What was the Arab reaction
to the announcement of the creation of the state of Israel?
"The armies of the Arab states
entered the war immediately after the State of Israel was
founded in May. Fighting continued, almost all of it within the
territory assigned to the Palestinian state...About 700,000
Palestinians fled or were expelled in the 1948 conflict."
Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Was the part of Palestine
assigned to a Jewish state in mortal danger from the Arab
armies?
"The Arab League hastily called
for its member countries to send regular army troops into
Palestine. They were ordered to secure only the sections of
Palestine given to the Arabs under the partition plan. But these
regular armies were ill equipped and lacked any central command
to coordinate their efforts...[Jordan's King Abdullah] promised
[the Israelis and the British] that his troops, the Arab Legion,
the only real fighting force among the Arab armies, would avoid
fighting with Jewish settlements...Yet Western historians record
this as the moment when the young state of Israel fought off
"the overwhelming hordes' of five Arab countries. In reality,
the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians intensified."
"Our Roots Are Still Alive," by the Peoples Press Palestine Book
Project.
Ethnic cleansing of the Arab
population of Palestine
"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."
Ethnic cleansing - continued
"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,'" Israel historian, Benny Morris,
"Righteous Victims."
Ethnic cleansing - continued
"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." Benny
Morris, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,
1947-1949"
Didn't the Palestinians
leave their homes voluntarily during the 1948 war?
"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." Peretz Kidron, quoted in
"Blaming the Victims," ed. Said and Hitchens.
Arab orders to evacuate
non-existent
"The BBC (British Broadcasting
Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout
1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States
monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. 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." Erskine Childers, British researcher, quoted in Sami
Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
Ethnic cleansing- continued
"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...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." Israeli author,
Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel."
The deliberate destruction
of Arab villages to prevent return of Palestinians
"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." Benny Morris, "The Birth
of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
After the fighting was over,
why didn't the Palestinians return to their homes?
"The first UN General Assembly
resolution--Number 194- affirming the right of Palestinians to
return to their homes and property, was passed on December 11,
1948. It has been repassed no less than twenty-eight times since
that first date. Whereas the moral and political right of a
person to return to his place of uninterrupted residence is
acknowledged everywhere, Israel has negated the possibility of
return... [and] systematically and juridically made it
impossible, on any grounds whatever, for the Arab Palestinian to
return, be compensated for his property, or live in Israel as a
citizen equal before the law with a Jewish Israeli." Edward
Said, "The Question of Palestine."
Is there any justification
for this expropriation of land?
"The fact that the Arabs fled
in terror, because of real fear of a repetition of the 1948
Zionist massacres, is no reason for denying them their homes,
fields and livelihoods. Civilians caught in an area of military
activity generally panic. But they have always been able to
return to their homes when the danger subsides. Military
conquest does not abolish private rights to property; nor does
it entitle the victor to confiscate the homes, property and
personal belongings of the noncombatant civilian population. The
seizure of Arab property by the Israelis was an outrage."
Sami Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
How about the negotiations
after the 1948-1949 wars?
"[At Lausanne,] Egypt, Syria,
Lebanon, and the Palestinians were trying to save by
negotiations what they had lost in the war--a Palestinian state
alongside Israel. Israel, however... [preferred] tenuous
armistice agreements to a definite peace that would involve
territorial concessions and the repatriation of even a token
number of refugees. The refusal to recognize the Palestinians'
right to self-determination and statehood proved over the years
to be the main source of the turbulence, violence, and bloodshed
that came to pass." Israeli author, Simha Flapan, "The Birth
Of Israel."
Israel admitted to UN but
then reneged on the conditions under which it was admitted
"The [Lausanne] conference
officially opened on 27 April 1949. On 12 May the [UN's]
Palestine Conciliation ,Committee reaped its only success when
it induced the parties to sign a joint protocol on the framework
for a comprehensive peace. . Israel for the first time accepted
the principle of repatriation [of the Arab refugees] and the
internationalization of Jerusalem. . .[but] they did so as a
mere exercise in public relations aimed at strengthening
Israel's international image...Walter Eytan, the head of the
Israeli delegation, [stated]..'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.'" Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, "The
Making of the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1947-1951."
Israeli admission to the
U.N.- continued
"The Preamble of this
resolution of admission included a safeguarding clause as
follows: 'Recalling its resolution of 29 November 1947 (on
partition) and 11 December 1948 (on reparation and
compensation), and taking note of the declarations and
explanations made by the representative of the Government of
Israel before the ad hoc Political Committee in respect of the
implementation of the said resolutions, the General
Assembly...decides to admit Israel into membership in the United
Nations.'
"Here, it must be observed, is
a condition and an undertaking to implement the resolutions
mentioned. There was no question of such implementation being
conditioned on the conclusion of peace on Israeli terms as the
Israelis later claimed to justify their non-compliance." Sami
Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
What was the fate of the
Palestinians who had now become refugees?
"The winter of 1949, the first
winter of exile for more than seven hundred fifty thousand
Palestinians, was cold and hard...Families huddled in caves,
abandoned huts, or makeshift tents...Many of the starving were
only miles away from their own vegetable gardens and orchards in
occupied Palestine - the new state of Israel...At the end of
1949 the United Nations finally acted. It set up the United
Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) to take over
sixty refugee camps from voluntary agencies. It managed to keep
people alive, but only barely." "Our Roots Are Still Alive"
by The Peoples Press Palestine Book Project.