Love of the Land: Ceren: Abbas Rewrites History, Including His Own

Ceren: Abbas Rewrites History, Including His Own

Omri Ceren
Commentary/Contentions
17 May '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/17/abbas-rewrites-history-including-his-own/


Mahmoud Abbas, Falastin a-Thaura (official PLO journal), March 1976:

The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which Jews used to live.

Mahmoud Abbas, New York Times, May 16 2011:

In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative [regarding partition]. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued. Indeed, it was the descendants of these expelled Palestinians who were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Sunday as they tried to symbolically exercise their right to return to their families’ homes.

Abbas opens his New York Times op-ed by poignantly recalling how as a young boy he and his family were “forced to leave” their Galilean village of Safed during the tumult. That too, per a 2009 interview that he gave to Al-Palestinia TV, is a lie. According to a historical witness who is himself, Abbas and his “well-off” family left their village preemptively, based on feverish conspiracy theories predicting Jewish retribution for the anti-Jewish massacres committed by Arabs during the 1920s. He might have added that Safed’s Arabs very enthusiastically participated in those 1920s massacres, continuing to indulge in pogroms through the 1930s. Of course, those facts would not have made a retribution campaign in Safed any less a fantasy. Arabs weren’t “forced to leave” the village by Jews, except maybe by the Jews who had taken up residence in their minds.

Abbas tells these little fibs are in addition to laying out an eyeroll-inducing timeline, where “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.” What a quick intervention that was. Some might almost say it was nearly instantaneous, in that it happened within a few hours of Israel’s creation.

Now, no one really expects the Palestinians not to peddle historical reveries in which they up and left in the face of a Jewish onslaught and not at the exhortation of invading Arab armies. In theory Jews had an incentive to keep their Arab neighbors from fleeing, in as far as they feared indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas by Arab forces. Arab forces had the opposite incentive, in as far as they intended to shell civilian areas indiscriminately. (By way of illustration, see this Jordanian Colonel’s gleeful account of how the Arab Legion shelled Jerusalem’s “densely populated” Jewish Quarter with mortars until it was ethnically cleansed.)

And so unsurprisingly there are accounts—this one by British Port Office H. C. Stebbens, for example—of how the Arab invasion “was preceded by extensive broadcasts from Cairo, Damascus, Amman, and Beirut to the effect that any Arabs who stayed would be hanged as collaborators with the Jews.” Why collaborators? Because they would have been serving as de-facto human shields.

But again, no amount of historical documentation is going to keep people honest about the Palestinians’ self-inflicted Nakba. Those are just the terms of the debate. Anti-Israel partisans lie casually, they lie consistently, and they lie even when they’re contradicting their own previous lies. Which is a problem, because when arguments are premised on falsehoods there can’t be any genuine debate.

As a small example, the real importance of his op-ed is that Abbas seems to set an entirely new precondition for peace talks, which is the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state—a violation of all the Palestinians’ previous Oslo I and II commitments. But no one can get to that because it takes hours to untangle how, no, the Israelis haven’t been spending the last 60 years wiping out Arabs, and yes, until recently even Abbas was willing to admit that.

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Love of the Land: Ceren: Abbas Rewrites History, Including His Own

Love of the Land: Hazony: Slanting Nakba

Hazony: Slanting Nakba

David Hazony
Commentary/Contentions
15 May '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/15/slanting-nakba/

Question: What do the following headlines have in common?

1. “Israeli Troops Fire on Palestinian Protesters in Deadly Clashes”—Huffington Post

2. “Israeli Police Fire on Protesters”—Daily Beast

3. “9 Killed as Israel Clashes with Palestinians”—New York Times

Answer: All of these headlines appear today on the sites’ home pages, covering the incident on the border between Israel and Syria on the Golan Heights. None of these headlines tells you that the protestors in question were crossing a hostile border between Syria and Israel, en masse, in a violent protest at least permitted (if not organized) by the Syrian government. You see, the term “Palestinians,” when combined with “clashes” and “IDF,” almost always refers to Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, maybe in East Jerusalem. They don’t live on or near the Golan Heights. They have no way of getting to that border. In the interest of being informative about the actual news item, shouldn’t the protestors have been called “Syrians,” even if they were waving Palestinian flags?

