based on extracts
from “BIG LIES: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel” (2005)
by DAVID MEIR-LEVI, with updates by Steve Lieblich:
1. THE REFUGEE QUESTION
The Arab version of the tragic fate of Arab refugees who
fled from the Palestine Mandate before and during the 1948 war and from Israel
immediately after the war, has so thoroughly dominated the discourse about the Israel-Arab conflict, that for some, it is
almost a given that the creation of the State of Israel caused the flight of
half a million Arab refugees; and that Israel caused
the problem and thus Israel must solve the problem.
This assertion, although canonized by the anti-Israel propaganda which makes it the core of its
narratives of the Middle East conflict, is unequivocally and totally false.
Origins of the Problem
Arab leaders persecuted their Jewish population in Palestine from the 1920s, and launched a relentless campaign, against the interests of their own people, to obliterate the Jewish national revival …before any “occupation” and even before the establishment of the State of Israel. They flatly rejected the restoration of the Jewish homeland as mandated by the League of Nations after World War 1.
The State of Israel was not created out of Palestinian
lands. It was created out of the Ottoman Empire, ruled for four hundred years
by the Turks who lost it when they were defeated in World War I.
There were no “Palestinian” lands at the time because there
were no people claiming to be Palestinians. There were Arabs who lived in the
region of Palestine who considered themselves Syrians. It was only after World
War I that the present states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were also
created – and also created artificially out of the Turkish Empire by the
British and French victors.
Population of Western Palestine (Gaza, Israel, and the West
Bank) – from “The Claim of Dispossession” by Arieh L. Avneri
1550 200k
1915 700k
(100k Jews)
1946 1.8
million (600k Jews)
2015 12
million (7 million Jews)
Jordan was created on about 80 percent of the Palestine
Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations for the
re-establishment of the Jewish homeland. Since then, Jews have been prohibited
from owning property there. Two-thirds of its citizens are Palestinian Arabs,
but it is ruled by a Hashemite monarchy.
Even after Jordan was created from 80% of the British Mandate of Palestine, the Arabs rejected the 1937 Peel Commission proposal to partition the remaining 20%.
In 1947, the UN partition plan recommended the creation of two
states on the remaining 20 percent of the Palestine Mandate: the State of
Israel for the Jews, and another state for the Arabs. The Arabs rejected their
state, and launched a war against Israel. This is the primal cause of the Arab
refugee problem.
In 1947, the UN partition would have created an even larger Arab state. If not for the Arabs' violent attempt to abort the partition, there would have been no war and there would now be a Palestinian state over 60 years old.
The Arab refugees were about 600,000 people who lost their
homes because of the war that the Arab states started. The Arab states - dictatorships all - did not want a non-Arab state in
the Middle East. The rulers of eight Arab countries whose populations vastly
outnumbered the Jewish settlers in the Turkish Empire, initiated the war with
simultaneous invasions of the newly-created state of Israel on three fronts.
Nascent Israel begged for peace and offered friendship and
cooperation to its neighbors. The Arab dictators rejected this offer and
answered it with a war of annihilation against the Jews. The war failed. But
the state of war has continued uninterruptedly because of the failure of the
Arab states –Saudi Arabia and Iraq in particular – to sign a peace treaty with
Israel. To this day, the Arab states and the Palestinians refer to the failure
of their aggression and the survival of Israel as an-Nakba – the
catastrophe.
Had there been no
Arab aggression, no war, and no invasion by Arab armies whose intent was overtly
genocidal, not only would there have been no Arab refugees, but there would
have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.
Israel actually offered to return land it had acquired while
defending itself against the Arab aggression in exchange for a formal peace. It
made this offer during the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in
1949. The Arab rulers refused the land because they wanted to maintain a state
of war in order to destroy the Jewish state.
Had Israel’s offer been accepted, there could have been
prompt and just resolution to all the problems that have afflicted the region
since. The only problem that wouldn’t have been resolved to the satisfaction of
the Arabs was their desire to obliterate the state of Israel.
From 1948 to 1967, Israel did not control the West Bank and Gaza. The Arab nations could have created an independent Palestinian state there, but did not. Instead of peace and reconciliation, they chose rejection and global terrorism.
The Arabs also rejected the offer of Palestinian autonomy in the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace negotiations. They scuttled the Oslo process that began in 1993 leading toward the creation of a Palestinian state, by violating their commitments. In 2000 and 2008, they also rejected offers to create a Palestinian state.
