- POINT 1: Arab governments are not responsible for the first phase of the 1948 War which lasted from the day the UN Partition Resolution passed on Nov. 29 1947 until May 14, 1948. This was only a civil war between Zionists and Palestinian Arabs.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments shared direct responsibility with the Palestinian Arabs for the first phase of the 1948 War. They helped organize the resistance and supplied ideological support
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Arabs are determined to wage war with the same determination and force as during the Crusades…." King Ibn Saud warned President Truman when the Partition Resolution was proposed. [1]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab League pledged to support Palestinian resistance to increased Jewish immigration and to any partition proposals, and pledged to intervene militarily if necessary in meetings at Bludan, Syria (June 9, 1946) and at Sofar, Lebanon (September 16, 1947). [2]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab League organized meetings for the heads of all Arab nations in Cairo in December, 1947. Their overarching objective was "obstructing the partition plan, preventing the creation of a Jewish state, and preserving Palestine as an independent unified Arab state." [3]
- Supporting Evidence: As soon as the Partition Resolution passed, Jews in Arab countries were attacked. In Aleppo, 300 Jewish homes and 11 synagogues were burned to the ground and half the city's 4000 Jews fled. In Aden, 76 Jews were killed. [4]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Arabs are determined to wage war with the same determination and force as during the Crusades…." King Ibn Saud warned President Truman when the Partition Resolution was proposed. [1]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments shared direct responsibility with the Palestinian Arabs for the first phase of the 1948 War. The Arab League supplied money.
- COUNTERPOINT: The Arab states supplied military support. The Arab League organized and deployed the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) made up of volunteers from Arab states.
- Supporting Evidence: "Even before the vote in the UN, the Arab League had set up a Military Committee, to be headed by Gen. Ismail Safwat, former chief of staff of the Iraqi army, to assist the Palestinians" Historian Benny Morris The Arab League organized the ALA between September and December, 1947. [6]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Cairo Conference [of the Arab League] set a timetable for assembling volunteers in Syria…..Syrian officers such as Adib Shishkali or Muhammad Tzafa, and politicians such as Akram Hourani, conducted the recruiting campaign in central and northern Syria. Several thousand Iraqi. Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian recruits showed up at Qatana, registered and drilled. In January-February 1948 they departed for Palestine." British Archival Records [7]
- Supporting Evidence: By the end of January, 1948, 3000 of its troops had infiltrated Palestine. By mid-April, 1948 7,000-8,000 ALA troops were in Palestine. [8]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab League deployed troops along Palestine's border in October, 1947 before the Partition Resolution had even passed. Damascus sent several battalions, and a small Syrian force crossed the frontier. Historian Benny Morris [9]
- Supporting Evidence: "By early spring of 1948 the guerillas had divided Palestine into fronts. The northern sector [had] 7,000 men; the central sector was held by 5,000 men….the southern 'front'…about 2000 Moslem Brotherhood volunteers from Egypt." Historian Howard Sachar [10]
- Supporting Evidence: "With superiority in numbers…Arab operations …became more extensive by the winter and early spring of 1948. Assaults were launched against Jewish quarters in the cities, particularly in Jerusalem. There were concentrated attacks against outlying kibbutzim in the Hebron hills." Historian Howard Sachar [11]
- Supporting Evidence: "Even before the vote in the UN, the Arab League had set up a Military Committee, to be headed by Gen. Ismail Safwat, former chief of staff of the Iraqi army, to assist the Palestinians" Historian Benny Morris The Arab League organized the ALA between September and December, 1947. [6]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments shared direct responsibility with the Palestinian Arabs for the first phase of the 1948 War. ALA troops led military attacks against the Jews during this "civil war" phase of the conflict and put the Jews in a grave situation.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments may actually be responsible for causing the early phase of the war. Left to themselves, local Palestinians may have made peace with the partition and the existence of the Jewish state.
