Three foundational myths underlie Israeli culture to this day. These are the ‘negation of exile’ (shelilat ha-galut), the ‘return to the land of Israel’ (ha-shiva le-Eretz Yisrael), and the ‘return to history’ (ha-shiva la-historia). They are inextricably intertwined in the master-narrative of Zionism, the story that explains ‘how we got to where we are and where we should go henceforth’. The negation of exile establishes a continuity between an ancient past, in which there existed Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, and a present that renews it in the resettlement of Palestine. Between the two lies no more than a kind of interminable interim. Depreciation of the period of exile is shared by all Zionists, if with differing degrees of rigidity, and derives from what is, in their outlook, an uncontestable presupposition: from time immemorial, the Jews constituted a territorial nation. It follows that a non-territorial existence must be abnormal, incomplete and inauthentic. In and of itself, as a historical experience, exile is devoid of significance. Although it may have given rise to cultural achievements of moment, exile could not by definition have been a wholesome realization of the nation’s Geist. So long as they were condemned to it, Jews—whether as individuals or communities—could lead at best a partial and transitory existence, waiting for the redemption of ‘ascent’ (aliyah) once again to the land of Israel, the only site on which the nation’s destiny could be fulfilled. Within this mythical framework, exilic Jews always lived provisionally, as potential or proto-Zionists, longing ‘to return’ to the land of Israel.footnote¹

Here the second foundational myth complements the first. In Zionist terminology, the recovery by the people of its home promised to deliver the normalization of Jewish existence; and the site designated for the re-enactment of Exodus would be the territory of the Biblical story, as elaborated in the Protestant culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Zionist ideology defined this land as empty. This did not mean Zionist leaders and settlers were ignorant of the presence of Arabs in Palestine, or mulishly ignored them. Israel was ‘empty’ in a deeper sense. For the land, too, was condemned to an exile as long as there was no Jewish sovereignty over it: it lacked any meaningful or authentic history, awaiting redemption with the return of the Jews. The best-known Zionist slogan, ‘a land without a people to a people without a land’, expressed a twofold denial: of the historical experience both of the Jews in exile, and of Palestine without Jewish sovereignty. Of course, since the land was not literally empty, its recovery required the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy—sanctioned by Biblical authority—of its historic custodians over such intruders as might remain after the return. Jewish settlers were to be accorded exclusive privileges deriving from the Pentateuch, and Palestinian Arabs treated as part of the natural environment. In the macho Hebrew culture of modern times, to know a woman, in the Biblical sense, and to know the land became virtually interchangeable as terms of possession. The Zionist settlers were collective subjects who acted, and the native Palestinians became objects acted upon.

The third foundational myth, the ‘return to history’, reveals, more than any other, the extent to which Zionist ideology was underpinned by the emergence of Romantic nationalism and German historicism in nineteenth-century Europe. Its premise is that the natural and irreducible form of human collectivity is the nation. From the dawn of history peoples have been grouped into such units, and though they might at one time or another be undermined by internal divisions or oppressed by external forces, they are eventually bound to find political self-expression in the shape of sovereign nation-states. The nation is the autonomous historical subject par excellence, and the state is the telos of its march toward self-fulfillment. According to this logic, so long as they were exiles, the Jews remained a community outside history, within which all European nations dwelt. Only nations that occupy the soil of their homeland, and establish political sovereignty over it, are capable of shaping their own destiny and so entering history by this logic. The return of the Jewish nation to the land of Israel, overcoming its docile passivity in exile, could alone allow it to rejoin the history of civilized peoples.

Metaphorically empty, factually inhabited by Arabs, how was Palestine ‘emptied’ to enable the creation of Israel? Recently, long overdue controversies have broken out over the origins of the present state, prompted by the work of historians who are not committed to its founding myths. This is a welcome development: much hallowed mystification has been cleared away. But there is a danger that debate could become too narrowly focused on the single issue of whether or not there was an Israeli master plan to effect a comprehensive expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948.footnote² The moral pressure behind this obsessive question is understandable, and should be respected. But it is also true that it takes for granted that what matters is the framework of the perpetrators, not the perspective of the victims. The existence or otherwise of an explicit Zionist intention to unleash ethnic cleansing, under cover of war, poses problems that Israelis certainly need to confront. But to Palestinians who lost their homes, their goods, their rights and their identities, it matters little whether the disaster that befell them resulted from decisions taken by military commanders and local bureaucrats on the spot, or from an implicit understanding that this was the wish of the Zionist political leadership, or through a diffuse atmosphere and ideology that treated massive expulsions as desirable—or any combination of the above. What counted for the Arabs driven off their lands was the fact of their dispossession and transformation into refugees. Retrospective rituals of bad conscience risk becoming luxuries that only the victor can afford, without consequence for the victims who have had to live with the results.

The reality is that the eventuality of massive expulsions was inherent in the nature of Zionist colonization in Palestine long before war broke out in 1948. Consideration of notions of population ‘transfer’ ceased to be just an abstract idea after the report of the Peel Commission in the late 1930s. After all, as Zeev Sternhell correctly observes, Zionism was in many ways a typical example of the ‘organic’—as distinct from ‘civic’—nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe.footnote³ This kind was feral in its demand for ethnic homogeneity, ruling out from the beginning any possibility of the Zionist movement accepting a bi-national state in Palestine. Given the demography of Palestine in 1947, the establishment of a Jewish state inexorably required the removal of Palestinians from their farms and towns. However, the form that this ‘population transfer’ was to take did not need a premeditated plan of expulsion by the Israeli government (as distinct from the calculation of individual officials and bureaucratic agencies). Rather, the crucial decision was to prevent Palestinian Arabs at all costs from returning to their homes, regardless of the circumstances in which they had ‘left’ them, and no matter how plainly their ‘departure’ had been envisaged as a temporary move made under duress, in the midst of war. There were, of course, deliberate and massive expulsions. The infamous Operation Danny of July 10–14, 1948, which resulted in a massacre at Lydda and the forcible transfer of the entire population of the townships of Ramlah and Lydda—ten miles south-east of Tel Aviv—to Jordan, is a well-known case in point.footnote⁴ But the really crucial decision, which was fully conscious and explicit, was to make sure that the collapse of the Palestinian community that unfolded under the pressures of all-out war between Israel and the Arab states would be irreversible.

For what followed, we are indebted to outstanding recent research by Haya Bombaji-Sasportas of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev.footnote⁵ In April 1948, Haifa fell to an Israeli assault. In June, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett—a darling of Israeli ‘moderates’ to this day—said to his colleagues:

To my mind this is the most surprising thing: the emptying of the country by the Arab community. In the history of the land of Israel this is more surprising than the establishment of the Hebrew State itself . . . This has happened amidst a war that the Arab nation declared against us, because the Arabs fled of their own accord—and their departure is one of those revolutionary changes after which history does not revert to its previous course, as we see from the outcome of the war between Greece and Turkey. We should be willing to pay for land. This does not mean that we should buy holdings from each and every [Arab]. We shall receive assets and land, which can be used to help settle Arabs in other countries. But they do not return. And this is our policy: they do not return.footnote⁶