Muslim Woman,
The Torah says to defend yourself when you are being attacked. 99.9% of the time children throwing rocks do not get killed or hurt. The are just told to leave. However, when throwing a rock you have a chance to kill someone. Jews have been killed by Palestinians throwing rocks at there heads before. Are Jews just suppose to take this?
Look how many children have been killed by Hamas and Fatah and these children aren't even throwing stones. They are just sitting around and Hamas and Fatah decide to kill eachother and they kill these kids to.
Does Islam teach killing children? Of course not!
It happned though! Don't expect anyone to cry and tell you how sorry they are. Jewish children are killed all the time, and no one says sorry to us. Why? It isn't there job! They didn't do it, so stop trying to lay the blame or give Jews some kind of guilt factor.
You and many others do not even recongnize us as a nation, so why should we care what you think? If the Arabs (and I am one and I am disgusted) le Israel live in peace, Israel wouldn't even have much of the land the have today, and Al-Aqsa would be in your possesion. Yet nope, as always you had to have all the land, well guess what. You got greedy, and G-d decided to punish you. 1.5 Billion Muslims couldn't wipe out little Israel. How pathetic on your part.
If you have a question about Judaism ask it, but do not keep ranting on about Judaism and a soldier possibly killing a child who continued to throw rocks at innocent civilians.
If a kid was throwing rocks at my childs face, I would run over there and stop the kid. If he began throwing rocks at me, I would physically deal with him. Wouldn't hurt him to bad, but just knock his weapon away from him to defend myself. When you have 100 rocks thrown at you all at once, how can you defend yourself? Not to mention they always fire rubber bullets that do not kill.
Jews are not forgiven for every sin. We are all judged on this earth and it is how we act that we do this. Muslim Woman, I really do not understand you at all. You make such a bug deal about a Jew defending himself, and
Almost 100% of the time, no rock thrower gets hurt, but when he does, he was out on the street throwing rocks at innocent people.
Since you seem to connect everything to a religious angle, I would have to say, the state of followers of Islam using violence that is against there religion is far more common then Jews doing so. Stop asking us these questions about what a Rabbi supports. Who cares what a Rabbi supports! It is what G-d supports. If my son is about to be killed by someone throwing a rock at his head, I will save my son no matter what. Don't expect me to cry about someone who throws rocks at a group of old ladies which did happen a few weeks ago!
Does Islam teach throwingr rocks at an 80 year old lady because your angry. If so, then may G-d save us.
Since you have no grip on history how about reading:
WHAT DOES "PALESTINE" MEAN?
It has never been the name of a nation or state. It is a geographical term, used to designate the region at those times in history when there is no nation or state there.
The word itself derives from "Peleshet", a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into English as "Philistine". The name came into use in the thirteenth century BCE, for the "Sea Peoples" who migrated from the region of the Aegean Sea and the Greek Islands and settled on the southern coast of the land of Canaan. There they established five independent city-states (including Gaza) on a narrow strip of land known as Philistia. The Greeks and Romans called it "Palastina".
The Philistines were not Arabs, they were not Semites . They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs. The name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine" is not an Arabic name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Greco-Roman "Palastina" derived from Peleshet.
HOW DID THE LAND OF ISRAEL BECOME "PALESTINE"?
In the First Century CE, the Romans crushed the independent kingdom of Judea. After the failed rebellion of Bar Kokhba in the Second Century CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe out the identity of Israel-Judah-Judea. Therefore, he took the name Palastina and imposed it on all the Land of Israel. At the same time, he changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.
The Romans killed many Jews and sold many more in slavery. Some of those who survived still alive and free left the devastated country, but there was never a complete abandonment of the Land. There was never a time when there were not Jews and Jewish communities, though the size and conditions of those communities fluctuated greatly.
How did the Zionists acquire land in Palestine?
Note: Land in Israel is often measured in hectares (1 acre = approx. 0.4 hectare, 1 hectare = approx. 2.5 acres) or dunams (dunam = approx. .25 acre, acre = approx. 4 dunams). There are 640 acres in a square mile. See Conversion for more information.
