The author tells of this artificial transformation of a sacred landscape in stark, sometimes emotionally charged prose. In many ways it compliments Walid Khalidi’s exhaustive but dispassionate account of every Palestinian settlement destroyed during and in the immediate aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49 (All That Remains, 1992 – see my review in Middle East Policy, Vol. III, No. 2, 1994). Whereas Khalidi passes no judgment but rather allows the facts to tell the sad, often horrific story of the Palestinian exodus, Benvenisti gives an uncensored account of some of the worst Israeli excesses and atrocities almost as if he is exorcising some inner demon that has been troubling him over the decades since he learned the truth that generations of Zionists have tried to cover up. Thirty-one cases are considered in detail. Their locations are shown on Map 2. The massacre at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem is one of the best-known of these. Others, like Safsaf near Safad, where 50-70 men were killed and 4 young women raped (p. 153), are less so. It was these instances of the violation of Muslim women’s honor that drove many Muslim villagers to flee. When forced to chose between land and honor, “honor won out over attachment to the land” (p. 247).

For decades the Israelis refused to acknowledge having had any part in the Palestinian exodus. It was always the fault of the lies spread by retreating Arab armies and “orders” from Arab governments. Benrenisti writes:

Ignoring the Arab landscape, and maintaining silence regarding the circumstances of its disappearance (always using the passive voice: “destroyed” or “abandoned”), makes it possible to avoid having to deal with an embarrassing situation and to stifle questions liable to destroy the Zionist mythos and to weaken faith in what is called “the internal truth of the righteousness of the path” (p. 231).

The Jewish Zionists, he laments, “have been drowned in a sea of consumerism and privatization.” In “a twist of irony,” it is to the Palestinians that “the values of national land as sacred property has been transferred.”

When it became impossible not to refer to specific instances of massacre and forced depopulation, as in the case of the large Muslim town of Safurriya near Nazareth, the excuse was that it “was a center for murderous Arab gangs” (p. 231). This loaded term was used to describe any group of Palestinian villagers who were lucky enough to have access to weapons and brave enough to resist.

“A clear distinction was made,” states the author, “between villages most of whose inhabitants were Christian or Druze – which were barely touched – and Muslim villages, whose inhabitants had, in some cases, already abandoned them” (p. 148). Druze villages were in fact not touched at all because of a tacit alliance between the tiny Palestinian Druze community (some 15,000 in 1948) and the Zionists before the war began. Nine years later in 1957, the Druze voluntarily agreed to accept male military conscription in the IDF in return for Israeli recognition of theirs as a distinct community (the Ottomans and the British had lumped them together with the Muslims). A similar dispensation was given to the even smaller Circassian Muslim community, with its two villages in Galilee.

The fate of Christian villages was much different. As the author himself notes on p. 154, when the Greek Catholic village of Eilbaun surrendered to the IDF, “the Israeli commander ordered the villagers to abandon it. To speed up the exodus he chose 12 young men and had them taken out and shot.” In the mixed Christian-Druze but predominantly Greek Orthodox town of al-Rama, “the commander of the occupying force instructed the Druze to return to their houses and the Christians to leave for Lebanon, threatening those who refused with summary execution” (p. 154). In the large Christian-Muslim village of al-Bassa on the Lebanese border, “one of the largest and most highly developed villages in the north of the country,” the village was attacked, and of the few inhabitants who remained hidden in the Orthodox church, “Israeli soldiers shot and killed 5 villagers inside the church ...[and] shot and killed 7 villagers outside the church” (p. 140). Other Christian villages were forcibly abandoned, often with the lie that they would be allowed to return, such as in the cases of Kafr Birim and Iqrit. The villagers are still awaiting permission to reoccupy their land even though the Israeli courts have upheld their right to do so. The military always finds “security reasons” to override the law. Six village churches (including two in Al-Bassa) “are now deserted and crumbling,” excluding those in Kafr Birim and Iqrit, whose evicted villagers were at least allowed to maintain their churches (Maronite and Greek Catholic, respectively) and hold annual Easter services there (p. 289).

