Defining yourself

Yom Ha'atzmaut celebrations, combined with the Palestinian Arab "Nakba" commemorations, are a good opportunity to notice a fundamental difference between Zionists and Palestinian Arab nationalists.

Zionists define themselves completely independently of any other players. Zionism is the national revival movement for the Jewish people in the land of their forefathers. Nothing to do with Europeans or Arabs or anything else - it is a completely positive, self-sustaining definition. One may argue that Zionists treated Arabs unfairly but the Arabs were not an inherent factor in the definition of Zionism; Zionism as a term is independent of other factors. Arabs who tried to destroy that dream weren't considered a threat to Zionism - they were considered irrelevant to the concept. If they accepted Israel, fine, if not, too bad for them.

Palestinian Arab nationalism, on the other hand, defines itself purely in relationship to others, and the definition is negative. And this 60th anniversary of Israel shows these differences in sharp relief.

Today, Yom Ha'atzmanut is being celebrated, but it is not the anniversary. The anniversary is on the fifth of the Hebrew month of Iyar, which is on Saturday. Since that is the Jewish Sabbath, the date was moved up to today to enable everyone to celebrate properly.

Nakba events were originally slated to occur on May 15th, "Nakba Day," but the very idea that Israel was celebrating today irritates Palestinian Arabs so much that they needed to declare today a day of mourning:

A national day of mourning will be held across the Palestinian territories on Thursday to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba.

Palestinian and black flags will be raised on roof tops of buildings, a partial public strike will be conducted between 12-1 am on Thursday in addition to demonstrations in cities across the West Bank.

In a statement issued on Thursday, the National Committee for Commemorating the Nakba called for all Palestinians to participate in the action in protest at " the celebrations by the state of occupation [Israel] at its establishment on the remains of Palestinian cities and villages by expressing the clinging of the Palestinians of their 'Right of Return' which is a legitimate right."

Today isn't the Hebrew or Gregorian or Muslim calendar anniversary, but since Israel celebrates today, Palestinian Arabs need to start their commemorations today as well. Their history and self-view is fully defined by what Israel does, not by what their supposed goals are.

If the Nakba is meant to mark the anniversary of the Palestinian Arab flight from their homes, it could occur on any day of the year, as there were no particular major population shifts on May 15th. They could choose the date of the surrender of Haifa or the date that Israel signed a cease fire with Jordan - ensuring that they would not be able to build a state. Yet they choose to mark it specifically when Israel does, and when Israel moves the date - so do they.

Similarly, look at this Nakba poster:

The shape of "Palestine" (portrayed as a keyhole) betrays the fact that Palestinian Arab nationalism is wholly dependent on external factors. Historic Palestine looks nothing like this picture; and while it would be hard to draw as the borders were never set in stone, everyone would agree that the Negev is not a part of it and that significant parts of what are now Jordan would be included in it. The fact that Palestinian Arabs have abandoned any pretense of trying to reconstitute "historic" Palestine and are only interested in the areas that Israel happens to control, with national borders created by the British and French, shows that Palestinian Arab nationalism is not at all about building a state, but about destroying one.

Of course, their history of accepting Jordanian sovereignty and citizenship in 1949 also shows that an independent nation was not their goal of the so-called "nationalists."

It has been nearly 15 years since Oslo. During most of that time, much of the West Bank has been under Arab autonomy. The PA has access to the same tools that embryonic Israel had access to in 1948. Before the intifada, there was a viable economy there; before 2003 there were no checkpoints.

Now look at how much progress they made with the autonomy they have, and compare it with what Israel accomplished in the 10-15 years after gaining its own autonomy. (We are not even beginning to talk about Gaza, the poster child for Palestinian Arab anti-nationalism.)

A real, independent national movement would take any opportunity and autonomy they could to build their institutions - their schools, hospitals, infrastructure; to build trade with other states, to gain jobs and security for their people. A sham national movement whose real purpose is destructive would do none of those things.

It is obvious which one fits the recent history of Palestinian Arab nationalism.

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The first refugees of the 1948 war were Jews

We will be hearing a lot in the next couple of weeks about the "Nakba" and how hundreds of thousands of Arabs became refugees.

Probably the largest flight of Arabs occurred in Jaffa in April and May of 1948, and many websites have weepy articles about how the Jews drove the Arabs out of Jaffa, reducing its Arab population from 75,000 to less than 5,000.

What will not be mentioned is the fact that the first refugees from Jaffa were Jews.

In August, 1947, the Arabs started shooting at Jews in Jaffa. Since Jaffa was a predominantly Arab town, the lives of the Jews there were particularly precarious. Arab snipers shot from the minaret of a mosque in the Manshieh Quarter and forced 18 Jewish families to leave the city.

For three months, the families (except for the children) had to sleep outside, until accomodations were found for them in Tel Aviv.

