A number of years ago, we had a bit of a motley crew over for Shabbat lunch. I remember that my brother was in town, visiting from New York. Another friend, a significant player in the Federation world was also there, as was a high school friend of one of our kids. And we were joined by one more friend, an Israeli Arab woman whom we’d initially met through my work.
It was an interesting, though hardly relaxed, Shabbat afternoon. (The conversation took place in English ironically, since even though the Arab woman spoke a mellifluous Hebrew, our American Jewish leader friend didn’t. But the abandonment of Hebrew on the part of American Judaism is a subject for a different conversation.)
Though it’s been years since that lunch, I thought of it again this week, particularly one moment at the end of the afternoon. Lunch was breaking up. The Arab woman left, as did our American Jewish friend. My brother was still around, as was our son’s friend, who, by the way, had been born in Israel and lived here his entire life. We were all catching our breath from what had been a pretty intense conversation.
Then the friend said, “That was really interesting.” I, frankly, hadn’t noticed that he was paying much attention to the discussion, and was surprised. “What did you think was particularly interesting?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never met an Arab before.”
That line stunned me more than the rest of the conversation. He’d been in Israel for fifteen or sixteen years, and had never met an Arab? Part of me couldn’t believe that. But I knew that it was not only possible, but it’s common. (Israel’s no different than America in this regard, by the way. In Los Angeles, for example, how many Hispanics or Asians did I really meet socially? Very, very few – and in my community, I was the norm, not the exception.)
Why did I recall that conversation this week? Because I got a response from Dr. K. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post that I subsequently distributed here, about a correspondence I had with a certain Dr. K about the Jerusalem home in which he’d grown up prior to the War of Independence. (You can read the responses to that column here, too.) Just as I was preparing to write Dr. K and to tell him about my column, I heard from him. He’d come across the article on the web, it turns out, and wrote me. I asked him for permission to post his response here, and he agreed.
I was struck, in reading the many responses to my column that were posted on my site that many of the people writing had probably not ever met anyone like Dr. K before. Like my son’s friend at that Shabbat lunch long ago, they are passionate about much of what goes on here, but haven’t actually conversed at all with significant swaths of the “players” in his complex situation.
So (yes, with his express, written permission), I’m posting Dr. K’s response to my article, and his invitation to others to engage in conversation. The issue, I believe, isn’t the disposition of his particular house (about which I’ve done no research, as my column was about the uses of memory and how we overcome loss and work for a better future). The issues that ought to concern us are broader than that. But feel free to engage him on whatever subject you’d like. Any comment that’s respectful in tone will be permitted. In this week prior to Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Reunification Day), what subject could be more pertinent?
As Dr. K asks below, is it possible that we might begin to know each other and to hear each other in ways that we haven’t so far?
I am the Dr. K that Dr. Gordis refers to in his post above. The responses to his column raise so many issues that I find myself unable to respond to all of them. I will be short.
My father had this house built in 1932, and I was born in Jerusalem in 1937. My family left Jerusalem because of the state of war that occurred in 1948. Regardless of why we left (it was not voluntary), why should we lose title to our home because of that war? The Israeli government did not allow us to return to it (nor to pay taxes on it!) after May 1948. To this day we have never been offered compensation nor any acknowledgement by any party for our loss.
My original purpose in communicating with Dr. Gordis was to try and connect with another human being who can help provide me a sense of connection with my home and land of birth. I am a realist and not stuck in living in the past. Yes, I was shocked at the changes that have occurred but who wouldn’t be?
I am interested in a dialogue and not in having people talking at me and telling me how I should be feeling or behaving. I hope we can talk about ourselves and not lecture others. Is this possible in this forum?
Interested in responding to Dr. K? Post your comments here.
Email
Print
Tags: America, arab, dispatch, family, Israel, Israeli
Dr. Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center, where he is also a senior fellow. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and currents in Israel...
The Jewish State must end, say its enemies, from intellectuals like Tony Judt to hate-filled demagogues like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even average Israelis are wondering if they wouldn't be better off somewhere else. 
Throughout history, people have been displaced by war – uprooted from homes and livelihood, never to return to their former lives.
I have never understood why Israel’s victory in 1948 should be held to a different moral standard than any other nation – to the victor go the spoils.
Nevertheless, I am genuinely sympathetic to your plight, and I offer the following suggestion. When the Arab nations make peace with Israel, and compensate Israelis whose families were expelled from their countries for their loss of property, Israel will in turn compensate Arabs who were forced to leave Israel in 1948 for their losses as well.
To the best of my knowledge this has not happened in the past between nations, but I believe it would be a just solution to the issue you have raised.
Unfortunately in war there are no winners. You find yourself as part of a group of people that wishes the Jewish race would be gone from their God-given Homeland. As such during the war you fled from your home ostensibly to seek safety. As the Jews won the war and Arabs wanted no peace, you lost your home. You would have wanted the best of both worlds. This was not to be. Sorry. Perhaps one day there will be groups of Arabs courageous enough to fight their governments for the right to establish peace between Jews and Arabs in the Mid-East.
Dear Dr. K.,
I cannot suggest to you that I personally know what you are feeling with respect to the loss and alteration of your home; the closest that I personally have come to your situation was having my home invaded by burglars, who stole items which were very personal to me. At the same time, I would speak with you of my ancestors and of those who are in very nearly precisely the same position that you are in many ways. With respect to the latter, and I refer to the Sefardic Jewish population, the overwhelming majority of whom were expelled from their homes in all of the Arabic countries, homes in which their families had lived in some cases for well over a thousand years, many utterly without warning. They,too,lost their homes, much as you did, and were not permitted to take much more than the clothes on their back. Their homes and their vast holdings in those lands also have gone utterly unrecompensed.
I would speak with you of the former as well, of my direct forbears, who were stripped of their homes and properties in Europe, homes that they and their forbears had lived in also for hundreds and in some cases, a thousand years. These ancestors, however, suffered another loss; they were stripped of their lives and of their parents lives and of their grandparents lives and of their children’s lives, in many cases, quite brutally right in front of their eyes.
And I would speak with you of yet a third population, a population which represents both of the above two groups, of the Jews who were expelled from their homeland and forcibly stripped of their homes and their holdings in Israel by the Romans, also without recompense, homes which their and my forbears had lived in for thousands of years. I would speak with you of the last thousand years, years in which my people mourned the loss of our homeland every day in our prayers and in our hearts, and continue to do so today.
I do not say these things to you, to use your phrase, to talk at you. I say these things to inform you that we are fully aware of your losses and that we mourn them, much as we mourn our own. I ask you to realize that our losses and yours are very nearly equivalent and that it is time for us to go beyond the losses.
Finally, I would speak with you of my view of the conflict in Israel. I believe that it is time for both our peoples to hold a mutual sulchah and to begin to live our normal lives, lives which have been interrupted since the birth of Israel by wars entailing the loss of both of our loved ones. I ask you to share that hope with me.
Sincerely,
Arn Pressner
Hello Dr. K
I am also interested in a dialogue and not in having people talking at me and telling me how I should be feeling or behaving.
I hope we can talk about ourselves and not lecture others.
I strongly suggest you read the following report: http://www.justiceforjews.com/jjac.pdf
and then we can continue our discussion and have dialogue.
Sincerely Mr. B.
Dr. K:
As a Jew and a Zionist is reflexive to empathize with the Jewish plight while often choosing to overlook the strains of others as in war we often choose sides. Your perspective and experiences are crucial to the middle east dialogue and I pray in time you and your family are treated justly. However, I do believe that in order for the Israeli government to truly have heartfelt attention paid to those in similar situations it must first feel secure that its existence is not threatened by those that wish to capitalize on international pressure. Prisoners are released, land is turned over and its holy capital city is on the table for discussion. The overtures made my Israel are humiliating as they are met with increased hate, violence and bloodshed. I wish I could say that the “death to the Zionist enemy” lesson plans in Palestinian text books are not related to your family’s eviction but sadly they are. As long as neighbors can’t co-exist, there is little emotional motivation to continuously extend a hand either across the street or across a wall.
Peace be with you.
Dear Dr. K,
I am sorry for your loss. I am sorry for some of the responses that seem to carry such anger and maybe fear that you are one of many rather than a person with memory and feelings. My parents lost everything but their lives in the Holocaust. I feel very lucky that they survived, met here in the US and gave me a love-filled life. I don’t ask anything of Germany today. But I would be stunned if Germans responded to my interest in where my parents lived with a “get over it” or a “if you knew what Germans have gone through?!”
What happened in Israel is not at all what happened in Nazi Germany. But for people to start being that, PEOPLE, we need to treat each of us as a subject, a person, and not as a group or an opportunity to vent our anger or despair.
I wish you well, Dr. K, and hope you find a good home on this earth with good neighbors and peace. I wish Israel peace and a way to offer consolation to those who’ve suffered losses no matter whom they are.
Peter N.
There is not a lot more to say than has been said already, Dr. K. Things happen in life and we have to learn to get past them. One part of my family lost an enormous amount of land when they had everything stolen from them and then were murdered in Latvia. Although we tried, we could not get that land back and have had to move on. Maybe there is a little corner of sadness that stays and remembers what was lost, but no one dwells on it. As they say in Arabic, fa’at ma’at. What is dead is gone.
There are no “what ifs” in history. The fact is that your family left, lost the property and successfully established their lives elsewhere. Life is full of injustices. That’s just the way things are. Material goods are not worth getting an ulcer about or becoming unhappy over. As it says in Perkai Avot: Who is happy? He who is content with his lot.
You sound as if you have a wonderful family. Enjoy them!
Dear Dr. K.
My sympathy goes out to you. You are pained. Of that there is no doubt. Let me say that I believe it is very important that you share the reasons, voluntary or not, why your family left. Violently uprooted by Israel or pressured by Arab bravado or otherwise, the reasons are very different and important to know. As mentioned in many comments, people are displaced by wars. My family’s home in Hungary no longer exists and the survivors of the Nazis who tried to return to claim the land were treated and responded to as if they never existed. Some made wonderful lives in the U.S. and others in Israel. The life in Hungary is over. It’s time for you too to be at peace where you are.
Also finished are the lives and claims to their possessions of the Jews expelled (involuntarily for the most part) from the Arab lands. They were absorbed, imperfectly, into Israel and today make lives for themselves. Have your Arab brothers return these Jews’ land and pay for that which was stolen.
Dr. K., you are older than I and know better that sometimes life is hard. You could very well visit Israel, close the book on the memories from your house by visiting it (as I am sure that would most gladly be arranged), even fight in the courts today (they are very left-winged) in Israel and possibly see some recompense.
I hope you live the remainder of your life in peace and that you come to see the responsibility of your own people in your personal destiny and stop blaming the Jews (Israel) for the loss of this one house of yours. Yes, there are others like you. Come visit and close your books. Israel would likely welcome you. ZW
Dear Dr. K,
One of the more poignant aspects of living in the Middle East, is that there is such a constant background hum of conflict and turmoil that it causes one to daily, (often hourly) count, assess, and not take for granted whatever is yours, be it a home, your children or the privilege of having fresh water come out of the tap.
Five years ago we built a beautiful home here in Jerusalem. We built it in Israel proper, not over the green line, on a virtually empty lot. Every tile in this house was lovingly chosen. The designs for the front doors were drawn and redrawn. The exact hue of the exterior stones was a carefully made decision. Afterwards we planted a grape arbor and cherry trees, orange trees and plums, olives and almonds. I love this garden to distraction.
The news here is discouraging. On a bad day, I have thought more than once that if Hamas has their way, or Ahmadinejad gets trigger-happy, or Hizbollah becomes more powerful, I would lose all this. I too would flee, lose this dream, tell my grandchildren stories of dispossession, of what was once mine. I harbor no fantasies. Neither Hamas, nor Hizbollah, nor Iran would compensate me, allow me to remain, or sell this place at market value.
The idea of losing this home I love makes me very sad. When I follow this line of thinking, I often wonder what it must have been like for the refugees of Eastern Europe to flee their homes, to become displaced, to survive the war, come back and see someone else living in their houses, sleeping in their very beds. I think about the Muslims and Hindus who ran for their lives when India and Pakistan were declared, often leaving homes and estates that belonged to families for generations. And then of course, you cannot remember only those who lost magnificent homes, but simple people who just lost what was theirs. Whether it was the vast fields on which they grazed their cattle, the bend in the river they swam in as children, or the smell of orange blossoms in the night air. If it was theirs and then, for myriad reasons, even if it was their own fault, they lost it all, it still hurts.
Of course you were shocked. I can tell you that I am sure this house would be divided up into apartments, stove pipes would be shoved through walls, bathrooms would be added onto balconies and it would break my heart to see it. Anyone who has ever created something and then had someone come along and stick their finger in it knows what this feels like. No one should deny you this hurt or tell you you should not feel what you are feeling.
