It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the enemies of the Judeans. I have suggested that this view of Jesus arose in a wider context of ideas whereby a Jesus or Saviour figure came to overthrow the works of the Old Testament creator and lawgiver god.
My view is built on Nina Livesey’s argument for Paul’s letters being produced by one of the several “Christian schools” that existed in Rome in the second century. As I pointed out in my previous post, I have found it difficult to understand how the kinds of teachings we associate with “gnosticism” — arguing that Jesus did not have a flesh and blood body, that the Jewish god was evil, that creation itself was evil — arose from what we know of our gospels and letters of Paul. But as per my previous post, I think that the relationship between those “gnostic” ideas and the ideas of orthodox Christianity makes sense if we set orthodoxy as the latecomer.
As Livesey points out, Paul’s letters, arguably critical of “Judaism”, arose at a time when Jews or Judeans were seen as having caused horrific losses to Roman military power in the Bar Kochba war of 132-135 CE and were themselves being severely punished. I would extend the time when Jews (and Jewishness) were widely abhored to the decades before when under the emperor Trajan there were widespread Judean revolts and massacres throughout the eastern part of the empire. (One might compare the widespread loathing of the “troublous” Palestinians – and Muslims – in Israel and the West today.) This was also the time when we see the emergence of “gnostic” or similar types of teachings arguing that the Jewish Scriptures testified to an ignorant (or even evil) god whose rule only promised death.
But there is an argument that “gnosticism” emerged after Christianity. This argument denies that there was any kind of Jewish gnosticism before the gospels and letters of Paul. Edwin Yamauchi pointed out…
A major difficulty in accepting a Jewish origin for Gnosticism is to account for the anti-Jewish use which most Gnostics seem to have made of these elements. The anticosmic attitude of the Gnostics contradicts the Jewish belief that God created the world and declared it good. . . .
Many scholars therefore believe that it was probably through the mediation of Christianity that these Jewish elements came to be used in such an antithetical way. (Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Evidences, 2nd ed, p. 242f)
Then a few pages later,
Gnosticism with a fully articulated theology, cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology cannot be discerned clearly until the post-Christian era. According to Wilson, were we to adopt the programmatic definition of Jonas ‘then we must probably wait for the second century’. Hengel would concur: ‘Gnosticism is first visible as a spiritual movement at the end of the first century AD at the earliest and only develops fully in the second century.’ (p. 245)
Both of these objections fall by the wayside if we place the whole game in the second century. Anti-Jewish ideas are readily understandable in a world that saw Jews as hostile to humanity “and the gods” and deserving of the bloodshed they were suffering. That is, in the times of Trajan (110s) and Hadrian (130s).
The second objection cited above expresses the point I am making: that yes, we are looking at second century developments.
It is not altogether coincidental that scholars who assume a Gnostic background for New Testament documents in some cases also adopt very late dates for these books, because late dates for these documents would make a stronger case for affinities with Gnosticism. Thus Rudolph dates Colossians to AD 80, Ephesians to the end of the first century, and both the Pastoral and the Johannine Epistles to the beginning of the second century. Koester dates the Pastorals to as late as between AD 120 and AD 160. (pp. 192f)
And why does Koester date the Pastorals to the middle of the second century? In large part because it is believed that it would have taken decades for Paul’s first century church assemblies to have evolved into the authoritarian episcopal structures that those letters indicate. But as Livesey has pointed out in her recent book, the “home gathering” situations of the letters is a rhetorical device aimed at building a sense of community among readers. They are not documenting a historical situation.
There is no independent evidence that dates any of our New Testament writings earlier than the middle of the second century. Yamauchi acknowledges that a second century date for the gospels and letters would make the possibility of a “pre-Christian” gnosticism more likely. I think the argument goes beyond mere chronological ordering of sources, though. That returns me to the point I was making in my previous post.
In coming posts I may (as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s) post notes on various teachers who appear to me to have preceded (proto-)orthodox Christianity and whose followers appear to have engaged with the new gospels and Pauline writings.
