Empire and Aftermath - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Empire and Aftermath

Writing the 'Histories' of the Wars of

1948Slide2

Aims

To

learn about the creation of the state of

Israel.

To trace the history of Israel/Palestine from the end of the British Mandate (1945 -1948), through the 1948 Arab-Israeli War until the signing of the armistices between Israel and the Arab states signed in 1949.

To

think about the different ways in which this event has been

told by the different actors over time

and what this may tell us about history writing more generally. Slide3

Part one

The end of the British Mandate, the UN partition plan, civil war and the war between Israel and the Arab statesSlide4

World War Two

In

1939 Britain issued a White Paper on

Palestine. It agreed

to allow 75,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine over the period 1940–44, after which migration would require Arab approval.

In

March 1940 the British High Commissioner for Palestine issued an edict banning Jews from purchasing land in 95% of Palestine.

This

act by Britain enraged the Jewish

community and was

clearly a reversal of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate provisions

.

When the war finally ended, the Allied forces in Europe were shocked to discover the true horror of the Nazi death camps. Between 1939 and 1945, approximately 6 million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been barbarically and systematically murdered

.

Jews in the Middle East were also affected by the war. Most of North Africa came under Nazi control and many Jews were used as slaves. The 1941 pro-Axis coup in Iraq was accompanied by massacres of Jews.Slide5

Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs)

Jews

in Europe who had been liberated from the concentration

camps

joined an estimated eight million people who had been displaced by war.

Known

as Displaced Persons (DPS) they found refuge in camps set up especially for them by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation agency (UNRRA).

No

country offered to take these desperate refugees and the British White Paper of 1939 continued to prohibit Jewish immigration.

The

Jewish DPs began to organize themselves and to make demands of their own. They wanted the Jewish people to be recognized as a people,

they demanded

the establishment of a Jewish State, and their own emigration to it.

The

British Government refused, and increased its efforts to prevent Jews leaving Europe for Palestine.

A

struggle now began, in Palestine and in Europe, between the British Government and the Jews. Slide6

Britain and the

Irgun

The

British returned

captured immigrants from the waters of the East Mediterranean to which they had sailed, to the DP camps in Germany from which they had fled.

In

Europe itself, at the frontier crossing between Austria and Italy, British troops halted concentration camp survivors who were on their way to the Adriatic and to Palestine and held them in former prisoner-of-war camps.

Inside

Palestine the

Irgun

reacted by attacking British military installations. As the subsequent death sentences on those caught, and the resulting reprisals instituted by the

Irgun

, increased the tension, acts of even greater violence marked their efforts.

The

violence reached a climax on 22 July 1946 when the

Irgun

blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. 91 people were killed, including British administrators working in the hotel, many of whom were Arabs and Jews. Slide7

The UN partition plan

On

18 February 1947, Ernest Bevin, the then Foreign Secretary, told the House of Commons that all attempts at reaching a compromise had failed and that the only course open was to submit the Palestine problem to the United Nations.

On

28 April 1947, in at an extraordinary session of the General Assembly, a United Nations Special Committee on Palestine was set up.

Members

of the committee disagreed on the form that a political resolution should take, there was general agreement that the country would have to be divided in order to satisfy the needs and demands of both Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

On

November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The UN partition plan divided the country in such a way that each state would have a majority of its own

population. The

area of Jerusalem and Bethlehem was to become an international zone. Slide8

The UN partition planSlide9

Civil War

Violence between Arabs and Jews erupted almost immediately after the

vote: Arabs

participated in anti-partition riots.

The

Jews retaliated.

By

the end of December over 350 people had lost their

lives.

As

the fighting increased in intensity, the ability of the British authorities, civil and military, to control events, to maintain law and order in fulfillment of the mandatory obligations, collapsed.

On

9 April 1948, a force of 130

Irgun

-Stern Gang dissidents attacked

Deir

Yassin

, a village of 700 inhabitants lying a few

kilometres

to the west of Jerusalem.

While

figures are disputed over 100 and perhaps over 200 villagers were killed, including civilians, women and children.

Deir

Yassin

, actual and supposed, remains indelibly written into the collective historical memory.

April

was a crucial month in the course of the civil war.

By

the end of

the British Mandate in May,

the Jewish military forces had secured control over most of the territory allotted to the Jewish state in the UN plan.Slide10

14 May 1948

On May 14, 1948, Great Britain withdrew from the Palestine Mandate.

At

6.45 am the Union Jack was lowered from the King David Hotel, where the Palestine government’s administrative officers had been housed.

Across its borders, Arab governments had declared their intention to invade Palestine to overturn the partition decision.

At

4 pm, in Tel Aviv’s Museum Hall, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, proclaimed the ‘establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine – to be called Israel.

Two

hours after Ben

Gurion’s

proclamation, the United States

recognised

the Provisional Government; three days later the Soviet Union followed suit. Despite persistent parliamentary questioning, the British government

agonised

until February before

recognising

de facto the state of Israel.

A

few months later in

May 1949,

the United Nations received Israel as an accredited member. Slide11

The Arab-Israeli War

Arab

armies from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, supported by troops from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, attacked

Israel. While

disunified

the attacking forces were

a

formidable

threat.

On

11 June, after four weeks of war, and following

appeals

from the

UN

General Assembly, the first truce came into being.

It

became clear that Israel the result of the four-week contest was an Israeli victory.

On

9 July Israel mounted offensives of its own on all three fronts. The IDF command hoped that they would be decisive and end the war, but they did not. The “Ten Days War

” ended

on 18 July, following the UN Security’s Council’s imposition of the Second Truce.