It was not Israel that
caused the Arab refugee problem, nor Israel that obstructed its solution. On
the contrary, the Arab refugee problem was the direct result of the aggression
by the Arab states, and their refusal after failing to obliterate Israel to
sign a formal peace, or to take care of the Arab refugees who remained outside
Israel’s borders.
The Jewish Refugees
There were other refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflict
that everyone on the Arab side of the argument chooses conveniently to forget.
Between 1949 and 1954, about 800,000 Jews were forced to flee from the Arab and
Muslim lands where they had lived for hundreds and even thousands of years –
from Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and other
Muslim countries. These Jews were peaceful citizens of their Arab countries and
in no way a hostile population. Nonetheless, they were forced at gun-point to
flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The only reason for their
expulsion was revenge against the Jewish citizenry of Arab countries for the
shame of the Arab defeat in their war of aggression. Most of these Jewish
refugees came to Israel, where they were integrated into normalcy by the tiny
fledgling Jewish state. The Arab states (and later the PLO) refused to do this
for the Arab refugees because they preferred to keep them an aggrieved
constituency for their war against Israel.
Some observers have suggested that the dual refugee
situation should be understood as a “population exchange” – Arabs fled to Arab
countries as Jews fled to the Jewish country, both as a result of the 1948 war,
both under conditions which their side regards as forced evacuations. On the
other hand, no one on the Arab side has suggested the obvious: if Jewish
refugees were resettled on land vacated by fleeing Arabs, why not resettle Arab
refugees on the lands of Jews who were forced to flee the Arab countries. One
reason no one has suggested this is that no Arab state will even now allow Arab
refugees to become citizens.
Taking into account the Jewish refugees’ assets that were
confiscated when they fled from Arab and Muslim lands, one can conclude that
the Jews have already paid massive “reparations” to the Arabs whether warranted
or not. The property and belongings of the Jewish refugees, confiscated by the
Arab governments, has been conservatively estimated at about $2.5 billion in
1948 dollars. Invest that money at a modest 6.5% over 57 years and you have
today a sum of $80 billion, which the Arab and Muslim governments of the lands from
which the Jews were expelled could apply to the benefit of the Arab refugees.
That sum is quite sufficient for reparations to Arab refugees. There is no way
of accurately assessing the value of Arab property left in Israel’s control;
but there are no estimates as high as a 1948 value of $2,500,000,000. So,
hypothetically, the Arab side has already gotten the better end of the deal.
Another irony must be considered in the context of the
refugee issue. Israel handled its Jewish refugee problem by devoting massive
resources to the education and integration of the Jewish refugee population
into its society. These refugees never became a burden on the world, never
needed the assistance of the United Nations, and never had their civil and
human rights denied by their new host country. Instead, despite great hardship,
early discrimination, difficult adjustments and initial privations, they and
their offspring have become productive citizens of the Middle East’s only
democracy, and substantive contributors to one of the most technologically and
socially advanced countries in the world.
During the many wars of the 20th century, tens of millions
of refugees were created.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) was established on December 14, 1950 to lead and co-ordinate
international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems
worldwide. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50
million refugees to restart their lives (25 million refugees of World War 2,
and another 25 million since). Today, the UNHCR in more than 110 countries
continues to help over 30 million refugees.
The only refugees for
whom resettlement is not even attempted, are the Arabs refugees of the 1948
Arab-Israel war, whom the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority have kept
in refugee camps.
The fate of the Arab refugees has been the diametric
opposite of Israel’s pro-active approach to the problem of Jewish refugees, and
the UNHCR’s approach to all other refugees, except the Arabs refugees of
Palestine.
Arab leadership has purposely kept their Palestinian brethren in
refugee slums, with their
misery perpetuated by Machiavellian rulers to be used as a propaganda weapon against
Israel and against the West.
The Palestinian refugees in Gaza were forced there in 1948
not by Israel but by the Egyptians, kept there under guard, shot if they tried
to leave, and never given Egyptian citizenship or Egyptian passports. (These
facts are recorded by Yasir Arafat himself in his authorized biography by Alan
Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace
Maker? 1982).
Refugees in Lebanon were kept under similar but less
draconian repression. They were barred by law from almost 70 professions, not
granted citizenship, and not allowed to travel. Only in Jordan were the
refugees granted citizenship.