- Supporting Evidence: "In many instances, I succeeded in avoiding clashes between Arabs and Jews. We initiated a successful effort to convince out people that it was to our advantage to coexist peacefully with the Jewish people." Muhammed Nimr al-Hawari, Jaffa lawyer. 1947 [14]
- Supporting Evidence: "The countryside remained unexpectedly quiet. In several instances, villagers approached their Jewish neighbors offering peace and suggesting 'good neighbor' pacts." Historian Yoav Gelber [15]
- Supporting Evidence: Nimr al-Hauari, the Najada's [Palestinian para-military organization] chief and Jaffa's commander….pledged to preserve peace in Jaffa if the Jews did not get edgy every time some unruly thugs shot at them….The Mufti, he warned would ultimately succeed in undermining the moderates' position unless King Abdullah [of Transjordan] stood behind his Palestinian partisans." Jordan did not do so. [16]
- Supporting Evidence: "Left to their own devices, Arabs and Jews for the most part continued to live together peacefully, if fearfully. The Higher Committee's violence alone would not have precipitated a full-scale war between the two peoples. But the Palestinian Arabs and Jews were not left alone…." The Arab League intervened. Historian Howard Sachar [17]
- Supporting Evidence: "In many instances, I succeeded in avoiding clashes between Arabs and Jews. We initiated a successful effort to convince out people that it was to our advantage to coexist peacefully with the Jewish people." Muhammed Nimr al-Hawari, Jaffa lawyer. 1947 [14]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments shared direct responsibility with the Palestinian Arabs for the first phase of the 1948 War. They helped organize the resistance and supplied ideological support
- POINT 2: Israel was the aggressor in the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts the historical facts. Arab states, not Israel, refused to accept the UN Partition Resolution and chose to seek on the battlefield what they could not get from the world community: a unitary Palestinian state with an Arab majority.
- Supporting Evidence: Representatives from Arab nations told the UN's 1947 investigative committee that they "rejected partition and advocated a unitary, democratic state from which the illegal immigrants (ie Jews) would be expelled and where the remaining Jews would have no political rights." Historian Benny Morris [18]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha [19]
- Supporting Evidence: The Palestine Arabs rejected the Partition Resolution and fought against its implementation. They still maintain this position and insist on restoring Palestine as part of the Arab nation." Al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini (Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestinian leader) 1959 [20]
- Supporting Evidence: Representatives from Arab nations told the UN's 1947 investigative committee that they "rejected partition and advocated a unitary, democratic state from which the illegal immigrants (ie Jews) would be expelled and where the remaining Jews would have no political rights." Historian Benny Morris [18]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab states and Palestinian leaders were the clear aggressors in the 1948 War. Even before the UN Partition Resolution was accepted, Arab leaders declared they would go to war if it passed.
- Supporting Evidence: "[W]e would rather die than accept minority rights" in the portion that was to become a Jewish state." Hajj Amin al-Husseini. 1947 [21]
- Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [22]
- Supporting Evidence: If the Partition Resolution passed, the Arabs would drench "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of Arab blood." Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman. 1947 [23]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs are determined to wage war with the same determination and force as during the Crusades." King Ibn Saud Message to President Truman 1947 [24]
- Supporting Evidence: "You will achieve nothing with talk of compromise or peace. For us there is only one test, the test of strength….We will try to rout you. I am not sure we will succeed, but we will try. We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. But it is too late for a peaceable solution." Abd al-Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, to delegation of Zionists. September 1947 [25]
- Supporting Evidence: "[W]e would rather die than accept minority rights" in the portion that was to become a Jewish state." Hajj Amin al-Husseini. 1947 [21]
- COUNTERPOINT: Just hours after the UN adopted the Partition Resolution (Nov. 29. 1947), Arabs launched attacks and mob violence against the Jews.
