The inscription says: “The mosque was closed as a result of the monstrous massacre perpetrated by the occupation forces in 1948, and was partially reopened in 1
Behalve deze derde poging die u nu leest, heb ik nog twee keer eerder een poging gedaan tot analyse van dit hoofdstuk van Shavit. De eerste was “Het Stockholmdualisme van Ari Shavit (5)” van 7 juni 2014. De tweede wasAri Shavit, Martin Kramer, Efraim Karsh, Benny Morris en . . . . . Lydda, Lydda, Lydda !!! van 8 november 2014. Ik ben nu, half maart 2021, bezig aan de definitieve versie.
Chapter five of Shavit’s book “My Promised Land” is called “Lydda, 1948”. This chapter is the treasonous, guilt-ridden, Stockholm-syndromatic heart of the book and it has deservedly been the subject of harsh criticism. Israel is a liberal country and like Western-Europe perhaps too liberal to survive islam. Shavit’s treasonous book could be published in Israel like on the front of the Dahmas Mosque in Lydda the Israeli government allows the following Arabic inscription, because you can’t be too tolerant of those who have sworn to use your freedoms to end all your freedoms:
“The mosque was closed as a result of the monstrous massacre perpetrated by the occupation forces in 1948, and was partially reopened in 1996.” [my blue bold]
Martin Kramer, of whom I will speak a bit further in this text, points to the tourist opportunity to make a “Nakba-trip” in Lydda, where an Arab guide will indeed tell you that mass murder and expulsion were part of a “systematic policy” of “Zionism.” Kramer cites a “Palestinian professor”:
“There was a brain behind the massacres, call it a master plan, call it an outline, because there is a pattern to the killings, and a logic to this pattern. After working in different archives, my picture is that Palestine in 1948 was a theater of Israeli massacres, a continuous show of Palestinians massacred, of killings and destruction, and of psychological warfare.”
All this antisemitic crap can be uttered in Israel about Lydda (= Lod), a town situated well within the borders of tolerant Israel.
The Damash-mosque figures as “the little mosque” in Shavit’s chapter 5 and in the ensuing controversy over this chapter. The inscription epitomizes the propaganda of the Palmaffia’s that Shavit is reinforcing with his accusationin chapter 5:
“In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.”
In line with the islamic-Palmaffiose propaganda, Shavit not only falsely claims a “massacre” was carried out at Lydda by “Zionism”, but he also claims that this was done because “Zionism” was (is) inherently evil. He introduces the notion “black box” and this black box is not the flight recorder that you find in airplanes, but the black box in the “behavioral” psychology of B. F. Skinner (1904 -1990). Skinner’s theory says: you cannot look inside one’s head, but you can look at what a person is doing when under pressure. I quote Shavit:
“Zionism obliterates the city of Lydda. Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be. In retrospect it’s all too clear. When Herbert Bentwich saw Lydda from the white tower of Ramleh in April 1897, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine, an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to the Jewish state and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Herbert Bentwich did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For half a century it succeeded in hiding from itself the substantial contradiction between the Jewish national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive forest and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, contradiction struck and tragedy revealed its face. Lydda was no more.” [my blue bold]
But this “black box” is constructed by Shavit himself! I mean: the construction is coming out of his own head, out of his own “black-box-under-pressure”! And his textual “black box” is built from the lies in this and the previous chapters! What lies?
The lie that the Zionists chose not to notice the fact that Palestine was already occupied by a people that of course would one day rise in a justified revolt against the continuing influx of Jews. In the previous four chapters, however, Shavit stil painted Zionism as superficially beneficial to Palestine – (superficially like in: more prosperity, better health-care, longer life-expectancy, less child-mortality, less malaria-mosquito swamps, more humane mentality) – but with a dark foundation of wrongdoing by the Zionists: they drove the “Palestinians” from their idyllic and buccolic villages, often by force. Of course this is a bunch of evil lies: the Zionists bought the land for good money, offered the serfs of the feudal islamic and absenteist landlords a better life and did not drive away anyone untill in the 1920’s the Mufti of Jerusalem and Al-Kassam started the violence in the name of islam. And now, in this chapter five, Shavit is “proving” what he has been deviously and mendaciously suggesting in the beforegoing chapters: that there is a very, very dark site to Zionism, because, you see, in Lydda Zionism “carries out a massacre”. But the massacre, which was not a massacre but the result of “normal” acts of war, would never have happened if the Mufti and his associates had not preached and practiced the terror against the Jews and had not five Arab armies attacked the newly born state of Israel.
