Wars are both good and bad times for history lessons. Good because history tends to lead to wars (p<0.05 in all specifications), and in the midst of violence and chaos it occurs to people to look back and see what happened before all this. Bad because all the violence and chaos make it hard to draw your focus away from the present day, hour, or second.
My motivation for this history lesson is that, in the course of Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s long campaign of retribution on Palestinian civilians, many people’s thoughts have turned to how we can prevent this from happening again, or what the correct response is that either Israel or the U.S. should take. All these ideas about the future are rooted in ideas about what happened in the past. If you think that Sharon left Gaza in 2005 and the Palestinians immediately elected Hamas to be their forever-leaders, or if you think that Hamas won close parliamentary elections leading Muhammad Dahlan to attempt a US-backed coup that ended the experiment in Palestinian democracy and put Hamas in sole control of Gaza, that belief about the past affects how you think certain actions will play out in the present.
I do not think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is morally complex, but it is admittedly historically complex. Even those people that share a goal—that everyone between the river and the sea lives in peace, dignity, and under a government that represents them—can take very different lessons from history. This historical complexity also can lead to a certain type of argumentation, an appeal to earlier and earlier events, moving the conversation back in time. This can be done in bad faith, as in “this earlier atrocity justifies the atrocity happens now.” But it also can be real context that explains why a proposed framing, policy, or initiative will not work or will not solve the root problem.
Why 1948?
By looking at 1948, we zoom in on two mass displacements that brought us here. Yes, things happened before 1948, but the events of 1948 can be argued to form a critical juncture that put us on the path we are on now.[1] The founding of the state of Israel on the land it was founded on, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, putting the rest under military rule, and fighting a war with the Arab nations to defend the gains of the Yishuv,[2] set the stage for everything that happened after, and forestalled any alternative ways of being between the river and the sea. The expulsions, pogroms, confiscations, and surveillance targeting Jews in the Arab world did not all start in 1948, and were not complete by the end of 1948. The defeat of the Arab armies by a newly formed Jewish state, however, seems to have been the catalyst for the already authoritarian governments of the Middle East and North Africa to direct anger against a much more convenient foe: their own native Jewish populations. Again, the decision by these governments to react this way to their defeat forestalled any preservation of the centuries of Jewish life, culture, and heritage in these countries.
1948 is also far enough in the past that it is outside of most living memory. It is far enough away, to put it frankly, to lie about it. Each of the twin displacements I want to talk about is subject to elision, whataboutism, straight up denial, victim-blaming, and conspiracism from those who find them to be politically inconvenient. While I have a side that I often find myself on in arguments about Israel and Palestine, I often find that side to be indefensibly coy about talking about the expulsions of Jews from the Arab and Muslim world. When addressed at all, there is an exaggeration of the role Israel itself played in these expulsions, and no real grappling with the way the collective trauma of the Mizrahim affects Israeli politics today. You hear all the time among anti-Zionists the slogan “go back to Europe,” which ignores not only the conditions under which many Jews left Europe but also the many who came from much closer to home.
From the other side, willful ignorance and denial of the ethnic cleansing of Israel informs every aspect of pro-Zionist thought, action, and apologia. The denial of the Nakba (catastrophe) and its centrality to the conflict is so complete that the conflict being “about” 1948 instead of, say, 1967 is treated as some secret that Palestinians are keeping, one that points to the essentially antisemitic nature of their quest for statehood and entire national identity. Even among the “1967” issues of the settlements and the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli left’s refusal to come to terms with its own history doomed it (in my view) to failure and dissolution.
I’m going to proceed in two parts. The first will talk about the Nakba, the ways that people have lied about it, and how I think these misrepresentations have affected the way we see the whole conflict. The second will talk about the expulsions of Arab Jews from the Arab world, the ways this has affected politics both in Israel and in the expelling countries, and how it has left the Middle East a worse place. Hopefully by the end of that second part I’ll have some pithy wisdom to impart about what to make of all this.
