PHOTO: Zionist paramilitary forces on patrol in the streets of Jerusalem in 1948. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images
Book Review
Nonfiction
Reckoning With Israel’s Past Is Hard. The Present Is Harder.
An Oct. 7 survival memoir and a chronicle of theft in 1948 grapple with the history of a war-torn region.
by Max Strasser
October 7, 2024
New York Times
[Max Strasser is The Times’s Ideas editor.]
LOOT: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, by Adam Raz
THE GATES OF GAZA: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, by Amir Tibon
Last autumn, in the weeks after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s crushing retaliation, it suddenly seemed as if everyone was talking about what Palestinians call the Nakba.
For good reason. Watching thousands fleeing Gaza City under Israeli orders — wheelchairs pushed along sandy roads, pickup trucks piled high with mattresses and children — evoked the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948. A Palestinian American friend told me that the news was triggering generational trauma. Israeli officials, too, were referencing the mid-20th century: Avi Dichter, a cabinet member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, boasted that the war would be “Nakba 2023.”
Nothing — not the Balfour Declaration, not the 1967 war, not the Oslo peace talks — is more critical in the troubled story of these neighbors than what happened at Israel’s creation.
For decades, there were few Jewish Israelis who would speak openly about how Zionist forces displaced and killed Palestinian civilians during what Israelis call their War of Independence. That changed in the 1980s with the arrival of a generation of scholars known as the New Historians. Though their scholarship remains taboo in Israel, their output continues. “Loot,” by Adam Raz, published in Hebrew in 2020 and recently translated into English, offers an important contribution to the tradition.
Raz, a historian and human rights researcher, narrows his lens further than previous authors, looking not at how the Zionist forces expelled Palestinians from their homes but instead at how they stole the things that filled them: farm equipment, livestock, cars, carpets, clothes, books, clocks, pianos. He estimates that the total value of plundered goods would be $820 million today.
LOOT: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, by Adam Raz
THE GATES OF GAZA: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, by Amir Tibon
Last autumn, in the weeks after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s crushing retaliation, it suddenly seemed as if everyone was talking about what Palestinians call the Nakba.
For good reason. Watching thousands fleeing Gaza City under Israeli orders — wheelchairs pushed along sandy roads, pickup trucks piled high with mattresses and children — evoked the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948. A Palestinian American friend told me that the news was triggering generational trauma. Israeli officials, too, were referencing the mid-20th century: Avi Dichter, a cabinet member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, boasted that the war would be “Nakba 2023.”
Nothing — not the Balfour Declaration, not the 1967 war, not the Oslo peace talks — is more critical in the troubled story of these neighbors than what happened at Israel’s creation.
For decades, there were few Jewish Israelis who would speak openly about how Zionist forces displaced and killed Palestinian civilians during what Israelis call their War of Independence. That changed in the 1980s with the arrival of a generation of scholars known as the New Historians. Though their scholarship remains taboo in Israel, their output continues. “Loot,” by Adam Raz, published in Hebrew in 2020 and recently translated into English, offers an important contribution to the tradition.
Raz, a historian and human rights researcher, narrows his lens further than previous authors, looking not at how the Zionist forces expelled Palestinians from their homes but instead at how they stole the things that filled them: farm equipment, livestock, cars, carpets, clothes, books, clocks, pianos. He estimates that the total value of plundered goods would be $820 million today.
Raz forensically chronicles the looting he finds described in military reports, letters and diaries. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the eye for narrative of earlier New Historians like Avi Shlaim or Tom Segev. “Loot” often reads like a Human Rights Watch report — damning in its meticulousness, but dry.
Still, the picture of Israeli society at the dawn of the Jewish state comes through clearly, in all its ugliness. Some of the newly minted Israelis plundered the homes of their former neighbors for profit; others, simply because they could. Soldiers did much of the looting, but even children and old women took part.
Not everyone approved, and it’s in the tension between those who condemned the marauding and those who didn’t — between the more vengeful and the more humanist strains among the Zionists — that the book’s most interesting themes emerge.
