The Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, defeated today a Herut motion for the appointment of a commission of inquiry into the fall of the Old City of Jerusalem into Arab hands during the 1948 war of Liberation.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in an address to the House on the motion, declared that the function of the Knesset was to legislate — not to write history. He said he greatly doubted whether anybody of this generation had sufficient perspective to treat the subject historically.
The Premier rejected as deliberate fabrications, recent reports that the Provisional Government was committed not to capture the Old City and that he had previously read and approved the publication of the book by Dov Joseph, wartime Governor of Jerusalem, whose revelations resurrected the issue and led to the motion in the Knesset.
Mr. Joseph’s book charged that incompetence and lack of leadership caused the population of the Old City’s Jewish quarter to capitulate and that Brigadier David Shaltiel, wartime commander of the Israel forces in Jerusalem, did not bring adequate relief to those besieged in the Old City.
Premier Ben-Gurion said there were still many undisclosed chapters about the Jerusalem saga and that many important positive aspects as well as negative ones have not yet been revealed. One thing, however, he could categorically state, the Premier declared: “If we had in 1948 an army equipped, trained and disciplined as today, then the results of the war would have been different.”
The Premier recalled 1,400 Tel Aviv volunteers who replaced camels and donkeys under fire of cannons to carry supplies to beleaguered Jerusalem to make all-out efforts to provision a population isolated from the coastal plain. Mistakes had undoubtedly been made, he added, but an inquiry would not serve any useful purpose.
Herut Deputy Yaacov Meridor, who introduced the motion, asserted that the gates of the Old City were already breached by the Irgun and Hagannah forces when the Jerusalem commander called off the offensive. Mr. Joseph’s disclosures warranted an inquiry, he argued.
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