The Nakba
In this section, I’m going to rely quite heavily on The War for Palestine (henceforth, TWfP), an edited volume that gathers a lot of the most prominent historians of this subject. It’s an excellent read on this subject, and has chapters detailing the war from the perspective of multiple Arab countries as well as going into the situation in mandatory[3] Palestine. I will link to other sources I use, and while I will not host pdfs on my site because I don’t know if that’s fair use, I am happy to provide any of these pdfs if you cannot access them yourself.
What was the Nakba?
Rashid Khalidi lays out the stark facts in his opening chapter of TWfP:
At the beginning of [1948], Arabs constituted over two thirds of the population of the country, and were a majority in fifteen of the country’s sixteen sub-districts. Beyond this, Arabs owned nearly 90 percent of Palestine’s privately owned land. In a few months of heavy fighting in the spring of 1948, the military forces of a well-organized Jewish population of just 600,000 people routed those of an Arab majority more than twice its size. In the months that followed, they decisively defeated several Arab armies, which had entered the country on 15 May 1948. Over this turbulent period, more than half of the nearly 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs were driven from or fled their homes. Those Palestinians who did not flee the conquered areas were reduced to a small minority in the new State of Israel (which now controlled about 77 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine). At the end of the fighting, Jordan took over the areas of Palestine controlled by its army west of the Jordan river, while the Egyptian army administered the strip it retained around Gaza, adjacent to its borders. In the wake of this catastrophe – al-Nakba, as it was inscribed in Palestinian memory – the Palestinians found themselves living under a variety of alien regimes, were dispossessed of the vast bulk of their property, and had lost control of most aspects of their lives (12).
What comes through in this description is a layered dispossession—Palestinians lost their literal houses and land with (obviously) no compensation, but they also lost any chance of self-rule everywhere they ended up – in Israel, under Egyptian administration, as part of the new Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and in Syria and Lebanon. Families who ended up on separate sides of an international border could no longer reach each other, so these connections were also taken from Palestinians.[4]
Khalidi estimates that, of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from what became Israel, half had already been pushed out by Israeli forces before the Arab armies invaded on May 15. This included most of the residents of Jaffa and Haifa (pp. 13-14). In carrying out the expulsions, Israeli forces used a range of violent measures. Some Palestinians, especially the wealthier professionals, fled to nearby Arab capitals in the early civil conflict in 1947 and 1948, and were simply not allowed to return (Morris p. 100). In some cases the Yishuv forces perpetrated massacres, as in Deir Yaseen, and broadcast them by radio and spread rumors of coming atrocities to provoke panic among Palestinians (Finkelstein 71-72). In Haifa, attacks on Palestinian crowds by Irgun Zvai Leumi members were followed up with:
Jeeps…brought in broadcasting recorded ‘horror sounds’—including ‘shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of sirens and the clang of fire-alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic: ‘Save your souls, all ye faithful! Flee for your lives!’ according to the eyewitness account of a Haganah officer—and threats to use poison gas and atomic weapons against the Arabs (Finkelstein 72).
In rural villages, there were more straightforward expulsion orders. Morris notes that “in Operation Yoav, Southern Front commander General Yigal Allon made sure that no, or almost no, Arab communities were left behind his line of advance.” In other campaigns, notably Operation Hiram to take the Galilee, expulsion was more haphazard, with some towns evacuated by the IDF and others not. In one parenthetical Morris says, “in most towns and villages the Haganah/IDF had no need to issue expulsion orders as the inhabitants fled before the Jewish troops reached the site; the inhabitants usually fled with the approach of the advancing Jewish column or when the first mortar bombs began to hit their homes” (Morris 101-103).
The episodes here are meant to represent the range of policies rather than give an exhaustive picture. The point is that direct and indirect violence was widespread and this drove people out. Palestinian leadership, which had long been coopted by the British or woefully disorganized (this is one main thrust of Khalidi’s TWfP chapter), was unable to coordinate to counter this campaign and the invading Arab armies were no better.