I think I have been searching in the wrong places for the origin of the Jesus figure in our New Testament writings. Of course it would be easiest to assume that there is some truth to the gospel narratives and that there was a historical preacher by that name who was crucified and whose followers believed he rose from the dead and went to heaven. But then I would be unable to explain why the earliest uncontested and independent evidence we have for that person does not appear until a full hundred years after his time and without a hint about how that life, so rich in allusions to mythical acts and persons, came to be known. Or I could conjure up an explanation that involved ordinary (generally illiterate) persons passing on ever more imaginative “oral reports” about the person but that would be letting my imagination fly in the face of studies that tell us that’s not how fabulous tales about historical persons originate. (They are composed from the creative imaginations of the literati.)
I used to fuss fruitlessly over trying to understand what might have led to the first gospel, widely believed to have been the Gospel of Mark. I liked the idea that that gospel portrayed a Jesus who could readily be interpreted as a personification of an ideal Israel, one who died with his nation in the catastrophe of 70 CE (the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus along with myriads of crucifixions of Jewish victims) and rose again to establish a new “spiritual” Israel in the “church”. But that idea did not explain the kinds of Christianities (there were many types) that swelled and plopped like bubbles in a vast Mediterranean hot mud spring. Not even if we moved the gospel to a later time so that it had the Bar Kochba war (132-135 CE) in mind.
An old door reopened
An important work to be read in conjunction with Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context
Nina Livesey (re)opened a door to a room for me that maybe I should have investigated more thoroughly before. In the book I recently discussed, Livesey speaks of a multiplicity of “Christian” schools comparable with the many philosophical schools in Rome. They usually centred around a prominent teacher, attracted an inner circle of disciples while also holding open public sessions, and would not be averse to publishing both trial and final versions of tracts illustrating some point of their teachings. Livesey revives the idea that the letters attributed to an apostle named Paul were published by one such school, one led by Marcion. Marcion was also reputed to have produced “a gospel”, one that many in later antiquity and since have considered to be an early form of our Gospel of Luke.
Let’s pause there and collect our thoughts for a moment.
Marcion was not the only “Christian” teacher in Rome around the middle of the second century. Other teachers or school heads (not all in Rome) around the same period include Apelles, Basilides, Cerdo, Heracleon, Justin, Marcion, Saturninus/Satornilos, Tatian, Valentinus . . . You get the idea. There were many competing teachings. Some of them came to be dismissed as a consequence of being labelled as “gnostic”. But they were there from the beginning — at least if by “the beginning” we insist on appealing only to independently verifiable sources.
Now when Marcion published “Paul’s letters” some other schools picked them up and used them as foils through which to teach their own doctrines. Multiple interpretations and textual variants were the result. That’s how the schools worked: they would be open to engaging with each others’ teachings, either with modifications, elaborations, or outright rejections. So it is difficult from our perspective to always know what the original teachings of some of these schools were: they were capable of changing over time.
Back to the gospels. When Marcion wrote up a life of Jesus, he was using that figure of Jesus as a means of promoting his (Marcion’s) view that “Christianity” was an antithesis of the Jewish religion. Marcion’s Jesus was not even real flesh and blood but a spirit being in the appearance of flesh and blood: the antithesis even in this respect to the physical ordinances of Moses.
Schools opposing the biblical narrative
But other schools had other ideas about Jesus. More than that, they had ideas about the origins of the Jewish religion and even of humanity itself that we today would find quite bizarre. There were multiple ideas about god and creation. Many of these ideas were borrowed from Greek philosophy, some from Greek literature and myths, as well as from the Jewish Scriptures. Some said that the god who created this world was a god lower than, and ignorant of, the ultimate “Good God”; some said the serpent in the Garden of Eden was actually a benefactor of humankind and the god who punished him (according to the Book of Genesis) was the wicked god; some said that the line of Cain (depicted in Genesis as the first murderer) was the righteous genealogy; some said Jesus first appeared in the form of Adam’s third son, Seth. Indeed, Jesus held different positions among these various schools. He might be seen as one of a number of spirit beings who were “born” in the earliest moments of time. Or he was a human, fathered by Joseph, who was possessed by a spirit being called Christ. Some saw him as hating the laws of the god of Moses and promising deliverance to all whom the Jewish god had condemned.
