Yeah I agree. I don't support the degree to which they've taken things in Gaza. That said they are in a difficult position because they can't let Hamas just bring in all the weaponry they want, because they know eventually those weapons would be turned on them. Here I just found this earlier today in my reading:
Benny Morris: "As far as I know, no Gazan has died of thirst or starvation. There are no African-style bloated bellies there. It is true that Israel has barred the importation of iron and steel and other materials needed for reconstructing houses destroyed or damaged in the December 2008–January 2009 campaign (and, in my view mistakenly, also barred the entry into Gaza of various other goods). But Israel argues, with solid logic, that Hamas would immediately use these materials to rebuild bunkers, munitions storage facilities, trenchworks, and the other institutions and instruments of its aggression."
wow, brilliant. you even find ways to justify the blockade. Watch this video and I dare you to try to say otherwise:
The most important contextual piece of information in the quote you just provided is when he said that the nascent Jewish state was facing genocide if they didn't take whatever actions were necessary, no matter how harsh, to win the war they were being forced to fight.
Except that isn't true.
'The truth is that by May 1948 Zionist forces had already invaded and occupied large parts of the land which had been allocated to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan. In January 1948 Israel did not yet exist.
The evidence that Israel started the 1948 war comes from Zionist sources. The History of the Palmach which was released in portions in the 1950s (and in full in 1972) details the efforts made to attack the Palestinian Arabs and secure more territory than alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan (Kibbutz Menchad Archive, Palmach Archive, Efal, Israel).
Already, Zionist forces were implementing their "Plan Dalet" to "control the area given to us [the Zionists] by the U.N. in addition to areas occupied by Arabs which were outside these borders and the setting up of forces to counter the possible invasion of Arab armies after May 15" (Qurvot 1948, p. 16, which covers the operations of Haganah and Palmach, see also Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, The Book of Palmach).
1. Operation Nachson, 1 April 1948
2. Operation Harel, 15 April 1948
3. Operation Misparayim, 21 April 1948
4. Operation Chametz, 27 April 1948
5. Operation Jevuss, 27 April 1948
6. Operation Yiftach, 28 April 1948
7. Operation Matateh, 3 May 1948
8. Operation Maccabi, 7 May 1948
9. Operation Gideon, 11 May 1948
10. Operation Barak, 12 May 1948
11. Operation Ben Ami, 14 May 1948
12. Operation Pitchfork, 14 May 1948
13. Operation Schfifon, 14 May 1948
The operations 1-8 indicate operations carried out before the entry of the Arab forces inside the areas allotted by the UN to the Arab state. It has to be noted that of thirteen specific full-scale operations under Plan Dalet eight were carried out outside the area "given" by the UN to the Zionists.
Following is a list drawn from the New York Times of the major military operations the Zionists mounted before the British evacuated Palestine and before the Arab forces entered Palestine:
· Qazaza (21 Dec. 1947)
· Sa'sa (16 Feb. 1948)
· Haifa (21 Feb. 1948)
· Salameh (1 March 1948)
· Biyar Adas (6 March 1948)
· Qana (13 March 1948)
· Qastal (4 April 1948)
· Deir Yassin (9 April 1948)
· Lajjun (15 April 1948)
· Saris (17 April 1948)
· Tiberias (20 April 1948)
· Haifa (22 April 1948)
· Jerusalem (25 April 1948)
· Jaffa (26 April 1948)
· Acre (27 April 1948)
· Jerusalem (1 May 1948)
· Safad (7 May 1948)
· Beisan (9 May 1948).
David Ben-Gurion confirms this in an address delivered to American Zionists in Jerusalem on 3 September 1950:
"Until the British left, no Jewish settlement, however remote, was entered or seized by the Arabs, while the Haganah, under severe and frequent attack, captured many Arab positions and liberated Tiberias and Haifa, Jaffa and Safad" (Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 530).
Although late PM Ben-Gurion speaks of "liberating" Jaffa it was alloted to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan.
Late PM Menachem Begin adds:
"In the months preceding the Arab invasion, and while the five Arab states were conducting preparations, we continued to make sallies into Arab territory. The conquest of Jaffa stands out as an event of first-rate importance in the struggle for Hebrew independence early in May, on the eve [that is, before the alleged Arab invasion] of the invasion by the five Arab states" (Menachem Begin, The Revolt, Nash, 1972, p. 348)
On 12 December 1948 David Ben Gurion confirmed the fact that the Zionists started the war in 1948:
"As April began, our War of Independence swung decisively from defense to attack. Operation 'Nachson'...was launched with the capture of Arab Hulda near where we stand today and of Deir Muheisin and culminated in the storming of Qastel, the great hill fortress near Jerusalem" (Ben Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 106).
Israeli historians have themselves refuted the claim that the Arabs started the 1948 war. Benny Morris uncovered a report from the Israeli Defense Force Intelligence Branch (30 June 1948) that shows a deliberate Israeli policy to attack the Arabs should they resist and expel the Palestinians (Benny Morris, "The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948", Middle Eastern Studies, XXII, January
1986, pp. 5-19).
Conclusion:
In sum, it is not true that the Arabs "invaded Israel" in 1948.
First, Israel did not exist at the time of the alleged invasion as an established state with recognised bounderies. When the Zionist leaders established Israel on 15 May 1948 they purposely declined to declare the bounderies of the new state in order to allow for future expansion.
Secondly, the only territory to which the new state of Israel had even a remote claim was that alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan. But the Zionists had already attacked areas that were alloted to the Palestinian Arab state.
Thirdly, those areas which the Arab states purportedly "invaded" were, in fact, exclusively areas alloted to the Palestinian Arab state proposed by the UN Partition Plan. The so-called Arab invasion was a defensive attempt to hold on to the areas alloted by the Partition Plan for the Palestinian state.
Finally, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, was under orders not to enter the areas alloted to the Jewish state (Sir John Bagot Glubb, "The Battle for Jerusalem", Middle East International, May 1973).
The most important contextual piece of information in the quote you just provided is when he said that the nascent Jewish state was facing genocide if they didn't take whatever actions were necessary, no matter how harsh, to win the war they were being forced to fight.