What interests me more, and what I would like to discuss with you is the ability to let go and move on. What I wonder about is when the Jews were kicked out of Iran and Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Alexandria and Warsaw, Yemin and Berlin, when they lost so very much, how they just threw a few photos in a suitcase and moved on, made a new life somewhere else and refused to waste away in refugee camps. Compare this to the Palestinian refugees. Why are there today so many of them still angrily living in poverty and despair? Why haven’t they picked themselves up and moved on?
Why are you living in America, educated, a doctor? What is it about your family, your parents, that made them go to America and forge a new, successful life? Is this more about the second chances we get and how generous those are? Is it about money and privilege? Is this about the host countries that these refugees end up in and what opportunities they are afforded? Is it possible that what is finally happening today, sixty some years after World War II, namely financial compensation (for buildings and artworks) owned by Jews, will one day happen to the Palestinians? That perhaps with legal documentation one day your son-in-law will be awarded market value compensation for your family’s home?
I don’t think we can really debate loss. Loss is personal and peculiar and not a thing based in reality. I think many people made many valid points about the legal aspects, the historic implications of what happened.
It seems that the only point of discussion is where do we go from here, how can the Palestinian people move on to create new homes and lives elsewhere like the rest of the world’s refugees. Why do the neighboring Arab countries that house these refugee camps keep another generation of Palestinians oppressed and without hope or rights? Perhaps if we solve this piece of the puzzle, it alleviates the pressure and dead-end of insisting on the Palestinian “Right of Return” which Israel will never agree to. Dr. K, I am interested in your response to these questions.
Dearest Dr. K.
I cannot say it better than others, but I would suggest you visit your home and get to know the people who are living there now. I “lost” my childhood home because of “life” also, and the feeling is so mixed and strong, and often I go back to just go and see it. It strengthens who I am. I am convinced we need to start the dialogue,–as in Buber’s “I and Thou” –to learn to understand each other. What I feel is that you really want advice to “go and fight for it.” But that can’t happen without a dialogue. This isn’t a matter of law, but of humanity. And it can not be one-sided. Let’s forge a peace one-by-one and see if there is more there than just a handshake- perhaps a friendship…..SL
Dr. K,
I am very sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine the pain you must feel having lost something you care about so must. I wish you luck in your quest to go forward living with this or in your search for any other remedy that may help you as you go forward.
Best Wishes
There seems to be a theme running through just about every posting. And I frankly don’t get a sense of malevolence or overt hostility from those writings (sorry Dr. K, I think you’ve read something nefarious into the postings). People (including myself) were merely sharing their family stories of escape, finding new lives, reconciliation. I don’t get the sense that this is the way you see your family’s journey. I don’t know the specifics of your family’s story, but venture to guess that if indeed your family was “coercively forced out” by the Israelis during the War of Independence, and were barred from returning once the conflict was over, you would have a very good case for a restitution claim. I can’t imagine that an Israeli Court would deny a claim based on that factual history. But if, instead, your family “chose” to leave (without Israeli coercion), expecting a quick Arab victory which would then allow them to return in victory, that is an altogether different matter. In America we call the concept “abandonment.”
We also have another concept in the law called “adverse possession,” which deals with the transfer of title to people who take continued possession of abandoned property. To quote from Wikipedia (no, I am not prepared to write a legal brief here), adverse possession is described as: “In common law, adverse possession is the process by which title to another’s real property is acquired without compensation, by holding the property in a manner that conflicts with the true owner’s rights for a specified period of time.”
Wikipedia continues:
“Adverse possession requires, as a minimum, the following five conditions to be met in order to perfect the title of the disseisor (some jurisdictions further require the possession to be made under a claim of title or a claim of right and/or other requirements listed below):
Actual possession of the property
Open and notorious use of the property
Exclusive use of the property
Hostile or adverse use of the property
Continuous use of the property”
I leave it to the experts to determine what your rights are in this matter. But if indeed you can meet the requisite burden of proof to show that you did not voluntarily abandon the property, I would think that ultimately there would be some sort of monetary settlement. But if you expect a return of the actual property, I can’t imagine that this would ever happen. Maybe it’s time to give up the ghost. It appears that you have lead a productive and satisfying life in the U.S. (as have I and my family). Let us be thankful for our good fortune, and move forward.
Much of what I want to say has already been said as this represents self-evident truths.
However I want to introduce a new dimension.
Many computer programs have a “what if” function. This is a favorite daydream of mine. What if,on that fateful day in 1947 when the U.N gave Israel a state, all the surrounding arab countries had taken a different approach -viz-We have a new neighbour,industrious,innovative,often brilliant and part of our Abrahamic background. Let us work together by combining our resources and see what we can produce co-operatively. Perhaps we would now have a MEEC (a middle Eastern Economic Community)which would undoubtedly attain superpower status.I this still a fantasy , or is it just possible that sane people will reject the fundamentalists?
BTW, based on your logic, when will the Egyptians be compensating the Jews for their homes in the Sinai? The Arabs who reside in Gaza for the homes, businesses and public buildings left (and destroyed) in Gaza. Is that compensation on the table for Judea? They certainly left “non-voluntarily”.
I would like to quote Ben Dror Yemini on the plight of the refugee.
Who is a Refugee?
“The “right of return” is just one example of the ways in which Palestinian refugees are treated differently from other war refugees. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than by the existence of two U.N. bodies for dealing with refugees – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) deals exclusively with Palestinians; the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is charged with responsibility for all other refugees around the globe. The mission of the UNHCR is to assist refugees to begin a new life As a consequence of its activities tens of millions of former refugees are no longer classified as “refugees” when they gain citizenship in their new host countries.
By contrast, not a single Palestinian has ever lost his refugee status. There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees or their descendants who are citizens of Jordan. Yet as far as UNRWA is concerned they are still refugees.
Indeed the number of Palestinian refugees continues to expand rapidly. That is so because a unique definition of refugee is applied to Palestinians. Everywhere else in the world only those who fled their previous place of residence are classified as refugees, but not their descendants. With respect to Palestinians, however, refugee status is transmitted from generation to generation. Even if one’s children never set foot within Israel’s 1949 armistice lines and are as wealthy as Bill Gates, they are still classified as refugees.
Moreover, UNRWA applies a far more expansive definition of refugee to Palestinians than that applied by UNHCR to refugees anywhere else in the world. According to UNRWA’s definition, an Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, or Syrian citizen whose primary place of residence between June 1946 and May 1948 was within Israel’s 1949 armistice lines is classified as a refugee, even if he was only temporarily in the country in search of work.
The effect of the special treatment of Palestinian refugees by the U.N. is not to solve the plight of Palestinian refugees but to perpetuate it. As the number of those classified as refugees grows year by year, the only consequence is to make any solution of the underlying Palestinian-Israeli conflict that much more difficult.
The Palestinians were not the only ones to be uprooted by the fighting between Israel and invading Arab armies in 1948-49. As a result of anti-Jewish rioting in Arab countries in the wake of the war, between 600,000 and 800,000 Jews fled the Arab lands where they had lived for centuries and even millennia. Most of those refugees came to Israel, where they were absorbed without assistance from the international community. Such population exchanges are common following major religious or ethnic strife all around the world.
Any place else in the world, the exchange of populations between Arabs fleeing Israel – i.e., the area within the 1949 armistice lines – and Jews fleeing Arab lands would have been the end of story. Such exchanges have been common throughout history down to the present, as the following survey will show. Indeed they were once considered the optimal solution to such strife. Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian geographer who was awarded the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, was the man who proposed and implemented the population transfer between Greece and Turkey.”
Dr, K
I would have been upset if I was forced out of my home, with no compensation. However, as the above poster alluded to “Most of those refugees came to Israel, where they were absorbed without assistance from the international community. Such population exchanges are common following major religious or ethnic strife all around the world” Where were your Arabs bothers?
Well after billions of dollars in aid to the palestinians, and trillions of petro dollars from the your Arab brothers. Your leaders have decided to confine the palestinians to permanent refugee camps.
I would be mad at my people first.
Dear Dr. K…You and Dr Gordis have begun a dialogue that seeks to resolve a situation that can only be done when two parties (nations) can peacefully learn to coexist with one another. You have made a life here in America, just as I have, and memories of any past life elsewhere are faded memories. “You Can’t Go Home Again” is a popular title to a book, and a way of life. But compensation for your loss would be a proper thing to do, once a peace treaty is signed, and recognition of Israel AND a Palestinian State is made by the world in general, and the Arab nations in particular. And if Arab leaders had the benefit of your willingness to enter a reasonible dialogue with Israelis, the world would be a better place for all.
There have been so many eloquent responses to Dr. K. Unfortunately for all, no response can heal the pain of a loss as experienced by both Jewish and Palestinian refugees. We have been fortunate that the world-wide Jewish community has worked to assist Jewish reugees create a life in the light of their new reality. Would that the Arab communities had done so also.
Dr. K
I’m starting off with two persumptions-you’re an intelligent man-you’re a doctor and you’re a tolerant man-you have a Jewish son-in-law.
How you feel is how you feel. Feelings have no reason for logic. Nobody has the right to tell you how to feel. Having said that I would suggest your feelings are logical-one at a times feels a desire for a touchstone of our past.
Many others have pointed out already how similar your situation is to what Jews themselves experienced in other parts of the world.
However being a son, I do know father tends to embroider and I do know what we see is what we see. (philosophical aren’t I?) Anyway in your letter you put something very important- “regardless of why we left it wasn’t voluntary” Sorry why did you leave? Was your family told the Jews would be wiped out and you should return then? As a man with a Jewish son-in-law (now) was your family than seen sympathetic to the Jews and other Arabs wished for you to depart?
I live in Toronto for 32 years and things because of governmental changes to me seem to have changed for the worse. Change is constant and nostalagia gives the prism of rose colour glasses.
I’m sorry for your loss but it was your loss. Are there still not Arabs still dwelling in Jerusalem in houses they occupied before 1948?
Cherish your happy memories. Banish the sad ones.
Shalom alechiem.
Dr. K,
I first of would like to give you a little background on myself. I am a Jewish- American and an ardent Zionist. I have spent almost a year living and studying in Israel yet would never claim to fully understand what it is like to live in Israel. I’ll say that I maybe have a “child’s” understanding of what it is like to be an Israeli. However my one advantage to being so far removed from the conflict is that I have been able to see the Israeli-Arab conflict through a different lense. My opinions have not been jaded by years of living with the threat of terrorism, and I am therefore free of some of the natural “distrust” and anger that shapes the way Israelis see the situation. I have also had the privilege of speaking with many people of Palestinian descent which has given me a greater understanding of both sides of the argument. The War of Independence left a refugee problem in its wake that to this day has never been solved. I have no answers for you as to why you should not be able to return to your home. I however would humbly like to pose a question to you. What would have happened to Jewish families who wished to flee as you did, from areas of violence? They would never have been allowed to go to Arab areas in order to avoid the impending conflict. In a war such as the conflict in 1948, it seems to me that by fleeing, your family did in fact “choose a side”. I know this argument would not hold up in a court of law, however it does have moral implications. Your family was allowed to safeguard their own lives in a place where Jewish civilians would have been slaughtered for doing the same. From this perspective I understand why the Israeli government did not allow the “refugees” back into Israel. How could they trust those who fled to nearby countries whose armies were trying to exterminate the Jewish neighbors that they left behind? I do not mean to place blame on anyone but rather point out some of the reasons that contributed to this issue. Thank you and I look forward to reading your response.
Sincerely,
Uri
There was a war, a war started by the Arabs with the announced intention of destroying Israel and killing the Jews. A war has permanent results—changes of borders, changes of sovereign control of land—that may transcend the rights of individuals to live where they would like to live. Dr. K, sadly for him, was on the losing side of that war. His family left Jerusalem. He says the departure was “not voluntary,” slyly implying that the Israelis kicked his family out. No one has ever charged that the Israelis kicked Arabs out of Jerusalem. The charge of forced expulsion has been made with regard to other areas of Israel, not to the city of Jerusalem itself. According to the Israelis’ own records, they selectively used force or the threat of force to expel Arabs from certain key spots within Israel that were indispensable to Israel’s capacity to defend itself. The rest of the Arabs who left, left of their own accord, or because they were urged by Arab leaders to do so.
In practical terms, Dr. K is on the side of the Arabs, on the side of all of Israel’s mortal enemies, who want to use the right of return to destroy Israel. He may say, “I just want my family’s property back, I just want to return to the place of my birth,” and maybe he’s even personally sincere about that. But in reality his claim is inseparable from, and helps advance, the entire concept of the right of return through which Israel’s enemies seek, by a claim of individual rights, to undo the defeat of the Arabs in 1948—to undo their failure to destroy Israel—to undo Israel’s successful defense of its existence. It’s simply impossible to consider his claim outside the context of the ongoing Arab war to destroy Israel. Admit Dr. K’s claim, and you’ve admitted the right of return. Admit the right of return, and you’ve consigned Israel to horrible destruction.
Tens of millions of people in Europe and on the Indian subcontinent were forced to leave their homes during and after World War II. None of them is demanding their return to their former homes as a “right” or having that demand recognized by a large part of the world—except the Arabs who left Israel and their descendants. The reason is very simple. The Arabs and much of the world seek to destroy Israel, and the claimed right of return is the strongest way of expressing and advancing that intent.
