1 aug 2019
An investigative piece published in Haaretz in early July uncovers measures taken by Israeli security forces to bury the history of their war crimes against Palestinians. In 1987, headed by Yehiel Horev, the Israeli military department Malmab (a Hebrew acronym for “Director of Security for the Defence Establishment”) began removing ‘sensitive’ documents from public archives.
The department’s official aim is to remove sensitive information about Israel’s nuclear programme from public archives, but it has emerged that Malmab has also removed hundreds of documents relating to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, that had previously been declassified.
Unveiled Nakba Massacres
During the Nakba, 800,000 Palestinian people were forcefully evacuated from their homes and became refugees. The Israeli government’s official account of these events maintains that the Palestinian people chose to emigrate, encouraged by Arab politicians and leaders. Malmab has been removing any documents that counter this official narrative from public archives, deeming them a ‘security threat’.
Haaretz found that Malmab has removed accounts of IOF generals about the massacres of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well as evidence of the expulsion of Bedouin communities during Israel’s early years of statehood.
One example of a document that has been removed from public archives is a series of interviews conducted in the early 2000s with former Israeli military figures by the Yitzhak Rabin Center. Haaretz compares the versions of these interviews that are now publically available with the originals. They find large sections to be missing. This missing segment from an interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. Elad Peled, is particularly shocking:
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee]. The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave. We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are gone.
Consequences of Military Operations
Another document removed by Malmab is a 1948 Israeli military intelligence paper titled ‘the emigration of the Arabs of Palestine’, written by an officer of Shia, the precursor to Shin Bet.
The lengthy document intricately describes the ethnic cleansing of 219 villages and four cities. It lists the six principle reasons for Palestinians fleeing their homes:
(1) “Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab places of settlement.”
(2) the impact of these acts of hostility on neighbouring villages
(3) operations by breakaway [Israeli terror organisations]”, particularly the Irgun and Lehi gangs
(4) orders issued by Palestinian institutions and leaders
(5) “Jewish ‘whispering operations’ to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”
(6) “evacuation ultimatums.”
He estimates that 70 percent of the Palestinian refugees fled their homes as a direct consequence of Jewish military operations. The Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris used this document to write a 1986 article about the Nakba. Soon after, Morris found that this document had been removed from public records.
Censorship of History
Moreover, Malmab is just one cog in a larger censorship wheel: Tuvia Friling, Israel’s chief archivist, notes, “In 1998, the confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad archives expired…When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of all the material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous – most of the material can be opened.”
As of February 2018, this confidentiality period is 90 years. Haaretz also quotes the executive director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne, “The IDF Archive, which is the largest archive in Israel, is sealed almost hermetically.
About 1 percent of the material is open. The Shin Bet archive, which contains materials of immense importance [to scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
The Israeli, anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé told The Electronic Intifada that Malmab has removed many of the documents that he and the other ‘New Historians’ used to expose the truth of the 1948 Nakba, including massacres, rapes, pillaging and demolition of homes.
Pappé says that many of the historians working with Nakba-era documents had already realised that Israeli security was removing these documents from public archives: he says, “[these historians] were unable to revisit ‘the village files’, which formed an important proof in my argument that the 1948 war was an act of ethnic cleansing.”
Similarly, in a response to Haaretz’s original article, Morris describes how his recent request to see documents that he had used in 2005 to write about the 1948 massacre in the Palestinian town Deir Yassin, was refused. The IDF offered Morris no explanation other than saying, “now the documents are closed”.
Why Israel is Blocking Access to This Information
Haaretz interviewed Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for more than two decades, about the archives project. He told Haaretz that exposing the truth about 1948 could ‘generate unrest among the country’s Arab population’. Many of the documents have already been published by the ‘New Historians’, but Horev hopes their removal will discredit these histories and undermine studies of Palestinian refugees.
Other Israeli proponents of censorship argue that uncovering these facts could weaken Israel’s foreign relations, and result in Israel being tried for war crimes.
‘Eliminating the Native’
Ilan Pappé warns that this censorship “must be understood in a new political climate and [is] not simply an attempt to spare Israeli governments embarrassment”. The reasons that Israeli Security are hiding these documents, Pappé says, are more “profound and alarming” than that they challenge the official Israeli account of the Nakba; he says that “the reasons…are part of a new assault on Palestine and the Palestinians.”
