NEWS & VIEWS
News Update
18 December 2021
Hide and Seek: Israel’s Archives, MOD, and Serious Crimes during 1948 War
Grotius – Center for International Law and Human Rights sent today a letter to the Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit requesting him to instruct the Ministry of Defence, in particular its Security Authority (“Malmab”) to refrain from concealing documents in Israel’s national and private archives that demonstrated the perpetration of serious crimes during the 1948 war by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians and to disclose illegally removed archival materials.
According to report in Haaretz from 5 July 2019, the Ministry of Defence’s Security Authority (“Malmab”) initiated this practice in early 2000s when it was headed by Yehiel Horev who served in this position from 1986 to 2007, and continued unabated since. The concealing effort targeted documents that have been disclosed before and formed the basis for existing historical research, as well as documents that should have been revealed even according to Israel’s extremely restrictive disclosing regulations. Haaretz reported:
Since the start of the last decade, Defense Ministry teams have been scouring Israel’s archives and removing historic documents. But it’s not just papers relating to Israel’s nuclear project or to the country’s foreign relations that are being transferred to vaults: Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba.
The phenomenon was first detected by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. According to a report drawn up by the institute, the operation is being spearheaded by Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of security of the defense establishment”), whose activities and budget are classified. The report asserts that Malmab removed historical documentation illegally and with no authority, and at least in some cases has sealed documents that had previously been cleared for publication by the military censor. Some of the documents that were placed in vaults had already been published.
An investigative report by Haaretz found that Malmab has concealed testimony from IDF generals about the killing of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well as documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin during the first decade of statehood. Conversations conducted by Haaretz with directors of public and private archives alike revealed that staff of the security department had treated the archives as their property, in some cases threatening the directors themselves.
Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades, until 2007, acknowledged to Haaretz that he launched the project, which is still ongoing. He maintains that it makes sense to conceal the events of 1948, because uncovering them could generate unrest among the country’s Arab population. Asked what the point is of removing documents that have already been published, he explained that the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that's backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.[1]
Further, Grotius underscored a 2018 report by Israel’s National Archivist in which he asserted in the context of materials relating to Israel’s conduct during the 1948 war that “there is an attempt to conceal the historical truth in order to construct a more convenient version.”[2] The same National Archivist wrote a letter dated 13 September 2016 to the Attorney General complaining that “100% of the examined documentation that has remained undisclosed, was concealed with no authority.”[3] Israel’s State Comptroller 2020 report confirmed the National Archivist conclusion regarding MOD’s intervention in the archiving process which lacked any basis in law.[4]
Grotius noted in the letter to the Attorney General the illegal nature of the Israeli authorities in their attempt to mismanage and practically sabotage the archiving of documents that demonstrate Israel’s culpability for serious crimes with no legal authority. More importantly, it is a violation of Palestinian victims’ rights to seek justice and to demonstrate their individual rights for return and repatriation,[5] as well as their right for compensation.[6]
Known in Israel as the war of independence, Israel’s armed activities that lasted between 1947 to 1949 witnessed the perpetration of serious crimes including the ethnic cleansing of more than two thirds of the Palestinian population.[7]
[1] Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs”, Haaretz, 5 July 2019. See also Ilan Pappe, “The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial”, 30(3) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.19-31 (2001).
[2] National Archivist Report on Disclosing Archival Materials, January 2018, p.17.
[3] National Archivist Report on Disclosing Archival Materials, January 2018, Annex 10.
[4] State Comptroller Report 70B, 2020, p.67.
[5] See Report of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, U.N. Doc.A/31/35, 21 July 1976; U.N. Study on The Right of Return of the Palestinian People, 1978, pursuant to U.N. General Assembly resolution 32/40B of 2 December 1977.
[6] See Michael Fischbach, Records of Dispossession (Columbia University Press, 2003); Geremy Foreman & Alexander Kedar, “From Arab land to ‘Israel Lands’: the legal dispossession of the Palestinians displaced by Israel in the wake of 1948”, 22 Environment & Planning: Society & Space (2004), pp.809 – 830.
[7] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (One World, 2006); Walid Khalidi, Palestine’s Partition: From the Great Revolution 1937 – 1939 to the Nakba 1947 – 1949 (Institute of Palestine Studies, 2021); Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2010). See also May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society 1918 - 1939 (I.B. Tauris, 2002); Efraim Karsh, “Nakbat Haifa: Collapse and Dispersion of a Major Palestinian Community”, 37(4) Middle Eastern Studies, pp.25-70 (2001); Benny Morris, “The Liar as a Hero”, The New Republic, 17 March 2011.