Israel and the Arab states are in a state of war. In such a situation it is hardly likely that Israel will allow millions of Arabs to settle in Israel. Besides, as Israel is a democracy, the increased number of Arabs in Israel will soon make sure that Israel ceases to exist.
Wars are terrible. The Arabs, hoping to achieve a quick victory in 1948, should never have started a war in the first place. Having started it though, and then lost it, it is hardly good manners to beseech for sympathy.
Though one has sympathy for Dr K, he is disingenuous in asking for sympathy, when he knows full well that acquiescing to his request, will in the fullness of time, lead to the extinction of Israel.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013173.html
“There was a war, a war started by the Arabs with the announced intention of destroying Israel and killing the Jews. A war has permanent results–changes of borders, changes of sovereign control of land–that may transcend the rights of individuals to live where they would like to live. Dr. K, sadly for him, was on the losing side of that war. His family left Jerusalem. He says the departure was “not voluntary,” slyly implying that the Israelis kicked his family out. To my knowledge, not even the Arabs have charged that the Israelis kicked Arabs out of Jerusalem. The charge of forced expulsion has been made with regard to other areas of Israel, not to the city of Jerusalem itself. According to the Israelis’ own records, they selectively used force or the threat of force to expel Arabs from certain key spots within Israel that were indispensable to Israel’s capacity to defend itself. The rest of the Arabs who left, left of their own accord, or because they were urged by Arab leaders to do so.
In practical terms, Dr. K is on the side of the Arabs, on the side of all of Israel’s mortal enemies, who want to use the right of return to destroy Israel. He may say, “I just want my family’s property back, I just want to return to the place of my birth,” and maybe he’s even personally sincere about that. But in reality his claim is inseparable from, and helps advance, the entire concept of the right of return, through which Israel’s enemies seek, by a claim of individual rights and of compassion for individuals, to undo the defeat of the Arabs in 1948, to undo their failure to destroy Israel, to undo Israel’s successful defense of its existence. It’s simply impossible to consider his claim outside the context of the ongoing Arab war to eliminate Israel. Admit Dr. K’s claim, and you’ve admitted the right of return. Admit the right of return, and you’ve consigned Israel to horrible destruction.
Tens of millions of people in Europe and on the Indian subcontinent were forced to leave their homes during and after World War II. None of them is demanding their return to their former homes as a “right,” and none is getting such a demand recognized by a large part of the world–except the Arabs who left Israel, and their descendants. The reason the right of return is insisted on in this one case alone is very simple. The Arabs and much of the world seek to make the Jewish state disappear from the earth, and the claimed right of return is the strongest way of expressing and advancing that intent.”
My thoughts, feelings, and logic get all twisted up in trying to talk to you Dr. K. I want to explain as others have about the macro equivalency of your people’s loss of homes/land with the loss of the Jews forced to leave Arab countries and Europe. But both my feelings of anger and sense of fairness get in the way of this line of reasoning. My feelings are that, given the way that the Jews were kicked out and stripped of their possessions in such violent ways and the fact that the value of the Jewish possessions lost/stolen far exceeds that of your people, I want to tell you in no uncertain terms that you are not entitled to compensation or return or anything. Yet, my sense of fairness whispers in my ear about how can the individual losers in this situation be expected to be content because the macro equation is balanced? There has been precedent set for compensation in other historical takings. The U.S. gave $ to the Japanese Americans put in Internment Camps in WWII. The Germans are still paying restitution payments from the Holocaust.
So I think that we could have a round and round conversation about this subject and you and I could come to an understanding and maybe an agreement on what should happen now. But you are still part of a people that wants to see Israel perish. As one writer wrote above, until Israel feels safe and secure there can be no movement on other issues.
So I see that you have choices on how to respond.
1. Get over the loss and move on – A healthy choice mentally, but quite unsatisfying at least in the short term.
2. Join your people in their violent struggle against Israel – Sadly, this is the most common choice of the Arab world.
3. Find the courage to work to change your community and your people’s hearts to accept Israel – This choice is the way to bring real change that can then lead to discussions about the issues you hold.
I would love to see you in the process of Option 3, but if you were my friend, I would have to recommend Option 1. Never forget the home of your birth, but lead your family in the life you have built elsewhere.
Mark
I am genuinely sympathetic to Dr. K. It can’t be a pleasant experience to lose your home, your city and your country. I can understand why it happened, but that doesn’t make it any more nicer for him.
So my question for Dr. K is: what do you think Israel should do in his situation, in specific and actionable terms?
I think the range of responses illustrated pretty well the ambivalence about this issue within the Jewish community.
Some people may view your plight as an untenable injustice, others as a passing one, and some as your share of a collective just desserts. I would not presume to second-guess your sorrow and outrage over the loss your family carries.
I do think, however, that it is important the Arab communities, and indeed the world, try to better understand the motivations behind the formation of the State of Israel in general, and the various decisions that affected the Palestinian Arabs in particular. You may never be convinced by them, but any dialogue – and prospect for peace – must be informed by understanding.
First and foremost, there was never a question of trading off nationalist interests. Zionists saw Zionism as a question of physical survival for Jews and the survival of the Jewish people. You can dispute whether this was accurate all you want; but the conviction was sincere. When faced with such choices, certain other considerations go out the window.
I commend you for asking the question, and I hope the various answers help a little bit.
Dr. K’s story is a sad one, but as the previous comments show, not unique. My father left behind 20,000 acres of farmland in Hungary that had been in his family for more than 4 generations. My father was in agricultural school preparing to someday take over the farm that he loved when the Nazis arrested his family and all their land was confiscated. At the time, 3 different generations lived on that land in 2 homes and farmed it. They were the largest employers in their district. When he went back after being liberated from Dachau, the homes had been taken over by local families. His family decimated, he left for the United States. He had no choice. The police did not offer to remove the “squatters”. The local priest had absconded with his grandmothers beautiful furniture and china. He returned fifty years later to find that the farm had been split up, his grandfather’s home was the town’s library and his parent’s home was the doctor’s clinic. The townspeople, upon hearing that my father had come back, did not have words of welcome for him. All they wanted to know was “are you going to try to take our land away from us?”.
As a people who love Torah and take pride in conducting ourselves in an ethical manner,we should set up compensation for individuals such as Dr. K. to compensate him for the value of theloss of the home he left in 1932. However, he must remember that he was not arrested and forced off the land as my father was. His family left voluntarily, to avoid the unpleasantness of a possible war. Many stayed behind. Anyhow, the discussion is moot. You cannot discuss issues of compensation with people who refuse to acknowledge your existence and insist on “a right to return”.
Dr. K – You and your family have been unjustly treated. Traditional Jewish law would have entitled you to compensation. That it has not been given is a result of politics and history. Regrettably, the anti-Zionist violence that has come from Arab quarters has hardened the hearts of many Jews and has in large part caused your dilemma. Many of the comments above seem to suggest that Jewish suffering is an excuse for what happened to you, but none argue that you have been treated fairly.
I was surprised by Rabbi Gordis’ claim that Israelis ”uses its abundance of memory primarily to propel us forward.” Wasn’t the entire Zionist claim based on history?
Israel would benefit by being metaphorically propelled backwards in time to its Declaration of Independence which promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants.” And even more recently, the (ignored) Or Commission recommended the implementation of these ideals. See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=335594&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
In my view, modern Israel needs to conjure up the spirit of its prophets and treat its inhabitants with equity and respect. Obviously, the murderous opposition to Israel’s sheer existence will not be placated by this – but it would restore Israel to the legitimacy it once had in world affairs, a consequence that can only benefit Israel’s security.
Dear Dr. K.,
As an American Jew, I have personally experienced bigotry. The summer I moved to North Carolina, I was approached by a gang of much larger boys, and their leader asked me if I was a Jew. When I replied in the affirmative, they proceded to taunt me, and harrased me for the entire year I attended the same school as they did. I have seen brown-shirted neo-nazis standing on a street corner in L.A., handing out their propaganda of hatred for a people they never knew, but whom they hated just for who they were. I spoke with students at UCLA who were handing out anti-Jewish literature (they did not know I was a Jew) telling me how the Jews secretly plotted the demise of African-Americans. I have seen and experienced discrimination in a country founded on equality of all people. It isn’t pleasant.
I sympathize with you and your family. It must have been horrible to be forced out of your home, only to find you were no longer welcome there. I don’t think it is just to play the balance-of-misery game; there were many thousands of Jews in Arab countries who were also forced out of their homes, but it doesn’t make your families suffering any less. I am certain that neither you nor your family ever forced anybody out of their homes. You were not responsible for the events of 1948. I hope that we can stop seeing eacho ther as representatives of an oppressor or intruder, and begin to see each other as people. I don’t think G-d wants any of us to force anybody else out of their homes (we are NOT reliving Biblical History), or to terroize anybody’s family, or to shoot at each other because of our ancestry, or to blow ourselves up just so we can kill other people too. I think G-d wants us to see each other as people, not as playing pieces in some sort of obscene chess game.
It would be good to hear again from Dr. K in response to the above. This was to be a conversation.
Dr. K.,
I am sorry about the loss of your home. I wish there had never been a war in 1948, and that our two peoples could have lived side by side, in peace and security, for the last 61 years. Since that did not happen — though no fault of yours, as a five-year old, or mine, as I wasn’t born yet — we now have to make the most of the hand we were dealt and the world we inherited.
If you seek compensation or apolgies, it should be from those who rejected a peaceful coexisence and started the war that resulted in your tragic loss. And we can work together toward a two-state solution today — 60 years too late but still relevant — so that more innocent people lose their home, or much worse, in this ongoing conflict.
Completely agreed.
I’ve written Dr. K, of course, and gave him the link to the discussion.
I don’t believe he’ll agree with everything people have written, of course, but I do hope that he’ll be as moved as I have been by many of them.
I still look forward to his writing.
All the best,
Daniel
The responses to my comments have evoked in me a wide spectrum of feelings. I will try and stay positive, and will not be able to address all the issues raised.
One wrong does not justify another. The wrongs that Jews have suffered in Arab countries and elsewhere need recognition and compensation just like the wrongs that Palestinian Arabs have suffered.
Generalizations about whole people and cultures such as “they hate us” and “want to drive us into the sea” may apply to extreme fringes in Arab & Muslim communities, and are fueled by the persistent belief that an injustice has not been addressed. That does not make such feelings about other people and cultures acceptable. The same situation exists among many Israelis such as those who scream “death to the Arabs”, and advocate ethnic cleansing. Reasonable people should not let the views of the extremists on any side be allowed to charactertize what the majority of people think and feel.
Many Palestinians, including the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, advocate for a two-state solution and acknolwedge and accept the right of Israel’s existnece. The Arab League declaration of 1997 states the same. I don’t recollect a single post in this thread acknowledging these positions. Do the views of the late Rabbi Kahane and his followers represent the Israeli perspective? Why are you generalizing the extremist view among some to all Palestinians?
On a personal basis, I am not looking for sympathy but for justice. I agree that the personal cannot be separated from the national, and I also believe that gradual positive steps can be taken that will take time and patience.
One respondent asked what measures I would like to see Israel take to address these issues? The framework for a two-state solution and a guarantee of Israel’s security is there on paper but needs the will of leaders to make it happen. The main obstacle I see are the Israeli settlements that dot the West Bank (and not the ones adjacent to the Green Line). Acknowledging that Palestinian Arabs suffered a loss of their homes and possessions in 1948, and that Jews in Arab countries suffered similar injustices, is a first step. These wrongs can be addressed without the destruction of Israel!
I also would ask respondents in this thread , what positive steps do you see Isreal taking in order for Israelis to live securely and prosperously in the Middle East on a longterm basis? Is living in a constant state of war the only option? When will Israel face such basic questions as to what are the borders of Israel? Why is there no constitution? Can non-Jews ever enjoy full rights of citizenship? If not, then how would one describe the kind of state Israel is? Is Israel really ready for peace without addressing these basic issues?
Personally, I feel blessed that my family and I are living in security and have thrived economically. I’m not looking for money nor for sympathy, but I’m looking for justice for those among the Palestinians who have not been able to enjoy the good fortune that my family and I have had, and continue to feel that they have been wronged
I think that a small minority among you might hear what I’m saying, but for many the sense of historical injustice and a feeling of distrust and lack of security will remain a barrier to a meaningful dialogue. I mean my comments to be respectful and realistic, and am truly not making them in a patronizing or self-righteous fashion. I also see no sense in continuing the conversation on my end because I’m not sure a real dialogue is possible in a thread like this.
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to give you a glimpse of the perspective of one Palestinian Arab-American individual.
Dr. K:
Reading your response to my question “So my question for Dr. K is: what do you think Israel should do in his situation, in specific and actionable terms?”, I believe that I did not phrase my question well. So let me ask it again.
Given the realities that (1) solving the entire Arab-Israeli problem is something that you or I can’t do, and as a subject has been addressed ad nauseum (2) it is not going to be solved anytime soon, what specific, actionable things would you suggest that the State of Israel do to redress your particular individual grievance?