Senior Fatah Central
Committee member Sakher Habash succinctly explained the reason for the
calculated refusal of the Arab rulers including the Palestinian rulers to help
the Palestinian refugees to return to normal lives. During a 1998 lecture at
Shechem’s An-Najah University, Habash said:
“To us,
the refugee issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli
state.”
In other words, war, terrorism, diplomatic isolation of
Israel, world-wide PR campaigns to demonize Israel all may fail (and most have,
so far); but as long as this last trump card is still alive, hope for the
destruction of Israel still pulses in the hearts of Arab revanchists.
Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 and are still alive
have no legal right to return to Israel, because the Arab leadership
representing them (Arab nations until 1993, and since then the Palestinian
Authority) are still, de jure and de
facto, at war with Israel; and these refugees,
therefore, are still potential hostiles. International law does not require a
country at war to commit suicide by allowing the entry of hundreds of thousands
of a potentially hostile population. In the context of a peace treaty, in 1949,
the Arab refugees could have taken advantage of Israel’s offer; but their
leadership refused.
Of course the present Palestinian claim of a “Right of
Return” is accompanied by the claim that there are not the original 600,000
refugees (minus those who have died in the interim) but over 5 million.
As distinct from the UNHCR definition of refugee, under the
UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA)'s operational definition, “Palestine refugees”
are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and
May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the
1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the
descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The number of registered
Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from over 500,000 in 1950 to more 5
million in 2007, and continues to rise due to natural population growth.
A Summary of The Salient Facts
The protracted Arab refugee crisis is an artificial crisis
maintained for decades by Arab rulers in order to exploit their own people’s
suffering -- to create a “poster child” for Palestinian victim-hood; a staging
ground for anti-Israel propaganda; a training center for Arab terrorists; and a
trump card for the anti-Israel jihad when all else (war, terrorism, international diplomacy)
fails.
“Haq el-Auda,” the claimed
“right of return,” for Palestinian Arabs to return their homes that have been
part of Israel since 1948 is a sham.
Sixty years ago there were nearly a million Jews in the Arab
states of the Middle East: honest hard-working citizenry contributing to the
culture and economy of their countries of domicile. Today, there are almost no
Jews in the Arab countries of the Middle East, and racist apartheid laws
prohibit even Jewish tourists from entering some Arab countries.
In Israel, on the other hand, the Arabs who did not flee
numbered about 170,000 in 1949; and now number more than 1,400,000. They have
representatives in the Israeli Parliament, judges sitting on the Israeli courts
and on the Israeli Supreme Court benches, and PhD’s and tenured professors
teaching in Israeli colleges and universities. They are a population that
enjoys more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than do any comparable
Arab populations anywhere in the Arab world.
The Arab rulers caused the Arab refugee problem in 1948 by
their war of aggression against the infant state of Israel; the Arab rulers
have since maintained the Arab refugee population and denied it any possibility
of normal life in Arab countries in order to use the suffering they themselves
have caused, as a weapon in their unending war against Israel.
During all these decades the refugee camps and their Arab
exploiters have been funded by billions of dollars from the oil-rich Arab
nations and the international community.
2. THE EIGHT STAGES OF THE CREATION OF THE PROBLEM
The flight of Arabs from what would soon become Israel took
place in eight stages:
One. As early
as the Fall of 1947, months before the UN partition plan of November 29, 1947,
it was clear that there would be a war no matter how the partition lines were
drawn. In anticipation of this war, many of the well-to-do Arabs (the effendi) of
Western Galilee, from Haifa to Acco and villages in between, closed down their
houses and went to Beirut or Damascus. With their wealth and connections, they
could wait out the war in safety. No one imagined the infant state of Israel
could win a war with the Arab states. The Arabs who left thought that they
would be out of the way of danger, and when the war was over they would come
back to their homes. Current estimates by objective observers (Conor Cruise
O’Brien, in his book The Siege, being perhaps the most objective) is that about 70,000
fled.
Two. These
refugees caused a sudden absence of political and social leadership among the
Arabs of Galilee, and thus as the hostilities developed in the winter of 1947,
many of the Arab peasantry (Felahin) fled as well, following their leaders’ example. They
lacked the money and connections to make a comfortable trip out of the way of
danger, as their effendi had done. So many of them simply walked with whatever they
could carry to Lebanon or Syria. Their leadership had fled, which led them to
assume that things must be pretty bad, so they figured they had better leave
too. They too were sure, based upon documentation from Arab press at the time,
that when the war was over and the Jews were all dead or driven from Israel,
they would come back to their homes.