I suspect it is impossible to ever find a way to reconcile all of these teachings. They span events from time before creation right through to the present and beyond. One thing they all seem to have in common, though: they are all opposed to the orthodox understanding we have of the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. Not all of them, as far as we are aware, include a place for Jesus. But of those that do, Jesus has a role that is opposed to the Mosaic Law and traditional Jewish Temple. (Not unreasonably, given that Jesus is derived from the name Joshua who was originally understood as the successor to Moses.)
In other words, what I am imagining here is a situation that we can with reasonable assurance place as early as the opening decades and middle of the second century — a time when a find a multiplicity of schools with various notions proposing narratives that contradicted those we read in Genesis and those of the “orthodox” interpretation of the Jewish bible more generally.
Where did those ideas come from?
An Anti-Jewish/Judean time
I am tempted to begin with the beginning of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as proposed by Niels Peter Lemche and in some depth by Russell Gmirkin. This takes us back to the beginning of the Hellenistic era (from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests) when Samaritans and Judeans, with the aid of Greek writings, collaborated to construct a narrative of origins that we read today in the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy or Joshua. Genesis in particular has retained hints that its authors were trying to incorporate multiple gods whom later readers would equate with Yahweh. Most scholars have seen multiple hands and schools of thought going into the final product of the Pentateuch. It is not difficult to imagine some intellects associated with the production of the first bible continuing to raise alternative ideas that were infused with Greek philosophy and myth or to imagine that some of this kind of divergent thinking continued through to the Roman era. What are surely critical turning points, however, are the calamities that befell the Jews (or Judeans) first under Vespasian and Titus (the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE), the uprisings and widespread massacres of Jews a few decades later under Trajan and then the “final solution” by 135 CE under Hadrian when the Jews were forbidden even to set foot in Jerusalem.
The bloody times coincided with the emergence of “Christian schools” in Rome. Let’s take a step beyond Nina Livesey’s specific focus on the letters of Paul appearing at this time. Let’s suggest that it is these times that witness the emergence of schools teaching the “end” of the Jewish laws. These times further witness teachings declaring the falsehood of the narrative of creation by the Jewish god, or at least teaching that this creation was evil or less than “good”. Imagine that this is the time when we see the namesake of Moses’ successor, Joshua/Jesus, promising deliverance from the judgment of that lesser god of the Jews.
If we can imagine all of that, we are, I think, confining ourselves to what the evidence in our second century sources allows.
But how does any of that explain the Christianity we recognize today?
It doesn’t. If that’s all we had, no doubt those negative teachings of Marcion, of Valentinus and others would have fallen by the wayside in time.
From antipathy to antithesis to … fulfilment
But something happened after Marcion released his story of Jesus, a Jesus who was an “antithesis” of the best that the god of the Jews could offer.
Another school, perhaps one associated with the “church father” Justin, or with Basilides in Alexandria (I don’t know and can only surmise), responded with an opposing narrative about a Jesus who was less an “antithesis” of the Jewish god than a “fulfilment” of all that the Jewish god had hoped for but had failed to achieve hitherto.
If that happened, we have a revolutionary moment. We no longer have a negative response to “the Jewish religion and scriptures”; rather, we have a way of capturing and finding new and enriched meaning in that old religion and its hoary sacred writings.
What if Jesus could be transformed from an anti-Moses or anti-Yahweh figure into a ‘higher than Moses’ figure, a fulfilment of the higher ethics of god who was henceforth to appear as a newly discovered deity, or as the old deity whose true character was only being seen clearly now for the first time — or as the “one sent to reveal” that newly understood deity?
Such a Jesus had the power to enrich and so preserve with new meaning texts that had long been revered (even among non-Jews). Allegorical reading could infuse them with new meanings. The old was discarded, yes, but it was also retained and revivified as throwing the “new” into 3D relief by its shadows: Joseph and Moses and David and Elijah (and so on) of the Old Testament prefigured the Jesus of the New — at least if read with a little imagination. A gospel could depict Jesus as a personification of an ideal Israel, healing others but suffering unjustly only to be raised up and bring all humanity to salvation. Another gospel could present Jesus as a new Moses delivering a “higher law” in the Sermon on the Mount. And so on.