The homes that belonged to the Jews were meanwhile occupied by Arabs.

Things quieted down in anticipation of the UN decision on partition, as the Palestinian Arabs used political means to make sure that the Jewish state would never come to fruition. But as soon as the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab nations, the Arabs attacked immediately, and once again the Jews of Jaffa bore the brunt.

This time, about 5000 Jews (mostly Yemenites) lost their homes, and the Jewish authorities scrambled to find accommodations for them.

Meanwhile, the Jaffa Arabs who left in November and December of 1947 were hardly "refugees." They were upper-class Arabs who could afford to move to Amman and Damascus and Beirut, in anticipation of a repeat of the 1936-9 riots when they moved as well. Like in 1936, they expected to move back to their houses after things died down. By no stretch of the imagination can these people be regarded as "refugees" even though they are counted as such today.

Their move away from Jaffa affected the rest of the residents, though, as they closed their businesses and unemployment skyrocketed in the coming months. This was one of the major factors behind the mass flight from Jaffa in April and May, 1948.

But the first ones to be forced to leave their homes were not Palestinian Arabs, but Palestinian Jews.

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The truth about 1948

Midstream Magazine has an article this month by David Guttman, who fought with the Palmach in 1948. While the article is not online, it is an expanded version of one he had written for FrontPage a few years ago.

The Midstream article expands on the severe paucity of guns and ammunition in the first phase of the war. But three main points from both articles are critical:

Some facts I can swear to:

A. The Palestinians initiated the war that led to their Naqba. Troops from Tel-Aviv eventually conquered Jaffa, but it was Arab fighters in Jaffa who, from the towers of their mosques, first fired into Tel-Aviv, and turned the intercity border areas into a battleground.

B. The first refugees were not Arabs but Yemenite Jews, from the Tel Aviv-Jaffa No-Man's Land that Arab aggression had created. Unlike the Palestinians, theirs was only a temporary refugee status. Instead of packing them away and forgetting them in squalid refugee camps, their Ashkenazi compatriots took them into their own neighborhoods. For the most part the Yemenites camped out in Tel Aviv apartment lobbies, and used the cooking and sanitary facilities of the permanent residents. When Jaffa fell to Irgun soldiers, they went back home.

C. The Palestinians fled for many reasons and from many threats, both real and imaginary, and that thousands upon thousands fled when nobody pushed them. As an example, when my unit occupied the abandoned British police station at Sidn'a Ali in the Sharon Plain, British troops were still stationed in the vicinity, and we had to train and patrol with our few guns (antiquated or homemade) concealed. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Sidn'a Ali were long gone, way before we could have pushed them out, and while the Brits were still in place to protect them from us. Needless to say, in the absence of any Palestinian targets (save for some abandoned camels) we committed no rapes.

I don't know why the Sidn'a Ali people fled, but they did leave a caretaker in place, as a sign that they intended to return once those pesky Jews had been ethnically cleansed. They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well.

They guessed wrong; and the Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women; and because there were so many Sidn'a Alis. To relieve their shame they stridently and continually demand that their unsavory history be rewritten and reversed.

This is the real "Nakba." While some Arabs were indeed driven from their homes, and some indeed left at the behest of their leaders, the vast majority voluntarily left out of fear of fighting combined with the expectation that they would return as victors; with the idea that if things don't work out they could always integrate into the neighboring Arab countries and start anew.

But their neighbors had other ideas.

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The 1920 "Nakba" (Steven Plaut)

From the Jewish Press (excerpts):

The authoritative source on the origin of “nakba” is none other than George Antonius, supposedly the first “official historian of Palestinian nationalism.” Like so many “Palestinians,” he actually wasn’t – Palestinian, that is. He was a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years afterward was the official text used at British universities.

The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in 1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland.

Before World War I, the entire Levant – including what is now Israel, the “occupied territories,” Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – was comprised of Ottoman Turkish colonies. When Allied forces drove the Turks out of the Levant, the two main powers, Britain and France, divided the spoils between them. Britain got Palestine, including what is now Jordan, while France got Lebanon and Syria.

The problem was that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel colonial powers – one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed “Palestinians.”

The bulk of the Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently and murderously.

On page 312 of The Arab Awakening, Antonius writes, “The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”

The original “nakba” had nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba – at this catastrophe– because they found deeply offensive the very idea that they should be independent from Syria and Syrians.

In the 1920’s, the very suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic nationality was enough to send those same Arabs out into the streets to murder and plunder violently in outrage. If they themselves insisted they were simply Syrians who had migrated to the Land of Israel, by what logic are the Palestinian Arabs deemed entitled to their own state today?

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The definition of "nakba" depends on the audience

Most Westerners would say that when Palestinian Arabs refer to the "nakba", or catastrophe, that they are referring to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948, and their defeat in the 1948 war. Certainly pro-Palestinian Arab Westerners use the term that way, and Palestinian Arabs speaking to Westerners seem to keep that definition as well.

