A review of Avi Shlaim’s and Benny Morris’s books, by Ronald Sanders, in The New York Times of of September 4, 1988
COLLUSION ACROSS THE JORDAN King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. By Avi Shlaim. Maps. 676 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $40. THE BIRTH OF THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE PROBLEM, 1947-1949 By Benny Morris. Maps. 380 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press. $39.50.
IF revisionist history means a kind of writing that differs, on grounds of scholarly objectivity, from popular assumptions and myths, then all serious historical writing is revisionist. Even as one puzzles at King Hussein’s severing of Jordan’s legal and administrative ties to the West Bank and the proposals of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to assume political responsibility there, it is useful to know the historical background so brilliantly presented in two new books by Israeli historians. Both re-examine aspects of their country’s origins as a state and are not afraid to be tough toward their own when truth requires that they be so.
Indeed, Avi Shlaim, a fellow of St. Antony’s College at Oxford, is tough toward the Israelis even when he does not have to be. His ”Collusion Across the Jordan” – which is largely based on hitherto unavailable source materials – is a lucid and meticulous study of the 30-year political relationship between the Zionist (later Israeli) leadership on one side of the River Jordan and the Emir (later King) Abdullah on the other, ending only with the assassination of the latter by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951. This strange and mostly clandestine, yet crucial, relationship stands now as a demonstration that even in 1948, when the new state of Israel was being invaded by Arab armies on all sides, the lineup against it was not really so monolithic as it seemed.
The fact was that the Israelis and Abdullah’s Jordanian monarchy, brought together by geography and their common origins in British Mandatory Palestine, had as many crucial interests in common with each other as Jordan had with the Arab world in general. Foremost among these, as Mr. Shlaim demonstrates with occasional though not consistent disapproval, was a common desire not to see an independent Palestinian state established west of the Jordan. Abdullah, still harbouring his Hashemite dynastic dreams of ultimate rule over the entire Arab world, had for a while aspired to a kingship over Jordan and Palestine, one that would even have tolerated the growth of a Jewish national home in its midst. But at last, perceiving the inevitability of Jewish statehood, he was ready to confine his ambition to sovereignty over the parts of Palestine that did not become Israeli. At the same time, the Zionist leadership was persuaded that Jordanian sovereignty over the areas that have since become known as the West Bank was preferable to another Arab state there.
It is with regard to the question of the West Bank that Mr. Shlaim’s book is particularly instructive. For the fact emerges quite clearly that the 1949 armistice border between Israel and Jordan – and, above all, the line that cut Jerusalem in two – was not so purely an accident of war as may once have seemed to be the case. Rather, it was to some extent the product of understandings (albeit strained at times) between Abdullah and the Israelis. Mr. Shlaim demonstrates that if Jerusalem in particular came to be divided between Jordan and Israel, it was largely because this was the arrangement preferred by both countries’ leaders to the internationalization of the city proposed by the United Nations in November 1947. If the fighting over Jerusalem and its access corridor became fierce in 1948, this was because the Israelis occasionally showed signs of wanting more than the Jordanians thought they should have. But throughout the war, as Mr. Shlaim shows, the Jordanians were scrupulous about not engaging Jewish troops in areas that had been designated as part of the proposed Jewish state in the November 1947 United Nations resolution.
This, then, is the thrust of the ”collusion” of Mr. Shlaim’s title, though the reader is often led to wonder why the author imposes on the whole story the harsh judgment implied by that word. Abdullah and the Israelis were, after all, only doing what nations do when they discover that a mutual acknowledgment of claims is a better way to peace than the pursuit of distant visionary goals. To be sure, they were ignoring any possible Palestinian Arab claims to statehood: Mr. Shlaim is never more severe regarding this point than when he writes that the book focuses ”in particular on the clandestine diplomacy that led to the partition of Palestine between the two sides and left the Palestine Arabs without a homeland.” Yet, through the course of more than 600 pages of narrative, he often slips into a rather more approving tone as he describes the repeated efforts of Israelis and an Arab king to achieve some kind of reconciliation with each other.
That this was the path of simple political realism is implied by the facts themselves as exhaustively assembled by Mr. Shlaim. For there is virtually nothing in his book to indicate that the Palestinian Arabs were ready, with a viable political leadership, to step in and take control of the West Bank for themselves in 1948. This never appears in his narrative as a practical alternative. Rather, what the reader sees is two functioning political entities behaving no more cynically than other nations in the same circumstances.
”Collusion Across the Jordan” ends with a brief sketch of the ways in which some of the outlines of the Israeli-Abdullah relationship have extended down through the reign of Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein, the present ruler of Jordan. (Golda Meir, who made two clandestine diplomatic visits to Abdullah in 1947-48, is said to have met with King Hussein 10 times while she was Prime Minister of Israel.) Of course, there have been some crucial changes in circumstances: the West Bank is now in Israeli hands, and a vigorous Palestinian Arab national movement has clearly emerged.
