FULL ARTICLES

WHY HIZBULLAH SHOULD BE CONDEMNED

Why Hizbullah should be condemned: When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006 the world was outraged. What about Hizbullah now?
By Dean Godson
The Times (of London)
May 14, 2008

“Even the Israeli enemy never dared to do to Beirut what Hizbullah has done,” lamented Fouad Siniora, Lebanon’s embattled Prime Minister, over the weekend. Yet British bien-pensant opinion – so vocal in its opposition to Israeli actions in Lebanon in 2006 – is strangely silent about the recent outrages.

Why? After all, Hizbullah is one of the world’s most ruthless clerical fascist organisations – complete with ersatz Nazi salutes and Iranian-style Holocaust denial. When the legitimate, democratic Government of Lebanon dared to challenge it, Hizbullah went on a sectarian rampage, murdering scores of opponents and destroying much of the country’s free media.

Yet there has been not a peep from the concerned humanitarians of the Stop the War Coalition, which boasted of putting 100,000 people on to the streets to protest against Israeli assaults. Nor has much been heard from two of Hizbullah’s most high-profile and indulgent British interlocutors – the ex-MI6 officer Alastair Crooke and Michael Ancram, the former Conservative minister.

Mr Ancram urges that we “dance with wolves” such as Hizbullah to obtain peace. “It is suddenly possible to explore Hizbullah claims to be an essentially Lebanese resistance movement with no current aggressive cross-border intentions towards Israel,” he opines. Indeed so: right now its aggressive intentions are inwardly directed, towards its fellow countrymen.

Hizbullah and its allies – which command only 30 per cent of the Lebanese vote – seeks to make good its democratic deficit at the polls through the use of force. The group boasts a vast arsenal. But Messrs Ancram and Crooke don’t want Hizbullah to be pressured to abandon this swiftly, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1559.

The other great myth about Hizbullah – peddled by too many of its Western apologists – is that it is an entirely indigenous “resistance” movement: if so, why have pictures gone up of the Iranian leader, Ali Khamenei, and the Syrian President, Bashar Assad, for the first time in Beirut since the Cedar Revolution of 2005? And, given the violent oppression of Sunnis by Hizbullah, why has so little been heard from the Muslim Council of Britain and the British Muslim Initiative, two predominantly Sunni organisations? Don’t Lebanese Sunnis deserve a little solidarity from their brethren?

So why does Hizbullah’s putsch of 2008 not excite stern criticism – as did Israel’s invasion of 2006? It’s simple: many “progressives” hate Israeli and Western policy far more than they love Lebanon.

 

GUILT IS AN UNHEALTHY BASIS FOR A RELATIONSHIP

A ‘Special’ Relationship
By Daniel Schwammenthal
The Wall Street Journal Europe
May 13, 2008

As Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, there is no denying that the Jewish state has an image problem in Europe. While opinion polls in the U.S. consistently show a majority of Americans sympathetic to Israel, the situation is the reverse on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s particularly bad in Germany. In a BBC survey last month, for example, Germans were among the Europeans with the least favorable views of Israel, second only to Spain. Even the respondents in the United Arab Emirates had a more positive perception of the Jewish state than Germans did.

This may be surprising given that Berlin is considered one of Israel’s more reliable allies in Europe. Successive German governments have justified the “special” relationship with Israel by pointing to the countries’ “special” history. In light of the Holocaust, Germany seems to have no choice but to support the Jewish state. Former Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer advocated this policy of “historical responsibility” as effortlessly as Christian-Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel does.

But guilt is an unhealthy basis for a relationship; it easily turns into resentment. This may help explain why so many Germans – 30% according to last year’s survey by Bertelsmann Foundation – are so eager to compare Israel to fascist Germany. If it were true that Israelis are modern-day Nazis, there would be less reason to feel guilty about the real Nazis.

Historical obligations also tend to have a statute of limitations. As the policy-defining event fades into the past, so will the rationale to stand by the Jewish state. Postwar Germans may reasonably reject any special obligations to Israel as a result of crimes committed before they were born.

This brings us to the fundamental problem with Berlin’s Israel policy. It implies that had there been no Holocaust, Israel would have no right to exist or, at least would have no reason to expect Germany’s support. Israel’s detractors take this argument one step further, claiming it was immoral to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East to atone for European crimes.

Churchill debunked the idea that Israel could be justified only as reparation for past atrocities long before the Holocaust: “The Jews are in Palestine by right and not by sufferance,” he said in 1922. Europe and Germany should thus be able to support Israel not just because of past wrongs committed against Jews but because of Jews’ inalienable right to a state in their ancestral homeland.

Israel’s right to exist doesn’t mean Germans must automatically back it. There has to be some special bond between nations to prompt support in difficult times. Such alliances are usually forged around common interests and values. As the Mideast’s most vibrant democracy, it would appear that Israel qualifies for a truly “special relationship.”

But unlike Americans, German officials almost never argue that Israel deserves solidarity as a Western ally. While Americans generally see Israel as a fellow democracy under attack from terrorists, in Germany and much of the rest of Europe, Israel is more often seen as a human-rights violator.

What explains this difference in perceptions? The U.S media are not that much better in presenting a more balanced view of the Middle East conflict than their European counterparts. More likely, Americans are simply less disposed to believe the worst of Israel.

A key factor is Americans’ appreciation of their Judeo-Christian heritage. While this is a common term in the U.S., and not only among religious people, it is a novel concept in Europe. Only recently has it found its way into the vocabulary of a few conservative Germans. Ms. Merkel and a few colleagues from Poland and Italy wanted to add a reference to the Continent’s Judeo-Christian heritage to Europe’s proposed constitution. The idea was rejected as too divisive, not only to seculars but also to other religions.

But the term does not just cover the moral standards shared by Judaism and Christianity. Its meaning goes beyond matters of faith. It describes the fact that next to the Greco-Roman heritage, the Judeo-Christian tradition is the other main pillar of Western civilization. Acknowledging this basic truth helps Americans to view Jews as part of that civilization and the Jewish state as part of the broader Western alliance.

In post-Christian Europe and Germany, this realization is largely missing. Moses’ law, the foundation for Western legal codes and moral values, is hardly acknowledged on the Continent. Jews are more often seen as having contributed to Western civilization – as individual scientists or artists – rather than being an integral part of it thanks to the role they played as a nation. Jews – often viewed as some kind of guest contributors – thus remain strangers in Europe, as does the Jewish state. And one is more inclined to believe bad things about strangers than about people one feels close to.

Given the similar threats Europe and Israel face from Islamic terror and a nuclear Iran, an alliance between them would seem natural. But as long as Europe’s public considers Israel more as part of the problem than as part of the solution, any such alliance will suffer. It’s time for German and European officials to make the real case for Israel – that of solidarity with an embattled ally.

 

THE REBIRTH OF ISRAEL

The Birth of a Nation, 1948
By Ruth Gruber
The New York Times (op-ed page)
May 18, 2008

IT was Friday, May 14, 1948. I was sitting in the press section of the United Nations General Assembly in its temporary quarters at Flushing Meadow in Queens. I felt my heart thumping. We journalists were waiting impatiently to see who would win a tug of war taking place in Washington.

On one side was President Harry S. Truman, who had told his aides that, with the last British troops leaving Palestine that day, he believed the Jews had a right to declare their own nation, and that he would make sure that the United States would be the first country to recognize it.

On the other side was the State Department, which wanted the land placed in a trusteeship under the United Nations. Secretary of State George Marshall was so passionate in his opposition to a Jewish state that he threatened to vote against the president in the November election. For Truman, who had come to office with the death of Franklin Roosevelt three years earlier, this was to be one of his first true tests of power.

As I sat waiting for the announcement of the decision in Washington, my mind wandered back to the spring and summer of the year before, which I had spent reporting for The New York Herald Tribune. I had traveled in Germany and Austria with the 11 members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. There had been many such committees studying the problems of the Holy Land since the Arab riots of the 1920s; this one was distinguished by having no representatives from Britain, which had been universally hostile to the Zionist cause.

With the members, I visited the camps for displaced persons in Germany and Austria and listened, dumbfounded, as the refugees described the horrors of the war. In particular, I remember visiting the Rothschild Hospital camp in Vienna. Some 100 refugees had just arrived from Romania, many of them children covered with sores and dirt. There was no place to put them but the street; they lay, exhausted, on the paving stones.

