Every Arab and the Slanted Left Does NOT Want You to READ This
Posted by johnhouk on Jul 07, 2008John R. Houk
ｩ July 7, 2008
I receive a Think-Israel e-newsletter every month or so. It is a website dedicated to countering the propaganda of dhimmi Lefties and Arab hatred of Israel.
SlantRight.com is going to post two of the many essays located on the Think-Israel website.
The essays are based on documents that are not fabricated and some of those documents were either recently declassified or are direct quotes from Arab sources. This means the crud Arabs produce as truth is in actuality myths, down right fabrications and hateful lies. The crud exists for one reason: to justify a continuous war with Israel established as a safe haven for Jews (religious, atheist and secular) to be free from thousands of years of persecution endorsed by peoples and governments Jews have lived in for thousands of years. The end-game of that continuous war is the total annihilation of Judaism (religious and/or ethnic depending on who is arguing).
My friends this would be a Second Holocaust since the last on ending in 1945.
Read the two essays HERE at the end of this introduction on SlightRight.com.
JRH 7/7/08
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HADRIAN'S CURSE 末 THE INVENTION OF PALESTINE
by Tsafrir Ronen
May-June 2008 Essays
Think-Israel
The Invention of Palestine as a Psychological Weapon for Conquering Eretz Yisrael
Summary
Almost 2,000 years ago, the Roman Emperor Hadrian cursed the Jewish People and decreed that Judea should be henceforth called "Palestine" after the Philistines, an ancient enemy of Israel that had disappeared from the world's stage more than 600 years earlier. It was his final twist of the knife and legacy after wars, massacres, persecutions, and exiles that had largely extinguished the Jewish presence from Judea.
Today, the modern enemies of a resurrected Jewish Nation have dusted off Hadrian's curse and are attempting to pull off a monumental theft: the Arab world have reincarnated "Palestine" to steal Israel's heritage and the Land of the Jewish People.
Hadrian's Curse will expose the BIG lie of the "Palestinian cause" in a full-length 120-minute documentary. The film will document that there never was a "Palestinian" people, The world has become so accustomed to the "truth" of the "Palestinian" perversion of history and work backwards, exposing recent claims and acts whose absurdity and villainy shock uninformed observers.
When Arafat declared: "Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it", it turns out that Arafat's nation already stretches over an area larger than all of Europe.
His is the twisted story of one of the biggest, most remarkable fraud in history. It is such a successful fabrication that many otherwise informed people have been duped and mislead. This propaganda has become a powerful weapon used Israel's enemies, the Arabs, to try to conquer Eretz Yisrael without firing a shot, without an army, tanks or jets. The Jewish People eventually bested Hadrian. They returned to their land and reestablished sovereignty over it.
They rebuilt Jerusalem as their capital, and resettled desolate Judea. They did all this only to now confront the reincarnated curse of Hadrian in the guise of Arabs renaming themselves "Palestinians" and claiming all the ancient Land as their own.
As explained in the film, many Israelis and lovers of Zion have accepted this misnaming and misidentification. Hadrian's ancient curse now threatens Israel's very existence. Israel's success and endurance and the world's hope for peace in the 21st century, demands that the deceit and danger of a Palestinian state must be exposed and avoided. It is our fervent hope that Hadrian's Curse will expose the historical truth.
Part I 末 The Secret All the Arabs Know
At the Annapolis Conference, George Bush spoke about his vision regarding the virtues of two nations for two peoples.
One of those peoples has a clear identity 末 the Jewish People. Yet it would be interesting to know the identity of that second people: Already in 1977, one of the central spokesman of that "second people", a member of P.L.O. leadership, Zahir Muhsein, the leader of the al-Sa'iqa Organization, revealed the truth in an interview to the Dutch newspaper Trouw:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."
Are you in shock? If the Palestinian People does not exist, what does exist? Arabs who live in Eretz Yisrael and who have disguised themselves as "Palestinians" for fraudulent purposes. "Only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel," in Muhsein's words. A fraud so successful that even George Bush can be found seeking a state for that fraud!
Do you think Zahir Muhsein is alone? This transparent fraud about the so-called existence of Palestine is revealed to us by all the Arabs' leaders:
In 1974, the late Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, declared: "It would be fitting for us to mention to the responsible Israeli authorities that we view Palestine not just as an inseparable part of the Arab nation, but as a part of Southern Syria." In 1987, he reiterated himself at a conference in Amman, "A country named 'Palestine' has never existed." Jordanian King Hussein responded, "The appearance of the national Palestinian persona serves as a response to Israel's claim that Palestine is Jewish."