To respond to your questions, I want to state that I am an American and not an Israeli. One of the tenets of my Zionism is that I don’t tell Israelis what to do. So I am essentially answering your questions as an academic exercise.
Dr. K: I also would ask respondents in this thread , what positive steps do you see Isreal taking in order for Israelis to live securely and prosperously in the Middle East on a longterm basis? Is living in a constant state of war the only option?
Ken: It is the only option as long as a fundamental rejection of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is a mainstream (not extremist) opinion in the Arab and to some extent the Muslim world. A “constant state of war” is preferable to the alternative, which is extermination. In spite of 61 years of a “constant state of war”, Israel has developed into a fairly free and prosperous country.
Dr. K: When will Israel face such basic questions as to what are the borders of Israel?
Ken: Israel’s borders need to be set as part of negotiations with its neighbors. Israel has borders with Egypt and Jordan. Perhaps its other neighbors will reach peace with Israel and there will be jointly recognized borders with Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
Dr. K: Why is there no constitution?
Ken: Because Israelis cannot agree on fundamental aspects of governance. Should the Torah form the basis of an Israel constitution? Alternatively, is Israel essentially a Hebrew-speaking secular republic? Something else?
Dr. K: Can non-Jews ever enjoy full rights of citizenship?
Ken: In theory, yes. In practice, it depends. Non-Jews that are loyal citizens of the state and participate in the civic life of the state have a different experience than those that do not.
Dr. K: If not, then how would one describe the kind of state Israel is?
Ken: A bundle of contradictions: a vibrant if flawed democracy, a Jewish nation-state and also the state of all of its citizens. The only state in the Middle East which approximates an Western-style liberal democracy.
Dr. K: Is Israel really ready for peace without addressing these basic issues?
Ken: Are the Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians, Sudanese, Iranians, etc. really ready for peace as long as they remain corrupt despotisms who indoctrinate their populations in hatred? Are all of aforementioned countries except for one faction of the Palestinians ready for peace when they refuse to accept the existence of Israel (try to get into one of those countries with an Israeli visa stamp in your passport)? The idea that Israel is not ready for peace because it is imperfect is absurd.
One more point. I do want to emphasize that my assessment of the current situation does not mean that I am pleased with it. My deepest desire would be that Israel would be living in peace with its neighbors including Palestine, and that each of its neighbors would be prosperous liberal democracies.
How sad that you entirely missed the point and read only from within the context of the paradigm you’ve created for yourself. Perhaps we all do that but it is clear that you did not truly open yourself up to really hear and understand what is written here. No one justifies the experience of those few (and in the context of history, five to seven hundred thousand is “few”)Arab refugees by relating it to the 2,000 years of Jewish expulsions and massacres. That is ridiculous. Just look at the face of Ahmadjinedad as he spews that garbage and you will recognize the insanity on which it is based.
To ask you only one question would sum up where I see you as (with respect for your intelligence) very deluded: Do you and your friends who represent the majority of all of the Arabs sit in your parlors and bemoan the extremist fringes of Arabs/Muslims who seem to be the only representative of all Arabs? We don’t hear the collective voice of the vast majority of peace desiring, Israel-accepting Arabs. Not at all nor have we ever in the entire 61 years and one day of Israels existence. It is clearly time for the collective “you” to address OUR issues. Perhaps that process must begin by deep introspection followed by addressing your own issues beginning with victimhood and hate.
Dr. K a little history.
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) 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. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.
_____________
Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920’s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which called for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place.
The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”
Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”
If this was the position of the more “militant” faction of the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann, then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a peace-and-cooperation agreement with the Hashemite emir Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal’s elder brother and founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab elites of all hues.
As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict “was uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,” and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit “from active policies of cooperation and development.” Behind this proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would ease the path for the local Arab populace to become permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel’s first prime minister, argued in December 1947:
If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, . . . if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance.
_____________
On the face of it, Ben-Gurion’s hope rested on reasonable grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I had revived Palestine’s hitherto static condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states. The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves quadrupled.
No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third.
That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to Mandate Palestine’s socioeconomic well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in a 1937 report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel:
The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A comparison of the census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.
Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably have been content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world, moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed classes of society.
So it was with the Palestinians. In the words of the Peel report:
We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary . . . with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine [has] meant the deterioration of the political situation.
In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged betters for the crime of “selling Palestine” to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight “until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country,” facilitated the transfer of 7,500 acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives, all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of land. So did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem.
It was the mufti’s concern with solidifying his political position that largely underlay the 1929 carnage in which 133 Jews were massacred and hundreds more were wounded—just as it was the struggle for political preeminence that triggered the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian Arab violence in 1936-39. This was widely portrayed as a nationalist revolt against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution. In fact, it was a massive exercise in violence that saw far more Arabs than Jews or Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs, that repressed and abused the general Arab population, and that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country in a foretaste of the 1947-48 exodus.
Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back against their inciters, often in collaboration with the British authorities and the Hagana, the largest Jewish underground defense organization. Still others sought shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. For despite the paralytic atmosphere of terror and a ruthlessly enforced economic boycott, Arab-Jewish coexistence continued on many practical levels even during such periods of turmoil, and was largely restored after their subsidence.
_____________
Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that most Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent attempt ten years later by the mufti-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective “government” of the Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 UN partition resolution. With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in their minds, many opted to stay out of the fight. In no time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban areas) were negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors; other localities throughout the country acted similarly without the benefit of a formal agreement.
Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying their supreme leadership. In his numerous tours around the region, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of Jerusalem and the mufti’s close relative, found the populace indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms. In Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the salaried force he sought to form in that city; his efforts in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya were hardly more successful. Arab villagers, for their part, proved even less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa, Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven out by angry residents protesting their village’s transformation into a hub of anti-Jewish attacks. Even the few who answered his call did so, by and large, in order to obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then return home.
There was an economic aspect to this peaceableness. The outbreak of hostilities orchestrated by the AHC led to a sharp drop in trade and an accompanying spike in the cost of basic commodities. Many villages, dependent for their livelihood on the Jewish or mixed-population cities, saw no point in supporting the AHC’s explicit goal of starving the Jews into submission. Such was the general lack of appetite for war that in early February 1948, more than two months after the AHC initiated its campaign of violence, Ben-Gurion maintained that “the villages, in most part, have remained on the sidelines.”
Ben-Gurion’s analysis was echoed by the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat, commander-in-chief of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel’s proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800 of the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from Palestine itself, and that most of these had deserted either before completing their training or immediately afterward. Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, was no less scathing, having found the Palestinians “unreliable, excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized warfare virtually unemployable.”
This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the fateful six months of fighting after the passing of the partition resolution. Even as these months saw the all but complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab society, nowhere was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely viewed by Arab leaders as “Zionist in inspiration, Zionist in principle, Zionist in substance, and Zionist in most details” (in the words of the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid about their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the bloodletting.
Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the Jews set out to lay the groundwork for their nascent state while simultaneously striving to convince their Arab compatriots that they would be (as Ben-Gurion put it) “equal citizens, equal in everything without any exception,” Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that “should partition be implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the Arabs of Palestine, their sons, and their women.” Qawuqji vowed “to drive all Jews into the sea.” Abdel Qader Husseini stated that “the Palestine problem will only be solved by the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine.”
_____________
They and their fellow Arab abetters did their utmost to make these threats come true, with every means at their disposal. In addition to regular forces like the ALA, guerrilla and terror groups wreaked havoc, as much among noncombatants as among Jewish fighting units. Shooting, sniping, ambushes, bombings, which in today’s world would be condemned as war crimes, were daily events in the lives of civilians. “[I]nnocent and harmless people, going about their daily business,” wrote the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, Robert Macatee, in December 1947,
are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the streets, and stray shots even find them while asleep in their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of five children, was shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the roof. The ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned, and finally the mourners following her to the funeral were attacked and one of them stabbed to death.
As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well, and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale violence. Thus, the December 1947 murder of six Arab workers near the Haifa oil refinery by the small Jewish underground group IZL was followed by the immediate slaughter of 39 Jews by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some 100 Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948 was “avenged” within days by the killing of 77 Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus.
Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these gruesome events for what they were, at times withholding details so as to avoid panic and keep the door open for Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts not only inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented numerous nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April 21-22), for example, gave rise to totally false claims of a large-scale slaughter, which circulated throughout the Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18), during the battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa, where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of “hundreds of Arab men and women.” Accounts of Deir Yasin in the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and accusations of havoc and rape.
This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the widest possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and casting the Jews as brutal predators. But it backfired disastrously by spreading panic within the disoriented Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this phase of the Arab war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing was the second, wider, and more prolonged phase involving the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded Palestine in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to join the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to the road, leaving their homes either for places elsewhere in the country or fleeing to neighboring Arab lands.
_____________
Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the war reached their own doorstep. “Arabs are leaving the country with their families in considerable numbers, and there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab centers,” reported Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that the “panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country.”
Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted in mid-December an “evacuation frenzy that has taken hold of entire Arab villages.” Before the month was over, many Palestinian Arab cities were bemoaning the severe problems created by the huge influx of villagers and pleading with the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early exodus, demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs to stay put and fight.
But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the AHC or from anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack of national cohesion, let alone any sense of shared destiny. Cities and towns acted as if they were self-contained units, attending to their own needs and eschewing the smallest sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many “national committees” (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export of food and drink from well-stocked cities to needy outlying towns and villages. Haifa’s Arab merchants refused to alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin, while Gaza refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron, armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time there was extensive smuggling, especially in the mixed-population cities, with Arab foodstuffs going to Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.
The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by the abysmal treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered throughout the country. Not only was there no collective effort to relieve their plight, or even a wider empathy beyond one’s immediate neighborhood, but many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and subjected to ridicule and abuse for their supposed cowardice. In the words of one Jewish intelligence report: “The refugees are hated wherever they have arrived.”
Even the ultimate war victims—the survivors of Deir Yasin—did not escape their share of indignities. Finding refuge in the neighboring village of Silwan, many were soon at loggerheads with the locals, to the point where on April 14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan delegation approached the AHC’s Jerusalem office demanding that the survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their relocation was forthcoming.
Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all, for fear of overstraining existing resources. In Acre (Akko), the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian population organized its own militia—not so much to fight the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially by fleecing them for such basic necessities as transportation and accommodation.
Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in-chief Safwat noted with some astonishment that the Jews “have so far not attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.”) By the time of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even then, none of the 170,000-180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.
The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations—reducing civilian casualties, denying sites to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces to repel them—rather than political design. They were, moreover, matched by efforts to prevent flight and/or to encourage the return of those who fled. To cite only one example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top Arab-affairs advisers, local notables, and municipal heads with close contacts with neighboring Arab localities traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their inhabitants to stay put.
_____________
What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is that they took place at a time when huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa on the AHC’s instructions, despite strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier, Tiberias’ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes. In Jaffa, Palestine’s largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.
Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA. Within weeks of the latter’s arrival in Palestine in January 1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.
By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of the country. It gained considerable momentum in April and May as ALA and AHC forces throughout Palestine were being comprehensively routed. On April 18, the Hagana’s intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general order to remove the women and children from all villages bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa counterpart reported an ALA command to evacuate all Arab villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan’s Arab Legion likewise ordered the emptying of scores of villages.
As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had placed their reluctant constituents on a collision course with Zionism in the 1920’s and 1930’s and had now dragged them helpless into a mortal conflict, they hastened to get themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with quintessential British understatement:
You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the national committee has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.
Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate era and the doyen of Palestinian historians, described the prevailing atmosphere at the time: “Wherever one went throughout the country one heard the same refrain: ‘Where are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine, their own country, needs them?’”
_____________
Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during the 1948 war, would sum up the situation in these words: “The Palestinians had neighboring Arab states which opened their borders and doors to the refugees, while the Jews had no alternative but to triumph or to die.”
This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason for the refugees’ flight and radically distorts the quality of their reception elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy from their brethren at home, the reaction throughout the Arab world was, if anything, harsher still. There were repeated calls for the forcible return of the refugees, or at the very least of young men of military age, many of whom had arrived under the (false) pretense of volunteering for the ALA. As the end of the Mandate loomed nearer, the Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian males between eighteen and fifty and ordered all “healthy and fit men” who had already entered the country to register officially or be considered illegal aliens and face the full weight of the law.
The Syrian government took an even more stringent approach, banning from its territory all Palestinian males between sixteen and fifty. In Egypt, a large number of demonstrators marched to the Arab League’s Cairo headquarters and lodged a petition demanding that “every able-bodied Palestinian capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay abroad.” Such was the extent of Arab resentment toward the Palestinian refugees that the rector of Cairo’s al-Azhar institution of religious learning, probably the foremost Islamic authority, felt obliged to issue a ruling that made the sheltering of Palestinian Arab refugees a religious duty.