A young man approached us, his eyes bloodshot. “In Romania, they killed 30,000 Jews in two hours,” he said, his voice sounding as if it came straight from his guts. “They took Jews to the slaughterhouse and hung them alive the way they hang cows, and they put knives to their throats and split them. Underneath them, they put a sign: Kosher Beef.”

In camp after camp, the committee members asked, “Why do you want to go to Palestine? It’s such a poor country. The Arabs and Jews are always fighting. They don’t have enough food, they don’t have enough water. What is it about Palestine?”

A 16-year-old orphan – actually, we never used the word “orphan” because the term couldn’t convey the horrors these children had been through – gave the most poignant answer. “Everybody has a home,” he said. “The Americans. The British. The French. The Russians. Only we don’t have a home. Don’t ask us. Ask the world.”

A woman tugged the sleeve of my jacket. “You are the only woman with all these men,” she implored. “You will understand me. I saw my husband burned. I don’t want to burn. I want to go home – to Eretz Israel.” The Land of Israel.

“That’s why we’re here,” I told her. “To help solve the problem. But if, Heaven forbid, we fail to find a solution, where would you like to go?”

Her reply: “Back to the crematory.”

It was this committee’s report that led directly to the General Assembly vote of Nov. 29, 1947, to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab entities. The Jews accepted this proposal, but the Arabs stormed out and threatened war.

***

My mind was drawn immediately back to the present of May 1948 as I noticed an American representative to the United Nations, Philip Jessup, hurrying toward the podium. I knew, after talking to his aides, that in his hand he had a speech supporting trusteeship, not statehood, for Israel. The State Department was about to betray the president.

Jessup was halfway up the stairs when an Associated Press reporter handed him a dispatch. Jessup read it, grew white-faced, descended the stairs and then disappeared. The reporter next to me said, “He’s gone to the bathroom.”

I shook my head. “He’s gone home.”

Then we were handed the A.P. report. In Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion had just read the world’s latest proclamation of independence. Eleven minutes later, Harry Truman had recognized Ben-Gurion’s government as the “de facto authority” of the new state.

Israel was born.

 

A MASTERS DEGREE IN ISRAELI STUDIES IS PROVING POPULAR AMONG STUDENTS AT A PALESTINIAN UNIVERSITY

Learn about your enemy: A masters degree in Israeli studies is proving popular among students at a Palestinian university
By Nathan Jeffay
The Guardian (Weekly education supplement)
May 6, 2008

“It had nothing, and in a very short period has built this very strong economy. We should be amazed by this,” says Azizha Noful. She is talking about Israel, which celebrates its 60th anniversary on Thursday.

You will hear many comments like this on Thursday at the many Israel 60 gatherings taking place across the world. After all, this is a classic observation of Israel’s supporters, and one that always dominates discussions at Independence Day events.

What is surprising, though, is that Noful is a Palestinian whose husband is a prisoner in Israel, and she wants an end to the country’s existence. So why is she praising Israel’s achievements?

The answer is that she one of a growing number of Palestinians who want to study Israel. Noful is a student on the fast-growing Israel studies course at the Palestinian Al-Quds University. Between the university’s West Bank and Gaza campuses, the two-year masters degree has more than 100 students – reflecting a year-on-year growth of about 10% since 2005.

At Al-Quds, scholarship and the Palestinian struggle are closely related. For example, one of the law courses involves running human rights clinics in the hope students will “play a role in the struggle for change” in “occupied Palestine”.

PECULIAR SETTING

The university fears confiscation of part of its campus for road building by Israel, and in 2002, Israeli forces closed an administration building, confiscating files, academic documents and computers. Student politics tends to be radical, and the university union goes through periods of Hamas control.

Professor Mohammed Dajani, director of Al-Quds’s Area Studies Institute, which runs the Israel studies course, admits his university is a peculiar setting for this subject. He point out that Palestinian identity has largely been synonymous with “a general Arab policy to shut Israel out of Arab memory” and ignore its existence as far as possible.

However, he says, this has been changing since the start of the occupation in 1967. “Before the 1967 war, Palestinians, like the rest of the Arab world, knew nothing about Israel and Judaism. Then in June 1967, Israeli occupation brought a dramatic shift and Palestinians were shocked to find out how much Israelis knew about the Arab world and how little they knew about them. Though Arab interest in Israel grew tremendously, only a few Arab institutions and publishers reflected objectivity in dealing with the topic.” The few courses and books that did deal with Israel were polemics that viewed Israel as an aggressor.

The Al-Quds course set out to remedy this. Every student takes an in-depth course in Zionist thought and history, and Hebrew language is compulsory, as is studying the Israeli political system, the economy and social structure. Electives and dissertations involve detailed study of niche issues in Israeli society, including women’s issues, ethnicity, divisions between Jews of eastern and western origins, the judicial system, the Israel Defence Forces and the status of Palestinian Arabs.

Given that it is covering new ground for the Arab world, the course faces a lack of Arabic-language texts and so uses Israeli scholarship in Hebrew or in English translation. Perhaps surprisingly, students haven’t objected to the use of Israeli texts, says Dajani.

Teaching Zionism presents one of the course’s biggest challenges, says Professor Mohammad Massalha, who is charged with this task. “We are dealing with people who, on a daily basis, face the result of Zionism. It is very difficult to teach about Zionism academically. But my job is to make as much of an artificial separation between the personal level and the academic level as possible.”

Massalha begins by studying the theory of ideologies as a general subject, and then moves on to considering how Zionism fits and breaks the mould of other ideologies. “This way, we have a model for trying to understand Zionism with some objectivity.” As for why students want to reach this kind of objectivity about Zionism and Israel, motivations vary. More than half are officials in the Palestinian Authority. They range from relatively junior officials to the top-ranking Jibril Rajoub and they all believe that increased knowledge will help their work.

For some, like Noful, it is about acquiring knowledge as power. She says: “Every Palestinian has to know about them [Israelis] - it is important to know about our enemy. As my mother says, if you want to face your enemy, know his language.”

LEARNING PROCESS

She also believes that Palestinians will eventually set up their own state and will do so more effectively if they learn from Israel’s successes. “Israelis are great developers and we can learn from everything they are doing,” she says.

However, she insists that this learning process must take place from a safe distance and shuns dialogue. “We have to know about Israel but not forget they are our enemy. I can’t be on good relations with my enemy.”

Others, like 32-year-old Ramallah resident Sameh Khader, assistant to the secretary of the PLO executive committee, take the opposite view, and hope that their studies will facilitate coexistence and help bring peace. “For me it’s not about knowing the enemy. I want to live peacefully with our neighbours and believe that to do that we need to understand them,” says Khader.

Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar, an Arabic-speaking political scientist at the Israeli Bar Ilan University, says that the success of the course shows a thirst for knowledge about Israel across the Arab world. He is in demand as an Israeli guest on al-Jazeera and other Arabic TV stations and as a writer on Arabic websites. He recently received an offer of a two-year visiting professorship in the Gulf to teach about Israel and Judaism.

“When I publish articles on Arabic websites, I get at least two or three queries every day, from people wanting to know how Israelis think and what life is really like in Israel,” he says.

“While some are trying to convert me to Islam, many don’t like Israel, Israelis or Jews but want to know more. I spend an hour or two every day exchanging mails with these people.

“With satellite TV and the web the Arab world is much more open today than it was, and while this has not brought a desire to accept Israel, it has brought a desire to better understand it.”

EXTRACTS

“WHAT SPAIN WAS IN 1936; LEBANON IS TODAY”

In a lengthy article published today, Middle East expert (and longtime subscriber to this email list) Barry Rubin warns the west to “wake up fast” to what is happening in Lebanon. The article is rather long to include here, so I have prepared some extracts.

“While America’s secretary of state devotes her time to doomed Israel-Palestinian talks and America goes ga-ga over a candidate whose main foreign policy strategy is to talk to dictators,” Lebanon is on the brink as the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbullah show who is in control.