Pappé believes that the censorship of these documents is part of the wider American-Israeli endeavour to depoliticise the ‘Palestinian Question’. He links the censorship to other recent events such as the ‘Nakba law’, the recent settlement expansion and demolitions which represent an annexation of Area C, the 2018 Israeli Nation-State Law and Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Pappé argues that Palestine is now at a dangerous point in its history: Israel is attempting to conclude the ‘elimination of the native’, a term coined by the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe to describe the motive behind settler colonial movements such as Zionism.
This is increasingly possible because Israel is becoming subject to less international criticism: pro-Palestinian politicians are increasingly dismissed as anti-Semites and legislation has been introduced in several countries to protect Israel from activism, including boycotts.
The removal of archival material about the Nakba is clearly one step towards ‘eliminating the native’, but how big is this step?
Pappé argues that a comprehensive understanding of the Nakba is necessary to understand subsequent Israeli policy. It is true that the Palestinian people do not need Israeli archive documents, or the New Historians’ accounts of 1948 that they generated, to remember the Nakba.
However, this archival evidence does expose the blueprint behind the Israeli war crimes of 1948, giving historians a broader understanding of the Zionist movement. On an international stage, they also lend credibility to the testimonies of the Palestinian people.
Therefore, Israel’s removal of these pieces of Palestinian history from public view makes it harder to explain Palestine’s present and change its future.
The department’s official aim is to remove sensitive information about Israel’s nuclear programme from public archives, but it has emerged that Malmab has also removed hundreds of documents relating to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, that had previously been declassified.
Unveiled Nakba Massacres
During the Nakba, 800,000 Palestinian people were forcefully evacuated from their homes and became refugees. The Israeli government’s official account of these events maintains that the Palestinian people chose to emigrate, encouraged by Arab politicians and leaders. Malmab has been removing any documents that counter this official narrative from public archives, deeming them a ‘security threat’.
Haaretz found that Malmab has removed accounts of IOF generals about the massacres of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well as evidence of the expulsion of Bedouin communities during Israel’s early years of statehood.
One example of a document that has been removed from public archives is a series of interviews conducted in the early 2000s with former Israeli military figures by the Yitzhak Rabin Center. Haaretz compares the versions of these interviews that are now publically available with the originals. They find large sections to be missing. This missing segment from an interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. Elad Peled, is particularly shocking:
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee]. The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave. We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are gone.
Consequences of Military Operations
Another document removed by Malmab is a 1948 Israeli military intelligence paper titled ‘the emigration of the Arabs of Palestine’, written by an officer of Shia, the precursor to Shin Bet.
The lengthy document intricately describes the ethnic cleansing of 219 villages and four cities. It lists the six principle reasons for Palestinians fleeing their homes:
(1) “Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab places of settlement.”
(2) the impact of these acts of hostility on neighbouring villages
(3) operations by breakaway [Israeli terror organisations]”, particularly the Irgun and Lehi gangs
(4) orders issued by Palestinian institutions and leaders
(5) “Jewish ‘whispering operations’ to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”
(6) “evacuation ultimatums.”
He estimates that 70 percent of the Palestinian refugees fled their homes as a direct consequence of Jewish military operations. The Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris used this document to write a 1986 article about the Nakba. Soon after, Morris found that this document had been removed from public records.
Censorship of History
Moreover, Malmab is just one cog in a larger censorship wheel: Tuvia Friling, Israel’s chief archivist, notes, “In 1998, the confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad archives expired…When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of all the material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous – most of the material can be opened.”
As of February 2018, this confidentiality period is 90 years. Haaretz also quotes the executive director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne, “The IDF Archive, which is the largest archive in Israel, is sealed almost hermetically.
About 1 percent of the material is open. The Shin Bet archive, which contains materials of immense importance [to scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
The Israeli, anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé told The Electronic Intifada that Malmab has removed many of the documents that he and the other ‘New Historians’ used to expose the truth of the 1948 Nakba, including massacres, rapes, pillaging and demolition of homes.
