Israel is a State whose Intelligence Services are Engaged in Rewriting
the History of the Nakba and the Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians
I was brought up as a
Zionist and from an early age I learnt that, despite the wishes of the Israelis,
the Arabs had insisted on leaving Palestine in order to let the Arab armies
invade and drive the Jews out. In every Arab village there was a radio which
conveyed orders from the Arab states to get out in order not to impede the
invading Arab armies.
Looking at it today, it is a
wonder how I and generations of Jews bought into these myths. They are, when
seen in the cold light of day, absurd. No indigenous population voluntarily exiles
itself. It makes no sense. Why would the Palestinians take orders from distant
Arab rulers. But to us it made sense. After all ‘the Arabs’ were the enemy.
The history of what has happened has been told
in many books and articles such as Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
and Benny Morris’s The
Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited. Over half the Palestinian refugees had
already been expelled by May 15th 1948 when Israel declared its
independence.
We were also told how the Zionists begged the Palestinians
to stay and in particular how the Mayor of Haifa Shabtai Levy pleaded with
the Palestinians to stay. Indeed Golda Meir wrote in her autobiography
"My Life" that Ben-Gurion asked her to try and prevent the flight of
Haifa’s Arabs.
“Ben-Gurion
called me and said: 'I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that
the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try
and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to
get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear,' he said. And so, I went
immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home I pleaded
with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work,”
It was also a lie. In fact on 2nd June 1948,
barely a month after their expulsion, David Ben-Gurion sent a letter to Abba
Khoushy, the secretary-general of the Haifa Workers' Council, and later the
city’s mayor instructing him that ‘we don’t want a return of the enemy.
And all institutions should act accordingly’ After Capturing Haifa, Ben-Gurion GaveOrder to Stop Fleeing Arabs From Returning.
What we weren’t told was how the Palestinians
in Haifa had been shelled and mortared by the Zionist terror militias and that
the main militia, the Labour Zionist Haganah had used loudspeakers to warn of a
terrible massacre if any Arabs stayed. Such
was the panic that many Palestinians drowned in the sea at Haifa Port when
boarding the boats to take them to safety. [See Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine]
We were also told how the Zionists begged the Palestinians
to stay and in particular how the Mayor of Haifa Shabtai Levy pleaded with
the Palestinians to stay. But as Michael
Bar-Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion, noted appeals to “the Arabs to stay” were political gestures for external audiences
whereas "[i]n internal discussions", Ben-Gurion communicated that “it
was better that the smallest possible
number of Arabs remain within the area of the state.” [Michael Bar-Zohar (1977): Ben-Gurion: A Political
Biography. Hebrew, Tel Aviv,
vol. 2, pp. 702–3]
It would have been impossible to form a majority Jewish state if the Arabs had stayed. In 1961 two researchers, quite independently
of each other, Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers, conducted research which
involved transcribing the CIA and BBC reports and tapes of the Arab radio
stations of the period. [See Erskine Childers, The Other Exodus, The Spectator, 12.5.61.]
What Khalidi and Childers found was that these
radio stations instructed the Arabs of Palestine to stay and indeed threatened
them with dire consequences if they left.
There was no evidence of any instruction to leave, contrary to the
Zionist mythology and yet a whole lie has been built on this myth, which was
constructed in order that Israel could avoid implementing UN Resolution 194.
[see The
Palestinian Exodus in 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies].
In Israel the official lie, that the Arabs
left of their own accord, persists. In 2011 the Knesset passed the Naqba Law which authorised the Finance Minister to
reduce state funding or support for an institution if it holds an activity that
rejects the existence of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” or
commemorates “Israel’s Independence Day or the day on which the state was
established as a day of mourning.”
The Palestinians still
left in Israel are supposed to rejoice on the day that their relatives were
expelled or massacred. The State instructs them to commemorate and celebrate a lie on pain of suffering the consequences.
Interestingly by August
last year the Finance Ministry had rejected all 98 appeals, 17
of which had been submitted by Israel’s fascist culture Minister Miri Regev, to
reduce funding to institutions which had nonetheless held events commemorating
Naqba day. In practice it was difficult to implement a law designed to change history to fit in with national myths.
However a Committee set up as a result of Regev’s whining decided to fine the Jaffa theatre a few thousand shekels for holding two events, one of which featured the poetry of Dareen Tatour, an Israeli Palestinian poet gaoled for her poetry by Israel.
However a Committee set up as a result of Regev’s whining decided to fine the Jaffa theatre a few thousand shekels for holding two events, one of which featured the poetry of Dareen Tatour, an Israeli Palestinian poet gaoled for her poetry by Israel.
It is clear that the Israeli state is intent on
preserving the myth of its creation, that the Arabs ran away. It seeks to do
this both by the use of legislation fining any institution, including schools,
which provide another version of history and through closing their archives,
even when they have previously been open to historians and researchers. The
truth is a malleable instrument of power.
However the genie is out of the bottle. Once a
document has been revealed and read no amount of retrospective censorship can
put the genie back into the bottle. The mere fact that
Israel is trying, by the crudest censorship, to put a stop to these
embarrassing revelations about its history, by resealing the archives, is proof that Israel has a
great deal to hide, not least the circumstances of its own creation.
History is being
rewritten by Israel’s security services with the sole purpose of distorting the past in order to shape
the future.
Today the same dilemma faces Israel as it did in 1948.
The majority of those now living within Greater Israel are Palestinian Arabs.
The Jewish State can only remain Jewish by depriving the majority of Palestinians
under their control of any civil or political rights. In other words Israel has
chosen a combination of apartheid (previously dressed up as the 2 State
Solution) and bantustanisation. The question is whether and when it resorts to its
final solution, transfer or ethnic cleansing. As Jonathan Ofir writes in the
article below:
‘Everything is being buried, by an arm of the Israeli government. If someone
were doing this to Holocaust documents, there would be a cry to the heavens. …
The Jewish State is actively trying to erase the Nakba and any critical
discussion of it. Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany – but Nakba denial is
not illegal in Israel, and it is thriving.