Why did the Nakba happen?
We can start with what we know is not the reason: Palestinians did not evacuate by order of the Arabs so that the latter would have free latitude to kill the Jews that remained. This myth has circulated among Zionists inside and outside Israel for a long time, but no evidence has been found for it (Shlaim 295). Lots of evidence, on the other hand, exists for various violent actions by Israeli forces pushing Palestinians out, both before and after the Arab countries invaded, as seen above. The historical debate among people who accept this evidence is therefore more about whether the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was a plan put in place before the 1948 war or whether it happened more haphazardly.
It is generally accepted that pre-1948 the Zionist leadership, especially David Ben Gurion, favored “transfer” of the Arab population as an ideal solution to the problem of creating a viable Jewish state. The 1937 Peel Commission report, which the British government first endorsed and later backed off, advocated forcible transfer of Arabs and was welcomed by the leaders of the Yishuv. Ben Gurion wrote of the report in his diary saying, “a central point whose importance outweighs all the other positive [points] and counterbalances all the report’s deficiencies and drawbacks…: The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys proposed for the Jewish state” (quoted in Morris TWfP, 41). The issue was also discussed in Jewish Executive Agency (the self-governing mechanism for the Yishuv) meetings. Morris describes the attitude of the Zionist leadership as “consensus or near-consensus in favor of transfer – voluntary if possible, compulsory if necessary” (Morris TWfP, 44).
Nevertheless, Morris does not see evidence for one unified plan to transfer Palestinians, which puts him at odds with historians like Nur Masalha, Norman Finkelstein, and Ilan Pappé. They all point to “Plan D” (aka Plan Dalet) as evidence that the Haganah had plans to clear villages of Palestinians. Pappé quotes from the plan:
These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centres that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state (Pappé 82).
Pappé says that because any village would be expected to resist seizure by Israeli troops, this was effectively a blanket expulsion order. He also points to earlier intelligence gathering on the exact populations and demographic characteristics of Arab villages as preparation to implement this kind of plan (19).
Morris’ interpretation of Plan D is as a military and not ethnic cleansing plan. I am doing a lot of quoting, but I feel like I need to quote from him to get the full gist of his point, in responding to criticisms by Masalha and Finkelstein:
In certain circumstances, Plan D allowed brigade and battalion commanders to expel villagers and destroy or mine villages hostile or potentially hostile to the Yishuv. But, in general, it instructed commanders to occupy and garrison-not level or depopulate-villages that did not resist and surrendered. But as many villages harbored “foreign” or local irregulars, who sniped at neighboring Jewish settlements or ambushed Jewish traffic, the plan legitimized them as targets for Haganah attack (and destruction). The plan nowhere provided for the expulsion of complete Arab urban communities or the destruction of Arab urban neighborhoods. During the plan’s implementation, in April-May, Haganah commanders were able ex post facto to cite the plan in explaining or justifying this or that attack, expulsion, or destruction of a village. But the expulsion of Palestinian communities was a by-product of the plan’s objectives, which were strategic and military (Morris 107).
Personally, I don’t know if I understand the value of this distinction—the plan specified circumstances for expulsion, which were used to justify expulsion, in a situation where the whole Zionist leadership understood there to be a need for expulsion, but it was not an expulsion plan. The shaky line drawn by Morris between expulsion and normal conduct of war is exemplified by his above story of Palestinians fleeing as mortars hit their homes is presented as evidence against expulsion.
This all happened in a situation in which the Palestinian community was weakened by its resistance to British rule and its leadership was divided and partially exiled. The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 had not succeeded in securing “lasting concessions” from the British, while severely harming the Palestinian economy and leading to the arrest, exile, and disarmament of its political and military leadership (Khalidi TWfP, 25-26). Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the British appointee as Grand Mufti and de-facto representative for Palestinians, had eventually run afoul of his employers when he felt obliged to support the growing popular resistance against British rule and proposals to form a Jewish state in the Mandate of Palestine (Khalidi TWfP, 21-23). His exile, his collaboration with the Nazis (including his triumphant entry into Rashid Ali’s Iraq after a coup there put a pro-German government in power until the British could reinvade and reinstall their client monarchy), and his many feuds with other Palestinian leadership made him a central but ineffective figure in organizing any Palestinian resistance (Khalidi TWfP, 28). The power vacuum and societal exhaustion from the Arab revolt made it difficult for Palestinian society to resist the mass expulsions of 1948.
