Posted on 12/21/2002 2:59:22 AM PST by Destro
We may contrast these attitudes with those of the Israeli government. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence includes the following: “WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”[56]
UN Resolution 194, which was acceptable to the Israelis, stated in point 11 that, “…that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property…” This resolution was *unanimously rejected* by the Arabs.[57]
The perception, common in some circles, that the Israelis are to blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis will therefore not withstand historical scrutiny. I summarize the relevant facts:
1) The post-World War II military confrontations between Jews and Arabs began when the 1947 UN partition plan “was immediately opposed by the [Palestinian] Arabs who...attacked Jews throughout Palestine as the British withdrew.”[58]
2) The surrounding Arab states followed through with an unprovoked and simultaneous declaration of war on Israel in 1948.
3) The anti-Semitism of the Arab states, heightened by the war against Israel, is what made the living conditions of the Mizrachim Diaspora so dangerous that they fled en masse to Israel. Thus, the Arab states *caused* a Jewish refugee crisis that the Israeli state then proceeded to absorb.
4) The Arabs lost the 1948 war with Israel. The resulting Palestinian refugees were not given citizenship by the Arab countries that had created the refugee crisis by attacking Israel. (The exception is Jordan).
The above list speaks for itself. One has to argue against it in order to lay the blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis on the Israelis.
Like I said, the "victim" Palestinians have re-written history, and people like you believe them, just like you believe the Srbs are not, and never have been racist. You have only to read the posts of some pro-Serbs on this site to see that they are racist.
"It's not easy depending on one's masters for scraps and knowing that neither their masters nor the Serbs think much of them."
Ever been to Yugoslavia,ABrit?
And,who are the "pro-Serbian racist posters" please?
How many mixed marrieges involve Albanians in Yugoslavia???
Jewish immigrants ethnically cleansed Palestinians in order to create a pure or nearly pure Jewish state; six hundred thousand of them. They emptied and leveled their villages. Since 1967, Israel has been colonizing Palestinian lands by establishing Jewish settlements. Today, Israel is seriously looking at "resettling" even those Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens by birth.
This is not a judgment, just stating of facts, so rest assured that if there is some intolerance and, indeed, hostility in among Palestinians towards Israel it's not as plain as your simplistic, naive, and inaccurate "justifying hate with hate" approach.
As for your comment in #42, not thinking much of someone or of some group is not the same as hating them. But how would you know the difference?
And, in being the way you are you prove my point (inadvertantly, but nevertheless).
Arab refugees were intentionally not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the fact total territory of Arab countries is about 700 times greater than that of Israel. Out of about 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Arab nations still maintain generations of the descendants of the refugees in so called "refugee camps" under squalid conditions with the hope that someday they will dislodge the Jews in Israel. The money spent by the Arab countries on armaments would be sufficient to build houses for all so called "refugees". Arab countries should be encouraged to care for their poor population instead of spending their richest resources in the world on armaments and development of terrorist groups such as Osama Bin Laden from Saudi Arabia.
http://www.science.co.il/Arab-Israeli-conflict.asp#Refugees
– Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph Sept. 6, 1948.
"The Arab state which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees."
– The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, Feb. 19, 1949.
"Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor nor conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their honor? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it."
– The Beirut Muslim weekly Kul-Shay, Aug. 19, 1951.
"The 15th May, 1948, arrived ... On that day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead."
– The Cairo daily Akhbar el Yom, Oct. 12, 1963.
"For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy."
– The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.
I could go on and on and on with this forgotten – or deliberately obscured – history. But you get the point. There was no Jewish conspiracy to chase Arabs out of their homes in 1948. It never happened. There are, instead, plenty of historical records showing the Jews pleading with their Arab neighbors to stay and live in peace and harmony. Yet, despite the clear, unambiguous words of the Arab observers at the time, history has been successfully rewritten to turn the Jews into the bad guys.
http://www.afsi.org/arablies.htm
By the way, the mufti of Jerusalem in question, was Arafats uncle!
There are plenty of sources, many actually Jewish, that portray a different picture of what happened before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict broke out in 1948. The roots of that go back a century or so ago, and can be traced to the usual British stupid foreign policy, her unflattering talent for causing problems, and an inherent inability to resolve a single conflict -- including the Northern Ireland situation, to this very day.