There are no solid numbers for this exodus, but estimates
range around 100,000 people. There were so many exiting that the Arab states
had a special conference in Beirut to decide how to handle all the Arabs that
were pouring across the borders. They set up special camps, later to be known
as refugee camps.These Arabs were fleeing of their own free will. No one,
neither Israel nor Arab states, were encouraging, frightening, or ordering them
to do so. The war had not yet even begun.
Three. After
November 29, 1947, warfare between the Israeli Haganah and para-military Arab
volunteers numbering in the tens of thousands began in earnest. The Arab press
and public speeches made it clear that this was to be a war of annihilation
like those of the great Mongol hordes killing all in their path. The Jews would
be either dead or out. Israel was fighting not a war of independence, but a war
of survival.
In order to defend some areas where Jews were completely
surrounded by Arabs (like the Jews of Jaffa, Jewish villages or kibbutzim in
parts of Galilee and the central hill country, and in Jerusalem), the Haganah
adopted scare-tactics that were intended to strike terror into the Arab
population of those areas, so that they would retreat to safer ground. Then, it
would be possible for the Haganah to defend those Jews who would otherwise be
inaccessible and thus vulnerable to genocidal Arab intentions.
Many Arabs in parts of western Galilee, Jaffa, and parts of
western Jerusalem, fled because of tactics such as rumors that a huge Jewish
army from the West was about to land on the coast, hand-grenades thrown on
front porches of homes, jeeps driving by and firing machine guns into the walls
or fences of houses, rumors circulated by Arabic-speaking Jews that the Haganah
was far bigger than it really was and was on the verge of surfacing with a
massive Jewish army, etc.
Here it is important to note that Jews were responsible in
this part of the Arab flight. But it was not because they wanted to ethnically
cleanse the country, or to wipe out the Arabs. It was because they knew that
outnumbered Jews, undefended in Arab enclaves would be slaughtered (as in fact
was the case of Jews in the Gush Etzion villages and in the Jewish Quarter of
the Old City in Jerusalem, and as had happened in Hebron in 1929). It was the
exigency of their fighting a war of survival against a bigger and better armed
enemy that drove them to the tactics described above.
It is also important not to forget these facts: Had the Arab
leadership accepted the UN partition plan, there would have been a state of
Palestine since November 29, 1947, for the Arabs, alongside of Israel.
Had the Arab armies not invaded, there would have been no
refugee problem. Keeping in mind these two facts, it is clear that the total
onus of culpability for the start of the refugee problem rests squarely and
solely upon the Arab states that invaded, in clear disregard for the UN
resolution 181 and international law.
Four. Arab
leadership from among the para-military forces and the forces of Syria were
vociferous in their announcements that they wanted Arabs to leave so that the
armies would have a clear field in which to perpetrate their genocide of the
Jews. When the war was over and the Jews were driven out or killed, the Arab
residents could come back and have both their own lands and those of the Jews.
We cannot know how many Arabs fled because of these
announcements; but since a number of Arab spokespersons after the war admitted
to having done this, and wrung their hands publicly in painful repentance of
having created the refugee problem, it is clear that the Arab leadership’s own
message to many Arabs in the area was a major
factor in the Arab flight.
It is also important to point out at this time that there
were a number of cases where Jewish leaders got out in public and pleaded with
Arabs not to leave. The mayor of Haifa is the best example of this. At the risk
of his own life, he drove through the Arab section of Haifa with a loudspeaker
on his jeep, and in Arabic called out to the residents of his city to disregard
the Arab propaganda.
Nonetheless, tens of thousands fled. The incredulous British
officers who witnessed this, documented it in a variety of sources. Those Arabs
who stayed were unharmed and became citizens of Israel.
The British also documented for the world a similar
phenomenon in Tiberius (a town in which the Arab population vastly outnumbered
the Jewish). The Arabs quite literally chose to leave even though they were
under no direct threat from the Jews and asked the British to assist them. Tens
of thousands left under British guard, while the Jews, both civilian and
Haganah, looked on. In a slightly different twist, the Arabs of Safed (Tzefat)
fled before the Haganah attack, even though the Arab forces in Safed
outnumbered the Jews about 10 to one.
