Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 05, 2008

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.

Hamas has killed almost 60 "Mohammeds"

Firas Press (Arabic) reports:

A media spokesman for the Fatah movement issued a list of nearly sixty people carrying the name of the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) who they said that Hamas killed in Gaza between the elections in December/January 2006 until their coup on June 13, 2007.

The article goes on to list all of them.

Apparently, profaning the name of Mohammed is much worse for Islamists than actually killing people with that name.

UNRWA runs out of fuel - guess whose fault it is?

Once again, the UNRWA in Gaza will have to curtail some of its operations due to a fuel shortage.

Whose fault is it?

AFP writes:

The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees is to suspend its food aid distribution in Gaza on Monday because of a lack of fuel caused by the Israeli blockade, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Sounds like Israel's fault, right?

Reuters adds a little more info:

The United Nations is set to halt delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip on Monday because its vehicles have run out of fuel, a U.N. official said.
Gaza has been facing a fuel shortage because of Israeli restrictions on supplies and a strike by Palestinian fuel distributors.

Slightly better , but go down a few more paragraphs to the end of the article and all of a sudden you learn a couple of tiny, salient facts:

An Israeli official said some diesel fuel intended for Gaza's power station had passed through on Sunday, but the transfer was halted when militants attacked the Nahal Oz fuel depot on the Israeli side of the Gaza border with mortar bombs.

The official added that as well as diesel for electricity and cooking gas, Israel was prepared to transfer petrol and diesel for vehicles but he said Gazans were not able to take delivery.

The Gaza fuel association said it went on strike to protest over Israel's supply limits which were cut back sharply after Palestinian militants attacked the Nahal Oz depot last month killing two Israeli civilians.

One would think that Gazans, supposedly so desperate for fuel, shooting mortars at their fuel suppliers would be somewhat more newsworthy than a throwaway paragraph at the end of a story implying Israel is withholding fuel to cause a humanitarian crisis. In fact, Israel tried to send the needed amounts over and were stopped by terrorists. Shouldn't that be made clear in the lede?

But then again, AFP and Reuters might have a little bit of an agenda.

UK Holocaust-denying professor loses job

Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, a professor of astronomy at University College, London, has been fired for his rather interesting views.

For example, he wrote about visitors to Auschwitz:

Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some forty-five thousand volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its the theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there. Let’s hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, some of which still exist, where the postman would collect the mail twice-weekly.

Not surprisingly, he is also a 9/11 (and 7/7) "truther" claiming that both attacks were done at the behest of Zionists.

No doubt he will bitterly complain about his loss of "freedom of speech," although no one is stopping him from continuing to publish at "revisionist" sites like CODOH.

Palestinian Arab lie #82,512

Spotted at a "Comment is Free" article at the Guardian, which should probably be renamed Comments are Worthless...

Last week in Gaza, Israel not only continued depriving the people of fuel and cooking gas, it held back supplies to UN agencies such as Unrwa - the agency devoted to the health, education, food supplies and more of Gaza's poor and deprived population. In hindering the operations of the UN, Israel was hindering the Quartet, of which the UN is a part.

Of course, it was Hamas that stopped fuel from going to UNRWA, not Israel - a fact that even UNRWA admits, and excuses.

Iran threatens Europe, no one notices

From IRNA:

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki here on Saturday warned European countries not to cross Iran's red lines.
Mottaki made the remark in response to the new proposal made by Group 5+1 in London.
The European countries are well aware of Iran's red lines, he underlined.
During his joint press conference with his Yemeni counterpart Abu Bakr al-Qurbi, Mottaki referred to his recent meeting with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in Kuwait and said he was informed that on May 2nd the Group 5+1 would gather in London to write a letter for Tehran.
"I told him that you are quite familiar with Iran's red lines, therefore, you should avoid crossing those lines," Mottaki said.

It's only been three weeks since reports surfaced of a new Iranian missile launch site that had the range to reach most of Europe.

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?

Flag tilt

From the LA Times Middle East blog:

Israelis have a knack for doing things backwards, sideways and upside-down — anything but straight. The country's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was famous for standing on his head. And now, even the Israeli flag is upside-down.
Israel's Bank Hapoalim printed the flags, which were given out free with the weekend papers, as a well-meant gesture of corporate patriotism before Independence Day next week. Thing is, they're printed wrong. The Star of David is misaligned in reference to the stripes, and essentially it rests on its side rather than its tip. Oops. "This is what happens, apparently, when we leave our Zionist creation up to the Chinese," said Israel Radio's Amikam Rothman this morning.

The design of the flag was first displayed in 1885 and first used in 1897, until being adopted by the state in 1948.

This is the flag I got with today's Maariv newspaper.