Even worse, the first headlines two give you the distinct impression of a moral equivalence with what’s happening elsewhere in the Middle East: that just as Syria and Libya attack peaceful protesters, so does Israel—which, incidentally, is exactly the impression Bashar Assad was hoping you’d get. You’d never guess that hundreds of Syrians stormed the border with Israel, tearing down fences, and hurling rocks.

At moments like these, can supporters of Israel be blamed for accusing these news outlets of bias?

For a totally different report on what happened, here is YNet’s piece. There you’ll discover something that the main news outlets apparently missed: that some of the people who crossed the border into Israel weren’t really protesting at all.

They were defecting.

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Love of the Land: Hazony: Slanting Nakba

Love of the Land: More celebrating

More celebrating

Frimet/Arnold Roth
This Ongoing War
15 May '11

http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2011/05/15-may-11-more-celebrating.html

Hat-tip to Jameel from muqata.blogspot.com for alerting us to a four-minute-long video of yesterday's Nakba-ready rock-throwing party in Silwan, a neighbourhood a few minutes' drive from where we live in Jerusalem. In the background, you hear local children shouting throughout the video "Allahu Akbar", an expression of their aspiration for peaceful relations along secular, democratic, live-and-let-live lines, as received from their parents, teachers and religious leaders.

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Love of the Land: More celebrating

Love of the Land: The Point of Nakba Day

The Point of Nakba Day

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
15 May '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/15/the-point-of-nakba-day/

This morning crowds of Arabs stormed Israel’s borders along the Golan Heights and Lebanon. The reason for these demonstrations, and others that took place in the territories is that it is May 15. That makes it the 63rd anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence (celebrated earlier this week according to the Hebrew calendar) but for Arabs, it is Nakba or “disaster” day.

In a sense the attempts to cross Israel’s borders is a highly appropriate way to commemorate the events of May 15, 1948. On that day, the British Mandate for Palestine expired and the forces of the United Kingdom withdraw, allowing the residents of the country to sort out their own disputes. The United Nations had voted the previous fall to partition the country into two states: one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews accepted the deal. The Arabs refused, insisting that there be no Jewish state, not even one with the truncated borders of the partition resolution that didn’t even include any of Jerusalem.

When the British withdrew, the Jews declared their state. The Arabs, who had spent the past few months launching attacks on Jewish towns, villages and cities, urged the surrounding Arab nations to invade to wipe out the newborn state of Israel. Five Arab armies complied with the request, as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan (today’s Jordan) and Iraq sent troops into the former Mandate. When the fighting stopped in 1949, Israel was still standing and parts of Palestine (including half of Jerusalem) were occupied by foreign armies and remained under the rule of Egypt and the Jordanians until 1967.

The point of this history lesson is this: From the day of Israel’s birth, the purpose of its Arab foes was not to truncate its borders but to make sure it had no territory at all. Nakba Day should illustrate that it is not the eviction of the Jews from parts of the West Bank that has inspired Palestinian Arab nationalism but the notion that Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the country is unacceptable.

This is something that Israel’s liberal critics who continue to carp that its government must give up nationalist and religious dreams and make peace don’t understand. The fact that even the current supposedly hard-right wing government has embraced the concept of a two state solution is ignored. The history of the last 18 years of peace processing which brought the Palestinians autonomy in the West Bank and a Jew-free Hamas-run state in Gaza but no peace for Israel is of no interest to those who prefer to insist that somehow the lack of peace is still somehow Israel’s fault.

Nakba Day helps remind the Arabs that their goal is the “return” of the descendants of millions of descendants of Arab refugees of the war of 1948-49. Which is to say that they have not given up their dream of wiping out Israel. It ought to remind Israel’s critics of the same thing.

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Love of the Land: The Point of Nakba Day

Love of the Land: Same Arabs, Same Sea

Same Arabs, Same Sea

West Bank Mama
15 May '11

(A good description of how today started out and it's progression. Regular updates of the days events can be found at Israel is Strong on FB also at LoveoftheLand on Twitter. Yosef)

http://westbankmama.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/same-arabs-same-sea/

Yitzchak Shamir, the former prime Minister of Israel, had an expression. “The Arabs are the same Arabs, the sea is the same sea”. He used this expression when people would try to convince him that there was a chance for a “new Middle East” and that we could somehow make peace with the Arabs, distinguishing one group from another. He refers of course, to the fact that the Arabs wan’t to destroy the State of Israel and push the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea.