Yet the prize goes to Arafat who in 1970, with candid simplicity, told the reporter Arianna Palazzi:
"The question of borders doesn't interest us... From the Arab standpoint, we mustn't talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it..... The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call "Jordan" is nothing more than Palestine."
Such revelations are an eye-opener for anyone who has not understood until today the masked-ball being run by the Arabs: The true meaning of Arafat's words, that "Palestine is Jordan," is that for the Arabic people, living under the "Pan-Arab" umbrella, in addition to over twenty Arabic countries, there is already a country called Jordan that was established by the British for the Arabs on 77% of the Land of Israel, promised to the Jewish People by the League of Nations in 1922. Anywhere else on earth, would an additional country be established for a people that already has twenty-one countries?
All the same, there is nothing like the testimony of the founder of the P.L.O. himself, Ahmed Shukari. Already in 1956 he proclaimed from the podium of the U.N., as the Arab League's ambassador there, that
"such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but the southern portion of Greater Syria..."
And if Ahmed Shukari says that Palestine does not exist at all, the logical inference is that "Palestinians" do not exist at all either. That same Shukari was born of a Turkish mother in Lebanon, was himself a Jordanian lawyer, served as the ambassador of Syria to the U.N., the ambassador of the Arab League to the U.N., and the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.N. In 1964, after this talented actor who changed loyalties like a chameleon was fired by the Saudis, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser hired him to found the "Palestine Liberation Organization", the P.L.O., an organization dedicated to the liberation of a country that in his own words did not exist at all.
All the prominent spokesman of that poor, homeless "people" say openly: The Arabs who live in Eretz Yisrael are precisely the same Arabs who live in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon. They are not a separate country, but a fragment of the enormous Arab nation divided amongst many Arab countries. In their identity they are Arabs and the invention of Palestine is just a transparent bluff: "a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity". Can any testimony be better than that of the Arabs themselves, exposing the lies and deception involved in Palestine's creation?
Yet the most compelling argument for the idea that the "Palestinian People" is a fraudulent invention, and that the Arabs are all one people, was expounded by none other than Mr. Husseini, head of the Supreme Arab Committee, to the U.N. special committee that was deliberating on Eretz Yisrael in 1947:
"An additional consideration of great importance for the Arab world is racial uniformity. The Arabs lived in a broad expanse stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. They spoke one language, and shared a common history, tradition and aspirations. Their unity was the solid foundation for peace in one of the most central and sensitive regions in the world. For that reason, it does not make sense that the United Nations should facilitate the establishment of a foreign entity within that well-rooted unity."
Indeed, Mr. Husseini is correct. His declaration before the investigative committee of the United Nations exposes the simple fact that there is no "Palestinian" language and no unique "Palestinian" culture. The Palestinians are Arabs, and they cannot be set apart from the Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc.
Remove from the argument the lies and untruths and you reveal that the conflict is taking place between the Arabic, Muslim empire of twenty-one states and the Jewish People, claiming their right to their one and only historic homeland, consisting of less than one fifth of one percent of the lands under Arab control.
This is the twisted story of the biggest, most unprecedented fraud in history. It involves such a successful bluff that many people have no doubt about its veracity. This propaganda has become a powerful weapon by which means Israel's enemies, the Arabs, are trying to conquer Eretz Yisrael without firing a shot, without an army, tanks or jets.
Part II 末 The Arabs' Ultimate Goal
Following the Six Day War, the Arab countries, defeated by a small county determined to survive, understood that Israel would be impossible to beat militarily. They understood that the Israeli Samson would be possible to beat only by way of the cunning of the Philistine Delilah. And that's what happened.... No longer would there be cries firing up the masses to genocide, but rather, sophistication... A melody carefully aimed at the delicate western ear. The Arabs discovered that from a propaganda standpoint, it was easier to convince world public opinion of the rights of the poor, small, deprived "Palestinian People" to its own state, than to justify the demand of the enormous Arab empire for an addition of territory from a tiny country fighting for its life.
The Palestinian People is a fabrication invented with aforethought as a psychological weapon of Arab countries defeated in battle, a "Trojan Horse" for conquering Eretz Yisrael, as Feisel Husseini said after the Oslo Accords.