- Supporting Evidence: "Violence began immediately with attacks on Jewish quarters in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. Soon after, the Higher Committee began recruiting volunteers through Palestine Arab towns and villages…." Historian Howard Sachar [26]
- Supporting Evidence: On the second day after the Resolution was passed, "Shooting, stoning and rioting continued apace….Bombs were thrown into cafes, killing and maiming, Molotov cocktails were hurled at shops, a synagogue was set on fire. Scores of young Arabs flooded the offices of the local national committees demanding weapons." Historian Efraim Karsh [27]
- Supporting Evidence: Two days after the Resolution passed, the Arab Higher Command declared a three-day general strike. "It enforced the closure of all Arab shops, schools and places of business and organized and incited large Arab crowds to take to the streets to attack Jewish target." Historian Efraim Karsh [28]
- Supporting Evidence: "On December 2, a large mob, armed with sticks and knives, burst out of Jerusalem's Old City gates and attacked Jewish pedestrians and shops….A number of people were injured…and buildings were set alight…The war had begun." Historian Benny Morris [29]
- Supporting Evidence: "Throughout the Arab world, Jewish communities were singled out for attack. In British-ruled Aden, 82 Jews were slaughtered by rioting mobs while another 130 Jews were massacred in Tripolitania. In Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria and Aleppo, Jewish houses and businesses were ransacked and synagogues desecrated." Historian Efraim Karsh [30]
- Supporting Evidence: "Violence began immediately with attacks on Jewish quarters in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. Soon after, the Higher Committee began recruiting volunteers through Palestine Arab towns and villages…." Historian Howard Sachar [26]
- COUNTERPOINT: Just hours after Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, the combined armed forces of five Arab states attacked Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon attacked with help from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Libya.(Cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, p. 75)
- Supporting Evidence: "How beautiful was this day, May 14, when the whole world held its breath anticipating the entry of seven Arab armies into Palestine to redeem it from the Zionists and the West. On this day Arab forces broke forth from all sides and stood as one man to demand justice and to please God, conscience and the sense of duty." Arab Legion Officer. [31]
- Supporting Evidence: "Arab planes hit Tel Aviv, Tiberius; Invader Hammering Jewish Outposts." AP headline, May 17, 1948
- Supporting Evidence: "…the Arab armies invaded Palestine…[their] encroachment transformed the war's character. A greater variety of troops, arms and methods of warfare multiplied the firepower and accelerated the tempo of military actions in the field. Furthermore, the balance of power shifted in favor of the Arab side…."Historian Yoav Gelber [32]
- Supporting Evidence: "How beautiful was this day, May 14, when the whole world held its breath anticipating the entry of seven Arab armies into Palestine to redeem it from the Zionists and the West. On this day Arab forces broke forth from all sides and stood as one man to demand justice and to please God, conscience and the sense of duty." Arab Legion Officer. [31]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders bluntly took responsibility for the war.
- Supporting Evidence: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We do not deny this. We told the whole world we were going to fight." Jamal Huseeini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, to the UN Security Council, April 16, 1948 [33]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Egyptian government has declared in a cablegram to the President of the Security Council on 15 May that Egyptian armed forces have entered Palestine and it has engaged in 'armed intervention' in that country. On May 16 I received a cablegram from the Arab League making similar statements on behalf of the Arab states. I consider it my duty to emphasize to that this is the first time since the adoption of the [UN] Charter that Member states have openly declared that they have engaged in armed intervention outside their own territory." Trygve Lie, UN Secretary General, Report to UN Security Council, May 16, 1948 [34]
- Supporting Evidence: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We do not deny this. We told the whole world we were going to fight." Jamal Huseeini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, to the UN Security Council, April 16, 1948 [33]
- COUNTERPOINT: The UN and other nations blamed the Arabs for the war which defied the UN and its compromise plan.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states launched their invasion of Palestine with the end of the Mandate. This was clear aggression, and…failure to meet it could easily lead to the ultimate downfall of the United Nations, just as the mishandling of the Manchurian and Ethiopian cases in the 1930's had led to the collapse of the League of Nations." Trygve Lie, first UN Secretary Genera l [35]
- Supporting Evidence: "Powerful interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein." UN Palestine Commission Report, Feb. 16, 1948 [36]
- Supporting Evidence: "This is not the first time that the Arab states, which organized the invasion of Palestine, have ignored a decision of the Security Council or of the General Assembly. The USSR delegations deems it essential that the council should state its opinion more clearly and more firmly with regard to this attitude of the Arab states toward decisions of the Security Council." Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Delegate to the UN, to the Security Council on May 29, 1948 [37]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states launched their invasion of Palestine with the end of the Mandate. This was clear aggression, and…failure to meet it could easily lead to the ultimate downfall of the United Nations, just as the mishandling of the Manchurian and Ethiopian cases in the 1930's had led to the collapse of the League of Nations." Trygve Lie, first UN Secretary Genera l [35]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts the historical facts. Arab states, not Israel, refused to accept the UN Partition Resolution and chose to seek on the battlefield what they could not get from the world community: a unitary Palestinian state with an Arab majority.
- POINT 3: Israel was not a David fighting Goliath. Zionist forces enjoyed a qualitative and quantitative advantage over the Arabs.
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts the documented record and can be made only by ignoring historical development. Today Israel does have one of the strongest militaries in the world. It did not in 1948 when Arab armies invaded. It was a fledgling state-only a few hours old-without a developed infrastructure or military when Arab nations attacked.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was at a serious military disadvantage compared to the Palestinians and the Arab states in resources, population and territory.