Reading
through the following articles and in particular the interview with Yehiel
Horev, Director Malmab, the Head of the Defence Ministry Department charged
with restricting access to already open archives is chilling. He makes no secret of his belief that historical
documents are a plaything of a government intent on rewriting history. Horev explained
that:
the objective is to undermine
the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s
view, an allegation made by a researcher that's backed up by an original
document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
Horev
elaborated, quite shamelessly, that
When the state imposes
confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the
document
There are those who still profess that Israel is just another liberal western
democracy. This deception lies at the
heart of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of
democracy. What is happening with Israeli archives dealing with the origins of the
State demonstrates that Israel’s democracy is just a facade, a sugar coating
that covers a military state. What other
democracy would allows its intelligence services to roam the country
intimidating academic archivists into permiting the censorship of embarrassing
documents?
Tony Greenstein
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| International forces overseeing the evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today's Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/Israel State Archives |
 |
| Benny Morris |
Yesterday, a Hebrew-only piece appeared in Haaretz, by Morris, titled “The Director of Historical
Revisionism in the Defense Ministry”. The title is a sarcastic pun on the name
of the revealed department, the “Department for Security of the Defense
Establishment” (acronym Malmab in Hebrew).
Morris congratulates Shezaf
for her “excellent investigative report” and continues to tell in detail of the
disappearance of archives he had quoted from concerning the massacre of Deir
Yassin from 1948.
Morris’s exposure reveals a
multi-layered conspiracy of cover-up, historical revisionism and censorship
that cuts across many decades:
About two years ago, when I
was preparing a collection of articles for my recent book in Hebrew (“From Deir
Yassin to Camp David”), I asked the Defense Ministry and IDF Archive for
permission to peruse anew documents which regarded the massacre which was
committed by the Etzel [Irgun] and Lehi [Stern Gang] in the Arab town Deir
Yassin, on the western approaches of Jerusalem, on February 9th 1948. On that
day 100-120 of the village residents were killed, most of them children, women
and elderly. These documents were open to researchers and the wide public at
the beginning of the 21st century and I had quoted from them extensively in the
English article “The Historiography of Deir Yassin” which I had published in
2005 in the Tel Aviv University’s “Journal of Israeli History”. I had now asked
to peruse them again, but the directors of the archive refused my request. They
had no explanation other than the statement: “now the documents are closed”.
Morris reveals that the
documents he was seeking were not only from 1948 (reports from the Haganah
Intelligence Service), but also from much later – 1971.
The 1971 documents relate
to secret discussions between former Haganah/IDF officials and Foreign Ministry
officials concerning what happened in Deir Yassin. And the reason for the
discussions is a booklet that was published in 1969 by the Hasbara Department
of the Foreign Ministry, under Abba Eban. Morris explains about the content:
In the booklet it was
claimed that there was no massacre in Deir Yassin and that the story about the
massacre is supposedly an Arab fiction, ‘part of a collection of fables’.
Morris also discloses that
it was his father, the late Yaakov Morris, who was the author of the booklet.
The release of the booklet caused uproar amongst veterans of the Labor movement
who had been leaders in the Zionist militias and the Israeli military in 1948,
and they complained about the booklet. In 1971, Shaul Avigdor, who had been a
Haganah immigration official, sent a complaint to Gideon Rafael, Director
General of the Foreign Ministry. Avigdor attached an opinion from Yehuda
Slutzki, author of the official Haganah history book, who affirmed that there
indeed was a massacre in Deir Yassin. Yitzhak Levy, who was head of the
Intelligence Service in Jerusalem in 1948 and later became Deputy Director
General of the Prime Minister Office, wrote to Menahem Begin (Irgun commander
and later Prime Minister) also in 1971 – Begin had denied the massacre.
Levitzeh [Yitzhak Levy]
wrote that he had investigated the story at the time, and found that Deir
Yassin was a quiet town, which had not participated in the battles of 1948 and
that indeed a massacre had been perpetrated there by the Irgun and Lehi. Also
Israel Galili, from the heads of the Haganah in 1948 and at the time a senior
minister in the Israeli government, complained directly to Eban. Eventually
Eban replied that his office had shelved the discussed booklet.
Morris summarizes:
The relevant letters from
1971, which were open for perusal in 2003-2004, were closed to researchers and
the wide public by order of the Malmab, and therefore in 2018 I was prohibited
from seeing them. As well, most of the “incriminating” material from April
1948, which was written by the Intelligence Service officers and was open in
2003-2004, was closed by the Malmab (by the way, even earlier, since I began to
work with 1948 matters from the early 1980’s, the Archive of the Defense
Ministry and IDF has consistently refused to release for review photographs of
the slain of Deir Yassin, which were apparently taken by the Intelligence
Service people before they were buried).
Morris cites Yitzhak Levy,
reporting about Deir Yassin in 1948:
The conquering of the town
was done with great cruelty. Whole families, women, elderly and small children
were killed… Some of the prisoners were taken to detention centers including
women and children and cruelly murdered by their captors.
Levy had supplied his
report the day after with a follow-up from testimonies of Lehi militants:
Lehi fighters raped a
number of women and murdered them later.
Morris writes that these
reports contain many more acts of the Irgun and Lehi in Deir Yassin, including
looting etc.
Morris decries the “idiocy”
of the Malmab in hiding these materials, since “the whole story was told and
publicized since 1988 in many books in Hebrew and English, from my pen and from
others”. But he resigns to the logic of it all:
Yet, as transpires from
Shezaf’s article, the heads of Malmab in their actions hope or hoped that
inaccessibility of the Israeli materials, which they had enforced, would cause
doubt regarding the work, the conclusions and the very credibility of the researchers
– including this writer – in whoever reads their books and articles.
