Since the start of the last decade, Defense
Ministry teams have been scouring Israel’s archives and removing
historic documents. But it’s not just papers relating to Israel’s nuclear project
or to the country’s foreign relations that are being transferred to
vaults: Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a
systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba.
The phenomenon was first
detected by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Research. According to a report drawn up by the institute, the operation
is being spearheaded by Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive
security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of
security of the defense establishment”), whose activities and budget are
classified. The report asserts that Malmab removed historical
documentation illegally and with no authority, and at least in some
cases has sealed documents that had previously been cleared for
publication by the military censor. Some of the documents that were
placed in vaults had already been published.
An investigative report by
Haaretz found that Malmab has concealed testimony from IDF generals
about the killing of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well
as documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin during the first decade of
statehood. Conversations conducted by Haaretz with directors of public
and private archives alike revealed that staff of the security
department had treated the archives as their property, in some cases
threatening the directors themselves.
Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades,
until 2007, acknowledged to Haaretz that he launched the project, which
is still ongoing. He maintains that it makes sense to conceal the events
of 1948, because uncovering them could generate unrest among the
country’s Arab population. Asked what the point is of removing documents
that have already been published, he explained that the objective is to
undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee
problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that's
backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that
cannot be proved or refuted.
The document Novick was
looking for might have reinforced Morris’ work. During the
investigation, Haaretz was in fact able to find the Aharon Cohen memo,
which sums up a meeting of Mapam’s Political Committee on the subject of
massacres and expulsions in 1948. Participants in the meeting called
for cooperation with a commission of inquiry that would investigate the
events. One case the committee discussed concerned “grave actions”
carried out in the village of Al-Dawayima, east of Kiryat Gat. One
participant mentioned the then-disbanded Lehi underground militia in
this connection. Acts of looting were also reported: “Lod and Ramle,
Be’er Sheva, there isn’t [an Arab] store that hasn’t been broken into.
9th Brigade says 7, 7th Brigade says 8.”
“The party,” the document
states near the end, “is against expulsion if there is no military
necessity for it. There are different approaches concerning the
evaluation of necessity. And further clarification is best. What
happened in Galilee – those are Nazi acts! Every one of our members must
report what he knows.”
The Israeli version
One of the most fascinating
documents about the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem was
written by an officer in Shai, the precursor to the Shin Bet security
service. It discusses why the country was emptied of so many of its Arab
inhabitants, dwelling on the circumstances of each village. Compiled in
late June 1948, it was titled “The Emigration of the Arabs of
Palestine.”
This document was the basis
for an article that Benny Morris published in 1986. After the article
appeared, the document was removed from the archive and rendered
inaccessible to researchers. Years later, the Malmab team reexamined the
document, and ordered that it remain classified. They could not have
known that a few years later researchers from Akevot would find a copy
of the text and run it past the military censors – who authorized its
publication unconditionally. Now, after years of concealment, the gist
of the document is being revealed here.
The 25-page document begins with an introduction that unabashedly
approves of the evacuation of the Arab villages. According to the
author, the month of April “excelled in an increase of emigration,”
while May “was blessed with the evacuation of maximum places.” The
report then addresses “the causes of the Arab emigration.” According to
the Israeli narrative that was disseminated over the years,
responsibility for the exodus from Israel rests with Arab politicians
who encouraged the population to leave. However, according to the
document, 70 percent of the Arabs left as a result of Jewish military
operations.
Palestinian children awaiting distribution of milk by UNICEF at the Nazareth Franciscan Sisters’ convent, on January 1, 1950.
The unnamed author of the text ranks the reasons
for the Arabs’ departure in order of importance. The first reason:
“Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab places of settlement.” The
second reason was the impact of those actions on neighboring villages.
Third in importance came “operations by the breakaways,” namely the
Irgun and Lehi undergrounds. The fourth reason for the Arab exodus was
orders issued by Arab institutions and “gangs” (as the document refers
to all Arab fighting groups); fifth was “Jewish 'whispering operations'
to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”; and the sixth factor was
“evacuation ultimatums.”
The author asserts that,
“without a doubt, the hostile operations were the main cause of the
movement of the population.” In addition, “Loudspeakers in the Arabic
language proved their effectiveness on the occasions when they were
utilized properly.” As for Irgun and Lehi operations, the report
observes that “many in the villages of central Galilee started to flee
following the abduction of the notables of Sheikh Muwannis [a village
north of Tel Aviv]. The Arab learned that it is not enough to forge an
agreement with the Haganah and that there are other Jews [i.e., the
breakaway militias] to beware of.”
The author notes that
ultimatums to leave were especially employed in central Galilee, less so
in the Mount Gilboa region. “Naturally, the act of this ultimatum, like
the effect of the 'friendly advice,' came after a certain preparing of
the ground by means of hostile actions in the area.”