And of course in this very chapter 5 Shavit is still contructing his mendacious “black box” of slandering lies. And he does so while he knows very well he is lying! Listen to Shavit:
“Lydda suspected nothing. Lydda did not imagine what was about to happen. For forty-four years, it watched Zionism enter the valley: first the Atid factory, then the Kiryat Sefer school, then the olive forest, the artisan colony, the tiny workers’ village, the experimental farm, and the strange youth village headed by the eccentric German doctor who was so friendly to the people of Lydda and gave medical treatment to those in need.
The city of Lydda had two mosques and a large cathedral called St. George. But though by Christian tradition, Lydda was the city of Saint George, the people of Lydda did not see that Zionism would turn into a modern-day dragon. They did not see that while Dr. Lehmann preached peace, others taught war. While Dr. Lehmann took his students to the neighboring Palestinian villages, Shmaryahu Gutman took them to Masada. While the youth village taught humanism and brotherhood, the pine forest behind it hosted military courses training Ben Shemen’s youth to throw grenades, assemble submachine guns, and fire antitank PIAT shells. The people of Lydda did not see that the Zionism that came into the valley to give hope to a nation of orphans has become a movement of cruel resolve, determined to take the land by force.
In the forty-four years that Lydda watched Zionism approach, Lydda prospered. From 1922 to 1947, the population more than doubled, from eight thousand to nineteen thousand. The leap forward was not only quantitative but qualitative. Modernization was everywhere. After the devastation caused by the 1927 earthquake, many of the old clay dwellings were replaced by new solid stone houses. By the Great Mosque and the cathedral, a commercial center and a new mosque were built. On the west side of town a new modern quarter of ruler-straight streets appeared. Lydda was a central junction of Palestine’s railway system, and the train company’s executives resided in the new English-style garden suburb, which was the city’s pride. There was electricity on some streets, running water in some houses. Two state schools and one Anglican school educated the boys and girls of Lydda separately. Two clinics, five doctors, and two pharmacies guaranteed decent medical service. The mortality rate was down to twelve out of a thousand, while the fertility rate was drastically up. A genuine social revolution had taken place in Lydda in the first half of the twentieth century.”
The above insane contradictions are not, of course, elaborated by Shavit. He just throws them on the page. So I will work them out: except for where the benign effects of the Jewish settlement in Palestine are spoken of, the above lines contain just lies. They are lies because one fundamental truth is not told, is withheld from the reader: islam, like always in it’s 1400 years of existence, and this time in the person of the Mufti of Jerusalem, started and persevered the terror and the attacks. These are lies because in every possible way Shavit keeps suggesting there is something very evil in Zionism while that is simply not true. It’s a lie, something that Shavit needs psychologically to be true. But.It. Is.Not. True. Always islam and the Arabs begin and perpetuate the violence and the terror, the Jews always only answer, and yes: maybe sometimes anticipate wisely on what they know is coming. It is now in 2015 as it was from the 1920’s on: if the Palestinian Arabs stop the terror there will be peace, prosperity and humaneness, i. e. the things that the Jews meant to bring from the beginning to Palestine.
In the foregoing I said that Shavit is lying, knowing very well he is lying! But I guess he himself thinks he is describing a very complex reality in which a lot of contradictory things are true at the same time. I call this his Stockholmsyndromatic schizophrenia, because his malignant slander of Zionism is simply not true and his acknowledgments of Zionism’s bright side surely are conform reality.
“In December, a seven-car convoy en route to Ben Shemen is viciously attacked. Thirteen of its Jewish passengers are brutally murdered. In February 1948, some four hundred students of the youth village are evacuated from the Lydda Valley in a sad convoy of buses, escorted by British armored vehicles.”
“But in 1947 the question of Palestine reaches its moment of truth. In February, His Majesty’s government has had enough of the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews and decides to leave the Holy Land and let the United Nations determine its fate. In June, an eleven-member UN inquiry commission arrives in Palestine and while touring the country visits Ben Shemen and the Lydda Valley. In August the committee comes to the conclusion that there is no chance that Jews and Arabs can coexist in Palestine, and therefore suggests dividing the land into two nation-states. ( . . .) As the Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine reject Resolution 181, violence flares throughout the country. It is clear that Arab nationalism is about to eradicate Zionism and destroy the Jewish community in Palestine by the use of brutal force. It is clear that the Jews must defend themselves, as no one else will come to their rescue. From December 1947 to May 1948, a cruel civil war between Arabs and Jews rages. After the British leave, the State of Israel is founded on May 14, 1948. The next day, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon invade and a full-scale war erupts.” [my blue bold]
What could one possibly add to that? So on the ground of what history books and Shavit himself are telling it’s impossible that ‘”Lydda suspected nothing” and that “Lydda did not imagine what was about to happen”. To say such a thing is insane.