What a cover-up, what a
conspiracy (and that’s not just a theory). Everything is being buried, by an
arm of the Israeli government. If someone were doing this to Holocaust documents,
there would be a cry to the heavens. What a shame. The Jewish State is actively
trying to erase the Nakba and any critical discussion of it. Holocaust denial
is illegal in Germany – but Nakba denial is not illegal in Israel, and it is
thriving.
H/t Ronit Lentin
Jonathan Ofir
Israeli
musician, conductor and blogger / writer based in Denmark.
Burying the Nakba: How
Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs
Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have
scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal
proof of the Nakba
By Hagar Shezaf
Jul 05, 2019
Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a
document she found in the file of Yosef Waschitz, from the Arab Department of
the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva. The
document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war,
began:
“Safsaf
[former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52
men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were
still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men.
There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of from Safed, girl of 14, 4
men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the
ring.”
The writer goes on to describe additional massacres,
looting and abuse perpetrated by Israeli forces in Israel’s War of
Independence. “There’s no name on the
document and it’s not clear who’s behind it,” Dr. Novick tells Haaretz. “It also breaks off in the middle. I found it
very disturbing. I knew that finding a document like this made me responsible
for clarifying what happened.”
The Upper Galilee village of Safsaf was captured by
the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Hiram toward the end of 1948. Moshav
Safsufa was established on its ruins. Allegations were made over the years that
the Seventh Brigade committed war crimes in the village. Those charges are
supported by the document Novick found, which was not previously known to
scholars. It could also constitute additional evidence that the Israeli top
brass knew about what was going on in real time.
Novick decided to consult with other historians about the
document. Benny
Morris, whose books are basic texts in the study of the Nakba – the
“calamity,” as the Palestinians refer to the mass emigration of Arabs from the
country during the 1948 war – told her that he, too, had come across similar
documentation in the past. He was referring to notes made by Mapam Central
Committee member Aharon Cohen on the basis of a briefing given in November 1948
by Israel Galili, the former chief of staff of the Haganah militia, which
became the IDF. Cohen’s notes in this instance, which Morris published, stated:
“Safsaf 52 men tied with a rope. Dropped into
a pit and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases
of rape. Caught and released. A girl of 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed.
Rings of knives.”
Morris’ footnote (in his seminal “The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”) states that this document was also
found in the Yad Yaari Archive. But when Novick returned to examine the
document, she was surprised to discover that it was no longer there.
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Palestine refugees initially displaced to Gaza board boats to Lebanon or Egypt, in 1949. Hrant Nakashian/1949 UN Archives
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“At first I
thought that maybe Morris hadn’t been accurate in his footnote, that perhaps he
had made a mistake,” Novick recalls. “It
took me time to consider the possibility that the document had simply
disappeared.” When she asked those in charge where the document was, she
was told that it had been placed behind lock and key at Yad Yaari – by order of
the Ministry of Defense.
Since the
start of the last decade, Defense Ministry teams have been scouring Israel’s
archives and removing historic documents. But it’s not just papers
relating to Israel’s nuclear project or to the country’s foreign
relations that are being transferred to vaults: Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic
effort to hide evidence of the Nakba.
The phenomenon was first detected by the Akevot
Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. According to a report
drawn up by the institute, the operation is being spearheaded by Malmab, the
Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym
for “director of security of the defense establishment”), whose activities and
budget are classified. The 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.
An investigative report by Haaretz found that Malmab
has concealed testimony from IDF generals about the killing of civilians and
the demolition of villages, as well as documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin
during the first decade of statehood. Conversations conducted by Haaretz with
directors of public and private archives alike revealed that staff of the
security department had treated the archives as their property, in some cases
threatening the directors themselves.
[Yehiel Horev] explained that
the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of
the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that's
backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot
be proved or refuted.
Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades, until
2007, acknowledged to Haaretz that he launched the project, which is still
ongoing. He maintains that it makes sense to conceal the events of 1948, because
uncovering them could generate unrest among the country’s Arab population.
Asked what the point is of removing documents that have already been published,
he explained that the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies
about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made
by a researcher that's backed up by an original document is not the same as an
allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
The document Novick was looking for might have
reinforced Morris’ work. During the investigation, Haaretz was in fact able to
find the Aharon Cohen memo, which sums up a meeting of Mapam’s Political
Committee on the subject of massacres and expulsions in 1948. Participants in
the meeting called for cooperation with a commission of inquiry that would
investigate the events. One case the committee discussed concerned “grave
actions” carried out in the village of Al-Dawayima, east of Kiryat Gat. One
participant mentioned the then-disbanded Lehi underground militia in this
connection. Acts of looting were also reported: “Lod and Ramle, Be’er Sheva, there isn’t [an Arab] store that hasn’t
been broken into. 9th Brigade says 7, 7th Brigade says 8.”
“The
party,” the document states near the end, “is against expulsion if there is no military necessity for it. There
are different approaches concerning the evaluation of necessity. And further
clarification is best. What happened in Galilee – those are Nazi acts! Every
one of our members must report what he knows.”
The Israeli version
One of the most fascinating documents about the origin
of the Palestinian refugee problem was written by an officer in Shai, the
precursor to the Shin Bet security service. It discusses why the country was
emptied of so many of its Arab inhabitants, dwelling on the circumstances of
each village. Compiled in late June 1948, it was titled “The Emigration of the
Arabs of Palestine.”
This document was the basis for an article that Benny
Morris published in 1986. After the article appeared, the document was removed
from the archive and rendered inaccessible to researchers. Years later, the
Malmab team reexamined the document, and ordered that it remain classified.
They could not have known that a few years later researchers from Akevot would
find a copy of the text and run it past the military censors – who authorized
its publication unconditionally. Now, after years of concealment, the gist of
the document is being revealed here.
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Palestinian children awaiting distribution of milk by UNICEF at the Nazareth Franciscan Sisters’ convent, on January 1, 1950. AW / UN Photo
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The 25-page document begins with an introduction that
unabashedly approves of the evacuation of the Arab villages. According to the
author, the month of April “excelled in
an increase of emigration,” while May “was
blessed with the evacuation of maximum places.” The report then addresses “the causes of the Arab emigration.”