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
"We Created Terror Among the Arabs"
The Deir Yassin Massacre
By WILLIAM MARTIN - May 13, 2004
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.
But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).
We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:
We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.
Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", Middle East Journal, 40
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....
About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants.... Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.
There were many other such villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to some historians, however they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.
Within the last 10 to 20 years, however, there has been an exponential increase in historical studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding Arab states told them to.
In fact, according to UN estimates, which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world. Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those doors still exists.
The '67 War generated a second wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who were either expelled through direct or psychological methods or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included the extensive use of napalm.
The reader is invited to read the Hagana's Plan D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state.
Those who invoke the suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.
The suicide bombings inside Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility, under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one that is intrinsically expansionist.'
Its worth noting that Israel is not a "racially pure" society by any real stretch of the imagination. 9.6% of Jews in Israel were born in Africa or Asia, and Arabs form another 20% of the population. Individuals who identify themselves as Muslim represent 16% of the population. 2-3% are Christians, many of these are of Arab decent. The annual growth rate of the Arab population in fact exceeds that of the Jews (2.6% vs. 1.7%), despite the crap laid out in the Koenig Memorandum. There are smaller groups native to the Levant and other nearby areas that make up another small but nevertheless noteworthy chunk of the population(Armenians, Circassians, Druze, and Samartians). Israel is in fact described as one of the most multicultural and multilingual societies in the world, largely as a result of immigration by Jews from numerous other states across the world. If Israel's policies are indeed driven by a desire for "racial purity", said purity is in practice one pretty fucked up weaksauce patchwork quilt not worthy of the name. I'd be inclined to look for other motives.
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
The easy answer is that both groups were facing such concerns, with the Israelis facing a threat from five mechanized national armies and the Palestinians facing the threat of Zionist extremists. How can you argue that the magnitude of one threat outstrips the other? How would you even quantify such a thing?
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
The easy answer is that both groups were facing such concerns, with the Israelis facing a threat from five mechanized national armies and the Palestinians facing the threat of Zionist extremists. How can you argue that the magnitude of one threat outstrips the other? How would you even quantify such a thing?
Just take a look at what happened in that war. Who was victorious? The Jewish army was already a formidable force. There was no fear of genocide amongst the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War 'On the eve of the war the number of Arab troops likely to be committed to the war was about 23,000 (10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 Jordanians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Syrians, 2,000 ALA volunteers, 1,000 Lebanese and some Saudi Arabians), in addition to the irregular Palestinians already present. The Yishuv had 35,000 troops of the Haganah, 3,000 of Stern and Irgun and a few thousand armed settlers.[60]'
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/is ... 48_war.htm 'Though the attack on Israel was a surprise one, Israel was surprisingly well equipped at a military level. The country had a navy and many in her army were experienced in combat as a result of World War Two. Israel had also bought three B-17 bombers in America on the black market. In July 1948, these were used to bomb the Egyptian capital, Cairo.'
The Arab armies were simply seeking to reclaim the land that had been alloted to the Palestinians by the British Mandate. They weren't seeking to annihilate the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War Five of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, namely Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, backed by Saudi Arabian and Yemenite contingents invaded[96] the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine on the night of 14–15 May 1948. However, only the forces of Syria and Egypt invaded territory outside of the Arab section of the Partition Plan[97]. The official motives for their intervention were set out in a statement[98] of 15 May 1948 :
the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, [and whereby] minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognised in democratic constitutional countries ....
The main objection the Arab League had to the division of Palestine in UN Resolution 181 was that it did not respect the rights of its Arab inhabitants
in accordance with the provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations.
(...)
Security and order in Palestine have become disrupted. The Zionist aggression resulted in the exodus of more than a quarter of a million of its Arab inhabitants from their homes and in their taking refuge in the neighbouring Arab countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War
'On the eve of the war the number of Arab troops likely to be committed to the war was about 23,000 (10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 Jordanians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Syrians, 2,000 ALA volunteers, 1,000 Lebanese and some Saudi Arabians), in addition to the irregular Palestinians already present. The Yishuv had 35,000 troops of the Haganah, 3,000 of Stern and Irgun and a few thousand armed settlers.[60]'
The Haganah figure likely includes the total number of personnel available, combat and non-combat (e.g., logistics) troops, at least according to Wikipedia. The Isrealis forces had minimal armor and far fewer aircraft than the Arabs. Anyhow, I agree that use of the term genocide is highly debatable in this context ... Of course, the same is likely to be true of terrorism carried out by Irgun irregulars, who realistically had NO chance of coming anywhere close to wiping out the Palestinian population in the area at the time (which included a huge figure of 711,000 displaced from Israel, nevermind those that stayed). Saying that Irgun and related groups were commiting atrocities at a rate anywhere near genocide is not that different from arguing that the Isrealis faced genocide at the hands of the Arab coalition.
This position (that the Arab leaders were largely responsible for the Palestinian exodus) is not above criticism, but it is worth some consideration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_ ... xplanation
Claims by Arab sources that support that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders
Former Prime Minister of Syria Khalid al-Azm recalled in his memoirs, "We brought disaster upon one million Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave their land, their homes, their work and their industry."[139] Abu Iyad made similar observations in his own memoirs.[140]
After the war, a few Arab leaders tried to present the Palestinian exodus as a victory by claiming to have planned it. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Said was later quoted as saying: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."[141]
Contemporary Jordanian politician Anwar Nusseibeh believed that the fault for the exodus and military loss was with the Arab commanders: "the commanders of the local army thought in terms of the revolt against the British in the 1930s. The rebels had often retreated to the mountains .... But the Jews were fighting for complete domination, so the fighters had erred in withdrawing from the villages instead of defending them […]."[142]
The Arab National Committee of Haifa, the Arab leadership in Haifa in 1948, wrote and delivered a report on the flight of roughly 60,000 Arabs from Haifa. The report said, "[T]he removal of the Arab inhabitants from the town was voluntary and carried out at our request."[143]
"Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring, brotherly states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down," wrote Habab Issa of Al-Hoda, the leading newspaper for Lebanese Maronites in the United States.[144] A Muslim weekly newspaper in Beirut similarly reported, "Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders […]? The Arab States [sp], and Lebanon amongst them, did it!"[145]
Mahmoud Abbas, at the time Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, would later recall: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."[146]
Jamal Husseini, the brother of Palestinian military and religious leader Hajj Amin Husseini, wrote to the Syrian UN representative, "The regular [Arab] aremies did not enable the [Arab] inhabitants of [Palestine] to defend themselves, but merely facilitated their escape from Palestine."[147] Palestinian military leader Emile Ghoury expressed similar views. Furthermore, Palestinian Arab protesters in the West Bank took to the streets on the occasion of "the first anniversary of Israel's establishment" to place blame on "the Arab states for the creation of the refugee problem."[148]
the larger issue being the continued Palestinian rejection of Israel's very existence.