Of course the pan-Arab and Islamic agitation since 1920 must have also done its job in Lydda. From 1943 untill 1945 the voice of the Mufti on Radio Zeesen from Nazi-Berlinmust have resounded in the “café’s” of Lydda, because the voice of the Mufti resounded everywhere in the Middle East:
“Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.”
Of the Jews in Palestine hardly anyone was eager for war, but a lot of Arab Muslims were. In any case they were bent on war in an infinitely larger portion. This ratio, if we take the nature of Islam and it’s 1400 years of history in account, could have been 0.1% to 50%. Yes, I’m just guessing, but it’s a very calculated guess, namely based on the history of islam. However: the Jews were increasingly prepared for the war they did not want . . . . . and had every reason to be: because terror and violence are always and everywhere started and sustained by islam and the Arabs.
Between 1920 and 1947, the number of Jews that was “determined to take the land by force” may have been growing, but the suggestion that “Zionism” since it’s beginnings was pregnant with what occurred in Lydda is stupid. On top of that: excesses committed by Jews were to begin with forced upon them because the war was forced upon them and secondly for the Jews excesses were a derailment, an abomination, a sin against their creed of reasonable humaneness, while with the Arabs excesses were and are the right track, a daily practice prescribed by islam, an ideology close to nazisme in every essential tenet.
Martin Kramer has made a devastating analysis of Shavit’s story on Lydda.
We must now proceed to discuss the events in Lydda between July 11 and July 13 in 1948. Shavit defines those events as a Zionist war crime in order to prove what he has been suggesting in this chapter five and in his previous four chapters, namely that an inherent evil is lurking in “the Black Box” of Zionism. But as far as this evil is concerned Shavit remains bogged down in slanderous suggestions while he describes in flowery terms the real blessings brought to Palestine by Zionism. Shavit claims that the Zionists did not “see” the Palestinian Arabs in their pastoral-idyllic environment, but tells you at the same time that the country was scarcely inhabited and immersed in poverty and disease. Shavit claims that the Zionists “expelled” the Palestinian serfs but proves no such thing and tells at the same time how the Zionists bought the land for good money and how the serfs were better off than ever. Shavit claims that there was a will to violent conquest in Zionism, but proves nowhere such thing and describes how the Zionists always used only violence in response to the “Palestinian” terror. In short, also from Shavit’s description only one conclusion is possible: not the Jews, not Zionism, not Israel was the source of the violence, but the Arabs and the Islam. Why then Shavit’s confused claptrap? The only answer I can think of is the one I gave before: it’s his Stockholm-syndromatic schizophrenia which makes him want to whitewash the enemy and accuse Zionisme and himself.
But also the ultimate evidence of the innate malice of Zionism, the “massacre” that supposedly had taken place at Lydda is provably a false accusation. Martin Kramer has made a devastating analysis of Shavit’s story on Lydda. Kramer is much too modest when he says:
“( . . .) I can’t construct an absolutely certain narrative of the events in Lydda on July 12, 1948. There are too many gaps and contradictions in the record. But with a little digging, I’ve had no trouble casting doubt on Shavit’s stick-figure dramatization ( . . .).”
“But what I uncovered in just a few days of archival research was more than enough to reinforce my initial doubts about Shavit’s account, and should be enough to plant at least a seed of doubt in the mind of every reader of My Promised Land.”
Let me repeat Ari Shavit’s accusation:
“In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.”
This was on july 12, 1948, in the middle of Israel’s War of Independence in a Lydda that was full of Arab guerilla’s and snipers
Shavit, in an attempt afterwards to minimize the damage and to downplay his treason and his playing into the hands of the Palmaffia-propaganda, has said:
“I really take issue with people who pick out Lydda and ignore the rest of the book.”
To which remarque Kramer replies that this complaint could best be directed at the New Yorker, the journal that, with Shavit’s consent, chose precisely the chapter on Lydda for a pre-publication. Kramer describes Shavit’s further attempts to damage-control:
“In interviews and appearances over the past months, he has gone farther, insisting that Israel’s deeds in Lydda must be seen in the context of a brutal war in a brutal decade; that the Arabs would have done worse to the Jews; and that Western democracies did do worse to their own “Others,” from Native Americans to Aboriginal Australians, so who are they to preach moral rectitude to Israel? This sort of damage control, whatever its short-term effect, is unlikely to negate the one probable long-term impact of Shavit’s book: its validation of the charge of a massacre at Lydda, carried out by Zionism itself and thereby epitomizing the ongoing historical scandal that is the state of Israel.”
