Israeli Institutions Accepting 1948 Ethnic Cleansing

"NEW YORK, NY May 17, 2012 –The contrasting explanations offered by Palestinians and Israeli Jews for the Palestinian exodus during the 1948 War are often cited as a central stumbling block to peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians have claimed they were expelled in 1948, while it has been widely assumed that most Israeli Jews subscribed to a Zionist narrative claiming that Palestinians left willingly due to fear and in response to calls by Arab and Palestinians leaders.

Now a Ph.D. dissertation written by Rafi Nets, a former pre-doctoral fellow at the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at Teachers College, Columbia University, finds that most main Israeli-Jewish institutions acknowledge a balanced narrative: that the exodus was not entirely volitional, but was also caused by Jewish/Israeli expulsion. Nets, an Israeli Jew who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote his dissertation for the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, and received the 2012 award for best dissertation from the Association for Israel Studies. His findings have been published or accepted for publication in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, The Middle East Journal, Peace Review, and Peace and Change.

In 2009, Nets and Daniel Bar-Tal, a faculty member at the School of Education at Tel Aviv University, published a representative public opinion survey they had conducted which found that 47 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed believed expulsion by Israel was among the factors leading to the exodus. Only 41 percent accepted the Zionist narrative. The survey was supported by a grant to Nets from the IPRA Foundation. Now, through the analysis of all the memoirs of 1948 war veterans, newspaper articles, publications of non-governmental organizations, and scholarly studies, Nets finds that the balanced narrative has in fact been widely endorsed by Israeli-Jewish societal institutions since the late 1970s (and especially since the late 1980s). In addition, since 2000, all history textbooks approved by Israel’s Ministry of Education have also included the balanced narrative.

Palestinians have long called for Israelis to acknowledge the expulsions of 1948.  The recent findings indicate that such acknowledgement has taken place widely for several decades."(1)

Good to see historical integrity being taken seriously in more and more nations.

Israeli institutions have much to be commended for.

Footnote:
(1) http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/new-study-finds-that-51-6-of-israelis-acknowledge-that-world-is-not-flat/