Wikipedia:Nakba Day, meaning "Day of the catastrophe" is a annual day of commemoration for the Palestinian people of their displacement and dispossession as a result of their defeat in the 1948 Palestine war.

Electronic Intifada: Every year Palestinians commemorate the Nakba ("the catastrophe"): the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948.

Nakba Archive: During the 1948 war with the nascent state of Israel it is estimated that around half of the 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes or fled, to neighboring Arab states. This period of Palestinian history has come to be known as al-Nakba, ‘the catastrophe’.

To the West, this makes sense - it can certainly be seen as catastrophic that a large group of people become homeless in the space of a year, no matter the circumstances.

There is another definition of Nakba, however, one that Westerners do not see nearly as much.

Palestine News Network: The Israelis are gearing up to celebrate 60 years since the inception of their state, what the Palestinians refer to as the Catastrophe, Al Nakba.

Gulf News: Not quite two weeks from now, on May 8, Palestinians will commemorate the Nakba, when their homeland was dismembered exactly 60 years ago that day.

In other words, to Arabs, the Nakba is more associated with the establishment of Israel than with any negative events that occurred to Arabs in Palestine.

A little reflection shows that the idea that the Nakba is meant to show solidarity with Palestinian Arabs and not just antipathy to Zionist Jews is ludicrous. After all, the Palestinian Arabs have been kept in stateless limbo due to the direct actions of their Arab brethren and their own failed leaders, who cynically use them as pawns - to pressure Israel.

It is most instructive that "Nakba Day" is timed to coincide with the anniversary of Israel's independence, not with the anniversary of any notable acts of dispossession or massacres like Deir Yassin. The true catastrophe, in Arab thought, is the creation of a Jewish state and not the tragedies that happened to the Arab citizens who fled or died.

Palestinian Arabs cannot even conceive that there is a difference between the two concepts; that Israel's establishment was not meant to displace hundreds of thousands of people. They cannot imagine that the Jews at the time were far more interested in surviving and in building a viable state where they could live in peace than in hurting others - to Arabs of Palestinian descent, force-fed a steady diet of lies and propaganda, the Jews' entire purpose was destructive and not positive. (This is, of course, another aspect of their own projection of their desires vis a vis the Jews of Palestine in 1948.)

But even deeper is the idea that Jews establishing a tiny state on their historic homeland itself is what they consider their disaster - even if not one Arab had left their home they would still regard Israel's Independence Day to be their catastrophe.

And they still do.

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Israeli Arabs' self-inflicted misery

Many people complain about the discrimination that Arabs in Israel suffer. But how much of that discrimination is from Zionist intolerance, and how much from how that community decides to act itself towards its country?

The Jerusalem Post interviews a "moderate" Israeli-Arab Islamic leader:

Israeli Arabs will never agree to do national service for the State of Israel because it would call into question their loyalty to the Palestinian cause, the founder of Israel's Islamic Movement, Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

"Any type of national service, no matter what it is, would be perceived by the Palestinian people as military service," said Darwish, speaking at his home in Kafr Kasim.

"He [the Israeli Arab who volunteers for National Service] would be seen as an enemy to the Palestinian people.

"To prove his loyalty to the Palestinian cause, he would be forced to join the Palestinian resistance movement against Israel. I do not allow my young people to enlist in organizations that fight for the Palestinian cause. But do not expect me to allow them to join the Israeli cause," added Darwish, who heads what is considered to be the more moderate southern wing of the Islamic Movement, created in the late 1990s.

If an easily-identifiable group decides to identify with a nation's enemies, what nation would treat them equally?

Even with the existence of a hostile, anti-state minority, Israel tries to bend over backwards to accommodate them, although Kadima at least seems to be a bit impatient:

Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter christened the first Kadima chapter in the none-Jewish sector Sunday, in the northern city of Shfaram.

"Even if they (heads of the Israeli-Arab community) choose not to celebrate our 60th anniversary, they will celebrate our 70th and 80th anniversaries, simply because we and the Muslim and Druze and Circassian and Christian citizens have no other country. It is as much theirs as it is ours," said Dichter.

When asked when he thought about the Israeli-Arab sector commemorating the "Nakba" – meaning the "catastrophe" of the establishment of State of Israel – every year, Dichter repeated his early statement, saying that the continuance use of such terminology is not in the sector's best interest.

"Anyone crying over the Nakba year after year can't be surprised if they end up with one… the Nakba won't give anyone better education or create new jobs."

Kadima, he added, rejects any kind of radicalism: "Any talk of transferring Israeli-Arab citizens to the Palestinian Authority is nothing but pure nonsense."