I suggest that once one or some of those schools (probably in Rome but not necessarily confined to there) discovered a way to both reject and embrace with new meaning the old Mosaic order of things, they were on a winner, as we might say today.
Such a Jesus, just like the other original Jewish writings and again like the writings of “proto-Christian” (including “gnostic”) schools, drew upon the inspiration of Greek myths and philosophy to flesh out their teachings. The Jesus with us today drew upon one additional source — the Jewish Scriptures — and found as a result a longer-lasting heritage. Various “schools” may have competed for the most outstanding way to oppose and supplant the religion of the Jews who from 70 to 135 CE were suffering the calamities of Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. The form of Christianity that became a religion that could boast of a “higher fulfilment” and stronger appeal to literati and hoi polloi alike was the one that learned how to infuse venerable texts and the experiences of their advocates with new meaning and build on their foundation. Rejection of the Old, in way, yes, like the teachings of other schools … but with one important twist.
Masalha’s sources: primarily the official archives (e.g. the Central Zionist Archives, Israeli State Archives, the London Public Record Office) and diaries and other writings of leading Zionist pioneers (e.g. of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann).
Here I continue a series I began in July 2010 — a history of the Zionist movement as documented from official archives and personal diaries by the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha.
I have long held off from completing that task, most especially since recent events in Gaza and now the West Bank and Lebanon left me feeling that the current traumas are too suffocating to allow anyone to think of the past. But the past is important for understanding what is happening today.
The following account makes it clear why current events did not begin with the Hamas attack on October 7 2024. It will all sound so horrifyingly familiar that you that you may find yourself wondering if you are reading history or today’s news stories.
“What did the world do to prevent the genocide of the Jews? Why now should there be such excitement about the plight of the Arab refugees?“
The “Miracle” of the “Arab Exodus”
We may have heard that Arabs fled wholesale of their own free will when the state of Israel was declared in May 1948.
The plight of these Arab refugees and the problem they posed deserve attention . . . A huge and pitiful multitude, uprooted, exploited and helpless, they numbered at their height approximately 750,000. . . .
Superstitious and uneducated, the Arab masses succumbed to the panic and fled. . . .
Weizmann (left) and US ambassador MacDonald
Certainly, [the big three — Weizmann, Ben-Gurion or Sharett] had been quite unprepared for the Arab exodus; no responsible Zionist leader had anticipated such a “miraculous” clearing of the land. Dr. Weizmann, despite his ingrained rationalism, spoke to me emotionally of this “miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks,” and cited the vaster tragedy of six million Jews murdered during World War II. He would ask, “What did the world do to prevent this genocide? Why now should there be such excitement in the UN and the Western capitals about the plight of the Arab refugees?” — First United States Ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald, p. 174ff
Such a carefully worded narrative positions the Arab “exodus” of 1948 as a sadly inferior foil to the biblical Jewish exodus, even a matter of divinely ordained compensation for one party at the “tragic” expense of “pitiful, superstitious, cowardly masses”. MacDonald does elsewhere express some pity for the Arabs along with regret that the Israeli approach was not “more humane”. But the purpose of these posts is to cite what the Israeli leadership were in fact thinking and planning — how the Zionist program planned for and enforced the Arab evacuations.
Events leading to the 1948 Exodus
Let’s back up a few months and into the year before Israel declared its actual birth.
2 November 1947: A vote by the United Nations General Assembly was imminent. The UN was scheduled to declare that Palestine should be partitioned between Jews and Arabs and that the Jewish state would contain a large Arab population (42%). The leading Zionist organization, the Jewish Agency Executive, met and agreed that citizenship should not be granted to the Arabs in the soon-to-be-established Jewish state. The reason was stated by Ben-Gurion:
In the event of war between the two Palestine states, said Ben-Gurion, the Arab minority in the Jewish State would be ‘“‘a Fifth Column.”’ Hence, it was best that they be citizens of the Palestine Arab State so that, if hostile, they “‘could be expelled”’ to the Palestine Arab State. But if they were citizens of the Jewish State, “‘it would only be possible to imprison them, and it would be better to expel them than to imprison them.”’ (Benny Morris, 28, citing the minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive meeting)
29 November 1947: The United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 181 endorsing the partition of Palestine into 2 states: Arab and Jewish, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem forming an international zone. The boundaries drawn up meant the Jewish state would consist of a 42% Arab population.