All this evidence of ethnic cleansing that makes many of Benvenisti’s countrymen uncomfortable with their past does not alter his own conviction that he has a right to be there. “No attempt to manipulate my sense of guilt will succeed in shaking my belief in my birthright to this land” (p. 5). But for those Palestinian exiles who have the same birthright, he acknowledges that something will in the end have to be done to accommodate them in some vague fashion. For him, these people, passionately attached to their land – which many of them have never seen – “have become the last Zionists.” The Jewish Zionists, he laments, “have been drowned in a sea of consumerism and privatization.” In “a twist of irony,” it is to the Palestinians that “the values of national land as sacred property has been transferred” (p. 332). Throughout the book the author refers to his father’s “naïve belief that there is enough space, physical and historical, for Jews and Arabs in their shared landscape” (p. 9). With any luck he will be proven right. In the meantime the author has given us a very forthright and deeply honest account of one prominent Israeli’s coming to terms with his nation’s short and far from irreproachable past.

The late Kamal Asali’s book, a collection of nine essays by leading Arab and European historians covering the history of Jerusalem over five centuries (3000 BC to the present), sets out, like Benvenisti’s, to put the record straight. In this case, however, there is no shady past to expose, but the need to publish an accessible account of Jerusalem’s history from the Arab perspective, given, as Rashid Khalidi in his introduction wryly puts it, “the extreme rarity of balanced general historical works on Jerusalem available in English” (p. xxii). The particular target of Khalidi’s remarks is the presumption of Israel’s “Jerusalem 3000” millennium celebrations, which very calculatedly dated the beginnings of the city with the Davidian conquest 1000 years before the birth of his descendant Christ. In fact, the city was 2000 years old when the Jews wrested the ancient hill town from the native Jebusites, many of whose customs and traditions David’s son Solomon adopted. Out of the religious amalgam of this union developed the Judaism that gave birth to Christianity (see Essay II: “Jerusalem from 1000-63 BC,” by George E. Mendenhall).

Much of the focus of the remaining seven essays is on the size and importance of the Jewish population of the city in given periods. With the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Hebrew population dropped from two-thirds to one-third of the Holy Land, and continued to decline, according to John Wilkinson, to only 9 percent by the time of the Arab conquest and a zero presence in the Holy City (p. 97). Jewish collaboration with the Persian conquerors a decade earlier had led to Byzantine retribution, which would probably have removed Jewish presence from Palestine altogether had it not been for the tolerance of Islam and the caliph Umar, who allowed them to return in small numbers. The Crusader conquest in 1099 exterminated both Jewish and Muslim populations in Jerusalem for nearly a century, but the restoration of the city to Islam by Saladin in 1187 also allowed for a Jewish return. Throughout the Ottoman period, their numbers remained small until the Zionist movement of the late nineteenth century attracted large numbers of European Jews to Palestine on the eve of World War I. The population was still quite small, however, less than 100,000. After the war, the number of Jews grew very rapidly so that by the early 1920s the official Jewish population of Jerusalem outnumbered the Arabs by a ratio of 3:2. But this was true, as Khalidi points out, only “within the grotesquely gerrymandered boundaries established by the British in the early 1920s ...[which] included every Jewish population concentration in the vicinity, some of them five or six kilometers from the city center, but excluded Arab neighborhoods like Silwan, which lie immediately under the walls of the Old City” (p. xxi). The Jerusalem subdistrict still had an Arab majority at the end of the mandate in 1948.

The U.N. partition plan of 1947, which called for the establishment of Jerusalem as a “corpus separatum” or international city, was never implemented but remains the solution adhered to by most member states of the United Nations, pending a final peace plan between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It was left for Michael Hudson of Georgetown University to write the final chapter on Jerusalem in the twentieth century (The Transformation of Jerusalem 1917-2000 AD); he has summarized this turbulent period with typical clarity based on unassailable expertise in this extremely tricky area. His conclusion is that any solution that will help solve not only the Jerusalem problem but the entire conflict is preferable to a situation that would allow the hatreds and conflicts on all sides to fester (p. 283). It is up to the Israelis to yield to the rest of the world, and up to the United States and Europe to insure that what they are willing to sacrifice for the cause of a lasting peace is sufficient.