What happened in '48? It's the question that haunts the Israel/Palestine dynamic and defines so much of the conflict. Th | dG1fVjV1RzRnazBMV3c
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00:00In 1948, the Palestinian village of Lubya, in the Western Galilee, Israel, was totally
00:10depopulated.
00:12It had been home to some 2,700 people.
00:19Like Lubya, many Palestinian villages in Israel were completely destroyed, and the landscape
00:27of Palestine was changed forever.
00:30Just two weeks ago, it turned to me one Israeli friend, and she told me that she has a very
00:40interesting story to tell about her uncle, who was one of the occupiers and the people
00:44from the Palmaq that expelled the village of Qasariah.
00:48And she told me, can you take from me this heavy burden and have the story?
00:53He never talked about the expulsion of Arabs from Qasariah until just before he died.
01:00One of the things he mentioned was an order to expel the residents of the little fishing
01:05village located on the sands of Qasariah.
01:08We knew that if you'd destroyed the roofs of their homes, the Arabs would leave.
01:15So, a group of us guys, we destroyed the village roofs, and they left.
01:21Like that.
01:21So easy, as if people's lives weren't involved, my aunt, Shoshana, shifted uncomfortably.
01:31And then his wife said to him,
01:34Motkele, you don't think you should shut up on that?
01:36On, you know, some things we don't tell.
01:39And he said, Shoshanka?
01:40And if I don't tell, it didn't happen.
01:42Something like that.
01:51The Nakba is something that we, okay, it's there somehow.
01:56We as Israelis, we knew almost nothing about it.
01:58When I was 18, I never heard, of course, not the word, but also nothing about Palestinian
02:03refugees.
02:03Nothing.
02:04There was an Israel independence war.
02:07They attacked us.
02:08They didn't accept the partition resolution or partition plan.
02:12And there was a war, and they lost the war, and they're out.
02:14And Chalas, there is no problem for us, not whatsoever.
02:17There was a very justified war, and nothing about their story, their other stories, of
02:24course, not stories of massacres.
02:25Okay, there was the Yassin massacre that was quite known, but it was very much an exception.
02:30This is the story, how the story goes.
02:34I grew up believing that Israel fought six just wars to prevent it being wiped out, and
02:44that to challenge Israel's actions is to challenge the right of Jews to exist.
02:50In the diaspora, we continue to cling to Israel's official version of a Jewish past.
03:02Yet the heroic story of David, who triumphs over Goliath, began to crack for many Israeli
03:09Jews during Israel's first war on Lebanon.
03:12Unlike Israel's past wars, the Lebanon war was regarded not as a defensive war, but as
03:20an aggressive war.
03:21It was widely seen not as a war of no choice, but as a war of choice.
03:27It was 1982, the outbreak of the first Lebanon war, that it was not warranted, was not justified.
03:40There was a TV presentation of that war for the first time I could see at least how it looked
03:47on the civilian side.
03:49And I was outside the country, so the first time I saw it from the outside, and I was asked
03:59by the Israeli embassy to represent Israel wherever I can, defending its actions in Lebanon.
04:06And I refused.
04:07And I had to ask myself why I refused, and this suddenly connected to 1948, so it was as if
04:17I could see what happened in 1948, because I could see with my own eyes what happened in
04:221982.
04:22And it suddenly turned the dissertation from something very dry, very still, into a very
04:32vivid picture and a very clear mapping of who was the criminal, who was the victim.