Ben-Gurion
30 December 1947: Ben Gurion addressed the Histadrut and declared that the Zionist settlers of Palestine would need to learn to think “like a state”:
There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.
This, Ben-Gurion added, made necessary the adoption of “a new approach…new habits of mind to suit our new future. We must think like a state.” (Masalha, 176; Morris, 28)
But what kind of state should Israel “think like”?
The kind of state in Ben-Gurion’s mind was Turkey which had ethnically cleansed (or “transferred”) their Greek population. Eleven years earlier he had made it clear that there was “nothing morally wrong in the idea” but that it was the kind of thing only a state should carry out.
Two non-Zionists — Senator (left) and Hexter — vehemently opposed the transfer idea: ’there are Arabs in this country. The more we take them in consideration, the more we will succeed . . . .’ — but were overruled by the Zionists
[Two non-Zionists, Senator and Hexter] vehemently opposed the transfer idea: ’there are Arabs in this country. The more we take them in consideration, the more we will succeed . . . .’ Senator considered transfer as fraught with danger: ‘We can’t say that we want to live with the Arabs and at the same time transfer them to Transjordan.’ In summing up the debate, Ben-Gurion stated that . . . the population exchange between Greece and Turkey could not serve as a precedent since it was a pursuant to voluntary agreement between two states: ‘We are not a state and Britain will not do it for us . . In Ben-Gurion’s view, the proposal would alienate public opinion, including Jewish public opinion, but there is nothing morally wrong in the idea’. (Flapan, 261)
Conflict Begins Before Israel’s Foundation in May 1948:
Within weeks of the UN partition resolution, the country was plunged into what soon became a full-scale civil war. By mid-December, “spontaneous and unorganized” Palestinian outbreaks of violence were being met by the full weight of the Yishuv’s armed forces, the Haganah, in what the British high commissioner called “indiscriminate action against the Arabs,”3 coupled with measures aimed at economic strangulation. Ben-Gurion advised on 19 December that “we adopt the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place.”4 On 30 December, a British intelligence observer reported that the Haganah was moving fast to exploit Palestinian weaknesses and disorganization, especially in Haifa and Jaffa, and to render them “completely powerless” so as to force them into flight.
The Palestinians were completely unprepared for war, their leadership still in disarray and largely unarmed as a result of the 1936-39 rebellion. The Yishuv’s defense force, the Haganah (to say nothing of the dissident Irgun Tzvai Leumi and Lehi groups), was fully armed and on the offensive. As early as February 1945, before World War II had even ended, the first of a series of master military plans adopted by the Haganah (which in turn was under the jurisdiction of the Jewish Agency) was in place in anticipation of the war for statehood. (Masalha, 176f. Note 3 = Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College Archives, Oxford, Cunningham Papers, 1/3/147, “Weekly intelligence Appreciation.” A three-day general strike started on 2 December in protest of the United Nations resolution. Note 4, see quote from Flapan p 90 following…)
Flapan was an Israeli historian and, despite his searingly critical account, himself remained a supporter of the Zionist project, albeit “more humane and liberal”. This kind of support for Zionism has been common among Israeli historians despite their acknowledgement of Zionist history. Another example is Benny Morris.
I flip over from Nur Masalha’s account to that of Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, beginning from page 88 (with my highlighting and formatting):
Records are available from archives and diaries, however, and while not revealing a specific plan or precise orders for expulsion, they provide overwhelming circumstantial evidence to show that a design was being implemented by the Haganah, and later by the IDF, to reduce the number of Arabs in the Jewish state to a minimum, and to make use of most of their lands, properties, and habitats to absorb the masses of Jewish immigrants.
