May 13, 2008

By Mahir Ali

AS Israel, going by the Hebrew calendar, marked its independence day last week, there were instances of its national flag being set alight by malcontents for whom the occasion offered cause for indignation rather than celebration. They were not, as one might expect, Arabs bemoaning the transformation of their homeland into an unwanted country six decades ago. Rather, they were ultra-orthodox Jews who consider Zionism incompatible with Judaism. Their protest highlighted one strand in what is a veritable bundle of contradictions.

Most of these contradictions were already manifest when, 60 years ago on Wednesday (according to the Gregorian calendar), David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of Israel. This was the same Ben-Gurion who had noted 11 years earlier: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." Hostile Arab neighbours obliged him in 1948, as a consequence of which Israel gained substantially more territory than the United Nations had envisaged in its partition plan the previous year.

The hostilities also facilitated the Zionist aim of ethnic cleansing: Plan Dalet, put into motion in March 1948, was intended to ensure that Jews did not constitute a minority in the new state. This strategy was implemented through tactics that ranged from threats and intimidation to massacres and the destruction of entire villages. One such drive by Israeli soldiers bore the name Mivtza Nikayon, or Operation Cleaning. The events of 1948 have been meticulously documented by Israeli historians, yet in the official Israeli narrative there is no explicit acknowledgement of atrocities sanctioned by the nascent state.

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