1949 The First Israelis

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  CONTENTS

  Preface to 1949: Seventy Years Later

  Preface: Ten Years Later

  Introduction

  PART I • BETWEEN JEWS AND ARABS

  1. The Green Line

  2. Face to Face

  3. Dividing the Spoils

  PART II • BETWEEN VETERANS AND NEWCOMERS

  4. The First Million

  5. Working and Fighting Hands

  6. Nameless People

  PART III • BETWEEN THE ORTHODOX AND THE SECULAR

  7. Each in the Name of His God

  8. The Battle for the Sabbath

  PART IV • BETWEEN VISION AND REALITY

  9. The Quest for a National Identity

  10. Codfish with Everything

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  In memory of my mother. She came to Palestine as a refugee from Nazi Germany, but just like many of the first Israelis never learned Hebrew properly and could not read this book until it came out in English.

  PREFACE TO 1949: SEVENTY YEARS LATER

  Tom Segev

  IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I started researching the story of the first Israelis, it occurred to me that this project served as a sort of recompense for not having been born earlier. In 1949, I was all of four years old; as a veteran journalist, there is no event I would rather have covered than the birth of the state of Israel.

  But if I’d worked as an Israeli journalist back then, I doubt whether I would have succeeded in uncovering the true story of the establishment of the State. When I found my way to the archives that were declassified thirty years ago, I was able to learn much more. This was the first time I could examine official sources documenting key historical decision-making processes, including David Ben-Gurion’s private diary.

  This was a powerful experience. You request a file at the archives, take the document into your hands, and again and again you can hardly believe your eyes: This is not what they taught you in school. The reality depicted in the majority of the documents was much less glorious and much less heroic than what I had always believed. There were directives about preventing Arab refugees from returning to their homes, which had been left empty after the 1947–48 war, and about driving out additional Arab residents. They had never talked to us about this in school. And there was the Syrian president who tried to make peace with Israel—but Ben-Gurion refused to speak with him; in school they told us that Israel had always extended its hand in peace, but the Arabs had rebuffed all our overtures. I found documentation of official decisions explicitly discriminating against immigrants from Arab lands, whereas the members of my generation were raised on the belief that as the nascent Israeli society began to coalesce, there was no discrimination.

  Many nations are sustained by founding myths, particularly during their early years. The Israeli documents that were declassified in the early 1980s bore witness to the efforts of the founding fathers and mothers of the state to impart a common dream to all Israelis. There was a tendency to limit one of the most important rights of the individual: the right to be skeptical. Everything was presented to us as if it were black-and-white: We were the good guys, and the Arabs were the bad guys. We didn’t know there were shades of gray.

  This book reflects an attempt to get to know the story of a nation whose true history had then not yet been written. There was ideology, mythology, and a lot of indoctrination. The most important history books were written by various political leaders themselves, or by authors they commissioned. Major organizations and political parties also published so-called histories. Together they developed a set of national myths and flattering self-images that remained almost entirely unquestioned until the early 1980s. And then the gates of the archives swung open.

  The Zionist interpretation of Jewish history serves to justify the establishment of the State. According to this view, the Jews were exiled from the Land of Israel and lived in the Diaspora from that point on. For the next two thousand years, they never abandoned the dream of returning to Zion. After the Holocaust, which was the climax of an unremitting history of persecution and discrimination the world over, the Jews succeeded in returning to the land of their forefathers and re-establishing themselves as a nation with their own country, the state of Israel.

  One can take issue with these premises, and many do. Most of the Jews in the world did not fully adopt the Zionist ideology. But in a nation whose very existence is based on such fundamental historical premises, every crack in the national mythos may be regarded as an existential threat. This explains, among other things, why historical research has become such an important part of Israeli public discourse. It is what makes Israeli politics so fascinating. We are arguing not just about power but about fundamental values.

  With the publication of this book in 1984, I found myself in the middle of a major political controversy, which continues to this day. My critics argued that this book was a subversive attempt to present a post-modern narrative hostile to the Zionist narrative. I was not alone for long. With time, additional documents were, by law, declassified, and new books were published that also re-examined some of the historical premises of the Israeli national mythos. Soon there was talk of a movement of “new historians,” and doctorates were written about us. They even ascribed to us a common ideology, “post-Zionism” or “anti-Zionism.” I always thought of us as First Historians rather than new or revisionist ones, for hardly anyone before us had made use of the newly available documentary material. Also, methodologically most of us did not stray from the traditional working assumption that historical truth, for the most part, is to be found in historical archives.