The main question remains, says Kramer, whether, as Shavit claims, Zionism perpetrated a deliberate massacre in Lydda, an assertion swallowed without any criticism by almost all major reviewers. Kramer’s distrust, he reports, was fueled by several factors. First, Shavit’s report on the batlle of Lydda fitted too nicely into its broader claim that “Zionism” was programmed to get rid of the Arabs in Palestine and that the Zionist soldiers became killers of innocents. Second, It’s a familiar story that Israeli soldiers are accused of war crimes, while they only do what all soldiers do in a war: shoot back when someone shoots at you.
Shavit claims his story is based on interviews from the early 1990s. During that time, some twenty years before the publication of his book, Shavit spoke with, Shmarya Gutman, the military governor of Lydda, who after the battle arranged the departure of the Arab residents, and Mula Cohen, the commander of the Yiftah brigade who crushed the rebellion in Lydda and with someone who Shavit identifies with his nickname “Bulldozer”, the man who, using a PIAT (Projector Infantry Anti tank) penetrated with a grenade the door of the “little mosque” (Damash Mosque) in Lydda and killed with one stroke between 30 or 70 or hundreds of people, this number depending on who is telling the tale.
PIAT (Projector Infantry Anti Tank)
Of course I do not know, says Kramer, how honestly Shavit uses these interviews from the 1990s on which he bases his story. But Kramer discovered that all those interviewed by Shavit and who fought in Lydda – Shmarya Gutman, Mula Cohen, “Bulldozer” and others – were interviewed at a later time by other researchers and that those interviews were done on the spot in Lydda, and . . . . . . on film. The contradictions that I found, says Kramer, between the story of Shavit and those interviews formed a pattern.
The battle in Lydda took place from 11 to 13 July 1948. At that time the regular Arab armies were already participating in the war during two months. Lydda is situated on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where the Transjordan Arab Legion was very active. Israeli troops, regular and irregular, participated in what was called “the war of the roads” also called operation “larlar” – (an acronym for the cities of Lydda, Ramleh, Latrun , Ramallah) – an operation that was intended to open a corridor to the starving and besieged Jerusalem.
At that time the Arab town of Lydda had about 40,000 inhabitants, half of that number refugees from Jaffa and its environment. There were about 125 soldiers of the Transjordan Arab Legion in the city but they were supported by a much larger number of Arab “irregulars” who had been preparing for battle for months.
On July 11 Moshe Dayan performed a brief raid with a small force on the edges of both Ramleh and Lydda. That same evening the Yiftah brigade consisting of 300 men entered Lydda, took the Grand Mosque and the Cathedral of Saint George. A large number of Arab men were imprisoned in the Grand Mosque. The main part of the city, however, still remained under Arab control. In particular the police station, which was really a kind of fortress, remained an Arab stronghold.
The next afternoon, July 12, around noon, suddenly two or three Trans Jordanian armored vehicles appeared firing on the outskirts of the city. The Arabs of Lydda, who imagined the Transjordan Arab Legion was coming to their rescue, erupted in violence: snipers got active and grenades were thrown from rooftops. That happened from the so-called “Little Mosque”, the Dahmash Mosque (not the big one with the imprisoned Arabs). The Israelis feared a coordinated attack by Arab soldiers of the Transjordan Arab Legion and the “irregulars” in the city. Israeli commanders ordered the Israeli units to give “heavy fire” (“withering fire”). The Great Mosque with the imprisoned Arabs remained intact, but the Israelis pierced the Little Mosque (Dahmash Mosque) with an anti-tank missile fired from the shoulder with a PIAT by a man with the nickname “Bulldozer”.
After half an hour the battle was over. The Arab soldiers and “irregulars” cleared without further combat the police station. On July 13, the next day, the whole civilian population of Lydda was ordered to leave the city. There were reasons for this: before July 11 the Arab leaders of Lydda had surrendered and the people of Lydda had been assured that they could stay in their town, but then, on the appearance of the Jordanian armored vehicles, the leaders of the town decided to start fighting again. So they had broken their word and now the whole population was sent on its way to Jordan. In this manner the Israelis made sure they had no hostile urban population in their rear during the ongoing battle for the road to starving Jerusalem.