the reverse of this statement is also true
I agree entirely that Israel must accept the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. They are much further along this road than the Palestinians are. Even the Israeli right wing, such as Netanyahu, has publicly endorsed the two-state solution. Hamas, however, still talks about Israel's destruction, and Fatah, though more moderate, still refuses to publicly accept Israel's legitimate existence.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Yeah I agree. I don't support the degree to which they've taken things in Gaza. That said they are in a difficult position because they can't let Hamas just bring in all the weaponry they want, because they know eventually those weapons would be turned on them. Here I just found this earlier today in my reading:
Benny Morris: "As far as I know, no Gazan has died of thirst or starvation. There are no African-style bloated bellies there. It is true that Israel has barred the importation of iron and steel and other materials needed for reconstructing houses destroyed or damaged in the December 2008–January 2009 campaign (and, in my view mistakenly, also barred the entry into Gaza of various other goods). But Israel argues, with solid logic, that Hamas would immediately use these materials to rebuild bunkers, munitions storage facilities, trenchworks, and the other institutions and instruments of its aggression."
how odd....in another thread you say the 80's is too long ago, give you something current....when did Benny Morris die????
i am talking about now, present day, groups like UNICEF to the World Health Organization say because of the blockade the majority of Palestinian children suffer from acute malnutrition
Umm, Benny Morris is very much alive. He is currently a professor of history at Ben Gurion University, and writes regularly for Israeli and American publications.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Yeah I agree. I don't support the degree to which they've taken things in Gaza. That said they are in a difficult position because they can't let Hamas just bring in all the weaponry they want, because they know eventually those weapons would be turned on them. Here I just found this earlier today in my reading:
Benny Morris: "As far as I know, no Gazan has died of thirst or starvation. There are no African-style bloated bellies there. It is true that Israel has barred the importation of iron and steel and other materials needed for reconstructing houses destroyed or damaged in the December 2008–January 2009 campaign (and, in my view mistakenly, also barred the entry into Gaza of various other goods). But Israel argues, with solid logic, that Hamas would immediately use these materials to rebuild bunkers, munitions storage facilities, trenchworks, and the other institutions and instruments of its aggression."
wow, brilliant. you even find ways to justify the blockade. Watch this video and I dare you to try to say otherwise:
Please go back and reread the first paragraph of what you quoted from me. I said I don't agree with how far they've taken things, but I then tried to explain Israel's reasoning. Understanding is not the same thing as supporting.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
The most important contextual piece of information in the quote you just provided is when he said that the nascent Jewish state was facing genocide if they didn't take whatever actions were necessary, no matter how harsh, to win the war they were being forced to fight.
Except that isn't true.
'The truth is that by May 1948 Zionist forces had already invaded and occupied large parts of the land which had been allocated to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan. In January 1948 Israel did not yet exist.
The evidence that Israel started the 1948 war comes from Zionist sources. The History of the Palmach which was released in portions in the 1950s (and in full in 1972) details the efforts made to attack the Palestinian Arabs and secure more territory than alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan (Kibbutz Menchad Archive, Palmach Archive, Efal, Israel).
Already, Zionist forces were implementing their "Plan Dalet" to "control the area given to us [the Zionists] by the U.N. in addition to areas occupied by Arabs which were outside these borders and the setting up of forces to counter the possible invasion of Arab armies after May 15" (Qurvot 1948, p. 16, which covers the operations of Haganah and Palmach, see also Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, The Book of Palmach).
1. Operation Nachson, 1 April 1948
2. Operation Harel, 15 April 1948
3. Operation Misparayim, 21 April 1948
4. Operation Chametz, 27 April 1948
5. Operation Jevuss, 27 April 1948
6. Operation Yiftach, 28 April 1948
7. Operation Matateh, 3 May 1948
8. Operation Maccabi, 7 May 1948
9. Operation Gideon, 11 May 1948
10. Operation Barak, 12 May 1948
11. Operation Ben Ami, 14 May 1948
12. Operation Pitchfork, 14 May 1948
13. Operation Schfifon, 14 May 1948
The operations 1-8 indicate operations carried out before the entry of the Arab forces inside the areas allotted by the UN to the Arab state. It has to be noted that of thirteen specific full-scale operations under Plan Dalet eight were carried out outside the area "given" by the UN to the Zionists.
Following is a list drawn from the New York Times of the major military operations the Zionists mounted before the British evacuated Palestine and before the Arab forces entered Palestine:
· Qazaza (21 Dec. 1947)
· Sa'sa (16 Feb. 1948)
· Haifa (21 Feb. 1948)
· Salameh (1 March 1948)
· Biyar Adas (6 March 1948)
· Qana (13 March 1948)
· Qastal (4 April 1948)
· Deir Yassin (9 April 1948)
· Lajjun (15 April 1948)
· Saris (17 April 1948)
· Tiberias (20 April 1948)
· Haifa (22 April 1948)
· Jerusalem (25 April 1948)
· Jaffa (26 April 1948)
· Acre (27 April 1948)
· Jerusalem (1 May 1948)
· Safad (7 May 1948)
· Beisan (9 May 1948).