An appendix to the document
describes the specific causes of the exodus from each of scores of Arab
locales: Ein Zeitun – “our destruction of the village”; Qeitiya –
“harassment, threat of action”; Almaniya – “our action, many killed”;
Tira – “friendly Jewish advice”; Al’Amarir – “after robbery and murder
carried out by the breakaways”; Sumsum – “our ultimatum”; Bir Salim –
“attack on the orphanage”; and Zarnuga – “conquest and expulsion.”
Short fuse
In the early 2000s, the
Yitzhak Rabin Center conducted a series of interviews with former public
and military figures as part of a project to document their activity in
the service of the state. The long arm of Malmab seized on these
interviews, too. Haaretz, which obtained the original texts of several
of the interviews, compared them to the versions that are now available
to the public, after large swaths of them were declared classified.
These included, for example,
sections of the testimony of Brig. Gen. (res.) Aryeh Shalev about the
expulsion across the border of the residents of a village he called
“Sabra.” Later in the interview, the following sentences were deleted:
“There was a very serious problem in the valley. There were refugees who
wanted to return to the valley, to the Triangle [a concentration of
Arab towns and villages in eastern Israel]. We expelled them. I met with
them to persuade them not to want that. I have papers about it.”
In another case, Malmab
decided to conceal the following segment from an interview that
historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. (res.) Elad Peled:
Lev Tov: “We’re talking about a population – women and children?”
Peled: “All, all. Yes.”
Lev Tov: “Don’t you distinguish between them?”
Peled: “The problem is very simple. The war is between two populations. They come out of their home.”
Lev Tov: “If the home exists, they have somewhere to return to?”
Peled: “It’s not armies yet,
it’s gangs. We’re also actually gangs. We come out of the house and
return to the house. They come out of the house and return to the house.
It’s either their house or our house.”
Lev Tov: “Qualms belong to the more recent generation?”
Peled: “Yes, today. When I sit in an armchair here and think about what happened, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.”
Lev Tov: “Wasn’t that the case then?”
Peled: “Look, let me tell
you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa
[Palestinian village in Upper Galilee]. The goal was actually to deter
them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock
troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That was the heart
of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes
with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What
happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to
every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t
have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave. We’re
running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive.
They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are
gone.”
Israeli Occupation soldiers guarding Palestinians in Ramle, in 1948
Another passage that the Defense Ministry wanted
to keep from the public came from Dr. Lev Tov’s conversation with Maj.
Gen. Avraham Tamir:
Tamir: “I was under Chera
[Maj. Gen. Tzvi Tzur, later IDF chief of staff], and I had excellent
working relations with him. He gave me freedom of action – don’t ask –
and I happened to be in charge of staff and operations work during two
developments deriving from [Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s policy.
One development was when reports arrived about marches of refugees from
Jordan toward the abandoned villages [in Israel]. And then Ben-Gurion
lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they
won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages, most
of which were in [the area covered by] Central Command, most of them.”
Lev Tov: “The ones that were still standing?”
Tamir: “The ones that
weren’t yet inhabited by Israelis. There were places where we had
already settled Israelis, like Zakariyya and others. But most of them
were still abandoned villages.”
Lev Tov: “That were standing?”
Tamir: “Standing. It was
necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized
all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I
knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There’s no place to
return to.”
Lev Tov: “Without hesitation, I imagine.”
Tamir: “Without hesitation. That was the policy. I mobilized, I carried it out and I did it.”
Crates in vaults
The vault of the Yad Yaari
Research and Documentation Center is one floor below ground level. In
the vault, which is actually a small, well-secured room, are stacks of
crates containing classified documents. The archive houses the materials
of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, the Kibbutz Ha’artzi kibbutz
movement, Mapam, Meretz and other bodies, such as Peace Now.
The archive’s director is
Dudu Amitai, who is also chairman of the Association of Israel
Archivists. According to Amitai, Malmab personnel visited the archive
regularly between 2009 and 2011. Staff of the archive relate that
security department teams – two Defense Ministry retirees with no
archival training – would show up two or three times a week. They
searched for documents according to such keywords as “nuclear,”
“security” and “censorship,” and also devoted considerable time to the
War of Independence and the fate of the pre-1948 Arab villages.
“In the end, they submitted a
summary to us, saying that they had located a few dozen sensitive
documents,” Amitai says. “We don’t usually take apart files, so dozens
of files, in their entirety, found their way into our vault and were
removed from the public catalog.” A file might contain more than 100
documents.
One of the files that was
sealed deals with the military government that controlled the lives of
Israel’s Arab citizens from 1948 until 1966. For years, the documents
were stored in the same vault, inaccessible to scholars. Recently, in
the wake of a request by Prof. Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv
University, Amitai examined the file himself and ruled that there was no
reason not to unseal it, Malmab’s opinion notwithstanding.
