One day, I hope, a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, on the South African model, will be set up here in Israel. It should be composed of Israeli, Palestinian and international historians, whose job will be to establish what really happened in this country in 1948.

In the 60 years that have passed since then, the events of the war have been buried under layer upon layer of Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab propaganda. A quasi-archaeological excavation is needed in order to expose the bottom layer. Even the eyewitnesses who are still alive sometimes have problems distinguishing between what they actually saw and the myths that have twisted and falsified the events almost beyond recognition.

I am one of the eyewitnesses. In the last few days, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary, dozens of radio and television interviewers from all over the world have been asking me to describe what actually happened. Here are some of these questions and my answers to them.

How was this war different from others?

First of all, it was not one war but two, which followed one another without a break.

The first war was fought between the Jews and the Arabs in the country. It started on the morrow of the UN General Assembly resolution of Nov. 29, 1947, which decreed the partition of Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state. It lasted until the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. That day marked the start of the second war — the one between the State of Israel and the neighboring countries, which threw their armies into the battle.

This was not a war between two countries for a piece of land or a fratricidal struggle. I categorize it as an “ethnic war”.

Such a war is fought out between two different peoples who live in the same country, each of which claims the whole country for itself. In such a war, the aim is not only to achieve a military victory, but also to take possession of as much of the country as possible without the population of the other side.

Was the war inevitable?

The Jewish side was determined to establish a state of its own. This was one of the fundamental aims of the Zionist movement, founded 50 years earlier, and was strengthened a hundredfold after the Holocaust, which had come to an end only two and a half years before.

The Arab side was determined to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in the country which they (rightly) considered an Arab country. That’s why the Arabs started the war.

What did you, the Jews, think when you went to war?

When I enlisted at the beginning of the war, we were totally convinced that we were faced with the danger of annihilation and that we were defending ourselves, our families and the entire Hebrew community.

Did you think that you were the stronger side?

Not at all. At the time, the Jews constituted only a third of the population. The hundreds of Arab villages throughout the country dominated the main arteries that were crucial to our survival. Slowly, the balance of power shifted. From April 1948 on, we started to receive large quantities of light weapons from Czechoslovakia. In the middle of May, when the expected intervention of the Arab armies was approaching, we were already in possession of a contiguous territory.

In other words, you drove the Arabs out?

This was not yet “ethnic cleansing” but a by-product of the war. But the military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogeneous Jewish territory.

Do you say that at this stage there was not yet a basic decision to drive all the Arabs out?

The Jewish side, which stuck to the partition resolution, wanted to prove that it was possible to set up a Jewish state in which almost half the population was Arab. So there were some efforts (in Haifa, for example) to convince the Arabs not to leave their homes. But the reality of the war itself caused the mass exodus. It must be understood that at no stage did the Arabs “flee the country”. In general, things happened this way: in the course of the fighting, an Arab village came under heavy fire. Its inhabitants — men, women and children — fled, of course, to the next village. Then we fired on the next village, and they fled to the next one, and so forth, until the armistice came into force and suddenly there was a border (the Green Line) between them and their homes. The Deir Yassin massacre gave another powerful push to the flight.

In that case, when was the start of the “ethnic cleansing” you spoke about?

In the second half of the war, after the advance of the Arab armies was halted, a deliberate policy of expelling the Arabs became a war aim on its own.

For truth’s sake, it must be remembered that this was not one-sided. Not many Arabs remained in the territories that were conquered by our side, but, also, no Jew remained in the territories that were conquered by the Arabs. The difference was quantitative: while the Jewish side conquered large stretches of land, the Arab side succeeded only in conquering small areas. The real decision was taken after the war: Not to allow the 750 thousand Arab refugees to return to their homes.

What did you personally feel during the war?

On the eve of the war, I still believed in a “Semitic” partnership of all the inhabitants of the country. One month before the outbreak of war I published the booklet “War or Peace in the Semitic Region”, in which I propounded this idea. In retrospect it is clear to me that this was far too late.

At the beginning of the war I was a private soldier in the infantry and fought around the road to Jerusalem, and in the second half I served in the Samson’s Foxes motorized commando unit on the Egyptian front.

Throughout the war I wrote up my experiences. Immediately after the war I wrote a second book called “The Other Side of the Coin”, disguised as a literary work, so I did not have to submit it to censorship. There I reported, inter alia, that we had received orders to kill every Arab who tried to return home.

What did the war teach you?

The atrocities I witnessed turned me into a convinced peace activist. The war taught me that there is a Palestinian people, and that we shall never achieve peace if a Palestinian state does not come into being side by side with our state. That this has not yet happened is one of the reasons why the 1948 war is still going on to this very day.