David Ben-Gurion confirms this in an address delivered to American Zionists in Jerusalem on 3 September 1950:
"Until the British left, no Jewish settlement, however remote, was entered or seized by the Arabs, while the Haganah, under severe and frequent attack, captured many Arab positions and liberated Tiberias and Haifa, Jaffa and Safad" (Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 530).
Although late PM Ben-Gurion speaks of "liberating" Jaffa it was alloted to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan.
Late PM Menachem Begin adds:
"In the months preceding the Arab invasion, and while the five Arab states were conducting preparations, we continued to make sallies into Arab territory. The conquest of Jaffa stands out as an event of first-rate importance in the struggle for Hebrew independence early in May, on the eve [that is, before the alleged Arab invasion] of the invasion by the five Arab states" (Menachem Begin, The Revolt, Nash, 1972, p. 348)
On 12 December 1948 David Ben Gurion confirmed the fact that the Zionists started the war in 1948:
"As April began, our War of Independence swung decisively from defense to attack. Operation 'Nachson'...was launched with the capture of Arab Hulda near where we stand today and of Deir Muheisin and culminated in the storming of Qastel, the great hill fortress near Jerusalem" (Ben Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 106).
Israeli historians have themselves refuted the claim that the Arabs started the 1948 war. Benny Morris uncovered a report from the Israeli Defense Force Intelligence Branch (30 June 1948) that shows a deliberate Israeli policy to attack the Arabs should they resist and expel the Palestinians (Benny Morris, "The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948", Middle Eastern Studies, XXII, January
1986, pp. 5-19).
Conclusion:
In sum, it is not true that the Arabs "invaded Israel" in 1948.
First, Israel did not exist at the time of the alleged invasion as an established state with recognised bounderies. When the Zionist leaders established Israel on 15 May 1948 they purposely declined to declare the bounderies of the new state in order to allow for future expansion.
Secondly, the only territory to which the new state of Israel had even a remote claim was that alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan. But the Zionists had already attacked areas that were alloted to the Palestinian Arab state.
Thirdly, those areas which the Arab states purportedly "invaded" were, in fact, exclusively areas alloted to the Palestinian Arab state proposed by the UN Partition Plan. The so-called Arab invasion was a defensive attempt to hold on to the areas alloted by the Partition Plan for the Palestinian state.
Finally, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, was under orders not to enter the areas alloted to the Jewish state (Sir John Bagot Glubb, "The Battle for Jerusalem", Middle East International, May 1973).
A) where is this from, you can't have it both ways, the arabs rejected the partition plan, so you can't say that they were defending what was rightfully theirs because of the plan they rejected. Had the arabs accepted the UN partition plan Israel would not have sought to expand its territory (or maybe they would have, but we'll never know). Given that the arabs rejected the plan and made it perfectly clear that they were going to seek to destroy the nascent Jewish state as soon as the British left, the Israelis, within the context of a war for their very survival made the perfectly rational decision to try to get as much land as possible for their new state. It's funny that this article tries to spin the arab invasion as defensive. They were talking explicitly about destroying the Jewish state. The only reason whoever wrote this garbage can say that the arabs were acting defensively is because the arabs weren't successful in their attacks on Israeli territory (although in fact the Syrians did manage to capture areas that had been allotted by the UN as part of the Jewish state, but were forced to withdraw from these areas as part of the armistice agreement that ended the war. It begs the question, however, if they were only trying to defend what the UN gave to the Palestinians (and which the Palestinians rejected) why did they capture areas given to Israel?) The idea that the Israelis only had a claim to what was given to them by the UN is also garbage. The arabs rejected the UN partition plan. The plan would have only come into effect had both sides accepted it. Again you can't have it both ways. Since the arabs rejected the plan the plan never took effect. It was not legally binding. The situation, which everyone understood, was that the British would leave and there would be a war and you would get whatever you could take by force. The arabs were the ones that created this situation, and it should be easy to understand why. They had the Israelis far outnumbered, and had five mechanized armies at their disposal. They fully expected to win the war, in which case there would be no Israel and the arabs would have all the land.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
the larger issue being the continued Palestinian rejection of Israel's very existence.
the reverse of this statement is also true
I agree entirely that Israel must accept the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. They are much further along this road than the Palestinians are. Even the Israeli right wing, such as Netanyahu, has publicly endorsed the two-state solution. Hamas, however, still talks about Israel's destruction, and Fatah, though more moderate, still refuses to publicly accept Israel's legitimate existence.
peace is the goal yeah?
in 2002 at an Arab summit in Saudi Arabia, Hamas agreed to peace if Israel were to withdraw to the 1967 borders.
the following reasons were giving as to why Israel rejected peace, to name a few,
-Hamas must recognize the state of Israel
-Hamas must renounce violence.
This may sound reasonable, but Israel did not have to agree to either of those 2 things, they did not have to recognize Palestine nor renounce violence. Considering how overwhelmingly 1 sided the violence against the Palestinian's is Israel's conditions were outrageous.
you keep saying both sides need to make some compromises, but they've reached a peace agreement, the only obstacle at this point is Israel.
The most important contextual piece of information in the quote you just provided is when he said that the nascent Jewish state was facing genocide if they didn't take whatever actions were necessary, no matter how harsh, to win the war they were being forced to fight.
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
"We Created Terror Among the Arabs"
The Deir Yassin Massacre
By WILLIAM MARTIN - May 13, 2004
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.
But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).
We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:
We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.
Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", Middle East Journal, 40
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....
About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants.... Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.
There were many other such villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to some historians, however they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.
Within the last 10 to 20 years, however, there has been an exponential increase in historical studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding Arab states told them to.
In fact, according to UN estimates, which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world. Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those doors still exists.
The '67 War generated a second wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who were either expelled through direct or psychological methods or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included the extensive use of napalm.
The reader is invited to read the Hagana's Plan D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state.
Those who invoke the suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.
The suicide bombings inside Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility, under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one that is intrinsically expansionist.'
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
The easy answer is that both groups were facing such concerns, with the Israelis facing a threat from five mechanized national armies and the Palestinians facing the threat of Zionist extremists. How can you argue that the magnitude of one threat outstrips the other? How would you even quantify such a thing?