89
It is true, of course, that many Palestinians left of their own accord. Tens of thousands of community leaders, businessmen, landowners, and members of the intellectual elite who had the means for removing their families from the scene of fighting did so. Thousands of others — government officials, professionals, and skilled workers chose to immigrate to Arab areas rather than live in a Jewish state, where they feared unemployment and discrimination. Nearly half the Arab population of Haifa moved to Nazareth, Acre, Nablus, and Jenin before their city was captured by the Haganah on April 23, 1948. The Arab quarters of Wadi Nisnas and Karmel were almost completely emptied out. . . .
But hundreds of thousands of others, intimidated and terrorized, fled in panic, and still others were driven out by the Jewish army, which, under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, planned and executed the expulsion in the wake of the UN Partition Resolution.
The balance is clear in IDF intelligence estimates. As of June 1, 1948, 370,000 Arabs had left the country, from both the Jewish parts and the Arab parts conquered by the Jews.
Jewish attacks on Arab centers, particularly large villages, townlets, or cities, accounted for about 55 percent of those who left;
terrorist acts of the Irgun and LEHI, 15 percent;
whispering campaigns (psychological warfare), about 2 percent;
evacuation ordered by the IDF, another 2 percent;
and general fear, about 10 percent.
Therefore, 84 percent left in direct response to Israeli actions, while only 5 percent left on orders from Arab bands. The remaining 11 percent are not accounted for in this estimate and may refer to those who left voluntarily. (The total reflects only about 50 percent of the entire exodus since a similar number were to leave the country within the next six months.)
Again, it is obvious that no specific orders for expulsion could have been issued. All of the Zionist movements’ official pronouncements as well as those of the provisional government and, after January 1949, the Israeli government — and Ben-Gurion was prominent in these bodies — promised, as noted, fair treatment for the Arab minority. Moreover, in the face of the often brutal destruction and evacuation of villages, Ben-Gurion — along with other cabinet ministers — publicly criticized the brutality, looting, rape, and indiscriminate killing.
90
In private, however, Ben-Gurion was not averse to making his real views clear. Thus, on December 19, 1947, he demanded that “we adopt the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place.” He declared: “When in action we . . . must fight strongly and cruelly, letting nothing stop us.’’ Even without direct orders, the goal and spirit of real policy were understood and accepted by the army. That Ben-Gurions’ ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve this purpose:
an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of foods and raw materials to the urban population;
psychological warfare, ranging from “friendly warnings” to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by dissident underground terrorism;
and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants by the army.
Ben-Gurion took note of the combined effects of economic, military, and psychological warfare in a diary entry from December 11, 1947:
Arabs are fleeing from Jaffa and Haifa. Bedouin are fleeing from the Sharon. Most are seeking refuge with members of their family. Villagers are returning to their villages. Leaders are also in flight, most of them are taking their families to Nablus, Nazareth. The Bedouin are moving to Arab areas. According to our “friends” [advisers], every response to our dealing a hard blow at the Arabs with many casualties is a blessing. This will increase the Arabs’ fear and external help for the Arabs will be ineffective. . . . Josh Palmon [an adviser to Ben-Gurion on Arab affairs] thinks that Haifa and Jaffa will be evacuated [by the Arabs] because of hunger. There was almost famine in Jaffa during the disturbances of 1936-1939.
91
In a letter to Sharett a few days later, Ben-Gurion focused on economic issues, observing that “the important difference with [the riots of] 1937 is the increased vulnerability of the Arab urban economy. Haifa and Jaffa are at our mercy. We can ‘starve them out.’ Motorized transport, which has also become an important factor in their life, is to a large extent at our mercy.”
The destruction of the Palestinian urban bases, along with the conquest and evacuation (willing or unwilling) of nearby villages, undermined the whole structure of Palestinian life in many parts of the country, especially in the towns. Ben-Gurion’s advisers urged closing stores, barring raw materials from factories, and various other measures.
Yadin, the army’s head of operations, advised that “we must paralyze Arab transportation and commerce, and harass them in country and town. This is the way to lower their morale.”
And Sasson proposed “damaging Arab commerce — even if Jewish commerce will be damaged. We can tolerate it, they cannot. . . we must not hit here and there, but at all transportation at once, all commerce and so on.”