Fighting continued on an off until the end of December

when the Israelis finally pushed Egypt out of Palestine except for the Gaza strip.

The

war of 1948 formally ended the next year with the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt on 24 February 1949, Lebanon on 23 March 1949, Jordan on 3 April 1949 and Syria on 20 July 1949. The Iraqis refused to enter into armistice negotiations. Slide12

The Arab-Israeli WarSlide13

Palestinian Arab refugees

As

a result of the war, approximately twenty percent more of the former mandate became part of Israel than the UN partition plan allotted. The Palestinian Arab state envisioned by the UN partition plan was never established.

The

country once known as Palestine was now divided into three parts, each under separate political control. The State of Israel encompassed

over

77 percent of the territory. Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and the

West Bank.

Egypt took control of the

Gaza Strip.

Between

1947 and 1949,

over 700,000

Arabs fled or were displaced from the areas over which Israel obtained jurisdiction.

The

precise number of refugees, and questions of responsibility for their exodus are sharply

disputed. It is likely that that they left for a combination of reasons: because they wanted to get out of a war zone; because they feared that they would be persecuted or killed by the Israelis; some left after witnessing their leaders flee; and some left due to expulsions by Israeli forces and orders from Arab leaders to leave. Slide14

Palestinian Arab refugeesSlide15

Jewish refugees

In 1945, there were nearly one million Jews living in ten Arab

countries.

The

majority of them, over 850,000, fled as refugees after the 1948

Arab-Israeli War.

Life for Jews in Arab countries became harsher as their governments reacted against them with anger because of the creation of the State of Israel and as a result of Israel’s military victories.

Arab

governments confiscated their personal and communal property and stripped them of their citizenships.

Most

of these Jewish refugees settled in

Israel – Israel

absorbed almost 700,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands between 1948 and 1989.

These

Jewish refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region often refer to themselves as the “forgotten refugees” of the Arab-Israeli conflict

.Slide16

Jewish refugeesSlide17

Part two

The different histories of 1948Slide18

The Zionist history

The conventional Israeli version of 1948 portrays the war as an unequal struggle between a Jewish David and an Arab

Goliath: a

desperate, heroic and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds.

In

this version, all the surrounding Arab states sent their armies into Palestine to strangle the Jewish state at birth, and the Palestinians left the country on orders from their own leaders and in the expectation of a triumphant return.

The

traditional Zionist version maintains that Britain’s aim in the twilight of its Mandate over Palestine was the prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; that the Jews were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned; that the Palestinians left of their own accord and in the expectation of a triumphal return; that there was an all-Arab plan to destroy the infant Jewish state as soon as it came into the world; and that Arab intransigence was the sole cause of the political deadlock that followed the war.Slide19

The ‘n

ew historians’ of Israel

Since the late 1980s, a group of

‘new historians’

or revisionist Israeli historians have challenged many of the claims surrounding the birth of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war.

The

catalyst for this new critical history was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in

1982.

Proponents

of the traditional Zionist view

criticised the new

historiography

arguing it rested

on defective evidence and was politically motivated, pro-Palestinian, and aimed at

deligitimizing

Zionism and the State of Israel.

Palestinian

historians criticised them for not going far enough.

While Israeli revisionist scholars may have challenged the conventional narrative of the Palestine war they were ultimately participants in an intra-Zionist debate, in which Jews were the subjects of history and Palestinians its passive objects. Slide20

The Palestinian history

By

the time the first accounts of the Palestine War were being penned in the 1950s, Arab nationalism had become the dominant discourse in the Arab world.

This

led to two tendencies in the history writing on 1948: the defensive Arab states adopted an apologetic mode, geared towards enhancing political legitimacy, while the Aran Nationalists wrote in a mode of self-examination that sought to elicit historical lessons and motivate radical social, political, or ideological change in preparation for the ‘next round’ against Israel. Neither placed much importance on the historical accuracy of their accounts.

There

is no analogous literature to the New Israeli Historians on the Palestine side. Historians wishing to write new Arab historians of the Palestine war have been hampered by a lack of

material and the unwillingness of Arab states to challenge their national

historiography

.

But despite

these

obstacles

Palestinian and other Arab

scholars

have been writing revisionist history. Slide21

Histories of the British role

On

14 May the British Foreign and Colonial Offices published a statement chronicling the history and policy of the Mandate. It highlighted how Palestine had developed under British

patronage, but was

also a confession of failure.

The

Zionist and the Palestinian versions of Britain's policy during the final phase of the mandate are clearly poles apart,

share

the assumption that the manner in which Britain chose to terminate the mandate inevitably led to an armed clash between the local parties.

British

rule has not undergone the same sort of reappraisal that the history of Zionist settlement and Palestinian nationalism has gone through.

Those

accounts that have been written

have largely been united in declaring that the British Mandate in Palestine ended in failure. Slide22

History as competing accounts

There are competing histories of 1948.

The

first Arab-Israeli war is called the War of Independence by the by Israelis and the

nakba

or “catastrophe” by Palestinian Arabs.

While

the same events are being discussed, very different histories of the 1948 war are when Arabs, Jews or the British are seen as the central actors in the accounts that are told.

Very

different histories are written when it is Israelis, Palestinians or others doing the writing.

History

can be a process of commemoration, a means of political activism, and a way to construct a national or communal identity based on collective memory.

It

is also as much a reflection of present circumstances as the past, written at a particular moment by historians who are informed by their current lives as much as their past experiences.