Just take a look at what happened in that war. Who was victorious? The Jewish army was already a formidable force. There was no fear of genocide amongst the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War 'On the eve of the war the number of Arab troops likely to be committed to the war was about 23,000 (10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 Jordanians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Syrians, 2,000 ALA volunteers, 1,000 Lebanese and some Saudi Arabians), in addition to the irregular Palestinians already present. The Yishuv had 35,000 troops of the Haganah, 3,000 of Stern and Irgun and a few thousand armed settlers.[60]'
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/is ... 48_war.htm 'Though the attack on Israel was a surprise one, Israel was surprisingly well equipped at a military level. The country had a navy and many in her army were experienced in combat as a result of World War Two. Israel had also bought three B-17 bombers in America on the black market. In July 1948, these were used to bomb the Egyptian capital, Cairo.'
The Arab armies were simply seeking to reclaim the land that had been alloted to the Palestinians by the British Mandate. They weren't seeking to annihilate the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War Five of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, namely Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, backed by Saudi Arabian and Yemenite contingents invaded[96] the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine on the night of 14–15 May 1948. However, only the forces of Syria and Egypt invaded territory outside of the Arab section of the Partition Plan[97]. The official motives for their intervention were set out in a statement[98] of 15 May 1948 :
the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, [and whereby] minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognised in democratic constitutional countries ....
The main objection the Arab League had to the division of Palestine in UN Resolution 181 was that it did not respect the rights of its Arab inhabitants
in accordance with the provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations.
(...)
Security and order in Palestine have become disrupted. The Zionist aggression resulted in the exodus of more than a quarter of a million of its Arab inhabitants from their homes and in their taking refuge in the neighbouring Arab countries.
That is the most fucked up shitty logic I've ever seen. You can't judge history by the outcome. Just because Israel won the war it doesn't mean they knew at the outset they were going to win. I'm unemployed right now and don't have any job prospects at all. By your logic if somehow (God please!!!) I get a job and rise through the ranks and become a billionaire we couldn't say that at one point I was down on my luck because look how it turned out. I don't know the future, and neither did they, so please don't tell me that just because in the end Israel won the war that at the war's beginning they somehow knew they would win. I've spoken to old folks who lived through the war, and trust me, they all said that certainly at the outset and for a while after that until the tide turned in Israel's favor people were very much afraid that Israel would lose and they'd all get massacred.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
The most important contextual piece of information in the quote you just provided is when he said that the nascent Jewish state was facing genocide if they didn't take whatever actions were necessary, no matter how harsh, to win the war they were being forced to fight.
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
"We Created Terror Among the Arabs"
The Deir Yassin Massacre
By WILLIAM MARTIN - May 13, 2004
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.
But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).
We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:
We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.
Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", Middle East Journal, 40
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....
About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants.... Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.
There were many other such villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to some historians, however they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.
Within the last 10 to 20 years, however, there has been an exponential increase in historical studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding Arab states told them to.
In fact, according to UN estimates, which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world. Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those doors still exists.
The '67 War generated a second wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who were either expelled through direct or psychological methods or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included the extensive use of napalm.
The reader is invited to read the Hagana's Plan D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state.
Those who invoke the suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.
The suicide bombings inside Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility, under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one that is intrinsically expansionist.'
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
massacring civilians has been happeneing since at least 48.
have you heard of the Doueimah massacre? it was an undefended town that Isreal destroyed.
some 35 families hiding in a cave, slaughtered, with 3 survivors. or the 75 old men praying in a mosque, gunned down. crushing skulls with sticks, people were blown up in houses. it was a system of expulsion and elimination.
the village was destroyed and people were deliberately targeted, so you're wrong, Israel has been targeting civilians -since 1948.
The most important contextual piece of information in the quote you just provided is when he said that the nascent Jewish state was facing genocide if they didn't take whatever actions were necessary, no matter how harsh, to win the war they were being forced to fight.
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
"We Created Terror Among the Arabs"
The Deir Yassin Massacre
By WILLIAM MARTIN - May 13, 2004
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.
But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).
We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:
We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.
Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", Middle East Journal, 40
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....
About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants.... Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.
There were many other such villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to some historians, however they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.
Within the last 10 to 20 years, however, there has been an exponential increase in historical studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding Arab states told them to.
In fact, according to UN estimates, which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world. Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those doors still exists.
The '67 War generated a second wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who were either expelled through direct or psychological methods or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included the extensive use of napalm.
The reader is invited to read the Hagana's Plan D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state.
Those who invoke the suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.
The suicide bombings inside Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility, under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one that is intrinsically expansionist.'
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
except the Irgun became part of the IDF
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.[/quote]
except the Irgun became part of the IDF [/quote]
But weren't part of the IDF when Deir Yassin happened. And once they became part of the IDF they were dispersed throughout the armed forces specifically so that they would not be able to maintain their autonomy on the sly. You can't blame the IDF for something the IDF didn't do, just because the people who did do it joined the IDF after the fact.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
They can't move back to Israel, they are already in Israel. And they are Israelis, not Americans, so I don't know why they would want to move "back" to America.
They are in occupied territories. Almost a third of inhabitants are first generation immigrants.
If I wanted to, I could immigrate to Israel and be granted citeizenship under the 'law of return' even if I am not jewish. I have a close relative that is jewish so that's enough.
They aren't in occupied territories. They are in Israel. You may want to go consult a map. Sderot is inside the '67 line. It is not in the West Bank or Gaza. If a third of the inhabitants are immigrants then 2/3 were born in Israel, and by the way I'd like to know where you get your numbers. Also, why is an immigrant who has gotten citizenship any less entitled to live in his home free from fear?
The succession of posts were referring to the people living in unlawful settlements, ie occupying territory that belongs to Palestinians. I said approx 1/3 were FIRST GENERATION immigrants, not just immigrants - a lot more would be immigrants.