Redemption of land in Eretz Israel, much of which had fallen into neglect under foreign rule, began in the mid-1850s with the first attempts to enable Jews to live productively in Ottoman Palestine without reliance on the "old yishuv" model of overseas support. Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) made the first known land purchase by someone from outside the region in 1855: 10 hectares (250 acres) of orange groves in Jaffa, under a newly-made arrangement with the Sultan allowing these first-ever purchases. Other private acquisitions followed, and by 1882, some 2,200 hectares had been purchased by Jews. Although several of the first Zionist villages (moshavot) were built on this land, the areas were not contiguous and the idea of using land purchase to prepare for Jewish sovereignty was far in the future. Each purchase entailed a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure vis-à-vis the local Turkish authorities, which, in the final declining phase of the Ottoman Empire, were either hostile to or uninterested in Jewish holdings in the sparsely populated backwater province that Palestine had become. Nearly all land was owned by the state (and was passed on to subsequent sovereigns) or by private and public entities through title or leasing arrangements. This state of affairs, coupled with the frequent need to resort to bribery in official dealings, gave the Jewish purchases a clandestine complexion that would recur in subsequent years.
Although the creation of the Jewish National Fund was originally proposed by Judah Alkalai in 1847 it had to wait until the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1901 to become a reality. The Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeYisrael) was established to buy land in Palestine for reclamation and Jewish settlement. In its first decade, the JNF built a worldwide fundraising organization based on sale of stamps, collection "Blue Boxes" in homes and schools and solicitation of donations. In the spring of 1903, JNF acquired its first parcel of land: 800 acres in Hadera. Other modest purchases were made in 1904 and 1908 in Lower Galilee, Judea, and the Lake Kinneret region, and two forms of settlement that would prove crucial in the land-acquisition enterprise were pioneered there: the cooperative (moshav) and the collective (kevutsa, later kibbutz).
From the start, the organization focused on greening the land through the planting of trees. JNF got involved in tree planting for many reasons, including as a way to fulfill the Biblical commandment. In order to solidify ownership of land purchased by JNF on behalf of the Jewish community, and in accordance with prevailing laws of the day, trees were planted whenever a new piece of land was purchased. In 1908, the first JNF trees were planted at Hulda: olive trees in memory of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism. In 1920, JNF expanded its role to help reclaim the swamps of Palestine. There quickly followed afforestation efforts. Since 1920, millions of trees have been planted in Israel by the Jewish National Fund.
Baron Benjamin (Edmond James) de Rothschild (1845-1934) enlisted in this cause after being petitioned by the leaders of Rishon Lezion, one of the First Aliya villages. His patronage embraced 12 settlements at all three levels of land redemption: purchase, reclamation and economically viable settlement. To make these possible, he established an administration that, although staffed in part by condescending officials who evoked the independent-minded settlers' resentment, institutionalized all three aspects of land redemption. The best-known settlements sponsored by Rothschild are Metulla, Zikhron Ya'akov, Rishon Lezion, and Rosh Pina. Metulla (est. 1896) is an example of a purchase that had the further advantages of controlling water sources and establishing the northern limit of Jewish settlement. In 1900, Rothschild transferred the settlements, their agricultural enterprises, and 25,000 hectares of land to the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA, est. 1891), which he continued to support in various ways.
In a military biography of Moshe Dayan, the early Zionist activity is described this way:
"Using Rothschild's money, these Jews purchased land from absentee Turkish landlords. To the Arab tenant farmers, the transfer of land from Turkish to Jewish ownership was of little consequence since the Jews rehired them as agricultural workers."
By the time Israel became a state in 1948, JNF owned 12.5 percent of all the land of Israel on which 80 percent of Israel's population now lives. With this ownership came the responsibility of transforming the land into a beautiful and fertile area that would be a suitable home for the new state.