Pappé says that many of the historians working with Nakba-era documents had already realised that Israeli security was removing these documents from public archives: he says, “[these historians] were unable to revisit ‘the village files’, which formed an important proof in my argument that the 1948 war was an act of ethnic cleansing.”
Similarly, in a response to Haaretz’s original article, Morris describes how his recent request to see documents that he had used in 2005 to write about the 1948 massacre in the Palestinian town Deir Yassin, was refused. The IDF offered Morris no explanation other than saying, “now the documents are closed”.
Why Israel is Blocking Access to This Information
Haaretz interviewed Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for more than two decades, about the archives project. He told Haaretz that exposing the truth about 1948 could ‘generate unrest among the country’s Arab population’. Many of the documents have already been published by the ‘New Historians’, but Horev hopes their removal will discredit these histories and undermine studies of Palestinian refugees.
Other Israeli proponents of censorship argue that uncovering these facts could weaken Israel’s foreign relations, and result in Israel being tried for war crimes.
‘Eliminating the Native’
Ilan Pappé warns that this censorship “must be understood in a new political climate and [is] not simply an attempt to spare Israeli governments embarrassment”. The reasons that Israeli Security are hiding these documents, Pappé says, are more “profound and alarming” than that they challenge the official Israeli account of the Nakba; he says that “the reasons…are part of a new assault on Palestine and the Palestinians.”
Pappé believes that the censorship of these documents is part of the wider American-Israeli endeavour to depoliticise the ‘Palestinian Question’. He links the censorship to other recent events such as the ‘Nakba law’, the recent settlement expansion and demolitions which represent an annexation of Area C, the 2018 Israeli Nation-State Law and Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Pappé argues that Palestine is now at a dangerous point in its history: Israel is attempting to conclude the ‘elimination of the native’, a term coined by the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe to describe the motive behind settler colonial movements such as Zionism.
This is increasingly possible because Israel is becoming subject to less international criticism: pro-Palestinian politicians are increasingly dismissed as anti-Semites and legislation has been introduced in several countries to protect Israel from activism, including boycotts.
The removal of archival material about the Nakba is clearly one step towards ‘eliminating the native’, but how big is this step?
Pappé argues that a comprehensive understanding of the Nakba is necessary to understand subsequent Israeli policy. It is true that the Palestinian people do not need Israeli archive documents, or the New Historians’ accounts of 1948 that they generated, to remember the Nakba.
However, this archival evidence does expose the blueprint behind the Israeli war crimes of 1948, giving historians a broader understanding of the Zionist movement. On an international stage, they also lend credibility to the testimonies of the Palestinian people.
Therefore, Israel’s removal of these pieces of Palestinian history from public view makes it harder to explain Palestine’s present and change its future.
31 may 2019
Sparking an uproar in 2015, Netanyahu argued prominent Palestinian leader 'played an important role' in Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jews, but Prof. Mustafa Abbasi says Palestinians were 'not at all' looking to aid the Nazis
In 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an uproar when he claimed that Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini was the one who’d urged Hitler to annihilate the Jews. In the wake of the criticism this elicited, Netanyahu said his intention was not to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust, but to note that “the Mufti played an important role in the Final Solution.”
But it turns out that there was another side to the story that also escaped mention by Netanyahu, the historian’s son: the forgotten role played by thousands of Palestinians who did not heed the Mufti of Jerusalem’s call to support the Axis countries, and went so far as to take up arms to fight the Nazis, often shoulder to shoulder with young Jews from Mandatory Palestine.
Professor Mustafa Abbasi, a historian at Tel Hai Academic College, has spent years tracing their story. Having recently published an academic article on the subject, this week he suggested an opposite narrative to the one that Netanyahu put forward. The prime minister had sought to paint the Palestinians as supporters of the Third Reich, but Abbasi says, “The Mufti did not find a receptive audience among the Palestinians for his call to aid the Nazis. Not at all.”
The subject of Abbasi’s research is unusual. Many studies have been published about Jewish volunteerism in the war against the Nazis, which reached a peak with the formation of the Jewish Brigade. But “the thousands of Arab volunteers are hardly mentioned and sometimes the record is often distorted,” Abbasi says.