The succession of posts were referring to the people living in unlawful settlements, ie occupying territory that belongs to Palestinians. I said approx 1/3 were FIRST GENERATION immigrants, not just immigrants - a lot more would be immigrants. Just an observation as you were asking why they would want to move back to where they came from as they were from Israel....
I'm fairly sure that at the point where you entered with your comment we were talking about Sderot, and not the settlements. Sorry for the misunderstanding, though.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
A) where is this from, you can't have it both ways, the arabs rejected the partition plan, so you can't say that they were defending what was rightfully theirs because of the plan they rejected. Had the arabs accepted the UN partition plan Israel would not have sought to expand its territory (or maybe they would have, but we'll never know).
Yes we will:
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.
From 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' Illan Pappe
P34 - 35
'...the Jews, who owned less than six percent of the total land area of Palestine and constituted no more than one third of the population, were handed more than half of it's overall territory. Within the borders of their U.N-proposed state, they owned only eleven percent of the land, and were the minority in every district. In the Negev - admittedly an arid land but still with a considerable rural and Bedouin population, which made up a major chunk of the Jewish state - they constituted one percent of the total population....
The categorical rejection of the scheme by the Arab governments and the Palestinian leadership made it undoubtedly easier for Ben-Gurion to believe that he could both accept the plan and work against it...
The expected Arab and Palestinian rejection of the plan allowed Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership to claim that the U.N plan was a dead letter the day it was accepted - apart, of course, from the clauses that recognized the legality of the Jewish state in Palestine. It's borders, given the Palestinian and Arab rejection, said Ben-Gurion, "will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution." As would be the fate of the Arabs living in it.'
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
The attack on the civilian population of Gaza last year was a massacre.
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
The attack on the civilian population of Gaza last year was a massacre.
I don't see it that way.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
'Israel has the right and the obligation to protect its citizens, and without providing real security, it will fail also to achieve peace and to put an end to the occupation.'
Or Israel could begin by ending the occupation and then talk about peace?
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
The attack on the civilian population of Gaza last year was a massacre.
'Israel has the right and the obligation to protect its citizens, and without providing real security, it will fail also to achieve peace and to put an end to the occupation.'
Or Israel could begin by ending the occupation and then talk about peace?
So your suggestion is that Israel ignore entirely all the security risks associated with simply pulling out of the West Bank, should go through the extremely painful process of uprooting 250,000 people from their homes, should ignore all of its security interests with regard to adjusting the '67 armistice line in final border agreements, all of this with absolutely no guarantee that they will get peace and security in return, and in fact if recent history should serve as precedent a virtual guarantee that they won't get peace and security?
I'm sorry but no state in the real world acts in this way, nor should they be expected to. I would like to see the occupation end, but not in a manner that endangers Israeli lives.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSviZs1g ... annel_page
http://www.israel-palestinenews.org/200 ... ue-to.html
Except that isn't true.
'The truth is that by May 1948 Zionist forces had already invaded and occupied large parts of the land which had been allocated to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan. In January 1948 Israel did not yet exist.
The evidence that Israel started the 1948 war comes from Zionist sources. The History of the Palmach which was released in portions in the 1950s (and in full in 1972) details the efforts made to attack the Palestinian Arabs and secure more territory than alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan (Kibbutz Menchad Archive, Palmach Archive, Efal, Israel).
Already, Zionist forces were implementing their "Plan Dalet" to "control the area given to us [the Zionists] by the U.N. in addition to areas occupied by Arabs which were outside these borders and the setting up of forces to counter the possible invasion of Arab armies after May 15" (Qurvot 1948, p. 16, which covers the operations of Haganah and Palmach, see also Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, The Book of Palmach).
1. Operation Nachson, 1 April 1948
2. Operation Harel, 15 April 1948
3. Operation Misparayim, 21 April 1948
4. Operation Chametz, 27 April 1948
5. Operation Jevuss, 27 April 1948
6. Operation Yiftach, 28 April 1948
7. Operation Matateh, 3 May 1948
8. Operation Maccabi, 7 May 1948
9. Operation Gideon, 11 May 1948
10. Operation Barak, 12 May 1948
11. Operation Ben Ami, 14 May 1948
12. Operation Pitchfork, 14 May 1948
13. Operation Schfifon, 14 May 1948
The operations 1-8 indicate operations carried out before the entry of the Arab forces inside the areas allotted by the UN to the Arab state. It has to be noted that of thirteen specific full-scale operations under Plan Dalet eight were carried out outside the area "given" by the UN to the Zionists.
Following is a list drawn from the New York Times of the major military operations the Zionists mounted before the British evacuated Palestine and before the Arab forces entered Palestine:
· Qazaza (21 Dec. 1947)
· Sa'sa (16 Feb. 1948)
· Haifa (21 Feb. 1948)
· Salameh (1 March 1948)
· Biyar Adas (6 March 1948)
· Qana (13 March 1948)
· Qastal (4 April 1948)
· Deir Yassin (9 April 1948)
· Lajjun (15 April 1948)
· Saris (17 April 1948)
· Tiberias (20 April 1948)
· Haifa (22 April 1948)
· Jerusalem (25 April 1948)
· Jaffa (26 April 1948)
· Acre (27 April 1948)
· Jerusalem (1 May 1948)
· Safad (7 May 1948)
· Beisan (9 May 1948).
David Ben-Gurion confirms this in an address delivered to American Zionists in Jerusalem on 3 September 1950:
"Until the British left, no Jewish settlement, however remote, was entered or seized by the Arabs, while the Haganah, under severe and frequent attack, captured many Arab positions and liberated Tiberias and Haifa, Jaffa and Safad" (Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 530).
Although late PM Ben-Gurion speaks of "liberating" Jaffa it was alloted to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan.
Late PM Menachem Begin adds:
"In the months preceding the Arab invasion, and while the five Arab states were conducting preparations, we continued to make sallies into Arab territory. The conquest of Jaffa stands out as an event of first-rate importance in the struggle for Hebrew independence early in May, on the eve [that is, before the alleged Arab invasion] of the invasion by the five Arab states" (Menachem Begin, The Revolt, Nash, 1972, p. 348)
On 12 December 1948 David Ben Gurion confirmed the fact that the Zionists started the war in 1948:
"As April began, our War of Independence swung decisively from defense to attack. Operation 'Nachson'...was launched with the capture of Arab Hulda near where we stand today and of Deir Muheisin and culminated in the storming of Qastel, the great hill fortress near Jerusalem" (Ben Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 106).