Contrast this with something else that happened this weekend:

President Shimon Peres and Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger met with Druse leaders in the western Galilee Sunday as part of the Id al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) celebrations.

Peres said that the state of Israel was proud of the Druse's contribution.

"Among Druse there is 0% draft dodging and 100% dedication to Israel's security," the president said. He said that 54% volunteered for combat duty.

Metzger said that "we are not just brothers in arms, we are brothers in peace and coexistence and love. I come to you with a request that you allow every person to live among you in peace. If a Druse comes to Tel Aviv to live, I will accept him with a blessing. If a Jew comes to Peki'in, accept him in a similar way."

Metzger was referring to a violent incident staged by residents of the Druse village of Peki'in against Jewish residents there.

It sure seems strange that the chief rabbis and president of a "racist state" celebrate a major Muslim holiday with some of its non-Jewish citizens.

Can the difference between how the the Druze and Israeli Arabs are treated have more to do with how they themselves act (despite the Peki'in incidents that chased 9 Jewish families from the town) and not as much to do with the supposed Israeli "racism"?

UPDATE: Treppenwitz has a great post on this same topic.

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The bias of BBC's history of PalArab refugees

I just noticed a BBC page that is intended as a backgrounder on the Palestinian Arab refugee situation, and as you would expect, it is filled with anti-Israel spin:

Today there are millions of Palestinians living in exile from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations.

The implication is that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs lived in the area for generations, and this is simply false. A great percentage, perhaps as high as half, moved into Palestine after the Zionists started building a thriving economy in the late 19th century.

Many still suffer the legacy of their dispossession: destitution, penury, insecurity.

Because they are stuck in "refugee" camps by their Arab "brethren."

Palestinian historians, and some Israelis, call 1948 a clear example of ethnic cleansing - perpetrated by the Haganah (later the Israeli Defence Forces) and armed Jewish gangs.

Official Israeli history, by contrast, says most Palestinian refugees left to avoid a war instigated by neighbouring Arab states, though it admits a "handful" of expulsions and unauthorised killings.

The BBC does not admit that any impartial historians support the "official Israeli history" which implies that it is lying propaganda, while the far-left Israeli historians and Palestinian Arab historians are not spun that way at all. It is clear who the BBC believes.

What is undisputed is that the refugees' fate is excluded from most Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts because, given a right of return, their numbers endanger the future of the world's only Jewish state.

The issue of the refugees is therefore seen by many Israelis as an existential one.

Four million UN-registered Palestinian refugees trace origins to the 1948 exodus; 750,000 people belong to families displaced in 1967 - many for the second time.

Palestinian advocacy group Badil says another million and a half hail from pre-1948 Palestine but were not UN-registered, while an additional 274,000 were internally displaced inside Israel after 1948, and 150,000 were displaced in the occupied territories after 1967.

That makes more than six million people, one of the biggest displaced populations in the world.

Note how the BBC accepts Badil's numbers without question. Also there is a sleight-of-hand here where the BBC, like Badil, is not differentiating between "refugees" and "displaced persons," lumping the PalArabs who moved within Israel after 1948 or the Jordanian citizens who moved to Jordan in 1967 - who are citizens of their countries - together with the dwindling refugee numbers and their ever-increasing descendants. The only purpose in doing this is the exaggerate the problem, not to illuminate it.

Israel steadfastly argues that all refugees - and it disputes the numbers - should relinquish any aspirations to return to what is now its territory, and instead be absorbed by Arab host countries or by a future Palestinian state.

The BBC doesn't bother to report Israel's count, because they accept the Palestinian Arab narrative and reject Israel's.

It disavows moral responsibility by arguing that 800,000 Mizrahi Jews were displaced from Arab countries between 1945 and 1956 (most of whom settled in Israel) and insists Palestinians left willingly.

But that view is at odds with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Resolution 194 asserts the refugees' unconditional right of return to live at peace in their old homes or to receive compensation for their losses.

The exact text is "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date..." Since they have not shown the desire to live in peace with Jews, this shows that the BBC's interpretation is incorrect.
As far as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country," it is unclear whether this applies - their country, presumably the British mandate of Palestine, no longer exists. Their returning to their homes, in fact, would compromise the Jews' and Israelis' rights to self-determination, which is enshrined in Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The BBC ignores that issue, only concerning itself with the rights of the Palestinian Arabs.

Even if the UDHR applied, it would only apply to the original 1948 refugees, not to the generations that follow.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of their cause, the practicality of return and questions of moral justice, in Mid-East diplomacy the refugees' fate has been largely ignored.

This has been achieved by a dual process pegging all solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict to the 1967 war, and discounting the events of 1948 as an element of the conflict.

Here the BBC seems to be advocating Israel's destruction, by saying that the descendants of Palestinian Arabs do have the right to move back to pre-1948 towns that no longer exist while Israel does not have the right to determine who can become a citizen.

