The Birth of Israel: Myths And Realities

By Simha Flapan. New York: Pantheon, 1987. 277 pp. $6.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

"Palestine will become as Jewish as England is English."—Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel in his autobiography, Trial and Error.

A dimly lit chamber, a spotlight focused on a massive table at the center. On the table a beautifully wrapped package labeled: Israel, America's Strategic Ally.

Seven pencil-thin legs "support" the table. And a surrealistic touch out of Salvador Dali: the legs do not quite reach the floor.

The subject is not levitation. In a literal sense, it is a review of Simha Flapan's seminal book The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, in which the Israeli author demolishes, based on irrefutable Israeli sources, the seven basic myths upon which an aggressive Israel has depicted itself as the victim of aggression and on which it asserts a claim to be America's valuable ally.

The most egregious of the seven delusions is that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes in 1948-1949 in response to calls from their leaders, who asked them to get out of the way temporarily while the Jews were driven into the sea. Flapan poignantly concedes that he, like most Israelis, accepted this and the other six myths as the core of Israel's self-perception.

A Question of Self-Defense?

Flapan's explanation is that Israel, one of the most powerful military forces in the world, sees itself after the holocaust the victim of unconquerable, bloodthirsty enemies. Thus anything is justified as last-ditch self-defense. Even Americans questioning the myths can "justifiably" be labeled anti-Semitic or self-hating Jews, depending on their religion.

Stemming from a national paranoia, the myths nevertheless constitute a brilliantly creative "justification" for Israeli aggression and for intimidation by American Zionists of their fellow Americans. The Palestinians might have had their state, another myth claims, but they rejected the UN partition of Palestine while Israel accepted it.

In fact, Israel said it accepted partition while it immediately set out to terrorize Palestinians into fleeing and to seize extra territory from what was to have been an Arab state.

The myth of "invasion" of a militarily weak Israel by massed Arab armies turns, under Flapan 's magnifying glass, into Jordan's Arab Legion moving into the West Bank by prior agreement with Jewish authorities. The explicitness of prior arrangements between Israel and Jordan is spelled out in greater detail by Flapan than in any previous account seen by this reviewer.

Myths Are Unraveling

And so it goes. The myths, or fabrications, or delusions, or whatever they may be called have proved to be astonishingly "useful" to Israel in the Middle East for 40 years. Even the aggressive war against Lebanon in 1982 did not actually tear the Israeli fabric of delusion.

However, real strain showed for the first time as nearly half a million Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the aggression. But basically the fabric of delusion held in Israel while the Israel lobby in the US defended Israel, attacked American critics of the aggression, and pushed successfully in Congress for extra billions for Israel to pay for the war.

For many years even such an honest historian as Simha Flapan did not examine the historical record. If he had bothered to do so he would have learned that the Zionist plan always was to take the territory of Palestine and get rid of the Palestinians. Israel Zangwill had claimed in 1901 that Palestine had no people. Theodor Herzl, father of political Zionism, had written in his diaries in 1898 that the Palestinians would be spirited across the border. And Chaim Weizinann saw no room for Palestinians in Palestine.

Paranoia of American Zionists

In America Zionists saw themselves as being in "exile" and facing implacable enmity from every person not Jewish. This "justified" enemies lists of those not supporting Israel 100 percent, intimidation and political defeat for those such as Sen. Charles Percy who voted just one time against Israel's desires. This home-grown paranoia also "justified" illegal collusion to reward or defeat US politicians depending on their attitudes toward Israel.

Only the intifadah, youths throwing stones against Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, has thrown Israel and the lobby into real confusion. These children, about 400 of whom have been killed by Israeli soldiers, cannot be credibly depicted as bloodthirsty enemies. They have shattered the delusion, which Flapan began cracking two years ago in The Birth of Israel.

In the dimly lit room, light floods the chamber. Gone is the table and the package labeled: Israel, America's Strategic Ally. Was it an optical illusion that never really existed?

Andrew I. Killgore in the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.