a failed state riven by civil war, like we currently see in places like Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and Syria.

Most importantly, I am aware of no example in history of any people forced into the sort of fight for survival the early Israelis were forced into, which did not involve the fighters committing some share of war crimes ( massacres, expulsions, and so forth ). My own father fought in World War II on bombers, making 30 missions in hostile airspace over the European theater. Do you think his planes didn’t drop bombs on German civilians? C’mon. We all know better.

The anti-Semitism of anti-Zionists shows itself clearly when they insist on demonizing Israeli Jews by holding them to some superhuman standard of morality, which no other people on earth has ever met. Pretending every other human on earth follows some high standard when threatened, and then painting Jews as monsters because they don’t hold to that idealistic standard, is a trick of rhetoric.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine

10. The 1920’s And The Spread of Hate