Israeli historians have themselves refuted the claim that the Arabs started the 1948 war. Benny Morris uncovered a report from the Israeli Defense Force Intelligence Branch (30 June 1948) that shows a deliberate Israeli policy to attack the Arabs should they resist and expel the Palestinians (Benny Morris, "The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948", Middle Eastern Studies, XXII, January
1986, pp. 5-19).
Conclusion:
In sum, it is not true that the Arabs "invaded Israel" in 1948.
First, Israel did not exist at the time of the alleged invasion as an established state with recognised bounderies. When the Zionist leaders established Israel on 15 May 1948 they purposely declined to declare the bounderies of the new state in order to allow for future expansion.
Secondly, the only territory to which the new state of Israel had even a remote claim was that alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan. But the Zionists had already attacked areas that were alloted to the Palestinian Arab state.
Thirdly, those areas which the Arab states purportedly "invaded" were, in fact, exclusively areas alloted to the Palestinian Arab state proposed by the UN Partition Plan. The so-called Arab invasion was a defensive attempt to hold on to the areas alloted by the Partition Plan for the Palestinian state.
Finally, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, was under orders not to enter the areas alloted to the Jewish state (Sir John Bagot Glubb, "The Battle for Jerusalem", Middle East International, May 1973).
The Deir Yassin Massacre occurred before the Arab army's invaded in 1948. Who do you think was more concerned with facing extinction through genocide? The Palestinians, or the Zionists?
http://www.counterpunch.org/martin05132004.html
"We Created Terror Among the Arabs"
The Deir Yassin Massacre
By WILLIAM MARTIN - May 13, 2004
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.
But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).
We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:
We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.
Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", Middle East Journal, 40
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....
About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants.... Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.
There were many other such villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to some historians, however they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.
Within the last 10 to 20 years, however, there has been an exponential increase in historical studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding Arab states told them to.
In fact, according to UN estimates, which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world. Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those doors still exists.
The '67 War generated a second wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who were either expelled through direct or psychological methods or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included the extensive use of napalm.
The reader is invited to read the Hagana's Plan D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state.
Those who invoke the suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.
The suicide bombings inside Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility, under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one that is intrinsically expansionist.'
The easy answer is that both groups were facing such concerns, with the Israelis facing a threat from five mechanized national armies and the Palestinians facing the threat of Zionist extremists. How can you argue that the magnitude of one threat outstrips the other? How would you even quantify such a thing?
Just take a look at what happened in that war. Who was victorious? The Jewish army was already a formidable force. There was no fear of genocide amongst the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War
'On the eve of the war the number of Arab troops likely to be committed to the war was about 23,000 (10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 Jordanians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Syrians, 2,000 ALA volunteers, 1,000 Lebanese and some Saudi Arabians), in addition to the irregular Palestinians already present. The Yishuv had 35,000 troops of the Haganah, 3,000 of Stern and Irgun and a few thousand armed settlers.[60]'
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/is ... 48_war.htm
'Though the attack on Israel was a surprise one, Israel was surprisingly well equipped at a military level. The country had a navy and many in her army were experienced in combat as a result of World War Two. Israel had also bought three B-17 bombers in America on the black market. In July 1948, these were used to bomb the Egyptian capital, Cairo.'
The Arab armies were simply seeking to reclaim the land that had been alloted to the Palestinians by the British Mandate. They weren't seeking to annihilate the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab% ... sraeli_War
Five of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, namely Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, backed by Saudi Arabian and Yemenite contingents invaded[96] the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine on the night of 14–15 May 1948. However, only the forces of Syria and Egypt invaded territory outside of the Arab section of the Partition Plan[97]. The official motives for their intervention were set out in a statement[98] of 15 May 1948 :
the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, [and whereby] minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognised in democratic constitutional countries ....
The main objection the Arab League had to the division of Palestine in UN Resolution 181 was that it did not respect the rights of its Arab inhabitants
in accordance with the provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations.
(...)
Security and order in Palestine have become disrupted. The Zionist aggression resulted in the exodus of more than a quarter of a million of its Arab inhabitants from their homes and in their taking refuge in the neighbouring Arab countries.
The Haganah figure likely includes the total number of personnel available, combat and non-combat (e.g., logistics) troops, at least according to Wikipedia. The Isrealis forces had minimal armor and far fewer aircraft than the Arabs. Anyhow, I agree that use of the term genocide is highly debatable in this context ... Of course, the same is likely to be true of terrorism carried out by Irgun irregulars, who realistically had NO chance of coming anywhere close to wiping out the Palestinian population in the area at the time (which included a huge figure of 711,000 displaced from Israel, nevermind those that stayed). Saying that Irgun and related groups were commiting atrocities at a rate anywhere near genocide is not that different from arguing that the Isrealis faced genocide at the hands of the Arab coalition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_ ... xplanation
Claims by Arab sources that support that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders
Former Prime Minister of Syria Khalid al-Azm recalled in his memoirs, "We brought disaster upon one million Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave their land, their homes, their work and their industry."[139] Abu Iyad made similar observations in his own memoirs.[140]
After the war, a few Arab leaders tried to present the Palestinian exodus as a victory by claiming to have planned it. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Said was later quoted as saying: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."[141]
Contemporary Jordanian politician Anwar Nusseibeh believed that the fault for the exodus and military loss was with the Arab commanders: "the commanders of the local army thought in terms of the revolt against the British in the 1930s. The rebels had often retreated to the mountains .... But the Jews were fighting for complete domination, so the fighters had erred in withdrawing from the villages instead of defending them […]."[142]
The Arab National Committee of Haifa, the Arab leadership in Haifa in 1948, wrote and delivered a report on the flight of roughly 60,000 Arabs from Haifa. The report said, "[T]he removal of the Arab inhabitants from the town was voluntary and carried out at our request."[143]
"Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring, brotherly states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down," wrote Habab Issa of Al-Hoda, the leading newspaper for Lebanese Maronites in the United States.[144] A Muslim weekly newspaper in Beirut similarly reported, "Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders […]? The Arab States [sp], and Lebanon amongst them, did it!"[145]
Mahmoud Abbas, at the time Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, would later recall: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."[146]
Jamal Husseini, the brother of Palestinian military and religious leader Hajj Amin Husseini, wrote to the Syrian UN representative, "The regular [Arab] aremies did not enable the [Arab] inhabitants of [Palestine] to defend themselves, but merely facilitated their escape from Palestine."[147] Palestinian military leader Emile Ghoury expressed similar views. Furthermore, Palestinian Arab protesters in the West Bank took to the streets on the occasion of "the first anniversary of Israel's establishment" to place blame on "the Arab states for the creation of the refugee problem."[148]
I agree entirely that Israel must accept the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. They are much further along this road than the Palestinians are. Even the Israeli right wing, such as Netanyahu, has publicly endorsed the two-state solution. Hamas, however, still talks about Israel's destruction, and Fatah, though more moderate, still refuses to publicly accept Israel's legitimate existence.