So was born the worldwide propaganda campaign that turned matters on their head. The Israeli "David" against the Arab "Goliath" was transformed, by way of sophisticated propaganda, into the Israeli "Goliath" oppressing the Palestinian "David". The object of this propaganda is to blot out and forget the name and identity of the ancient, Biblical Eretz Yisrael, and to transform it into the land of "the Palestinian People" fabricated by Arab propaganda.
By such means did their false propaganda gain such a strong foothold in the media and the bastions of liberalism that no one has paid any attention to the simple truths spoken openly by Zahir Muhsein, Assad, Shukari, King Hussein or Arafat.
By means of brainwashing, fabrications, lies, falsification, and taking advantage of the world's ignorance and the international media's superficiality, a process has been taking place in broad daylight, for several dozen years already, of counterfeiting and blotting out history. And just as Goebbels and Hitler, the arch propagandists of the 20th century said derisively, the bigger the lie, the more people will believe in it.
Fulfilling the demands of the Palestinian lie, will put an end to the identity of Eretz Yisrael. Following the loss of the Land's identity, will come the loss of our right to the land. For, if there are "Palestinians", that implies that there is also a land called Palestine, and if there is a Palestine... then there is no Eretz Yisrael.
The most terrible part is that large sectors of Israel, itself, have already fallen into the Arab propaganda trap. It is they who are opening the door to the Trojan horse that will destroy the identity of Eretz Yisrael. This is a war that is not being waged by means of weapons and armies, or over physical territory. It is being waged on the battlefields of awareness of the Land's identity. The Roman name "Philistia" was a fiction invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian after the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 C.E., a fiction of Hadrian then, and a fiction of the Arabs today, to the same degree.
It is a fabrication that represents no people, not then and not today. It is a sophisticated fiction invented for one purpose and one purpose alone: to wipe out a land's identity. If the land is called Palestine, then the Jewish people are occupiers. If the land is called Eretz Yisrael, then the Arabs are occupiers.
This is the essence of the Arab propaganda war, which is intended to steal the identity of Eretz Yisrael and to transform it into Palestine, and by such means to turn the Jewish people into occupiers of Eretz Yisrael. That's the whole story.
Now it's already clear. The Palestinian identity is tactical, artificial and temporary. It is just a tool in the pan-Arab struggle against Israel. The amazing thing is that it's all out in the open. Section 12 of the Palestinian charter summarizes the idea of this temporary identity, by stating that:
"The Palestinian people believes in Arab unification. It believes that in order to fulfill its task towards achieving this goal, it must, at this stage of its national struggle, preserve all the components of its Palestinian personality, and it must increase awareness of its existence, and reject all plans liable to weaken it or make it disappear."
Is there another people in the world that writes in its charter of self-definition the expression "at this stage"? And what will be in the next stage? Obviously, after conquering Israel, the territory will be divided up between Arab countries, and those Arab countries themselves will throw Palestine into the wastebasket of history.
As Arafat said, the Palestinian people are a fiction. The same is true regarding the Jordanian people, and all the other Arabic speaking peoples in the Middle East. These are not peoples with separate identities, but part of the great Arab nation. Only that has a true identity. By their self-definition, they cannot be divided up into a number of peoples with individual identities. Rather, they constitute one nation consisting of many states, as Arafat himself said to Arianna Palazzi in an incautious moment.
For the sophisticated Saudis, with their Saudi Peace Plan, it is clear that its purpose is not to actualize the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, for no such people exists. They conceal the truth that the great Arab nation has already actualized its right to self-determination by establishing a large number of countries, one of which extends over about 78% of the area of mandatory Eretz Yisrael.
For the Arabs, exploding with laughter over the foolishness of the West, it is clear that if an additional Arab state arises in the western portion of Eretz Yisrael, that will not serve the right of self-determination, but the demand of imperial conquest of all Eretz Yisrael by the Arab nation. Is George Bush dragging Israel to its destruction?
The Palestinian fabrication is exposed precisely when we listen to authentic Arab voices. The prominent Arab historian, Dr. Philip Hitti, who expressed himself at the Anglo-American commission of inquiry in the State Department building in 1947, said as follows:
"Sir, Palestine never existed throughout history. Absolutely not!"
Moreover, Professor Juhan Hazam, in his testimony before that same commission, added:
"Before 1917, when Balfour made his declaration, there had never been a Palestinian question, and there was no Palestine as a political or geographic unit."
Also a local Arab leader, Abd al-Mahdi, testified before the Peele Commission in 1937 as follows:
"There is no such land. Palestine is a term invented by the Zionists. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our land was for hundreds of years a part of Syria."
