PLUNDERING PALESTINE - Jerusalem Quarterly

short of the 1967 occupation of remaining rump-Palestine and other Arab lands, most
notably the Syrian Golan Heights.
But Kletter goes further than that: while indicting certain military men for their
excesses, he by and large exonerates Israel for acts which, he claims, were inevitable
given the state of war and the material needs of the immigrants. Although he severely
criticizes the politicization of works on archaeology, he does not hesitate to render
judgment on the question of human, and therefore archaeological, intent. If we are
to believe him, the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, monuments and places
of worship was a nearly accidental byproduct of violence after 1947. There was no
intention of carrying out ethnic cleansing, just a few late isolated cases of it (p. 42).
And if subsequently, the authorities proceeded to raze villages in their entirety, it was
first because of “embarrassment” and later to hide the unsightly blight that might
disturb tourists, notably along the road from the coast to Jerusalem. The old Arab
city of Tiberias was razed, along with its mosques and synagogue. On the other hand,
the Arab village of Bar’am, whose inhabitants never left the country, was entirely
destroyed in order to “accentuate” the synagogue (p.61).
He cites various authors regarding volition or intent, selectively, and finds there was
none. One of them is the ur-Benny Morris. But not the Benny Morris of 2004 (The
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited) who had meantime become
unequivocal in judging that there had been an expulsion policy and, in his infamous
Ha’aretz interview in January of the same year, stated that Ben Gurion, who led that
policy, had finally gotten cold feet and not finished the job and gotten rid of all Arabs
from “the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River…”, as he should have.
Why is this important? First of all, because it addresses the question of credibility
regarding the work as a whole, and most particularly, the choice of archival
documents. Historians (and this designation is not a corporate one; history today
works through a multiplicity of media and sources: written, oral, pictorial, fictional,
and so on) always choose carefully among available documents – so much so that
there is some credibility to the slogan: “archives lie.” They lie at the source and
they lie upon their publication. At the source because they are drafted and crafted
by a certain class of people (consuls, ministers, civil servants and other members of
the elite) and not the countless marginalized persons whose situation they purport
to describe. 1 And they lie by virtue of the criteria of selection employed by those
intellectuals who choose, present and interpret them for the public. This is why a close
critical reading of documents, as well as the concept of intersecting networks (“who
said what, when and to whom?”), has become vital as a criterion for verification in
the social sciences. And when verifiable secondary sources are selected or distorted,
it is a reasonable induction that the material as a whole will be as well. Circumstantial
evidence is found in the author’s having presented the work to the censor for approval.
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