Umm, Benny Morris is very much alive. He is currently a professor of history at Ben Gurion University, and writes regularly for Israeli and American publications.
A) where is this from,
peace is the goal yeah?
in 2002 at an Arab summit in Saudi Arabia, Hamas agreed to peace if Israel were to withdraw to the 1967 borders.
the following reasons were giving as to why Israel rejected peace, to name a few,
-Hamas must recognize the state of Israel
-Hamas must renounce violence.
This may sound reasonable, but Israel did not have to agree to either of those 2 things, they did not have to recognize Palestine nor renounce violence. Considering how overwhelmingly 1 sided the violence against the Palestinian's is Israel's conditions were outrageous.
you keep saying both sides need to make some compromises, but they've reached a peace agreement, the only obstacle at this point is Israel.
Deir Yassin = very, very, bad, and a stain on Israeli history. But this was the work of the Irgun, which again, was outside the mainstream. It was not the policy of the Haganah, and later the IDF, to massacre civilians.
That is the most fucked up shitty logic I've ever seen. You can't judge history by the outcome. Just because Israel won the war it doesn't mean they knew at the outset they were going to win. I'm unemployed right now and don't have any job prospects at all. By your logic if somehow (God please!!!) I get a job and rise through the ranks and become a billionaire we couldn't say that at one point I was down on my luck because look how it turned out. I don't know the future, and neither did they, so please don't tell me that just because in the end Israel won the war that at the war's beginning they somehow knew they would win. I've spoken to old folks who lived through the war, and trust me, they all said that certainly at the outset and for a while after that until the tide turned in Israel's favor people were very much afraid that Israel would lose and they'd all get massacred.
have you heard of the Doueimah massacre? it was an undefended town that Isreal destroyed.
some 35 families hiding in a cave, slaughtered, with 3 survivors. or the 75 old men praying in a mosque, gunned down. crushing skulls with sticks, people were blown up in houses. it was a system of expulsion and elimination.
the village was destroyed and people were deliberately targeted, so you're wrong, Israel has been targeting civilians -since 1948.
except the Irgun became part of the IDF
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
except the Irgun became part of the IDF
But weren't part of the IDF when Deir Yassin happened. And once they became part of the IDF they were dispersed throughout the armed forces specifically so that they would not be able to maintain their autonomy on the sly. You can't blame the IDF for something the IDF didn't do, just because the people who did do it joined the IDF after the fact.
The succession of posts were referring to the people living in unlawful settlements, ie occupying territory that belongs to Palestinians. I said approx 1/3 were FIRST GENERATION immigrants, not just immigrants - a lot more would be immigrants.
I'm fairly sure that at the point where you entered with your comment we were talking about Sderot, and not the settlements. Sorry for the misunderstanding, though.
Yes we will:
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.
From 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' Illan Pappe
P34 - 35
'...the Jews, who owned less than six percent of the total land area of Palestine and constituted no more than one third of the population, were handed more than half of it's overall territory. Within the borders of their U.N-proposed state, they owned only eleven percent of the land, and were the minority in every district. In the Negev - admittedly an arid land but still with a considerable rural and Bedouin population, which made up a major chunk of the Jewish state - they constituted one percent of the total population....
The categorical rejection of the scheme by the Arab governments and the Palestinian leadership made it undoubtedly easier for Ben-Gurion to believe that he could both accept the plan and work against it...
The expected Arab and Palestinian rejection of the plan allowed Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership to claim that the U.N plan was a dead letter the day it was accepted - apart, of course, from the clauses that recognized the legality of the Jewish state in Palestine. It's borders, given the Palestinian and Arab rejection, said Ben-Gurion, "will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution." As would be the fate of the Arabs living in it.'
Sure they did. They created this situation by the mere fact that they happened to be living on land that the Zionists wanted as their own in 1947.
The attack on the civilian population of Gaza last year was a massacre.
I don't see it that way.
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/the-go ... n?page=0,0
No, of course you don't see it:
An estimated 800 civilians and 248 police recruits killed
http://palestinian.ning.com/forum/topic ... -the-story
Or Israel could begin by ending the occupation and then talk about peace?
There lies the problem.
So your suggestion is that Israel ignore entirely all the security risks associated with simply pulling out of the West Bank, should go through the extremely painful process of uprooting 250,000 people from their homes, should ignore all of its security interests with regard to adjusting the '67 armistice line in final border agreements, all of this with absolutely no guarantee that they will get peace and security in return, and in fact if recent history should serve as precedent a virtual guarantee that they won't get peace and security?
I'm sorry but no state in the real world acts in this way, nor should they be expected to. I would like to see the occupation end, but not in a manner that endangers Israeli lives.
Well, it isn't a problem for me, and it says something about you that my simply disagreeing with you should be problematic.