Barak Ravid :Citing National Se :curity, Israel Likely to Keep Army File on Palestinian Refugees From 1948 Sealed
File includes research material commissioned by Ben-Gurion to 'prove' refugees were not expelled in 1948 War of Independence.
haaretz.com|Di Barak Ravid
The Israeli government is expected to keep
classified one of the main files in the Israel Defense Forces archives
that concerns the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948,
which Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Officials
in Jerusalem said that in a discussion by the ministerial committee on
archival material, headed by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, the foreign
and defense ministries were adamantly against opening the file to
public scrutiny for fear of undermining state security and the country’s
foreign relations.
The
file, whose number is 681-922/1975, includes material commissioned by
then prime minister David Ben-Gurion in the early 1960s to prove that
nearly a million Palestinians who lived in cities and villages in what
became Israeli territory in 1948 fled of their own accord during the War
of Independence, and weren’t expelled by the IDF.
The research, whose existence was revealed three years ago in Haaretz by historian Dr. Shay Hazkani,
was written by Middle East scholars at the behest of Ben-Gurion, who
was trying to neutralize American pressure to return the refugees to
their homes. He hoped that if the international community could be
persuaded that the Palestinians left on their own and were not expelled,
as they asserted after the war, the pressure on Israel would lessen.
Government correspondence from that period shows that the researchers
were told in advance what they were supposed to prove – that the Arabs
fled with the encouragement of Palestinian and Arab leaders, that Arab
armies aided those fleeing and that the Jewish forces tried to prevent
the flight.
There
were at least two studies on the issue commissioned by Ben-Gurion. The
first was written by Rony Gabbay, who worked for an agency known in the
1960s as the Shiloah Institute, which eventually evolved into the Dayan
Center at Tel Aviv University. The study was based on documents in
various Israeli archives, including from the Shin Bet security service
archive.
The
second study was written by Moshe Maoz, then working for the prime
minister’s adviser on Arab affairs and today professor emeritus of
Islamic and Middle East studies at Hebrew University. Maoz’s study was
partially based on Gabbay’s.
Attempts to unseal file stalled
In
2013, Hazkani, an assistant professor at the Meyerhoff Center for
Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, together with attorney
Avner Pinchuk of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, submitted a
request to the IDF archive to release the classified file to the
public. In November 2013, the IDF archive refused. They also approached
the chief archivist at the State Archives, Yaacov Lazowick, who has the
ultimate authority on such issues, asking that the file be opened. They
argued that since the material in the file couldn’t have been written
later than 1964, the 50-year limit on its restriction was probably up.
In
July 2014 Lazowick told Hazkani and Pinchuk that after consulting with
the IDF archive, he was asking to convene the ministerial committee on
archival material to make a decision. This committee meets rarely; the
last time it met was in 2008, when it decided to keep various files
related to the Deir Yassin massacre confidential.
The
committee was set to meet several times, but every time the meetings
were postponed, first because of the dissolution of the Knesset and the
2015 elections, but later also because of scheduling problems. Last
week, on September 11, the committee finally met to discuss what’s been
dubbed the “Nakba file.” Aside from Shaked, the committee members are
Culture Minister Miri Regev, a former chief military censor and IDF
spokesman, and Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, a former chairman of the
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and intelligence minister.
A
senior Israeli official who attended the meeting said the foreign,
defense and justice ministries were all categorically opposed to
releasing the file. The Foreign Ministry noted that releasing it could
affect Israel’s ability to deal with future negotiations with the
Palestinians or decisions by the UN Security Council on core issues of a
permanent arrangement like the refugee issue.
The
ministerial committee did not make a final decision, instead requesting
additional clarifications from various officials whose opinions were
not heard. Until the panel meets again, the file will remain closed.
The
official noted that Shaked had read large sections of the classified
file and that it did not contain significant details that have not been
published in the past. Still, given the ministries’ positions, the
ministers seem likely to keep the file classified.
Hazkani
noted that there are several files and documents in Israeli archives
relating to 1948 that the public has never seen. With the encouragement
of state officials, he said, both the state and IDF archives were
“preventing researchers from Israel and the world from telling the story
of 1948 in its entirety.”
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