Investigation proves Beit Hanoun blast was Palestinian

From JPost:

A blast in northern Gaza that killed a Palestinian mother and her four children on Monday was not caused by the Israeli Air Force, a probe into the explosion conducted by the IDF Southern Command concluded on Friday.

Col. Shai Alkilai from the Southern Command conducted the probe over the last few days under orders from OC Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant and IAF Commander Maj. Gen. Elazar Shkedi.

The blast under investigation occurred Monday morning in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, when according to Palestinians, an IDF tank shell hit the home of the Abu Meatak family, as the mother Miyasar was preparing breakfast for her children. She was killed together with the four children.

According to the findings of the probe four terrorists were spotted carrying weaponry and explosives on their backs. The IAF fire was on target and only hit the armed terrorists. As a result there occurred secondary explosions which destroyed the home and killed the mother and her children.

The IDF probe ruled out the possibility that the family was hit by IDF fire. The IDF probe also revealed that the secondary explosion was far greater than the type of explosion caused by the initial IDF bombing and the munitions it had used.

This is largely consistent with the findings of B'Tselem and Al-Jazeera and completely at odds with the initial "eyewitness" accounts that were published immediately worldwide in thousands of media outlets as fact.

And even though the Palestinian Arabs have a consistent track record of lying in the aftermath of events like these, the world media will still trust them more than the Israelis.

See my earlier coverage here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE 1: Video

UPDATE 2: YNet adds more details:

At around 8 am, a cell of four terrorists was spotted firing at Givati troops operating in the Beit Hanoun area. IDF officials in the command room followed the cell, confirmed that they were terrorists carrying explosives, and for attempted to determine the place where they would be attacked by an IAF aircraft.
The cell members were spotted moving 400 meters away from the forces. At 8:13 am, an aircraft fired at two of the cell members, hitting them. One of the terrorists was killed and his friend was wounded. The army continued to follow the injured terrorist, and about a munite later the aircraft fired another missile at him, identifying an accurate hit.

Footage released by the IDF on Friday shows that civilians standing several meters away from the terrorist were not hurt. As the missile used to target him was accurate. The location selected by the IDF for targeting the second terrorist is close to a grape orchard, where not every civilian can be seen, and about three meters away from the gate of the Palestinian family's home.

Seven minutes after the second missile was fired, reports were received about civilians being hit, and several hours later it turned out that the family members were killed. The family was hit after the second missile was fired, and according to estimates, weapons carried by the terrorist led to greater damage. The house's gate apparently flew at the family members, who were at the time outside the house, inside the grape orchard.
A number of sub-blasts took place following the first explosion, as a result of the weapons carried by the terrorists, which were not directly caused by the missile explosion. As part of the inquiry, the IDF examined previous incident in which similar missiles were fired.

The part about the family being outside is new; B'Tselem didn't say that although one of the photos of the scene seemed to indicate that at least one kid was outside. At any rate, the "preparing breakfast" part of the story is in doubt.

Arab countries reneging on aid pledges to their Palestinian brethren

From BBC:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stressed that pledges made at the Paris conference were for the Palestinian people, not the US.

"Clearly when you make a pledge you ought to fulfil it," she said after the talks.

US officials say that of $717m promised by Arab League members, only $153m of Arab pledges have been delivered, all from three countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Algeria.

Ms Rice was careful not to pinpoint individual Arab states for criticism.

It should be noted that Arab pledges only accounted for less than 10% of the total pledges made at the donor conference, despite huge windfall oil profits and non-stop rhetoric about how important the Palestinian issue is to them.

Press reports of the conference show that Kuwait pledged $300 million at the time and has evidently not delivered a penny. Saudi Arabia pledged $500 million and the UAE $300 million, all over three years. I could find no reports of any pledges from Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen or other Arab countries.

Which goes to show that Arab nations care less about their Palestinian brethren than the infidel West does.

Today's peaceful Gaza news

Palestine Press Agency reports that people who are arrested by Hamas in Gaza find out during interrogation that Hamas has all of their phone records and is monitoring them.

A 45-year old Palestinian Arab was murdered by some of those mysterious "unknown gunmen" in Rafah. He was shot with four bullets at point blank range.

12 were injured in Gaza, including women and children, by Hamas policemen who beat them while waiting in line to get cooking gas.

Hamas prevented Fatah and other groups from holding May Day celebrations in Rafah.

Our 2008 PalArab self-death count is at 65.

UPDATE: A man transliterated as Mohiuddin Cup who was an officer in the "Presidential Guards" was murdered in Gaza City. 66.

Judenrein Hebron

There are hundreds of articles that talk about the supposed suffering of Palestinian Arabs in Hebron, as the Jews who live there are characterized as radical, zealous extremists who impose their capricious will on the frightened populace. An entire UN team and a separate Christian group painstakingly report every real and imagined crime done by Jews in Hebron.

