The Nakba

The End of the Mandate and my two cents on the big Debate


Perhaps one of the first questions to ask when approaching the history of a subject such as the end of the British Mandate/ the creation of the state of Israel/the Nakba is what is it that is at stake? If history is written and thus constructed, and not given as fact and if such a process of constructing historical narratives is fundamental to the life of political movements, the way they create their discourses (in fact limiting the contours of how they can create such discourses) and ultimately the decisions they take and claims they make based on what they know, then the stakes, politically speaking, are quite high. To put it briefly, the careers of political movements and potentially the fates of large groups of people, are on the line when discussing the histories of seminal events such as the end of the British mandate.

I will not be so crude as to say that knowledge equals power without fleshing that out, but -at least - a relationship exists between the kind of knowledge one has (and produces), the goals one aspires to achieve (which themselves are informed by such knowledge) and what can be done about them. Having said that, it is hardly tenable to think that a historian will approach such a subject (or any subject for that matter) uninterestedly, without a sense of the stakes personally involved for him or herself. The historian as a knowing subject is located within a particular nexus of power relations, prejudices and discursive narratives and thus will come to any subject with a specific knowledge of the world. It is therefore not necessarily useful to ask how to be "objective," or whether one historian is more "objective" than another because such a thing as a detached uninterested objectivity does not seem possible, or, in any case, useful. What must be addressed, then, is how those who write our histories relate to the issues at hand, how explicit they make the connection between themselves as agents and the material they study, and what historical interpretations they exclude through the deployment of particular discourses.
This brings up a series of other questions: what is the role of the intellectual in the public space? How far is the historian constrained by political and social structures, regarding what can be said? How conscious is the historian of his location, constraints, and personal trajectory which at a specific moment in time informs simultaneously his/her interest in the subject and his/her biases towards it? In fact, given that discursive limits do exist at any specific point in time, how much responsibility does the individual intellectual bear for what they present as knowledge?
Certain structures in terms of political configurations, social constraints and historical events necessarily limit which versions of history can be written at any one point in time. Having said that, there is still no reason to excuse the individual intellectual from bearing responsibility for the implications of the knowledge she or he produces. The discussion on methodology (Beinin) falls within the bounds of this. Each methodology will produce specific knowledge. Different types of knowledge allow for different possibilities for action. What the historian must be able to do is distance him/herself enough from the discourse within the bounds of which he or she operates to be able to look at it critically and identify the assumptions and exclusions it makes use of.

Surveying what has been said about the end of the British mandate and the Nakba by Gelvin, Morris, Masalha, Parsons, Beinin and Finkelstein,(and excluding the right of the center half of the spectrum) it seems that there is no longer any real debate as to why there came to be a Palestinian refugee problem. This is especially true when taking into consideration the development of Morris' own views regarding the importance of direct expulsions (Parsons& Beinin). While Morris' multi-causal explanation (Morris) still holds, the weight of direct expulsions in the light of later findings and other scholarship has increased. This has blurred the distinction, which Morris hoped to clearly make (Masalha), between a number of military decisions to expel Palestinians, and an explicit political macro policy to rid the state of Israel of an Arab constituency through expelling Palestinians.

The reason Laila Parsons' article on Druze Jewish relations can be said to make a contribution to this discussion is not simply that she elucidates the experience of one religious minority on the eve of the Nakba, but that she is able to link this to the wider debate, contextualize it and use it to help us understand more about the decisions made by the Zionist leadership and the different experiences of Palestinians (Parsons). Parsons takes the findings of her work to make a wider conclusion about the nature of expulsions and does so coherently without any imaginative stretches of history.

Morris is willing to assert that the Palestinians left their lands for a number of reasons including the effects of the military operations, fear of mistreatment and sometimes to make way for the invading Arab armies (Morris, Response to Finkelstein and Masalha in Journal of Palestinian Studies Vol 21. No. 1, 1991, p.99). He is also willing to assert that direct expulsions constituted a proportionally high percentage of the causal factors (Parsons & Beinin) leading to the refugee problem, and that those expulsions also took non direct forms, such as whispering campaigns or preventing Palestinians from returning during the war once they had left their homes. Neither does he make the argument that there didn't exist already strong ideas among the Zionist leadership about the desirability of an Arab-free Palestine (Masalha). What Morris doesn't want to do, is make the linkage between the Zionist leadership and the expulsion of the Palestinians, in the absence of an official document that would prove the existence of a political policy to expel Arabs (Masalha). In effect, what Masalha and (less convincingly, in my opinion) Finkelstein (Finkelstein, Rejoinder to Benny Morris, Journal of Palestinian Studies Volume 21, No.1, 1992) seem to want Morris to do, is to take the responsibility, politically for what he states to be historical fact.

Masalha and Morris do not differ significantly as to what actually happened, but Masalha places the expulsion of the Palestinians within a historical lineage of transfer thinking, while Morris refuses to make such a connection. It is difficult to imagine that any tendencies towards expelling the Palestinians first appeared on the battlefield, or that the military leadership was completely disconnected from the political leadership and thus there was no exchange of ideas regarding expelling the Arabs. In fact, such a hypothetical situation would seem a-historical in the sense that it dislocates the moment of the Nakba from a longer history of Zionist thought regarding the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. At the same time, Morris wants to insist that in the absence of a document, there can be no proof of an official policy. However, there is also no reason to attribute the flight of the Palestinians solely to a trend in Zionist thought which would have preferred a Palestine free of Palestinians. That alone, as a single cause explanation and given what we know about what happened during the 1948 war, does not suffice.