Palestine betrayed
In an excerpt from his new book on the subject, Efraim Karsh refutes the 'new historian' narrative that blames Israel for the 'Palestinian refugees' and places the blame squarely where it belongs: On the Arab leadership of the time, which decided that it preferred to try to annihilate the Jewish state rather than live in peace with it. It is a historical irony that, since the late 1980s, much of the Palestinian historiography has been written by Israeli "new historians" -- younger, politically engaged academics and journalists who claim to have discovered archival evidence substantiating the anti-Israel case. These politicized historians have turned the saga of Israel's birth upside down, with aggressors transformed into hapless victims and vice versa. Rarely mentioned in these revisionist accounts are the Arabs' outspoken commitment to the destruction of the Jewish national cause; the sustained and repeated Arab efforts to achieve that end from the early 1920s onward; and the no less sustained efforts of the Jews at peaceful coexistence.I'd love to read the whole book. But you can bet that the 'international community' will ignore it.
Rather than unearth new facts or offer novel interpretations, the "new historians" have recycled the standard Palestinian Arab narrative of the conflict. The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British mandate 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, and one that is completely at odds with the anti-Israel caricature that is so often the order of the day.
They reveal that there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian-Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab-Israeli conflict, corollaries, on the one hand, of the total rejection of the Jewish right to national self-determination, and, on the other, of the desire to annex Palestine, or parts of it, to the neighbouring Arab states, or to a prospective regional empire; that the claim of premeditated dispossession is not only baseless but the inverse of the truth; and that far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution.
Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighbouring Arab states, accepted the resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place, for the simple reason that the Zionist movement was amenable both to the existence of a substantial non-Jewish minority in the prospective Jewish state on an equal footing, and to the two-state solution, raised for the first time in 1937 by a British commission of inquiry and reiterated by the partition resolution.
That they chose to reject this solution and to wage a war of annihilation against Palestine's Jewish community amounted to nothing short of a betrayal of their constituents, who would rather have co-existed with their Jewish neighbours yet instead had to pay the ultimate price of this folly: homelessness and statelessness.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:45 PM
4 Comments:
In 1976 when I was on a kibbutz, I first learned about this part of Israeli history. The kibbutz was run by Hashomer Hazair and I was recommended particular reading material. What I read was what this man has said. I find it totally appalling that Israelis can deny their own history!
I have just received a post from Joan S. at latamisrael.blogspot.com about a Venezuelan cultural event where they have completely revised Jewish history - denied Jews their history and called it palestinian!
Its a hideous bunch of vicious lies. I have blogged it and am also writing to the UK ambassador.
Nothing will change. The truth is not going to change the mind of the world that long ago convicted Israel of a deed for which has no responsibility.
What could go wrong indeed
"DOCUMENT NO. A-AC 14-44 Communications received by Ad Hoc Palestine Committee, November 18, 1947 To the Secretary General of the United Nations Lake Success: The Jewish Orthodox community (Eida Hacharedis) of Jerusalem comprising 60,000 souls, objects to the plea of including Jerusalem in the Jewish state and/or its residents becoming automatically citizens of the Jewish state. Chief Rabbi J. Z. Dushinsky In the Name of the Ashkenazic Community."
The Christians of Palestine protested as well. The Muslim protested as well.
No my friend, your twist of the truth is a part of the problem, you see. The Muslims Jews and Christians and other communities lived peaceably in Palestine before the advent of foreign Jewish invasion. Also your Jews smuggled in weapons to Palestine well before the war for Israel so your Jews had planned the war long beforehand.
Israel began actively investigating the nuclear option from its earliest days. In 1949, HEMED GIMMEL a special unit of the IDF's Science Corps, began a two-year geological survey of the Negev desert with an eye toward the discovery of uranium reserves. Although no significant sources of uranium were found, recoverable amounts were located in phosphate deposits.
Jewish-American gangsters also helped in the struggle for Israel's creation during the 1940s. In his book, Rockaway describes how an emissary of the pre- state Haganah defense organization (the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces) approached Meyer Lansky, one of the major players in the crime scene in America, and with his intervention, shipments of weapons and military equipment were smuggled out of New York harbor, bound for Palestine. Lansky wasn't the only one. According to Rockaway, other Jews from the underworld donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Haganah.
The Zionists went in as outlaw terrorists, have remained outlaw terrorists. The Arabs are not Jew haters, the Israelis have been brainwashed into believing it even though it was the Jews who robbed the Arabs of their homes, land, sea, cars, toys, pets since 1948. See how you all try and rationalize it, it's a wonder to the rest of us!
One more thing. Palestine was to become part of an Arab republic with a centralized government until the British reneged on their promise to the Arabs after WW1. Palestine was not just some insignificant land with random people.
The people in the land of Palestine were living peaceably together before the advent of the Foreign European invasion. The majority of Palestine residents which included Jews Muslims and Christians opposed the Jewish state and the immigration of foreign Jews. It meant nothing to the victors of WW1 and WW2 they invaded anyway. The white man invaded people of color for resources, it's an old European story we all know. The real Semite Jews (of color) serve as a cover for the non Semite (white European) Jews. Please. Get real. The comment box does not allow enough space to elaborate but here you have it in summary.
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