Wherever Arabs chose to stay, they were unharmed and later
became citizens of Israel.
There have been a number of essays written by later
historians contesting the truth of the assertion that Arab leaders told their
people to flee. But Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The
Siege and Mitchell Bard’s Myths and Facts of the Middle East Conflict offer irrefutable proof of the existence of such pronouncements.
Five. Deir
Yassin: The events that took place at Deir Yassin are still hotly disputed. But
by their own admission, Arab leadership today acknowledges that the lies
created by the Arabs about the fictitious “massacre” were concocted in order to
shame the Arab armies into fighting against the Jews, frighten the Arabs, and
encourage them to flee.The village sits near Jerusalem, overlooking the road
from Tel Aviv. Jewish Jerusalem was under siege, and its only lifeline was this
one road to Tel Aviv. A contingent of Iraqi troops had entered Deir Yassin on
March 13, 1948. Some sources suggest that they were asked to leave. Apparently
they did not, since their armed bodies were numerous among the dead after the
battle. It was obvious that they were going to try to cut off that road. Doing
so would spell the end of Jewish Jerusalem. So on April 9, 1948, a contingent
of the Irgun (a para-military splinter group) entered the village. This
operation was completely legitimate in the context of rules of engagement,
since the Iraqi presence made the village a legal military objective.
Their intent, to capture the village and drive out the
Iraqis, was completely clear from the onset, because they entered with a jeep
and loudspeaker telling the civilian population to flee the village.
Unfortunately, this jeep slid into a ditch, so some of the
villagers may not have heard the message; however, many did and fled before the
Irgun got to the village. Rather than surround the village and prevent their
escape, the Irgun left several routes open for the civilians to flee, which
hundreds of villagers used. However, the Iraqis had disguised themselves as
women -- it is easy to hide weapons beneath the flowing robes of the burqa --
and had hidden themselves among women and children in the village. So, when the
Irgun fighters entered, they encountered fire from “women!”
When the Irgun fighters fired back, they killed innocent
women because the Iraqis were dressed like women and hiding behind them. After
suffering more than 40 percent casualties to their forces, the Irgun succeeded
in killing or capturing the Iraqis. Then, while they were in a group, still
dressed as women, having surrendered and agreed to be taken prisoner, some of
the Iraqis opened fire again with weapons concealed beneath their women’s
clothing. Irgun fighters were caught off guard, more were killed, and others
opened fire into the group. Iraqis who had indeed surrendered were killed along
with those who had only pretended to surrender and had then opened fire.
When the Haganah arrived they found the dead women and other
civilians and thus incorrectly accused the Irgun of murder and massacre. But
the Red Cross, which was called in to assist the wounded and civilians, found
no evidence of a massacre. In fact, even the most recent review of the evidence
(July 1999), by Arab scholars at Beir-Zayyit university in Ramallah, indicates
that there was no massacre, but rather a military conflict in which civilians
were killed in the crossfire. The total Arab dead, including the Iraqi
soldiers, according to the Beir Zayyit calculation, was 107.
So where did the idea of a massacre come from? The same Arab
sources that confess to having urged the Arabs to flee have also acknowledged
that Arab spokespersons at the time cynically exaggerated the casualties of the
Deir Yassin battle, making up stories of gang rape, brutalizing of pregnant
women, killing unborn children cut from their mothers’ wombs by blood-thirsty
Jews, and massive murders with bodies thrown into a nearby quarry. The same
Arab sources admit that their purpose in these lies was to shame the Arab
nations into entering the conflict with greater alacrity, so that the Jews
would be destroyed by the overwhelming numbers of Arab invaders.
The plan backfired. As a result of this propaganda, Arab
civilians panicked and fled by the tens of thousands. This was confirmed in the
1993 PBS documentary called The
Fifty Years of War in which Deir Yassin survivors were
interviewed. They testified that they had begged Dr. Hussein Khalidi, director
of Voice of Palestine (the Palestinian radio station in East Jerusalem) to edit
out the lies and fabrications of atrocities that never happened. He told them:
“We must capitalize on this great opportunity!”
The flight of Arabs had begun many months before Deir
Yassin. So Deir Yassin cannot account for those hundreds of thousands of Arabs
who sought refuge prior to April 9, 1948. Moreover, while current Arab
propaganda asserts that Deir Yassin was one of many examples of Jewish massacre
and slaughter, there is not one other documented example of any such behavior
by the Jews. By any standard, Deir Yassin was not an example, but an exception.
