From American Thinker, June 8, 2014, by Daniel Mandel*:
Mahmoud
Abbas’s Fatah/Palestinian Authority has just cemented a reconciliation
agreement with Hamas, the terrorist movement that seized Gaza from Fatah in
2007 and whose charter
calls for the murder of Jews.
U.S.-brokered
Israeli/Palestinian negotiations have foundered in a predictable round of
recriminations. But events commemorated in recent weeks provide the clue to
understanding why such talks invariably lead to an impasse. On May 15,
Palestinians marked what they call the naqba
(Arabic for "catastrophe") – the day Israel came into existence upon
the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.
That
juxtaposition of Israeli independence and naqba
is not accidental. We are meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the
displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.
But the truth
is different. A British document from early 1948, declassified last year, tells
the story:
“the Arabs have suffered ... overwhelming defeats[.] ... Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”
In other
words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring
states, were already at war, and Arabs fleeing, even before Israel came into
sovereign existence on 15 May 1948.
Thus, what is
now called the naqba
consisted not of Israeli forcible displacement of Arabs, but of neighboring
Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responding to Israel’s
declaration of independence and Britain’s departure with full-scale
hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air, and the head of Israel’s
provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to
the nation from an air-raid shelter.
Israel
successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment – the universally affirmed
objective of the Arab belligerents – and Palestinians came off worst of all
from the whole venture. At war’s end, over 600,000 Palestinians were living as
refugees under neighboring Arab regimes. As Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, writing in Arab News, put it the other week,
“[i]t was a defeat but the Arabs chose to call it a catastrophe.”
Accordingly,
the term naqba
is misleading. Indeed, it smacks of falsehood, inasmuch as it implies a tragedy
inflicted by others. The tragedy, of course, was self-inflicted.
As Israel’s
U.N. ambassador Abba Eban was to put
it some years later,
“[o]nce you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem. Nothing in the history of our generation is clearer or less controversial than the initiative of Arab governments for the conflict out of which the refugee tragedy emerged.”
However, the
Palestinians do not mourn today the ill-conceived choice of going to war to
abort Israel. They mourn only that they failed.
This is
contrary to historical experience of disastrous defeat. The Germans today mourn
their losses in the Second World War – but not by lauding their invasion of
Poland and justifying their attempt to subjugate Europe. They do not glorify
Nazi aggression.
The Japanese
today mourn their losses in the Second World War – but not by lauding their
assault on Pearl Harbor and their attempt to subjugate southeast Asia. They do
not glorify Japanese imperialism.
The very
existence of naqba
commemorations is therefore instructive in a way few realize. It informs us
that Palestinians have not admitted or assimilated the fact – as Germans and
Japanese have done – that they became victims as a direct result of their
efforts to be perpetrators.
It informs us
that Palestinians would still like to succeed today at what they miserably
failed to achieve then.
And it
informs us that they take no responsibility for their own predicament, which is
uniquely maintained to this day at their own insistence.
If readers
doubt this, consider the following vignette: in January 2001, John Manley,
then-foreign minister in Jean Chretien’s Canadian government, offered to
welcome Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Canada. The Palestinian
response? Mr. Manley was burned in effigy by Palestinian rioters in Nablus, and
Palestinian legislator Hussam Khader of Fatah – not Hamas or another of the
Islamist groups –declared,
“If Canada is serious about resettlement, you could expect military attacks in
Ottawa or Montreal.” A similar offer by
then-Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock also received a threatening
Palestinian rejoinder.
Why this
astounding response by a government official to an offer of refugee relief?
Because establishing a Palestinian state and resettling the refugees and their
descendants inside it or abroad would remove any internationally accepted
grounds for conflict. That’s why helping to solve the Palestinian refugee
problem is regarded as a hostile act – by Palestinians.
Naqba commemorations disclose that the
conflict is about Israel’s existence – not about territory, borders, holy
places, refugees or any other bill of particulars.
When
Palestinians accept that Israel is here to stay, the possibility of the
conflict’s end will come into view. In the meantime, responsible governments
can discourage and repudiate naqba
commemorations – rather than treat them as benign expressions of
national loss or grief – as a small but important step toward bringing that day
closer.
*Daniel
Mandel is director of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Middle East
Policy and author of H.V.
Evatt & the Creation of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).