Nakba Denial
The extent of Israel’s use of violence to expel Palestinians was widely unacknowledged among the Israeli public for the first few decades of Israel’s existence. Official narratives said that during the war, “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighboring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful coexistence was possible” (Shlaim 287-288). Writers like Rony Gabbay challenged this official narrative, but there was little mainstream historical work within Israel on the events of 1948 until the 1980s. One reason for surge in interest was the release of some Israeli documents from 1948 under the 30-year rule (Shlaim 290). Another was that right wing PM Menachem Begin, defending the Israeli army’s conduct in Lebanon, compared himself with Ben Gurion’s conduct in 1948, claiming “the only difference between them was that Ben-Gurion had resorted to subterfuge, whereas he was carrying out his policy openly” (Flapan 5). These claims led to an intense interest in verifying whether Begin’s claim was true.
The work came out as a result shattered, at least in the academic world, many of the Israeli myths regarding 1948, including the Israeli role in the refugee issue, the idea that the Arabs were united in the goal of destroying the Jewish state, that the Yishuv/Israeli forces were outnumbered in the field, that the British were trying to prevent the creation of a Jewish state, and that post-1948 Israel faced total intransigence from Arab states (Shlaim does a good job going through these one by one in abbreviated form). Flapan lays out his book specifically to counter several “myths,” saying:
Friends and colleagues with whom I have worked closely for many years advised me not to present the subject of my research as a challenge to Israel’s long-held and highly potent myths…. But I concluded that such an approach would defeat the very purpose of this book. It would have produced a detailed historical study interesting only to historians and researchers, whereas, in my opinion, what is required is a book that will undermine the propaganda structures that have so long obstructed the growth of the peace forces in my country (3-4).
Flapan and those like him, including many of the TWfP contributors, came to be known as the “new” historians, in comparison to the older tradition of official apologia for Israel/the Yishuv during the 1948 war. These works, despite coming out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, have not penetrated Israeli society. For example, history textbooks used in schools need to use very specific language about the 1948 war, and those that treat the Nakba too seriously have been recalled and revised (Jamal). Refugees in these textbooks are presented as coming from the simple chaos of war, with Jews and Palestinians both affected, and it was simply poor Palestinian leadership that led to so many leaving (Jamal). Commemorations of the Nakba by Palestinian citizens of Israel have been criminalized since 2011 (Adalah).
Other steps have been taken to keep the Nakba from being researched or discussed. The state archives have been slow to release, and once released, slow to digitize documents relating to the Nakba. Palestinian researchers requesting released documents are told they need additional security clearance. Palestinian books and papers seized as “absentee property” are inaccessible to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and many files remain sealed long after they could have any security importance. Files that were declassified in the 1980s have even in some cases been reclassified (Kraft).
One place Nakba denial has been weaker is among the Israeli right. Unlike many in the Israeli left, they tend to see little morally wrong with the mass expulsion of Arabs and have therefore seen less reason to deny it (Shlaim 292). In the modern extreme right, there are calls for, and direct threats to enact, a “second Nakba.” Benny Morris himself is an example of how a (somewhat) realistic view of what happened in 1948 is not precursor to a more sympathetic view of Palestinians now. After the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, he moved far to the right and began advocating for continued expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank in Gaza—basically, that Israel finish the job (Rogan and Shlaim TWfP, xxii).