Indeed, this is a picture of the real situation in 1918 and at the start of the British conquest of Eretz Yisrael...
Were there any trace of truth to the claim regarding the historicity of a Palestinian People, we should certainly have expected to find mention of it in the history books and encyclopedias, as well as in archaeological research.
Part III 末 Will Israel finish Hadrian's Work?
Thus, the way to Palestinian Hell was paved with the good intentions of Christian Zionists like Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary. In the Balfour declaration, and by the decree of the Mandate, they decided, based on historic rights, to grant Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people. Yet they called it Hadrian's Roman name, Palestine, which had originally had the precise intention of blotting it off the map.
From that moment on, the way was prepared for the birth of the Palestinian fiction.
The name Palestine, by which the British accidentally called the land, bore the seeds of destruction of the Palestinian bluff, as if the entire Land was the stolen property of the Palestinian people, an ancient, rooted people, thousands of years old. This was such an incredible but successful fabrication that large portions of Israeli society fell into its snare. In the report presented in 1938 to the League of Nations, the British made it very clear:
"The name 'Palestine' is not a country but a geographic region.'"
No one could have imagined in 1917, at the time of the Balfour declaration during WWI, that anyone would use the name Palestine to create a monstrous, hostile, false identity, for propaganda purposes, and would engrave on their flag the destruction of Israel.
The reporter and writer Joan Peters, in her book From Time Immemorial, writes,
"The one and only identity never adopted [by the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael] before 1967 was that of 'Palestinian Arab'."
The Palestinian lie was not hatched by any land or any people, but by a map, a map drawn by two European colonial ministers, an Englishman, Herman Sykes, and a Frenchman, George Picot, and on the map was written... "Palestine". It was clear to the British that Palestine as a sovereign political unit had never existed. No nation had ever borne its name. No people had ever prayed for its welfare. It was a name that hadn't existed at all for 1300 years, ironically, precisely when Muslim empires were dominant. "Palestine" was a Roman political fabrication that had faded and disappeared together with the empire that had created it.
The Land regained independence only when the name Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel], the name in the hearts of the first Zionists, was restored to it. Had not this identity been preserved by the Jewish People, and had it not been preserved in the hearts of the Christian Bible-loving nations who made up the League of Nations, the national rebirth of the Jewish People might never have taken place.
This is the substance of the war being waged on millions of television screens throughout the world. It is being waged over the identity of Eretz Yisrael. It is being waged by means of all the media, and it seems as though the Arabs have the upper hand, while Israel leaves an impression of impotence, of not yet having even identified the battlefield on which its fate will be sealed.
While Israel prepares jets and tanks for a military struggle, Israel's enemies are preparing their weapons for the final battle, for sticking the last dagger into the back of a State of Israel that does not understand and is not even ready for this battle. Unless Israel prepares for this battle, comes to an understanding of its complexity and frees itself from the false terminologies and constant brainwashing, Israel will be defeated and its land will be irrevocably taken from it.
Will Israel, which valiantly vanquished all the Arab armies when they attacked it also know how to face this propaganda attack that is threatening to destroy it?
It would seem as though the battle is already decided. The Arab propaganda has already penetrated the nervous system and destroyed the immune system that defended the Jewish People for 2000 years, with even the Israeli Prime Minister and Foreign Minister saying that "Israel's interest is to establish a Palestinian state"...
In other words, what they want is for the Bible to be rewritten and for King David's land of the Bible to become the land of Goliath the Philistine.
Could anything be more insane? Is there another nation on earth that behaves this way?
Is it possible that Israel will be beaten without a single shot being fired, simply handing over their land to a wretched fabrication, a coarse, primitive, charlatan canard, a deception that conceals the destruction that the Arabs are preparing for Israel? Could Israel's leaders be too blind to see the danger looming of the Land's Jewish identity being lost? Will precisely the vision of the prophets, fulfilled with the establishment of the State of Israel, bring with it the destruction of the identity of the Jewish People's land, and lead to its exchange for the false identity of Hadrian's Palestine? When lies are repeated many times, they become true. Such a lie is the fabrication regarding the existence of a historic Palestinian identity. That false identity, which began with Hadrian's curse and that was revived by Lord Balfour, has become a first rate propaganda tool. It became that the moment the Arabs understood the potential of destroying the identity of Eretz Yisrael, and with it the identity of the People of Israel, whose name bears the stamp of ownership of the Land.