According to the Israeli narrative that was disseminated over the years,
responsibility for the exodus from Israel rests with Arab politicians who
encouraged the population to leave. However,
according to the document, 70 percent of the Arabs left as a result of Jewish
military operations.
The unnamed author of the text ranks the reasons for
the Arabs’ departure in order of importance. The first reason: “Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab
places of settlement.” The second reason was the impact of those actions on
neighboring villages. Third in importance came “operations by the breakaways,” namely the Irgun and Lehi
undergrounds. The fourth reason for the Arab exodus was orders issued by Arab
institutions and “gangs” (as the document refers to all Arab fighting groups);
fifth was “Jewish 'whispering operations'
to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”; and the sixth factor was “evacuation ultimatums.”
The author asserts that, “without a doubt, the hostile operations were the main cause of the
movement of the population.” In addition, “Loudspeakers in the Arabic language proved their effectiveness on the
occasions when they were utilized properly.” As for Irgun and Lehi
operations, the report observes that “many
in the villages of central Galilee started to flee following the abduction of
the notables of Sheikh Muwannis [a village north of Tel Aviv]. The Arab learned that it is not enough to
forge an agreement with the Haganah and that there are other Jews [i.e.,
the breakaway militias] to beware of.”
The author notes that ultimatums to leave were
especially employed in central Galilee, less so in the Mount Gilboa region. “Naturally, the act of this ultimatum, like
the effect of the 'friendly advice,' came after a certain preparing of the
ground by means of hostile actions in the area.”
An appendix to the document describes the specific
causes of the exodus from each of scores of Arab locales: Ein Zeitun – “our destruction of the village”; Qeitiya
– “harassment, threat of action”;
Almaniya – “our action, many killed”;
Tira – “friendly Jewish advice”;
Al’Amarir – “after robbery and murder
carried out by the breakaways”; Sumsum – “our ultimatum”; Bir Salim – “attack
on the orphanage”; and Zarnuga – “conquest
and expulsion.”
Short fuse
In the early 2000s, the Yitzhak Rabin Center conducted
a series of interviews with former public and military figures as part of a
project to document their activity in the service of the state. The long arm of
Malmab seized on these interviews, too. Haaretz, which obtained the original texts
of several of the interviews, compared them to the versions that are now
available to the public, after large swaths of them were declared classified.
These included, for example, sections of the testimony
of Brig. Gen. (res.) Aryeh Shalev about the expulsion across the border of the
residents of a village he called “Sabra.” Later in the interview, the following
sentences were deleted: “There was a very
serious problem in the valley. There were refugees who wanted to return to the
valley, to the Triangle [a concentration of Arab towns and villages in
eastern Israel]. We expelled them. I met
with them to persuade them not to want that. I have papers about it.”
In another case, Malmab decided to conceal the
following segment from an interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with
Maj. Gen. (res.) Elad Peled:
Lev Tov: “We’re talking about a population – women and
children?”
Peled: “All, all. Yes.”
Lev Tov: “Don’t you distinguish between them?”
Peled: “The problem is very simple. The war is between
two populations. They come out of their home.”
Lev Tov: “If the home exists, they have somewhere to
return to?”
Peled: “It’s not armies yet, it’s gangs. We’re also
actually gangs. We come out of the house and return to the house. They come out
of the house and return to the house. It’s either their house or our house.”
Lev Tov: “Qualms belong to the more recent
generation?”
Peled: “Yes, today. When I sit in an armchair here and
think about what happened, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.”
Lev Tov: “Wasn’t that the case then?”
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice
and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee].
The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach
[the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That
was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20
homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we
entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh
blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for
our forces] to leave. We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull,
it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those
houses are gone.”
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IDF soldiers guarding Palestinians in Ramle, in 1948. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
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Another passage that the Defense Ministry wanted to
keep from the public came from Dr. Lev Tov’s conversation with Maj. Gen.
Avraham Tamir:
Tamir: “I was
under Chera [Maj. Gen. Tzvi Tzur, later IDF chief of staff], and I had excellent working relations with
him. He gave me freedom of action – don’t ask – and I happened to be in charge
of staff and operations work during two developments deriving from [Prime
Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s policy. One
development was when reports arrived about marches of refugees from Jordan
toward the abandoned villages [in Israel]. And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the
villages] so they won’t have anywhere to
return to. That is, all the Arab villages, most of which were in [the area
covered by] Central Command, most of them.”
Lev Tov: “The
ones that were still standing?”
Tamir: “The ones
that weren’t yet inhabited by Israelis. There were places where we had already
settled Israelis, like Zakariyya and others. But most of them were still
abandoned villages.”
Lev Tov: “That
were standing?”
Tamir: “Standing.
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.”
Lev Tov: “Without
hesitation, I imagine.”
Tamir: “Without
hesitation. That was the policy. I mobilized, I carried it out and I did it.”
Crates in vaults
The vault of the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation
Center is one floor below ground level. In the vault, which is actually a
small, well-secured room, are stacks of crates containing classified documents.
The archive houses the materials of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, the Kibbutz
Ha’artzi kibbutz movement, Mapam, Meretz and other bodies, such as Peace Now.
The archive’s director is Dudu Amitai, who is also
chairman of the Association of Israel Archivists. According to Amitai, Malmab
personnel visited the archive regularly between 2009 and 2011. Staff of the
archive relate that security department teams – two Defense Ministry retirees
with no archival training – would show up two or three times a week. They
searched for documents according to such keywords as “nuclear,” “security” and
“censorship,” and also devoted considerable time to the War of Independence and
the fate of the pre-1948 Arab villages.
“In the end,
they submitted a summary to us, saying that they had located a few dozen
sensitive documents,” Amitai says. “We
don’t usually take apart files, so dozens of files, in their entirety, found
their way into our vault and were removed from the public catalog.” A file
might contain more than 100 documents.