The deliberate massacre, according to Shavit fitting in so well in the character he ascribes to Zionism, is supposed to have taken place around 12 o’clock on the 12th July 1948 at the Little Mosque, called Dahmash mosque. That is during the half hour of intense fighting that followed the appearance of the armored Jordanian vehicles.
As a storyteller, says Kramer, Shavit is a bit chaotic and soulful, so Kramer cites the relevant passages in Shavit’s text and then puts his finger on the core of what those passages suggest or argue. Kramer calls that a “take away point”, i.e. the core of what an average reader would “take away” from that passage. Then Kramer assesses what the “perfomers” in the story have said elsewhere in interviews. I will summarize Kramer’s points, but there will be fewer than Kramer lists himself because I’m “integrating” some of Kramer’s points.
1) Shavit creates the impression that the city on July 11 was already safely in the hands of the Israelis and that the Israelis had nothing to fear of the Trans-Jordan Legion. But that is not true. There were soldiers of that legion in the police station which was not an ordinary building but a so-called “Tegart Fort” built by the British and situated up-high in the town of Lydda.
Tegart fort, not in Lydda, but in Latrun
Shavit conceals the fortress-character of that police-station and the presence of those soldiers. From there, the Arabs covered a large part of the city, and they were indeed shelling and shooting from the station that day around noon on July 12th. During that shelling and shooting from the Tegart fort the already mentioned Jordanian armored vehicles also drove up shooting on the edges of the town. At that time in the whole city “irregulars” simultaneously suddenly opened fire and threw hand-grenades.
(The Jordanian soldiers eventually gave up the police fort, probably because of lack of ammunition and the intense fire that the Israelis unleashed on it, but that fact was only noticed by the Israeli commanders on July 13.)
2) Shavit claims that not only in the Great Mosque, but also in the Little Mosque (Dahmash Mosque) prisoners were held. But that is not true: the Little Mosque was outside the area secured by the Israelis, no prisoners were held in the Little Mosque and the Israelis just did not know who or what was present in the Little Mosque. During the half hour of intense shooting however, from a high point of the Little Mosque a hand grenade was thrown to the Israelis. The testimonies on what the consequences of that grenade were, differ: some say a soldier lost a hand, others say two Israelis died.
3) Thereupon a shot was fired with a PIAT on the door of the Little Mosque by someone who calls Shavit “Bulldozer”. (His real name was Shmuel Ben-David.) Shavit describes him as someone who was “traumatized” and took “delight in killing“. Shavit gives the impression that the door of the Small Mosque was penetrated by “Bulldozer” with that PIAT in a mood of vengeful bloodlust without any commander having issued an order to do so.
But commander Gutman has told in an interview, recorded on film, that after two Israelis were killed by a hand-grenade thrown from the Little Mosque, he declared the mosque a legitimate military target. Shavit also gives the impression that “Bulldozer” was not at all sure that the hand-grenade was thrown from the Little Mosque. That he was provoked by the sight of a fellow soldier whose hand was torn off by the grenade and fired the PIAT through the door of the mosque on his own initiative. That “Bulldozer” deliberately wanted to murder the people who were in the small mosque:
“He does not aim at the minaret from which the grenades were apparently thrown but at the mosque wall behind which he can hear human voices. He shoots his PIAT at the mosque wall from a distance of six meters, killing seventy.”
But in the above mentioned filmed interview, commanding officer Gutman has, standing with “Bulldozer” on the spot itself, stated that he indeed gave the order to pierce the door with the PIAT. Also “Bulldozer” himself declared that he had received express orders to go to the Little Mosque with the PIAT. The commanders on the spot assumed rightfully that the grenade was probably thrown from inside the mosque, because no one would have been crazy enough as to do that from the minaret.
The number of seventy victims is a wild guess, says Kramer. It probably comes from an old Arab villager who was interviewed by Shavit for an article in 2002. The man reported that this number “was mentioned”. In Jewish accounts a number of 30 victims is mentioned and in Arabic tales sometimes hundreds. Why Shavit choose the number 70, says Kramer, is unclear.
4) When “Bulldozer” fires the PIAT from his shoulder in the small space of the narrow alley he is seriously injured by the recoil of the weapon. Shavit writes:
“And when the PIAT operator is himself wounded, the desire for revenge grows even stronger. Some 3rd Regiment soldiers spray the wounded in the mosque with gunfire.“
Shavit says “Bulldozer” told him that his comrades, visiting him in hospital, said the following:
“They told him that because of the rage they felt at seeing him bleed, they had walked into the small mosque and sprayed the surviving wounded with automatic fire.”