According to Algazi, there
could be several reasons for Malmab’s decision to keep the file
classified. One of them has to do with a secret annex it contains to a
report by a committee that examined the operation of the military
government. The report deals almost entirely with land-ownership battles
between the state and Arab citizens, and barely touches on security
matters.
Another possibility is a
1958 report by the ministerial committee that oversaw the military
government. In one of the report’s secret appendixes, Col. Mishael
Shaham, a senior officer in the military government, explains that one
reason for not dismantling the martial law apparatus is the need to
restrict Arab citizens’ access to the labor market and to prevent the
reestablishment of destroyed villages.
A third possible explanation
for hiding the file concerns previously unpublished historical
testimony about the expulsion of Bedouin. On the eve of Israel’s
establishment, nearly 100,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev. Three years
later, their number was down to 13,000. In the years during and after
the independence war, a number of expulsion operations were carried out
in the country’s south. In one case, United Nations observers reported
that Israel had expelled 400 Bedouin from the Azazma tribe and cited
testimonies of tents being burned.
Below: The evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today's Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949
The letter that appears in the
classified file describes a similar expulsion carried out as late as
1956, as related by geologist Avraham Parnes:
“A month ago we toured Ramon [crater]. The
Bedouin in the Mohila area came to us with their flocks and their
families and asked us to break bread with them. I replied that we had a
great deal of work to do and didn’t have time. In our visit this week,
we headed toward Mohila again. Instead of the Bedouin and their flocks,
there was deathly silence. Scores of camel carcasses were scattered in
the area. We learned that three days earlier the IDF had ‘screwed’ the
Bedouin, and their flocks were destroyed – the camels by shooting, the
sheep with grenades. One of the Bedouin, who started to complain, was
killed, the rest fled.”
The testimony continued,
“Two weeks earlier, they’d been ordered to stay where they were for the
time being, afterward they were ordered to leave, and to speed things up
500 head were slaughtered.... The expulsion was executed
‘efficiently.’” The letter goes on to quote what one of the soldiers
said to Parnes, according to his testimony: “They won’t go unless we’ve
screwed their flocks. A young girl of about 16 approached us. She had a
beaded necklace of brass snakes. We tore the necklace and each of us
took a bead for a souvenir.”
The letter was originally
sent to MK Yaakov Uri, from Mapai (forerunner of Labor), who passed it
on to Development Minister Mordechai Bentov (Mapam). “His letter shocked
me,” Uri wrote Bentov. The latter circulated the letter among all the
cabinet ministers, writing, “It is my opinion that the government cannot
simply ignore the facts related in the letter.” Bentov added that, in
light of the appalling contents of the letter, he asked security experts
to check its credibility. They had confirmed that the contents “do in
fact generally conform to the truth.”
Nuclear excuse
It was during the tenure of
historian Tuvia Friling as Israel’s chief archivist, from 2001 to 2004,
that Malmab carried out its first archival incursions. What began as an
operation to prevent the leakage of nuclear secrets, he says, became, in
time, a large-scale censorship project.
“I resigned after three
years, and that was one of the reasons,” Prof. Friling says. “The
classification placed on the document about the Arabs’ emigration in
1948 is precisely an example of what I was apprehensive about. The
storage and archival system is not an arm of the state’s public
relations. If there’s something you don’t like – well, that’s life. A
healthy society also learns from its mistakes.”
Why did Friling allow the
Defense Ministry to have access the archives? The reason, he says, was
the intention to give the public access to archival material via the
internet. In discussions about the implications of digitizing the
material, concern was expressed that references in the documents to a
“certain topic” would be made public by mistake. The topic, of course,
is Israel’s nuclear project. Friling insists that the only authorization
Malmab received was to search for documents on that subject.
But Malmab’s activity is
only one example of a broader problem, Friling notes: “In 1998, the
confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad
archives expired. For years those two institutions disdained the chief
archivist. When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of
all the material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous –
most of the material can be opened.”
In 2010, the confidentiality
period was extended to 70 years; last February it was extended again,
to 90 years, despite the opposition of the Supreme Council of Archives.
“The state may impose confidentiality on some of its documentation,”
Friling says. “The question is whether the issue of security doesn’t act
as a kind of cover. In many cases, it’s already become a joke.”
In the view of Yad Yaari’s
Dudu Amitai, the confidentiality imposed by the Defense Ministry must be
challenged. In his period at the helm, he says, one of the documents
placed in the vault was an order issued by an IDF general, during a
truce in the War of Independence, for his troops to refrain from rape
and looting. Amitai now intends to go over the documents that were
deposited in the vault, especially 1948 documents, and open whatever is
possible. “We’ll do it cautiously and responsibly, but recognizing that
the State of Israel has to learn how to cope with the less pleasant
aspects of its history.”