But this morning, Ma'an reports:

Palestinian police handed over an Israeli citizen to the Israeli authorities on Friday morning, who claimed he had entered Hebron by mistake.

The Israeli authorities said that any Israeli who enters area "A" is going against the orders of the Israeli military commander.

Casual observers have no idea that "Area A" (or H1) the Judenrein part of Hebron, exists.

Fewer still know that this area comprises 80% of Hebron.

This area includes parts that were unquestioningly Jewish owned before the 1929 massacre that killed 67 Jews in Hebron, driving them out of the city that they had lived in for thousands of years continuously. And Jews are still not allowed to return to those areas, as the world considers the concept of "return" to exclusively belong to Palestinian Arabs, not Palestinian Jews.

Since 1967, the Arab population of Hebron has ballooned from 38,000 to over 130,000, hardly evidence of Israeli oppression.

Only by sheer luck did the Jew who wandered into the Judenrein part of Hebron this morning survive without getting murdered.

Since Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994, at least 50 Jews have been murdered in that area in terror attacks, including a massacre of 12 Jews coming from synagogue in 2002, but no international or Christian teams care about protecting them.

Fatah terror groups didn't agree to "calm" in Cairo

The press has been buzzing about a supposed agreement between twelve Palestinian Arab terror groups in Cairo for a "calm" or temporary truce with Israel:

Palestinian militant factions agreed on Wednesday to a proposal for a truce with Israel that Egyptian mediators will now try to sell to the Jewish state, a senior Egyptian official said.

The 12 groups meeting in Cairo agreed to the plan, already backed by Hamas and Fatah, for a "comprehensive, simultaneous and reciprocal period of calm to be applied progressively, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank," Egypt's MENA news agency said, without naming the official.

A deal for a six-month period of calm had already been accepted by the Islamist movement Hamas, while Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, from rival Fatah, on Sunday gave the negotiations unconditional support.

...The agreement of Islamic Jihad, which fires most rockets from Gaza into Israel, is seen as crucial for the deal. However, a spokesman for the group said they would respect a truce but not sign it if it applied only in Gaza.

Other factions at the Cairo talks include the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) as well as the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and the Popular Struggle Front (PSF).

No one in the media seems to have noticed the absence of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades of Fatah from these reports. The PA sent a representative but he was not an Al Aqsa member, and Al-Aqsa is quite at odds with the official PA/Abbas position on the use of terror.

A good number of terror and rocket attacks out of Gaza are claimed by Al Aqsa. A barrage on Wednesday was claimed by them, and some on Tuesday were claimed by another Fatah-linked group not mentioned in the articles about the agreement, the Abu Ammar Brigades.

The "agreement" is worthless, but the apparent absence of major players - from the most prominent Palestinian Arab faction - shows that it is a joke as well.

Efraim Karsh on the real history of 1948

Historian Efraim Karsh destroys the myth of Zionist dispossession of Arabs in 1948. From Commentary (excerpts):

mainstream Zionism not only took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann, then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a peace-and-cooperation agreement with the Hashemite emir Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal’s elder brother and founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab elites of all hues.
As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict “was uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,” and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit “from active policies of cooperation and development.” Behind this proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would ease the path for the local Arab populace to become permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel’s first prime minister, argued in December 1947:

If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, . . . if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance.

_____________

No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third.

That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to Mandate Palestine’s socioeconomic well-being. ...

Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that most Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent attempt ten years later by the mufti-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective “government” of the Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 UN partition resolution. With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in their minds, many opted to stay out of the fight. In no time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban areas) were negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors; other localities throughout the country acted similarly without the benefit of a formal agreement.

Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying their supreme leadership. In his numerous tours around the region, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of Jerusalem and the mufti’s close relative, found the populace indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms. In Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the salaried force he sought to form in that city; his efforts in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya were hardly more successful. Arab villagers, for their part, proved even less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa, Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven out by angry residents protesting their village’s transformation into a hub of anti-Jewish attacks. Even the few who answered his call did so, by and large, in order to obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then return home.

...Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, scathingly found the Palestinians “unreliable, excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized warfare virtually unemployable.”

This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the fateful six months of fighting after the passing of the partition resolution. Even as these months saw the all but complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab society, nowhere was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely viewed by Arab leaders as “Zionist in inspiration, Zionist in principle, Zionist in substance, and Zionist in most details” (in the words of the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid about their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the bloodletting.

Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the Jews set out to lay the groundwork for their nascent state while simultaneously striving to convince their Arab compatriots that they would be (as Ben-Gurion put it) “equal citizens, equal in everything without any exception,” Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that “should partition be implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the Arabs of Palestine, their sons, and their women.” Qawuqji vowed “to drive all Jews into the sea.” Abdel Qader Husseini stated that “the Palestine problem will only be solved by the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine.”

...As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well, and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale violence. Thus, the December 1947 murder of six Arab workers near the Haifa oil refinery by the small Jewish underground group IZL was followed by the immediate slaughter of 39 Jews by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some 100 Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948 was “avenged” within days by the killing of 77 Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus.

Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these gruesome events for what they were, at times withholding details so as to avoid panic and keep the door open for Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts not only inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented numerous nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April 21-22), for example, gave rise to totally false claims of a large-scale slaughter, which circulated throughout the Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18), during the battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa, where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of “hundreds of Arab men and women.” Accounts of Deir Yasin in the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and accusations of havoc and rape.

This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the widest possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and casting the Jews as brutal predators. But it backfired disastrously by spreading panic within the disoriented Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this phase of the Arab war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing was the second, wider, and more prolonged phase involving the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded Palestine in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to join the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to the road, leaving their homes either for places elsewhere in the country or fleeing to neighboring Arab lands.

...Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the war reached their own doorstep. “Arabs are leaving the country with their families in considerable numbers, and there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab centers,” reported Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that the “panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country.”

Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted in mid-December an “evacuation frenzy that has taken hold of entire Arab villages.” Before the month was over, many Palestinian Arab cities were bemoaning the severe problems created by the huge influx of villagers and pleading with the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early exodus, demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs to stay put and fight.

But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the AHC or from anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack of national cohesion, let alone any sense of shared destiny. Cities and towns acted as if they were self-contained units, attending to their own needs and eschewing the smallest sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many “national committees” (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export of food and drink from well-stocked cities to needy outlying towns and villages. Haifa’s Arab merchants refused to alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin, while Gaza refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron, armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time there was extensive smuggling, especially in the mixed-population cities, with Arab foodstuffs going to Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.

The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by the abysmal treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered throughout the country. Not only was there no collective effort to relieve their plight, or even a wider empathy beyond one’s immediate neighborhood, but many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and subjected to ridicule and abuse for their supposed cowardice. In the words of one Jewish intelligence report: “The refugees are hated wherever they have arrived.”

Even the ultimate war victims—the survivors of Deir Yasin—did not escape their share of indignities. Finding refuge in the neighboring village of Silwan, many were soon at loggerheads with the locals, to the point where on April 14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan delegation approached the AHC’s Jerusalem office demanding that the survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their relocation was forthcoming.

Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all, for fear of overstraining existing resources. In Acre (Akko), the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian population organized its own militia—not so much to fight the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially by fleecing them for such basic necessities as transportation and accommodation.

...What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is that they took place at a time when huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa on the AHC’s instructions, despite strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier, Tiberias’ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes. In Jaffa, Palestine’s largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.

As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, they hastened to get themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with quintessential British understatement:

You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the national committee has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.

Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during the 1948 war, would sum up the situation in these words: “The Palestinians had neighboring Arab states which opened their borders and doors to the refugees, while the Jews had no alternative but to triumph or to die.”
This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason for the refugees’ flight and radically distorts the quality of their reception elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy from their brethren at home, the reaction throughout the Arab world was, if anything, harsher still....

No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews. During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover that while the refugees

express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.

Read the whole thing. I think that Karsh exaggerates the Arab calls to evacuate and minimizes the Zionists' taking advantage of the situation after the fact; I believe that the vast majority of those who left did so due to simple fear combined with the expectation that they could start over again elsewhere, as their ancestors had done countless times. Read my analysis here in part 8 of my history series.

Either way, the point is that Jews did not actively try to depopulate Palestine of its Arab population and this myth has been kept alive for propaganda and political purposes - the same reasons that the descendants of the original 1948 refugees themselves are being kept in camps to this very day. And while the "Nakba" will be loudly celebrated in the coming weeks, the real catastrophe is not what happened during a few months in 1948 but how Palestinian Arabs have been treated by their brethren over the past 60 years.

Baby tossing!

This is spreading quickly through the Internet, and who am I to stop it?

A bizarre Indian Muslim (and, apparently, Hindu) ritual of throwing babies off of a 50 foot mosque:

Here are some of the physical consequences of shaking a baby:

The brain rotates within the skull cavity, injuring or destroying brain tissue.

When shaking occurs, blood vessels feeding the brain can be torn, leading to bleeding around the brain.

Blood pools within the skull, sometimes creating more pressure within the skull and possibly causing additional brain damage.

Retinal (back of the eye) bleeding is very common.