“What Spain was in 1936; Lebanon is today,” writes Rubin. “Does anyone remember the Spanish Civil War? Briefly, a fascist revolt took place against the democratic government. The rebels were motivated by several factors, including anger that their religion had not been given enough respect and regional grievances, but essentially they sought to put their ideology and themselves into power. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the rebels with money and guns. The Western democracies stood by and did nothing. Guess who won? And guess whether that outcome led to peace or world war.

“... When Barack Obama says he will negotiate with Syria and Iran over Iraq’s future, he signals every Persian Gulf regime to cut its own deal with Iran. When his stances convince Hamas that he’s the guy for them; when Iran and Syria conclude they merely need stand defiant and wait until January 21 for any existing pressure vanishes, the U.S. position in the Middle East is being systematically destroyed.

“This does not make Obama the candidate favored by Arabs in general but only by the radicals. Egyptians, Jordanians, Gulf Arabs, and the majorities in Lebanon and Iraq are very worried. This is not just an Israel problem; it is one for all non-extremists in the region. If the dictators and terrorists are smiling, it means everyone else is crying.

“... For all those in the West who don’t like Israel, then at least help the people you pretend to like. Back the Lebanese government with real power and aid, covertly or overtly, those battling the radical forces in Lebanon.”

Rubin concludes with a passage from the move classic Casablanca:

Rick: “Sam, if it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?”

Sam: “Um, my watch stopped.”

Rick: “I bet they’re asleep in New York. I’ll bet they’re asleep all over America.”

FULL ARTICLES

“THIS, DESPITE SO MANY OF THEIR GREATEST INTELLECTS DYING IN THE GAS CHAMBERS”

Happy birthday, Israel and Shalom
By Andrew Roberts
The Daily Express
May 2008

The State of Israel has packed more history into her sixty years on the planet – which she celebrates this week – than many other nations have in six hundred. There are many surprising things about this tiny, feisty, brave nation the size of Wales, but the most astonishing is that she has lived to see this birthday at all. The very day after the new state was established, she was invaded by the armies of no fewer than five Arab countries, and she has been struggling for her right to life ever since.

From Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25 million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers only eight thousand square miles, and is home to seven million citizens, one-fifth of whom are Arabs. The Jews of the Holy Land are thus surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and sixty times their population, yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution – the State of Israel – has somehow survived.

When during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.

Jerusalem is the site of the Temple of Solomon and Herod. The stones of a palace erected by King David himself are even now being unearthed just outside the walls of Jerusalem. Everything that makes a nation state legitimate – blood shed, soil tilled, two millennia of continuous residence, international agreements – argues for Israel’s right to exist, yet that is still denied by the Arab League. For many of their governments, which are rich enough to have solved the Palestinian refugee problem decades ago, it is useful to have Israel as a scapegoat to divert attention from the tyranny, failure and corruption of their own regimes.

The tragic truth is that it suits Arab states very well to have the Palestinians endure permanent refugee status, and whenever Israel puts forward workable solutions they have been stymied by those who interests put the destruction of Israel before the genuine well-being of the Palestinians. Both King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt were assassinated when they attempted to come to some kind of sane accommodation with a country that most sane people now accept is not going away.

The process of creating a Jewish homeland in an area where other peoples were already living – though far fewer of them than anti-Israel propagandists claim – was always going to be a complicated and delicate business, and one for which Britain as the Mandated power had a profound responsibility, and about which since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 she had made solemn promises.

Yet instead of keeping a large number of troops on the ground throughout the birth pangs of the State of Israel, Britain hurriedly withdrew all her forces virtually overnight on 14 May 1948, thus facilitating the Arab invasions the very day, one of which was actually commanded by a former British Army officer, John Glubb (known as Glubb Pasha). Less than four years earlier, Britain had landed division after victorious division in Normandy, now ”Partition and flee” was the Attlee government’s ignominious policy, whose consequences are still plaguing the world half a century later in Kashmir and the Middle East.

“We owe to the Jews,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, “a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.”

The Jewish contribution to finance, science, the arts, academia, commerce and industry, literature, philanthropy and politics has been astonishing relative to their tiny numbers. Although they make up less than half of one per-cent of the world’s population, between 1901 and 1950 Jews won 14% of all the Nobel Prizes awarded for Literature and Science, and between 1951 and 2000 Jews won 32% of the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, 32% for Physics, 39% for Economics and 29% for Science. This, despite so many of their greatest intellects dying in the gas chambers.

Civilization owes Judaism a debt it can never repay, and support for the right of a Jewish homeland to exist is the bare minimum we can provide. Yet we tend to treat Israel like a leper on the international scene, merely for defending herself, and threatening her with academic boycotts if she builds a separation wall that has so far reduced suicide bombings by 95% over three years. It is a disgrace that no senior member of the Royal Family has ever visited Israel, as though the country is still in quarantine after sixty years.

After the Holocaust, the Jewish people recognised that they had to have their own state, a homeland where they could forever be safe from a repetition of such horrors. Putting their trust in Western Civilisation was never again going to be enough. Since then, Israel has had to fight no fewer than five major wars for her very existence. She has been on the front line in the War against Terror and has been fighting the West’s battles for it, decades before 9/11 or 7/7 ever happened. Radical Islam is never going to accept the concept of an Israeli State, so the struggle is likely to continue for another sixty years, but the Jews know that that is less dangerous than entrusting their security to anyone else.

Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would have done placed in their position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 million is nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example at random, Hizbullah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed eight patrolmen and kidnapped two others, and that summer fired four thousand Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further forty-three civilians.

Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what WE would do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire thirty-six thousand rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing seventy-two British servicemen in an ambush and capturing eighteen. There is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. Why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?

Last month I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, researching a book about the Second World War. Walking along a line of huts and the railway siding where their forebears had been worked and starved and beaten and gassed to death, were a group of Jewish schoolchildren, one of whom was carrying over his shoulder the Israeli flag, a blue star of David on white background. It was a profoundly moving sight, for it was the sovereign independence represented by that flag which guarantees that the obscenity of genocide – which killed six million people in Auschwitz and camps like it – will never again befall the Jewish people. Happy birthday, Israel and Shalom.

 

“DESPITE ENTERING ITS SEVENTH DECADE OF LIVING UNDER EXISTENTIAL SIEGE, ISRAEL IS PROSPERING”

Happy 60th birthday, Israel: well done for surviving
By Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
April 30, 2008

Melanie Phillips says that the prosperity and growing cultural confidence of Israel is a fitting riposte to the Western intelligentsia, American meddling and the daily propaganda assault that ignores the Islamisation of the Palestinians

***

What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?

Next week, on 8 May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of that declaration. With every decade that it clocks up, people ask the same question: will Israel still be there for the next one? It is indeed astonishing that it has not only survived but is flourishing. Its situation as a permanently embattled nation is unique. On the day after Ben-Gurion declared its independence, six Arab armies invaded and tried to wipe it out. With the current exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab and Muslim world has been trying ever since.

Israel is the only country whose creation was approved by the UN; yet it is the only country whose legitimacy is called into question. It is the only country which the world requires to compromise with its Palestinian Arab attackers and accede to their demands, even while they are firing rockets at its schools and houses and blowing up its citizens. It is the only country which continues to provide electricity and basic services to those attackers and routinely treats thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals, even those who have Israeli blood on their hands. And yet it is the only country which, in the court of public opinion, is condemned for behaving ‘disproportionately’ when it uses targeted military means to defend itself, and is accused of causing the very ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ atrocities of which it itself is the victim.

At present, the situation looks particularly ominous. Israel is menaced on several fronts by Iran which, racing to develop a nuclear weapon, is threatening a new genocide of the Jews while denying the last one. In Lebanon Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iranian-sponsored army Hezbollah, which is once again armed with thousands of rockets, says the next attack on Israel is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Iranian-backed Hamas, which is pledged to wipe out Israel and every Jew, has built a well-trained standing army of at least 20,000 men and a huge arsenal of weapons smuggled in from Egypt, and relentlessly attacks Israel with rockets and bombs.

It is widely expected that, once Independence Day is over and President Bush has returned home from his celebratory visit, Israel will finally mount a major incursion into Gaza to deal with Hamas. If it does, Western opinion, which largely ignores Israeli victimisation, can be guaranteed to cry ‘atrocity’ once again. And just as before, Hamas will deliberately place women and children in the line of fire to maximise civilian casualties in order further to inflame that opinion.