- Supporting Evidence: "The seven Arab states in existence in 1947 -- Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Transjordan…contained an area 230 times larger than the projected Jewish state and a population 60 times that of its Jewish inhabitants who numbered only a little more than half a million." Samuel Katz [38]
- Supporting Evidence: "Seven Arab states-in control of vast strategic territories and abundant oil and other natural resources, enjoying the sympathy of an omnipotent Muslim World-lost Palestine merely because of their reliance on romantic notions…." Iraqi Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry. September 1949 [39]
- Supporting Evidence: "As it braced itself for the promised Arab backlash to the Partition Resolution, the Yishuv could hardly ignore its stark inferiority to the Arab world on every quantitative index of power, from demography to territory to geostrategic location, to wealth." Historian Efraim Karsh [40]
- Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian Arabs, who outnumbered the Jews, had a "vast hinterland of sympathetic Arab states which were able to supply them with volunteers, supplies and safe havens." In contrast, Israel was small, had few natural resources and was surrounded by enemies. Historian Benny Morris [41]
- Supporting Evidence: "The surrounding Arab population outnumbered Israel's by 40 to 1." [42]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestine's encirclement by four Arab states…made its Jewish community virtually landlocked and dependent for its very existence on naval and aerial transportation." Historian Efraim Karsh [43]
- Supporting Evidence: "The seven Arab states in existence in 1947 -- Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Transjordan…contained an area 230 times larger than the projected Jewish state and a population 60 times that of its Jewish inhabitants who numbered only a little more than half a million." Samuel Katz [38]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was at a serious disadvantage compared to the Arab states because under the Mandate rules, it could not develop regular armies or obtain major weapons system. The Arab states, as independent nations, could and did.
- Supporting Evidence: "The embargo on Jewish immigration and Jewish weapons acquisition was stringently maintained [by British authorities]. The Jews were denied the right to organize a militia. Haganah members were disarmed wherever they were found….[They were] prohibited by the British from bringing in ammunition, from organizing their reserves and defending their communications openly…" Historian Howard Sachar [44]
- Supporting Evidence: Egypt, Transjordan and Iraq had developed well-equipped armies with armored tanks, artillery and air forces. The British continued to train and supply these military establishments and British officers commanded the Transjordan Arab Legion. British RAF planes flew with Egyptian squadrons. [45]
- Supporting Evidence: Even as Britain kept Jewish embargos enforced, it "continued to sell weapons to Iraq and Transjordan under its treaty relations with those states." Historian Howard Sachar [46]
- Supporting Evidence: "The embargo on Jewish immigration and Jewish weapons acquisition was stringently maintained [by British authorities]. The Jews were denied the right to organize a militia. Haganah members were disarmed wherever they were found….[They were] prohibited by the British from bringing in ammunition, from organizing their reserves and defending their communications openly…" Historian Howard Sachar [44]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was at a serious disadvantage militarily.
- Supporting Evidence: "I have no doubt that any neutral investigation will demonstrate one obvious truth, that we Arabs entered Palestine stronger in numbers and equipment than the Jews. It is clear to me that the artillery of each Arab army was stronger than the Jewish artillery." 'Abd al-Rahman 'Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, 1953 [47]
- Supporting Evidence: Only 18, 900 trained fighters were fully mobilized. [48]
- Supporting Evidence: Jews could not openly buy arms. They had to buy them clandestinely from Czechoslovakia. [49]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel had to disassemble the arms it did purchase and hide them in kibbutz underground warehouses. "The parts could not be assembled until the British left Palestine." [50]
- Supporting Evidence: "I have no doubt that any neutral investigation will demonstrate one obvious truth, that we Arabs entered Palestine stronger in numbers and equipment than the Jews. It is clear to me that the artillery of each Arab army was stronger than the Jewish artillery." 'Abd al-Rahman 'Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, 1953 [47]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts the documented record and can be made only by ignoring historical development. Today Israel does have one of the strongest militaries in the world. It did not in 1948 when Arab armies invaded. It was a fledgling state-only a few hours old-without a developed infrastructure or military when Arab nations attacked.
- POINT 4: 'New ' historians have uncovered the fact that Israel had an advantage in the number of troops. Israel had 90,000 fighters; the Arabs between 30,000 and 68,000.
