To the Editor:

In “The Palestinian Myth” [October 1975] David Gutmann endeavors to refute Dr. Walid El-Khalidi’s statements in “Plan Dalet.” Far from invalidating El-Khalidi’s claims, however, Mr. Gutmann builds upon the old Zionist myth that the Palestinian Arabs are at fault for their condition of homelessness in 1948.

There is no doubt that Mr. Gutmann is correct in asserting that many Arabs in Palestine followed the exodus of “well-to-do” Arabs during the early months of 1948. However, the author neglects to reveal the telling evidence that Palestinian Arabs were both encouraged and forced to leave their homes in cities and villages—presumably because this does not conform to his conception of a spontaneous panic and departure.

Christopher Sykes (in Crossroads to Israel) wrote that in the latter months of 1948, “the exodus . . . was consciously and mercilessly helped on by Jewish threats and aggression toward Arab populations.” Roving vans with loudspeakers blaring in Arabic were effectively utilized by both the Haganah and the Irgun. Arthur Koestler observed that the Arabs of Haifa were promised escort to “Arab territory” and loudspeakers “hinted at terrible consequences if the warnings were disregarded.” Meyer Levin (Jerusalem Embattled) wrote that the message from the loudspeakers in Jerusalem was: “The road to Jericho is open! Fly from Jerusalem before you are all killed.” Nathan Chofski, an early Jewish pioneer in Palestine, stated in William Zukerman’s Jewish Newsletter (February 9, 1959): “. . . we, Jews, forced the Arabs to leave cities and villages . . . some of them were driven out by force of arms; others were made to leave by deceit, lying, and false promises. It is enough to cite the cities of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla, Beersheba. Acre from numberless others.”

According to “The Other Exodus” by Erskine Childers (London Spectator, May 12, 1961), a review of BBC monitoring of all Middle Eastern broadcasts in 1948 failed to produce any evidence that Arab radio stations, within or outside of Palestine, appealed to the Palestinian Arabs to evacuate. The evidence uncovered revealed that the Arabs were asked and also ordered to remain on their land in Palestine. The record also, showed that on March 27, several days before the Haganah’s drive against Arab population centers, the Irgun radio (broadcasting in Arabic) warned urban-centered Arabs that “typhus, cholera, and other diseases would be widespread in April and May.” Two weeks later this “concern” for the health and welfare of the Palestinian Arabs was further illustrated by the murdering of more than 250 men, women, and children by the Irgun and Sternist forces at Deir Yassin.

Mr. Gutmann reduces Deir Yassin to an unimposing footnote in his article. Yet Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun terrorist group, wrote in The Revolt that the consequences of the slaughter at Deir Yassin caused Arabs to become “seized with limitless panic and [they] started to flee for their lives.” Arthur Koestler called Deir Yassin “the psychologically decisive factor in this spectacular exodus.” Journalist I. F. Stone, who covered the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, wrote in “For a New Approach to the Israeli-Arab Conflict” (New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967) that “Jewish terrorism, not only by the Irgun in such savage massacres as Deir Yassin but in milder form by the Haganah . . . encouraged Arabs to leave areas the Jews wished to take over for strategic or demographic reasons. They tried to make as much of Israel as free of Arabs as possible.” . . .

Mr. Gutmann’s disregard of the Zionist efforts which prompted much of the Palestinian Arab exodus incapacitates his article as a vehicle to explode the so-called Palestinian myth. The author utilizes the long-expressed Zionist myth of a voluntary Palestinian Arab flight (thereby reducing, if not completely eliminating, Zionist responsibility in displacing the Palestinian Arabs). Yasir Arafat’s triumph in the United Nations was not, as Mr. Gutmann states, “a new myth.” Violence and terror ushered in the Jewish state. Arafat is the logical extension of Menachem Begin and his ideological antecedents and adherents.

Gary V. Smith
Alabama State University
Montgomery, Alabama

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To the Editor:

. . . David Gutmann writes that Reform rabbis are among those who circulate the lie “that Israelis stole the land from its rightful owners, the innocent Palestinians.” To this statement I must take serious exception. Nowhere in the article does Mr. Gutmann mention the name of any Reform rabbi holding this point of view. Furthermore, in my capacity as an officer of the National Federation of Temple Brotherhoods, an affiliate of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, I know that the official policy of the UAHC and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform Rabbis) is completely opposed to this “Palestinian myth.”

I am very upset that Reform rabbis, who are in the forefront of support for Israel by all Americans, have been so maligned in this article. . . .

David S. Levine
Merrick, New York

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David Gutmann writes:

Like the Palestinians whose cause he champions, Gary V. Smith attacks a conveniently distorted version of the opposition. Indeed, his misstatement of the tenor and the very words of my article can in itself serve as an object lesson on the kind of mythification that has turned the Palestinians into media heroes. Thus Mr. Smith tells the readers of COMMENTARY that I am disqualified to speak on the Palestinians because of my “disregard of the Zionist efforts which prompted much of the Palestinian Arab exodus.” I presume that Mr. Smith is honorable; but if so, he cannot read plain English. In my article I stated explicitly: “There is no doubt that Jews can fight as brutally as Christians or Arabs, and there is no doubt that in some cases they welcomed and even stimulated the Arab flight from Palestine.” Also: “It was a dirty, nasty little war fought at close quarters by intertwined populations, Semitic cousins who had learned over fifty years to dislike and fear each other.”