Personal experiences with the difficulties and triumphs of land acquisition in the Emek Jezreel valley of Israel in the period from 1891 to the 1920s are documented in great detail in this memoir published in 1929. Interesting passages include:
"It was not only the fertility of these plains [Emek Jezreel] that attracted the [sic], but also the fact that these were the only regions where it was possible to purchase a large stretch of land from a single owner, while the remainder of Palestine was broken up into small parcels belonging to many individuals..."
"[It was not easy for Hankin] to reach this agreement to a low price, for even then [1891] speculators of all kinds were surrounding the land owners and attempting to frustrate his efforts by offering a higher price. But Hankin enjoyed the confidence of the Arabs, so that he succeeded in overcoming the competition of the speculators."
"...The Turkish Government refused to authorize the sale, even though official permission was applied for ... by a Jew, Efraim Krause, who was a Turkish citizen."
"In 1921 it was impossible to find a Jewish purchaser for one of the finest and best situated orange plantations in Palestine (although it was offered at an exceedingly low price), so that it had to be sold to an Arab."
Shlomo Gravetz of the Jewish National Fund says: "Throughout the history of land reclamation by Jews in Eretz Yisrael, the Arabs have always claimed that the Jews were throwing them off their land. In 1932 the High Commissioner appointed the Bentwich Committee to investigate these claims, and out of
700 purchases of Arab property, the committee did not find one case in which the Jews had acted immorally."
Why was almost 80% of the Mandate territory of Palestine given to Arab Jordan?
The British underwent a change of heart about the establishment of the Palestine Mandate. The reasons were related to political developments that had taken place in the region between 1920 and 1922. The result was that Abdullah, an Arab from the Hejaz (now Saudi Arabia), was abruptly installed as the Emir of Transjordan by the British. In a British memorandum presented to the League of Nations on 16 September 1922, it was declared that the provisions of the Mandate document calling for the establishment of a Jewish national home were not applicable to the territory known as Transjordan (today called Jordan), thereby
severing almost 80% of the Mandate land from any possible Jewish Homeland.
The world seems to have plunged into historical amnesia about this. Most people somehow forgot that Arab claims towards Palestine were already satisfied once. It is the Jews and not the Arabs who suffered from the "game" that was played between the Great Powers after World War I. International lawyer David Fromkin described these events in his book
A Peace To End All Peace. Fromkin wrote:
- Britain feared that if Arabs from the territory of British Palestine were to attack the French in Syria, France would retaliate by invading British Palestine.
Thus, Winston Churchill opted for a "Hashemite solution." He decided to "buy off [Prince] Abdullah: to offer him a position in Transjordan." Churchill brought a memorandum to the March, 1921 Cairo Conference, which envisaged:
- ... establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine west of the Jordan and a separate Arab entity in Palestine east of the Jordan. Abdullah, if installed in authority in Transjordan, could preside over the creation of such an Arab entity.
Churchill disregarded important objections that "since Transjordan had been included by the League of Nations in the territory of [mandated] Palestine, it was not open to Britain unilaterally to separate it from the rest of Palestine." In order to silence Churchill's opponents, Britain accepted a "compromise concept of Transjordan: while preserving the Arab character of area and administration to treat it as an Arab province or adjunct of Palestine."
It is important to indicate that the British Colonial Office regarded "the administrative separation of Transjordan as a merely provisional measure. It [was] decided not to allow Zionism in Transjordan for the present but also not to bar the door against it for all time." As it often happens, the temporary arrangement "hardened into an enduring political reality and the Arabian prince became a permanent factor of the Palestine Mandatory regime."
Therefore, 76% of the country was given "to an Arab dynasty that was not Palestinian. The newly created province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is often forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine."