Israel has effectively deployed a number of arguments to justify this, such as saying that it is the only Jewish state, the refuge of Jews from around the world, while there are 22 Arab countries where the refugees could go.

It also points out that UN General Assembly resolutions have no force under international law and says the unassimilated refugee population has been held hostage by frontline Arab states waiting for Israel's destruction.

The diplomatic focus on 1967 has been advantageous for Israel: territory occupied at that time is regarded as the entire problem, and solutions can therefore be limited to dividing up that land.

This is problematic for Palestinians, however, because it sidelines the Nakba, the "catastrophe" of 1948 - an issue that for them lies at the heart of the conflict.

Notice how the BBC consistently parrots the Palestinian Arab viewpoints as being factual and without attribution, while the Israeli viewpoints are always attributed to Israel and thus implying that they are biased.

Also notice how the BBC doesn't put quotes around the word "Nakba", because it agrees with its characterization as being a catastrophe.

Palestinians accuse Israel of a kind of "Nakba-denial", absolving itself of liability, but thereby condemning itself to perpetual conflict with its Arab neighbours.

Israel vigorously denies such a characterisation. Zionist historians justify what happened in 1948 by saying the new Jewish state was threatened with annihilation by the invading Arab armies.

But some of Israel's "new", or revisionist, historians argue that its founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, exaggerated the Arab threat, in order to implement a covert plan to expel Palestinian civilians and grab as much of the former Palestine as possible.

Again, it is clear who the BBC believes, and again it doesn't consider the idea that non-Zionist historians may believe the Zionist narrative. It is consistently pushing the revisionist historian viewpoint as the truth - and it simply isn't.

Demography - the need to have a large majority of Jews to sustain a Jewish state - has certainly been a key concern for Israel since its foundation.

Under a 1947 UN-sanctioned plan to partition Palestine, Israel would have been established on 55% of the former territory, and without a significant transfer of population the Jews in that territory would have scarcely exceeded the Arab population there.

The 1948 war ended with Israel in control of 78% of the former Palestine, with a Jewish-Arab ratio of 6:1.

The equation brought security for Jewish Israelis, but emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns of 700,000 inhabitants - the kernel of the Palestinian refugee problem today.

With the justification of not wanting to jeopardise its Jewish majority, Israel has kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants out of negotiations on a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

But for most Palestinians, their fate remains an open wound, unless there is a Middle East peace deal that acknowledges what happened to the refugees.

To its credit, the BBC does not seem to refer to current PalArabs as "refugees" but it still assumes that somehow, uniquely in the world, descendants of a single refugee population has the right to move back to the country of its ancestors no matter how long after they leave. The concept that they should be absorbed by their host countries, as refugees have been for millennia, is not on the BBC radar because they wholly swallow the lie that Palestinian Arabs deserve to move to a country that the vast majority have never lived in.

They similarly absolve the Arab nations from their role in keeping the PalArabs in their miserable state and using them as pawns in their own fight against Israel. That story is simply ignored, as is the discrimination that Palestinian Arabs suffer in most Arab countries.

This is not an unbiased history - this is a clear advocation of the Arab viewpoint and it is wrong more often than it is right.

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Teaching the "Naqba" to Israeli Arabs - and Jews

YNet reports:

The Education Ministry has authorized Arab schools to use a history book featuring the establishing of the State of Israel as a disastrous to the Palestinians, Israel radio published Sunday.

The third-grade book, Living together in Israel, states that some Arab residents were driven out of their homes and became refugees and that Israel confiscated many of their lands.

The book's authors made it a point to state that it was the Arabs that refused the United Nations offer to divide the land between the Palestinian and the Jews (UN resolution 181), while the Jews accepted it.

"When the war ended, the Jews prevailed and Israel and its neighbors signed a truce… the Arabs call the war the 'Nakba', meaning the war of disaster and destruction. The Jews call it the War of Independence."
...
Tamir's decision sparked harsh criticism: National Religious Party Chairman MK Zevulun Orlev called on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to fire Tamir immediately saying her decision was "anti-Zionist and goes against the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state."

Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman slammed Tamir's decision as well "Tamir is like Avraham Burg. She expresses not only the post-Zionist spirit but also political masochism. The political left is constantly looking for ways to justify the other side, when we have nothing to apologize for."

Both sides are wrong.

It is impossible to be completely objective when writing anything, and schoolbooks are no exception. The overriding concern when writing schoolbooks must be the truth, an important secondary concern must be that the children are being taught to be good citizens of the nation that they belong to.

