Why does the ‘only democratic state in the Middle East’ (Israel) sends Defence Ministry Agents to Archives in order to brow-beat them into hiding historical documents?

For nearly 20 years Israeli Arabs lived under military rule – not because they were a Fifth Column but to prevent them returning to the land that had stolen been from them

Israel is a state that has been built on myths – whether it is that ‘god’ gave the settlers the land of the Palestinians or the fiction that in 1948, the Palestinians miraculously ran away on the orders of the Arab states in order that a Jewish state could be created. As Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris and other historians have demonstrated, the Palestinians left because they were forced to do so.


I have previously covered the topic of the desperate efforts of the Israeli state to prevent the truth emerging. This has taken the form of reclassifying documents that have been released to historians, presumably on the assumption that they were not copied and therefore any one quoting from them can’t prove that what they said is true.

At the end of this article in Ha’aretz, Adam Raz quotes the cynical comments of Yehiel Horev, the former director of the Malmab, the secretive Defence Ministry unit which is dedicated to rewriting the history of the Israeli military’s deeds. In an interview he made his purposes crystal clear:

“When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened… If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.”

Of course all nations based their identity on myths such as the tales of King Arthur and his knights. Israel’s national myths are not just about ancient tales of kings but about recent events where the evidence is crystal clear. Myths that are national lies with the sole purpose of legitimising the theft of land.

From 1949 to 1966 Israel’s Arab population was kept under military government. They could not leave their villages without permission. As is the case with everything in Israel the excuse was that the Arabs were a fifth column, a security threat.

We now know, as the article by Adam Raz explains, that this was never true and was not believed by the military establishment either. The purpose of military rule was in order to prevent Israel’s Arabs, who had often been displaced by the fighting from their villages, from returning to their land.

A law, the Absentee Property Law was passed in 1950 with the specific purpose of defining the property of persons who were expelled, fled or left the country after 29 November 1947 as well as their property (land, houses, bank accounts etc.), as “absentees”.

Property belonging to absentees was placed under the control of the Custodian for Absentees’ Property. The Absentees’ Property Law 1950 was the main legal instrument used by Israel to take possession of the land belonging to the internal and external Palestinian refugees.

An Orwellian category Present-Absentees was created. You could be present in Israel, having not been expelled, and still be absent. Even if you left your house in 1948 because of the fighting or you were forced out by the Haganah you are still counted as an Internally Displaced Person. Of course Israeli Jews who were forced to leave their homes face no such prohibition.

It is estimated today that 1 in 4 Israeli Palestinians are Internally Displaced Persons. That lies at the root of inequality in Israel, an inequality emphasised by the Jewish Nation State Law that made ‘Jewish settlement’ into a national virtue.

IDPs are not permitted to live in the homes they formerly lived in, even if they were in the same area, the property still exists, and they can show that they own it. [Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, pp. 68-91].

However it was one thing to pass a racist law but it was another thing to implement that law. Israeli Palestinians desired nothing more than to return to where they were living but for Zionism, all wings of the Zionist movement including the ‘left’ Mapam, it was an article of faith that no Palestinian should ever return to their home even if they only moved a mile away for safety.

Thus it was that military rule was instituted over Israel’s Palestinian population. By forbidding them to leave their villages without permission it made it that much easier to prevent unauthorised access to their previous homes. This was necessary because although Zionist settlers moved into their former villages this took time, not least because at that time there weren’t enough Zionist settlers.

Thus Israel was born in a fit of ethnic cleansing and today the job of Malmad and the Ministry of Defence is to keep documents of the time secret and hidden and to perpetuate the myth that the Palestinian refugees left of their own accord.

Tony Greenstein

Secret Israeli Document Reveals Plan to Keep Arabs Off Their Lands

A document unsealed after 60 years reveals the Israeli government’s secret intentions behind the imposition of a military government on the country’s Arab citizens in 1948: not to enhance security but to ensure Jewish control of the land

Adam Raz
Jan 31, 2020 11:50 AM

Israel’s defense establishment has for years endeavored to conceal historical documentation in various archives around the country, as was revealed in an article in Haaretz last July.

That article, which followed up on a study by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, noted that for closed to 20 years, the staff at Malmab – the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of security of the defense establishment”) – had been visiting public and private archives and forcing their directors to mothball documents relating to Israeli history, with special emphasis on the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was done without legal authority. The article sparked a furor, and dozens of researchers and historians urged the defense minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, to halt the clandestine illegal activity. Their appeal received no response.