Today is what the Arabs call “Nakba” day – the catastrophe. They refer to the English date of the Israel Independence Day. Today they “commemorated” by doing what they did 63 years ago – trying to kill Jews.

An Arab from Kfar Kassem went on a rampage with his truck, killing a 28 year old and injuring 17 in south Tel Aviv this morning. He rammed pedestrians, 15 vehicles including a motorcyclist, hit a bus (thankfully empty of passengers), and slammed into an iron fence guarding an elementary school. He then ran from his truck and started to hit passersby. Eyewitnesses said he was shouting “death to the Jews”. He was subdued by two Israelis and taken into custody by police.

He now says it was an “accident”.

In Gaza a group tried to go over the fence into Israel and the IDF shot at their legs, injuring some. In another part of Gaza, near the fence, a person trying to set a bomb was killed by the IDF.

In the north Arabs from Syria flying Palestinian flags crossed over the fence in the Golan and were fired upon by the IDF. As of this writing there are some Israelis injured and one Arab dead – although there is no confirmation yet about the numbers.

Arabs are also trying to enter Israel from the Lebanese border and the IDF is firing at them.

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Love of the Land: Same Arabs, Same Sea

Love of the Land: Nakba Myths: Refugees ... and Refugees ...

Nakba Myths: Refugees ... and Refugees ...

Daphne Anson
14 May '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/05/nakba-myths-refugees-and-refugees.html



David Ben-Gurion's Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948 (to use the secular calendar) was of course followed by the Arabs' determined but heroically thwarted attempt to wipe the fledgling state off the map, and in the course of hostilities - started of course by the surrounding Arab nations, not by Israel, which sought only peace - some 600, 000 Arabs (now termed, in hindsight, Palestinians, as cunning and effective a propaganda move as there ever has been) became refugees.



A few years ago a writer in a Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadeedah, laid the blame for the so-called Nakba ("catastrophe") squarely where it indeed resides: with the Arab leaders themselves.

"…The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the “Catastrophe” in 1948, that the duration of the exile will not be long, and that it will not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees will return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those “Arkuvian” [i.e. unkept] promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events…" (hat tip: Elder of Ziyon)

But, as David Gutmann, a former Palmach fighter, observed in an article entitled "The Arab Lie Whose Time Has Come" :

"To back up its demands for full repatriation to Israel of Arab refugees and their descendants, the Palestinian leadership has—for over fifty years—busily spun the story of their "Naqba," their catastrophic flight from Palestine during 1947-48, in all the media available to them. This version of events—replete with Jewish brutality and Arab victimization—is a lie whose time has come, one now almost universally believed by Gentile and Jew alike.


It has become the latest Blood Libel against the People of the Book; and like the others it will never go away. Nevertheless, many Jewish Peaceniks—both Israeli and American—have signed on to the Naqba narrative, and Jewish authors and intellectuals now number among its leading proponents...."

Testified Gutmann from his own firsthand knowledge:

"The Palestinians initiated the war that led to their Naqba. Troops from Tel-Aviv eventually conquered Jaffa, but it was Arab fighters in Jaffa who, from the towers of their mosques, first fired into Tel-Aviv, and turned the intercity border areas into a battleground.


The first refugees were not Arabs but Yemenite Jews, from the Tel Aviv-Jaffa No-Man's Land that Arab aggression had created. Unlike the Palestinians, theirs was only a temporary refugee status. Instead of packing them away and forgetting them in squalid refugee camps, their Ashkenazi compatriots took them into their own neighborhoods. For the most part the Yemenites camped out in Tel Aviv apartment lobbies, and used the cooking and sanitary facilities of the permanent residents. When Jaffa fell to Irgun soldiers, they went back home.