In an article in the latest issue of the periodical Cathedra (“Palestinians Fighting the Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in World War II”), he explains why these Palestinian fighters have been left out of the history books.
On the one hand, Zionist historians naturally placed an emphasis on the role played by Jewish volunteers in the fight against the Nazis. On the other hand, their Palestinian counterparts were focusing on the struggle against British rule and were not eager to glorify the names of those who cooperated with Britain not so many years after the British put down the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, and thereby indirectly helped the Jews establish a state.
“Neither side wished to highlight this subject,” says Professor Abbasi. “But I think it’s the historian’s job to be faithful to the sources and to try to describe history as it was, without being hostage to any national narrative that would limit him and prevent him from writing history freely.”
One has to wonder why no organization was ever established to commemorate the actions of these Palestinian volunteers. “Many of them were killed and many others are still listed as missing. But no memorial has ever been established for them,” says Abbasi. In fact, the records of the Palestinian volunteers, along with much of their personal archives and papers, have disappeared, much of it lost in the War of Independence.
Over the last few years, Abbasi was able to learn of their story in Palestinian newspapers from the Mandate era, in memoirs and personal journals, and through interviews he conducted with a few of the last remaining volunteers who are still alive. He also collected material from various British archives, from the Zionist Archive, and the archives of the Haganah and the IDF.
Abbasi estimates that about 12,000 young Palestinians enlisted in the British Army in World War II. Hundreds became POWs, many others (the exact figure is unknown) were killed. “Compared to other peoples, this is not an insignificant number,” he says, and also points out that, unlike other groups, the Palestinians volunteered for the British Army from the first stage of the war.
Initially, the Palestinian and Jewish volunteers served in mixed units. “They received training and drilled at the same bases and in many instances fought shoulder to shoulder, and were also taken prisoner together,” says Abbasi. And as reported here two years ago, the proximity of the Jewish and Palestinian fighters sometimes led to unusual outcomes, as in the case of Shehab Hadjaj, a Palestinian who enlisted in the British Army, was taken prisoner in Germany and died in 1943. To this day, he is listed at Mount Herzl as “a casualty of Israel’s wars” because someone mistakenly thought his surname indicated that he was Jewish.
“Relations among the fighters were generally good, and if there was any friction it was mainly over service conditions, like mail and food,” Abbasi says. However, there were certain key differences between the two groups, too. For example, while the Jews were united in their goal of fighting the Nazis to promote the establishment of the Jewish state, the Palestinians “had no clear national agenda,” Abbasi writes. For this reason, unlike the Jews, they did not seek to form separate Palestinian units and there was no “Palestinian Brigade” parallel to the Jewish Brigade, in which thousands of Jews from Mandatory Palestine served.
So who were the Palestinians who volunteered for the British Army to fight the Nazis? Abbasi says they mostly came from the Palestinian elite and that, contrary to what many think, represented “an important and central part of the Palestinian public.” A part of the public that believed it was necessary to stand by Britain at this time, and to temporarily put aside the Palestinian national aspirations – akin to the Jewish idea to “fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler.”
They did this at a time when the Mufti of Jerusalem had left Palestine for exile in the Arab countries and Europe, where he met with Hitler and congratulated the Muslim volunteers of the Free Arab Legion – an Arab unit established in the army of Nazi Germany. “He left Palestine for a decade in 1937. What kind of leader abandons his people at such a time?” Abbasi wonders. “He had no influence on the public. He was detached and the public was already tired of him and his methods. They didn’t see him as a leader,” he says. “Anyone who says differently is distorting history,” he adds in a not so subtle dig at certain politicians.
In his research, he documented pro-British propaganda conferences that were held from 1940 on in Abu Dis (next to Jerusalem), in Jenin, in villages in the Nablus area, in Tul Karm and in Lod. Among the supporters of Britain’s fight against the Nazis were the mayors of Nablus and Gaza. Radio Palestine broadcast the comments of an Egyptian writer who said, “The war is between the lofty and humane values represented by England and the forces of darkness represented by the Nazis.”
Motivations for volunteering were varied. “Some did it for ideological reasons, out of opposition to the Nazi ideology and loyalty to the British and the values that they represented,” says Abbasi. This motivation was common among upper middle class and highly educated Palestinian volunteers from urban backgrounds. Rural Palestinians were motivated largely by financial reasons. “And there were also those who were seeking adventure and wanted a chance to travel abroad,” he says.
