Losing Israel Read Online Free PDF Page B

were loose and dangerous and got what was coming to them, or pure and to be protected; modest and shy, desire had to be coaxed reluctantly out of them, and then they often died. Smith’s books always seemed to feature a tough, white, male hero and a noble, exceptional and impossibly divided chief who tried to rise above the limitations of his hopelessly primitive culture. So did Uris’s The Haj – in his case, a tough Jewish hero and a noble, exceptional mukhtar. The leaders of these bloodthirsty people – Zulus or Matabeles, in Smith’s books, Arab fellahin in Uris’s – were always doomed to fail.
    The message of Exodus and The Haj was unambiguous: when the Jews began to arrive in Palestine, the Arabs, what few there were of them, were backward, ignorant and uncultured. They barely scraped a living from the land; they were variously nomads or peasants (but not like the enlightened, idealistic peasants of the kibbutz movement). Besides, most of them had arrived from other areas of the former Ottoman Empire only after the Jews had begun to create new economic opportunities in the wasteland that was Palestine. They identified, if they identified at all, as Arabs, in a pan-Arab collective, but they were tribal rather than national in their affiliations, and disunified and squabbling. The Arab was weak, exploitable, and subject to irrational passions. The Jew, by contrast, was righteous, developed, civilised and moral. And we Jews had a right, an ancestral right much older, deeper and more meaningful than that recent and tenuous connection claimed by Arabs in Palestine. The Arabs could go anywhere in the sprawling undifferentiated mass of ‘Arabia’, but Jews had nowhere to go but the Land of Israel.
    The Haj reinforced everything I had been learning, without words, about ‘the Arabs’. The mukhtar was rapacious, oversexed; the women were frightened and stupid; boys would go after their own sisters if they could. And they were responsible for their own catastrophe. The Arab uprising of 1936 was bloody and vicious and underhand, and all the Arabs of Palestine under the leadership of Al Husseini were in cahoots with Hitler. During the Second World War, the Arabs were about to sell out to the Axis powers, and then all the Jews would have been slaughtered; there would have been a double Holocaust. After the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947, the Jews were nobly willing to accept far less than they needed or wanted, but ‘the Arabs’ in their folly and short-sightedness refused it. So when the British withdrew and Israeli statehood was declared (legally, it was always stressed – because of the UN Partition Plan), the new, vulnerable, tiny state (‘tiny’ was important: it was always David against Goliath) had to withstand the unprovoked attack by the armies of seven Arab countries, intent on its destruction, innumerable in their troops and much better equipped than the heroic, hastily formed Jewish people’s army with its few dusty guns. And tiny, embattled Israel prevailed, because it couldn’t afford not to. Because we had nowhere else to go.
    On our kibbutz ulpan, the Jewish Agency gave us the same story, the same bracing and exciting message. We travelled in pairs to Jerusalem to participate in a history and Jewish identity workshop; we were taken on tours to Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum, and to Masada, site of heroic Jewish resistance to the Romans. We were courted, and encouraged to make the grand decision to return , to become Israeli.
    Throughout it all, in what we heard and read and saw, the word Nakba was never spoken. What happened to the Arabs in Palestine from 1947 to 1949 was a footnote to the story, an unfortunate by-product, and their own fault; it was certainly never accorded the status of its own special term. According to the Zionist version of events, after the declaration of independence and in the course of the war (started by the Arabs) some of the Arabs fled; they were