From the moment of its creation, Transjordan was closed to all Jewish migration and settlement, a clear betrayal of the British promise in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and a patent contravention of its Mandatory obligations. Britain continued in its role as Mandatory over the whole of the area of the Mandate from 1922, but Jewish hopes of reconstituting the Jewish National Home were thereafter to be limited within the 23% of Palestine west of the Jordan River, an area that includes what is today called the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The League of Nations was dissolved after the conclusion of World War II with the terms of the Mandate still uncompleted, and a new body, the United Nations,was founded on June 26, 1945. Article 80 was specifically placed in the UN Charter to cover Mandates for places like Palestine where the purposes of those Mandates still remained uncompleted at the time of the demise of the League of Nations. Article 80 made it clear that the rights created by the Mandate and the terms of the Mandate were not to be affected.
Palestine continued to be administered by Great Britain under the Mandate until 1946 when Transjordan was granted independence. In one fell swoop, sovereignty in 77% of Palestine had been awarded to the Arabs. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations recommended that both a Jewish State and an Arab State be created in the remainder of the Mandated territory west of the Jordan River, and that Jerusalem be internationalised. Even though this was dramatically favorable to the Arabs and punative to the Zionist Jews, the Jews accepted the proposal. The Arabs rejected it.
Why did Arabs leave the new State of Israel?
The vexing question of the "Palestinian Refugees" is one of the perennial open sores of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinians left their homes in 1947-48 for a variety of reasons. Thousands of wealthy Arabs left in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders' calls to get out of the way of the advancing armies, a handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the cross fire of a battle. Tragically, had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN resolution, not a single Palestinian would have become a refugee and an independent Arab state would now exist beside Israel.
There are now claims from Arab sources that millions of Palestinians were pushed off their land by the Zionists, then expelled by the new State of Israel in the War of Independence in 1948, followed by similar Israeli policies that continue today. What is the truth of these claims?
The Palestinian tragedy is primarily self-inflicted, a direct result of the vehement Palestinian Arab rejection of the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947 calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and the violent attempt by the Arab nations of the region to abort the Jewish state at birth. Palestinian Arabs have tried to rewrite the history of the 1948 war in a manner that stains Israel politically and morally. Their objective is to 1) extract from Israel a confession of the allegedly forcible dispossession of "native Palestinians" by "an act of expulsion," and then 2) to ensure the return of refugees to parts of the territory that is now Israel and/or to compensate the Palestinian Arabs monetarily for their sufferings.
But this cannot actually happen, however fervently Arabs may believe in it, because historical fact is not what they claim. Arabs left Israel in 1948 in large numbers, it is true, but not for the reasons that Palestinian Arabs put forth. Fortunately for history, during the past decade Israeli and other state archives have declassified millions of records, including invaluable contemporary Arab and Palestinian documents, relating to the 1948 war and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. These make it possible to establish the truth about what happened in Palestine.
A good example is events of the War of Independence period in the city of Haifa. When hostilities between Arabs and Jews broke out in 1947, there were 62,500 Arabs in Haifa; by May 1948, all but a few were gone, accounting for fully a tenth of the total Palestinian dispersion.
The first thing the documents show is that Arab flight from Haifa began well before the outbreak of hostilities, and even before the UN’s November 29, 1947 partition resolution. On October 23, over a month earlier, a British intelligence brief was already noting that:
- ... leading Arab personalities are acting on the assumption that disturbances are near at hand, and have already evacuated their families to neighboring Arab countries.
By November 21, as the General Assembly was getting ready to vote, not just "leading Arab personalities" but "many Arabs of Haifa" were reported to be removing their families. And as the violent Arab reaction to the UN resolution built up, eradicating any hope of its peaceful enforcement, this stream of refugees turned into a flood. Thus it was that, by mid-December 1947, some 15,000-20,000 people, almost a third of the city’s Arab population, had fled, creating severe economic adversity for those remaining who found essential services disrupted, causing both unemployment and shortages in basic necessities. As 1948 wore on, looting, infighting between rival Arab groups, and other disturbances made Haifa increasingly uninhabitable. The Arab leaders of Haifa dispatched an emergency delegation to Cairo in late January, warning that, if terrorist activity did not cease, the result would be the eventual disappearance of the entire Haifa community. Their warning had no effect.
