I found reading Meron Benvenisti's book a difficult experience for
me for several different reasons.
Firstly, the author's own sense of pain is apparent throughout. A
Zionist, whose father was a geographer who devoted his life to
writing about the Holy Land and its connection with the Jewish
people, Benvenisti has chosen to document the way in which Zionist
institutions and the State of Israel worked successfully over the
years to obliterate as much as they could from the Palestinian
heritage within the new state. He at once recognizes the need of
Israel to establish its own identity, and at the same time is moved
by the terrible loss that this entailed to those who were
displaced, and to the cultural and historical heritage of the
sacred landscape. He bravely tackles the complex feelings that this
duality engenders in him and the result is disturbing reading. As
he says at the outset: "This book is about my troubled internal
landscape as much as it is about the tortured landscape of my
homeland."
Secondly, as someone who came to Israel in 1958 at the age of
twenty-six as a junior official in the British Council and is
neither a Jew nor an Arab, I have had to recognize how completely
I, and those like me, accepted the version of history presented to
me by the Israelis whom I knew at the time and who were so
welcoming. On the other hand, I have had to realize how little I
was aware of what the realities of the situation were for those who
were displaced, or of what efforts had been made to destroy their
heritage. Not only had villages been destroyed, the names of
natural features, the identity of sacred places, the whole complex
web that makes up a human landscape and which had existed for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years had been largely swept away in
much of the country. All we outsiders saw were the cactuses growing
round the ruins of houses, the one sign that this hill, that
valley, had once been home to those who were far away. But in our
excitement at the very real achievements of the new state, these
failed to move us.
Thirdly, much of what is talked about in the book enables the
reader to understand the depth of the passion that Palestinians
still feel for their lost homeland and which, in its turn, has lead
to continuous conflict, the latest round of which is currently upon
us. But like many books on the conflict, this one is perhaps better
at defining the nature of the wounds that plague both Israelis and
Palestinians than proposing how to heal them.
Creating New Facts, Destroying the Old
Indeed, in his more pessimistic moments, Benvenisti feels that both
sides have lost. He points out that such is the current pace of
developments that in the end the landscape of the region will be
neither the Jewish landscape envisaged by his father, agricultural
settlements surrounding thriving towns, nor the traditional
landscape of Palestine. "The two landscapes how now merged and been
engulfed in a wasteland of cement, stone and asphalt. The Jewish
landscape triumphed but it was a Pyrrhic victory."
In his introduction, Benvenisti sets out the nature of his personal
dilemma and the limitations of his work. He points out that he has
not unearthed new archival material, but that he has made use of
readily available information. But reading the book, it seems that
he has done more than he himself claims credit for. He has gathered
together a mass of material, some of it from unfamiliar sources,
and set it out in such a fashion that much of the information
appears new. It seems likely that some of his facts will be
disputed by one side or the other, but the power of the book lies
not so much in the individual instances to which he refers, but in
the picture he presents of sustained struggle to create new facts
by destroying the old. He remains convinced of the right of the
Zionist movement to struggle for a homeland and rejects the idea
that the creation of Israel was some sort of imperialist endeavor,
though he recognizes that this will not be acceptable to many
Palestinians, but yet has spent time and energy unearthing the
destroyed landscape, the vanished land. A Quixotic endeavor but one
that commands respect.
The book opens with an account of the activity of Israeli
map-makers in the period leading to the inception of the state and
thereafter. Most of them were researchers who in the period before
1948 had sought evidence for the continuity of Jewish settlement
over the centuries. In 1949, nine of them were appointed to a
committee that systematically reworked the map of the area
rendering obsolete the maps produced by the Mandatory authorities.
Their work, and that of other committees that were set up to give
new names to settlements and other geographic features, resulted in
the eradication from the map of the majority of Arabic names
(although some of the Israeli map-makers regretted the
disappearance of the traditional names, they were powerless to
prevent it). The resulting maps are compared by Benvenisti with
those of the Palestinians in which "reality is frozen at 1946," and
everything created by the Jews since 1882 is considered an
aberration.