Ezra Danin spoke of “a crushing blow” to be dealt by destroying “transportation (buses, trucks transporting agricultural produce, and private cars) . . . [and] economic facilities — Jaffa port (boats to be sunk); the closing down of stores; cutting off their contact with neighboring countries; the closing down of Arab factories through blockage of raw materials and cement.” Later, he added that “Jaffa must be put under a state of siege.” . . . .
Yigal Allon, commander in chief of the Haganah’s Palmach shock troops, also advised economic measures: “It is not always possible to discern between opponents and nonopponents. . . . It is impossible to refrain from injuring children — because it is impossible to separate them from the others when one has to enter every house. The Arabs are defending themselves now, and there are weapons in every house. Now only extreme punitive measures are possible. The call for peace will appear as a sign of weakness. Only after inflicting a major blow can calls to peace work. We must strike at their economy.”
Clearly, significant numbers of Arabs without food, work, or the most elementary security would choose to leave, especially given that almost all of their official leadership had left even before the fighting began.
92
On January 5, 1948, Ben-Gurion was able to review in his diary some of the effects of economic warfare on the Arabs of Haifa: “[Their] commerce has for the most part been destroyed, many stores are closed . . . prices are rising among the Arabs.” He noted that up to twenty thousand Arabs had left, including many of the wealthier people, whose businesses were no doubt among those destroyed.
Ben-Gurion’s belief in the efficacy of the policy of destroying the Arab economy led him to monitor its results constantly. Thus, on January 11, 1948, he noted in his diary a telephone conversation between Hussein al-Khalidi, secretary of the Arab Higher Committee and former mayor of Jerusalem, and the banker Farid Bey, in Haifa. Farid Bey told Khalidi of the desperate situation in Jerusalem and Haifa. “You have no idea how hard it is outside,” Khalidi replied, referring to the Arab leadership abroad. Farid Bey responded, “And here [Arabs] are dying day by day.” “It is even worse in Jaffa,” said Khalidi. “Everyone is leaving.”
That same day, Sasson reported to King Abdallah that the Palestinians in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem were facing “hunger, poverty, unemployment, fear, terror.” Two days later, on January 13, Khalidi informed the mufti of the crisis: “The position here is very difficult,” he reported from Jerusalem. “There are no people, no discipline, no arms, and no ammunition. Over and above this, there is no tinned food and no foodstuffs. The black market is flourishing. The economy is destroyed. . . . This is the real situation, there is no flour, no food. . . . Jerusalem is emptying out.”
The urban disintegration of the Palestinian Arabs was a fait accompli. Ben-Gurion’s tactics had succeeded. As he explained it:
The strategic objective [of the Jewish forces] was to destroy the urban communities, which were the most organized and politically conscious sections of the Palestinian people. This was not done by house-to-house fighting inside the cities and towns, but by the conquest and destruction of the rural areas surrounding most of the towns. This technique led to the collapse and surrender of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, Acre, Beit-Shan, Lydda, Ramleh, Majdal, and Beersheba. Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos, and hunger, which forced them to surrender.
93
The military campaign against the Arabs, including the “conquest and destruction of the rural areas,” was set forth in the Haganah’s Plan Dalet [which I will outline in my next post]. Plan D, formulated and put into operation in March 1948, went into effect “officially” only on May 14, when the state was declared. The tenets of the plan were clear and unequivocal: The Haganah must carry out “activities against enemy settlements which are situated within or near to our Haganah installations, with the aim of preventing their use by active [Arab] armed forces.” These activities included the destruction of villages, the destruction of the armed enemy, and, in case of opposition during searches, the expulsion of the population to points outside the borders of the state.
Also targeted were transport and communication routes that might be used by the Arab forces. According to an interview with Yadin some twenty-five years later, “The plan intended to secure the territory of the state as far as the Palestinian Arabs were concerned, communication routes, and the strongholds required.” Yadin and his assistants outlined nine courses of operation that included “blocking the access roads of the enemy from their bases to targets inside the Jewish state,” and the “domination of the main arteries of transportation that are vital to the Jews, and destruction of the Arab villages near them, so that they shall not serve as bases for attacks on the traffic.”
The plan also referred to the “temporary” conquest of Arab bases outside Israeli borders. It included detailed guidelines for taking over Arab neighborhoods in mixed towns, particularly those overlooking transport routes, and the expulsion of their populations to the nearest urban center.