As my continuing Palestinian Arab history series shows, 1948 was a catastrophe for most Arabs in Palestine. But the reason that it was so disastrous for them was not because the Jews managed to avoid being pushed into the sea as the combined Arab world so fervently desired. The reason it was a Naqba was because the Arabs of Palestine were treated like dirt by their own leaders and by the leaders of the Arab world. They were used as pawns by Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, for his own aggrandizement and anti-semitic aims; they were used as pawns by the Arab League, they were used as pawns by the Arab nations who committed them to refugee camps, and (as we will see as the series continues, iy"h) they were and are continuing to be used by the UNRWA for its own self-preservation. (From the pan-Arab perspective, 1948 was also a tragedy - because weak dhimmi Jews winning a war against the proud Arab nation was the ultimate disgrace. Histories must emphasize the honor/shame society of Arabs as well in explaining why this was a "naqba.")

No one should discount the fact that Israel did end up destroying many Arab villages after 1948 but at the same time no one should disregard that the reasons that most of the Arabs fled were more due to fear of fighting in general and the conviction that other Arab nations would take care of them rather than from any sort of Zionist policy of expulsion. Yes, most Arabs ended up leaving their homes - that should not be denied - but the context can and must be taught. Israel has little to be ashamed of in the 1948 war, as the infant Zionist state had to make decisions to ensure its survival first. The proven examples of how Zionists tried to stop Arabs from leaving Haifa , how outside Arab armies forced the Arab residents to leave Tiberias, how the residents of Abu Ghosh aimed at peaceful relations with the Jews, - all these need to be taught, just as Deir Yassin must be taught in the proper context for the right age groups.

Classic Zionist histories have ignored some events that muddy the waters in the Paul Newman/"Exodus"-style histories. "Post-Zionist" histories have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, blaming the Jews for events that overtook them and for decisions that had to be made quickly in the context of their very survival (as well as looking at 1948 through the lens of 21st century multiculturalism.) The truth must be the main concern when writing textbooks, and both sides have not spent nearly enough effort describing what the Arabs of 1948 knew on their own - the major reason for Palestinian Arab suffering is their treatment by their Arab "brethren" and self-anointed "leaders," and to a large extent this remains true today.

There is no reason why the true story of 1948 cannot be taught, warts and all, to Israeli Arabs and to Israeli Jews. In the end, when one looks at the facts, Israel's War of Independence is nothing to be ashamed of.

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PA newspaper admits Arabs responsible for "naqba"

Palestinian Media Watch caught a column by Mahmoud Al-Habbash for the PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadeedah where he blames the Arab leadership squarely for the Palestinian Arabs leaving their homes in 1948.

“…The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the “Catastrophe” [[the establishment of Israel and the creation of refugee problem] in 1948, that the duration of the exile will not be long, and that it will not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees will return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those “Arkuvian” promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events…" [Term "Arkuvian,” is after Arkuv – a figure from Arab tradition - who was known for breaking his promises and for his lies."] ”

I found the column in Arabic (autotranslated) and the writer uses the 1948 experience as a springboard to describe how Arab leaders continue to lie to the Palestinian Arabs even today.

He brings examples:

• Arab leaders promised to lift the embargo against the Palestinian Arabs and didn't follow through.
• The Arab governments and Iran promised to give hundreds of millions of dollars that didn't materialize.
• The PalArab leaders themselves promise to find the murderers of many within the territories, including the murderers of the three kids last week, and nothing ever materializes.

It is a very bitter column that is noteworthy not only in how it portrays 1948 but in the matter-of-fact way it is mentioned, as if every Palestinian Arab knows the real facts behind what happened then - it is only one paragraph in this article and if this was a novel concept for most Palestinian Arabs he would have adduced some proof.

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Happy Naqba!

I just wanted to wish all of my readers a Happy Naqba!

As Hossam Ezzedine, the terror apologist for AFP, describes it:

Palestinians marked the worst day in their history, determined to lift damaging economic sanctions and warning that Israeli unilateralism could kill off a two-state solution.

Indeed, it was the worst day of their history. (Notwithstanding that they weren't called "Palestinians" for at least 15 years afterwards...)

Because what exactly happened in May of 1948? Instead of accepting a Palestinian Arab state that the UN offered, they decided to try to wipe out the Jews.

Of course it was a disaster! They chose wrong and lost!

In 1948 there could have been a Palestinian Arab state with its own flag, currency, and international legitimacy. If they would have chosen peace with Israel they would have jobs, a good economy, oceanfront property, and an incredibly tiny Jewish state next door.

So, in commemoration of the incredibly bigoted and stupid move that their forefathers chose, they celebrate the annual event of the disaster of their own making. They wave flags and shout empty slogans and threaten the West and make friends with Iran and Syria and support terrorists.

And here's the funniest part - they could have a state today! They could declare a Palestinian Arab state in Gaza and easily get more than half the UN to recognize them as a legitimate state - any hour of any day they choose. They could invite the gigantic Palestinian "diaspora" to help them build their country in the areas that Israel no longer enters. They could be preparing the institutions needed to run their state. It is all there for the asking.

