Posted on July 7, 2007
Meron Rapoport
In July 1950,
Majdal - today
Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a
closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before
the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a
population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins
of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure
where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the
Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of
the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni,
would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to
visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.
This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of
Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in
the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice
agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of
Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct
responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the
time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site
was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least
two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.
A member of the establishment is responsible for the documentation: Shmuel
Yeivin, then the director of the Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of
the present-day Antiquities Authority. Yeivin, as noted by Raz Kletter, an
archaeologist who has studied the first two decades of archaeology in Israel,
was neither a political activist nor a champion for Arab rights. As Kletter
explains, he was simply a scientist, a disciple of the British school and a
member of the Mandate government's Department of Antiquities who believed that
ancient sites and holy places needed to be preserved, whether they were sacred
to Jews, Christians or Muslims. In line with his convictions, he fired off
letters of protest and was considered a nudnik by the IDF.
"I received a report that not long ago, the army blew up the big building
in the ruins of Ashkelon, which is known by the name of Maqam al-Nabi Hussein
and is a holy site for the Muslim community," Yeivin wrote on July 24,
1950, to Lieutenant Colonel Yaakov Patt, the head of the department for special
missions in the Defense Ministry, and sent a copy to chief of staff Yigael Yadin
and other senior officers. "That building was still standing during my last
visit to the site, on June 10 - in other words, the army authorities found no
reason to demolish it from the conquest until the middle of 1950. I find it hard
to imagine the site was blown up due to infiltrators, as they have not stopped
infiltrating the area during this entire period."
The detonation, by the way, was extremely successful. Of the ancient and holy
site, not so much as a stone remained.
Yeivin's complaint was seemingly related to procedural matters, but only
seemingly. The army, he wrote, needed to understand that there were
"sanctified buildings," and if it wanted to touch them, "it is
proper, honest and courteous first to talk to the institutions that supervise
these areas and buildings, and to consult with them in order to find ways to
avoid destruction." But that is not happening, Yeivin stated. "I was
told that simultaneously, the mosque in the abandoned village of
Ashdod
was blown up," Yeivin added. "This is not the first case. I already
have had many occasions to draw your attention to similar cases elsewhere, and
the chief of staff issued explicit directives with regard to the preservation of
such buildings and places, but apparently none of this avails commanders of a
certain type ... I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should
be brought to trial and punished, because in this case there was no
justification for a swift, war-contingent operation."
A perusal of the IDF Archives shows that Lieutenant Colonel Patt forwarded
Yeivin's complaint to Yadin. However, Yadin, who would later become Israel's
preeminent archaeologist and whose father, Eliezer Sukenik, was an archaeologist
of repute in his own right and Yeivin's colleague in the Mandate Department of
Antiquities, was not unduly upset. Below Patt's letter addressing Yeivin's
complaint are handwritten remarks: "1. Confirm receipt of letter and inform
that the matter is being dealt with; 2. Add to
Dayan's
material for my meeting with B.-G." - referring to then prime minister and
defense minister
David
Ben-Gurion.
It stands to reason that the handwriting is Yadin's, as it is unlikely that
anyone else could have met with Ben-Gurion concerning "Dayan's
material." And Yadin, as is clear from another note written on the letter,
did not attribute any great importance to the complaint. "Teven la'afarayim,"
it says, roughly the equivalent of "coals to Newcastle" - in short,
there is nothing new in Yeivin's complaint.
Nor was Dayan unduly upset. In a response he sent to the chief of staff's
bureau, apparently on August 10 under the heading "Destruction of a holy
place," Dayan wrote: "The detonation was carried out by the Coastal
Plain District, at my instruction." The first words of the sentence have
been struck out, but a letter dated August 30 removes all doubt. Dayan replied
to a letter concerning "damage to antiquities in the Ashkelon area":
"The chief of staff approached me and I gave him my explanations; the
action was carried out at my instructions."
That reply was so embarrassing that Yaakov Prolov, the head of the Operations
Department in the General Staff, sent a letter to the chief of staff's bureau
asking for guidelines on how to reply to Yeivin. "A mistake was made here
and it can be assumed it will not happen again," someone instructed him in
script that looks like that attributed to Yadin in the previous letter.
Whitewashing, it turns out, is not a new invention.