  With time, many Israelis learned to absorb the history of their nation more critically. They found they had a great hunger for the “new history.” And I wrote more books, which together constitute a kind of collective biography of my country. Then I undertook to write a biography of David Ben-Gurion himself. But as time went on, other books were published that revisited worn truths and empty clichés, and so even to this day there are Israelis who are surprised to discover that Israeli history is more complicated than what they taught us to believe.

  I identify with the first Israelis. They have an enchanting innocence about them. I am aware of the suffering endured by many of those, both Jews and Arabs, who paid the price of the founding of the State of Israel. And sometimes I’m jealous that they were present during one of the most dramatic success stories of the twentieth century. As is clear from the reports published by the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and other international organizations, the lives of most Israelis are better than those of most other people on earth. And most people don’t live in free countries. Israelis do.

  But the first seventy years of the state passed in a series of wars. When Israelis spoke about Arabs at the beginning of the 1950s, they were not referring to Palestinians. Most of them had been driven out or had fled, and were living in refugee camps in neighboring countries. Hardly anyone took interest in them; they were not seen as a real threat. When Israelis spoke of Arabs, they were referring to Arab countries. Most Israelis believed
that there would be more wars, but most believed that time was in Israel’s favor. Once Israel became stronger, the Arabs would realize that the Jewish state could not be destroyed and eventually, one of these days, they’d make peace.

  After a while, they could tell themselves that they were right. A peace treaty was signed with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994. These were two of Israel’s main enemies. A few other Muslim nations recognized Israel as well, openly or covertly.

  Since the Six Day War in 1967, the conflict has been centered on a series of confrontations with the Palestinians. After five decades of cruel oppression in the Palestinian territories conquered by Israel during that war, including the settlement of hundreds of thousands of Israelis in those territories and the systematic violation of Palestinian human rights, and after waves of Palestinian terrorism that Israel has been unable to completely eliminate, most Israelis now believe that there is no possibility of peace.

  Many Israelis regard the occupation as a continuation of the Zionist enterprise that began in the 1920s and persisted during the lifetimes of the first Israelis. Others predict that a prolonged occupation will convert Israel into an apartheid state. Neither group is optimistic. This is the main difference between them and the first Israelis: Most Israelis today are not worried about their own personal situations, but their faith in the future of their state is less certain. For the first Israelis, it was just the opposite.

  Two of the major internal problems that concerned the first Israelis continue to concern Israelis today, albeit to a lesser extent. The rift between Jews of European descent and Jews from Muslim nations continues to polarize the state today. The cliché that emerged among the first Israelis remains true today: The majority of university students are the descendants of European immigrants, and the majority of prisoners are the descendants of those who came from Muslim lands. The effort to put everyone into a single “melting pot” has not been fully realized.

  Several of the fundamental questions that troubled the first Israelis remain unresolved, including the relationship between religious and secular Jews. Seventy years later, it continues to be expressed in the disparity in values and mentality between Jerusalem, the zealous, extremist city built on 3000-year-old stone, and Tel Aviv, a secular, open-minded hundred-year-old city built on the sands of the Mediterranean. The question of who is a Jew remains an issue, but compared to 1949, there is less tension between religious and non-observant Israelis. Most Jews now have a deeper connection to Judaism compared to the secular ideology that guided the leadership of the state during the early years of its existence. After seventy years of independence, less than half of all young Israelis identify as secular. As they’ve become more religious, they’ve also become more right-wing. Today, nearly seven in ten young Israelis identify as supporters of the right. The first Israelis were ruled by a government that identified with the values of socialism and social solidarity.

  Seven decades after the Declaration of Independence, Israeli society is still a kaleidoscope of identities. It is a coalition of minority groups who struggle to identify as Israelis. In this sense, we are all the first Israelis. We are partners in a unique historical endeavor that has not yet succeeded fully, but has also not yet failed. That’s what makes the story so compelling. (Trans. Ilana Kurshan, Jerusalem, 2017)

  PREFACE: TEN YEARS LATER

  SOME TIME AFTER this book first came out, a friend surprised me with an Arabic edition, published in Beirut by the Institute for Palestinian Studies. I had no prior knowledge of the translation and of course the Institute, affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization, had not asked for permission, nor had it offered to pay royalties. Still, I was quite pleased that the book had found its way across the line of fire. Subsequently, when I met a member of the Institute, I said to him, “I know you—you stole my book.” “True,” the man answered, “but you stole my country.” This exchange, I think, more or less sums up the level of discussion between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1980s. We have certainly come a long way since. Indeed, the first Israelis would hardly recognize their country now.

  For me, the story of those first Israelis is basically one of success; I tend to think of them with compassion and not a little envy for their part in the historic task of creating a new state. Yet when my book appeared in Israel a decade ago, it caused a stormy controversy. Reactions ranged from shame to dismay to rejection, for the book shattered a firmly established self-image and exposed as myths a large number of long-accepted truths. Its effect was all the more devastating since it was based almost entirely on official documents.