A good many popular assumptions and myths surround the mass flight of Palestinian Arabs during Israel’s war of independence in 1948 and none of them are left unchallenged by Benny Morris’s scholarly study, ”The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.” Mr. Morris, the diplomatic correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, is a rare combination of journalist and painstaking research historian, whose thorough use of Israeli, British and American archives – many of the materials unavailable until now – has enabled him to present a definitive history of his subject. Moreover, he does not succumb to the temptation of moralising. Rather, he depicts both the Jewish and the Arab sides in all their human reality – aspiring, fumbling, succeeding, failing, gradually evolving their positions and constantly making errors of conduct and judgment under the stress of war.
The gist of Mr. Morris’s story is summed up by him thus: ”The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Israeli-Arab war.” In other words, as Mr. Morris demonstrates, we must put aside notions often cherished either by Jews or by Arabs, of an Israeli grand plan of expulsion on the one hand, or an Arab grand plan of encouraged population withdrawal in anticipation of a triumphant return on the other.
On the Israeli side, Mr. Morris is able to describe, through a detailed use of archival materials, how a policy emerged among a military leadership at war to encourage the flight of Arab villagers in troubled areas and even forcibly to send them packing. Such departures were eventually followed by the mass evacuations of some major Arab urban populations.
Mr. Morris does not seek any facile explanations for these mass evacuations, which in some cases – mainly that of the almost overnight departure of about 50,000 Arabs from Haifa at the end of April 1948 – were mystifying, discouraged as they were by some Jewish leaders and seemingly unjustified by the conditions of the Jewish conquest. He allows for the element of panic that spread among Arabs as a result of the massacre of villagers at Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem by Jewish guerrillas of the Irgun and the Stern Gang on April 9, 1948 – and later, of other Israeli atrocities that he does not flinch to describe – but he sees this as part of a ”multi-layered” causal picture. A typical Arab merchant of Haifa, he writes, ”did not leave only because of the weeks or months of sniping and bombings; or because business was getting bad; or because of intimidation and extortion by [ Arab ] irregulars; or because he feared the collapse of law and order when the British left; or because he feared for his prospects and livelihood under Jewish rule. He left because of the accumulation of all these factors.”
ONE factor still insisted on by many, but which Mr. Morris’s firm allegiance to the documentary record will not allow him to acknowledge, is the alleged use of broadcasts by Arab leaders urging Palestinians to withdraw en masse until the Jews had been defeated. Referring to the start of the main Arab exodus in April 1948, Mr. Morris writes: ”I have found no contemporary evidence of such blanket, official ‘calls,’ by the Syrian government or the other Arab governments, to Palestine’s Arabs to leave.” Among those who have challenged this careful formulation is Heskel M. Haddad, the president of the World Organisation for Jews from Arab Countries, who maintained in a letter published in The Times in July that he himself heard such broadcasts when he was in Baghdad in 1948.
It should be pointed out that Mr. Morris does acknowledge ”minor exceptions” in the case of ”orders, apparently by Syrian officials, to some of the Arab inhabitants of Eastern Galilee to leave a few days prior to, and in preparation for, the invasion of 15 May.” Perhaps, then, Mr. Haddad is recalling one of these ”minor exceptions”; or perhaps Mr. Morris’s inability to find ”blanket calls” represents a gap in the available record that he has so thoroughly examined. It is true that the official Arab sources on this period have not yet been opened to researchers; on the other hand, Mr. Morris’s Israeli and British sources include reports thoroughly monitoring Arab broadcasts. The question apparently remains moot, but Mr. Morris’s conclusions must be regarded with the utmost respect.
What is incontrovertible is that, as these two books demonstrate, historical scholarship by Israelis on the Arab-Jewish conflict can be as reliable and illuminating as that produced by any other national group.
The Palestinian Arab exodus began in December 1947-March 1948, with the departure of many of the country’s upper and middle- class families, especially from Haifa and Jaffa, towns destined to be in, or at the mercy of, the Jewish-State-to-be, and from Jewish-dominated districts of western Jerusalem. Flight proved infectious. Household followed household, neighbour followed neighbour . . . The prosperous and educated feared death or injury in the ever-spreading hostilities, the anarchy that attended the gradual withdrawal of the British administration and security forces. . . .
Most of the . . . families . . . probably thought their exile would be temporary. These families had the financial wherewithal to tide them over; many had wealthy relatives and accommodation outside the country. The urban masses . . . however, had nowhere to go, certainly not in comfort. For them, flight meant instant destitution; it was not a course readily adopted. But the daily spectacle of the abandonment by their ”betters,” the middle and upper classes, with its concomitant progressive closure of businesses, schools, law offices and medical clinics, and abandonment of civil service and municipal posts, led to a steady attrition of morale, a cumulative sapping of faith and trust in the world around them: their leaders were going or had gone; the British were packing. They had been left ”alone” to face the Zionist enemy. – From ”The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.”