It is clear that Bercuson’s piece is irredeemably flawed and its publication incompatible with a newspaper’s obligation to the truth. It is therefore essential that the National Post retract it and commit to fact checking any future items on this topic.
Dear National Post editorial team:
I’m writing to you on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East regarding David Bercuson’s piece on Friday, titled “The simple truth behind the 'Nakba'.” It is riddled with incorrect claims of fact and must be retracted.
Bercuson states that the Nakba is used by what he terms “Palestine Arabs” (rather than the proper term, “Palestinians”) to described expulsion “by what they call Jewish colonizers acting against an aboriginal people.” In fact, it is Zionists themselves who self-identified as colonizers and viewed the Palestinians as natives. To give just a few examples:
- Theodore Herzl himself described Zionism as “something colonial” while referring to Palestinians as “the indigenous population.”
- In his seminal essay “The Iron Wall”, the Israeli right’s intellectual godfather Vladimir Jabotinsky refers repeatedly to Palestinians as “the native population” and to Zionists as “the colonists” (and to “our colonising aims”).
- The first Zionist bank, founded by the Second Zionist Congress, was named the “Jewish Colonial Trust.”
- The 19th century societies created by Jewish philanthropist Maurice de Hirsh to further Zionism were named the “Jewish Colonization Association” and the “Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.”
The piece also asserts that had Palestinians simply accepted partition, there would have been no Nakba. There is scant evidence for this proposition, and masses to the contrary:
- First, it was not only Palestinians that opposed partition, but Zionists as well. While the former were more publicly outraged over their homeland being torn asunder, in private the latter were adamant that control over all of Palestine remained the ultimate goal. For example, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, reassured anti-partition colleagues that “we shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today – but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them” and that “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine” (both quoted by Israeli historian Simha Flapan in The Birth of Israel).
- Second, there was no path to a viable Jewish state without the removal of the Palestinians. The partition plan offered Zionists a country with only a bare Jewish majority, which Ben Gurion recognized “does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state.” He added, accurately, that the demographic mix “does not even give us absolute assurance that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority.” Bercuson accurately notes that there were cases where Jews sincerely wanted their Arab neighbours to remain, such as Haifa Mayor Shabtai Levy. But since giving effect to those desires would have precluded the creation of a Jewish state, even villages with local nonaggression pacts – such as Deir Yassin itself, which as Bercuson mentions was the victim of a horrific massacre at the hands of the Irgun – saw them ignored by Zionist militias (and, later, the Israeli army). The result was what Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, referred to as “a miraculous clearing of the land.” It is why Israel refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return home (a right not denied to the Syrians or Ukrainians that Bercuson mentions). It is why Ben Gurion declared, “I will be for them not returning after the war,” even saying “we must prevent at all costs their return” (cited by Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited). As exhaustively documented in historian Nur Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians, Zionist leaders had been preoccupied with expelling Palestinians since their project’s inception. These quotes are merely the tip of the iceberg. It was not merely “some leaders” who wanted Palestinians gone – it was the consensus position.
- Third, the Nakba began before the first Arab/Israeli war and continued after it ended. Palestinian villages were being depopulated as early as December 1947. Numerous massacres, not just the infamous one at Deir Yassin, occurred before the war, and the Palestinian population of the major cities of Haifa, Acre and Jaffa were gone before the end of the British mandate. On the other side, ethnic cleansing continued after the guns fell silent. Two pick just two examples from many, in 1950 the 2,700 remaining Palestinians in the village of Majdal were expelled to the Gaza Strip and 120 Palestinians were trucked to a point near the West Bank and forced at gunpoint to march eastwards, with the British Minister to Amman attesting to dozens dying from thirst and starvation (both incidents cited in Masalha, A Land Without a People).
It is also false and incoherent for Bercuson to claim that Palestinians “fled of their own accord out of fear.” As mentioned, Deir Yassin may have been the most notorious but there were massacres throughout Palestine. Perhaps worse even than the fear of death was that of rape; Benny Morris notes that “there were several dozen cases” and that it is “a crime viewed with particular horror in Arab and Muslim societies.” It is not “of own’s own accord” that one flees under such circumstances. Worse, it is simply incorrect to suggest, as Bercuson does, that any meaningful number of Palestinians left “as a result of entreaties of the Arab states.” Historian Walid Khalidi has demonstrated that no such widespread orders existed, and a June 1948 assessment by Israeli military intelligence (one that Benny Morris considers reliable) cites this factor as accounting for perhaps 5% of the total flight. The top cause given is “Direct Jewish hostile actions against Arab communities.”
Finally, while it is not a factual error, the suggestion that we should ignore ethnic cleansing because there are many historical instances of people being forced to flee in terror is utterly repugnant. Certainly, no decent person would argue that the horrors of October 7 are somehow diminished by the fact that it was neither history’s first nor its last massacre, but that is the logic that Bercuson thinks should apply when the victims are Palestinian.
It is clear that Bercuson’s piece is irredeemably flawed and its publication incompatible with a newspaper’s obligation to the truth. It is therefore essential that the National Post retract it and commit to fact checking any future items on this topic.
Sincerely,
Adam Allouba
Media Advocate
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
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