In sum, it was not what happened at Deir Yassin that caused
the flight of tens of thousands of Arabs; it was the lies invented by the Arab
High Command and Dr. Hussein Khalidi of the “Voice of Palestine” radio news
channel that caused the panic. One can hardly blame Israel for that.
Moreover, we have information from a famous source, Yassir
Arafat himself (his authorized biography, by Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker) that the Deir Yassin lies were spread “like a red flag in
front of a bull” by the Egyptians. Then, having terrorized them with these
stories, the Egyptians proceeded to disarm the Arabs of the area and herd them
into detention camps in Gaza (today’s Gaza refugee camps). Why did the
Egyptians do this? According to Arafat, it was to get the Arabs out of the area
because the Egyptians wanted a free hand to wage their war. Egypt had every
intention of conquering the Negev and southern part of the coastal plain. They
wanted no interference from the local Arabs.
Deir Yassin was not a massacre; nothing even vaguely akin to
what the Jews are accused of ever happened. We don’t know how many Arabs fled
as a result of the Arab propaganda over Deir Yassin. Several hundred thousand
is a good estimate. Most of them ended up in the Egyptian detention camps in
Gaza.
Six. Besides Deir
Yassin, there are two other incidents in which Arab refugees are said to have
fled because of Israeli army actions: Lydda and Ramle. Both villages sat
astride the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As the siege on Jerusalem
tightened, the Israeli forces knew that in order to save the Jews of west
Jerusalem from defeat and possible annihilation, they had to keep that road
open. So one night they entered both villages and forcibly drove out the Arab
residents. They rousted them from bed and sent them walking across the fields
to the area that was under Jordanian control some kilometers away. None were
killed. There was no massacre, but they were driven out. On the other hand,
they were driven out because their villages sat astride the road to Jerusalem,
and the only way to guarantee the survival of 150,000 Jews in Jerusalem was to
control this one road.
Seven. By May
15, 1948, the British had evacuated their forces from all of British Mandatory
Palestine, and the Haganah, which now became the Israeli Defense Force (IDF),
had a free hand. The Arab countries also had a free hand in attacking, and
attack they did. Armies from eight Arab dictatorships poured into the area from
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt (volunteers and soldiers from Saudi
Arabia, Yemen and Morocco came too). They outnumbered the IDF about five to one.
For the next month or so the Israelis were fighting a terribly difficult
defensive war and were just barely able to keep the invaders out. There were
about 63,000 IDF volunteers, but weapons for only 22,000.
In June 1948 the UN imposed a cease-fire. By July when the
Arabs re-initiated hostilities, the Israelis had been able to use the
cease-fire to import arms and planes from Russia and Germany via
Czechoslovakia. Now better armed, the IDF numbered 65,000 and the odds were
reduced to about 2 to 1. Those were good odds for the determined Jewish
fighters.
When the fighting resumed in July, the IDF went on the
offensive and succeeded in driving the Arab armies out of both the Jewish areas
and large parts of the areas that the UN had intended to be the Palestinian
state (western Galilee, and southern coastal plain north of Gaza). When this
offensive began, more Arabs fled. As noted above, the Arabs who stayed were not
harmed and became citizens of Israel.
Contrary to revisionist Arab propaganda, there was never any
intent to massacre Arabs, although the Arabs clearly intended to massacre the
Jews. Many civilians died in the cross fire, and the overwhelming majority of
Arabs who fled did so needlessly, at their own initiative, or because of the
Arab leadership that lied and intimidated them. In at least two specific cases
a few Arabs were driven out by the IDF as a defensive measure. It was not part
of any plan to ethnically cleanse the land or massacre the Arabs. These
accusations are all part of a new and mendacious revisionism aimed at
exonerating the Arabs from their culpability as aggressors and from their role
in creating the Arab Refugee problem. Their agenda is to transfer the guilt
from themselves – where it belongs -- to Israel.
Proof that Israel never set out to ethnically cleanse the
Arabs of Palestine is to be seen in the following facts:
- the complete absence of any coverage in
any world press, including the Arab press and the openly hostile western press
in regard to any such actions by Israel;
- the complete absence of these
accusations from any Arab spokespersons during that time, even at the very
height of the flight (post-Deir Yassin), and for many years thereafter; and 3)
The fate of the Arabs who stayed: They became Israeli citizens and enjoy more
freedom, democracy, political representation, high standard of living better
education, and economic opportunities, than many Arabs anywhere in the Arab
world today.