  History plays a role of immense importance in Israel’s political and cultural discourse. Indeed, the very existence of the country is based on a certain interpretation of Jewish history, namely the Zionist one. According to the official version of that history—for many years the only version—Israel’s history was one of exemplary equality and justice. 1949, however, suggested that the story was far less noble and heroic than Israelis had been led to believe. For it is true: Israel does bear part of the responsibility for the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees; it has not taken up every chance to make peace with its Arab neighbors; and the government did at times discriminate against new immigrants from Arab countries. It is not surprising, then, that many critics were outraged; some described my book as a display of post-Zionist self-hatred.

  The appearance of 1949 coincided with a period of tremendous fragility in Israeli life, marked by the ongoing war in Lebanon and triple-digit inflation, to name just two sources of instability. Shortly after the book came out Koteret Rashit, a now-defunct newsweekly, published a nationwide poll which revealed that eight out of ten Israelis said they were personally happy, but six out of ten believed that most other Israelis were not. This contradiction seemed to suggest that while people felt content in their own lives, they were uncertain about the general well-being of Israeli society. Had such a poll been conducted in 1949, it might well have indicated the opposite: that the first Israelis were often unhappy in their personal lives but believed in their country and its future. They had a dream. This is perhaps the most profound difference between Israelis then and now.

  But the loss of the dream has not been an unequivocal negative, for self-knowledge has taken its place. The people of Israel have grown up. Their maturity has come in the wake of peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and negotiations with the Palestinians: they feel more secure today and their economic situation has also improved dramatically. Unlike the first Israelis, who saw themselves collectively, most now tend to think of themselves as individuals. The tribalism which may have been imperative in the early days of Israel has since lost much of its urgency, as has political ideology in general. More and more Israelis live not for the sake of history or the future but for the present, for life itself. Having grown up, they have also learned to apply some degree of self-criticism. It is probably no coincidence that many of the so-called “new historians” were trained at American universities; one of the most crucial lessons they brought home was the importance of challenging and criticizing accepted truths.

  As far as I know, the term “new historiography” was first used in Israel in connection with my book. But I was not a new—that is, alternative or revisionist—historian in any sense. It was my good fortune that a great deal of previously inaccessible archival material had just been made available for research. And I was thus in a position to tell a story no one had told before. My use of this material made me, more precisely, a “first” historian of that particular period, just as much of what was later called new historiography is more properly “first” historiography. In truth, before the archives were accessible, Israel had a national mythology; only after the archives were opened could real history be written, and for the first time. The true new historians will be those who reevaluate and revise what we have done.

  In recent years the Israeli government has declassified the minutes of cabinet meetings held in 1949. Most of
these documents were not officially available to me when I worked on this book, although I was able to see parts of them unofficially. Declassifying these minutes indicates a commendable degree of liberalism, although some sections are still secret—specifically, those which contain evidence on atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians during the war of 1948, or those which record high-level discussions among cabinet ministers about the need to expel the Arab population. So even now Israelis are not allowed to know the whole truth about their past.

  Readers should be aware that in addition to the new archival material, numerous other books uncovering Israel’s early history have been published in the last decade. The following list highlights only some titles of interest: Itzhak Levi’s memoirs of the 1948 War of Independence contain a remarkable account of the Dir Yassin massacre. Benny Morris revisits the origins of the Arab refugee problem in his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. A number of other historians, including Baruch Kimmerling, Ilan Pape, Zaki Shalom, Itamar Rabinowitz, Arye Shalev, and Avi Shlaim have reexamined diverse aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict and challenged Israel’s official history. Several new books have been written about Israel’s Arab citizens, the most noteworthy by Uzi Benziman and Attalah Mansour.

  The painful story of the Yemenite children that was first described in 1949 has recently become a heated political issue, characterized by much demagoguery and even some violent outbursts. Two official commissions of inquiry, in addition to the one mentioned in my book, have been set up to look into the matter. The treatment of new immigrants has also been taken up in a number of works by Dvora Hakohen, Tsvi Tsameret, and others. The treatment of Holocaust survivors has been studied by Hanna Yablonka as well as in my own The Seventh Million.

  As Israel celebrates fifty years of independence, its society remains deeply divided over basic conflicts. Indeed, Israel seems more bitterly riven today than ever before, caught in a Kulturkampf, a war between basic moral and political values. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin lost his life in that war. Israel’s first native-born prime minister, Rabin was also the first leader to tell his people that Israel’s existence was no longer in danger and hence the time had come to take the risks of peace. His was the voice of optimism; his assassin acted out of pessimism. Their two positions express the conflict at the heart of Israel today.