“From a political perspective, it is also extremely important that the property be looked after, and that when [the Arab residents] return they will find that it is safe,” one official wrote in his diary. And Israel’s minister of minorities Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit — the closest “Loot” comes to a hero, albeit a truly tragic one — demanded policies to stop the pillaging.
But allowing Arab residents to return wasn’t the plan. Sheetrit was sidelined by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who believed, Raz writes, that war was “a tool for societal design.” As Raz argues, the prime minister and those around him felt the theft, destruction and displacement would give Israelis the best chance to make a new society.
Many Jews worried that their nation had been born in sin. In the actions of their countrymen, some saw a disturbing mirror image: “These scenes were familiar to me, but I was always used to associating them with what others did to us during the Holocaust, during the world wars and during all the pogroms,” wrote one young soldier fighting in Tiberias. “And here — here we were doing these horrible things to others.”
I thought about historical echoes — and cycles of reprisal and violence — as I read Amir Tibon’s Oct. 7 survival memoir, “The Gates of Gaza.” In it, Tibon describes how he hid silently in a dark room with his wife and two young daughters for 10 hours while Hamas militants attacked his community, Kibbutz Nahal Oz, killing 15 of his neighbors and taking another seven hostage — and how some Palestinians who crossed the border looted.
The details of his family’s ordeal are excruciating. I held my breath as I worried about Tibon’s younger daughter — at 1½, basically the same age as my son — being able to keep quiet as gunfire resounded through the kibbutz, and the mehablim (Tibon prefers the Hebrew for “terrorists”) looked for their next victims.
Tibon and his wife had moved to Nahal Oz, less than a mile from Gaza, in 2014. He’d first visited as a reporter during that year’s Hamas-Israel war. The kibbutz’s fields, he recalls, were used as a “parking lot for Israeli tanks,” but Tibon was drawn to the verdant environment, and the tight-knit, like-minded community. He also saw himself as participating in the Israeli national project — establishing settlements like Nahal Oz had been part of Ben-Gurion’s goal of fixing in place Israel’s borders, and, years later, militants were still trying to drive Israelis away.
In alternating chapters that digress from the events of Oct. 7, Tibon gives a brief history of the region and surveys its contemporary politics. Tibon is a reporter for the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz and he identifies as a “left-leaning” Zionist. He wants to see an independent Palestine neighboring a secure Israel. He clearly detests the Israeli right and blames Netanyahu not only for the security failures of Oct. 7 but also for a series of cynical, shortsighted policies that led to the attack. Even after surviving Oct. 7, Tibon questions the Israeli military response for killing too many people.
I couldn’t help feeling that Tibon’s humanist, liberal politics were crashing against the Israeli and Palestinian reality. He reminded me of those Zionist officials in 1948 who desperately wanted Ben-Gurion to stop the looting. Oct. 7 was not the first time that Nahal Oz was attacked. In 1956 — some 30 years before Hamas existed — Palestinian militants crossed the border and ambushed Roi Rotberg, a 21-year-old kibbutznik, murdering him and taking his mutilated body back to Gaza. The next day, Moshe Dayan, then the military’s chief of staff, delivered the most famous eulogy in Israeli history.
“For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate,” Dayan said. “How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?”
This was, Tibon writes, “a rare recognition by an Israeli leader of the Palestinian Nakba.” Dayan had identified Israel’s tragic endowment — a country built on displacement — and declared that the only response could be strength, a country where thriving in a kibbutz on a border forged in war would help secure peace.
But Tibon does not offer the whole quote. “We are the generation of settlement,” Dayan went on. “Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells.”
In the epilogue, Tibon goes back to visit his deserted, bullet-scarred kibbutz and stands looking over the border at the rubble of Gaza. He rereads Dayan’s eulogy and wonders if his former neighbors at Nahal Oz will someday be able to return, if peace with the people on the other side of the border is conceivable. It’s certainly hard to imagine, so long as the people of Gaza live with barbed wire and machine guns.
LOOT: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property | By Adam Raz | Verso | 337 pp. | $34.95
THE GATES OF GAZA: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands | By Amir Tibon | Little, Brown | 335 pp. | $27See more on: Israel-Hamas War News, Benjamin Netanyahu