Blots on the landscape
Not surprisingly, it did in fact happen again. At the end of October, Yeivin
sent another letter, this time directly to Yadin, to complain about "the
blowing-up of the ancient mosque at Yavneh," a 1,000-year-old structure
whose minaret is still standing on a hill south of Yavneh, close to the train
station. Yeivin reminded Yadin that he had been promised that those responsible
would be punished this time. But it turned out there was an unexplained
disparity between the explicit orders prohibiting damage to mosques and the
actual policy in the field.
"I have just received an official reply from your bureau chief [Michael
Avitzur], and after reading it I am totally at a loss," Yeivin wrote to
Yadin. "On the one hand, I have in front of me your explicit order, which
speaks unequivocally about preserving places of archaeological or historical
value ... On the other hand, I read in the letter of Lieutenant Colonel Michael
Avitzur that the mosque at Yavneh 'was exploded on July 9, 1950, before the date
on which the cessation of blowing up mosques was announced.' How can these two
things be reconciled?"
Yeivin's quotation from Avitzur's letter makes it clear that blowing up mosques
was widespread enough that it required a special order to stop it. Yeivin
himself wrote later in the letter, "I am extremely concerned following my
talks with a number of people involved in the policy on this question."
Yeivin did not specify whom he spoke to, but noted, "I do not see myself as
being able to write explicitly about everything."
David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the
time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian
Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff
and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern
Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of
mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any
such order.
"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from
Zakariyya,
but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says.
"I know that in the South, in the villages of
Bureir
and
Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil],
the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not
familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to
me."
The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book
"Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain
(Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities
Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new
historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of
Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no
small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages,
the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from
3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare
Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last
minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been
for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments,
they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.
As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation
occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the
remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked
facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab
neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948,
arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote
A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August
1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the
Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been
cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in
sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or
have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan
noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda
Meir.
Kletter reveals in his book that Yeivin and his staff occasionally tried to stop
the destruction - not always, not consistently, and not for moral reasons or out
of any special respect for the people (the Arabs) who lived for centuries in
these towns and quarters. Their grounds were scientific, and Kletter believes
this approach stemmed from their background. Before 1948 they worked for the
Department of Antiquities of the Mandate government under British management,
alongside Arab employees. Kletter relates that in the department they fought for
the "Judaization" of the names of ancient sites, but nevertheless
remained loyal to the department - so much so that after the United Nations
passed the partition plan, in November 1947, Yeivin proposed that the department
remain unified even after the country's division into a Jewish state and an Arab
state. Eliezer Sukenik went one step farther: "I do not believe the Jewish
state will preserve its antiquities," he said in a December 1947
discussion. "We must place scientific sovereignty above political
sovereignty. We are interested in the archaeology of the whole land, and the
only way [to ensure this] is a unified department."
Perjury at Megiddo
"Yeivin was not the greatest archaeologist in the world, but he had
personal integrity, which is the most important trait of the British
heritage," Kletter says. "But that heritage did not suit the
nationalism of the 1950s, because Ben-Gurion wanted to erase everything that had
been, to erase the Islamic past."
Ben-Gurion saw
everything that existed here before the revival of the Jewish community as
wasteland. "Foreign conquerors have turned our land into a desert," he
said at a meeting of the Society for Land of Israel Studies in 1950. Thus the
failure of Yeivin and his colleagues was a foregone conclusion. In the 1950s,
when archaeology was a fad and archaeologists like Yadin were cultural heroes,
people of science were nudged out of management positions. Yeivin was forced to
resign and "technocrats" like Teddy Kollek were effectively put in
charge of managing Israel's major archaeological sites.
The Department of Antiquities was formally established in July 1948, as a unit
of the Public Works Department in the Ministry of Labor. Even before this, the
veterans of its Mandatory predecessor tried to preserve antiquities, and in
particular to prevent looting, but did not always succeed. The museum in
Caesarea was emptied out by thieves, and the same fate befell the findings and
documents at Tel Megiddo, which were concentrated in the offices of the
University of Chicago archaeological expedition, which had been digging there
since the 1920s. Rare collections, such as the one at Notre Dame Monastery in
Jerusalem, disappeared almost completely, and private collections and antique
shops in Jaffa and Jerusalem were also targeted by thieves. "All the
objects have disappeared from the government museum [more than 100 fragments of
inscriptions and parts of pillars]," reported Emanuel Ben-Dor, who would
later become Yeivin's deputy director, after visiting
Caesarea.