One of the files that was sealed deals with the
military government that controlled the lives of Israel’s Arab citizens from
1948 until 1966. For years, the documents were stored in the same vault,
inaccessible to scholars. Recently, in the wake of a request by Prof. Gadi
Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University, Amitai examined the file himself
and ruled that there was no reason not to unseal it, Malmab’s opinion
notwithstanding.
According to Algazi, there could be several reasons
for Malmab’s decision to keep the file classified. One of them has to do with a
secret annex it contains to a report by a committee that examined the operation
of the military government. The report deals almost entirely with
land-ownership battles between the state and Arab citizens, and barely touches
on security matters.
Another possibility is a 1958 report by the
ministerial committee that oversaw the military government. In one of the
report’s secret appendixes, Col. Mishael Shaham, a senior officer in the
military government, explains that one reason for not dismantling the martial
law apparatus is the need to restrict Arab citizens’ access to the labor market
and to prevent the reestablishment of destroyed villages.
A third possible explanation for hiding the file
concerns previously unpublished historical testimony about the expulsion of
Bedouin. On the eve of Israel’s
establishment, nearly 100,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev. Three years later,
their number was down to 13,000. In the years during and after the
independence war, a number of expulsion operations were carried out in the
country’s south. In one case, United Nations observers reported that Israel had
expelled 400 Bedouin from the Azazma tribe and cited testimonies of tents being
burned. The letter that appears in the classified file describes a similar
expulsion carried out as late as 1956, as related by geologist Avraham Parnes:
 |
The evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today's Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
|
“A
month ago we toured Ramon [crater]. The Bedouin in the Mohila area came to us
with their flocks and their families and asked us to break bread with them. I
replied that we had a great deal of work to do and didn’t have time. In our
visit this week, we headed toward Mohila again. Instead of the Bedouin and
their flocks, there was deathly silence. Scores of camel carcasses were
scattered in the area. We learned that three days earlier the IDF had ‘screwed’
the Bedouin, and their flocks were destroyed – the camels by shooting, the
sheep with grenades. One of the Bedouin, who started to complain, was killed,
the rest fled.”
The testimony continued,
“Two
weeks earlier, they’d been ordered to stay where they were for the time being,
afterward they were ordered to leave, and to speed things up 500 head were
slaughtered.... The expulsion was executed ‘efficiently.’” The letter goes on
to quote what one of the soldiers said to Parnes, according to his testimony:
“They won’t go unless we’ve screwed their flocks. A young girl of about 16
approached us. She had a beaded necklace of brass snakes. We tore the necklace
and each of us took a bead for a souvenir.”
The letter was originally sent to MK Yaakov Uri, from
Mapai (forerunner of Labor), who passed it on to Development Minister Mordechai
Bentov (Mapam). “His letter shocked me,” Uri
wrote Bentov. The latter circulated the letter among all the cabinet ministers,
writing, “It is my opinion that the
government cannot simply ignore the facts related in the letter.” Bentov
added that, in light of the appalling contents of the letter, he asked security
experts to check its credibility. They had confirmed that the contents “do in fact generally conform to the truth.”
Nuclear excuse
It was during the tenure of historian Tuvia Friling as
Israel’s chief archivist, from 2001 to 2004, that Malmab carried out its first
archival incursions. What began as an operation to prevent the leakage of
nuclear secrets, he says, became, in time, a large-scale censorship project.
“I resigned
after three years, and that was one of the reasons,” Prof. Friling says. “The classification placed on the document
about the Arabs’ emigration in 1948 is precisely an example of what I was
apprehensive about. The storage and archival system is not an arm of the
state’s public relations. If there’s something you don’t like – well, that’s
life. A healthy society also learns from its mistakes.”
Why did Friling allow the Defense Ministry to have
access the archives? The reason, he says, was the intention to give the public
access to archival material via the internet. In discussions about the implications
of digitizing the material, concern was expressed that references in the
documents to a “certain topic” would be made public by mistake. The topic, of
course, is Israel’s nuclear project. Friling insists that the only
authorization Malmab received was to search for documents on that subject.
But Malmab’s activity is only one example of a broader
problem, Friling notes:
“In
1998, the confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad
archives expired. For years those two institutions disdained the chief
archivist. When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of all the
material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous – most of the
material can be opened.”
In 2010, the confidentiality period was extended to 70
years; last February it was extended again, to 90 years, despite the opposition
of the Supreme Council of Archives. “The
state may impose confidentiality on some of its documentation,” Friling
says. “The question is whether the issue
of security doesn’t act as a kind of cover. In many cases, it’s already become
a joke.”
In the view of Yad Yaari’s Dudu Amitai, the
confidentiality imposed by the Defense Ministry must be challenged. In his
period at the helm, he says, one of the documents placed in the vault was an
order issued by an IDF general, during a truce in the War of Independence, for
his troops to refrain from rape and looting. Amitai now intends to go over the
documents that were deposited in the vault, especially 1948 documents, and open
whatever is possible. “We’ll do it
cautiously and responsibly, but recognizing that the State of Israel has to
learn how to cope with the less pleasant aspects of its history.”
In contrast to Yad Yaari, where ministry personnel no
longer visit, they are continuing to peruse documents at Yad Tabenkin, the
research and documentation center of the United Kibbutz Movement. The director,
Aharon Azati, reached an agreement with the Malmab teams under which documents
will be transferred to the vault only if he is convinced that this is
justified. But in Yad Tabenkin, too, Malmab has broadened its searches beyond
the realm of nuclear project to encompass interviews conducted by archival
staff with former members of the Palmach, and has even perused material about
the history of the settlements in the occupied territories.