'Ethnic Cleansing' in the Holy Land
After his review of the way in which map-making follows on actual
possession of land and property and sets a seal on their
acquisition, Benvenisti turns to the position before 1948 when the
Arab and Jewish worlds existed in the Holy Land side by side but
separate. The Jews moved in their world and the Arabs in theirs
and, to the majority on both sides, the land occupied by "the
other" was just a blank space. A "glass wall" existed between the
two communities and the mental map of the Jewish agricultural
settlers did not include the Arab villages. While this contention
would probably be disputed by members of the Mapam kibbutzim who
struggled to create good relations with their neighbors (though, as
Benvenisti points out, they did not scruple to take over the land
of those who had fled), it rings true. He describes the way in
which contemporary Israeli accounts of the creation of Israel pay
scant regard to Palestinian society in the Holy Land before 1948,
and gives some fascinating insights into the reality of that
society as perceived by a sympathetic outsider.
Having thus set the scene, Benvenisti turns his attention to the
actual conflict in 1948 and its impact on the reality of the
situation and on the geographical landscape. He distinguishes
sharply between the first part of the war when most expulsions of
Palestinians were random and the result of communal violence on
both sides, and the second when more systematic efforts were made
to clear the land of Israel from unwanted Palestinian communities.
In his accounts of the fate of individual villages and communities,
he draws heavily on the work of Benny Morris and other historians
with similar views. In his chapter on the consequences of the
Israeli victory, he does not hesitate to use the heavily charged
words "ethnic cleansing" and his account makes dismal reading. The
Palestinians were defeated and the victors made no bones about
claiming what they had won.
Israelis Should Recognize the Reality
In the second half of the book, Benvenisti deals with the detailed
histories of particular Palestinian communities and with the way in
which Israeli kibbutzim and moshavim absorbed the land of those who
had been uprooted. En passant he deals harshly with claims that the
kibbutzim established clear rights to ownership of the land they
have today for which they are requiring generous compensation. He
writes that compassion for the kibbutz residents who may lose their
land under present Israeli government policies does not extend to
"Arab farmers who cultivated the same land for a thousand
years."
Benvenisti is particularly concerned with the fate of the so-called
"internal refugees," Palestinians who lost their original villages
within Israel but were allowed to stay in the country, many of them
in what today are named "unrecognized" villages that have little in
the way of social services or recognition from the state.
He deals interestingly with the way in which artists and writers
from both communities dealt with what had happened and with their
very different memories of what had occurred and concepts of
history. He also has some material on the treatment of Muslim
religious sites within Israel. Particularly poignant is his account
of the way in which mosques were destroyed or neglected, and
certain sacred sites taken over by Israelis in the years after the
1948 war and the names of their original holy men replaced with
those of Jews.
Benvenisti's conclusions from all this are, not surprisingly,
pessimistic. He writes that "Israelis and Palestinians alike feel
that neither the physical nor the spiritual landscape is
divisible," and correctly describes the way in which both parties
fear the other's interest in, and love of, the landscape, of the
land itself. The book ends with a plea that Palestinians living in
Israel and, in particular the "internal refugees," receive fair
treatment from the authorities, that crumbling mosques and
cemeteries be restored, and that Israelis recognize the reality of
what occurred rather than hide behind versions of history that do
not reflect the truth. Disregarding the Palestinian history of the
Sacred Land and of its people is neither possible in the long run,
nor desirable in itself.
What to make of all this? From the point of view of a right-wing
Israeli, Benvenisti's work can well be seen as the work of a
traitor who, whether intentionally or inadvertently, strengthens
Palestinian claims to the Land they have lost. For their part,
Palestinians might be forgiven for thinking that if Benvenisti's
account is true, then Israel will eventually weaken and fade away,
destroyed by its own internal contradictions, a society based on
false premises and injustice. It is a book that will be popular
with few.
The Consequences for Victors and Vanquished
But from another perspective, the book appears as a gallant effort
to come to terms with the fact that victory in war is often
followed by disastrous consequences for the defeated and by cruel
and unjust behavior on the part of the victors. The latter do not
consider the feelings and interests of the vanquished. For Israeli
victors like Benvenisti, embued with a sense of injustice, alive to
history and to the sheer romance of the landscape of the Sacred
Land in all its dimensions, there can be no easy resolution of the
dilemma this poses.
This thought-provoking and, in some ways, moving book ought to be
read by all those who wish to gain an insight into the many
dimensions of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in the
Holy Land and, in particular, in the complex internal landscape of
many "liberal" Israelis - men and women who feel for what has
happened to the Palestinians and their landscape, but who have to
recognize the question marks to their own future, and that of their
Israeli landscape, posed by full recognition of the disaster that
has occurred to the Palestinian people. The answer must, in the
end, be for both sides to make compromises and for both to
recognize the value of the history and physical and mental
landscape of the other, but this looks like being a work of many
decades.