There is an overwhelming body of evidence from contemporary Arab, Jewish, British, and American sources to prove that, far from seeking to drive the Arabs out of Haifa, the Jewish authorities went to considerable lengths to convince them to stay. During the fighting in the city in April 1948, The Hagana’s truce terms stipulated that Arabs were expected to "carry on their work as equal and free citizens of Haifa." In its Arabic-language broadcasts and communications, the Hagana consistently articulated the same message. On April 22, at the height of the fighting, it distributed a circular noting its ongoing campaign to clear the town of all "criminal foreign bands" so as to allow the restoration of "peace and security and good neighborly relations among all of the town’s inhabitants." On April 29, even Farid Saad of the [Arab] National Committee was saying that Jewish leaders had "organized a large propaganda campaign to persuade [the] Arabs to return."
As the Jews were attempting to keep the Arabs in Haifa, an ad-hoc body, the Arab Emergency Committee, under orders from the Arab Higher Committee, was doing its best to get them out. Scaremongering was a major weapon in its arsenal. Some Arab residents received written threats that, unless they left town, they would be branded as traitors deserving of death. Others were told they could expect no mercy from the Jews. Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Murad of the National Committee, who had headed the truce negotiating team, proved particularly effective at this latter tactic: on April 23, he warned a large group of escapees from the neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas, who were about to return to their homes, that if they did so they would all be killed, as the Jews spared not even women and children. On the other hand, he continued, the Arab Legion had 200 trucks ready to transfer the Haifa refugees to a safe haven, where they would be given free accommodation,clothes, and food. Sir Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner for Palestine, wrote in an official communication to London:
- British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it.
Syria's UN delegate, Faris el-Khouri, interrupted the UN debate on April 22, 1948 on Palestine to describe the seizure of Haifa as a "massacre" and said this action was "further evidence that the 'Zionist program' is to annihilate Arabs within the Jewish state if partition is effected." The following day (April 23, 1948), however, the British representative at the UN, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told the delegates that the fighting in Haifa had been provoked by the continuous attacks by Arabs against Jews a few days before and that reports of massacres and deportations were erroneous. The same day, Jamal Husseini, the chairman of the Palestine Higher Committee, told the UN Security Council that instead of accepting the Haganah's truce offer, the Arabs "preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings, and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town."
Palestinian Arabs bemoan "the uprooting of the Palestinian people in one of the worst crimes of modern history." But were they uprooted, and if so by whom? In Haifa, one of the largest and most dramatic locales of the Palestinian exodus, not only had half the Arab community fled the city before the final battle was joined, but another 5,000-15,000 apparently left voluntarily during the fighting while the rest, some 15,000-25,000 souls, were ordered or bullied into leaving against their wishes, almost certainly on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee. The crime was exclusively of Arab making. There was no Jewish grand design to force this departure, nor was there a psychological "blitz." To the contrary, both the Haifa Jewish leadership and the Hagana went to great lengths to convince the Arabs to stay.
The well-documented efforts, indeed, reflected the wider Jewish attitude in Palestine. All deliberations of the Jewish leadership regarding the transition to statehood were based on the assumption that, in the Jewish state that would arise with the termination of the British Mandate, Palestine’s Arabs would remain as equal citizens. Israel's Proclamation of Independence, issued May 14, 1948, invited the Palestinians to remain in their homes and become equal citizens in the new state:
- In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions....We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all.
In the country as a whole, just as in Haifa, the first Arabs to leave were roughly 30,000 wealthy Arabs who anticipated the upcoming war and fled to neighboring Arab countries to await its end. Less affluent Arabs from the mixed cities of Palestine moved to all-Arab towns to stay with relatives or friends. All of those who left fully anticipated being able to return to their homes after an early Arab victory, as Palestinian nationalist Aref el-Aref explained in his history of the 1948 war:
- The Arabs thought they would win in less than the twinkling of an eye and that it would take no more than a day or two from the time the Arab armies crossed the border until all the colonies were conquered and the enemy would throw down his arms and cast himself on their mercy.