Abbasi found that some Palestinian women also volunteered to fight the Nazis. Almost 120 young women did so as part of the
Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, alongside Jewish women. A British recruiting poster in Arabic, published in the Falastin newspaper in January 1942, read: “She couldn’t stop thinking about contribution and sacrifice, she felt ongoing pride and exaltation of spirit – when she did what she saw as her sacred duty for her nation and its sons. When your country is crying out to you and asking for your service, when your country makes it plain that our Arab men need your love and support, and when your country reminds you of how cruel the enemy is – when your country is calling you, can you stand by and do nothing?”
Abbasi is one of the only researchers in Palestinian society who is studying this area, which was also the subject of a 2015 article by Dalia Karpel in Haaretz Magazine. He came to it thanks to his maternal grandfather, Sa’id Abbasi, who was one of the volunteers in the British Army during the war. “The family didn’t talk about it, until one day when I asked my grandmother why there was such a big age difference between her children,” he says. “Her answer was: ‘Don’t remind me of the time your grandfather left me for so many years.’” Abbasi decided to find out more about that time, and came to see that his family story was part of his people’s history.
In the future, he hopes, the original material he has collected will be developed into a book that, for the first time, will tell the optimistic story of a rare moment in history in which Jews and Palestinians joined forces for a lofty shared goal.
In 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an uproar when he claimed that Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini was the one who’d urged Hitler to annihilate the Jews. In the wake of the criticism this elicited, Netanyahu said his intention was not to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust, but to note that “the Mufti played an important role in the Final Solution.”
But it turns out that there was another side to the story that also escaped mention by Netanyahu, the historian’s son: the forgotten role played by thousands of Palestinians who did not heed the Mufti of Jerusalem’s call to support the Axis countries, and went so far as to take up arms to fight the Nazis, often shoulder to shoulder with young Jews from Mandatory Palestine.
Professor Mustafa Abbasi, a historian at Tel Hai Academic College, has spent years tracing their story. Having recently published an academic article on the subject, this week he suggested an opposite narrative to the one that Netanyahu put forward. The prime minister had sought to paint the Palestinians as supporters of the Third Reich, but Abbasi says, “The Mufti did not find a receptive audience among the Palestinians for his call to aid the Nazis. Not at all.”
The subject of Abbasi’s research is unusual. Many studies have been published about Jewish volunteerism in the war against the Nazis, which reached a peak with the formation of the Jewish Brigade. But “the thousands of Arab volunteers are hardly mentioned and sometimes the record is often distorted,” Abbasi says.
In an article in the latest issue of the periodical Cathedra (“Palestinians Fighting the Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in World War II”), he explains why these Palestinian fighters have been left out of the history books.
On the one hand, Zionist historians naturally placed an emphasis on the role played by Jewish volunteers in the fight against the Nazis. On the other hand, their Palestinian counterparts were focusing on the struggle against British rule and were not eager to glorify the names of those who cooperated with Britain not so many years after the British put down the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, and thereby indirectly helped the Jews establish a state.
“Neither side wished to highlight this subject,” says Professor Abbasi. “But I think it’s the historian’s job to be faithful to the sources and to try to describe history as it was, without being hostage to any national narrative that would limit him and prevent him from writing history freely.”
One has to wonder why no organization was ever established to commemorate the actions of these Palestinian volunteers. “Many of them were killed and many others are still listed as missing. But no memorial has ever been established for them,” says Abbasi. In fact, the records of the Palestinian volunteers, along with much of their personal archives and papers, have disappeared, much of it lost in the War of Independence.
Over the last few years, Abbasi was able to learn of their story in Palestinian newspapers from the Mandate era, in memoirs and personal journals, and through interviews he conducted with a few of the last remaining volunteers who are still alive. He also collected material from various British archives, from the Zionist Archive, and the archives of the Haganah and the IDF.
Abbasi estimates that about 12,000 young Palestinians enlisted in the British Army in World War II. Hundreds became POWs, many others (the exact figure is unknown) were killed. “Compared to other peoples, this is not an insignificant number,” he says, and also points out that, unlike other groups, the Palestinians volunteered for the British Army from the first stage of the war.