When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened… If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.

What sort of documents did Malmab order the directors to hide away in their archives’ safes? The many and varied examples include: thick files kept by the military government under which Israel’s Arab citizens lived for 18 years; testimony about the looting and destruction of Arab villages during the Independence War; cabinet ministers’ comments on the Arab refugee situation, following that war; evidence of acts of expulsion and testimony about camps set up for captives; information about Israel’s nuclear project; documents relating to various foreign policy issues; and even a letter sent by the poet and Holocaust survivor Abba Kovner about his own anti-Arab sentiments.

It’s not clear whether Malmab has reduced its activity in the archives since the article was published. However, it can be said that during the past six months, files earlier ordered closed by Malmab have been reopened, adding to our knowledge of the history of the two peoples who share this land. Though none are earth-shattering in historical significance, these are important documents that shed light on significant aspects of various events.

One such document is a secret codicil to a report drawn up by the government-appointed Ratner Committee in early 1956. The document, restored from oblivion in a safe at the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center at Givat Haviva, is titled, “Security Settlement and the Land Question.”

The importance of the information included in the codicil can be seen within the context of the history of the military government imposed on Israel’s Arabs in 1948, just months after independence, and abolished only in 1966. There were about 156,000 Arabs in Israel at the war’s end. Following the armistice agreement with Jordan (April 1949) and the annexation of the Triangle – a concentration of Arab locales in central Israel – 27 villages, from Kafr Qasem in the south to Umm al-Fahm in the north, also fell under the jurisdiction of the military government.

Administratively, the latter was divided into three regions: north, center (Triangle) and Negev. Sixty percent of Israel’s Arab citizens lived in Galilee, 20 percent in the Triangle and the rest in the Negev and in various so-called mixed cities, such as Haifa and Acre. In practice, about 85 percent of all Arab citizens were under the rule of the military government, subject to night-time curfews and regulations requiring them to obtain a travel permit before leaving their area of residence.

Related Articles

• Burying the Nakba: How Israel systematically hides evidence of 1948 expulsion of      Arabs
• Land swap in south, population swap in north: Israel and Palestine according to Trump

The military government was based on the Defense (Emergency) Regulations, promulgated in 1945 by British mandatory authorities, and invoked by Israel to facilitate supervision of the movement and settlement of its Arab citizens, and to prevent their return to the areas captured by Jewish forces in the Independence War. The Jewish public was told that the purpose of the military government was to deter hostile actions against the state by its Arab citizens. In practice, however, it only exacerbated the enmity between the two peoples.

The military government, an ugly episode in Israeli history, was the subject of severe criticism at the time, not least by certain members of the Jewish community. Various parties on both the left and the right – Ahdut Ha’avodah, Mapam, the Communist Party and Herut (precursor of Likud) – objected, each for its own reasons, to its imposition. One reason for the opposition was that, as early as the early 1950s, the Shin Bet security service had concluded that the country’s Arab citizens did not pose any sort of security risk.

Opinion was also divided in Mapai, the ruling party (precursor of Labor). The state committee that was headed by Prof. Yohanan Ratner, a retired general and architect, was the second body appointed to consider whether the military government was necessary. The first, convened by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in 1949, had decided to leave the status quo in place. In February 1956, the three members of the Ratner Committee reached the unanimous conclusion that

“the military government has been reduced as much as it can be, and there is no place for a further reduction.”

That this was probably a foregone conclusion is attested to by a remark made in public by a member of that panel, Daniel Auster (mayor of Jerusalem until 1950):

“Of 200,000 Arabs and other minorities now residing in Israel, we did not find one who is loyal to the state.”

Secret action

A few years later, in the early 1960s, when pressure mounted to abolish the military government, Ben-Gurion explained that it was still essential in order to prevent an insurrection by the country’s Arabs. The state’s existence depends on the presence of the military government, he maintained, although he did not mention the opposition to it of the security establishment. However, it gradually became clear that what truly interested the advocates of the government was not security but control over land. That had been facilitated by Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations (1945), under which a military commander can issue an order to close “any area or place.”

In a closed meeting of the Mapai leadership, in 1962, Ben-Gurion stated that without article 125, “we would not have been able to do what we did” in the Negev and Galilee. “Northern Galilee is Judenrein [empty of Jews],” he warned.