- COUNTERPOINT: 'New' historians have not uncovered new facts. Since the 1950's, historians have known that there was rough parity in the number of front line ground troops. "[S]chool children could find [this information] in historical atlases, students in textbooks. Even Ben-Gurion's autobiographical account of Israel's history…" contains this information. (Efraim Karsh, , Fabricating Israeli History, 2002, p. 29)
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim is a distortion of the facts. Even in troop numbers, Israel did not have an advantage.
- Supporting Evidence: The 90,000 Israeli troop number includes Israel's front line troops AND all its support troops. The numbers cited for the Arab forces includes only front line troops and not the vast number of support troops and personnel available to the Arab forces. In effect, these numbers compare apples and oranges. [51]
- Supporting Evidence: In May, 1948, Israel had 34,000 front line troops; the Arabs 42,000 [52]
- Supporting Evidence: In October 1948, Israel had 45,000 front line troops; the Arabs 55,000 [53]
- Supporting Evidence: The 90,000 Israeli troop number includes Israel's front line troops AND all its support troops. The numbers cited for the Arab forces includes only front line troops and not the vast number of support troops and personnel available to the Arab forces. In effect, these numbers compare apples and oranges. [51]
- COUNTERPOINT: 'New' historians have not uncovered new facts. Since the 1950's, historians have known that there was rough parity in the number of front line ground troops. "[S]chool children could find [this information] in historical atlases, students in textbooks. Even Ben-Gurion's autobiographical account of Israel's history…" contains this information. (Efraim Karsh, , Fabricating Israeli History, 2002, p. 29)
- POINT 5: Israel had the backing and support of strong Western nations.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not get help from Western nations. It did not get help from the US.
- Supporting Evidence: American officials told the Foreign Minister of the provisional Israeli government that the Jews "must not seek the help of the United States in the event of an invasion." May 4, 1948 [54]
- Supporting Evidence: The US imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East on Dec. 5, 1947. "Otherwise the Arabs might use arms of US origin against the Jews or Jews might use them against Arabs," The embargo remained in place throughout the war. [55]
- Supporting Evidence: American officials told the Foreign Minister of the provisional Israeli government that the Jews "must not seek the help of the United States in the event of an invasion." May 4, 1948 [54]
- COUNTERPOINT: Great Britain actively aided the Palestinian and Arab cause to the disadvantage of the Jews..
- Supporting Evidence: The British showed "undisguised partiality for the Arab military effort" and aided the Palestinian Arabs to the disadvantage of the Jews. [56]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain stringently maintained the embargo on Jewish weapons acquisition, denied the Jews the right to organize a militia and disarmed Haganah members wherever they were found. [57]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain continued to sell weapons to Iraq and Transjordan prior to the 1948 War. A British officer, Lieutenant Sir John Bagot Glubb, commanded the Transjordanian Arab Legion along with 50 to 75 experienced British officers and non-commissioned officers.
- Supporting Evidence: Britain aided the Palestinians, selling them British military installations and arms. "[M]embers of the British Office for Arab Affairs came to me offering help, in arms and men….The British were distributing arms and ammunition to our fighting men on the field and in the streets. This was a secret to no one." Muhammed Nimr al-Hawari,, 1947 [58]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain gave financial support to the Arab side, but froze Mandate funds, "a measure that threatened to bankrupt the embryonic Jewish state at the outset." "The one financial concession that [Britain] approved for the post-Mandate period was an appropriation of 300,000 pounds for the Supreme Muslim Council, equivalent to an indirect subsidy of the Arab war effort." Historian Howard Sachar [59]
- Supporting Evidence: "We [British and the Arabs] are partners in adversity on this question. A Jewish state is no more in our interest than it is in the Arabs…" Sir John Troutbeck, Head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo. 1947 [60]
- Supporting Evidence: The British showed "undisguised partiality for the Arab military effort" and aided the Palestinian Arabs to the disadvantage of the Jews. [56]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not get help from Western nations. It did not get help from the US.
- POINT 6: Israel was willing to start the 1948 War because it knew it would be victorious.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was not certain it could win the 1948 War.