The Palestinians fled for many reasons and from many threats, both real and imaginary, and that thousands upon thousands fled when nobody pushed them. As an example, when my unit occupied the abandoned British police station at Sidn'a Ali in the Sharon Plain, British troops were still stationed in the vicinity, and we had to train and patrol with our few guns (antiquated or homemade) concealed. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Sidn'a Ali were long gone, way before we could have pushed them out, and while the Brits were still in place to protect them from us. Needless to say, in the absence of any Palestinian targets (save for some abandoned camels) we committed no rapes." (For the rest see: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13508)

One of the most intriguing and insightful commentaries on the refugee issue and Arab rejectionism of Israel has been made by Francisco Gil-White in a well-documented article:

"Critics of Israel from the moderate ... to the most extreme portray it as an example of colonialism: European settlers push out the native population turning them into homeless refugees. And sure, they say, those Europeans were themselves victims of genocide, but do two wrongs make a right?

There are two problems with this view. First, it incorrectly portrays the makeup of the people who constitute most of the Jewish population in Israel. And second, it incorrectly describes the causes and nature of the Palestinian refugee problem....
Is Israel a European “Settler State”?

That is the commonly held view, but the truth is quite different."

Pointing out that, following the establishment of and Israel in 1948, refugees from Iraq (130,000), Yemen (45,000), Libya (35,000) and other mizrachi communities took refuge there - in such numbers that some of the countries were virtually depleted of Jews altogether, he states the obvious truth:

"Thus, the general perception that Arabs are the only refugees produced by the Arab-Jewish conflicts since 1947 is simply wrong. The difference is that Jewish refugees who fled to Israel – and who had everything taken from them in the process – became Israeli citizens (or citizens of other countries). By way of contrast, Palestinian refugees were refused citizenship by every Arab state except Jordan."

The number of Oriental Jews (450,000) who fled to Israel between 1948 and 1956 was markedly higher than the number (360,000) who made aliya from Europe and the USA.

Gil-White cites studies that show that by the early 1970s, the number of Israelis of mizrachi and background outnumbered Jews of other origins, and that in 1985, the "Oriental Jews" constituted the majority of the Israel's Jewish population, a proportion later diminished by the arrival of Jews from the Soviet Union.

Regarding the lands the mizrachim left behind:

'Many claim that the status of Jews in the Arab world was not like that of Jews in Europe (i.e., it was supposedly better), and therefore Arabs did not have anti-Semitic attitudes until Zionists came to Palestine. In truth, Jewish life in the Arab world was characterized by institutionalized racism....

Why did Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine, elicit fury in many Arabs from its very beginnings? To understand this, one must look at the world from a traditionalist Arab/Islamic point of view.

The Arab upper classes saw "dhimmitude" as the cement of the social fabric, helping guarantee the loyalty of 'the street'. Many ordinary Arabs perceived in the lowly status of Jews – that is, in "dhimmitude" – a confirmation of their own worth. And there was special contempt for the Jews, perhaps because, unlike the Christian case, no Jewish states existed to compete with Islamic states....

Why did millions of Arabs all over North Africa and the Middle East, who never met a Zionist, hate them? There are two reasons. First, they did not act like proper dhimmis. Second, the Zionist Jews carried the dangerous contagion of modern ideas....

This helps explain why the Mufti of Jerusalem, Nasser, Arafat, Hamas, etc. have not merely called for defeating Israel and/or extracting political concessions, but rather have always agitated for Israel’s total destruction. The existence of a Jewish State in the Middle East is seen as an offense to the natural order of Allah-proclaimed Jewish inferiority – and as a source of ideas that challenge the traditional Middle Eastern practices and power-relations. Arab leaders use both these perceived offenses to mobilize popular support from the Arab 'street'.

This also explains some otherwise odd facts. For example, the Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, organized a murderous attack against Jewish civilians in 1920.

It was directed primarily at members of the ‘Old Yishuv’. These were not recent Jewish immigrants. Their families had been in Palestine for over 2000 years. In 1929, Mufti-organized Arabs slaughtered Jews in Hebron and other towns. Although Palestinian leaders speak of the Hebron massacre as a heroic act of resistance to Zionism, in fact, it was a terrorist pogrom, and directed largely at indigenous Palestinian Jews, not recent immigrants.