Finally, after the February 1949 cease-fire that signaled
the end of the war, there was still a continued flight by tens of thousands of
Arabs. The Jews did absolutely nothing to encourage or force this flight.
Eight. During
the Rhodes armistice talks in February 1949, Israel offered to return to the
Arabs the lands it now occupied as a result of the war and that were originally
meant to be part of the Palestinian state if
the Arabs would sign a peace treaty.
This would have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to return to their
homes. But the Arabs rejected the offer because, as they themselves admitted,
they were about to mount a new offensive. They had lost round one but they were
hoping for more and more rounds until the Arabs achieved victory. Their new
offensive took the form of 9000 terrorist attacks by the fedayeen mostly
from Egypt that were perpetrated against Israel from 1949 to 1956.
At the Lausanne conference which took place from August to
September 1949, Israel offered to repatriate 100,000 refugees even without a
peace treaty. But the Arab states rejected the offer because to accept it would
involve a tacit recognition of the state of Israel.
In other words, despite Israel’s offers of repatriation, the
Arabs insisted on keeping the Arab refugees in squalor and suffering. Arab
spokespersons in Syria and Egypt were quoted in their newspapers as saying: We
will keep the refugees in their camps until the flag of Palestine flies over
all of the land. They will go back home only as victors, on the graves and
corpses of the Jews.
Moreover, as some Arabs were candid enough to announce in
public, the refugee problem would serve as “a festering sore on the backside of
Europe,” as moral leverage to be used against Israel in order to win the
emotional support of the West against Israel.
Conclusion
The Arab refugee problem was created by the belligerent Arab
dictators who defied the UN, invaded Israel, encouraged the Arabs to flee, and
then purposely kept the Arab refugees in a state of wretched poverty for
propaganda purposes. Israel’s role in creating the refugee problem was a relatively
minor one restricted to legitimate military contexts. It tried to reverse these
after the war, but was rebuffed by the Arab states.
The refugee problem was then intentionally perpetuated by
the Arab states through their refusal to abide by the UN resolutions and the
Geneva convention, their refusal to integrate any refugees into under-populated
Arab countries, their refusal to enter into peace negotiations with Israel, and
their refusal to countenance any steps toward resolution by Israel or others.
By perpetuating the refugee problem, the Arab leaders sought
to gain pseudo-moral leverage against Europe and Israel, to keep a “festering
human sore” in the forefront of their propaganda war against Israel, and to use
the issue as a political weapon against Israel.
As late as 1979, when Egypt signed a peace treaty with
Israel, the Egyptians refused to deal with the refugee issue in the Gaza strip
and instead ceded all of the Gaza strip to Israel. A similar pattern was
established in Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Jordan had integrated
thousands of Palestinians into its economy and did not see any need or
responsibility to deal with the disposition of those on the
West Bank.
The abuses, exaggerations, lies, and distortions perpetrated
by Arab governments, by the UN Refugee Agency, and the refugee spokespersons
made it impossible, even back in 1949, to identify a bona fide refugee
populace.
In 1967, the Arab states again launched an aggressive war
against Israel and as a result Israel became the governing authority in the
Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and in the West Bank.
Under Israeli rule
from 1967 to 1992, The Palestinian population of the West Bank experienced the
highest standard of living of any Arab country with the exception of the oil
states. The same is true of Arab Israelis. The Arab population of the West Bank
and Gaza has tripled since June 1967!
By contrast, since the transfer of authority in the West
Bank to the PLO in 1993, the condition of the Palestinian population under the Palestinian
Authority has declined precipitously. The standard of living of the West Bank
Palestinians has eroded, and GDP is one-tenth of what it was under Israeli
control. This is due to the mis-appropriation of more than $5.2 billion by the
rule of the Palestinian Authority into the personal accounts of Arafat and his
lieutenants for weapons stock-piling, neglect of the infrastructure, and due to
the continuous terror war, against which Israel must exercise defensive controls
and deterrents.
Justice for Jewish and Arab refugees could have been part of
a peace settlement if the Arab states had been willing. Today, solutions are
possible, but only if the Palestinian Authority will stop its new war of
terror.