For Israel finds itself trapped by a pincer movement of military and psychological attack from not only the Arab and Muslim world but also the West. And Britain, whose intelligentsia has swallowed wholesale Arab and Muslim lies, is the Western leader of those baying for Israel’s head. Thanks to the poison spread by the British media, the universities, NGOs and the churches, Israel has been systematically demonised and delegitimised.

Few are aware, for example, how both Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately position both terrorists and weaponry in densely populated civilian areas, using women and children as human shields. While British headlines scream at Israel for causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, few are aware that Hamas has been stealing fuel supplies intended for Gaza’s population and blowing up the crossing points to provoke Israel into closing them, to escalate the conflict and inflame the world. Even fewer are aware that many of the most inflammatory images from the region are fabricated, since both Hamas and Hezbollah routinely stage ‘atrocities’ or artificially exaggerate incidents using doctored footage – courtesy of British journalists who are threatened with murder or kidnap if they fail to toe the line.

More fundamentally, the obsessional demonisation of Israel is based on a false set of beliefs taken straight from Arab propaganda – that as a result of Holocaust guilt, Israel was created when a load of European Jews with no claim to the land were dumped on Palestine, driving out its rightful Arab Muslim inhabitants.

Ben-Gurion would today be surprised to find, for example, that Israel is regarded as illegally occupying the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza). Along with modern Israel, this was part of the territory of Palestine within which in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the task of re-establishing the Jewish national home because of the unique claim by the Jews – the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded it. In other words, far from being ‘Palestinian land’, the Jews are entitled to claim it under international law, which also gives it the right to hold on to it in self-defence. Yet ‘progressive’ opinion not only denies both law and history but demands (as do the Palestinians) the ethnic cleansing of every last Jewish settler from a putative Palestinian state (just as half Israel’s population was created by Jews driven out of their ancient homes in Arab lands). So much for anti-racism.

The denial and inversion of such facts has singled out Israel for vilification applied to no other country. Scapegoated for crimes of which it is in fact the victim, Israel has become the Jew of the Western world. This is a victory for the Arabs in the new type of war in which they are engaged. Asymmetric warfare, whose principal battlefield is the mind, uses ostensibly powerless people (the Palestinians) who are in fact backed by powerful state actors (Iran). Such an inversion of strong and weak and the systematic use of deception are vital to the principal strategic goal of asymmetric warfare: to confuse and demoralise its victims and suborn world opinion to its cause. Even Israel itself has weakened under this. For it has an intelligentsia which is no longer confident of the nation’s right to its own Jewish identity. This has created a dangerous vacuum. In Israeli universities, revisionist historians have told corrosive lies about their country’s history, portraying it as having been born in sin. In the schools, children have not been taught Jewish history and parrot Arab disinformation instead.

The country’s sense of national purpose has been further weakened by the 2006 Lebanon war, which punctured public belief in Israel’s military invincibility, and by the ongoing crisis of political leadership caused by a political system which is endemically corrupt and excludes the brightest and the best from public office.

The result of all this is that at present, both the Israeli Left and Right are consumed by a morbid despair. The Left thinks Israel is doomed to war in perpetuity because there is no prospect of a Palestinian state – which it remains convinced is the prerequisite for peace, despite this being contrary to all history, evidence and logic. The Right, on the other hand, thinks that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is Israel’s Chamberlain, about to declare peace in our time by giving away half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and thus delivering Israel to the wolves of Arab annihilation. But both are surely missing the bigger picture.

First, despite entering its seventh decade of living under existential siege, Israel is prospering. Its economy is booming, it leads the world in high-tech, and property prices in Tel Aviv rival those in London. Second, having stared over the edge of the cultural abyss it has started to realise the danger. It is beginning to turn education round, with a new awareness dawning among high school principals of the need to teach Jewish history, identity and values. And although unprecedented numbers of mainly secular Israelis now choose to live abroad, there are rapidly growing numbers of the religiously orthodox who know exactly what they are fighting for and are prepared to die for it – as do the majority of middle-of-the-road Israeli citizens.

The same, however, can’t be said of the Palestinian Arabs, who are simply falling apart. The rise of Hamas, the progressive Islamisation and terrorisation of Palestinian society and the continued corruption and factional fighting within Fatah are all taking their toll. Increasingly, Palestinians are packing up and leaving. It is they rather than the Israelis who are in despair. Their sense of national identity – always artificial – now lies finally shattered by the death cult that acts in their name. After all, with even supposedly secular Fatah being steadily Islamised, why on earth would any Palestinian in his right mind want to live in a repressive Islamic republic – which Palestine would without doubt become – where dissidents are thrown from the tops of tall buildings?

And here lies the paradox which offers the best hope for Israel’s future. For the very Islamism which so menaces it might finally unlock the door to peace. This is because both Islamism and Iran threaten not just Israel but the ‘moderate’ Arab world too. Accordingly, the last thing those Arabs want is an Iranian-backed, Islamised state of Palestine. Egypt and Jordan simply cannot afford to have Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood on their doorsteps in a Hamas-dominated Gaza or West Bank. Currently, they rely on Israel to prevent it. But increasingly, talk of some kind of Jordan-Egypt-Palestinian confederation is in the air.

As the analyst Jonathan Spyer has noted, Jordan’s recent decision to connect Jericho to the Jordanian electricity grid is an example of its increasing involvement in the West Bank. And behind the scenes, the more realistic Palestinians have grasped that their best chance of having any future at all lies in just such a confederation. Such an outcome would have history on its side. Some readers may feel the need to lie down after reading the rest of this sentence, but Jordan is historically the state of Arab Palestine. This was the original two-state ‘solution’ back in 1921, when Winston Churchill unilaterally gave away three quarters of the original territory of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty, creating what is now Jordan, with the remainder supposed to go to the Jews.

But this chance of an end to the dispute is currently being undermined by the self-serving meddling of America which, like Europe, falsely casts the Arab war against Israel as a boundary dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and is trying to force the agreed outline of a Palestinian state by the time President Bush leaves office.

It is even pressuring Israel to accept Hamas’s ‘truce’ – by which Hamas means a period when Israel doesn’t attack it so it can equip itself for war undisturbed – so that on his visit to Israel next week Bush can pretend that Middle East peace in our time is imminent. But this is a virtual reality peace process, since even the ‘moderate’ Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has said in terms that he will never recognise Israel as a Jewish state. So what’s to discuss?

Despite its sham nature, however, this appeasement process has had two baleful consequences. It has caused Olmert, under pressure from the Americans, the Israeli media and powerful Israeli oligarchs who want the economic advantages of peace at any price, to destroy checkpoints, release prisoners and float the possibility of territorial concessions – all of which promote and incite further Arab violence. And it has caused Jordan to put its own confederation idea on ice. Thus meddling America is destroying the best option for the Middle East to resolve its core dispute – that it is left to sort it out by itself.

Indeed, much of the responsibility for these six decades of conflict lie with a Western world which, from 1921 onwards, has chosen to appease Arab violence while shedding crocodile tears over its Jewish victims. But the future of Israel is the future of the West. If the front line in Israel were to go down, the West would be next. Given its current internal appeasement of Islamism, however, the West may go down anyway. At least Israel knows it has to fight to survive. As a result, in 60 years’ time it will still be there. Can the same be said for Britain or Europe?

FULL ARTICLES

TODAY ONLY A FEW DOZEN JEWS ARE THOUGHT TO REMAIN IN LEBANON

Israel’s advent altered outlook for Middle East Jews
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
Reuters
May 5, 2008

(This is the first story in a special series Reuters is running this week to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary)

SIDON, Lebanon (Reuters) – A ruined cemetery lies by the sea in Sidon, the worn Hebrew inscriptions on the headstones a reminder of Lebanon’s once-thriving Jewish minority, which has all but vanished since the state of Israel emerged 60 years ago.

The graveyard sits in wasteland across the road from an unstable mountain of garbage piled over rubble collected from buildings destroyed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

“The Israeli troops came and looked after the cemetery,” recalled Mohammed al-Sarji, a Sidon environmentalist and film-maker. “After they left in 1985, it was neglected.”