Contempt for the Palestinians only intensified with time. “Fright has struck the Palestinian Arabs and they fled their country,” commented Radio Baghdad on the eve of the pan-Arab invasion of the new-born state of Israel in mid-May. “These are hard words indeed, yet they are true.” Lebanon’s minister of the interior (and future president) Camille Chamoun was more delicate, intoning that “The people of Palestine, in their previous resistance to imperialists and Zionists, proved they were worthy of independence,” but “at this decisive stage of the fighting they have not remained so dignified.”
No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews. During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover that while the refugees
express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.
_____________
Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.
It is indeed the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two leaders who determined their national development during the 20th century—Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasir Arafat, the latter of whom dominated Palestinian politics since the mid-1960’s to his death in November 2004—were megalomaniacal extremists blinded by anti-Jewish hatred and profoundly obsessed with violence. Had the mufti chosen to lead his people to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he had promised the British officials who appointed him to his high rank in the early 1920’s, the Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial part of Mandate Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation, instead of turning it into one of the most murderous terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960’s or the early 1970’s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999 as part of the Oslo process; or at the very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000.
Instead, Arafat transformed the territories placed under his control in the 1990’s into an effective terror state from where he launched an all-out war (the “al-Aqsa intifada”) shortly after being offered an independent Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 92 percent of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. In the process, he subjected the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships and plunged their standard of living to unprecedented depths.
What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is that, far from being unfortunate aberrations, Hajj Amin and Arafat were quintessential representatives of the cynical and self-seeking leaders produced by the Arab political system. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the Mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents against Zionism and the Jews, while lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish entrepreneurship, so PLO officials used the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states and, during the Oslo era, by the international community to finance their luxurious style of life while ordinary Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.
And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN partition resolution, their reckless decisions are being reenacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders. This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006 replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but also to the supposedly moderate Palestinian leadership—from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia (negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to prime minister Salam Fayad—which refuses to recognize Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state and insists on the full implementation of the “right of return.”
And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the name of justice (no less) call today not for a new and fundamentally different Arab leadership but for the dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when these dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look forward to putting their self-inflicted “catastrophe” behind them.
Efraim Karsh
Dr. K
Let me get this straight you said:
“Generalizations about whole people and cultures such as “they hate us” and “want to drive us into the sea” may apply to extreme fringes in Arab & Muslim communities, and are fueled by the persistent belief that an injustice has not been addressed. That does not make such feelings about other people and cultures acceptable. The same situation exists among many Israelis such as those who scream “death to the Arabs”, and advocate ethnic cleansing. Reasonable people should not let the views of the extremists on any side be allowed to charactertize what the majority of people think and feel.”
Arafat to Abu Mazen to Ismail Haniyeh have all stated their wish for destruction of Israel. Hamas has it in it’s charter. Hamas was voted in by the Palestinians. Are you saying these “extreme fringes” ie. Fatah Hamas somehow voted in Hamas somehow.?
How about the polls in Gaza supporting suicide bombing? supporting the destruction of Israel. These extreme fringes have alot of power I guess. Your moral calculus is truly dizzing.
Well, Dr. K., you rather closed the door on further discussion, didn’t you, if you “see no sense in continuing the conversation”?
Since the posting of your letter, I have been trying to think of what I could say to get you to open up your mind a bit.
You wrote: “Many Palestinians, including the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, advocate for a two-state solution and acknolwedge and accept the right of Israel’s existnece. The Arab League declaration of 1997 states the same. I don’t recollect a single post in this thread acknowledging these positions.”
Let me tell you why you didn’t read about the so-called two state solution. Not one single Arab leader or organisation has acknowledged that my state of Israel is the Jewish state. In fact they have denigrated the idea and have said they would never accept Israel as a Jewish state. So, Dr. K., since they make this a non-starter, why would you expect us to mention it? What is there to say? On this point, unless the Arabs change, we will never see eye to eye.
” Do the views of the late Rabbi Kahane and his followers represent the Israeli perspective?”
Not at all, and anyone following Kahane’s beliefs are not going to take the time or make the effort to have a dialogue with you.
” Why are you generalizing the extremist view among some to all Palestinians?”
If what you read in all these letters to you is “generalizing the extremist view among some to all Palestinians,” either you are misreading or I am. Israel has made numerous concessions, offering land for peace and what did we get in exchange? Intifadas. Did YOU hear the moderate Palestinians speak up? Neither did I. I can count on the fingers of one hand the moderate voices I have heard or read. Don’t you think something is amiss here, when every concession Israel makes is met with violence? What does that teach us? To me the lesson is not to make any concessions because they obviously are misconstrued as weakness.
Zach K. wrote out a long and very well researched historical background of the conflict for you. I hope you read it after all his hard work, time and effort. You can’t brush all this off as irrelevant, Dr. K. You say you want justice, but I am not sure that that is really what you want.
I have some Arab friends in El Aroub. They also complained about wanting their house back. I asked them to file a claim in the courts in Jerusalem. And do you know what their response was? “No, we couldn’t possibly do that. They [their fellow Arabs] would kill us.”
I guess that just about sums it up.
http://joshuapundit.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-state-solution-fallacy.html
Charles Krauthammer’s column today over at the National Review looks at the proposed ‘two states for two peoples’ solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict favored by the Obama Administration and refers to it as a ‘red herring’, a false argument:
Well, I think this argument over a two-state solution is a complete red herring.
There is no Israeli government, including Netanyahu’s government, that would not accept a settlement in which a real Palestinian state genuinely accepted a settlement that ends the war with Israel and recognizes a Jewish state.
The problem is such a partner doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed ever. For the last nine years, you’ve had in Israel under Sharon and Olmert governments which accepted a two-state solution, have engaged in negotiations, and have essentially offered what Israel offered nine years ago under Ehud Barack, who’s now the defense minister, with Bill Clinton assisting in that offer of a Palestinian state and a settlement in perpetuity with Israel.
The Palestinians rejected it at the time. They have rejected it ever since, which is why all the negotiations over the last eight years have failed. It’s never been the Israeli problem. It’s been the fact that the Palestinians will not accept a Jewish state.
Look, the Palestinians already have a state. It’s called the Gaza. It’s independent. There are no Israelis in Gaza. It’s a terrorist state that has been at war with Israel ever since the day the Israelis left. It’s an ally of Iran and Islamic radicalism.
The Israelis and Americans understand that if you have a Palestinian state of that sort in the rest of Palestine, it will be a catastrophe.
And what Israel is saying today is unless you talk about what kind of Palestinian state, that it can’t be a Gaza state. It has to be a state that accepts Israel and accepts the peace, all talk of a two-state solution is irrelevant and is headed nowhere.
What Dr. Krauthammer is saying is entirely correct, but I think he misses a few important points.
First, the entire notion of ‘Palestinian nationalism’ is a fantasy manufactured by Yasir Arafat and the PLO in collusion with the Arab League after 1967. It didn’t exist until after the Six Day War, when the Arabs needed an excuse to avoid any political acceptance of Israel’s existence and their own military defeat. And it may not even exist in reality now.
As a matter of fact, after 1948, every Arab living in the areas of Palestine that Jordan occupied became a Jordanian citizen by law, and they remained Jordanians until 1996, even after Israel took over the area. Meanwhile,Jordan ( who also bears the distinction of killing and expelling the most ‘Palestinians’ of any country in the Middle East) was allowed to bar resettlement in Jordan by its own citizens, who remained ‘refugees’ on the UN’s tab, even though they had citizenship in a sovereign country!
Things really do get that weird when Israel is concerned.
The so-called Palestinians are actually made up of a diverse group of people with very little in common except a shared sense of victimization.They are split by clan, by national origin, by location ( Jordanian ‘Palestinians’ really have little in common with Gaza ‘Palestinians’ or Lebanese ‘Palestinians’) and by a myriad of political connections and affiliations.
There are also a number of divisions and old scores to settle between the various factions – the split between Hamas and Fatah is only one of many.
Not to mention the little fact that the Palestinian occupied areas are separated not only by being governed by rival factions but by geography, with the Israeli Negev between the two parts. No nation in history has ever survived long under those conditions.
There’s also not a whole lot of the economic viability or freedom needed to provide the basis for a state. Monopolies on certain consumer goods and services for the well connected and onerous ‘taxes’ on the less well connected that are essentially protection money and provide zero social services are the norm, particularly in Fath’s areas in Judea and Samaria(AKA the West Banak). There’s not much in the way of natural resources and much of the population has been on the UN dole for so long that actually working at a job is a unique and barely remembered experience.
The one thing the Palestinians did have to export was labor, which might have worked out as part of a working economic partnership with Israel if Yasir Arafat and his friends hadn’t made that an impossibility. Nowadays, a lot of the work that used to be done by Palestinians in Israel pre-intifada is done by guest workers from places like Romania and Moldava.
To sum up, from a cultural, political and economic standpoint, what we’re looking at is another recipe for yet another failed state. And I think we have enough of those already, thank you.
Another thing that rarely gets mentioned is the very real possibility that the Palestinian leadership really doesn’t want a state, not even if it included all of Gaza plus all of Judea and Samaria. Yasir Arafat got offered almost that by Ehud Barak during the Clinton years, but turned it down, to the astonishment of Dennis Ross. Likewise, both Hamas and Fatah refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or to compromise on their demands one iota in trying to come to a peace agreement with Israel – even though that pretty much ends the possibility of a realistic settlement before it’s even started.
It’s not too hard to figure out why.
As Ross has said, when he presented the final outlines of the deal to Yasir Arafat, it specified that this was a complete settlement of all claims and would signify the end of the conflict.
Arafat didn’t sign because he realized that without the War Against the Jews to unify the Palestinians and their victim status, there was nothing to keep them together as a cohesive group. Moreover, there would be no need for Arafat and his Fatah thugs to be in charge of anything, and they would have to justify their existence by actually governing instead of living leech-like off the Palestinians and the aid money.It would have been the end of them, and the finish of the gravy train that has made millionaires out of well placed Fatah apparatchniks while the majority of the people they supposedly represent still live in squalor in refugee camps.
A real Palestinian state would have meant the end of them.
Hamas has the same problem, as Gaza makes plain to anyone but the most biased observer. They’re good at terrorism and violence, but lousy at the nuts and bolts of running a civil society, even with water and electricity provided by the hated Jews and more aid per capita than any developing nation in history.
If Hamas was actually interested in creating a state, the last thing they would have done is to waste resources and money launching rockets and mortars against Israel. After the Jews were removed from Gaza, some state-of-the-art greenhouses and irrigation systems were purchased by the World Bank from the farmers in places like Gush Katif and deliberately left intact for the Palestinians to use.
Within hours after the Israelis left, those greenhouses were looted and destroyed. The greenhouses that used to sell massive amounts of fruits and vegetables and flowers to Europe became rocket launching sites and grow nothing today.And Gaza is simply another terrorist squat swimming in its own sewage.
Given Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah’s popularity in Judea and Samaria, any ’state’ given the Palestinians can expect to revert to Hamas and be subject to the same kind of non-government Gaza has. Not that a Fatah state would be any different.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that a Hamastan in part of Palestine would be an Iranian enclave capable of menacing Europe and moderate Arab regimes like Egypt and Jordan. As I mentioned, the one industry the Palestinians have developed is terrorism.
Barack Obama, The EU and the other idiots shilling for a Palestinian state may just get one..and live to regret it.
Dr K:
I sympathize with the loss of your family’s home. You were one of many victims of the 1947-48 war. But as was noted in Zach K’s excerpt from Ephraim Karsh, you were victimized not by the Jews of Palestine, but rather by the Arab leaders that were determined to eliminate them. It’s the same situation as the 4th generation descendants of 1948 refugees in the Middle East find themselves–victimized by those who would use them as part of their endless struggle against the existence of Israel.
Even the alleged “moderates” like Abbas not only refuse to accept the idea that the Jews are also a people entitled to national self-determination, that this is a conflict between two nationalist movements rather than a situation of land be taken from one people by an occupying power.
You state that you are loking for “justice” for your fellow Palestinians who have not been as fortunate as you and your family. However, I have not heard from any Palestinian leader (or supporter of their cause here in the US) any definition of “justice” that does not include the elimination of the state of Israel– either militarily, or demographically via the so-called “right” of return.
At no previous time in world history has the side that lost a war– which it had initiated– had a claim to roll back the situation to the status quo ante, to get a historical “do-over”.
So while I do genuinely sympathize, it does not mean that I accept the conclusion drawn by too many that the only remedy with “justice” requires the elimination of the state of Israel.
Who Needs a Palestinian State?
Everyone, and by “everyone” I mean the denizens of Washington D.C.’s and Brussel’s government buildings, agrees that we need a Palestinian state. Chiming in with their “Yes” votes are the dictator of a dozen Arab states who agree that the only thing that will fix the region is adding another Arab dictatorship to the place, and subtracting the region’s one democracy.
But who actually needs a Palestinian state? Or rather a second Palestinian state. The first Palestinian state, commonly called Jordan, was carved out of the Palestine Mandate and equipped with a refugee Saudi royal family. Today Jordan exists mainly under the protection of the US and Israel, and its population of Palestinian Arabs is a seething mass of Muslim extremists currently enjoying a 30 percent unemployment rate, where the majority of the population supports Osama Bin Laden, at a higher percentage rate than even Pakistan.