Kramer has found three testimonies that contradict what the comrades in the recollection of Bulldozer would have said when standing at his sickbed. But these testimonies show nothing of bloodlust. On the contrary. These witnesses who actually went into the mosque were shocked by what they found. The witnesses were surprised at the degree of destruction the PIAT had caused and wondered whether there might have been a pile of grenades in the mosque that was hit. It further shows that it was standard procedure to enter such a building while firing and throwing grenades because you do not know whether there are surviving enemies with weapons waiting for you to kil you. Weapons were indeed found in th mosque.
5) Right after the catastrophe in the Little Mosque has unfolded, this is what happened according to Shavit:
“Others toss grenades into neighboring houses. Still others mount machine guns in the streets and shoot at anything that moves. . . . After half an hour of revenge, there are scores of corpses in the streets, 70 corpses in the mosque. . . . In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed.”
In the prepublication In the New Yorker it was even worse: “In 30 minutes, 250 Palestinians were killed”.
Kramer is in his criticism very factual and hardly pays attention to the biased demonizing tone of Shavit descriptions of how the battle progressed. A reader that gets carried away by Shavit’s prose, could get easily the impression that the Jews were the only ones that were shooting.
Shavit bases that number of 200 Arab civilians killed on Benny Morris, for whom this unconfirmed figure is reason to assert that it was a massacre. Morris argues: if you look at the very few Israelis who were slain, one can hardly speak of a “battle” or “fight”. But Shavit conceals the fact that there is not only Morrris who wrote about Lydda and that there is a controversy among historians about this number and about the claim that all these casualties were civilian. Shavit pretends the issue is clear and misleads his international readership. Shavit also suggests that the Israelis – “Zionism” – erupted in an uncontrolled orgy of violence. That is not so: the Israelis acted disciplined and under orders while they were under sniper fire from all sides.
6) Shavit writes
“But then news comes of what has happened in the small mosque. The military governor orders his men to bury the dead, get rid of the incriminating evidence.”
“At night, when they were ordered to clean the small mosque and carry out the seventy corpses and bury them, they took eight other Arabs to do the digging of the burial site and afterward shot them, too, and buried the eight with the seventy.”
Shavit is trying to give the impression that “Zionism” was as bad as Holocaust-Nazism and that the Jews wanted to cover up their Nazi-like crime as soon as possible. But the speed with which the dead were buried, probably had to do with the “heavy heat” of which Shavit also speaks. Furthermore, there is an interview from 2003 with one of those supposedly murdered Grave-diggers, Fayeq Abu Mana (“Abu Wadi”), who was twenty years old in 1948. He tells to have done the burying with his brother and cousin in a squad of ten men. The statement of his wife that all the gravediggers were taken prisoner after they had done their job was still on line a few months ago, but has now disappeared.
I find it curious that Kramer makes so little fuss about this last vital point: the fact that the murdering of the gravediggers is a fable and that its debunking rests on solid evidence. I, for one, was especially shocked by this detail, which would indeed have reflected a Nazi-like mentality, though even in that case it would have been an incidental crime perpetrated by a limited group of Jewish offenders.
I summarize:
Contrary to Shavit’s assertions:
– there weren no prisoners in the Little Mosque (Damash Mosque) who subsequently consciously could have been killed by the Israeli’s, who did’nt even know what or who was present in the mosque.
– the Israeli’s were at noon of July 12 under fire of snipers, especially from the fortress-like police-station, situated up-high in the town.
– the Israeli’s did not know whether and with how many soldiers the Jordan Legion would enter the battle
-the handgrenade that possbly killed two Irsaeli soldiers and certainly ripped of a hand of one soldier was thrown from inside the mosque itself and not from the minaret, so the decision to blow out the door of the mosque with a PIAT was not a deed of blind revenge but made by commanders who could not know what or who was inside the mosque
– it is by no means certain that the comrades of “Bulldozer”, seeing that he was severely wounded by the recoil of the PIAT, dashed into the mosque and massacred in revenge those present, because it was standard procedure to enter a building while shooting if the possibilty existed that armed and surviving ennemies were waiting inside.