In contrast to Yad Yaari,
where ministry personnel no longer visit, they are continuing to peruse
documents at Yad Tabenkin, the research and documentation center of the
United Kibbutz Movement. The director, Aharon Azati, reached an
agreement with the Malmab teams under which documents will be
transferred to the vault only if he is convinced that this is justified.
But in Yad Tabenkin, too, Malmab has broadened its searches beyond the
realm of nuclear project to encompass interviews conducted by archival
staff with former members of the Palmach, and has even perused material
about the history of the settlements in the occupied territories.
Malmab has, for example,
shown interest in the Hebrew-language book “A Decade of Discretion:
Settlement Policy in the Territories 1967-1977,” published by Yad
Tabenkin in 1992, and written by Yehiel Admoni, director of the Jewish
Agency’s Settlement Department during the decade he writes about. The
book mentions a plan to settle Palestinian refugees in the Jordan Valley
and to the uprooting of 1,540 Bedouin families from the Rafah area of
the Gaza Strip in 1972, including an operation that included the sealing
of wells by the IDF. Ironically, in the case of the Bedouin, Admoni
quotes former Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira as saying, “It is
not necessary to stretch the security rationale too far. The whole
Bedouin episode is not a glorious chapter of the State of Israel.”
Palestinian refugees leaving their village, unknown location, 1948.
According to Azati, “We are moving increasingly
to a tightening of the ranks. Although this is an era of openness and
transparency, there are apparently forces that are pulling in the
opposite direction.”
Unauthorized secrecy
About a year ago, the legal
adviser to the State Archives, attorney Naomi Aldouby, wrote an opinion
titled “Files Closed Without Authorization in Public Archives.”
According to her, the accessibility policy of public archives is the
exclusive purview of the director of each institution.
Despite Aldouby’s opinion,
however, in the vast majority of cases, archivists who encountered
unreasonable decisions by Malmab did not raise objections – that is,
until 2014, when Defense Ministry personnel arrived at the archive of
the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. To the visitors’ surprise, their request to examine the
archive – which contains collections of former minister and diplomat
Abba Eban and Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit – was turned down by its
then director, Menahem Blondheim.
According to Blondheim, “I
told them that the documents in question were decades old, and that I
could not imagine that there was any security problem that would warrant
restricting their access to researchers. In response, they said, ‘And
let’s say there is testimony here that wells were poisoned in the War of
Independence?’ I replied, ‘Fine, those people should be brought to
trial.’”
Blondheim’s refusal led to a
meeting with a more senior ministry official, only this time the
attitude he encountered was different and explicit threats were made.
Finally the two sides reached an accommodation.
Benny Morris is not
surprised at Malmab’s activity. “I knew about it,” he says “Not
officially, no one informed me, but I encountered it when I discovered
that documents I had seen in the past are now sealed. There were
documents from the IDF Archive that I used for an article about Deir Yassin, and which are now sealed.
When I came to the archive, I was no longer allowed to see the
original, so I pointed out in a footnote [in the article] that the State
Archive had denied access to documents that I had published 15 years
earlier.”
The Malmab case is only one
example of the battle being waged for access to archives in Israel.
According to the executive director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne,
“The IDF Archive, which is the largest archive in Israel, is sealed
almost hermetically. About 1 percent of the material is open. The Shin
Bet archive, which contains materials of immense importance [to
scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
A report written by Yaacov
Lozowick, the previous chief archivist at the State Archives, upon his
retirement, refers to the defense establishment’s grip on the country’s
archival materials. In it, he writes, “A democracy must not conceal
information because it is liable to embarrass the state. In practice,
the security establishment in Israel, and to a certain extent that of
foreign relations as well, are interfering with the [public]
discussion.”
Advocates of concealment put
forward several arguments, Lozowick notes: “The uncovering of the facts
could provide our enemies with a battering ram against us and weaken
the determination of our friends; it’s liable to stir up the Arab
population; it could enfeeble the state’s arguments in courts of law;
and what is revealed could be interpreted as Israeli war crimes.”
However, he says, “All these arguments must be rejected. This is an
attempt to hide part of the historical truth in order to construct a
more convenient version.”
What Malmab says
Yehiel Horev was the keeper
of the security establishment’s secrets for more than two decades. He
headed the Defense Ministry’s security department from 1986 until 2007
and naturally kept out of the limelight. To his credit, he now agreed to
talk forthrightly to Haaretz about the archives project.
“I don’t remember when it
began,” Horev says, “but I do know that I started it. If I’m not
mistaken, it started when people wanted to publish documents from the
archives. We had to set up teams to examine all outgoing material.”
Palestinian refugees in the Ramle area, 1948.