Ari Shavit demonstrates a more conflicted attempt to come to terms with the Nakba from someone on the left, in his book My Promised Land. In a chapter on Lydda, he details the massacre and expulsion of Lydda’s population, using mainly interviews from the propagators of the massacre (and one victim of the expulsion). The narrative is framed by statements at the beginning and end of the chapter that frame the entire event as inevitable and necessary for Jewish safety. He says at the beginning, “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.” One finding of the new historians was the lack of clarity in both the Arab war aims and the sheer amount of contact and negotiation between Israel and various Arab armies (Shlaim’s chapter in TWfP and his article both detail some of these findings). At the end of the chapter, Shavit returns to this theme:
Lydda is an integral and essential part of our story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda….
I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born. If it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.
Here there is a clear conflation between Zionism and the ability for Shavit and his family to exist and live in safety. I reject that conflation, but it’s essentially an ideological one so I don’t think it can be proven one way or another. The point I want to make is that you need to make that conflation to “accept” 1948 in the way that Shavit does.
The Nakba and the Peace Process
In June 1967 Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan after the latter three countries threatened to attack the country and Egypt closed off the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ship traffic. Israel quickly defeated all three armies and captured territory from each: the West Bank from Jordan (which Jordan had secured in the 1948 war and annexed soon after), the Gaza strip and Sinai peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. About 300,000 refugees streamed out of the West Bank and Gaza into Jordan (Amnesty). In the aftermath of 1967, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 242, which called for a just solution to the refugee problem but, more famously, instituted the “land for peace” framework. If I can summarize this framework, it is that Israel (like other countries) is not allowed to enlarge its borders through military force, but it also had security concerns it needed addressed, so it could return the territories it had conquered in return for recognition and establishment of peaceful relations by the countries it took the land from.
This framework was followed in the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal negotiated in 1978. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and Egypt recognized and entered a peace agreement with Israel. The main hang up in this agreement was the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Egypt administered the latter between 1948 and 1967). Sadat wanted some guarantee of a future Palestinian state in these territories, to answer the many critics who said he was selling the Palestinians out for Egypt’s land back and U.S. financial support. When he could not secure this, he was willing to sign a more limited deal that called for “autonomy” in the territories (Anziska 122-126). It was clear that for Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, this was not any kind of political autonomy, but a more individualized autonomy under Israeli sovereignty. He said to President Jimmy Carter:
“People go around in Judea and Samaria and say to the Arabs that they should accept autonomy since it is only a first step towards a Palestinian state…. We know this from reliable sources. Had we thought that out of autonomy a Palestinian state would arise we would never have suggested it. We will not accept a Palestinian state” (Quoted in Anziska 129).
Seth Anziska blames the U.S. and Egyptian capitulation to the Israeli (especially the Likud) vision of autonomy, as well as the exclusion of any Palestinian voices, for the later failure to produce a Palestinian state. That thesis has been challenged by Dennis Ross, who worked on Arab-Israeli affairs from the Reagan through the Obama administrations. Ross says that Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO and the Fatah party, needed only to accept a modified version of resolution 242 in order to be included in negotiations under the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations. Basically, he suggests that Arafat, in his intransigence, took the opportunity to miss an opportunity.
If we see Arafat’s role as the representative of Palestinian aspirations to be securing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, this is a fair reading of the situation. The U.S. held Israel and the PLO to different standards, of course, as Begin had said he agreed to resolution 242 but “did not accept that this required withdrawal on all fronts” (Quoted in Anziska 67, emphasis in original). But Ross is right that this was at least an opportunity for Arafat to embarrass the Israelis and show their unwillingness to bargain in good faith. But it is not clear that Arafat saw his role as securing this specific Palestinian state, or that the Palestinians who he represented saw his role that way. In fact, when Arafat did attempt to negotiate for a state on the basis of 242, political space opened for Hamas to make a more totalizing demand for Palestinians to regain everything taken from them.