"The collection in the office of the Greek patriarch was destroyed."
The Megiddo incident was particularly embarrassing, as the dig was carried out
by American archaeologists and the U.S. consulate wanted to know who was
responsible for the devastation. An investigation was launched under Yeivin's
supervision, and the local commanders said that Arab units had wrecked the site.
Yeivin discovered that this was untrue, and that Israeli soldiers had looted the
site and then burned the archaeological expedition's offices.
In a confidential report, Yeivin quoted from an internal letter of the local
unit: "In consultation with the battalion commander and with the brigade's
operations officer, we agreed that in the event of an investigation by the U.S.
consul general ... we will (shamefully) lie and say the place was found in this
condition when it was captured and that the crime was committed by the Arabs
before they fled."
But the theft of antiquities was only a small part of the problem. The major
problem was the destruction. In August 1948, the army started to demolish
ancient
Tiberias, apparently in the
wake of a local decision. The attempts to salvage some of the town's
archaeological gems were to no avail. In September the site was visited by Jacob
Pinkerfeld, from the Department of Antiquities' monument conservation unit.
"In ancient Tiberias the army began to blow up a hefty strip of buildings
in the Old City," Pinkerfeld wrote in his report. "In talks with all
the responsible parties at the site, we emphasized the special importance of the
ancient stone with the relief of the lions on it, which was built into one of
the walls. We were promised that this antiquity dating back 3,000 years would be
specially guarded, but in my last visit I found precisely this stone blown to
bits." So sweeping was the destruction of Tiberias that even Ben-Gurion was
taken aback when he visited the city in early 1949.
The list for destruction sometimes assumed ludicrous proportions. During a visit
to
Haifa in August 1948, Yeivin discovered
the army was laying waste to large sections of the Arab city around
Hamra
Square (now Paris Square) under the direction of the city engineer. In his
restrained language, Yeivin expressed his astonishment at the destruction:
"With our own eyes we saw the ruins of half of a building that had served
as a synagogue on the Street of the Jews ... According to Jews who live there
and wandered about among the ruins, another two or three synagogues were also
destroyed there ... It would appear that with attentiveness, the damage
inflicted to these holy buildings could have been avoided."
Depressing impression
The leveling of the villages began as soon as the fighting ended. During his
visit to the North, Yeivin saw the army blowing up villages near Tiberias and
Mount
Tabor. He asked that before villages were demolished, consultations be held
with representatives of the Department of Antiquities, because "in many
villages, ancient building stones are embedded in the houses." At
Zir'in
(now Kibbutz Yizrael) a Crusader tower was blown up, and the fortress at
Umm
Khaled, near Netanya, was reduced to rubble.
al-Muzayri'a's mausoleum that later converted to a mosque.
But there were successes, too. An order was issued to raze the fortress at
Shfaram, but Antiquities Department staff arrived at the last minute and blocked
the demolition. And at Al-Muzeirra,
a village south of Rosh Ha'ayin, a miracle occurred: the army used a handsome
building of pillars in the middle of the abandoned village for target practice,
apparently without knowing it was "the only mausoleum that survived in our
country from the Roman period," according to Yeivin. When, nonetheless, the
decision came to blow up the mausoleum in July 1949, an antiquities inspector
arrived at the site and prevented the blast. The site is now known as "Hirbat
Manor" (the Manor Ruin) and is recommended in all sightseeing guides for
the area.
Kletter relates that in February 1950, at the initiative of Yeivin and others,
who grasped that without government intervention, the country's urban past would
simply disappear, Ben-Gurion agreed to establish a government committee
"for sacred and historic sites and monuments." The committee was
staffed by senior government and military personnel. The report, which was
submitted in October 1951, stated that certain sites had to be preserved as
"whole units" - "Acre, a few quarters in Safed,
small sections of Jaffaand Tiberias, small
sections of Ramle and Lod,
a few sections of Tarshiha." The
rest of the towns, and hundreds of villages, were already lost.
However, the state institutions failed to honor even these conclusions.
According to Kletter, Yeivin was one of the first to fight the August 1950
decision to demolish all of Jaffa.
Afterward, artists who had moved into the abandoned city joined the struggle, as
did Development Authority personnel, and thus a few sections were spared total
annihilation. Yeivin was less successful in Lod. In June 1954, he wrote a
protest letter to the education minister, in the wake of a decision on "the
destruction of the ancient quarter in the city of Lod."
