Israel Matzav

What Abu Bluff left out

Remember Abu Bluff's op-ed in the New York Times last week? Benny Morris fills in some of the history that Abu Bluff left out.

In fact, what actually happened was this: The Arab states and the Palestinian national leadership, headed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, opposed the partition of Palestine, claiming all of Palestine for the Arabs. When the General Assembly voted in favor of partition, on 29 November 1947, the Palestinian leadership rejected the resolution and the Palestinian militias launched hostilities to abort the emergence of a Jewish state. They were aided by money, arms and volunteers from the Arab states. In the course of this first, civil-war half of the 1948 War (roughly from 30 November 1947 until 14 May 1948) the Palestinian militias attacked Jewish traffic and settlements for four months. But eventually the Jewish militias, chiefly the Haganah, went over to the offensive (in early April) and routed the Palestinians, and some 300,000 were displaced from their homes and lands. On 15 May 1948, the day after the Zionist leaders declared the establishment of the State of Israel, the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq invaded Palestine, in defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the partition resolution, and attacked the Jewish state. The army of Jordan, the fourth invading army, occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the core of the territory earmarked in the partition resolution for Palestinian Arab statehood. (The Palestinians failed to declare statehood, and Jordan did not allow the Palestinians to establish a state and subsequently formally annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt emerged from the war in control of the Gaza Strip.) During the weeks and months after 15 May, the Israeli army contained the invading armies and eventually drove them out of most of Palestine. Another 400,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in the course of the fighting: Some were expelled by Jewish troops (for example, from Lydda and Ramle in July 1948), some were advised to leave or ordered out by Arab leaders and officers (for example, from Haifa in April 1948 and Majdal in October). But most of the 700,000 simply fled out of fear of being caught up and harmed in the fighting. In summer 1948 the Israeli government decided not to allow the displaced Arabs—most of whom ended up in refugee camps in other parts of Palestine, i.e., the West Bank and Gaza—to return to the area of the State of Israel, deeming them inimical (they had just assailed the Jewish community and tried to destroy the Jewish state) and a potential Fifth Column.

Abbas's twisted history deliberately omits mention of the first half of the 1948 War, the civil war half, in order to portray the Palestinians as innocent victims. In fact, they were primary agents in the events that followed 29 November 1947, and in launching their assault on the Jewish community provoked and generated the Zionist counter-attack that resulted in the collapse of Palestinian society and the creation of the refugee problem. In history, peoples often pay for their aggression and mistakes, and this is what happened in Palestine.

Read the whole thing. I don't agree with everything he says (de facto, Netanyahu has extended the 'settlement freeze' until very recently and it didn't make a difference - at some point you have to say enough is enough), but he's dead-on about the 'Palestinian' goal.

Labels: Abu Mazen, Palestinian refugees, War of Independence

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:43 PM