The 1948 war at Israel’s creation, which forced some 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homeland, hardened Arab attitudes to deep-rooted Jewish minorities across the Middle East.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were displaced. Some migrated voluntarily from mainly Muslim countries to the newly proclaimed Jewish homeland. Others were forced out by dispossession, discrimination or violence. Thousands stayed on.

Israeli statistics show more than 760,000 Middle Eastern Jews had moved to Israel by 2006, with more than 40 percent arriving in the first three years of the state’s existence.

Over the last six decades of Middle East tension, Jewish communities have dwindled to insignificance in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen, but cling on in countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and non-Arab Iran and Turkey.

Iran, seen by Israel as its deadliest foe, hosts 22,000 to 25,000 Jews, down from at least 85,000 before the 1979 Islamic revolution, when many went to the United States. Today, it is the biggest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel.

Morris Mottamed, who formerly held the Jewish seat in Iran’s parliament, noted that post-revolutionary turmoil and economic factors had prompted emigration among other minorities too.

Discrimination was not behind the Jewish outflow, he argued, adding that Iranian Jews enjoyed freedom of worship, education and travel. Their numbers had been stable for five years.

“I’m sure in future also there will be a very strong community of Jewish people in Iran,” Mottamed told Reuters.

Asked about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, he said he disagreed with it.

The United States says such hostility to Israel creates a threatening atmosphere for Iranian Jews. It also says they and other minorities suffer discrimination. Tehran denies this.

UNEQUAL COEXISTENCE

Morocco, which has warmer ties with Israel than most Arab countries, was home to around 400,000 Jews before 1948.

But after waves of migration, fewer than 4,000 remain, the residue of a 2,000-year history of peaceful, if unequal, cohabitation interspersed with episodes of bloody repression.

In the past, Moroccan Jews were considered subordinate to Muslims and discrimination was widespread. Every city has its Mellah, the poorest quarter to which Jews were once confined. Their residents were the first to leave when they could.

A Jewish cemetery, community centre and restaurant were among targets of Islamist suicide bombers who killed 45 people in Casablanca in 2003. But such violence against Jews is rare.

“There is no anti-Semitism in Morocco,” Simon Levy, 75, who chairs the Moroccan Museum of Judaism in Casablanca, told Le Soir daily. “There is a growing Islamist sentiment, and the Muslim has this certainty he is better than everyone else.”

But Morocco remains Levy’s home: “I made my choice long ago to stay in this country as a Moroccan, like my ancestors.”

Tunisia’s 2,000 Jews live in harmony with their Muslim neighbours, reflecting the policy of its secular government.

“We are doing our best to teach our children the Jewish religion as Muslims learn their religion,” said David Didoshim, headmaster of a Jewish school on the island of Djerba.

The community was jolted when an al Qaeda suicide bomber attacked a Djerba synagogue in 2002, killing 21 people.

Yet Hayim Haddad, a Jewish resident, said no Jews had left the island afterwards. “All the people know how much we are attached to our country Tunisia, whatever happens,” he added.

Tunisian Jews numbered 100,000 until the North African country won independence in 1956. Most then moved to France.

TALE OF DISPERSAL

Conflict in Palestine in the 1930s made life harder for Egyptian Jews, as militant nationalist groups became active.

Israel’s advent in 1948 and the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 added to their difficulties. In 1948, there were bomb attacks in Jewish areas and some Jews were killed in riots.

Jewish emigration accelerated after Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 and economic pressures mounted at home.

Many Jewish residents were entrepreneurs without Egyptian citizenship who opted to leave after the government nationalized their businesses and seized their wealth. Some were held in detention centres and coerced into leaving the country.

Egypt was home to 75,000 to 80,000 Jews in 1922. Today, only about 30 still live in Cairo, mostly ageing women with Muslim or Christian husbands. A few more than that survive in Alexandria.

Magda Haroun Silvera said she had often met bureaucratic obstacles when renewing her passport or identity card.

“My birth certificate says I was born in the Israeli hospital so they always ask me if I am really Egyptian. People have forgotten how big the Jewish community once was,” she said.

She said she had retained her Jewish identity despite marrying a Muslim and later a Catholic.

“My daughters are Muslims by their father. I tried to raise them with an open mind. In our household we do Ramadan, Christmas and then the Jewish feasts with my mother,” she said.

Silvera said the Jews of Egypt “do not relate to Israel” because they had mixed marriages and were attached to Egypt.

KEEPERS OF HEBREW

Only 200 to 300 Jews live in Yemen, remnants of a community that spoke a form of ancient Hebrew as a living tongue. About 50,000 moved to Israel thanks to an airlift begun in 1949.

Yemeni Jews say they have lived peacefully with their Muslim compatriots over the years, but in 2007 about 45 were evacuated from the north after attacks from rebel Zaidi Muslim tribesmen.

In Iraq, a Jewish community that traced its history back to Babylonian times has all but evaporated. Over 120,000 were flown to Israel after 1948 when government persecution intensified.

Some Iraqi and Syrian Jews made their way to Lebanon in the 1940s, boosting that country’s Jewish community to 14,000, and about 6,000 of them subsequently moved on to Israel.

Lebanese Jewish migration began in earnest after the 1967 Middle East war brought Palestinian guerrillas and more refugees to Lebanon, hastening its slide towards the 1975-90 civil war.

Several leaders of Lebanon’s rapidly shrinking Jewish community were kidnapped and killed by pro-Iranian Shi’ite militant groups that sprang up after Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Today only a few dozen Jews are thought to remain.

(Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl in Tehran, Tarek Amara in Tunis, Tom Pfeiffer in Rabat, Jonathan Wright in Cairo, Lin Noueihed in Dubai and Peter Graff in Baghdad)

 

“WE BELIEVE THAT ISRAEL’S EMERGENCE IS THE GREATEST COLLECTIVE EVENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE”

Remarkable half-century old Mike Wallace interview with Abba Eban puts current anti-Israel sentiment into perspective
By Jonathan Mark
May 5, 2008

Fifty years ago on the cusp of Israel’s 10th birthday, not its 60th, Abba Eban, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States, sat down for an interview with CBS.

“I’m Mike Wallace,” says the newsman. “The cigarette [I’m smoking] is Parliament.”

It was a time when journalists almost had to smoke, a haze drifted between the talking heads on an unadorned stage, draped in black.

The primitive black and white kinescopes of Wallace interviews from the late 1950s were recently made available by the University of Texas at Austin, where they’ve been archived.

The interview on that night takes us back to a simpler time, before settlers, before Israel’s control of Jerusalem or the West Bank, a time when “little Israel” was David, not Goliath. It was the year “Exodus” was published. Israel was a teen idol, or so we remember. But the young Wallace (40 years old) was tough and Eban was, well, Eban.

Here, condensed, is some of their exchange, which happened long before “settlers”, Israel’s control of Jerusalem or the West Bank.

WALLACE “Mr. Ambassador, in its ... 10 years as a nation, Israel has been involved in repeated violence... “

EBAN “Well, Mr. Wallace, the last 10 years have not only been years of violence. They have been incomparable years of joyous creation, of sovereignty restored, of the people gathered in, of a land revived, of democracy established, but there has also been violence imposed by the hostility of our neighbors.”

WALLACE “... You called Egypt’s President Nasser, Israel’s most perilous adversary. Now today Colonel Nasser would seem to be even stronger...”

EBAN “Well, at present, Nasser’s policy is one of acquiescence towards us, and there has been a relative tranquility on our frontier with him. Perhaps the memories of the Sinai expedition [in 1956] have had a salutary effect in causing him to avoid his previous belligerent provocations, but basically we have not changed our views on Nasser and Nasserism.” The word “Palestinian” is not heard on the broadcast. The West Bank was Jordan in those days; Gaza was Egypt.

WALLACE “... Arnold Toynbee has said, ‘The evil deeds committed by the Zionist Jews against the [refugee] Arabs are comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis.’ How do you feel about that?”

EBAN “Well, about Professor Toynbee’s statement I can only repeat what I’ve written, that it is a monstrous blasphemy. Here he takes the massacre of millions of our men, women and children, and he compares it to the plight of Arab refugees alive, on their kindred soil, suffering certain anguish, but of course possessed of the supreme gift of life. This equation between massacre and temporary suffering which can easily be alleviated is, I think, a distortion of any historic perspective.”

