Founding Fictions: Israel, Colonialism and the Weaponisation of History

In this series, we examine some of the most enduring myths surrounding the Arab-Israel conflict by tracing their historical roots and political consequences.

Israel and its Discontents - PART - 1

Israel’s birth is often polemically smeared as a vicious land grab, but sober history tells another story.

Was Israel born in sin? That question has echoed with increasing shrillness across social media feeds, elite university campuses and sections of the ‘liberal’ media since October 7, 2023 - when the Palestinian terror group Hamas massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians - till this month, when Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched ‘Operation Rising Lion’ against Iran’s embattled Islamic regime.

A familiar litany of accusations accompanies this central question: that Israel is a ‘settler-colonial project’ founded through ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestinian Muslims, and that it functions today as a heavily-armed, US-backed colonial outpost intent on maintaining the West’s hegemony in West Asia.

The historical truth, of course, is considerably more inconvenient to that narrative.

A good starting point to dissect the central question of Israel’s troubled birth would be to examine the Jewish state’s own ‘Historikerstreit’ (a public and bitter historian’s war) that occurred in the 1980s over the country’s founding myths and was sparked by the first Lebanon War. This academic dispute would be significant in shaping historical narratives and the camps in which the world is divided today.

On one side of this dispute stood historian Shabtai Teveth, a defender of the traditional Zionist narrative. On the other were the so-called ‘New Historians,’ most notably Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim. These scholars challenged the view that Israel’s early conflicts were not purely defensive, while taking serious aim at Israel’s traditional self-image as a blameless haven beset by hostile neighbours.

Morris’s 660-page masterwork, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987) painstakingly laid bare uncomfortable truths about forcible expulsions of the Palestinian Muslims by Jewish militias and remains a landmark work of the 1948 ‘Nakba’. Likewise, his 2008 book ‘1948: A History of the first Arab-Israeli War’ remains a seminal analysis of that defining moment.

Yet even Morris, the most judicious and harshest critic of Israel, became disillusioned with the Palestinian leadership. After a lifetime of watching Palestinian leaders walk away from peace deals in 2000, 2001 and 2008, Morris concluded that the root problem was not occupation but the Palestinian refusal to accept any Jewish state at all.

The history of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations is littered with missed chances, nearly all of them on the Palestinian side.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed the first two-state solution. It would have awarded roughly 80 percent of the land to the Arabs and a small sliver to the Jews. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini - and the Arab leadership rejected it outright, responding with armed rebellion not only against the British, but against any vision of coexistence with the Jews.

In 1947, the United Nations approved another partition plan under Resolution 181. This time, the Jews were offered 55 percent of the land, the Arabs 45 percent. Again, Arab leaders responded with violence. The Jews, they insisted, did not deserve even one inch of Palestine.

Despite successive Arab defeats in 1967 and ’73, Yasser Arafat rejected generous offers in 2000 and 2001 that would have given the Palestinians a state comprising 95 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas said no to a virtually identical proposal from Ehud Olmert in 2008.

If today’s anti-Israel narratives thrive on myth, it is in part because of al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the ideological architect of some of the earliest and most violent forms of Palestinian rejectionism.

In 1929, it was al-Husseini who inflamed tensions around the Temple Mount, spreading the false rumour that Jews intended to seize the al-Aqsa Mosque - a lie that culminated in the massacre of 67 Jews in Hebron. He played a similar role in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, which not only targeted Jews but also assassinated Arab moderates willing to compromise. And during World War II, al-Husseini reached Berlin, where he lobbied with Hitler personally to prevent Jewish children from escaping to Mandate Palestine, and helped recruit SS units among Bosnian Muslims, aligning Palestinian nationalism with anti-Semitism in its most virulent form.

That his rise to prominence was enabled by a British Zionist makes the episode doubly ironic. In 1921, Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine and himself a supporter of Zionism, appointed al-Husseini as Grand Mufti, hoping to placate Arab unrest and integrate Muslim leadership into the British administrative fold. It was a decision that would haunt the Mandate for decades.

The end of the 1948 War resulted in three refugee problems – two of which were resolved and one – the Palestinian one – festers. The initial flight of Palestinian Arabs in late 1947 and early 1948 occurred amid civil war, following the Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan and violent attacks on Jewish civilians. The Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’ which resulted in the expulsion or fleeing of anywhere between 7.11-7.26 lakh (as per UN figures) is indeed a searing part of Palestinian memory. Today, there are 5 million refugees on rolls of the UN.

But the narrative that it was the product of a premeditated Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing, centred on Plan Dalet, wilfully ignores both chronology and causality. Plan Dalet, adopted by the Haganah (the pre-state Jewish militia) in March 1948, was not a blueprint for ethnic cleansing but a military contingency designed to defend Jewish areas and open supply lines to besieged Jerusalem. Abuses certainly occurred, most notoriously at Deir Yassin, but there is no evidence of a general policy of expulsion.

Additionally, some 70,000 Jews were expelled from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Arab cities such as Hebron and Nablus. However, they were absorbed within the newly created state of Israel.

A third and far larger (and violent) exodus had followed in the ensuing years: nearly 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab countries - from Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, and elsewhere amid rising anti-Semitism, confiscation of property and state-sanctioned intimidation. These Jewish refugees were resettled, mostly in Israel. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they were absorbed into national life rather than warehoused into inherited victimhood.

Coming to the birth of Israel, harsh critics of Israel like the Jewish historian Avi Shlaim (foremost among the ‘New Historians’) have long painted Russian Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ‘Iron Wall’ strategy as proof that Zionism was inherently aggressive and colonial from the outset. But this caricature strips the idea of its context. Writing in 1923 amid growing Arab hostility to Jewish immigration, Jabotinsky had (presciently as it turned out) argued that no Arab leader would accept a Jewish national revival voluntarily.

His ‘Iron Wall’ was not really a call to annex territory or expel Arabs, but a realist doctrine which stated that only when the Arabs understood that the Jewish community was there to stay - and capable of defending itself - could real negotiations begin. Far from rejectionist, Jabotinsky believed that once security was assured, political compromise would follow. He called explicitly for equal rights for Arabs in the future Jewish state and rejected notions of ethnic supremacy.

Meanwhile, treatment of Palestinian refugees varied starkly across the Arab world. Jordan granted them citizenship and access to public services. Lebanon, by contrast, imposed restrictions on employment, movement and property ownership, thus effectively confining generations to squalid camps. In Syria and Egypt, Palestinians were granted few rights and used as diplomatic pawns. For many Arab regimes, preserving refugee misery served not humanitarian aims, but a darker political function to keep the Palestinian issue unresolved and Israel permanently delegitimised.

(Tomorrow, we examine the contested legacy of the Deir Yassin massacre, the mythology of victimhood and Jewish extremism, from the militancy of Irgun and Lehi to present day hardliners.)