Initially, the Palestinian and Jewish volunteers served in mixed units. “They received training and drilled at the same bases and in many instances fought shoulder to shoulder, and were also taken prisoner together,” says Abbasi. And as reported here two years ago, the proximity of the Jewish and Palestinian fighters sometimes led to unusual outcomes, as in the case of Shehab Hadjaj, a Palestinian who enlisted in the British Army, was taken prisoner in Germany and died in 1943. To this day, he is listed at Mount Herzl as “a casualty of Israel’s wars” because someone mistakenly thought his surname indicated that he was Jewish.
“Relations among the fighters were generally good, and if there was any friction it was mainly over service conditions, like mail and food,” Abbasi says. However, there were certain key differences between the two groups, too. For example, while the Jews were united in their goal of fighting the Nazis to promote the establishment of the Jewish state, the Palestinians “had no clear national agenda,” Abbasi writes. For this reason, unlike the Jews, they did not seek to form separate Palestinian units and there was no “Palestinian Brigade” parallel to the Jewish Brigade, in which thousands of Jews from Mandatory Palestine served.
So who were the Palestinians who volunteered for the British Army to fight the Nazis? Abbasi says they mostly came from the Palestinian elite and that, contrary to what many think, represented “an important and central part of the Palestinian public.” A part of the public that believed it was necessary to stand by Britain at this time, and to temporarily put aside the Palestinian national aspirations – akin to the Jewish idea to “fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler.”
They did this at a time when the Mufti of Jerusalem had left Palestine for exile in the Arab countries and Europe, where he met with Hitler and congratulated the Muslim volunteers of the Free Arab Legion – an Arab unit established in the army of Nazi Germany. “He left Palestine for a decade in 1937. What kind of leader abandons his people at such a time?” Abbasi wonders. “He had no influence on the public. He was detached and the public was already tired of him and his methods. They didn’t see him as a leader,” he says. “Anyone who says differently is distorting history,” he adds in a not so subtle dig at certain politicians.
In his research, he documented pro-British propaganda conferences that were held from 1940 on in Abu Dis (next to Jerusalem), in Jenin, in villages in the Nablus area, in Tul Karm and in Lod. Among the supporters of Britain’s fight against the Nazis were the mayors of Nablus and Gaza. Radio Palestine broadcast the comments of an Egyptian writer who said, “The war is between the lofty and humane values represented by England and the forces of darkness represented by the Nazis.”
Motivations for volunteering were varied. “Some did it for ideological reasons, out of opposition to the Nazi ideology and loyalty to the British and the values that they represented,” says Abbasi. This motivation was common among upper middle class and highly educated Palestinian volunteers from urban backgrounds. Rural Palestinians were motivated largely by financial reasons. “And there were also those who were seeking adventure and wanted a chance to travel abroad,” he says.
Abbasi found that some Palestinian women also volunteered to fight the Nazis. Almost 120 young women did so as part of the
Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, alongside Jewish women. A British recruiting poster in Arabic, published in the Falastin newspaper in January 1942, read: “She couldn’t stop thinking about contribution and sacrifice, she felt ongoing pride and exaltation of spirit – when she did what she saw as her sacred duty for her nation and its sons. When your country is crying out to you and asking for your service, when your country makes it plain that our Arab men need your love and support, and when your country reminds you of how cruel the enemy is – when your country is calling you, can you stand by and do nothing?”
Abbasi is one of the only researchers in Palestinian society who is studying this area, which was also the subject of a 2015 article by Dalia Karpel in Haaretz Magazine. He came to it thanks to his maternal grandfather, Sa’id Abbasi, who was one of the volunteers in the British Army during the war. “The family didn’t talk about it, until one day when I asked my grandmother why there was such a big age difference between her children,” he says. “Her answer was: ‘Don’t remind me of the time your grandfather left me for so many years.’” Abbasi decided to find out more about that time, and came to see that his family story was part of his people’s history.
In the future, he hopes, the original material he has collected will be developed into a book that, for the first time, will tell the optimistic story of a rare moment in history in which Jews and Palestinians joined forces for a lofty shared goal.
