Documentary Seven Deadly Myths is an exploration of the myths and realities of the 1948 war and the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. It features veterans of the war, as well as historians who fought to reveal the true history of the events that took place in 1947-1949 and led to the creation of the state of Israel. 4-8-2010

The Seven Myths

1) The Zionists accepted the UN partition resolution and planned for peace

2) The Arabs rejected the partition and launched the war

3) The Palestinians fled voluntarily intending reconquest

4) The Arab states had united to expel the Jews from Palestine

5) The Arab invasion made war inevitable

6) A defenseless Israel faced destruction by the Arab Goliath

7) Israel subsequently sought peace but no Arab leader responded.
Synopsis

My story begins in the 1980s, as the right wing government of Menachem Begin rose to power and Israel launched its offensive attack on Lebanon. Encountering for the first time a mass resistance to the decision to begin the 1982 war, Begin set out on an aggressive public relations campaign, reshaping both global and domestic views of Israel. It was during this time that a handful of historians began researching recently declassified documents, hidden for decades in Israeli, Zionist, and military archives. Their findings unleashed a wave of controversy throughout the country.

The historians were attacked by Israel's academic world, but they persisted to analyze and publish works that revealed what Palestinian historians have been arguing for decades. They were therefore dubbed dubbed, “The New Historians,” or “Revisionist Historians.” In their fight against rising public pressure, these brave academics fought to shed light on a history that, with the help of state-issued school books, most Israelis do not know to this day.1

Their historical discoveries drew to the time that predates the Israeli state itself. When it was only a dream in the minds of many persecuted European Jews, who fought for their own liberation. Historians such as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris illustrated with the use of primary sources such as the diaries of Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl and the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion the intentional planning of the forced transfer of the majority of Palestinians living on the land at the time.2 They discovered that whether intentional or predeterimed, there was for decades an intention within the Jewish leadership that settled in then-Palestine to remove its indigenous peoples and bring in Jews to settle in their place. The New Historians uncovered how the then Jewish leadership was able to organize and arm several militias and (internationally recognized) terrorist organizations in resistance to the British Mandate government, and against Palestinians who saw the Jewish immigration as an extension of colonization. They also uncovered the tragic events that transpired in 1948, which allowed for the space for this massive forced transfer to take place. The historians rediscovered this history, erased from history books by its very perpetrators. But with the passage of time, even the historians' fierce critics were forced to admit the uncovered crimes of the 1948 war.3

As the UN writes in its report on what transpired and has today become the longest standing and largest refugee problem in the world, “More than 750,000 Palestinians were arbitrarily displaced or expelled between late 1947 and the first half of 1949.”4 What we Israelis call our War of Independence, has become known in the Arab world as al-Nakba, or “The Catastrope”. And it wasn’t until New Historian Ilan Pappe’s 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that this history and the new findings were put into a comprehensive analysis that demonstrates against much criticism and pressure that the plight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians was not incidental, not an inevitable product of war, but premeditated, intentional.5 Like Pappe, other New Historians also uncovered an organized and pervasive practice of mass executions, rapes, mass graves, and death marches, perpetrated by Jewish militias, united in May 1948 as the nascent Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Describing the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians set to walk for dozens of kilometers through the Middle Eastern summer, Pappe asks in his book a fundamental question. “Three years after the holocaust, what went through the minds of the Jews who watched people pass by?"6

It was this question that drove me to explore this project.

Tikva Honig-Parnass served in the Palmach, a Jewish underground militia. Working as a wireless operator, Honig-Parnass participated in the ethnic cleansing of central Israel, the area today just east of Jerusalem. In her invaluable though largely unknown essay, Reflections of a Daughter of the ’48 Generation, Tikva begins to etch at the seemingly immovable wall surrounding Israel’s cultural taboo of that monumental year. She writes, “The position we internalized pretended that we were not dealing with the development of a military force that was waiting for an opportune time to realize the Zionist plan for the conquest of the land and the dispossession of its Palestinian inhabitants, but rather a "revolutionary army" of the oppressed.”7

