“There is no real evidence for the Nakba — it is a Palestinian narrative, not documented history”

The documentary basis for 1948 is unusually strong, because the state that carried out the operations kept meticulous records and then, for a period in the 1980s and 1990s, opened them. What the historians who worked in those archives found is not a Palestinian narrative; it is an Israeli one, written by Israeli officers and officials for internal use.

The single most consequential document is the report completed by the Intelligence Service of the Israel Defence Forces on 30 June 1948, “Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948.” It counted roughly 391,000 Palestinians already displaced by 1 June, attributed about 70 per cent of that movement to the operations of Jewish forces, and only some 5 per cent to orders and directives from Arab institutions — which, the report noted, had in fact tried to restrain the exodus. Benny Morris located the document in the mid-1980s and published from it in 1986. It was subsequently withdrawn from public access. The Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research recovered a second copy from the Yad Ya’ari archive and published it in full.

That withdrawal was not an isolated act. In Haaretz on 5 July 2019, Hagar Shezaf reported the findings of an Akevot study: “Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba,” an operation “spearheaded by Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department… whose activities and budget are classified.” The Akevot report asserts that “Malmab removed historical documentation illegally and with no authority, and at least in some cases has sealed documents that had previously been cleared for publication by the military censor. Some of the documents that were placed in vaults had already been published.” Shezaf’s own investigation established that Malmab had concealed testimony from IDF generals about the killing of civilians and the demolition of villages, and documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin during Israel’s first decade; archive directors described security department staff treating their collections as departmental property, in some cases threatening the directors themselves. Yehiel Horev, who ran Malmab for twenty years until 2007, confirmed to Haaretz that he had launched the project and that it was continuing, and argued that concealing the events of 1948 made sense because uncovering them could generate unrest among the country’s Arab population.

Among the material that was sealed is the recorded interview in which Major General Avraham Tamir described razing standing Palestinian villages in 1948 to prevent return: “It was necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There’s no place to return to.” The same Haaretz investigation opens with a document found by the historian Tamar Novick in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva, in the file of Yosef Vashitz of Mapam’s Arab Department, describing killings, rape and mutilation at the Galilee village of Safsaf — a document previously unknown to scholars, which Novick took to Morris.

Alongside the state archives sit the private papers: Herzl’s diaries, Ben-Gurion’s diaries and letters, and Yosef Weitz’s unedited diaries in the Central Zionist Archives, the source base Nur Masalha used for Expulsion of the Palestinians. Morris, whose politics are the opposite of Masalha’s and who has defended the expulsions, told Haaretz in January 2004 that from April 1948 “there is an atmosphere of transfer” and that “the entire leadership understands that this is the idea.” A body of evidence assembled by Israeli historians from Israeli archives, disputed among themselves over interpretation but not over the underlying documents, and actively withdrawn from public access by an Israeli government department, is the opposite of an undocumented narrative.

Sources

• Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs” — Haaretz, 5 July 2019 (PDF via the Akevot Institute)
• IDF Intelligence Service report, 30 June 1948 — published in full by the Akevot Institute
• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) — full text
• “Survival of the Fittest”: Ari Shavit interviews Benny Morris — Haaretz, 8 January 2004