But Jordan is practically heaven on earth compared to the Second Palestinian State that the Obama Administration is to determined to inflict on Israel.
Currently ruled by mutually hostile armed gangs loyal to either the Fatah or Hamas terrorist groups, Palestine 2.0 has already been a failed state for over a decade. Every attempt at foreign investment has failed. The ruins of industrial zones, greenhouses and even a casino, dot the landscape. Palestinian Arab Christians from overseas who returned to build up the economy fled quickly in the face of relentless shakedowns, kidnappings and militia gangs masquerading as law enforcement.
The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs work for two employers. The UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority… which in turn is funded by foreign donors. Work for the Palestinian Authority usually means belonging to a militia gang which is loyal to a particular figure in the PA leadership, who in turn passes that loyalty on to the current “government”. With little to do, the gangs spend their free time dealing drugs, carrying out terrorist attacks and collecting protection money from their town’s remaining stores.
For 17 years, Israel, America and just about every interested party has tried to build a Palestinian state. They provided weapons and training to build a modern Palestinian police force. They sent advisers and fortunes in economic aid, thousands per Palestinian Arab. They created industrial zones and transferred greenhouses. Billions in funds from the EU, America and various do-gooders were swallowed up to fund the lavish lifestyles of Arafat and his henchmen.
To those who argue that a Palestinian State will build regional stability, the rational person must ask, how in the world has any of this contributed to regional stability?
Year after year, the proposed Palestinian State has become a worse place. Given autonomy, its own military, political, legal and economic system– “Palestine” has made the region more unstable than ever. Terrorism has increased. Violence has increased. General instability has increased. Proposing that more of this will stabilize the region is akin to a man setting fire to one piece of furniture after another in his living room, and claiming that when the entire room is on fire, it will be a safe place to live.
So I ask again, who needs a Palestinian state? If the Palestinian Arabs really wanted a state (a second state) in Gaza, the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem, they could have had it before 1967, when those territories were in Arab hands. Instead the PLO back then called for no Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel. As Clinton discovered to his chagrin at the end of his term, Arafat did not actually want a state and was not interested in accepting an Israeli offer that gave him 99 percent of what he wanted. Is it really any surprise that Hamas today follows the same exact party line?
And really why would they want a Palestinian state? If a state was actually created, the UNRWA would have to close up shop. A Palestinian state could no longer rely on foreign donors to fund the hundred thousand or so armed gangsters who form its “government” and its only real form of employment. And the same Muslim states who pass along “charity” to help fund the “martyr operations” that are behind much of the local terrorism would turn elsewhere.
Instead for 17 years the same tired opera has been playing in the region’s one theater. First the world’s statesmen and diplomats descend on Israel, crying that the only hope for the region’s stability is a Palestinian state. Next the Israeli diplomats arrive with a generous territorial offer, counterbalanced by a second clause that asks that there be no more terrorism. That second clause is immediately ignored by everyone in the room.
Next the Palestinian Authority diplomats arrive demanding twice as much land, no more border security preventing terrorists from entering Israel, half of Israel’s capital, contiguous borders that would cut Israel in half, the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from territories claimed by them… and finally the return of the “refugees”, which is code for unlimited immigration from their proposed Palestinian State into Israel.
The Israelis make a counteroffer. The statesmen and diplomats accuse Israel of rejecting peace. The Palestinian Arabs begin carrying out terrorist attacks again (assuming they even bothered to stop during the negotiations). Israel bombs the terrorists. The statesmen and diplomats accuse Israel of perpetuating the cycle of violence, and urge everyone to go back to the negotiating table. By the time that happens a year later, the Palestinian Arabs have doubled their demands, and the whole “Cycle of Peacemaking” repeats itself all over again.
The “not so secret” secret here is that the Palestinian Arabs do not want a state or peace. 17 years of running the Palestinian Authority into the ground have shown how utterly incapable Fatah and Hamas are of running anything, besides armed gangs, mosques and occasional social services to their loyalist families… all funded from abroad.
The Palestinian ruling powers derive their authority from two forces
1. The Muslim desire to destroy Israel as an infidel state whose existence contradicts Islam. This keeps the money and arms flowing in to the different factions, as well as provides popular support by Arabs. Which is why no Palestinian leader will recognize and accept the existence of Israel. It is why Arafat negotiated out of one side of his mouth and ordered terrorist attacks out of the other. It is why after his death. his Fatah movement has lost credibility and popular support to Hamas due to its increasing inability to kill Israelis.
2. Western and Israel diplomats who keep trying to create a Palestinian state out of the bizarre notion that such a state would bring the terrorism to an end. Like all Dhimmi behaviors in regard to Islam, they ignore the fact that the short term goal of terrorism is terrorism. The long term goal of terrorism is to conquer and hold the territory of the terrorized. There is no room for the middle ground of compromise in that equation. It’s either absolute power, or nothing at all.
Terrorism is practiced by armed gangs and movements who derive their power and support from being terrorists. Proposing that they stop being terrorists is a lot like walking into GM and suggesting that instead of making cars, they should make donuts and hand them out for free, so everyone will be happy.
Palestinian nationalism has always been a crock, a transparently phony justification for terrorism that has always come before nationalism. Palestine was never a country or a state. It was the name given by the Roman occupation forces to a region they were administering, a region far larger than modern day Israel. There was never an Arab Palestinian king or ruler until Arafat. There was never a separate country called Palestine. The Post WW1 Palestine Mandate in the 20th century was used to create two states, an Arab state, Jordan, and a smaller state, Israel.
Now the drive is on to create Palestine 2.0, despite the obvious fact that the Palestinian Arabs have done everything possible to prevent it from coming into being. Nearly two decades of terrorism have turned the endless rounds of peace negotiations into a joke. Half the Palestinian Authority is now ruled by the Iranian backed Hamas terrorist group, which insists it will never recognize or accept permanent peace with Israel. A state of affairs that never would have come into being, had Israel not completely withdrawn from Gaza in the first place.
So once again, who wants or needs a Palestinian state?
Israel did not come into being out of pity for the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Nor did it come into being thanks to US aid or support. Both of those however are common myths.
The State of Israel was in place well before the Holocaust, in the form of an embryonic country of farmers who drained the swamps, businessmen who set up shops, journalists who printed newspapers, and soldiers who trained to protect and defend their homeland. When the UN recognized Israel, it simply accepted the fait accompli that Israel existed and was capable of taking care of itself, which it proved by fighting the armies of the surrounding Arab nations to a standstill. It did it without US military aid, which only came into the picture much later with the Kennedy administration. It did it, because the people of Israel genuinely wanted their own state and worked to make it happen.
By 1942, 17 years after the Palestine Mandate, the Jews of Israel had built a thriving country, from power generators to vast stretches of farmland, from a revived language to the Technicon, created in 1924, which is considered one of the world’s leading electrical engineering and computer science schools in the world.
17 years after Oslo, the Palestinian Arabs have built nothing but death and destruction. Worse yet they’ve taken everything that was given to them and turned it into either a weapon or a bribe. By every standard, they have failed to show their ability to build or run a functioning state. Not even the most liberally minded thinker can point to anything in the Palestinian Authority leadership that suggests that they’re capable of running a functional state. Which is why that same species will naturally duck the question and begin blaming Israel instead.
And that highlights the real issue. The only reason for creating Palestine 2.0 is the destruction of Israel. It will not bring regional stability. It will not even bring local stability. It cannot even function unless its entire workforce is funded from abroad. It cannot even stop engaging in terrorism.
Palestine 2.0 is a Frankenstein’s monster, with body parts from Shiite, Sunni and Marxist terrorists. It only knows how to do one thing and one thing alone, kill. It is not a natural creature, because no Palestinian state ever existed throughout history. It is an artificial state whose existence has only one purpose. The destruction of Israel.
And that answers our question at last. Who needs a Palestinian state? Someone who is either ignorant, foolish or needs to destroy Israel.
The Two State Solution is not a formula for any kind of stability or end to the violence. It’s meant to take the violence to a whole new level. It is a formula for the destruction of Israel. 17 years of peacemaking by Israelis has produced 17 years of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs. Everything sowed on the Palestinian Authority, from money to guns, from autonomy to infrastructure, have come up as dragon’s teeth.
Palestine is not a state. It was never a state. It will never be a state. It is currently ruled by two factions who have both disowned a negotiated Palestinian state in favor of the destruction of Israel. It is not a country, it is a weapon.
Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of Israel with one goal, its destruction. Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of every Jew in the world, legitimizing the worst and ugliest kinds of bigotry. Palestine is an imaginary place given form as a vicious myth brainwashing generation after generation of Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs to call themselves Palestinians and kill and die in the name of perpetuating a second Holocaust, all for the glory of Allah, Mohammed, Marx, not to mention Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, the House of Saud, and every cause and ruler with an interest in toppling Israel into the dust.
Palestine is death. It exists only as a form of living death by a population taught to see themselves as willing martyrs to the bomb belt from birth. It breathes death, it celebrates death, it teaches death and preaches death. It is the final ugly end of the hatred and cruelty bottled up in the Arab and Islamic dictatorships of the region. It is the true face of Islam and its shining reflection in the mirror of the Western press and diplomats is the true measure of their Dhimmism.
The Cult of Death in Palestine and the war against Israel is only a preview for the West of things to come. Palestine is not a place, it is hate and homicide boiled down into myth. Palestine is not only in Israel. It is in Paris and London. It is in Madrid and Detroit. It is in Sydney and Moscow. It is everywhere that the toxic brew of Muslim fanaticism and Arab nationalism flows. Its flag is the flag of death. Its constitution is a death warrant for every free nation. Its legislature is a smug coven of obese terrorist chieftains sending their followers off to death with the promise of virgin demons fornicating with them in Paradise.
Palestine 2.0 is a monster with only one purpose, to create Holocaust 2.0. That is who needs a Palestinian state. That is why the far left and the far right are both so hellbent on bringing one into being. Accepting the Two State Solution means accepting death. Rejecting it means embracing life.
Zev, you are an incredible writer.
I so wish Dr. K would be able to see and not have closed off to both the content you write as well as the emotion.
Dr. K, if you are still reading, do you still choose to ignore the overwhelming agreement in all of the letters above? There is so much agreement in the content and, as expressed with almost poetic skill, agreement in the emotions “we” feel about the general “you”. Almost everyone who has written aknowledges your personal pain and that there is a tiny minority of Arabs/Muslims who don’t fervently strive for the destruction of Israel and the Jews. Can you still not accept that? Read the above over and over. The facts are there. They are very historically verifiable. The Arab story is a good one but it is not verifiable. Try it yourself. Unless you believe the Jews control the history books like so many believe we control the media and the banks, the verifiable facts speak for themselves. If you believe you can present a factual, verifiable history that disproves all of the 40 or so letters of history presented above then do so. In essence, when you decided that the conversation is over, you took your ball and went home. That is not the grown up way of doing it. You wanted a conversation. As usual, the Jews are talking and begging you to converse (see the 40 letters above). You seem to have decided that we’re all “full of it” and only you know the true, alternative to our truth.
You wanted a conversation. It is your turn to speak. Give the facts as you have researched them (and please, with sources. The Arab story is so often bizarre and not found in any of the documents we seem to have access to). Prove to everyone that we are wrong. And, most importantly, show us and prove to us and convince us of a true, safe way to bring about the peace with the Arabs and the Muslims so that one day, you can be an honored guest in the house you were born in. And believe me, honored you would be. The house may not revert to being yours but I guarantee justice and remuneration will have been rightly served you. That’s a promise we Jews will keep because it’s simply how we are.
“Know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.”
From the tone of most of the posts above, it looks like some knowledge has been lost.
Oy vey!
I have read Zev’s comments with some interest. He seems to be one of the very few not offering an olive branch and is quite vehment against the Palestinians. I agree with his comments to some extent. Wither Israel and there is no Palestine. It never existed as an automonous state controled by a group called Palestinians at any time in history. If they want their state there is already Jordan; so why create another one?
Let’s try this for an answer Zev. There was seldom (when it did happen) and for the longest time no Israel except in Jewish hearts.
Palestine 2.0 existed originally there was suppose to be a Jordan, TransJordan and Israel.
Israel needs Palestine. Most of these people were secular and by being exposed to Israel have a concept of democracy. Much as it pains many people they voted for Hamas over Fatah because they were rejecting Western dictates of what they should do. In fairness to the Palestinians Hamas seems to have given more charity to these people, more schools and less corruption than the old Arafat’s forces. Perhaps Zev thinks “old boss same as the new boss”
So again why make Palestine? The optimist says you’ll have a secular democratic nation on Israel’s door. The pessimist says when these people attack Israel they’re doing so as soldiers of a foreign country and Israel has full right to respond back rather than attacking “freedom fighters”.
I ask you Zev, why do you want these people in your tent rather than outside of it?
Dr.K are you aware of this history?