The fabrication can probably most easily be seen in that at the time the alleged cruel expulsion of Arabs by Zionists was in progress, it passed unnoticed. Foreign newspapermen who covered the war of 1948 on both sides did, indeed, write about the flight of the Arabs, but even those most hostile to the Jews saw nothing to suggest that it was not voluntary. In the three months during which the major part of the flight took place -- April, May, and June 1948 -- the London Times, at that time openly hostile to Zionism, published eleven leading articles on the situation in Palestine in addition to extensive news reports and articles. In none was there even a hint of the charge that the Zionists were driving the Arabs from their homes.
More interesting still, no Arab spokesman mentioned the subject. At the height of the flight, on April 27, Jamal Husseini, the Palestine Arabs' chief representative at the United Nations, made his long political statement, which was not lacking in hostility toward the Zionists; he did not mention refugees. Three weeks later -- while the flight was still in progress -- the Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, made a fiercely worded political statement on Palestine; it contained not a word about refugees.
Throughout the period that preceded the May 15 invasion of the Arab regular armies, large-scale military engagements, incessant sniping, robberies and bombings took place. In view of the thousands of casualties that resulted from the pre-invasion violence, it is not surprising that many Arabs would have fled out of fear for their lives. The second phase of the Arab flight began after the Jewish forces started to register military victories against Arab irregulars, as in the battles for Tiberias and Haifa. Arab leaders were alarmed by these developments:
- On January 30, 1948, the Jaffa newspaper, Ash Sha'ab, reported: "The first of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere....At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle."
- Another Jaffa paper, As Sarih (March 30, 1948) excoriated Arab villagers near Tel Aviv for "bringing down disgrace on us all by 'abandoning the villages."
- John Bagot Glubb, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, said: "Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war" (London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948).
More than 200,000 Arabs had left the country by the time the provisional government declared the independence of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. When the invasion by Arab armies began the next day, most Arabs remaining in Palestine left for neighboring countries. The Palestinian Arabs chose to flee to the safety of the other Arab states, still confident of being able to return, rather than remaining in Israel to act as a strategically valuable "fifthcolumn" in the war. A leading Palestinian nationalist of the time, Musa Alami, revealed the attitude of the fleeing Arabs:
- The Arabs of Palestine left their homes, were scattered, and lost everything. But there remained one solid hope: The Arab armies were on the eve of their entry into Palestine to save the country and return things to their normal course, punish the aggressor, and throw oppressive Zionism with its dreams and dangers into the sea. On May 14, 1948, crowds of Arabs stood by the roads leading to the frontiers of Palestine, enthusiastically welcoming the advancing armies. Days and weeks passed, sufficient to accomplish the sacred mission, but the Arab armies did not save the country. They did nothing but let slip from their hands Acre, Sarafand, Lydda, Ramleh, Nazareth, most of the south and the rest of the north. Then hope fled. (Middle East Journal, October 1949)
As the possibility of Arab defeat turned into reality, the flight of the Arabs increased, exacerbated further by the atrocity stories following the attack on
Dir Yassin. More than 300,000 departed after May 15, leaving approximately 160,000 Arabs in the State of Israel. Although most of the Arabs had left by November 1948, there were still those who chose to leave even after hostilities ceased. One survey concluded that sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
The research done by Benny Morris in
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is, despite occasional inaccuracies, more detailed and accurate than anything that preceded it. If we consider the facts Morris presents, it is reasonably clear that the flight of much of the Arab population from the territory that became Israel stemmed from battles between Arab and Jewish forces, and from the fears of Arab civilians of getting caught in the fighting. The Zionist leadership, Morris' research shows, correctly understood the danger that the Palestinian Arabs posed to the nascent Jewish state, and therefore did little to prevent their departure, at times encouraging or even precipitating it through political or military actions. In fact, Morris' own research does much to disprove the claims of his recent writings that what happened during the War of Independence was "ethnic cleansing."