History is after all a tale of blood; and no people—Jew or Gentile—lives in history without dirty hands. Thus the War of Independence marked the point at which Jews reentered history as active and sometimes brutal participants rather than as “moral” though passive victims. But while I do not deny or excuse Jewish atrocities, I will not condone Mr. Smith’s rewriting of history, as he attempts to prove that Jewish brutality was the main cause of the Arab disaster. In order to make this ugly charge stick, Mr. Smith not only exaggerates the importance of the Jewish war crimes—like Deir Yassin—that did take place; he invents some that never occurred. I will not, for example, be lectured by Mr. Smith as to what really happened in Haifa, where I spent a good deal of time during the War of Independence. The Arabs did end by leaving Haifa, but they began the war by attacking the Jewish sector of it. As part of their siege, all major roads into Jewish Haifa were brought under Arab fire; and the local British neither opened the roads nor permitted armed Jews of the Haganah to perform this vital task. However, when the British withdrew to their perimeter, and Haifa could be taken by the Haganah, I know that Jewish loudspeakers (one of them in the hands of my cousin, a Haganah intelligence officer) were employed to persuade fleeing Arabs to stay in the now-Jewish city. Despite a local history of Jewish-Arab cooperation, the Arabs still piled on the British LST’s waiting to ferry them to Acre. As I said in my article: Jewish wishes for or against Arab flight did not much matter—the Arabs ran in either case. Clearly, the Arab flight from Haifa and elsewhere cannot be taken as prima facie evidence of Jewish aggression, any more than the postwar Allied presence in Berlin could be taken as evidence that the U.S., Britain, and Russia had committed unprovoked aggression against Hitler’s Germany. But without doubt the refugee camps are full of ex-Haifaites, ready to tell their sympathizers how they were driven from their city by the overwhelming Jewish advantage in loudspeakers.

While Mr. Smith wants to make atrocities the issue, I did not choose to do so, even though I could have easily stuffed my paragraphs with the gruesome details of Arab massacres. The world has been helped to remember Deir Yassin; unrecorded now are the gross atrocities routinely committed against Jewish soldiers and civilians unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of Arab irregulars. (Haganah officers, who were not hysterical, dramatizing men, routinely advised us to keep a round or a grenade against the time when we might have to kill ourselves rather than fall captive to the Palestinian guerrillas.) My subject was not Arab violations of the rules of war, but the violation of history that Arabs and their supporters have triumphantly perpetrated: namely, the false story that the Jews, possessed of superior armament from the outset, and working from some great master plan, craftily engineered the Arab flight from Palestine. Finally, this is much more dangerous than accusing Jews of behaving as Gentiles usually do in their wars; this charge smacks of Jewish plots, grand designs, of the Elders of Zion manipulating poor benumbed peasants through their control of the media—the radios and the loudspeakers that Mr. Smith is so keen on. I was remembering a history; violent, confused, and morally ambiguous on both sides. Mr. Smith prefers the morality tale: bloody and devious Jews on one side; innocent, victimized Arabs on the other. In effect, Smith and his friends plead their cause by reviving, in modern dress, the images and dramas that have caused terrible mischief for Jews across the centuries: already the Palestinian Jew has been turned into the “Zionist”—Shylock armed; while the innocent Palestinian Arab, as the most recent victim of the Palestinian Jew, has entered the niche previously reserved for Jesus Christ. It is only a few years ago that Pope John XXIII officially exculpated the Jews of deicide; now we find the Palestinians and their supporters busily legislating Deir Yassin into the new Golgotha.

I think David Levine should relax. In the sentence that he excitedly objects to I was documenting the wide reach of the Palestinian myth by pointing out that it had even been taken up by “some alienated Israelis, Reform rabbis, and American Jewish students.” I was not referring to an organizational entity: “some” qualifies “Reform rabbis,” just as it does the other categories. I was referring to a type of person, probably well known to Mr. Levine, who I believe is more apt to be found among Reform than among Conservative or Orthodox Rabbis. The Reform ranks are more likely to contain rabbis who demonstrate their “liberal” credentials, their purity of conscience, and their capacity to transcend “parochial” loyalties by preaching “Justice for the Palestinians.” Though meaning well, they thereby imply that the Palestinians were the targets of a special injustice, over and above the usual brutalities and misfortunes of war. Whether they mean to or not, their rhetoric bolsters the myth that the Palestinians were the victims of a Zionist grand design to steal their land. But I don’t mean to belabor a minor point; I apologize to any Reform rabbis, particularly those who are unambivalent in their support for Israel, whom I might have offended.

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