After all, the very day that Britain left Palestine was the day the Israel declared itself independent. It isn't that hard.

But evidently it is preferable to complain about a naqba rather than do anything about it.

Because they do have a currency today - and that currency is whining.

They have learned that they get more attention by whining to the world about their self-imposed catastrophe than by doing something about it. They whine about occupation, they whine about having no money, they whine about Israelis defending themselves, they whine about a Jewish mom in Samaria building a new bathroom on her house. They love when their kids get killed, because a funeral is worth many, many whines.

Complaining is its own reward. It gets results - nations throw money at the whiners, at least at whiners about Israel.

So we will be seeing many, many more decades of Naqba celebrations. You can whine more easily about catastrophes that you pretend happened to you than about the hard work you refuse to do. And it is hard to teach an entire generation how to work when they have been raised to whine.

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The "Naqba" no one talks about

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs expelled from their homes. Expulsions, summary executions of civilians by the brutal soldiers, horrendous torture, and mass detentions under the cover of war. None of them able to return to the homes they lived in all their lives.

This is not Israel in 1948, but Kuwait in 1992.

350,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes in Kuwait - and no one talks about it.

By almost any measure, Arabs have treated their Palestinian brethren worse than the Jews ever dreamed about. But this is not a story that you will hear Palestinian Arabs mention. They would prefer that the world pressue Jews, and not think about documented abuses from the first Gulf War (not to mention abuses of Palestinian Arabs in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world.)

Now, why are these "naqbas" ignored? Could it be that the point of Palestinian Arab victimhood is really about destroying Israel, and not at all about Arab "survivors" of 1948 and 1967?

I only found this article fully quoted in one place on the Internet, although bits and pieces of the story can be found in many places, including most on-line encyclopedias and histories fo the Gulf War.

Here is how the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported the situation of the Palestinian Arabs of Kuwait in the aftermath of the first Gulf War (September 9, 1992):

DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS, and pundits alike have described the "liberation of Kuwait" as an apex in U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. With great fanfare and pronouncements of new openness and democracy for the oil-rich kingdom, the emir returned to his palace, rebuilt complete with gold toilet seats courtesy of the U.S. Army.

But those promises of freedom lasted only as long as television news teams stayed in Kuwait City. Reports from human rights monitors detail an ongoing Kuwaiti campaign to punish and expel the 350,000 Palestinians living in Kuwait before the war. Today, all but 60,000 Palestinians have been driven out by a combination of summary executions, torture, detention, forced expulsions, and a variety of other pressures. And according to human rights workers, Kuwait is trying to squeeze those last few out quickly.
...

More than 50 percent of Kuwait's prewar population was Palestinian. Many had lived their whole lives in Kuwait, holding positions from banking and business to laborers. Many were members of the professional classes that helped build Kuwait into a relatively modern society.

Roughly half of Kuwait's Palestinians, some 180,000, left during Iraq's occupation. But the real horror began with liberation.

The Kuwaitis launched a brutal campaign of punishment and expulsion against the Palestinians for the PLO's opposition to the Gulf War, ostensibly for their "collaboration" with the Iraqi invaders, despite the fact that many Palestinians had fought and died with the Kuwaiti resistance.

In April 1991, Amnesty International reported that "scores of victims had been killed and hundreds more had been arbitrarily arrested, many brutally tortured by Kuwaiti armed forces and members of the resistance." The report found that "teams of torturers often appeared to work in relays, maintaining the torture for hours."

Amnesty International has documented that 40 Palestinians were summarily executed, and another 120 disappeared. Five thousand were detained, most of whom were beaten and/or tortured. Another 7,000 Palestinians were formally expelled.

Kuwaiti officials have admitted that some excesses happened, but claimed these occurred without their knowledge and were committed by citizens who had endured great hardships by Iraqi invaders and their alleged collaborators.

But the implicit Kuwaiti government approval for these atrocities is underscored by the fact that no one has been brought to justice for crimes committed against Palestinians. Aziz Abu-Hamad, a senior researcher at Middle East Watch, said the Kuwaiti government has not made any serious effort to locate the 120 vanished Palestinians. Mass graves have been discovered, but Kuwaiti authorities have made no attempt to exhume these graves and identify the bodies.

An agency was created, called State Security Intelligence Police, Abu-Hamad said, which made a practice of telling Palestinians that if they didn't leave, "we'll come after you."

And the government has made it all but financially impossible for Palestinians to remain in Kuwait. All foreigners who worked for the Kuwaiti government were fired immediately after the Iraqi invasion. After the war, most foreign workers were rehired, but no Palestinians. Private employers followed suit. The oil and banking industries were forbidden to rehire Palestinians.