“We will find ourselves in that situation for many years if we do not prevent – by means of Article 125, by administrative force and military force – entry into forbidden areas. And in the eyes of the Arabs these forbidden areas are theirs. Because the land of Ayalon [Valley] is Arab land.”

Despite the inherent logic of this argument, few testimonies exist about the military government’s latent nationalist motivations. For one thing, there was a tacit understanding, rarely violated, that this was not a subject for public discussion. The secret appendix to the Ratner Committee’s report, found in the Yaari Archives and in the State Archives, and being published here for the first time, is highly illuminating about the true motives that guided the country’s leaders.

According to the panel, the army alone could not safeguard state lands: only Jewish settlement – “security settlement,” as it was called – could do that in the long run. It was thus essential to establish Jewish settlements in the three geographical zones overseen by the military government. Such a process, however, would be lengthy, the committee members agreed, and in the meantime Arab citizens uprooted in the war wanted to return to their homes – something that could not be prevented through legislation. In the view of the codicil’s framers,

“The laxness [by the Arabs] in seizing these areas is due mainly to the fact these areas were closed by the military government or under its supervision.”

They added that only

“the vigilance of the military government’s representatives largely prevented more serious lawlessness in regard to land seizure.”

In other words, it was that government that prevented the Arabs from returning to their lands.

The report’s authors also objected to a decision made by Pinhas Lavon, a senior Mapai figure who opposed the military government and who replaced Ben-Gurion as defence minister in early 1954 (but resigned a year later during the so-called Lavon affair, which involved a covert operation in Egypt that went wrong). Lavon cancelled the prior decision to divide Galilee into 46 separate, closed areas in which Arabs needed a permit to move from one to another. A division into three or four zones would be enough, to his mind, and would ease life for Arab citizens. The committee members were adamantly against this, arguing that it had led to excessively free movement by the Arabs, because of which “the takeover of the state’s lands increased.”

The Ratner Committee exceeded the official mandate it received upon its appointment in late 1955. Its secret codicil also includes detailed recommendations for amending property laws, particularly an Ottoman statute from 1858. The latter stipulated that anyone, Jew or Arab, who resided on land for 10 years consecutively, was entitled to retain it permanently. Now, eight years after Israel’s founding, the committee was worried that within two years, much land would be lost and transferred to Arab citizens. Its recommendation, then, was to abolish the time frame in regard to remaining on these lands.

The text of the secret codicil shows unequivocally that a major task of the military government was to act as a means to control the state’s lands until their permanent status could be regularised and until, with state support, Jewish settlement could begin in formerly Arab areas. Hence, one of the committee’s conclusions:

“Until the stabilisation of security settlement in the few reserve areas that can still be settled, it is essential to maintain the military government in these places and to strengthen its apparatus… so that the military government can ensure, directly and indirectly, that the lands are not lost to the state.”

The panel described the military government as a tool in the struggle against Arab “trespassers,” and added that without the military government, “many more areas are liable to be lost to the state.” In a reprimand to the state, the committee noted that the military government was suffering from “known laxness… as a result of the criticism being levelled at it.”

Published in part at the time (without the secret section), the Ratner Committee’s recommendations provoked considerable public and governmental criticism. Ben-Gurion, who received a copy of the report in February 1956, blocked discussion of it for months because of disagreements within the government. The Sinai War, which erupted in October 1956, meant that it stayed off the agenda for an even longer period. Ultimately, the report was never submitted to the government for approval, but nevertheless served as the basis for policy in the coming years. In 1958, another committee, headed by Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen, suggested far-reaching changes in the military government, effectively proposing its almost total abolition. Not surprisingly, the cabinet held lengthy discussions in 1959 about whether to publish the recommendations of the Rosen committee.

Why did the state continue to conceal a report that was written more than six decades ago? The explanation might lie in a cabinet session in July 1959, in which Education Minister Zalman Aranne stated that “among the conclusions are some that are political.” In other words, security had nothing to do with it. He added,

“The thing must be done, but not revealed, such as Judaizing Galilee, for example.”

Perhaps it’s appropriate here to recall the words of Yehiel Horev, the former director of the Malmab, who admitted in an interview to Haaretz last July that the defense establishment is simply trying to hamper historians.

“When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened… If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.”

Adam Raz, a historian, is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research and author of the book “Kafr Qasem Massacre: A Political Biography,” published in both Hebrew and Arabic.