The psychological aspect of warfare was not neglected either. The day after the plan went into effect, the Lebanese paper Al-Hayat quoted a leaflet that was dropped from the air and signed by the Haganah command in Galilee:
We have no wish to fight ordinary people who want to live in peace, but only the army and forces which are preparing to invade Palestine. Therefore . . . all people who do not want this war must leave together with their women and children in order to be safe. This is going to be a cruel war, with no mercy or compassion. There is no reason why you should endanger yourselves.
Exactly how cruel and merciless was already clear from the example of the Dir Yassin massacre. The village of Dir Yassin was located in a largely Jewish area in the vicinity of Jerusalem and, as already noted, had signed a nonaggression pact with its Jewish neighbors as early as 1942. As a result, its inhabitants had not asked the Arab Higher Committee for protection when the fighting broke out. Yet for the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion. In a 1979 article dealing with the later forced evacuation of Lydda and Ramleh, New York Times reporter David Shipler cites Red Cross and British documents to the effect that the attackers “lined men, women and children up against walls and shot them,” so that Dir Yassin “remains a name of infamy in the world.” When they had finished, they looted the village and fled.
The ruthlessness of the attack on Dir Yassin shocked Jewish and world public opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.
I have jumped ahead a little. I need to backtrack to clarify a little more in the next post what the Zionist Plan D (Dalet) was all about.
Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Flapan, Simha. Zionism and the Palestinians. London: Harper & Row, 1979.
Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. https://archive.org/details/birthofpalestini00morr/mode/2up
McDonald, James G. My Mission In Israel 1948-1951. Simon And Schuster, 1951. http://archive.org/details/mymissioninisrae002443mbp
Abstract: Bayesian decision theory is a mathematical framework that models reasoning and decision-making under uncertain conditions. The Bayesian paradigm originated as a theory of how people should operate, not a theory of how they actually operate. Nevertheless, cognitive scientists increasingly use it to describe the actual workings of the human mind. Over the past few decades, cognitive science has produced impressive Bayesian models of mental activity. The models postulate that certain mental processes conform, or approximately conform, to Bayesian norms. Bayesian models offered within cognitive science have illuminated numerous mental phenomena, such as perception, motor control, and navigation. This Element provides a self-contained introduction to the foundations of Bayesian cognitive science. It then explores what we can learn about the mind from Bayesian models offered by cognitive scientists.
Abstract: This Element surveys contemporary philosophical and psychological work on various forms of irrationality: akrasia, strange beliefs, and implicit bias. It takes up several questions in an effort to better illuminate these more maligned aspects of human behaviour and cognition: what is rationality? Why is it irrational to act against one’s better judgement? Could it ever be rational to do so? What’s going wrong with beliefs in conspiracy theories, those arising from self-deception, or those which are classed as delusional? Might some of them in fact be appropriate responses to evidence? Are implicit biases irrational when they conflict with our avowed beliefs? Or might they be rational insofar as they track social realities?
What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.
A friend of mine, the philosopher and magician David Abram, used to be the house magician at Alice’ s Restaurant in Massachusetts (made famous by the Arlo Guthrie song). Every night he passed around the tables; coins walked through his fingers, reappeared exactly where they shouldn’t, disappeared again, divided in two, vanished into nothing. One evening, two customers returned to the restaurant shortly after leaving and pulled David aside, looking troubled. When they left the restaurant, they said, the sky had appeared shockingly blue and the clouds large and vivid. Had he put something in their drinks? As the weeks went by, it continued to happen — customers returned to say the traffic had seemed louder than it was before, the streetlights brighter, the patterns on the sidewalk more fascinating, the rain more refreshing. The magic tricks were changing the way people experienced the world.
David explained to me why he thought this happened. Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch. It is our preconceptions that create the blind spots in which magicians do their work. By attrition, coin tricks loosen the grip of our expectations about the way hands and coins work. Eventually, they loosen the grip of our expectations on our perceptions more generally. On leaving the restaurant, the sky looked different because the diners saw the sky as it was there and then, rather than as they expected it to be. Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.