The Jewish Nakba: Expulsions, Massacres and Forced Conversions
Originally was published in Hebrew, in MAARIV
Each year, the Palestinians mark Nakba Day, the catastrophe that befell them with the establishment of the State of Israel. But the Jews in Arab countries also suffered catastrophe and it was many times worse.
By Ben-Dror Yemini (bdyemini@gmail.com)
They say that she was stunningly beautiful. Sol (Suleika) Hatuel was 17 years old when she was beheaded. A Muslim friend claimed that she had succeeded in converting her. When Sol denied the claim, she was accused of renouncing Islam and was condemned to death. Her case reached the sultan.
In order to prevent her death, the community elders tried to persuade her to live as a Muslim. She refused and said, “I was born as a Jew, I will die as a Jew.” Her fate was sealed. It happened in 1834. She was from Tangier and was executed in Fez. Many make pilgrimages to her grave. Despite the fact that the incident was immortalized in eyewitness testimony, in a famous painting and in a play, her story has been forgotten. The following article is dedicated to her and to the victims of the Jewish Nakba.
Every year on the 15th of May, the Palestinians – and many others around the world along with them – “celebrate” Nakba Day. For them, this is the day that marks the great catastrophe that befell them as result of the establishment of the State of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs became refugees. Some fled, some were deported. The Nakba grew to such enormous proportions that it is preventing a solution to the dispute.
We must remember that in the 1940s, population exchanges and deportations for the purpose of creating national states were the accepted norm. Tens of millions of people experienced it, but only the Palestinians (and they are not alone in this) have been inflating the myth of the Nakba.
However, there is another Nakba: the Jewish Nakba. During those same years, there was a long line of slaughters, of pogroms, of property confiscation and of deportations against Jews in Islamic countries. This chapter of history has been left in the shadows. The Jewish Nakba was worse than the Palestinian Nakba. The only difference is that the Jews did not turn that Nakba into their founding ethos. To the contrary.
Like tens of millions of other refugees around the world, they preferred to heal the wound. Not to scratch it and not to open it and not to make it bleed even more. The Palestinians, in contrast, preferred bleeding to rehabilitation. And now they are also paying the price.
The industry of lies has intensified the myth of the Nakba and turned it into the ultimate crime. The Nakba has spawned innumerable publications and conferences, to the point of completely distorting the actual historical process. The Deir Yassin massacre has become one of the milestones in the Palestinian Nakba. There is no need to hide what occurred there (even though the issue of the massacre is in dispute). Innocent people were killed.
There were a few other instances of behavior that should be exposed and condemned.
Extermination War against the Jews
A long series of massacres was perpetrated against the Jews in Arab countries. They did not declare war on the countries in which they lived. They were loyal citizens. That did not help them. Their suffering was erased. Their story is never told. The Palestinian narrative has taken over history. There is no need for a Palestinian narrative versus a Zionist narrative. We need to shake off narratives in favor of the truth. And the truth is the number of Jews murdered was greater, their dispossession was greater, and their suffering greater.
A stunning testimonial from those years, which actually comes from the Arab side, sheds light on the issue. In 1936, Alawite notables sent a letter to the French Foreign Minister in which they expressed their concern for the future of the region. They also referred to the Jewish question: “The Jews brought civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims, and they dispersed gold and prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything by force. Despite this, the Muslims declared holy war against them and didn’t hesitate to massacre their children and women … Thus, a black fate awaits the Jews in case the Mandates are cancelled and Muslim Syria united with Muslim Palestine.” The interesting thing is that one of the letter’s signatories was none other than the great grandfather of Bashar Al Assad, the president of Syria.
We must remember that Nakba Day is the date of the declaration of Israel’s independence, May 15th . We must remember what happened just a few hours after that declaration. The Secretary of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzamaha, announced the declaration of war against Israel: “This war will be a war of annihilation and the story of the slaughter will be told like the campaigns of the Mongols and the Crusaders.”
The Mufti, Haj Amin Al Husseini, who was close to Hitler during the Second World War, added his own bit: “I am declaring a holy war. My brother Muslims! Slaughter the Jews! Kill them all!” The mini-Holocaust of the Jews in Arab countries.
Various documents, some of them discovered only in recent years, show that the declaration of war was far broader. It was actually a declaration of war on the Jews.
Research that was conducted, among others, by Prof. Irwin Cotler, former Minister of Justice of Canada, shows that the Arab League formulated a bill that would place a series of sanctions on the Jews, including confiscation of property, bank accounts and more. The preamble to the bill states that “All Jews will be considered members of the Jewish minority in the State of Palestine.” And if the fate of the Jews of Palestine was sealed, the fate of the Jews in Arab countries was clear.
The bill was indeed the background to the sanctions against the Jews in Arab countries – sometimes by way of legislation, as happened in Iraq and later in Egypt, and sometimes by taking those measures without the need for any legislation. According to the industry of lies, the Jews in Arab countries lived peacefully in their environment, under the protection of the government, and it was only because of the Zionist movement and the harm done to the Arabs in Palestine that the Jews began to suffer.
This lie has been repeated innumerable times. Most of the Jews in Arab countries did not undergo the horrors of the Holocaust. But, even before the advent of Zionism, their situation was not any better. There were periods in which the Jews enjoyed relative peace under Muslim rule, but those periods were the exceptions. Throughout Jewish history in Muslim lands there were humiliations, expulsions, pogroms and a systematic deprivation of rights.
Series of Pogroms
We can, of course, start with the conflict between Muhammad and the Jews. Muhammad undertook social reforms, bringing the Arabs out of the Jahaliya period, and borrowed the concept of monotheism – primarily, perhaps, from the Jews. Many motifs from the Jewish religion appear in the Koran, for example, circumcision and the prohibition on eating pork. But Muhammad wanted to convert the Jews, they, of course, refused. The result was a confrontation that ended in the expulsion and slaughter of hundreds.
The Jews, as the “People of the Book,” were given the right to live under the protection of Islam and to practice their religion. From time to time, from generation to generation, the conditions underwent changes. In many cases, the Jews lived under the covenant of Khalif Omar.
This covenant enabled them to live as protected people (“Dhimmis”), albeit with inferior status. But many times, under Muslim rule, they were not even allowed a life of inferior status.
The Golden Age: One of the proofs of the coexistence of Jews and Muslims is Jewish prosperity under Muslim rule in Spain and the Golden Age. The reality, however, was different.
It encompassed a series of violence events against the Jews. In 1011 in Cordoba, Spain, under Muslim rule, there were pogroms in which, according to various estimates, from hundreds to thousands were murdered. In 1066 in Granada, Yosef Hanagid was executed, along with between 4,000 and 6,000 other Jews. One of the worst periods of all began in 1148, when the Almohad dynasty came to power (al Muwahhid?n), and ruled Spain and North Africa during the 12th and 13th centuries.
Morocco: The country that suffered from the worst series of massacres. In the 8th century whole communities were wiped out by Idris the First. In 1033, in the city of Fez, 6,000 Jews were murdered by a Muslim mob. The rise of the Almohad dynasty caused waves of mass murders. According to testimony from that time, 100,000 Jews were slaughtered in Fez and about 120,000 in Marrakesh (this testimony should be viewed with caution). In 1465, another massacre took place in Fez, which spread to other cities in Morocco.
There were pogroms in Tetuan in 1790 and 1792, in which children were murdered, women were raped and property was looted. Between 1864 and 1880, there were a series of pogroms against the Jews of Marrakesh, in which hundreds were slaughtered. In 1903, there were pogroms in two cities – Taza and Settat, in which over 40 Jews were killed.
In 1907, there was a pogrom in Casablanca in which 30 Jews were killed and many women were raped. In 1912, there was another massacre in Fez in which 60 Jews were killed and about 10,000 were left homeless. In 1948, another series of pogroms began against the Jews which led to the slaughter of 42 in the cities of Oujda and Jrada.
Algeria: A series of massacres occurred in 1805, 1815 and 1830. The situation of the Jews improved with the start of the French conquest in 1830, but that did nor prevent anti-Jewish outbursts in the 1880s. The situation deteriorated again with the rise of the Vichy government. Even before 1934, the country was permeated by Nazi influences, which led to the slaughter of 25 Jews in the city of Constantine. When it achieved independence in 1962, laws were passed against citizenship for anyone who was not a Muslim and their property was effectively confiscated. Most of the Jews left, usually completely penniless, together with the French (“pieds noirs”).
Libya: In 1785, hundreds of Jews were murdered by Burza Pasha. Under Nazi influence, harassment of the Jews intensified. Jewish property in Benghazi was plundered, thousands were sent to camps and about 500 Jews were killed. In 1945, at the end of World War II, a program against the Jews began and the number of murdered reached 140. The New York Times reported the horrible scenes of babies and old people who had been beaten to death. In the riots that broke out in 1948, the Jews were more prepared, so only 14 were killed. Following the Six Day War, riots broke out once again and 17 Jews were slaughtered.
Iraq: a massacre occurred in Basra in 1776. The situation of the Jews improved under British rule in 1917, but this improvement ended with Iraq’s independence in 1932. German influences increased and reached a peak in 1941 in the pogrom known as Farhud, in which 182 Jews were slaughtered (according to historian Elie Kedourie, 600 people were actually murdered) and thousands of houses were pillaged.
Those were the days of Haj Amin al Husseini, who preached violence against the Jews. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Iraqi parliament acted according to the Arab League bill and in 1950 and froze the assets of Jews. Sanctions were imposed on those who remained in Iraq. The Farhud massacre and the harassment from 1946 to 1949 to all intents and purposes turned the Iraqi Jews into exiles and refugees. The few thousand who remained in Iraq suffered from harsh edicts. In 1967, 14 Iraqis were sentenced to death on trumped up charges of espionage. Among them were 11 Jews. Radio Iraq invited the masses to the hanging festivities.
Syria: The first blood libel in a Muslim country occurred in 1840, and led to the kidnapping and torture of dozens of Jewish children, sometimes to the point of death, and a pogrom against the Jews. In 1986, the Syrian Minister of Defense, Mustafa Talas, published a book, “The Matzah of Zion,” in which he claims that the Jews did, indeed, use the blood of a Christian monk to bake matzah. Same old anti-Semitism, new edition. Other pogroms occurred in Aleppo in 1850 and in 1875, in Damascus in 1848 and in 1890, in Beirut in 1862 and in 1874, and in Dir al Kamar there was another blood libel which also led to a pogrom in 1847. That year, there was a pogrom against the Jews of Jerusalem, which was the result of that blood libel. In 1945, the Jews of Aleppo suffered severe pogroms. 75 Jews were murdered and the community was destroyed. There was a resurgence of the violence in 1947, which turned most of the Syrian Jews into refugees. Those who remained there lived for many years as hostages.
Iran: There was a pogrom against the Jews of Mashhad in 1839. A mob was incited to attack Jews, and slaughtered almost 40. The rest were forced to convert. That is how the Marranos of Mashhad came into being. In 1910, there was a blood libel in Shiraz in which 30 Jews were murdered and all Jewish homes were pillaged.
Yemen: There were fluctuations in relations that ranged between tolerance and inferior subsistence, between harassment and pogroms. The Rambam’s Letter to Yemen was sent following a letter he received from the leader of the Yemeni Jews, describing edicts of forced conversion issued against the Jews (1173). There were further waves of apostasy edicts which cannot be detailed here for lack of space.
One of the worst milestones was the Mawza exile. Three years after Imam Al Mahdi took power in 1676, he drove the Jews into one of the most arid districts of Yemen. According to various accounts, 60 – 75% of the Jews died as a result of the exile. Many and varied edicts were imposed on the Jews, differing only in severity. One of the harshest was the Orphans’ Edict, which ordered the forced conversion of orphaned children to Islam. In nearby Aden, which was under British rule, pogroms occurred in 1947 which took the lives of 82 Jews. 106 of the 170 shops that were owned by Jews were completely destroyed. Hundreds of houses and all the community’s buildings were burned down.
Egypt: As in the other Arab countries, the Jews of Egypt also suffered inferior status for hundreds of years. A significant improvement occurred when Muhammad Ali came to power in 1805. The testimony of French diplomat, Edmond Combes, leaves nothing in doubt: “To the Muslims, no race is more worthy of contempt than the Jewish race.” Another diplomat added, “The Muslims do not hate any other religion the way they hate that of the Jews.”
Following the blood libel in Damascus, similar libels began to spread in Egypt as well and incited mobs to carry out a series of attacks: in Cairo in 1844, 1890, and in 1901-1902; and Alexandria in 1870, 1882 and in 1901-1907. Similar attacks also occurred in Port Said and in Damanhur.
Later on, there were riots against the Jews at the end of World War II, in 1945, in which 10 were killed and hundreds were injured. In 1947, the Companies Law was passed, which severely damaged Jewish businesses and led to the confiscation of property. In 1948, following the UN resolution on partition, riots began in Cairo and Alexandria. The dead numbered between 80 and 180. Tens of thousands were forced to leave, many fleeing and abandoning their property. The lot of those who remained did not improve. In 1956, a law was passed in Egypt which effectively denied the Jews citizenship, forcing them to leave the country with no property. This was an act of pure expulsion and mass property confiscation.