The struggle against Israel was the glue that bound the Arab world, otherwise sunken in endless internal quarrels. The Arabs' aim in fabricating Palestine was not to build a nation but to annihilate a nation. Yet to conceal that plan, they invented the plan of "phases". The first phase is the invention of a "Palestinian People". The second phase is the liquidation of Israel, weakened and wearied after Oslo.
By such means did the Arabs conceal their genocidal intent with a "new tool", in the words of Zahir Muhsein, for conquering Eretz Yisrael without firing a shot.
All of these lies and falsehoods, this whole "costume ball" is being marketed by the media, which is turning out to be an obsessive collaborator with the biggest lie on earth. Precisely this Hadrian understood. That's why he chose the name Palestine. Precisely this is understood as well by Hadrian's heirs 末 the Arab propagandists who through their use of this false name sever the historic tie between the People and the Land of Israel. Without doing that, it would be impossible to use the word "conquest" 末 could a people be considered the conqueror of its own land? The question Israel faces is this: Will the Jews forego the name and the identity of their Biblical land? Will the Christian world agree to concede on the identity of the cradle of western civilization, the holy land, Eretz Yisrael?
It's the twist of fate that for all this to happen, the Jews had to vanquish Hadrian completely, return to their land, establish sovereignty, resurrect the Hebrew language, establish a mighty army, industry, the best agriculture on earth, hi-tech, culture, song, dance, reestablish a nation, rebuild Jerusalem as their capital and settle every town and village that Hadrian destroyed. Could we have possibly come full circle? Will Hadrian's curse, which didn't succeed for 1800 year, precisely when Israel was in exile from their land, succeed just now, with Israel's return? Will it be precisely the Israeli government that will resurrect Hadrian's curse, previously lost in the depths of forgetfulness?
Today, 1800 years later, an Israeli Prime Minister is calling for fulfilling what Hadrian failed to do 末 the erasure of Eretz Yisrael and the establishment of Palestine.
The Emperor Hadrian is smiling from the grave.
- Tsafrir Ronen is a former member of the secular kibbutz, Ein Charod. He is a media personality, serves in the elite army unit, Sayeret Matkal, and was one of the founders of the Nahalal Forum on Behalf of the Entire Eretz Yisrael. He is currently preparing Hadrian's Curse, a full-length documentary film on the Arab/Palestine myth. Send comments to Zvi Katzover, mayor of Kiryat Arba, at Rivka@kiryat4.org.il.
This article was published in three sections one per week in The Jewish Press (www.jewishpress.com) from May 14, 2008 through May 28, 2008. This version is from the author's website and is archived for May 26, 2008 at
http://tzafrirronenen.blogspot.com/2008/05/ hadrians-curse-by-tsafrir-ronen.html
Thanks are due Ruth Doron and Israel Zwick for alerting us to this article.
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1948, ISRAEL, AND THE PALESTINIANS 末 THE TRUE STORY
by Efraim Karsh
May-June 2008 Essays
Think-Israel
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 c駘鐫re 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,[1] 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.[2]
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."[3] 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."[4]
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."[5]
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."6 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.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9]
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.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]
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,"[13] 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.[14]
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 末 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.[15]
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. [16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
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.[19] 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."[20]
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."[21]
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),[22] 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."[23]
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.[24]
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,[25] just as the killing of some 100 Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948[26] was "avenged" within days by the killing of 77 Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus.[27]
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.[28]
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."[29]
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.[30]
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.[31]
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."[32]
Even the ultimate war victims 末 the survivors of Deir Yasin 末 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.[33]
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 末 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.[34]
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 末 reducing civilian casualties, denying sites to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces to repel them 末 rather than political design.[35] 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.[36]
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.[37] Only days earlier, Tiberias' 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes.[38] In Jaffa, Palestine's largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea;[39] in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.[40]
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.[41]
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.[42]
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: 糎here 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?'"[43]
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."[44]
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.[45]
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."[46]
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.[47]
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 末 Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasir Arafat, the latter of whom dominated Palestinian politics since the mid-1960's to his death in November 2004 末 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 末 from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia (negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to prime minister Salam Fayad 末 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.
Footnotes [*To view footnotes proceed to this link and scroll to the end of the article.]
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Every Arab and the Slanted Left Does NOT Want You to READ This
John R. Houk
ｩ July 7, 2008
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Think-Israel Essays
May-June 2008
Think-Israel background of Arabic hatred of Israel
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