Besides throwing all Palestinians out of work, the Kuwaiti rulers are refusing to give them back wages, severance pay (one month's salary for each year of service under Kuwaiti law), or pension funds they are owed until they have their passport stamped with an exit visa (which gives them one week to leave).

By June 1992, another 110,000 Palestinians had left Kuwait, and a deadline of Sept. 30 will soon be announced for the remaining 60,000 Palestinians, Abu-Hamad said.

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Why Israel's creation is a "naqba"

Among all of the events of Arab and Muslim history, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 appears to be unique.

Muslims have suffered defeats in war beforehand. Christians in Spain defeated the Muslims in the 15th century, Napoleon conquered Egypt, European nations occupied most of North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire kept losing territory and influence from the 17th century until its total disappearance after World War I.

Yet only one event, involving a tiny amount of territory that was all but abandoned by the Arab world for centuries, gets the moniker "naqba", catastrophe.

In what sense is it so important? By any objective measure (number of Muslims killed, number of Muslim refugees, amount of territory involved, the margin of victory), Israel's War of Independence is barely a skirmish in the vast history of Muslim conquests and defeats. (Kuwait expelled more Palestinians in 1991 than Israel did in any war, for example.)

So, what is unique about the establishment of the State of Israel that makes Arab and Muslim blood boil so disproportionately to the actual damage done?

Only one answer makes sense. It is not that the Muslims were defeated, it is who defeated them.

Animosity between Jews and Arabs is as old as the Bible, where the descendents of Ishmael and Isaac always had problems with each other. But as is well known, for many centuries Jews did prosper under Muslim rule more than under Christian rule.

It is important to understand that as a tiny minority in Muslim and Arab countries, Jews posed no threat (and were indeed more similar to the Muslims than the Christians were.) They were clearly second-class citizens, dhimmis. There were still blood libels and other nastiness, but comparatively Jews were well off - as long as they kept their place as dhimmis.

Israel and Zionism changed everything. All of a sudden, the uppity Jews were saying that they had a right to own and control land in the Middle East - equal to the Muslims. The Arab nations could not fit that into their worldview of Jews as naturally second-class citizens, and therefore they attacked the Jews, both in Israel and in their own countries.

What's worse, the Jews had the audacity to be able to fight and win! Muslim pride could not handle such an affront. The weak Jews didn't know their place and this was what caused the Arabs to expel hundreds of thousands of Jews from their midst in the '40s and '50s - an extreme example of pure bigotry that gets next to no mention in the press nowadays.

In some ways, the 1967 war was even worse for Arab pride. They could almost, almost come up with excuses why the hated Zionists beat their combined armies in 1948, but in 1967 they all but guaranteed their people a swift and complete destruction of the Jewish state - and they were routed, by only Jews, with no help from any other country.

More attacks on Arab pride followed: Israel, in a few decades, built a modern and wildly successful society. In the very middle of the failing Arab League nations. They built farms in deserts, they created universities, they built a high-tech powerhouse, they successfully integrated Jews from all over the world. And they did this without any real natural resources. In a short time, Israel's very success at building a nation hurt Arab pride as much as its military successes.

There are two parts of the (specifically) Arab psyche that are at play here. One, as mentioned, is pride. Extreme pride precludes the possibility of admitting mistakes, or adjusting strategy. Even Sadat said that he could not have considered peace with Israel unless Egypt managed to wage a more successful war that 1967 - the Yom Kippur war was a war for pride. (Losing in war is an even bigger deal to Arabs because so much of Arab history revolves around the sword, romanticizing the best warriors.)

The second, related part that needs to be understood is that Muslims in general, and Arabs in particular, seem to have a big inferiority complex. This comes, I believe, from the rise of the West since the Middle Ages. The Arab world went from being leaders in science and art to also-rans, and the Western superiority in all secular areas kept increasing. Now, as long as Westerners stayed West, it is possible to ignore this widening gap. Excuses could be made. But when Israel came about, where a land that had been a wasteland became a modern high-tech mecca (so to speak) in such a short time, it was no longer possible to ignore the obvious lifestyle differences between the West and the Arab world. Everything that the Arab leaders told their people to keep them in place was being shown to be wrong on a daily basis - women could be successful, democracy works, the free market creates prosperity, individualism allows flexibility, Jews are smart and strong, and freedom is a better social model than despotism. Arabs who live in Israel enjoy a higher standard of living and more freedom than any Arab population in the Middle East.

This is why the creation of Israel is a "catastrophe." The threat to the Arab world is not territorial, it is existential - because freedom is not compatible with what Arab leaders want for their subjects. As long as Israel is demonized, they have a chance of convincing the people that Israel is an aberration of history, a speed-bump on the road to eventual Muslim triumph. But the freedom that Israel represents and the quality of life that Israel enjoys is a poke in the eye of Arab pride.

And the fact that it is Jews who managed to perform these miracles makes it all the more painful.

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