Malmab has, for example, shown interest in the
Hebrew-language book “A Decade of Discretion: Settlement Policy in the
Territories 1967-1977,” published by Yad Tabenkin in 1992, and written by
Yehiel Admoni, director of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department during the
decade he writes about. The book mentions a plan to settle Palestinian refugees
in the Jordan Valley and to the uprooting of 1,540 Bedouin families from the
Rafah area of the Gaza Strip in 1972, including an operation that included the
sealing of wells by the IDF. Ironically, in the case of the Bedouin, Admoni
quotes former Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira as saying, “It is not necessary to stretch the security
rationale too far. The whole Bedouin episode is not a glorious chapter of the
State of Israel.”
 |
Palestinian refugees leaving their village, unknown location, 1948. UNRWA
|
According to Azati, “We are moving increasingly to a tightening of the ranks. Although this
is an era of openness and transparency, there are apparently forces that are
pulling in the opposite direction.”
Unauthorized secrecy
About a year ago, the legal adviser to the State
Archives, attorney Naomi Aldouby, wrote an opinion titled “Files Closed Without Authorization in Public Archives.” According
to her, the accessibility policy of public archives is the exclusive purview of
the director of each institution.
Despite Aldouby’s opinion, however, in the vast
majority of cases, archivists who encountered unreasonable decisions by Malmab
did not raise objections – that is, until 2014, when Defense Ministry personnel
arrived at the archive of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. To the visitors’ surprise, their request to examine
the archive – which contains collections of former minister and diplomat Abba
Eban and Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit – was turned down by its then director,
Menahem Blondheim.
According to Blondheim, “I told them that the documents in question were decades old, and that I
could not imagine that there was any security problem that would warrant
restricting their access to researchers. In response, they said, ‘And let’s say there is testimony here that
wells were poisoned in the War of Independence?’ I replied, ‘Fine, those people should be brought to
trial.’”
Blondheim’s refusal led to a meeting with a more
senior ministry official, only this time the attitude he encountered was
different and explicit threats were made. Finally the two sides reached an
accommodation.
Benny Morris is not surprised at Malmab’s activity. “I knew about it,” he says
“Not officially, no one
informed me, but I encountered it when I discovered that documents I had seen
in the past are now sealed. There were documents from the IDF Archive that I
used for an article about Deir
Yassin, and which are now sealed. When I came to the archive, I was
no longer allowed to see the original, so I pointed out in a footnote [in the
article] that the State Archive had denied access to documents that I had
published 15 years earlier.”
The Malmab case is only one example of the battle
being waged for access to archives in Israel. According to the executive
director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne,
“The IDF Archive, which is the largest
archive in Israel, is sealed almost hermetically. About 1 percent of the
material is open. The Shin Bet archive, which contains materials of immense
importance [to scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
A report written by Yaacov Lozowick, the previous
chief archivist at the State Archives, upon his retirement, refers to the
defense establishment’s grip on the country’s archival materials. In it, he
writes, “A democracy must not conceal
information because it is liable to embarrass the state. In practice, the
security establishment in Israel, and to a certain extent that of foreign
relations as well, are interfering with the [public] discussion.”
Advocates of concealment put forward several
arguments, Lozowick notes:
“The
uncovering of the facts could provide our enemies with a battering ram against
us and weaken the determination of our friends; it’s liable to stir up the Arab
population; it could enfeeble the state’s arguments in courts of law; and what
is revealed could be interpreted as Israeli war crimes.”
However, he says, “All
these arguments must be rejected. This is an attempt to hide part of the
historical truth in order to construct a more convenient version.”
What Malmab says
Yehiel Horev was the keeper of the security
establishment’s secrets for more than two decades. He headed the Defense
Ministry’s security department from 1986 until 2007 and naturally kept out of
the limelight. To his credit, he now agreed to talk forthrightly to Haaretz
about the archives project.
“I don’t
remember when it began,” Horev says, “but
I do know that I started it. If I’m not mistaken, it started when people wanted
to publish documents from the archives. We had to set up teams to examine all
outgoing material.”
From conversations with archive directors, it’s clear
that a good deal of the documents on which confidentiality was imposed relate
to the War of Independence. Is concealing the events of 1948 part of the
purpose of Malmab?
 |
Palestinian refugees in the Ramle area, 1948. Boris Carmi / The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
|
“What
does ‘part of the purpose’ mean? The subject is examined based on an approach
of whether it could harm Israel’s foreign relations and the defense
establishment. Those are the criteria. I think it’s still relevant. There has
not been peace since 1948. I may be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge the
Arab-Israeli conflict has not been resolved. So yes, it could be that
problematic subjects remain.”
Asked in what way such documents might be problematic,
Horev speaks of the possibility of agitation among the country’s Arab citizens.
From his point of view, every document must be perused and every case decided
on its merits.
If the events of 1948 weren’t known, we could argue
about whether this approach is the right one. That is not the case. Many
testimonies and studies have appeared about the history of the refugee problem.
What’s the point of hiding things?
“The
question is whether it can do harm or not. It’s a very sensitive matter. Not
everything has been published about the refugee issue, and there are all kinds
of narratives. Some say there was no flight at all, only expulsion. Others say
there was flight. It’s not black-and-white. There’s a difference between flight
and those who say they were forcibly expelled. It’s a different picture. I
can’t say now if it merits total confidentiality, but it’s a subject that
definitely has to be discussed before a decision is made about what to
publish.”
For years, the Defense Ministry has imposed
confidentiality on a detailed document that describes the reasons for the
departure of those who became refugees. Benny Morris has already written about
the document, so what’s the logic of keeping it hidden?
“I don’t remember the document you’re referring to, but if he quoted
from it and the document itself is not there [i.e., where Morris says it is], then his facts aren’t strong. If he says,
‘Yes, I have the document,’ I can’t argue with that. But if he says that it’s
written there, that could be right and it could be wrong. If the document were
already outside and were sealed in the archive, I would say that that’s folly.
But if someone quoted from it – there’s a difference of day and night in terms
of the validity of the evidence he cited.”
'When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document'
In this case, we’re talking about the most quoted
scholar when it comes to the Palestinian refugees.
“The
fact that you say ‘scholar’ makes no impression on me. I know people in
academia who spout nonsense about subjects that I know from A to Z. When the
state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he
doesn’t have the document.”