Today Tikva Honig-Parnass fights for the documentation and recognition of the true history of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and fights against Israeli policies and practices that perpetuate contemporary ethnic cleansing. For decades she has served as an editor and journalist, and worked with a multitude of media to shed light on her own actions, which as she says, she buried “in the depths of repressed denial.”
A fellow journalist and 1948 veteran, Uri Avnery was an infantry soldier with the Haganah militia (which would later become the IDF). During the entire span of the war, until he was severely wounded, he wrote dispatches for an Israeli publication, describing the war from the front. His articles were collected at the end of the war and published under the title In The Fields of the Philistines. Emerging from his hospital bed a national hero, Avnery describes being horrified by his new nations' idealization of the atrocities of war, described in his book. He immediately set to write and publish The Other Side of the Coin in 1949, revealing not only the war crimes he and his comrades committed, but also their involvement in the campaign to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Both Avery and other veterans, such as Hava Keller have spent the rest of their lives, after the war, fighting for peace and co-existence, and they've given me the privilege of agreeing to be part of this project.

Their fight, however, has not been an easy one. Shlaim and Pappe were forced to go into self-imposed exile after their and their family’s life was threatened by right-wing Israelis. Many of the New Historians were exonerated from their academic circles and communities. While as an editor of a pro-peace publication, Uri Avnery was severely hurt when both his hands were broken in one of several assassination attempts. But it is not only this immense personal risk that veterans of historians of the ethnic cleansing take on. Their fight is also made next to impossible by the Israeli leadership.

Immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel, the new government instituted a series of laws that made permanent the new demographic reality. Such laws as the Abandoned Areas Ordinance, Absentees' Property Law, and the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law ensured all land, previously owned or inhabited by Palestinians, was transferred to the ownership of Jewish entities. This practice continues to today, and is especially prevalent in Jerusalem.

In 1950, Israel passed the Law of Return, which ensured that any Jewish person anywhere in the world, could claim citizenship in Israel but refuses to acknowledge the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their lands of centuries. It was under the Law of Return that I and my family were allowed to immigrate to Israel, but the Palestinian villages that were obliterated from the map to build the settlements and cities in which we lived continues to be erased from history.

This “memoricide” as Ilan Pappe calls it and the modern campaign of ethnic cleansing are acted out daily and in various ways. From targeted home demolitions and evictions of Palestinians from their houses, limitation on property ownership, and land annexation through both West Bank settlement, and the Segregation Wall, Palestinians still face an uncertain future, on an ever shrinking patch of land. Most dangerously though, the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing is once again flourishing in public discourse under the rubric of Israel's “Demographic Problem.”

Identified by the late New Historian, Simcha Flapan, the seven myths of the creation of the State of Israel today lay the basis for the occupation and annexation of Palestinian territories and the ongoing conflict.8Their debunking has become the work of the New Historians around the world, both in exile, and in Israel, and their publicization has become the work of activists and journalists. It was thus only through the freedom of having moved to Canada at the outbreak of the Second Intifadah that this historical record became available to me. Though it was once freely debated in Israel, the New Historiography is becoming increasingly marginalized as its defenders are facing an every growing censorship and danger. Simultaneously, the Palestinians are facing an uphill fight where their future remains uncertain. Many have been displaced multipile times, many being forced to flee to refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, where they still languish today, and many others were forced to other countries. They are not allowed to return to Israel, to reunite with their families. It is therefore through their resilience and courage that I find the motivation to pursue this project, against the will of so many in my life.

------------------------------

Seven Deadly Myths is an Israeli story. It is the story of uncovered truths, fabricated myths, and unforgettable sins. From the 1980s, when Israeli government documents became declassified and the first objective history of the creation of the State of Israel began to be written to today, a new Israeli narrative has emerged. It is one of Israelis who like their Palestinian colleagues, are fighting to document and stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This is the story of the so-called New Historians and the deeply buried truths they’ve found in the halls of Zionist, army, and state archives. More so, it is the story of the veterans who’ve perpetuated the crimes uncovered, and their fight to come to terms with their actions. Through these stories, the story of the ongoing ethnic cleansing becomes evident as it is resisted not only by the Palestinians whom it targets, but also by those whose conscience helps motivate Israeli and international activism, dialogue, and struggle to preserve the truth. Though I did work as a journalist, this is not a journalistic documentary. Rather it is a personal exploration of some courageous and fascinating people who have helped reshape the world I had always taken for granted.

Source