The constituency for the PLO is Palestinians, but the situation of Palestinians varies wildly. In the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, we can talk about Palestinian populations that are not displaced—whose families are from the city or area they currently live. In the West Bank, these are a majority, with “only” a third of the population (900,000) being refugees. In Gaza, two thirds are refugees (1.2 million), and we will not even attempt to give an accounting of what the total internally displaced might be by the end of the current assault (Citino, Gil, and Norman). Within Israel, land expropriations of “absentees” quickly grew to include lands owned by Palestinians who had not been expelled—the “present absentees”—and many of these people became internally displaced (Robinson Ch 2). Counting these families is harder, as records were either not kept or difficult to access, but around 250,000 of Israel’s current 2 million Palestinian citizens could come from these families (Badil). There are another half a million refugees each in Syria and Lebanon, and another 2.4 million in Jordan (including 19,000 who fled Syria after 2011) (Citino, Gil, and Norman). A smaller number have moved out of the region entirely.
All of this is to say there is no way to divide the Palestinian experience from the experience of displacement. Even Palestinian Authority elections, which polled a relatively small portion of Palestinian society, included in that slice huge numbers of people living in a place they are not from, knowing that their families had houses and lands that are no longer accessible to them, that in fact other people have taken up residence in.
Despite this, at various times majorities of Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza have supported a two state solution (Shikaki). This support has been contingent on people believing that it is at all effective to pursue a two-state solution, and that belief is right now understandably low (PCPSR). But this willingness throughout (and after) the Oslo process to compromise and to take a home over their specific home has been, to my mind, completely ignored and undervalued by US policymakers, who tend to emphasize the “intransigence” of the Palestinians.
In the narrative around the various “generous” offers during the peace process (specifically those made by Israeli prime ministers in 2000 and 2005), the generosity of the offers is often described in percentages of land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (e.g. Wright). Leaving aside whether these offers were generous on their own terms (Wright and Ackerman get into this, though), the framing here assumes that the most that Palestinians could possibly ever want is the land of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plus East Jerusalem if they are lucky. For refugees especially, I would submit that this bouquet of land is not their wildest dream but instead a bitter compromise. In this context, I think the reluctance of first Arafat and then Abbas to accede to these offers makes perfect sense. At the very least, I think the characterization of these episodes as showing the Palestinians are simply unwilling to live alongside Israel are willful misreadings of history.
I no longer declare myself to be “for” one or two states. I think that any state or states between the river and the sea should be democratic and representative of all their peoples, without further ethnic cleansing and with the possibility to reverse the ethnic cleansing that has already taken place. But the configuration will have to be the product of negotiation, and I will accept what the Palestinian people accept. The boundaries of that acceptance are informed by the dispossession of 1948. As long as the U.S. has been involved in peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, it has allowed the latter to dictate the terms of the negotiations while playing up the faults of the former. This stance relies on ignorance or suppression of the Nakba and its centrality to the conflict.
In the second part of this two-part series, I will complete the tragedy with a discussion of the targeting and eventual expulsion of the Mizrahim from the Arab world. The purpose of this will not be whataboutism or to sate “the other side” with a rote acknowledgement of their trauma. I think the experience of nationalism has been a sour one in the entire region (the entire world?), and these displacements were some of the first signs of the pitfalls of Arab nationalism. The fate of Arab Jews is also one of many reasons the Arab countries have failed to play a constructive part in advocating for or assisting Palestinians throughout this conflict.
[1] I’m here using the language of path dependence, which is widespread in (qualitative) political science to explain historical points where change is more possible (“critical junctures”) that put a country, institution, or world system on a particular path that is difficult to exit.
[2] The declaration of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, makes talking about this period complicated as generally historians talk about the Yishuv (the Jewish communities in Israel) and the Haganah (their main military arm) pre-May 14 and Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces after. I will try to keep to this standard but I’m not a historian so if I mess up please give me a break.
[3] As in part of the British Mandate for Palestine. Mandates were set up for Britain and France to rule the former Ottoman territories after World War I.
[4] A strange upside to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967 was that Palestinians there could visit family in Israel after nearly two decades apart.
Alex Norris 