- Supporting Evidence: Israel's "strategy cannot be understood without taking into account its very real fears of defeat and possible annihilation," in the 1948 War. Historian Benny Morris [61]
- Supporting Evidence: "Until recently there was only the problem of how to defend [pre-state Israel] against the Palestinian Arabs…But now we face a completely new situation. The land of Israel is surrounded by independent Arab states…that have the right to purchase and produce arms, to set up armies and train them…Attack by Palestinian Arabs does not endanger the Yishuv, but there is a danger that the neighboring Arab states will send their armies to attack and destroy the Yishuv." David Ben Gurion. 1947 [62]
- Supporting Evidence: Yigael Yadin, Haganah Commander of Operations, reported that even with a best case scenario-that Israel could admit immigrants and increase its manpower, buy and import arms and quickly assemble weapons that had been hidden from the British-"the chances for success were 50-50." May 12, 1948, two days before the Arab invasion began. [63]
- Supporting Evidence: By the middle of June 1948, after one month of fighting, the outcome was uncertain. "Gravely short of manpower and weapons, the fledgling Israeli army actually was in danger of collapse on nearly every front. Troop morale was poor…." Historian Howard Sachar [64]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel's "strategy cannot be understood without taking into account its very real fears of defeat and possible annihilation," in the 1948 War. Historian Benny Morris [61]
- COUNTERPOINT: World leaders believed that Israel had little chance of winning the war.
- Supporting Evidence: Britain's Imperial Chief of Staff concluded that "In the long run the Jews would not be able to cope…and would be thrown out of Palestine unless they came to terms with [the Arabs]." [65]
- Supporting Evidence: "[A]s the Arabs gradually co-ordinate their war effort, the Jews will be forced to withdraw from isolated positions, and having been drawn into a war of attrition, will gradually be defeated." US Intelligence Agencies report. [66]
- Supporting Evidence: "Tel Aviv in a fortnight," "A parade without any risks whatever." Egyptian Army analysis of the upcoming war. [67]
- Supporting Evidence: We are 'fully confident of ultimate success thought it might take some years. It would be a war of attrition since manpower reserves upon which the Arab side could draw are inexhaustible." Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. 1947. [68]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs thought they would win in less than the twinkling of an eye and that it would take no more than a day or two from the time the Arab armies crossed the border until all the colonies were conquered and the enemy would throw down his arms and cast himself on their mercy." Arif al-Arif, Arab historian, 1955 [69]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain's Imperial Chief of Staff concluded that "In the long run the Jews would not be able to cope…and would be thrown out of Palestine unless they came to terms with [the Arabs]." [65]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was not certain it could win the 1948 War.
- POINT 7: Arab and Palestinian armies did not pose a serious threat to Jews during the 1948 War. Jews exaggerate the threat to justify their own aggression.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was defending itself against a genocidal war of extermination.
- Supporting Evidence: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. May 15, 1947 BBC broadcast. [70]
- Supporting Evidence: "I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Palestinian government. [71]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out." Arab Higher Committee circular. 1947. [72]
- Supporting Evidence: Damascus radio called on all Arabs to "undertake the liberation battle that will tear the hearts from the bodies of the hateful Jews and trample them in the dust." Time Magazine, June 2, 1948, p. 20 [73]
- Supporting Evidence: "The surviving Jews would be helped to return to their native countries, but my estimation is that none will survive." Ahmed Shuqeiri who would later be head of the PLO [74]
- Supporting Evidence: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. May 15, 1947 BBC broadcast. [70]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel had every reason to believe this would be a genocidal war of extermination. A virulent anti-Semitism infected many Arabs. Many leaders of the war effort had collaborated with the Nazis and hoped to bring the final solution to Palestine.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1941, the Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Germany where he served as a consultant on the "Jewish Question." He tried to persuade Hitler and other Nazi leaders to extend their anti-Jewish program to the Arab world. After visiting Auschwitz, he expressed his hope to "employ the same method" to "solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries." [75]
- Supporting Evidence: Haj Amin al-Husseini's "popularity among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states actually increased more than ever during his period with the Nazis," according to his biographer. In 1948, the National Palestinian Council elected him Chairman though he was then a wanted war criminal. [76]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab League appointed Fawzi al-Qawukji Field Commander of the ALA forces. Al-Qawuki had learned his bomb making skills in an SS course in Nazi Germany where he had found refuge during World War II. [77]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1941, the Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Germany where he served as a consultant on the "Jewish Question." He tried to persuade Hitler and other Nazi leaders to extend their anti-Jewish program to the Arab world. After visiting Auschwitz, he expressed his hope to "employ the same method" to "solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries." [75]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel had every reason to believe this would be a genocidal war. Arab forces attacked civilian centers and killed civilians and soldiers who surrendered.
