On September 20, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, will take his case for Palestinian statehood to the United Nations. This is a matter of basic justice, Abbas will argue, because the Palestinian people were dispossessed by the new state of Israel in 1948, and the current Israeli government is still preventing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
But Abbas’s claim is based on a big historical lie.
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In fact, Abbas has lately been lying about his own life story as one of those “dispossessed” Palestinians. Last May, he published an op-ed article in the New York Times titled “The Long Overdue Palestinian State,” in which he recounted his own “expulsion” by the Jews in 1948, at the age of 13. Abbas wrote that “shortly after” the U.N. General Assembly voted to partition the “Palestinian homeland” into two states in 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.” Abbas claimed that he and his family were forced out of their home in the Galilean city of Safed and fled to Syria, where they “took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees.” For dramatic effect, the Times provided an illustration above Abbas’s article depicting a young boy standing next to a tent in the desert and gazing forlornly at the verdant hills of Galilee just over the horizon.
In his Times op-ed, Abbas also wrote, “Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.” Abbas didn’t explain how any country could have recognized a United Nations–designated Palestinian state that the Palestinians and the Arab states themselves rejected. The Arab Higher Committee (AHC) was the recognized representative of the Palestinian people at the time of the U.N. partition vote. The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledgling Jewish state in “rivers of blood.”
Following instructions from the AHC, Palestinian militias and volunteers from neighboring Arab countries began attacking Jewish settlements after the U.N. partition plan was announced in November 1947. The irregular Arab units were ordered to take strategic strongholds and hold on until the expected invasion of Israel by regular Arab armies after the British withdrawal on May 14, 1948. What happened in Safed was typical of the bloody inter-communal warfare that soon convulsed the country. Elements of the Arab Liberation Army — the main Palestinian armed force — plus Jordanian irregular units, entered Safed’s Arab neighborhoods and began sporadic attacks on the Jewish quarter. Facing a full-scale invasion of Galilee by the Syrian and Jordanian regular armies, Jewish military commanders couldn’t afford to have armed Palestinian units behind their lines. On the night of May 8, reinforcements from the Palmach, the elite Jewish strike force, counterattacked and took the key Arab strongholds in the city. Almost immediately, Safed’s Arabs began streaming out toward the Syrian border. There were no expulsions of Arab civilians by Israeli forces.
In his Times op-ed, Abbas even contradicted previous accounts he had offered in which he conceded that his family left Safed voluntarily — in part because of fear that the Jews would seek revenge for a murderous rampage by local Arabs against the Jewish community in 1929. In an interview on Palestinian radio, Abbas said, “We left [Safed] on foot at night to the Jordan River. . . . Eventually, we settled in Damascus. My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work.” There was no mention by Abbas in that earlier interview of living in a canvas tent.
President Abbas’s historical distortions (clearly not fact-checked by the Times) are at the very heart of the Palestinian nakba myth (nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe”) and emblematic of the Palestinian leadership’s century-long refusal to accept a Jewish state in any part of the Arab Middle East. That obstinate rejection, not the Israeli government’s positions about borders or West Bank settlements, remains the No. 1 obstacle to peace in the Holy Land.
Last week, as he prepared for his statehood initiative at the U.N., the Palestinian president reaffirmed that the issue for the Palestinians is not the occupation of the West Bank, but the very creation of Israel. In a New York Times report from the Palestinian capital of Ramallah, Abbas was quoted: “Some Israelis complain that this is a unilateral move, but when you address 193 countries, that is not unilateral. We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.” The Times reporter didn’t bother commenting that the 63 years of “occupation” Abbas was complaining about goes back to 1948 and the original sin, for the Palestinians, of the creation of the modern state of Israel.
Resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict is tough enough; it becomes almost impossible when one side insists on lying about the conflict’s origins.
I think that it is fair to say that the reason the Palestinians have remained stateless for the past 63 years is their own unwillingness to divide mandate Palestine into a country for the Jews and one for them, and wider Arab desires to incorporate the whole of Palestine into one of their countries (I'm looking especially at you, Jordan), and/or their pressure on the Palestinians to continue to refuse to negotiate with Israel.
