Tracing the roots of Palestinian dissent

Review by Fouad Ajami / Washington Post Book World Service

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

The mayor of Jaffa left “without even saying goodbye,” a British official, Sir Henry Gurney, complained in early May, 1948, adding that municipal services had broken down and that remnants of the Arab Liberation Army, a volunteer force from the urban slums of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, led by a poseur and adventurer by the name of Fawzi al Qawuqji, would-be saviours of Arab Jaffa, were busy looting the town.

A week later the world of Arab Jaffa would become a memory. Of Jaffa's pre-war population — 70,000 to 80,000 — no more than 5,000 inhabitants would remain. And on May 18, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the new state of Israel, visited the conquered city.

By then the mixed Arab and Jewish towns of Tiberias and Haifa had fallen, and their Arab inhabitants had taken to the road. There would be more dislocations to come: the fall of the towns of Lydda and Ramle (in July), the flight from upper Galilee and the northern approaches of the Negev (October-November), a Palestinian exodus that stretched out over a space of 20 months.

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, a book of extraordinary power and integrity written by a young Israeli scholar and journalist, Benny Morris, takes that great tale of flight and conquest and tells it as it has never been told before: with precision and moral economy, with awesome detail and honesty, drawing from recenty declassified archival and private papers.

Hitherto this subject has been the realm of publicists and protagonists — Zionists, Palestinians, many others. In Benny Morris this episode has its first historian and chronicler — no axe to grind, no apologies to make. And it is surely no accident that Benny Morris is an Israeli, and an Israeli born in 1948 at that.

Revisionism is easier for the victors — the vanquished still have wars to fight, scores to settle.

Cite this clipping

"Tracing the roots of Palestinian dissent," Stuart News, 18 September 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-101. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-101