TOM SEGEV Critica il libro di BENNY MORRIS’’1948′
Most of the Arabs in the country, approximately 400,000, were chased out and expelled during the first stage of the war. In other words, before the Arab armies invaded the country. According to Morris, the expulsion of the Arabs was meant to safeguard the homeland before the invasion of the armies of Arabia. This explanation is problematic, first because according to Morris himself, David Ben Gurion was not at all afraid of the Arabs of Israel, and for good cause: they were almost powerless. Ben Gurion was afraid of an invasion by the Arab armies. Moreover, Ben Gurion was not certain that they would invade Israel. On May 7th 1948 he wrote in his journal: “Will the neighboring countries fight?” Ben Gurion could not know this for certain because, according to Morris, the Arabs themselves hesitated until almost the very last moment. Be that as it may, Morris states that the invasion plans by the Arab armies played no role [in the thinking and decisions of] the Arabs of the land of IsraelThis brings the discussion back to the question of why 400,000 Arabs were expelled before these armies had taken even a single shot at the IDF, and the possibility arises that it did not happen because the Arabs had attacked Israel but vice versa: the Arab states attacked Israel – among other reasons – because it had chased out and expelled 400,000 Palestinians. It is doubtful if any person knows more about this subject than Morris. The thesis which transpires from his book is that almost everything happened as the result of an error: the Jews exaggerated the force of the Arabs and were afraid of another Holocaust. In fact, they did not correctly estimate their weakness and were unjustifiably afraid of them. It seems that it was for this reason that they expelled them, with no justification. But Morris wishes to justify the expulsion of the Arabs: he says that they started the attack, but the concrete information that he brings forth about their harassment of the Jewish settlements cannot explain great extent of the expulsion.Naturally, the question arises: were the Arabs expelled in order to get rid of them. Morris states at as early as December 1947, at least, which is nearly half a year before the Arab armies invaded, two goals were at the forefront for the Jews of the land of Israel: expanding the territory designated by the United Nations resolution for the founding of a Jewish state; and reducing the number of Arabs living in that territory. And that was what they did. Historiographically, that is sufficient, but Morris brings his readers into an old dispute about a subject with which he is also well-familiar: the Zionist movement’s yearning to transfer the Arabs of the country, or at least some of them.This idea has accompanied the Zionist movement since the time of Herzl himself. It took center stage in the thinking of the leaders of the Zionist movement, including Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion. But Morris makes a great effort to detach the chasing out of the Arabs from the idea of transfer. A similar measure of logic could detach the founding of the state from the Zionist vision.The rest of the Arabs [300,000 more] were expelled during the war and thereafter. What Morris says about the frontline conditions does not demonstrate the military need to expel the population, especially as Israel’s military power was much greater than the armies of Arabia within two or three weeks, and the remaining Arab population did not constitute any kind of threat to the country. The question of why they were expelled remains without an answer in this book. Morris says that they wanted to throw the Jews into the sea and states: “The Arab expulsion clearly derived from the Zionist transferist thinking in the 30s and 40s.” This is a perplexing statement, as Morris goes out of his way to prove the marginal status of transferist thinking.
continua qui
2La guerra del 1967 e il problema dei profughi palestinesihe 1967 War and the Palestinian Refugee Problem
by Tom Segev
documento pdf in inglese - anno 2005 - pagine 16 La guerra del 1967 e il problema dei profughi palestinesi
Commenti
Posta un commento