Tom Knapp has graciously invited me to respond here to his article “Context is everything: American libertarians and Israel, part 1,” first published in 2004.

Tom recently reposted it at his blog, where I added a brief comment.

Tom wrote the article as a response to “Is Applying Libertarian Principles to Israel Anti-Semitic?,” by Carol Moore.

Tom’s article contains so many inaccuracies that it’s impossible to properly rebut all of them in a post of reasonable length. In this post I will address what I believe is the most important issue. This is Tom’s apparent acceptance of the myth that, in the military operations of 1948, the Arab governments intended and attempted a Nazi-esque extermination of Israel’s Jewish population.

Tom presents no evidence for this claim, so I will turn to a prominent Zionist advocate who purports to do so: Alan Dershowitz.

“While the Arab armies tried to kill Jewish civilians and did in fact massacre many who tried to escape, the Israeli army allowed Arab civilians to flee to Arab-controlled areas. For example, when the Arab Legion’s Sixth Battalion conquered Kfar Etzion, they left no Jewish refugees. The villagers surrendered and walked, hands in the air, into the center of the compound. Morris reports that the Arab soldiers simply ‘proceeded to mow them down.’ The soldiers massacred 120 Jews; 21 of them were women. This was part of a general Arab policy: ‘Jews taken prisoner during convoy battles were generally put to death and often mutilated by their captors.’ It is precisely because the Israeli army, unlike the Arab armies, did not deliberately kill civilians that the refugee problem arose.” (Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003, p. 79)

Dershowitz misrepresents his source. Both quotes are out of context. The first, a fragment of a sentence, is filled out with an indirect quote that is a flat lie.

This is what historian Benny Morris actually wrote, on the page indicated by Dershowitz’s footnote for the first quote:

“In the center of the country Arab Legion units, supported by hundreds of villagers, managed to overcome and conquer the isolated Etzion Bloc (four Jewish settlements north of Hebron). Under intermittent siege since January, it was defended by about four hundred men and one hundred women (the children had been evacuated) …. On May 12 the assault was renewed; Legion Sixth Battalion units and thousands of armed villagers gathered for the kill. … The next day the legionnaires broke into the main settlement, Kfar Etzion. Villagers shouting ‘Deir Yassin, Deir Yassin’ poured through the breach. The remaining defenders laid down their weapons and walked, hands in the air, into the center of the compound. There, according to one of the few survivors, the villagers (and perhaps some of the legionnaires as well) proceeded to mow them down.’ (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999, p. 214)

It was mainly, if not entirely, Palestinian irregulars, “villagers,” who committed the massacre. The importance of this point will become clearer in due course.

Before taking up the second quote, I feel I should mention a couple of minor points.

Like any good propagandist, Dershowitz doesn’t miss the opportunity to exaggerate the number murdered. The figure of 120 is the total number of Jews who died at Kfar Etzion on May 13, including combat deaths. Morris doesn’t break the number down, probably because the exact breakdown is uncertain.

The state of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, the day after the fall of Kfar Etzion. On the next day, May 15, the regular armies of several Arab countries intervened in the Palestinian civil war. This action is often mischaracterized as an “invasion of Israel.”

Dershowitz doesn’t make this timeline clear, giving a naive reader the impression that the Kfar Etzion massacre took place after the intervention of the Arab main armies.

Elements of the Arab Legion, the regular army of Jordan, had been in Palestine for some time “on loan” to the British. As the British wound down their presence, these Legion units began to operate independently in support of the Palestinian irregulars. This accounts for their involvement in the siege and fall of the Etzion settlements.

I now turn to Dershowitz’s second quotation of Morris. This time Dershowitz deigns to favor the reader with a complete sentence. “‘Jews taken prisoner during convoy battles were generally put to death and often mutilated by their captors.’” (Dershowitz, p. 79, citing Morris, p. 204)

This is from a part of Morris’s book that discusses the strategy and tactics of the Palestinian irregulars during the “civil war” period, before the intervention of the main Arab armies. They relied heavily on siege tactics, especially ambushing convoys, because for the most part they weren’t strong enough for frontal assaults on Jewish settlements.

