The Birth of Israel Myths and Realities

By Simha Flapan

Simha Flapan was born in Poland in 1911 and emigrated to Palestine in 1930. From 1954 to 1981 he was National Secretary of Israel's Mapam party and Director of its Arab Affairs department. He died in Tel Aviv in 1987, the same year this book was published. In writing this book he hoped to sweep "away the distortions and lies that have hardened into sacrosanct myth." He examined what he described as seven myths about Israel.
Myth one: Acceptance of the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 was a compromise by which the Jewish community gave up the idea of Jewish state in the whole of Palestine and recognized the right of Palestinians to their own state, believing that the Palestinians would peacefully cooperate with the resolution. Flapan said that the reality was that it was only a tactical move in an strategy aimed a thwarting the creation of a Palestinian Arab state with a secret agreement with Transjordan and the ulterior motive of obtaining more territory for the Jewish state.
Myth two: Palestinians totally rejected partition and launched an all-out war under the urging of the mufti of Jerusalem, forcing the Jews to depend on a military solution. Flapan said there was more to it than that and the majority of Palestinians did not respond to the mufti's call for holy war against Israel and that many Palestinian groups made efforts to reach a compromise prior to Israel's Declaration of Independence. He further declared that Ben-Gurion opposed the creation of a Palestinian state and that fed fuel to the mufti's fire.
Myth three: Palestinians fled Israel (before and after its establishment) in response to a call by Arab leaders to leave and then return with Arab armies in victory and that Jewish leaders tried to persuade Palestinians to stay. Flapan said the truth was that the flight of Palestinians was prompted by Israel's leaders who believed Zionist colonization and statehood required the relocation of Palestinian Arabs to Arab countries.
Myth four: All the Arabs states united in 1948 to invade and expel the Jews. However Flapan found that the impetus was to prevent Transjordan & Israel from implementing their secret agreement. Abdallah of Transjordan wanted Palestinian lands to create what he called Greater Syria. The other Arabs countries opposed that scheme.
Myth five: The Arab invasion in 1948 made war inevitable. Flapan said that documents showed it was not inevitable because the Arabs had agreed to a last-minute proposal for a three month truce if Israel would postpone its Declaration of Independence. But Israel rejected the proposal.
Myth six: The newborn state of Israel was outnumbered and outgunned by its Arab opponents. Flapan said that was true only for the first four weeks of the war, at which point Israel received huge quantities of arms from overseas and that Israel's fighters were better trained and more experienced than the Arab forces.
Myth seven: Israel has always wanted peace but since no Arab states are willing to recognize Israel there is no one to talk peace to. Flapan said that from the end of World War II to 1952, Israel in fact turned down successive proposals by Arab states and by neutral mediators.
Flapan looked at each so-called myth and presented his arguments against them in this book. I thought some of his arguments were a bit of a reach and rather thin. But like they say, there is always two sides to every story and Flapan's book is very informative.