In one such source under the rubric “Ethnic Cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine,” the mutual exclusiveness was not just the Arab idea:
"Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund...On December 19, 1940, he wrote: 'It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country...The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with 'land buying' - but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe'...There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists." Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine."
Benny Morris, in “Righteous Victims,” says:
Following the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream (Zionist) leader was able to conceive of future coexistence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples - achievable only by transfer and expulsion. Publicly they all continued to speak of coexistence and to attribute the violence to a small minority of zealots and agitators. But this was merely a public pose..Ben Gurion summed up: 'With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)...I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it,'"
In “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” Benny Morris states:
"Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October [1948]. But no [general] expulsion policy was ever enunciated and Ben-Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals 'understand' what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the 'great expeller' and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy...But while there was no 'expulsion policy', the July and October [1948] offensives were characterized by far more expulsions and, indeed, brutality towards Arab civilians than the first half of the war."
In “The Birth of Israel,” Simha Flapan, an Israeli author, states”
That Ben-Gurion's ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve his purpose...most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants...”
The destruction was not concomitant with any of the Arab population partaking in the war either. Continues Simha Flapan:
"even [if] they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence."
In “Blaming the Victims,” Peretz Kidron says:
"Israeli propaganda has largely relinquished the claim that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was 'self-inspired'. Official circles implicitly concede that the Arab population fled as a result of Israeli action - whether directly, as in the case of Lydda and Ramleh, or indirectly, due to the panic that and similar actions (the Deir Yassin massacre) inspired in Arab population centers throughout Palestine. However, even though the historical record has been grudgingly set straight, the Israeli establishment still refused to accept moral or political responsibility for the refugee problem it- or its predecessors - actively created."
For reference purposes it is worh looking up the Deir Yassin massacre.
In direct contradiction to your quotes there seems to be no evidence that Arab authorities called on Arab population to evacuate Palestine. In “Bitter Harvest,” British researcher, writes:
There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put."
In support of my statements, I call everyone’s attention to another passge from Benny Morris’s “The Birth of the Palestinian refugee Problem, 1947-1949:”
During May [1948] ideas about how to consolidate and give permanence to the Palestinian exile began to crystallize, and the destruction of villages was immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this aim...[Even earlier,] On 10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha... The village was destroyed that night... Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on 20 April... Abu Zureiq was completely demolished... Al Mansi and An Naghnaghiya, to the southeast, were also leveled. . .By mid-1949, the majority of [the 350 depopulated Arab villages] were either completely or partly in ruins and uninhabitable."
As for the right of the Palestinians and the appeal made by the Israelis for them to return, the original UN resolution 194 has been passed and repassed no less than 28 times, with some authors claiming that the obstruction is coming from Israel and not the Palestinian side (Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine”). That Israel signed the UN resolution in 1949 is what another Israeli historial, Ilan Pappe (“The Making of the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1947-1949”) calls a “mere exercise in public relations aimed at strengthening Israel’s international image.”
He quotes Walter Eytan, the head of the Israeli delegation that signed the protocol as saying:
“My main purpose was to begin to undermine the protocol of 12 May, which we had signed only under duress of our struggle for admission to the U.N. Refusal to sign would...have immediately been reported to the Secretary-General and the various governments.”
There is a lot to be said of the courage of the many Israeli authors to face and admit the truth that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a coin with two sides and that the wrong is not a monopoly of only one of them. These same authors, at the same time, as many other Israelis, are staunchly in favor of the existance of the Jewish State and cannot be burdened with the label of being anti-Semitic.
It is importrant to remember that Palestine was to be made into a state made up of two entity statelets, similar to what has been created in Bosnia: an etitiy called the Arab State and the other one called the Jewish State. Unilateral recognition of Israel sparked the war because the recognition failed to recognize the Palestinian State. And we know the rest of the story...
And as far as you are concerned, you can go on and on, as you say...maybe one day you will be able to conceptualize the big picture.
"http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/764443/posts
You prove my point by citing a discredited revisionist historian, who sought to portray the Palestinians as "victims".
BTW,Albi,don`t want to answer my simple questions,do you?You don`t need to search the Net to answer,you know!
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