But isn’t concealing documents based on footnotes in
books an attempt to lock the barn door after the horses have bolted?
“I
gave you an example that this needn’t be the case. If someone writes that the
horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s
really black.”
There are legal opinions stating that Malmab’s
activity in the archives is illegal and unauthorized.
“If
I know that an archive contains classified material, I am empowered to tell the
police to go there and confiscate the material. I can also utilize the courts.
I don’t need the archivist’s authorization. If there is classified material, I
have the authority to act. Look, there’s policy. Documents aren’t sealed for no
reason. And despite it all, I won’t say to you that everything that’s sealed is
100 percent justified [in being sealed].”
The Defense Ministry refused to respond to specific
questions regarding the findings of this investigative report and made do with
the following response:
“The
director of security of the defense establishment operates by virtue of his
responsibility to protect the state’s secrets and its security assets. The
Malmab does not provide details about its mode of activity or its missions.”
Lee Rotbart assisted in providing visual
research for this article.
Don’t
wait for Israeli archives to prove what Palestinians already know
 |
| Illustrative photo of Palestinian refugees fleeing during the Nakba. |
The village of Safsaf (“willow” in Arabic) appears on page 490 of the newest edition of Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, a seminal book that catalogues 418 Palestinian communities that were destroyed and depopulated during the Nakba. A Palestinian eyewitness account describes the day when Zionist forces conquered the village and rounded up its residents in October 1948:
As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering of the village’s spring and dumped sand on them.
On Thursday, Haaretz published a widely-shared investigative piece by Hagar Shezaf on how Israeli authorities are systematically concealing archival materials relating to the 1948 war, even after they have been officially disclosed. It begins with an Israeli historian stumbling upon a document four years ago that was written in November 1948 by the Haganah’s former chief of staff. The note, which was first unearthed by New Historian Benny Morris in the 1980s, is also quoted in Khalidi’s book:
Safsaf – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.
It is strangely consoling to see official Israeli admission of the event. As Shezaf’s excellent article shows, and thanks to the vital work of Akevot – an Israeli organization that works to expand public access to documentation about the conflict held in government and private archives – along with other historians, archive research has made it irrefutably clear that Zionist forces consciously carried out brutal acts of violence against Palestinians to facilitate their expulsion.
Though this is hardly news, such archives remain valuable in providing what are essentially “confessions” by officials of the inhumane crimes they oversaw – crimes that are denied by Israel and its supporters to this day.
Yet, for many Palestinians, the bewildered reactions to these discoveries can be infuriating. They remind us of how thousands of Palestinian testimonies, and decades of Palestinian-led research, struggle to stir so much as a ripple in mainstream discourse about Israel’s history. A few Israeli documents, however, can swiftly rile up a storm.
The knowledge of this disparity has been a key reason for Israel’s obstinate archive policy: as one official blatantly told Shezaf, authorities deliberately continue to hide these documents in order to “undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the [Palestinian] refugee problem.” And many still fall for it.
 |
Jewish workers demolish homes in Jaffa in 1948 after the majority of the city’s Palestinian residents were either expelled or fled, October 6, 1949. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)
|
This cruel double standard over who has “permission to narrate” the conflict has been raised before – and, it seems, it must be raised again and again.
The world should not have to constantly catch up to what Palestinians have always known about the Nakba. Many Palestinians reading about Safsaf in Haaretz would have reached for their copies of All That Remains or other collections, correctly assuming they would find the same facts recorded years before. Descendants of Safsaf’s survivors would likely know the harrowing story by heart, having heard it from their grandparents’ own lips. Like all settler-colonial states, Israel fears the ghosts of its dark and violent origins. Palestinians are those living ghosts. Listen to what they have to say.
More than 100 files from the 1800s are still classified in Israel’s archives
Israel recently published its catalogue of some 300,000
classified files, including thousands of documents from before the state was
even founded. The very existence of the files had been kept a secret until
recently.
By Asaf Shalev |
| The Israeli state archives in Jerusalem on September 03, 2012. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) |
Israel’s State Archives unceremoniously published the contents of its catalog of classified archive documents this past summer, posting them online in 363 separate spreadsheets. Buried in the catalog of classified archives were more than 100 files dating back to the 1800s, and more than 2,000 files that predate the founding of the State of Israel but which the archive has yet to declassify.
The very existence of the 300,000 classified files—their names, dates, and origin within the state bureaucracy—had been kept a secret, until now. One-fifth of the files, deemed too sensitive still by the government, were excluded from the disclosure.
“There were many people who were concerned about the opening of this catalog,” State Archivist Yaacov Lozowick wrote in a statement accompanying the release.
The classified catalog, currently housed on the website of the State Archives, is hard to find, difficult to access, and almost impossible to search through or analyze. In order to understand what lies in the cryptic files, +972 Magazine enlisted various data-research tools and analyzed the hundreds of thousands of entries.
One of the things that stood out immediately was the age of some of files. The oldest item, a Foreign Ministry document titled “Parker Report,” dates back to 1821. That’s all we know about it. In total, the catalog of classified archival documents contains 125 items from the 19th century, and about 2,000 documents from before 1948, when Israel was founded. Because we cannot access the files themselves, it is impossible to say why documents that predate the state are still classified over 70, and in some cases, nearly 200 years later.
In contrast, in the United States the FBI and CIA routinely release old records, even ones that cast those agencies in a negative light. It is also telling that, unlike the U.S. government archives, which are run as an independent agency, Israel’s State Archives is a branch of the Prime Minister’s Office, whose current occupant has proven to be no champion of transparency.
Documents from virtually every Israeli ministry appear in the catalog: each of the 363 original spreadsheets represent a different agency, sub-department, state-run company, and in a few cases, former senior officials who bequeathed their personal collections to the State Archives. Conspicuously absent are the Defense Ministry (aside from one cache of records produced during Israel’s first, short-lived occupation of Gaza in 1956), the military, the Mossad, and the Shin Bet security service. These institutions manage their archives separately, lest any documents wrangle free.