The context of "dhimmitude" explains why so much terrorist violence was directed against non-immigrant Jews in Palestine. By presenting themselves as equal to Muslims, the Zionists had cancelled the dhimma; therefore, jihad could resume. Since the dhimma was an agreement that applied to the entire community, all Jews were now subject to jihad slaughter...

The Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Saudi armies and Iraqi and Palestinian irregulars did not invade Israel because it had attacked or threatened those countries, but because Israel had chosen to exist. By doing so, it had cancelled the dhimma on a grand scale.'
Read all of Gil-White's article here:

http://www.ourjerusalem.com/opinion/story/opinion20030907.html

There's also another pertinent point to be made.

Last September, a guest post on this blog reminded us of the uniqueness of the Palestinian Arabs' insistence on the right to return to their former homeland - other persons displaced as a result of other twentieth-century events, including catalysts during the 1940s, made new lives for themselves, but only in the case of the "Palestinian refugees" is the right to return - a sine qua non for a peace deal as far as the PA is concerned - demanded. See http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/09/in-contrast-to-palestine-partitions.html

See also: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/true-number-of-palestinian-arabs-who.html

And for great posts on the Nakba question from the archives of a master see:
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2006/12/pa-newspaper-admits-arabs-responsible.html
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2008/05/first-refugees-of-1948-war-were-jews.html
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2008/05/truth-about-1948.html
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2005/05/why-israels-creation-is-naqba.html
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2006/04/naqba-no-one-talks-about.html
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2008/04/definition-of-nakba-depends-on-audience.html
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2006/05/happy-naqba.html

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Love of the Land: Nakba Myths: Refugees ... and Refugees ...

Love of the Land: Eloquent refugee piece from our man in Uruguay

Eloquent refugee piece from our man in Uruguay

Bataween
Point of No Return
18 January '10

Roni Goldberg's eloquent piece in Guysen International News (Spanish) 'La Nakba de los judios de los paises arabes' contrasts the two sets of refugees created by the Arab-Israeli conflict - the Palestinians, 'living propaganda'; the Jews, putting the past behind them. It marks a departure from the hitherto 'pusillanimous' approach of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to a more assertive, rights-based message. At least, we hope it is a harbinger of change. Roni Goldberg is vice-consul at the Israeli embassy in Uruguay.

"The establishment of Israel in 1948 brought with it two migratory movements : the so-called Nakba ( "tragedy") of the Palestinian people, during which some 650,000 Palestinians, according to UNRWA, abandoned their properties and lands to head into exile, and the - no less tragic - exodus of 850,000 Jews who had lived until then in the Arab world, and had to leave everything in their flight toward the Jewish state.

"As is well known, the Palestinian exile over 62 years does not make it a more tragic historical event than the forced exile suffered by Jews in the Arab world.

"The Palestinians left their land in the heat of battle, in which many of them actively participated, although most were told to stay away for a few days or weeks until the nascent Jewish state was swept away and the Jews driven into the sea, then they would be allowed to return, and "all will be yours. " Unfortunately for them, the end was very different. The Jews, however, had to flee en masse from their country leaving everything to escape the pogroms, the unpunished murders and institutional discrimination to which they were subjected by the Arab rulers since even before the institution of the Jewish state, making a peace settlement and their loyal subjects hostage to what happened in distant Palestine. Ancient Jewish communities were condemned to disappear in a short time almost without trace.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Eloquent refugee piece from our man in Uruguay

Love of the Land: The State of the Refugees

The State of the Refugees

Honest Reporting/Backspin
22 October 09

The Independent takes an amazing look at the tragedy of Palestinian refugees. This piece slams Arab governments, the UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority for doing far more harm than good:

The bottom line:

Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments.

On the UNRWA:

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA's mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining.

On the return of refugees:

Even under the best of circumstances, an influx of refugees would further destabilise a Palestinian economy that is kept afloat by the world's highest per capita receipts of foreign aid.

On the status of the refugees in host countries:

While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries.

On the PA:

Still, the record of Arafat's Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami's observation, which applies both to Arafat's Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing.

This report also takes a hard look at the status of refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

In short,Lebanese camps have become hotbeds of radical jihad, Syria is more interested in manipulating the refugees to increase its regional leverage, and Jordanian officials fear the consequences of integrating many of their refugees.

Read it all.

Love of the Land: The State of the Refugees