WALLACE “Of course, the problem of the refugees is allied with the problem of territorial expansion on the part of Israel. A major Arab spokesman here in the United States ... says, ‘The area of the territories held by Israel today exceeds by about 40 percent the area of the territories given Israel by the United Nations. Most of this added area,’ he says, ‘was taken by force and should therefore be relinquished by Israel.’”

EBAN “Well, I think this gentleman need not to lose any sleep at night worrying about whether the State of Israel is too big. Really there is nothing more grotesque or eccentric in the international life of our times, than the doctrine that little Israel, 8,000 square miles in area, should become even smaller in order that the vast Arab Empire should still further expand.”

WALLACE “Well, as a member of the Judaic faith, which cherishes social justice and morality, do you believe that any country should profit territorially from violence?”

EBAN “Mr. Wallace ... I am not going to analyze how the frontiers of countries which I have seen or in which I have served were achieved [but it is the Arabs] who decreed the method by which the present frontiers were achieved. They rejected the 1947 recommendation.”

WALLACE “Now then, Mr. Eban, regarding the American Jew and the State of Israel, the anti-Zionist rabbi, Dr. Elmer Berger [a Reform rabbi, not Satmar or Neturei Karta] has written, ‘the Zionist-Israeli axis imposes upon Jews outside of Israel, Americans of Jewish faith included, a status of double-nationality,’ a status which he deplores. What’s your answer?”

EBAN “Well, Mr. Wallace, I have so many pressing duties that I don’t follow the wisdom of this gentleman perhaps as closely as I should. I will only say this, that we ask no allegiance, we seek no loyalty from anyone who is not a citizen of Israel. There is a kinship of spirit, of emotion, of historic memory between us and those who share our faith throughout the world ... We believe that Israel’s emergence is the greatest collective event in the history of the Jewish people, and that there is no pride and no dignity for a Jew such as those to be found in giving aid and sustenance to Israel in the great hour of her resurgence.”

 

OUT OF FIRE AND DESIRE, A COUNTRY WAS BORN

Book of Genesis
By Abby Wisse Schachter
The New York Post
May 4, 2008

On May 20, 1948 – six days after the Jewish State of Israel declared independence – Syrian troops attacked the nation’s oldest communal settlement, or kibbutz, Degania. The Syrians had eight tanks and 10 armored cars. The settlers had homemade machine guns and some bombs.

As one of the tanks rolled in, two Molotov cocktails struck it from a nearby trench, reported Arthur Koestler, a foreign correspondent for The Guardian.

“One was thrown by Shalom Hochbaum,” Koestler wrote, “who arrived two years ago after spending altogether five years in 13 different concentration camps, including Belsen. The second was thrown by Yehuda Sprung of Cracow, 12 years in Degania, before that a student of law at Cracow University. He is a thin, timid little man who looks like a tailor. Neither of them had seen a tank before in his life.”

It took weeks, but this group of tailors, refugees and Holocaust survivors fought off the Syrians and a 2,000-year-old wish – “next year in Jerusalem” – was fulfilled. Out of fire and desire, a country was born.

By reading through the newspaper reports of the time, from correspondents and the local Palestine Post, one sees how fragile those first months were. The Israeli fighters were a ragged bunch, many just off the boat from Europe, handed a rifle at the port of Haifa. But they learned early the importance of training; that everyone, no matter their profession, would have to learn the ways of war.

In the New Republic, writer Lawencer Lader wrote about the rise of the Palmach – young men and women of the kibbutz who were trained as an elite strike force. The commander of one of these brigades, Moshe Kellman, told Lader: “None of us is a soldier by profession. Most of us have come from the kibbutzim. Our purpose to go back and someday start new kibbutzim of our own. The Palmach grew out of the kibbutzim because from 1941 on, we realized that it was more important for a boy of 17 to devote his full time to defending his home and people than to plow the fields or tend the vineyards.”

THE PRELUDE

Israel was a dream, since the time of Moses, yes, but given urgency by the work of Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who in 1897 called for “normalizing” the Jewish condition by a return to the homeland.

From the 1880s to the 1930s, the movement to establish the Jewish State proceeded in two ways: Practical settlement and political advocacy. The Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 25,000 in 1882 to between 85,000 and 100,000 just prior to World War I, while political advocacy on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish state met with mixed results. The Ottoman empire controlled the area until 1919 and allowed land to be purchased for Jewish settlement, while refusing to grant any specific Jewish claim to the land.

After WWI, dominion over Palestine passed from the Turks to the British, who established a Mandate over the territory. Jewish political fortunes looked brighter. After all, it was the British Lord Balfour who declared in 1917 that the British government “view with favor” the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people.”

The Mandate period (1920-48) was marked by growing Jewish immigration into Palestine, while demands for further immigration grew with Hitler’s rise to power in Europe. The British authorities, meanwhile, tried to manage Jewish political aspirations while also attempting to quell majority Arab unrest at the growing Jewish presence. Deadly Arab riots against Jews in 1920, 1929 and 1936-39 convinced Jews that self-defense, military service and self-reliance was their only option.

Jewish self-defense evolved as the settlements grew. Initially, immigrants were hired to guard Jewish settlements for an annual fee. After the 1920 Arab riots, a Jewish military, or Haganah, was formally organized and established. For those young men and women living on communal farms, military training became part of the residency requirements.

From 1939-1945, the Jews of Palestine fought on two fronts – alongside the British against Hitler, and at home defended themselves against Arab attacks. In an effort to save the Jews of Europe, the Haganah organized the transport of hundreds of thousands of them into Palestine on illegal ships, since the British had banned further immigration. After the war, the British began looking for a way out of Palestine, finally opting for the newly formed United Nations to vote on a plan to partition Palestine into two states – one Jewish and one Arab – on November 29, 1947.

The Jews were elated, the Arabs defiant and the fight for Israel’s independence had begun.

EARLY DEFEAT

Hostilities began as a series of attacks and counter attacks between Arabs, Jews and the British Mandate authorities that continued from December 1947 until May 1948. The day after Israel’s declaration of independence, May 15, five Arab armies invaded: Syria, Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Lebanon.

But one of the worst Jewish defeats came before the state was even officially at war, in early May at the settlements of Gush Etzion, 20 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, on the hills between Hebron and Bethlehem. The series of four settlements were strategically located on the road used by the Arabs to transport weapons and supplies to Jerusalem.

On May 4 and again on May 12, poorly-armed Jewish settlers, reinforced by better-trained Haganah and Palmach fighters, were attacked over several days by Arab Legionnaires commanding thousands of Arab irregulars.

After three days of fighting, 30 Jewish fighters had been killed and the remaining settlers surrendered. Polish-born, Palmach fighter Eliza Feuchtwanger radioed Jerusalem. “The Arabs are in the Kibbutz. Farewell.”

The Arab Legion commander, Abdullah Tell, later admitted that the Jews “fought with incredible bravery.”

Following the surrender, the Arabs entered the settlement, looted the buildings and massacred 127 men and women. Only five Jews survived. Slaughtered bodies, both men and women, remained in place for a year and a half before Transjordanian authorities allowed Israel to retrieve the corpses.

VICTORY IN THE GALILEE

Israel’s fortunes started to turn in the settlements in the Galilee region.

Correspondent Koestler described the Syrian military’s uneven advance on Degania as an example of how the settlers were getting the upper hand.

“The Syrians advanced in a hesitating and undecided sort of way. They sent out several waves of infantry which as soon as they came within range of automatic fire, turned tail and swarmed back instead of digging in.” Then “eight tanks arrive at the outer fence of the settlement. The first one, on the flank nearest the lake was incapacitated by a Molotov-cocktail which hit its caterpillar chain. The third broke through the fence, reached the slit trench, then slowly veered south as if to progress parallel to the trench.”

In the New Republic, Lader wrote of how until May 10, “the city of Safed which controls the Upper Galilee valley was considered one of the impregnable strongholds of the Arabs in Palestine.”