The role of Arab leaders in urging the Arab population to leave is similarly well-documented. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, declared:
- We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.
The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book,
The Arabs:
- This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to reenter and retake possession of their country.
In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 194849, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave:
- Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.
Monsignor George Hakim, a Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada alJanub (August 16, 1948):
- The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.
One refugee quoted in the Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), said:
- The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.
Habib Issa said in the New York Lebanese paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951):
- The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade. He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean....Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.
And Jordan's King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs, blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:
- The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue.
In a few, exceptional cases accounting for only a small fraction of the Palestinian refugees, The Haganah did employ psychological warfare to encourage the Arabs to abandon a few villages. This insignificant element of the issue has been magnified by pro-Palestinian Arab advocates as if it were the whole problem.
The fate of these Arab refugees from Israel, a problem created by the Arabs themselves, is covered in
this page from palestinefacts.org.
REFUGEE's
The issue of Palestinian refugees is a sticking point in Middle East peace negotiations. How did this problem begin, and who is responsible?
In the 1948 war, approximately 600,000 Jewish refugees were persecuted and expelled from Arab lands including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco -- leaving behind an estimated $30 billion in assets. These Jewish refugees were welcomed by Israel, and with their descendants, now comprise a majority population of the State of Israel.
In the same war, according to the UN, approximately 720,000 Palestinians refugees fled to Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza. The UN estimates that they and their descendents now number about 3.7 million.
The Arab League forbade any Arab country from accepting these refugees or settling them in normal housing, preferring to leave them in squalid camps. Former UNRWA Director Ralph Galloway stated in 1958: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a **** whether Arab refugees live or die."
Again, it was Arabs who resisted efforts by Israel to settle the refugees in normal housing from 1967-95, when Israel administered the lands.
And again in the late-1990s, when 97 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza lived under full jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, the refugees continued to be confined to camps -- despite the millions of UNWRA and international relief dollars which poured into PA coffers specifically for this purpose.
It is important to note, as Joan Peters documents in her seminal work, "From Time Immemorial," that the vast majority of these refugees did not live for generations on the land, but rather came from Egypt, Syria and Iraq as economic opportunities increased during the first half of the 20th century, the formative years of Jewish aliyah.
The United Nations' standard definition of a "refugee" is one who was forced to leave a "permanent" or "habitual" home. In the case of Arab refugees however, the UN broadened the definition of refugee to include anyone who lived in "Palestine" for only two years prior to Israel's statehood in 1948.
The number of 3.7 million refugees is further inflated, given that the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees does not include descendents in its definition of refugees, nor does it apply to a person who "has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality." Under this definition, the number of Palestinians qualifying for refugee status would be well below half a million. Yet the UN has created a new set of rules for Palestinian refugees.
* * *
A key question is the issue of responsibility:
Since five Arab armies launched the 1948 war, logic dictates that they are responsible for the outcome. Yet it is still instructive to know: Did Israel forcibly evict these Arabs in 1948, or did they leave voluntarily?
Though historical sources vary, many statements from Arab leaders and the media support the contention that Arabs created the refugee problem:
The Beirut Daily Telegraph (September 6, 1948) quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee:
The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously...
The London Economist (October 2, 1948) reported an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa's Arabs:
There is little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in the flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit... And it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.
Habib Issa, secretary-general of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily "al-Hoda" (June 8, 1951):
[Azzam Pasha, Arab League secretary,] assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states.
Former Prime Minister of Syria, Khaled al-Azem, wrote in his memoirs, published in 1973 in Beirut:
We brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land.
The PA's current prime minister, Mahmud Abbas ("Abu Mazen") wrote in the PLO journal "Palestine a-Thaura" (March 1976):
The Arab armies, who invaded the country in '48, forced the Palestinians to emigrate and leave their homeland and forced a political and ideological siege on them.