– there are participating Israeli soldiers who witness they were shocked by what they found in the Little Mosque
– there is no evidence there were 70 killed in the mosque: Israeli estimates speak of 30 and Arab estimates of hundreds
– there is no evidence that 200 Arab civilians were killed in that half hour on July 12 1948 around noon and so the conclusion of Benny Morris – on the basis of a comparison between the small number of Jews that was killed and those 200 – that there was no battle but a massacre, is unwarranted
– the maybe 70 or 30 corpses from the Little Mosque were not quickly burried at night because “Zionism” wanted to conceal its crime, but because of the heat
– one of the eight Arabs that burried the corpses from the Little Mosque who supposedly were killed by the Jew as a cover up of their crime was interviewed many yaers later and did not remember anything about this killing, while his wife testified that there were not eight but ten gravediggers who all stayed alive
In short, Shavit gives the impression that “Zionism” in Lydda exploded into an uncontrolled orgy of violence. That is not true. The Israelis acted disciplined and under orders, while they took sniper-fire from all sides. And the story of the cover-up of the “crime” of the Dahmash Mosque and the murdering of the Arab gravediggers afterwards is a myth.
As I said before: in my opinion Kramer is too modest about the results of his analysis of Shavit’s story and claims only to have sown serious doubts about Shavit’s version. But I think Kramer’s criticism is pretty devastating. It is devastating because it highlights the eagerness with which Shavit embraces the most incriminating versions of everything that happened in Lydda. Incriminating, that is, for Zionism and Israel and the Jews.
Kramer, summarizing his judgment:
“( . . .) not only are some of Shavit’s assertions impossible to verify, but by relying on the same eyewitnesses interviewed by Shavit (and on a few he should have interviewed), one can quite easily construct an entirely different story from his. That is the story not of a vengeful ‘massacre’ committed by ‘Zionism,’ but of collateral damage in a city turned into a battlefield. This is Lydda not as a ‘black box’ but as a gray zone—a familiar one, since many hundreds of Israeli military operations in built-up areas have fallen into it.
It is in this gray zone, not in Shavit’s ‘black box,’ that real complexity resides. But nowhere does Shavit give his readers a clue that anything in his dramatic narrative of Lydda is contested. To the contrary, at the end of his source notes is this assurance:
I read hundreds of books and thousands of documents. . . . To make sure all details are correct, oral histories were checked and double-checked against Israel’s written history. The exciting process of interviewing significant individuals was interwoven with a meticulous process of data-gathering and fact-checking.”
“A meticulous process of data-gathering and fact-checking”?
But Kramer points at the fact that Shavit in these same “sources notes” contradicts himself. For Shavit also says this:
“It is not an academic work of history. Rather, it is a personal journey through contemporary and historic Israel.”
What will it be? A personal journey or a meticulous-data-gathered-fact-checked-academic work?
This is foolishness, says Kramer, because nobody can book a personal trip to a day in 1948s. Simon Schama, one of the “grandees” of English historiography, also gets a slap from Kramer. Schama, Kramer says, believes Shavit’s book is at the same time “without the slightest trace of fiction” and also an act of “imaginative re-enactment”. (Yes, I myself know Schama as a passionate history-re-liver.).
What I have called the Stockholm-syndromatic shizophrenia in Shavit’s book has also drawn the attention of Kramer. Shavit’s contradictions regarding the character of Zionism are unsolvable, says Kramer. And quotes two of them:
“The small-mosque massacre could have been a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events.”
“Gutman feels he has achieved his goal. Occupation, massacre, and mental pressure have had the desired effect.”
What is it going to be? Zionism as an evil massmurder-and-ethnic-cleansing-planning ideology, or not? That is the fundamental question. Because we are talking about the founding ideology of Israel. So if Shavit wants to characterize Zionism as inherently evil, which he does, he cannot demand that this ideology is acknowledged as reflecting the founding spirit of Israel.
Shavit:
“Let’s remember Lydda, let’s acknowledge Lydda. Yet let no one use Lydda in order to doubt Israel’s legitimacy.”
But that, Kramer says, is of course exactly what the propaganda of Israel’s ennemies is going to do. And Shavit should have been aware of that.
Efraim Karsh
Efraim Karsh has also contributed to the Shavit-Lydda-discussion. Karsh, who has fundamentally eviscerated the lie of the “occupation” by Israel of Samaria-Judea (“the West Bank”), is also the author of “Palestine Betrayed” (2010), a study in which, on the basis of newly released British archives, detailed evidence is produced that no ethnic cleansing took place during the War of Independence of Israel in 1948. The exceptional evictions of Arabs carried out by the Jews were dictated by the conditions of war, a war that was started and sustained by the Arabs.