However, put in their place, it's hard to see any other people being more receptive an outside people being allowed to carve a new country out of land where, overall, they were the majority.
Read sometime The Iron Wall speech by Jabotinsky (see: External Link), one of the founders of revisionist Zionism, which claimed not just what we think of as Palestine for jewish settlement, but Jordan as well, so no leftist he. I quote:
"We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.
This view is absolutely groundless. Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement."
Furthermore, on the question of to what degree the Palestinians were forcibly expelled from Palestine, I would recommend the book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris. Morris is no softy vis a vis the Palestinians either, as one can see in this interview: External Link, though he is certainly to the left of Jabotinsky (not sure that that's saying much).
In his book, he details not just the comparatively few expulsions that took place (most Palestinians fled simply because of things like fear of war) but also the Israeli decision to not allow them to return once the war was over. Therefore, saying that, by and in large, the Palestinians weren't expelled, is kind of like having someone move into move into your condo while you're out to dinner and bar it against you, all the while telling the police he never forced you out.
I don't mean to portray this as a simple issue. Certainly, the Israelis would have been out of their minds to let the Mufti and his ilk come back.
And if nothing else is clear in all of this, the one thing that is is that the terrorism some Palestinians have carried out against Israel is as wrong as can be, and as long as the Palestinian leadership blessed it, negotiations with them were impossible.
The question is where to go from here. That begins with the fact that there was a war. They lost. It could (hypothetically) be as unjust an outcome as was the Trail of Tears was, but it is still a fact. They lost. The 78% of the (non-Jordanian) Palestinian mandate that is pre-1967 Israel is gone for good.
If there is a deal that can be reached over the remaining 22%, which the Palestinians can accept and which the Israelis can believe in (also very much a hypothetical), they should do the deal. The Palestinians need a state, and Israel needs to be rid of the West Bank and the people therein. Without that land, Israel has a secure Jewish majority as far out as the eye can see. But let that land and its people become incorporated into Israel, and that's game over for a jewish state.
Daniel:
The article is absolutely correct. There are living Israelis who were adults during that period, and they can vividly remember what happened with the “Palestinians.” I am amazed that Israelis have to justify their right to exist and to defend themselves, to a world that was only too happy to collaborate with Hitler in annihilating Jews. May be USA should justify conquering an entire continent and displacing the natives. But who would tell the lion that he is aggressive? As to the book that you are citing in your comment, the world is awash with revisionist history, including the denial of the Holocaust.
What I find interesting is that the same newspaper (NYT) which was so eager to publish the Mahmoud Abbas’ lies, did not write anything about the Holocaust during WWII, and its editor-in-chief at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was vociferously against the formation of the State of Israel. New York Times cares only about circulation, and since there are only 12 million Jews and ~1.6 billion Muslims, why should the Media pay attention to facts?
Conclusion: The world is constantly trying to appease Islam at Israel’s expense. History repeats itself because people refuse to learn history.
YOU: There are living Israelis who were adults during that period, and they can vividly remember what happened with the “Palestinians.”
ME: Stangely, there are still living Palestinians as well, and they remember things differently.
More to the point, there is also the Israeli archives, many of which were (comparatively) recently opened to the public. It is from there that most of the research that I mentioned comes.
(Oh, and your use of scare quotes around the word Palestinians is silly. They do exist, and they are exactly that, Palestinians.)
YOU: I am amazed that Israelis have to justify their right to exist
ME: I am even more amazed how often the debate over the Israeli right to the West Bank is falsely claimed to be one of Israeli existence.
YOU: May be USA should justify conquering an entire continent and displacing the natives.
ME: That was, at least, as unjustifiable as what the Israelis did, stuck as they were between the rock of a Europe that still harbored hatred for them and the hard place of an America that wouldn't open their doors to them.
YOU: As to the book that you are citing in your comment, the world is awash with revisionist history, including the denial of the Holocaust.
ME: Seriously??? That's your argument???