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There is a common misconception regarding UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. The resolution does not recognize any "right" of return for refugees, but recommends that they "should" be "permitted" to return, subject to two conditions: that the refugee wishes to return, and that he wishes to live at peace with his neighbors.
Even though the Arab states originally rejected Resolution 194, they now misquote it to back the demand of an unlimited right of return to within the borders of the State of Israel. In Yasser Arafat's January 1, 2001, letter to President Clinton, he declared:
"Recognizing the Right of Return and allowing the refugees' freedom of choice are a prerequisite for ending the conflict."
In the summer of 2000, Palestinian negotiators submitted an official document at Camp David, demanding that the refugees automatically be granted Israeli citizenship, and that the right of return should have no time limit. Additionally, the PA demanded that Israel provide compensation amounting to $500 billion dollars. Abu Mazen said that compensation payments should be made by Israel alone, and not from any international funds.
Israel maintains that settling refugees in Israel is a crude political move to destroy the Jewish state through demographics. If the whole point of a Palestinian state is to provide an independent home for their people, why do they insist on going to Israel?
While the political outcome remains uncertain, one thing is tragically clear: Thousands of Palestinians remain in squalid camps, used as political pawns in the ongoing war against Israel.
As Jordan's King Hussein stated in 1960:
Since 1948, Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner. They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and I could say even criminal
(Sources: MEMRI, Ha'Aretz, Joan Peters, Moshe Kohn, Prof. Shlomo Slonim, Prof. Ruth Lapidoth) .
What did the Arabs do about Jordan's annexation of the parts of Palestine they captured?
In April 1950, Jordan annexed eastern Jerusalem (dividing the city for the first time in its history) and the "West Bank" areas in historical
Judea and Samaria that Trans-Jordan had occupied by military force in 1948 (Jordan changed its name to Trans-Jordan in April 1949). On April 24, 1950, the Jordan House of Deputies and House of Notables, in a joint session, adopted a Resolution making the West Bank and Jerusalem part of Jordan. This act had no basis in international law; it was only the de facto act of Trans-Jordan as a conquerer. The other Arab countries denied formal recognition of the Jordanian move and only two governments - Great Britain and Pakistan - formally recognized the Jordanian takeover. The rest of the world, including the United States, never did.
After the 1948 War for Independence and the Jordanian takeover, the Palestinian Arabs never attempted to establish an independent state in the territory alloted to them by the
1947 United Nations Partition Plan. They cooperated with its unilateral annexation by Jordan, becoming part of Jordan's political system. Across the barbed wire that marked the dividing line, Jordanian East Jerusalem was not made the capital, even for its Palestinian residents, in 19 years of Jordanian rule. The capital remained in Amman. There was no outcry of claims of "Palestinian" identity being submerged by Jordan.
The reason there was no Arab outrage over the annexation was because Jordan is a state whose ethnic majority is Palestinian Arabs. On the other hand, the Palestinians of Jordan are disenfranchised by the ruling Hashemite minority. Despite this fact, in the years following the annexation the Palestinians displayed no interest in achieving "self-determination" in Hashemite Jordan. It is only the presence of Jews, apparently, that incites this claim.
The Jordanian "occupation" of the West Bank was very abusive of the rights of Jews and Christians, or any resident of Israel. During the 1948-1967 period of its occupation,
Jordan permitted terrorists to launch raids into Israel. Jewish and muslim residents of Israel were not permitted to visit their Holy Places in East Jerusalem. Christians, too, were discriminated against. In 1958, Jordanian legislation required all members of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre to adopt Jordanian citizenship. In 1965, Christian institutions were forbidden to acquire any land or rights in or near Jerusalem. In 1966, Christian schools were compelled to close on Fridays instead of Sundays, customs privileges of Christian religious institutions were abolished. Jerusalem was bisected by barbed wire, concrete barriers and walls. On a number of occasions Jordanian soldiers opened fire on Jewish Jerusalem. In May 1967, the Temple Mount became a military base for the Jordanian National Guard.