Backed by this specialized knowledge, Karsh intervened in the Shavit-Lydda-debate with an article of July 6th, 2014 entitled “The Uses of Lydda“. Karsh points out that from 1948 to date there have always been slanderous accusations of massacres and ethnic cleansing directed at Israel and Israelis. These accusations have even adopted retro-active form: the “new historians” of the generation Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé have claimed – very often provably via deliberate falsification of history! – that these massacres and ethnic cleansing were an integral part of Zionism. With “My Promised Land” Shavit has joined this camp of slandering “post-Zionism”. Later Shavit has tried to dissociate himself from these lying traitors, professing it was no at all meant like that. But the damage was done and the islamic-Arabic-Palmafiose propaganda in collaboration with the Western mainstream-press will make good use of Shavit’s slander to boost Jew-and-Israel-hate wordlwide
Karsh in his “The Uses of Lydda” gives praise to Kramer’s “What happened at Lydda”. The expulsion of the population of Lydda in 1948, says Karsh, was the exception that proved the rule: “Zionism” had no plans for mass murder and ethnic cleansing. To Shavit, who claims that the expulsion of the population of Lydda was “an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution” Karsh replies:
“If, however, there was anything inevitable about the expulsion of Lydda, the cause lay not in Zionism but in the actions of Palestinian Arab leaders and their counterparts in neighboring Arab states. Had these notables accepted the UN partition resolution calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place. As for Lydda itself, no exodus was foreseen in Israeli military plans for the city’s capture or was reflected in the initial phase of its occupation. Quite the contrary: the Israeli commander assured local dignitaries that the city’s inhabitants would be allowed to stay if they so wished. In line with that promise, the occupying Israeli force also requested a competent administrator and other personnel to run the affairs of the civilian population.
All this was rendered irrelevant when the city’s notables and residents, rather than abiding by their surrender agreement with the IDF, attempted to dislodge the Israelis by force. The IDF, its tenuous grip on Lydda starkly exposed, thereupon decided to “encourage” the population’s departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east, so as not to leave behind a potential hotbed of armed resistance. In an area where Jordan’s Arab Legion was counterattacking in strength, it was essential to prevent any disruption of ongoing war operations.
As it happens, this spontaneous response by the IDF to a string of unexpected developments on the ground was uncharacteristic of general Israeli conduct. Then and throughout the war, inhabitants of other Arab localities who had peacefully surrendered to Israeli forces were allowed to remain in place. In this respect, Lydda was an one of the very few exceptions that proved the rule, not—as Shavit argues—the rule itself.”
Moreover, those “very few exceptions” accounted for but a small portion of the total exodus. Many more Palestinians were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces than by the Israeli army. In fact, there are no contemporary sources describing the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society, like Shavit does as “an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution”. Here is, from June 1949, the report of a high British official who returned from of a fact-finding mission under the Arab war refugees in Gaza. I quote from Karsh:
“While [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves), they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.” [my blue bold]
There is also a discussion between Martin Kramer and Benny Morris. First Morris criticizes Kramer in ‘Zionism’s ‘Black Boxes‘. Kramer answers with ‘Distortion and Defamation‘. And finally they have a last altercation under the title ‘The Meaning of ‘Massacre’‘.
In this discussion, viewpoints are repeated in slightly different terms. But there is one important new point. What might be called essential is this: Kramer makes clear to Morris that there might have been cases of mass murder have been by Israelis in this war, but that Morris should refrain from stretching these terms to include tragedies like in Lydda. Kramer is right: a massacre is the murder of defenseless people, but in Lydda, there was guerilla-warfare going on.
Kramer:
“[The claims of the ‘New Historians’] have grown ever more extravagant: first, the creeping reclassification of complex battles as “massacres,” then the spread of the notion that Israel’s leaders “covered up for the officers who did the massacres,” and finally the florid elaboration of freshly discovered “massacres” in popular works ranging from “imaginative reenactments” to theatrical plays. For the last 30 years, new myths (in the guise of “new history”) have replaced old ones (the much-derided “old history”). This process has now peaked in a single decadent sentence, written by Ari Shavit and indebted to Benny Morris: “Zionism commits a massacre in the city of Lydda.”
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Martin Kramer, “What happened at Lydda”, (July 1, 2014)
Efraim Karsh, “The Uses of Lydda”, (July 6, 2014)
Benny Morris, “Zionism’s ‘Black Boxes’ “, (July 13, 2014)
Martin Kramer, “Distortion and Defamation”, (July 20, 2014)
Martin Kramer, “The Meaning of ‘Massacre’ ”, (July 28, 2014)
ALSO INTERESTING:
Alex Safian, “Ari Shavit’s Lydda Massacre”
Naomi Friedman, “What primary Sources tell us about Lydda 1948”
Sol Stern, “The Triumph and Tragedy of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land”
Martien Pennings 