Not for the Palmach fighter, however. They spent a week prior to May 10 quietly bringing supplies and ammunition each night through the valley below the city. “Then a force of 200 men, each armed with only 50 rounds of ammunition,” Lader recounts, “attacked at night, taking the Arabs by surprise. Another Palmach unit fought for 11 hours in the police station, and after three hours rest, stormed the remainder of the city. By noon, the supposedly impregnable Safed was safe in Palmach hands.”

BATTLE FOR JERUSALEM

Jerusalem was the center of major confrontations before and after the formal declaration of war. Indeed, the old city was under siege for five-and-a-half months ending finally on May 19, 1948.

As Mordechai Chertoff reported in The Palestine Post, “instead of breaking their spirit, the siege had turned the residents of the [Jewish] Quarter into soldiers.”

In an effort to win control of Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest city, the Israeli forces fought a long battle along the single roadway to the city. One of the fiercest fighting took place 15 kilometers west of Jerusalem, at Latrun. As British troops departed the police fort on May 14, Arab Legionnaires tried to take it over and fighting broke out for the strategic outpost.

One report from Jon Kimche in the Palestine Post on June 1, 1948 captures the intensity of the fighting. “By 4 o’clock the attacking force has reached the perimeter of the police station from which heavy fire was directed at them. With a sudden rush in the face of a strong searchlight shining on the attackers, one group of Jews set fire to the building while another group attacked with small arms. A number of Arabs escaped from the inferno, but for the majority there was no getaway.

“By dawn, the operation was completed and the Jews withdrew to their previous positions. The Arabs remained in possession of Latrun, but it had again been destroyed.”

But even with some relief in May, the Arab stranglehold over Jerusalem remained a serious problem for the Jews. With no other way of getting supplies, food and arms to the Jewish resident of the city, the newly established Israeli Defense Forces took on the task of digging a new road into Jerusalem. On June 14, writer I.F. Stone was the first reporter to be taken into the city by military convoy on the new “Burma” road.

“The hastily improvised new road,” he reported in the Palestine Post, “rough-hewn by bulldozer and tractor across trackless fields, hills and valleys is one of the engineering feats of the Jewish war of independence. Even more impressive are the working men from the docks of Haifa and the workshops of Tel Aviv willing to serve as coolies and human mules over dark and hazardous mountain trails in order to turn the flank of the Jerusalem siege and bring up badly needed supplies.”

THE NORTHERN FRONT

“From the GI’s point of view this war seems about like any other war,” reported The Chicago Sun-Times’ Keith Wheeler who was with the Haganah on the Lebanese border, June 14, 1948, “99 percent griping and waiting and one percent action.”

“One discovers,” Wheeler observed, “that the Jewish soldier resembles any other soldier. He loves to brag. He holds his enemy in vast contempt. He collects souvenirs as ardently as a United States marine. On the slightest provocation he whips out snapshots of children, wives and sweethearts. He is hospitality personified.”

On the other hand, as Wheeler observed there were some serious differences between Israeli GIs as compared, say, to their American counterparts. The Jewish soldier “doesn’t want his name in the papers. By habit of many years he yearns almost pathologically for anonymity. He is completely without rank consciousness and if so moved, never hesitates to call a company commander ‘fathead’ in his presence. There is no ‘brass’ in the Haganah. Nobody salutes anybody and nobody wears any insignia of rank. ‘The only difference is authority, and that is never questioned,’ the commander of an outfit on the border told me.”

THE SOUTHERN FRONT

Kenneth Bilby of the International Herald Tribune was another witness to Jewish ingenuity and resourcefulness. He was taken first by transport plane (flown by a “youthful American pilot”) and then by jeep to relieve the Egyptian siege of isolated Jewish settlements in the Negev Desert. “The Israel air-transport service provides one of the Jewish answers to the Egyptian effort to besiege and throttle Jewish settlements in the Negev,” he reported on Aug 8. “With Egyptians menacing the sole supply route to the Negev, the Jews rely on their air force as much as the Western powers in Berlin.”

THE BATTLE FINALLY OVER

Throughout 1949, armistice agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria,, ending the Independence War. These agreements temporarily put an end to hostilities and established armistice lines between Israel and Jordan on the West Bank of the Jordan River – known until the Six Day War in June 1967 as the Green Line.

What Israel could not achieve diplomatically, it achieved through force of arms. Instead of three non-contiguous areas of Jewish sovereignty, as declared by the UN partition plan of 1947, the newly established state controlled one single territory bordering Syria and Lebanon in the North, Transjordan to the East and Egypt to the southwest. The country’s capital, Jerusalem would remain divided between Israel and Jordan for proceeding 19 years, with Jews cut off from their religion’s holiest site, the Western Wall, until 1967’s Six Day War.

DEBUNKING REVISIONIST MYTHS

1948, Israel, and the Palestinians – The True Story
By Efraim Karsh
Commentary magazine
May 2008

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.

The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

***

Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920’s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which called for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place.

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

If this was the position of the more “militant” faction of the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann, then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a peace-and-cooperation agreement with the Hashemite emir Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal’s elder brother and founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab elites of all hues.

As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict “was uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,” and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit “from active policies of cooperation and development.” Behind this proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would ease the path for the local Arab populace to become permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel’s first prime minister, argued in December 1947:

“If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, . . . if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance.”

***

On the face of it, Ben-Gurion’s hope rested on reasonable grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I had revived Palestine’s hitherto static condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states. The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves quadrupled.

No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third.

That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to Mandate Palestine’s socioeconomic well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in a 1937 report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel:

“The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A comparison of the census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.”

Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably have been content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world, moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed classes of society.
So it was with the Palestinians. In the words of the Peel report:

“We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary . . . with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine [has] meant the deterioration of the political situation.”

In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged betters for the crime of “selling Palestine” to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight “until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country,” facilitated the transfer of 7,500 acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives, all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of land. So did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem.

It was the mufti’s concern with solidifying his political position that largely underlay the 1929 carnage in which 133 Jews were massacred and hundreds more were wounded—just as it was the struggle for political preeminence that triggered the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian Arab violence in 1936-39. This was widely portrayed as a nationalist revolt against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution. In fact, it was a massive exercise in violence that saw far more Arabs than Jews or Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs, that repressed and abused the general Arab population, and that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country in a foretaste of the 1947-48 exodus.

Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back against their inciters, often in collaboration with the British authorities and the Hagana, the largest Jewish underground defense organization. Still others sought shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. For despite the paralytic atmosphere of terror and a ruthlessly enforced economic boycott, Arab-Jewish coexistence continued on many practical levels even during such periods of turmoil, and was largely restored after their subsidence.

***

Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that most Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent attempt ten years later by the mufti-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective “government” of the Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 UN partition resolution. With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in their minds, many opted to stay out of the fight. In no time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban areas) were negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors; other localities throughout the country acted similarly without the benefit of a formal agreement.

Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying their supreme leadership. In his numerous tours around the region, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of Jerusalem and the mufti’s close relative, found the populace indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms. In Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the salaried force he sought to form in that city; his efforts in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya were hardly more successful. Arab villagers, for their part, proved even less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa, Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven out by angry residents protesting their village’s transformation into a hub of anti-Jewish attacks. Even the few who answered his call did so, by and large, in order to obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then return home.

There was an economic aspect to this peaceableness. The outbreak of hostilities orchestrated by the AHC led to a sharp drop in trade and an accompanying spike in the cost of basic commodities. Many villages, dependent for their livelihood on the Jewish or mixed-population cities, saw no point in supporting the AHC’s explicit goal of starving the Jews into submission. Such was the general lack of appetite for war that in early February 1948, more than two months after the AHC initiated its campaign of violence, Ben-Gurion maintained that “the villages, in most part, have remained on the sidelines.”

Ben-Gurion’s analysis was echoed by the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat, commander-in-chief of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel’s proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800 of the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from Palestine itself, and that most of these had deserted either before completing their training or immediately afterward. Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, was no less scathing, having found the Palestinians “unreliable, excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized warfare virtually unemployable.”

This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the fateful six months of fighting after the passing of the partition resolution. Even as these months saw the all but complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab society, nowhere was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely viewed by Arab leaders as “Zionist in inspiration, Zionist in principle, Zionist in substance, and Zionist in most details” (in the words of the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid about their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the bloodletting.

Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the Jews set out to lay the groundwork for their nascent state while simultaneously striving to convince their Arab compatriots that they would be (as Ben-Gurion put it) “equal citizens, equal in everything without any exception,” Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that “should partition be implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the Arabs of Palestine, their sons, and their women.” Qawuqji vowed “to drive all Jews into the sea.” Abdel Qader Husseini stated that “the Palestine problem will only be solved by the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine.”

***

They and their fellow Arab abetters did their utmost to make these threats come true, with every means at their disposal. In addition to regular forces like the ALA, guerrilla and terror groups wreaked havoc, as much among noncombatants as among Jewish fighting units. Shooting, sniping, ambushes, bombings, which in today’s world would be condemned as war crimes, were daily events in the lives of civilians. “[I]nnocent and harmless people, going about their daily business,” wrote the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, Robert Macatee, in December 1947, “are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the streets, and stray shots even find them while asleep in their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of five children, was shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the roof. The ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned, and finally the mourners following her to the funeral were attacked and one of them stabbed to death.”

As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well, and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale violence. Thus, the December 1947 murder of six Arab workers near the Haifa oil refinery by the small Jewish underground group IZL was followed by the immediate slaughter of 39 Jews by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some 100 Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948 was “avenged” within days by the killing of 77 Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus.

Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these gruesome events for what they were, at times withholding details so as to avoid panic and keep the door open for Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts not only inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented numerous nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April 21-22), for example, gave rise to totally false claims of a large-scale slaughter, which circulated throughout the Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18), during the battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa, where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of “hundreds of Arab men and women.” Accounts of Deir Yasin in the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and accusations of havoc and rape.

This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the widest possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and casting the Jews as brutal predators. But it backfired disastrously by spreading panic within the disoriented Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this phase of the Arab war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing was the second, wider, and more prolonged phase involving the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded Palestine in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to join the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to the road, leaving their homes either for places elsewhere in the country or fleeing to neighboring Arab lands.

***

Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the war reached their own doorstep. “Arabs are leaving the country with their families in considerable numbers, and there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab centers,” reported Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that the “panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country.”

Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted in mid-December an “evacuation frenzy that has taken hold of entire Arab villages.” Before the month was over, many Palestinian Arab cities were bemoaning the severe problems created by the huge influx of villagers and pleading with the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early exodus, demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs to stay put and fight.

But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the AHC or from anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack of national cohesion, let alone any sense of shared destiny. Cities and towns acted as if they were self-contained units, attending to their own needs and eschewing the smallest sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many “national committees” (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export of food and drink from well-stocked cities to needy outlying towns and villages. Haifa’s Arab merchants refused to alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin, while Gaza refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron, armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time there was extensive smuggling, especially in the mixed-population cities, with Arab foodstuffs going to Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.

The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by the abysmal treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered throughout the country. Not only was there no collective effort to relieve their plight, or even a wider empathy beyond one’s immediate neighborhood, but many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and subjected to ridicule and abuse for their supposed cowardice. In the words of one Jewish intelligence report: “The refugees are hated wherever they have arrived.”

Even the ultimate war victims—the survivors of Deir Yasin—did not escape their share of indignities. Finding refuge in the neighboring village of Silwan, many were soon at loggerheads with the locals, to the point where on April 14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan delegation approached the AHC’s Jerusalem office demanding that the survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their relocation was forthcoming.

Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all, for fear of overstraining existing resources. In Acre (Akko), the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian population organized its own militia—not so much to fight the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially by fleecing them for such basic necessities as transportation and accommodation.

Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in-chief Safwat noted with some astonishment that the Jews “have so far not attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.”) By the time of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even then, none of the 170,000-180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.
The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations—reducing civilian casualties, denying sites to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces to repel them—rather than political design. They were, moreover, matched by efforts to prevent flight and/or to encourage the return of those who fled. To cite only one example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top Arab-affairs advisers, local notables, and municipal heads with close contacts with neighboring Arab localities traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their inhabitants to stay put.

***

What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is that they took place at a time when huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa on the AHC’s instructions, despite strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier, Tiberias’ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes. In Jaffa, Palestine’s largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.

Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA. Within weeks of the latter’s arrival in Palestine in January 1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.

By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of the country. It gained considerable momentum in April and May as ALA and AHC forces throughout Palestine were being comprehensively routed. On April 18, the Hagana’s intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general order to remove the women and children from all villages bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa counterpart reported an ALA command to evacuate all Arab villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan’s Arab Legion likewise ordered the emptying of scores of villages.

As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had placed their reluctant constituents on a collision course with Zionism in the 1920’s and 1930’s and had now dragged them helpless into a mortal conflict, they hastened to get themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with quintessential British understatement:

“You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the national committee has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.”

Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate era and the doyen of Palestinian historians, described the prevailing atmosphere at the time: “Wherever one went throughout the country one heard the same refrain: ‘Where are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine, their own country, needs them?’”

***

Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during the 1948 war, would sum up the situation in these words: “The Palestinians had neighboring Arab states which opened their borders and doors to the refugees, while the Jews had no alternative but to triumph or to die.”

This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason for the refugees’ flight and radically distorts the quality of their reception elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy from their brethren at home, the reaction throughout the Arab world was, if anything, harsher still. There were repeated calls for the forcible return of the refugees, or at the very least of young men of military age, many of whom had arrived under the (false) pretense of volunteering for the ALA. As the end of the Mandate loomed nearer, the Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian males between eighteen and fifty and ordered all “healthy and fit men” who had already entered the country to register officially or be considered illegal aliens and face the full weight of the law.

The Syrian government took an even more stringent approach, banning from its territory all Palestinian males between sixteen and fifty. In Egypt, a large number of demonstrators marched to the Arab League’s Cairo headquarters and lodged a petition demanding that “every able-bodied Palestinian capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay abroad.” Such was the extent of Arab resentment toward the Palestinian refugees that the rector of Cairo’s al-Azhar institution of religious learning, probably the foremost Islamic authority, felt obliged to issue a ruling that made the sheltering of Palestinian Arab refugees a religious duty.

Contempt for the Palestinians only intensified with time. “Fright has struck the Palestinian Arabs and they fled their country,” commented Radio Baghdad on the eve of the pan-Arab invasion of the new-born state of Israel in mid-May. “These are hard words indeed, yet they are true.” Lebanon’s minister of the interior (and future president) Camille Chamoun was more delicate, intoning that “The people of Palestine, in their previous resistance to imperialists and Zionists, proved they were worthy of independence,” but “at this decisive stage of the fighting they have not remained so dignified.”

No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews. During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover that while the refugees “express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes...I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.”

***

Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.

It is indeed the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two leaders who determined their national development during the 20th century—Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasir Arafat, the latter of whom dominated Palestinian politics since the mid-1960’s to his death in November 2004—were megalomaniacal extremists blinded by anti-Jewish hatred and profoundly obsessed with violence. Had the mufti chosen to lead his people to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he had promised the British officials who appointed him to his high rank in the early 1920’s, the Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial part of Mandate Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation, instead of turning it into one of the most murderous terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960’s or the early 1970’s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999 as part of the Oslo process; or at the very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000.

Instead, Arafat transformed the territories placed under his control in the 1990’s into an effective terror state from where he launched an all-out war (the “al-Aqsa intifada”) shortly after being offered an independent Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 92 percent of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. In the process, he subjected the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships and plunged their standard of living to unprecedented depths.

What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is that, far from being unfortunate aberrations, Hajj Amin and Arafat were quintessential representatives of the cynical and self-seeking leaders produced by the Arab political system. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the Mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents against Zionism and the Jews, while lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish entrepreneurship, so PLO officials used the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states and, during the Oslo era, by the international community to finance their luxurious style of life while ordinary Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.

And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN partition resolution, their reckless decisions are being reenacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders. This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006 replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but also to the supposedly moderate Palestinian leadership—from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia (negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to prime minister Salam Fayad—which refuses to recognize Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state and insists on the full implementation of the “right of return.”

And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the name of justice (no less) call today not for a new and fundamentally different Arab leadership but for the dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when these dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look forward to putting their self-inflicted “catastrophe” behind them.