Now look again at how Dershowitz uses these quotes, one mangled and misrepresented, both taken out of context. He describes a massacre of the surviving defenders of a settlement, falsely attributing it to regular soldiers. Then he says “This was part of a general Arab policy,” and for evidence cites a quote about convoy ambushes, which the reader will incorrectly assume also refers to regular soldiers.

Since Dershowitz is claiming a “general Arab policy” of massacring the surviving defenders of settlements, why doesn’t he cite more examples of such massacres? The answer appears to be that he cannot, since his sources contain no such examples.

They do, however, contain examples of Arab regular forces taking prisoners and permitting refugees to depart, contrary to his alleged “general Arab policy.”

Let’s return to the Etzion settlements, of which, Benny Morris tells us, there were four. Dershowitz neglects to mention the other three, because they surrendered to the Arabs the day after their sister, on May 14, and about 350 survivors were taken prisoner. Another four were murdered by the Arabs. (Morris, p. 214)

Martin Gilbert, another historian whom Dershowitz cites elsewhere on other matters in The Case for Israel, agrees that “From the Etzion Bloc settlements of Revadim, Massuot Yitzhak and Ein Zurim, the surviving Jews were led into captivity.” (Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1998, p. 189)

A web search on Gilbert’s name will show that his book is a favorite of some strongly pro-Zionist websites.

On May 28, 1948, the Arabs took the Jewish Quarter of East Jerusalem. “Almost all the inhabitants and seriously wounded combatants were allowed to cross into Jewish Jerusalem; nearly three hundred able-bodied defenders were taken prisoner.” (Morris p. 225) “As its inhabitants were led into captivity in Transjordan, there was a sense of humiliation among the Jews elsewhere in the country.” (Gilbert, p. 198)

On June 10, 1948, Syrian forces captured a Jewish frontier settlement called Mishmar Ha-Yarden. “By midday the settlement was overrun, and those defenders who were captured taken to prison in Damascus.” (Gilbert, p. 208)

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some massacres by regular Arab troops that didn’t get mentioned in either of those books. I am surpised that Dershowitz apparently couldn’t find one recorded anywhere, and so had to resort to a crude deception.

The Arabs, who of course ultimately lost the war, didn’t take very many major centers of Jewish population. The Syrians didn’t get much farther than Mishmar Ha-Yarden. The West Bank, where the Jordanians and Iraqis operated, was mostly Arab except for Jerusalem and the Etzion settlements. On the southern front, where the Egyptians occupied Gaza, the Jewish settlements weren’t cut off as they were at Etzion and in East Jerusalem. The Jews executed a staged retreat, falling back on their supply lines. The Egyptians rarely overran a settlement before its inhabitants had exfiltrated.

The picture I’ve sketched, in which the Arab regulars mostly kept Geneva rules while the Palestinian irregulars were murderous, is just about the reverse of Tom’s picture.

Tom ignores the civil war in Palestine, except for this curious passage:

“The libertarian case against Israel in this respect has been made on many grounds, some defensible and some not. Some go so far as to blame the state of Israel for displacements and attacks which took place before that state even existed (as with the Deir Yassin massacre).”

I certainly would “go so far.” The people directing Zionist military operations at the time of Deir Yassin, were the very people who soon after became Israel’s first government.

But that’s by the by. The point is that Tom ignores how the Palestinians fought in their own cause in 1947 and 1948. In his version the Palestinians do nothing but run away. They only wanted to “live in peace with the Jews,” but this desire was frustrated by the “invasion” and “threats” of the Arab governments.

This is a variant of one of the most hackneyed cliches in the propaganda of imperialism. “Our subject peoples are content with our rule. Any unrest is the fault of outside agitators.” Our own government has been using it with regard to Iraq.

I’ll conclude with a mention of the obvious: this post alone carries no proof that I’ve represented my sources accurately. I’ve provided the bibliographic data, and I’ll repeat it below. All three books are widely available. If your library doesn’t have them all, Amazon does. By all means check up on me. Independent thinkers check sources, and evaluate them.

Martin Gilbert’s Israel: A History, is an excellent introduction to the orthodox Israeli view. I mean the orthodox view of serious scholars, not the crap that passes for “history” on American editorial pages. It’s quite an eye-opener.

For anyone ready to take the plunge and give the Palestinian side a hearing, I would suggest starting with Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, an essay collection edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens.

Bibliography

Alan Dershowitz,The Case for Israel, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999

Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1998