Ilan Pappe: Tries his hand at fiction to get at the truth about Palestinian history
... Musalem Awad was the only practicing Palestinian historian in Israel who had a permanent post in a university. He was also Yaacov's supervisor, and had been interested for years in the 1948 catastrophe, particularly in the war crimes committed in the coastal area. Yet he never dared to write about it himself and felt uneasy when he assigned it to Yaacov.
Musalem was a conservative historian, believing in hard facts as the core material for telling the story of the past. Such evidence, he believed, had been brought to him by Yaacov. Here was the explicit documentation of atrocities that he was looking for. Yaacov had found the documents, not in the military archives whose directors were economical about such truths, but in his cousin's house. The material was so hot that Musalem became obsessed with it to the point of unconsciously using his student as an extension of his own mind.
The massacres on the coast had never been admitted by Israel, and international historiography did not mention them. "Let's face it," Musalem would say, "there is no conclusive evidence." A declaration that got him into trouble with the less professional, but more politically committed, Palestinian literati and pundits in the country who wrote about the past.
In Fatima's village, survivors of the massacre -- a few women and those who were under thirteen at the time -- told Palestinian historians they had only heard shots, but had never seen anyone killed, and that the buses had taken them deep into Jordan, where they waited in vain to be reunited with husbands, brothers, sons, cousins and friends. Fatima missed the bus convoy and was adopted by her relatives in a nearby village, where she found refuge after the soldiers left her own village and before Jewish settlers took over the remaining houses and built their kibbutz, beach resort and parking lot, covering the scene of that dreadful day....
Read entire article at Excerpt from Ilan Pappe, "The Best Runner in the Class." Published first by Left Curve; republished by electronicintifada.net
Musalem was a conservative historian, believing in hard facts as the core material for telling the story of the past. Such evidence, he believed, had been brought to him by Yaacov. Here was the explicit documentation of atrocities that he was looking for. Yaacov had found the documents, not in the military archives whose directors were economical about such truths, but in his cousin's house. The material was so hot that Musalem became obsessed with it to the point of unconsciously using his student as an extension of his own mind.
The massacres on the coast had never been admitted by Israel, and international historiography did not mention them. "Let's face it," Musalem would say, "there is no conclusive evidence." A declaration that got him into trouble with the less professional, but more politically committed, Palestinian literati and pundits in the country who wrote about the past.
In Fatima's village, survivors of the massacre -- a few women and those who were under thirteen at the time -- told Palestinian historians they had only heard shots, but had never seen anyone killed, and that the buses had taken them deep into Jordan, where they waited in vain to be reunited with husbands, brothers, sons, cousins and friends. Fatima missed the bus convoy and was adopted by her relatives in a nearby village, where she found refuge after the soldiers left her own village and before Jewish settlers took over the remaining houses and built their kibbutz, beach resort and parking lot, covering the scene of that dreadful day....