There are stupid books out there, so any book that tells me something I don't like is stupid. The material of these books comes mostly from the Israeli archives. Are those archives now some pseudo-Nazi plot?
YOU: History repeats itself because people refuse to learn history.
There is a difference between us: I lived the history while you are reading anti-Israeli propaganda from the safety of this country. I remember the 1967 War when the Arabs were screaming that they would make Jews swim in their own blood, while Israelis with Auschwitz numbers tattooed on their arms were sitting in fear in bankers. I remember the endless terrorist attacks carried out almost daily, and the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda conducted by the Arab Media. I remember the Yom Kippur War, when the Arabs united, yet again to destroy Israel on its holiest day. I remember Yasser Arafat organizing kidnapping of school buses and murder of the children. I remember many other things. No other Government would make peace with such people. I also remember the people of my native Eastern Europe telling me to go to MY Palestine, after they had murdered half a million Jews.
Conclusion: Israel does not owe you or the world any explanation. The world, however, owes Israel MANY explanations.
I dont' mean to make light of whatever hardships, large as they sound, but you can't write good history, even in tears, without debating the relevant fact. And, so far, that is what you have done.
The books that I have mentioned are based almost exclusively on material from the Israeli archives, by people who also live in Israel and also remember many of the bad things that you do.
I'm still amazed at the attempts to justify the Arab world's attempts to crush Israel, a nation with a land mass so small that it does not even register on maps of the larger (continental) areas. Are you so bold as to suggest that if the Arabs / Palestinians left the Israelis in peace, the Israelis would unilaterally attack and persecute the Arabs / Palestinians? Now, reverse the question and answer honestly - if the Israelis stopped defending their right to exist, do you for one second believe the Arabs / Palestinians would allow them to live in peace?
Thanks but to be honest with you I haven't cared what happens to the Arabs who call and style themselves as "Palestinians" since they danced in the streets of Ramallah and Gaza on September 11, 2001.
In a just world they would be forcibly driven out to Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria by a justly outraged World Community for their hate filled depredations on Western Civilization. Actually I am exhausted with the 1300 year struggle with Islam that continues to this day. Let's finish it and them for good.
"There were no expulsions of Arab civilians by Israeli forces."
That is a highly debatable statement, as Blsdaniel has pointed out.
To get some idea of how the wacky right wing nutjobs in Israel are making a solution so difficult, take a look at the maps in this New York Times piece and ask yourself what you would do about drawing borders if you had the responsibility for doing so:
Its not really that debatable, the descendants of Arabs who wanted to stay are living in Israel, which is why Israel is about 20% Arab, by contrast the Arabs forced all the Jews outJews out as there are almost no Jews in the West Bank or Gaza. What isn’t debatable is the oppressive policies of the Arab and Muslim world that forced approximately 850,000 Jews out of the predominantly Muslim and Arab lands from 1948-1973. These are the forgotten refugees, and the same International Community that sheds crocodile tears for the Palestinian Arabs who are three generations removed from the refugees of 1948 remain silent about the mass expulsion of the Jews from the Muslim and Arab world.
As for your map, it would not be that difficult if the Palestinians actually wanted a State. The Palestinians would get approximately 95% of the West Bank, Israel would give up the red dot settlement outposts, and retain the yellow areas contiguous with Israel. This sort of deal must be negotiated in good faith by both sides, not imposed as a precondition for negotiations as Obama wanted to do, and no such negotiation will happen if the Palestinian Arabs are not willing to recognize the Jewish State’s existence, or even come to the negotiating table.
1. There's plenty of evidence that many Palestinian Arabs were induced by alarming radio broadcasts of incipient attack to flee, evicted at gunpoint, etc. This evidence is not dismissed by legitimate Israeli historians. The only debate is about how much of this there was.
Yes, I looked at the map. If the Palestinian Arabs were committed to the two state solution, then the yellow/purple land swaps on the map would be workable, and Israel would almost certainly end up giving up the settlements deep in the West Bank (i.e., “the red dots.”). In 2005, Israel forcibly removed thousands of Israeli settlers from Gaza, demonstrating that it WILL remove settlements, there’s precedent. Unfortunately, there’s no indication that the Palestinian Arabs will budge one inch on even basic land swaps that all disinterested observers agree must be part of a final workable deal, and just two weeks ago Abbas was rejecting the Jewish state’s very right to exist by referring to all of Israel as occupied territory.