Israeli law, pursuant to British law, stipulated that only what was built before
1700 was considered an "antiquity," but Yeivin wrote that the other
sites should also be preserved - both for tourism and because they are
"cultural and educational assets and living historical testimonies that
every enlightened state is obliged to preserve."
Qisarya was completely
destroyed except its mosque.
Kletter's book leaves the impression that the destruction was not accidental and
that its perpetrators were aware of its significance. The ideological foundation
of the devastation is set forth in the August 1957 Foreign Ministry letter sent
at the behest of Golda Meir. After the author of the document, A. Dotan,
requested the Ministry of Labor to "clear the ruins," he specified
"four types" of "ruins" and the grounds for their
destruction:
"First, it is necessary to get rid of the ruins in the heart of Jewish
communities, in important centers or on central transportation arteries; rapid
treatment must be given to the ruins of villages whose residents are in the
country, such as Birwe, north of
Shfaram, and the ruins of Zippori;
in areas where there is no development, such as along the rail line from
Jerusalem to Bar Giora, one receives a depressing impression of a once-living
civilized land; attention must also be directed to ruins in distinctly tourist
areas, such as the ruins of the Circassian village in Caesarea, which is
intact but empty ... Accordingly, the Ministry of Labor should assume the
mission of clearing the ruins ... It should be taken into account that the
participation of nongovernmental elements requires caution, as politically it
is desirable for the operation to be executed without anyone grasping its
political meaning."
Kletter says he was surprised to discover the scale of the destruction, but
that to some extent he understands those who were behind the operation. The
decision not to allow the Palestinian refugees to return was unavoidable, he
believes, if the idea was to establish a Jewish state here. Those were the rules
of the game in that period, he says, and if the Jewish community had lost in
1948, the Arab victors would likely have treated the Jews in the same way. And
because it was impossible to preserve hundreds of abandoned Palestinian towns
and villages, there was no choice but to demolish most of them, Kletter
maintains.
He also has nothing against the archaeologists who in the early years of the
state were concerned almost exclusively with Jewish sites, or in the best case
with Christian or Roman sites, and ignored Muslim sites almost completely. It is
natural for researchers to be interested first and foremost in their own
culture, Kletter says; and besides, relative to the political pressure exerted
on them by people like Ben-Gurion, who declaredly wanted to erase the Arab past
of this country, they behaved honorably. "Early Israeli archaeology has
something to be ashamed of and much to be proud of," Kletter writes.
Still, Kletter says, his book is "about loss, about what could have been
but was not. The loss of archaeology that began with a scientific tradition and
did not continue, the loss of vast historical information, the loss of the
village landscape. I don't think this village landscape belongs to us - it
belongs to the people who lived here - but still, there is longing for that lost
landscape. We cannot bring it back, but at least we should be aware of the truth
and not lie to ourselves."
Kletter says this country's great good fortune lies in the fact that it contains
so many monuments that it was impossible to destroy all of them. But even those
that were destroyed somehow continue to live a different life. Mash'had Nabi
Hussein, the holy site in Ashkelon, was leveled in 1950, but the Muslim
believers did not forgo it. A few years ago, the Shi'ite Ismaili sect, which is
based in central India, established a kind of small marble platform at the site,
on the grounds of Barzilai Hospital, and since then thousands of believers have
come there every year. In Yavneh, only the minaret remains of the razed ancient
mosque, standing alongside heaps of rubble and one fig tree, but in a visit to
the site a week ago I saw a group of elderly Ethiopians there on the hill,
praying ardently under the fig tree. It was as if the place had remained holy
even if its inhabitants had changed.
Click here to
read the full article at Ha'aretz's website
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This is immensely valuable and important. The genius of 12-step treatment programs for individuals are the "steps" of "fearless moral inventory" and "making amends." Until the Nakba is acknowledged and voluntarily redressed by Israel, the anger of the victims and the guilt (however denied or unconscious) of the perpetrators will prevent any reconciliation or lasting peace. Israel and Palestine can be seen as enacting a collective, compulsive, abusive relationship, enabled by the US. You are engaging in the confession which must precede absolution.
"History Erased By Ha'aretz"
This title might be misunderstood, as if Haaretz is erasing history. Actually, Haaretz published an article by Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport. The title of the article in English is "History Erased". In Hebrew, the title is "Operation to Explode the Mosques". The content of the article is a recitation of some of the history.