Almost three quarters of the files come from only three government bodies: Israel Police (28.2 percent or 71,874 files), the Foreign Ministry (24.2 percent or 61,620 files), and the Prime Minister’s Office (21 percent or 53,587 files). Next up are the Energy Ministry, the State Comptroller’s Office, the Israel Prison Service, and the Justice Department.
 |
| Israeli Black Panthers, including Charlie Biton, protesting on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, May 1, 1973. (Moshe Milner/GPO) |
Then, there are those still-classified archival files with labels like “anti-Israel organizations” and the “fight against anti-Semitism,” produced by Israel’s diplomatic missions around the world. There are files on Deir Yassin and Kfar Qasim, the two most notorious massacres carried out by Israeli forces. The catalog contains 13 files from the 1940s and 1950s about the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat representing the UN Security Council who was killed by a Zionist militia in 1948. The sinking of Israel’s Dakar submarine, still a mystery, is the subject of another classified file.
But even many files without sensational appeal promise to contain valuable historical information. For example, there is the case of the Israeli Black Panthers, a 1970s group of radicals who demanded social justice for Mizrahi Jews. As part of my research for a book I am writing about the group, I knew there were police files on the Panthers from references found in a couple of academic articles and a Haaretz magazine feature. Eventually, I obtained the documents, but not from the State Archives (where I was told the Panthers files were unsealed by mistake and subsequently re-sealed).
These police intel reports, containing invaluable and rare documentation of the Panthers by various undercover agents and informants, came from two files, the only two state archives files on the Panthers that we knew existed. A search for the keyword “Panthers” in the classified database yielded the two file numbers, along with 21 other files — from various police precincts — containing the words “Black Panthers” in their titles. It would not have been possible to find them without searching in the combined database. Knowing that the files exist is far cry from holding them in your hands, of course, and the chance of obtaining those particular files is nil at the moment.
I recently filed a request for the remaining Panther files only to be told that the person authorized to review and release archival police records died in accident more than a year ago. A police spokesperson said in an email that a job opening for such a person would be posted “soon,” providing no timeline for the recruitment and hiring process.
 |
An employee at the Israel State Archives looks at classified documents related to the Yemenite Children Affair, at the Israel State Archives offices in Jerusalem, December 22, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
|
‘A country without a history’
Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University, built his academic reputation by extracting social and cultural histories from the clutches of archives dating back hundreds of years. These days, Algazi is better known by his students and friends for his preoccupation with the more immediate past. He recently conducted research into a long-forgotten protest movement and he gives occasional talks on what he’s found.In the early 1950s, according to Algazi, residents of a transit camp for immigrants near Kfar Saba mounted a veritable political struggle demanding better treatment from authorities. Iraqi-born communists living in the camps riled up and then organized the community for a series of demonstrations and other actions. The police got called in and the whole affair was kept out of the papers and out of the wider public’s eye.
After a recent talk about the affair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I caught a ride with Algazi back to Tel Aviv and in the car, he told me, “Israel is a country without a history.” What he meant was that we know very little about the machinations of power, money, and social status that congealed in the 1950s, the critical decade after the country’s founding. The policy decisions that shaped Israeli society and allocated resources and privileges remain an enigma to this day, he explained. The Kfar Saba story is a foray into a time when Israel intra-Jewish ethnic lines were drawn. The discovery of the event would not have taken as long as it did in a country with an appreciation for its past.
“For the vast majority of historical researchers, the documentation kept in archives is the central raw material,” said Miriam Eliav-Feldon, a veteran history professor and the chair of the Historical Society of Israel, speaking at an event confronting the crisis of access to public archives a few months later. “Without it, it’s almost impossible to find out what took place, what the intentions and motivations of the individuals were.”
The effort to “rescue archival access” was launched more than two years ago when the State Archives shuttered its reading room. That’s where patrons used to fill out request slips and were hand-delivered boxes of files. The State Archives decided that all of its materials would be digitized, however, and meanwhile, anyone who wants access has to search the online catalog and request the files be scanned and posted online. The plan may have been well intentioned, Eliav-Feldon said, but it has led to long and erratic wait times and a lack of transparency about what is being released. “It makes it impossible to get work done,” she added.
A short time into the digital revamp efforts, lawyers for the Prime Minister’s Office imposed a new policy that gummed up the research process even further. Now, each file that has not already been scanned and uploaded must first be vetted by the government body that generated it to begin with. Want to read decades-old correspondence from the public security minister? The archive has to get the ministry’s approval first. The same goes for police reports, health ministry minutes and any other stacks of papers collecting dust on a warehouse shelf at the State Archives. Aside from having no conceivable incentive to allow the publication of potentially embarrassing documents, government bodies do not typically keep archival professionals on staff.
The coalition of archival access seekers reflects in many ways the various public battles being waged over Israel’s past. There are the Nakba scholars. There are Argentinian and Chilean Jews working to flesh out the extent of Israel’s ties with Latin American military dictatorships. Then there’s the reinvigorated campaign to expose the abduction and disappearance of thousands of babies of Mizrahi families. Without access to official archives, much of that work simply cannot be done.
“Blocking access to the documentary record, to the memory cells of our recent past,” Eliav-Feldon said at the Tel Aviv University event, “does grave harm to our knowledge and understanding of our existence.”
You can search the catalog of classified Israeli archives (in Hebrew) thanks to the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. The nonprofit organization performed its own web scraping and programming of the classified catalog, making the files searchable on its website. You are also welcome to download the database by clicking here and play with the data yourself.
Asaf Shalev is a journalist based in California. He is completing a book about the Israeli Black Panthers with UC Press. Find him on Twitter: @asafshaloo. Omri Kahalon, a software engineer, contributed to this report.
Listen to the following sound podcast
https://soundcloud.com/ottoman-history-podcast/the-politics-of-1948-in
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