***
The above is just a partial list out of a long series of massacres in Muslim countries. It happened before the Zionist endeavor. It continued with the Zionist endeavor. We are talking about a succession of events. Tens of thousands were murdered simply because they were Jewish. So the fairytale of coexistence and blaming Zionism for undermining that coexistence is yet another completely baseless myth.
Before the UN vote on partition in November 1947, Egypt’s ambassador to the UN, Heykal Pasha, warned that “The lives of a million Jews in Muslim countries will be in danger if the vote is for partition… if Arab blood is spilled in Palestine, Jewish blood will be spilled elsewhere in the world.”
Four days afterwards, the Iraqi foreign minister, Muhammad Fadil al Jamali said that “We will not be able to restrain the masses in the Arab countries, after the harmony in which Jews and Arabs lived together.” There was no harmony. There had been a massacre of Jews just a few years earlier. El Jamali lied, of course. The very same Iraqi government had encouraged the harassment of Jews and issued orders to confiscate all Jewish property.
Additionally, the Iraqi leader of the time, Nuri Said, had already presented a plan for expelling the Jews in 1949, even before the hasty – actually forced – exit of the Jews from Iraq. He also explained that “The Jews are a source of trouble in Iraq. They have no place among us. We must get rid of them as best we were able.” Said even presented a plan to lead the Jews via Jordan in order to coerce them into passage to Israel. Jordan objected, but the expulsion was implemented anyway. Said even admitted that this entailed a type of population exchange.
So the massacres, the pogroms and the great expulsion of the Jews was a continuation of their suffering under Muslim rule. There have always been Muslims who came out in defense of the Jews. They are also worthy of mention. That were also periods of prosperity, but it appears that most of the Jewish prosperity, as in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s, in Algeria in the 19th and 20th centuries, in Iraq in the 1920s – was under colonial rule. In most cases, the situation of the Jews was bad before the European invasion and worsened once again with the end of the colonial era.
* * *
Throughout the relations between Jews and Arabs, in Arab countries or in the course of the Zionist enterprise, there was not one case of a pogrom against Muslims of the type committed by the Arabs against the Jews. Even in the worst cases, which must be condemned, such as Deir Yassin, they occurred as part of a military confrontation.
Those are cases that should be condemned, but we need to put things in perspective. The Arabs slaughtered the Jews without any hostilities and without any military excuse, just because they were Jews. And those few Arabs who were killed, were killed as part of a military campaign. Despite this, any injury inflicted on the Arab population resulted in innumerable investigations and references. The worst abuse of all, the abuse of Jews by Arabs, was erased and forgotten.
Let’s return to Deir Yassin, the ultimate symbol of the Nakba. We have called it an indecent act and we will repeat that. But we must note that it was preceded by a series of murderous terrorist attacks against the civilian population. Waves of incidents, which to all intents and purposes were actual pogroms, by an incited mob that attacked the civilian population. Thousands of Jews were slaughtered – women, children and the elderly. The Palestinians even murdered their own people. In the great Arab Revolt in the 1930s, 400 Jews and 5,000 Arabs were killed, most of them at the hands of their brethren.
The months before Deir Yassin were the worst of all. 39 workers were murdered at the Haifa refineries, 50 Jews were killed by car bombs in Jerusalem, and on and on. In total, in the four months between the vote on partition and the declaration of establishment of the State of Israel, 815 Jews were murdered, most of them before the Deir Yassin incident (on April 9, 1948), some afterward (the slaughter of the Hadassah hospital convoy, 79 killed, April 13, 1948). Most were civilians. Most died in massacres and terrorist attacks. And that is the real background. Far more murdered Jews. But they have all been forgotten. They should be mentioned. That is the Jewish Nakba, whose victims, in Israel and around the world, are mentioned less and less.
The Palestinians paid the price
Close to a million Jews lived in Arab countries at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel. Just a few live there today. Most left because they suffered from pogroms and the threat to their lives. It was a crueler expulsion than the one suffered by the Arabs of Palestine, who paid the price for the declarations of war and annihilation made by their leaders. Even the Jewish property that was confiscated or abandoned as a result of the expulsion is more valuable than the Arab property that remained in Israel.
Various investigators have tried to estimate the value of the confiscated Jewish property following the forced departure of the Jews from Arab countries, compared with the Arab property left in Israel following the forced departure of the Arabs. Economist Sidney Zabludoff, an international expert in the field, estimates that the value of the Arab property is $3.9 billion, compared with the value of the Jewish property which is $6 billion (at 2007 values).
So even in this area, the Palestinians’ claims are refuted. They dragged the Arab countries into war. They paid the price. And they are the ones who caused the Jews to pay an even higher price. Both in property and in blood.
This article is not intended to cultivate the Jewish Nakba, and it by no means includes all the cases of pogroms, property confiscations, forced conversions and other harassment. The purpose is precisely the opposite. When they understand, in the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, that suffering, expulsion, loss of property, the cost in lives, is not the monopoly of one side, they may, perhaps, have the sense to understand that this past is a matter for history lessons. Because if we start to perform a political accounting, they have an overdraft. The Jewish Nakba was far greater. The suffering was enormous. But it is the suffering of many nations, Jews and Arabs among them, who went through the experience as part of the creation of new nation states.
It is therefore worth presenting the story of the Jewish Nakba. Not for the purpose of increasing the hostility, but for the purpose of presenting the truth, and for the purpose of reconciliation between the nations. Inshallah.
Dr. K I hope you are getting an education.
What’s Behind Western Condemnation of Israel’s War Against Hamas?
Efraim Karsh
•With a unanimity that has become all too familiar, politicians, the media, NGOs, and church leaders across the globe took their cue to denounce Israel’s legitimate act of self-defense against one of the world’s most extreme terror organizations. This chorus of disapproval is in stark contrast to the utter indifference to far bloodier conflicts that have been going on around the world.
•Why do citizens in democracies enthusiastically embrace a radical Islamist group that not only seeks the destruction of a fellow democracy but is overtly committed to the substitution of a world-wide Islamic caliphate for the existing international order?
•Decades of mistreatment of the Palestinians by the Arab states have gone virtually unnoticed. Only when they interact with Israel do the Palestinians win the world’s attention.
•The fact that international coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has invariably reflected a degree of intensity and emotional involvement well beyond the normal level to be expected of impartial observers would seem to suggest that it is a manifestation of longstanding prejudice that has been brought out into the open by the conflict.
•The Palestinians are but the latest lightning rod unleashed against the Jews, their supposed victimization reaffirming the millenarian demonization of the Jews in general, and the medieval blood libel – that Jews delight in the blood of others.
A Tidal Wave of International Indignation
No sooner had Israel opted to stop Hamas’ attacks on its civilian population, after years of self-imposed restraint, than it was confronted with a tidal wave of international indignation. With a unanimity that has become all too familiar when it comes to the world’s pronouncements on Israel, politicians, the media, NGOs, and church leaders across the globe took their cue to denounce this legitimate act of self-defense by a sovereign democracy against one of the world’s most extreme terror organizations, overtly committed to its destruction, which for years had been raining down thousands of rockets and mortar shells on civilian communities (not to mention the long string of suicide bombings).
Echoed by the international media’s blanket coverage of Israel’s response in Gaza, but not Hamas’ murderous ideology and actions, this chorus of disapproval over the Jewish state’s “disproportionate” use of force is in stark contrast to the utter indifference to far bloodier conflicts that have been going on around the world, from the long-running genocide in Darfur, with its estimated 400,000 dead and at least 2.5 million refugees, to war in the Congo, with over 4 million dead or driven from their homes, to Chechnya, where an estimated 150,000-200,000 have died and up to a third of the population has been displaced at the hands of the Russian military. None of these tragedies saw protesters flock into the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Oslo, Dublin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Washington, and Fort Lauderdale (to give a brief list), as has been the case during the Gaza crisis.
Arab Mistreatment of the Palestinians Went Unnoticed
How can this be? Why do citizens in democracies enthusiastically embrace a radical Islamist group that not only seeks the destruction of a fellow democracy but is overtly committed to the substitution of a world-wide Islamic caliphate (or umma) for the existing international order based on territorial nation states? Not because of compassion for the Palestinians, whose plight has never attracted genuine international interest, especially by the Arab states (and for that matter, the Palestinian leadership), whose decades of mistreatment of the Palestinians have gone virtually unnoticed.
Between 1949 and 1967, Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively. Not only did they fail to put these populations on the road to statehood, but they showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving the quality of their life – which is one of the reasons that 120,000 West Bankers moved across to the East Bank of the Jordan and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad between 1949 and 1967.
Nobody in the international community paid any more attention to this than they have more recently to the ongoing abuse of Palestinians across the Arab world from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, a country which was condemned in a June 2006 Amnesty International report for its “long-standing discrimination and abuses of fundamental economic and social rights of Palestinian refugees.”
Nor has there been any international outcry when Arab countries have massacred Palestinians on a grand scale. In 1970 King Hussein of Jordan ordered the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in the course of putting down the Palestinian uprising during “Black September.” This left between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinian refugees dead. But the fact that Hussein killed more Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel managed to do in decades was never held against him or dented the widely held perception of him as a man of peace. As the supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist Robert Fisk put it in his recent memoirs, King Hussein was “often difficult to fault.”
Again, more than two decades ago Abu Iyad, the number two man in the PLO, publicly stated that the crimes of the Syrian government against the Palestinian people “surpassed those of the Israeli enemy.” While in the wake of the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Kuwaitis not only set about punishing the PLO for support of Saddam Hussein’s brutal occupation by cutting off their financial support for Yasir Arafat’s overblown and corrupt organization, but there was also a widespread slaughter of Palestinians living in Kuwait.
This revenge against innocent Palestinian workers in the emirate was so severe that Arafat himself acknowledged: “What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.” Yet there was no media coverage or specially convened UN meetings because it is only when they interact with Israel that the Palestinians win the world’s attention.
Only Palestinian Interaction with Israel Wins World Attention
In other words, the extraordinary international preoccupation with the Palestinians is a corollary of their interaction with Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical times, a reflected glow of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Had their dispute been with an Arab, Muslim, or any other adversary, it would have attracted a fraction of the interest that it presently does.
On occasion, notably among devout and/or born again Evangelical Christians, this obsession has manifested itself in admiration and support for the national Jewish resurrection in the Holy Land. In most instances, however, anti-Jewish prejudice and animosity, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known, has served rather to exacerbate distrust and hatred of Israel. Indeed, the fact that the international coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the libels against Zionism and Israel, such as the despicable comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, have invariably reflected a degree of intensity and emotional involvement well beyond the normal level to be expected of impartial observers would seem to suggest that, rather than being a response to concrete Israeli activities, it is a manifestation of longstanding prejudice that has been brought out into the open by the vicissitudes of the conflict.
There is another side to the ledger. For millennia Jewish blood has been cheap, if not costless, throughout the Christian and Muslim worlds, where the Jew became the epitome of powerlessness, a perpetual punching bag and a scapegoat for whatever ills befell society. There is no reason, therefore, why Israel shouldn’t follow in the footsteps of these past generations, avoid antagonizing its Arab neighbors and exercise restraint whenever attacked. But no, instead of knowing its place, the insolent Jewish state has forfeited this historic role by exacting a price for Jewish blood and beating the bullies who had hitherto been able to torment the Jews with impunity. This dramatic reversal of history cannot but be immoral and unacceptable. Hence the global community outrage and hence the world’s media provision of unlimited resources to cover every minute of Israel’s “disproportionate” response, but none of the devastation and dislocation caused to Israeli cities and their residents.
Put differently, the Palestinians are but the latest lightning rod unleashed against the Jews, their supposed victimization reaffirming the millenarian demonization of the Jews in general, and the medieval blood libel – that Jews delight in the blood of others – in particular. In the words of David Mamet, “The world was told Jews used this blood in the performance of religious ceremonies. Now, it seems, Jews do not require the blood for baking purposes, they merely delight to spill it on the ground.”
Zionism Failed to Solve the “Jewish Problem”
To make such an argument will no doubt be dismissed as “Zionist propaganda” by many opponents of Israel. But in fact this not only runs counter to the prevailing wisdom among Israeli academics and intellectuals, for whom such arguments are anathema, but it also challenges one of the most fundamental tenets of Zionism – that the creation of a Jewish state, where the Jewish diasporas would congregate and become normalized, would solve the “Jewish problem” and ameliorate, if not eliminate altogether, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
What this line of thinking by the founding fathers of Zionism failed to consider, however, is that the prejudice and obsession that had hitherto been reserved for Jewish individuals and communities would be transferred to the Jewish state. As the poet Heinrich Heine, himself a convert from Judaism, once wrote, Judaism is “the family curse that lasts a thousand years” and no matter how much it has tried, Israel has never been able to escape this disturbing reality.
A saddening thought indeed. But is there any other explanation as to why, sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West?