- Supporting Evidence: When false rumors circulated about Israeli atrocities, "The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible for they knew well how their own guerillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors." Historian Howard Sachar [78]
- Supporting Evidence: The defenders of the Israeli settlement Kfar Etzion surrendered, laid down their weapons and walked, hands in the air, into the center of the compound. "There, according to one of the few survivors, the villagers [and some of the Legionnaires] mowed them down." [79]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab aerial bombardments consistently attacked Jewish civilian centers, not military targets. The first Egyptian air attack was on the city of Tel Aviv (May 17, 1948); followed by air attacks on towns and kibbutzes and the central civilian bus station in Tel Aviv. [80]
- Supporting Evidence: When false rumors circulated about Israeli atrocities, "The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible for they knew well how their own guerillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors." Historian Howard Sachar [78]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel had every reason to believe this would be a genocidal war. Jews were being assaulted throughout the Arab world, even though they had nothing to do with the new state of Israel and had lived in these countries for centuries if not millennia. This was not just an attack on Zionists. It was an attack on all Jews.
- Supporting Evidence: "Throughout the Arab world, Jewish communities were singled out for attack. In British-ruled Aden, 82 Jews were slaughtered by rioting mobs while another 130 Jews were massacred in Tripolitania. In Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria and Aleppo, Jewish houses and businesses were ransacked and synagogues desecrated." Historian Efraim Karsh [81]
- Supporting Evidence: "Throughout the Arab world, Jewish communities were singled out for attack. In British-ruled Aden, 82 Jews were slaughtered by rioting mobs while another 130 Jews were massacred in Tripolitania. In Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria and Aleppo, Jewish houses and businesses were ransacked and synagogues desecrated." Historian Efraim Karsh [81]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel was defending itself against a genocidal war of extermination.
- POINT 8: Israel won the 1948 War because of its military superiority.
- COUNTERPOINT: Historians agree that Israel won the 1948 War not because of a military superiority it did not have, but because it was so highly organized, committed and resourceful compared to its enemies.
- Supporting Evidence: "Facing off in 1947-48 were a highly motivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial society and a backward, largely illiterate, disorganized one….Moreover, decades of feuding had left Palestinian society deeply divided….By the late 1940's, the [Jewish community] was probably one of the most politically conscious, committed and well-organized communities in the world." Historian Benny Morris [82]
- Supporting Evidence: "If anything, the Palestine War demonstrates that there is far more to armed conflict than the size of the armies engaged in combat operations or the nature of their equipment. That war was not won by the militarily stronger combatant,,,.[W]hile the atomized Palestinian Arab community, lacking a cohesive corporate identity, fragmented into small pieces, the [Jewish community] managed to weather the storm….." because of its "unwavering sense of purpose" and the highly organized state-in-the-making that it had created." Historian Efraim Karsh [83]
- Supporting Evidence: "Facing off in 1947-48 were a highly motivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial society and a backward, largely illiterate, disorganized one….Moreover, decades of feuding had left Palestinian society deeply divided….By the late 1940's, the [Jewish community] was probably one of the most politically conscious, committed and well-organized communities in the world." Historian Benny Morris [82]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel won the war because the Arab states were disunited and disorganized. They could not prevail over the tightly organized and committed young state.
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab states did not "throw their full weight and whole-hearted commitment behind the Palestine War." Historian Efraim Karsh [84]
- Supporting Evidence: Among the Arab states "There was no political agreement about the goals of the war; there was no unity of military command, agreed military aims, or operational procedures and timetables; there was no political-military coordination." Benny Morris [85]
- Supporting Evidence: : "[W]e have in our possession the report of an Iraqi parliamentary enquiry committee which was appointed in February 1949 to investigate the 1948 war…The report describes the developments on the inter-Arab plane and analyzes the reasons for the defeat. The Arab leaders, it says, did not reach agreement about the ultimate aim, which made it impossib le to coordinate military operations and allocate objectives. The Arab countries did not throw sufficient forces into the battle. The Palestinians did not bear the burden of the fighting…." [86]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab states did not "throw their full weight and whole-hearted commitment behind the Palestine War." Historian Efraim Karsh [84]
- COUNTERPOINT: Historians agree that Israel won the 1948 War also because it had no choice: It had to win or die.
