Scholarly Review: The Historiography of the 1948 Wars

1 2 3 4 5 6

The historiography of the 1948 events in Palestine remains a work in progress and a true battlefield, for in this case, writing history is one of the issues at stake in the conflict itself – to the point that claiming to review the facts only, dissociated from their interpretation, appears to be a huge challenge. “War of independence” to some and “catastrophe” (nakba) to others, these events are seen through the lens of foundational heroism to the former, and through that of the obliteration of an entire world to the latter. These conflicting narratives ceaselessly question the periodization and the qualification of the events that took place between November 29, 1947 – when United Nations resolution 181 proposed the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab – and January 1949, when the last ceasefire put an end to combat between the young state of Israel, born on May 14, 1948, and its Arab neighbors. Nonetheless, one must attempt to put forward a minimal framework of events in order to appreciate the issues at stake in their historiographical interpretation. To this end, one must first distinguish the Judeo-Palestinian inter-community conflict, which intensified after the partition plan was put forward, from the Israeli-Arab struggle that began after the Egyptian, Syrian, Transjordanian, Iraqi and Lebanese armies entered Palestine on May 15.

UN resolution 181 recommended the splitting of Palestinian territory, hitherto under the British Mandate, between a Jewish state, to be established upon 54% of its territory and an Arab state, to be created from the remaining 46%. Though there were no more than 10,000 Jews on the lands intended for the Arab state, only 55% of the population was Jewish within the boundaries of the future Jewish state. Jerusalem was to be a corpus separatum, an enclave under international trusteeship. The conflict between Jewish and Palestinian communities gradually intensified from December 1947, until a broad Zionist offensive – begun on April 4, 1948 in the framework of the Dalet Plan – etched out the irreversible reality of partition on the ground. A few days before the British Mandate officially expired and the state of Israel was unilaterally proclaimed, the UN map for partition was worth no more than a scrap of paper, and the exodus of Palestine’s civilian populations was taking the proportions of a mass uprooting of people, before the Arab armies had even entered this territory. They crossed its borders on May 15, joining the few thousand combatants of the Palestinian militias, the first of which were ‘Abd el-Qadir al-Husseini’s Jaysh Al-Jihad al-Muqaddas and the Arab Liberation Army (Jaysh al-Inqadh al-‘Arabi), a corps of Arab volunteers who had started arriving from Syria in January 1948 under the command of Fawzi al-Qawuqji. The Arab armies launched an offensive that lasted until the first ceasefire on June 11. When the fighting resumed on July 9, the Israeli army initiated a race against the Arab forces in order to prevent the implementation of the plan Bernadotte (the UN mediator) had prepared, proposing to entrust central Palestine, Jerusalem and the Negev to Transjordan, and to limit Jewish immigration. Great Britain managed to impose a second truce between July 19 and September 18; Israel violated it by seizing Galilee and the Negev desert before accepting the ceasefire. By the end of the 1947-1949 wars, some 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinians had fled their homes, out of a total Arab population estimated at 900,000 to 1 million before the exodus (Abu Lughod, 1971: 139-164). 65% of them stayed within the Palestinian borders (39% of them settled in the West Bank and 26% in Gaza); 14% sought refuge in Lebanon, 10% in Syria and 10% in Transjordan.

From the Arab and Palestinian point of view, the catastrophe paradigm has constantly fueled collective memory, as much as it has historiography. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we can concur with Abraham Sela’s diagnosis when he wrote, “Arab historiography of 1948 essentially consists of non-scientific literature, based more on collective memory than on critical historiography” (Sela, 1991: 125). Indeed, this observation lumps Palestinian and Arab historiography together in a questionable manner, and furthermore, it is based on a radical dichotomy between memory and history – the opposition of which modern historians now consider limited.

1 2 3 4 5 6