The settlement of Ariel holds 17,000 by itseld. Some of the bigger settlements like Maalae Adumim have over 30,000.
I don't think that, in the event of reasonable Palestinian negotiators, Israel is going to be as easy going as willing as you say to evactuate these places.
Maybe you don't see Maale Adumim as "deep in the West Bank", but at very least, Ariel is.
It's a good deal more debatable that that. That some Arabs are still there is no proof that others weren't expelled, and that still others weren't blocked from returning. Again, look at the research from those like Morris that comes from the Israeli archives. Some Palestinians were expelled, some fled thinking that they could later return but were blocked, and some fled after failing in attacks on Jews and being pursued. It really is a more complex topic than you are making out.
You make a good point about the Jews who left the Arab world, though how many of them were expelled vs. how many of them simply thought they'd do better in Israel IS debatable. Still, it would be all but impossible to say that they didn't experience major discrimination there.
As for the map, when you say that Israel would give up the red dots, are you saying that they'd give up places like Ariel? That's like 18,000 people who would have to be moved from just that one red dot!
I am certainly not saying that we should feel sympathy for the group I mentioned. It was included for at least two reasons: first, it's a real group; and, second, I didn't want to make it seem like I thought that all groups of Palestinians who fled were innocent or should even be let back in.
And I didn't forget the fourth group, as I mentioned them explicitly with my phrase "that some Arabs are still there".
And to this we can add another important group: the Druse, who, after fighting with the Arabs against the Jews switched sides en masse. My understanding is that few of them were ever expelled, and they live securely in Israel to this day.
What's the take away from this? That those who didn't attack the Jews were never expelled, and that therefore the Arabs who were expelled / blocked from returning were part of those who attacked Israel, and therefore shouldn't have been allowed to stay in / come back to Israel? Possibly.
Or it could be that Arabs were simply seen as less cooperative than Druse (which they were) and were therefore expelled, whether they were a threat or not.
I can't find it right now, but there's a passage in Morris' Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem about how Ben Gurion said that only special cases of Arab families would be allowed to return while the war was on, and that once peace was restored, large scale return was something that would have to be negotiated. But when Moshe Sharret brought to his attention a village of Arabs that had fled but which had traditionally been very friendly to the Jews, even to the point of hiding Hagganah agents from the British during the mandate, Ben Gurion refused even that. Sharret left the discussion to write in his diary that he now realized that no one was going to be allowed to come back.
On the issue of JUST Safed, I don't know whether or not there expulsions or not. Benny Morris will generally tell you that out and out expulsions were rare, and that expulsions played no role in many of larger Palestinian departures, such as in Haifa. There, drawing from Morris and Ephraim Karsh, it seems that it was a combination of wealthy Arabs hitting the road in anticipation of staying away until the troubles were over (sometimes going so far as to give the keys to their houses to their jewish neighbors) and fleeing outright after the Arab militias stupidly attacked the jewish sections of town, thereby goading the jewish forces into retaliating. (Having spent some time in my other post holding up at least some of the Palestinian side of the issue, it's worth taking a little time here pointing out that in many places, Haifa especially, the behaviour of the Arab Higher Committees was stupid, stupid, stupid.)
But the question of what happened in just Safed isn't all that relevant for even just Safed. Morris also repeatedly recounts how the flight of people in one city to another caused the people of the second city to flee as well. Also, as the Palestinians themselves generally lacked even light artillery, when jewish forces opened up on them with mortars, that was enough the Palestinians to call it a day and flee.
And, once again, there is the issue that many of those fleeing thought that they could come back later (some of them, only long enough to take in their last harvest), when the dust clears. And that was clearly blocked by the Israelis (especially after one group of Palestinians snuck back in and murdered a jewish family in their sleep).
You will look in vain for universal good guys and villains in this story. The only question is, where to go now.