- Supporting Evidence: "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." Muhammed Nimr al-Khatib, prominent Palestinian leader of the 1948 War. [87]
- Supporting Evidence: The Holocaust had ended only three years before this war started and it had "convincingly demonstrated that there was no relying for survival on anyone else, and that massacre would as likely as not follow upon military defeat." Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 193
- Supporting Evidence: "I am a little less certain than [historian Yoav Gelber] that the decisive factor in the Jewish victory was the organizational, cultural and technical infrastructure of the Jewish Yishuv-in brief, its modern character. Organization played a crucial role, but some recent examples (Viet Nam, Afghanistan, the Caucasus) have shown the advantages of primitivism over a sophisticated infrastructure. What mattered more (and Professor Gelber stresses this) was the fact that the Palestinian Jews, unlike the Arabs, had nowhere to go: they were fighting with their backs to the wall." Historian Walter Laqueur [88]
- Supporting Evidence: "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." Muhammed Nimr al-Khatib, prominent Palestinian leader of the 1948 War. [87]
- COUNTERPOINT: Historians agree that Israel won the 1948 War not because of a military superiority it did not have, but because it was so highly organized, committed and resourceful compared to its enemies.
- POINT 9: Israel committed massacres during the 1948 War like the one at Deir Yassin.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israeli forces did not commit a massacre. Pro-Palestinian spokespeople keep pointing to Deir Yassin because they have no other examples to use. But these are fabricated charges.
- COUNTERPOINT: Deir Yassin was not a massacre of a peaceful village, but a military Arab-Jewish battle with unfortunate civilian casualties.
- Supporting Evidence: The town was strategically located on the Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem road. Jewish forces needed access on it to bring supplies to the 100,000 Jews besieged in Jerusalem. Arab troops infiltrated it and prevented passage of the Jewish convoys. [89]
- Supporting Evidence: Jewish troops attacked the town on April 8 1948 and a battle ensued. 40 of the 100 Jewish troops were wounded and two were killed. 110-120 Arabs were killed, including some civilians, according to Bir Zeit University professor Sharif Kanaana.
- Supporting Evidence: The town was strategically located on the Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem road. Jewish forces needed access on it to bring supplies to the 100,000 Jews besieged in Jerusalem. Arab troops infiltrated it and prevented passage of the Jewish convoys. [89]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian leaders fabricated claims of butchery and rape in hopes of rallying Palestinians and other Arab nations to their cause.
- Supporting Evidence: "I asked Khalidi [Dr. Hussein, a prominent Palestinian leader] how we should cover the story. He said 'We must make the most of this.' So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women rapes. All sorts of atrocities." Hazem Nusseibeh, editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948. BBC Program. [90]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab radio talked of women being killed and raped, but this is not true….I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters." Ayish Zeidan, a survivor of Deir Yassin, in the Daily Telegraph, April 8, 1998 [91]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he villagers protested against the atrocity claims. We said, 'There was no rape.' [Khalidi] said, "We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews." Abu Mahmud, Deir Yassin resident in 1948. BBC Program [92]
- Supporting Evidence: "I asked Khalidi [Dr. Hussein, a prominent Palestinian leader] how we should cover the story. He said 'We must make the most of this.' So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women rapes. All sorts of atrocities." Hazem Nusseibeh, editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948. BBC Program. [90]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Jewish government condemned the purported massacre when news of it circulated.
- COUNTERPOINT: Though no massacre occurred and though the Jewish government condemned the high casualties, Deir Yassin became a powerful propaganda tool.
- Supporting Evidence: "News of the outrage rapidly circulated through Palestine, and characteristically was embellished and soon dramatically exaggerated… The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible for they knew well how their own guerillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors." Historian Howard Sachar [94]
- Supporting Evidence: The fabricated stories about Deir Yassin "were our biggest mistake" because "Palestinians fled in terror" and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims. ." Hazem Nusseibeh, editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948. BBC Report: Israel and the Arabs: the 50 Year Conflict. [95]
- Supporting Evidence: "News of the outrage rapidly circulated through Palestine, and characteristically was embellished and soon dramatically exaggerated… The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible for they knew well how their own guerillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors." Historian Howard Sachar [94]
- COUNTERPOINT: The massacre that did occur four days later is never mentioned. Palestinian Arab forces exacted their revenge (April 13, 1948). An Arab force ambushed a Jewish convoy on its way to Hadassah Hospital, killing 80 Jewish doctors, nurses and patients. There was no battle-the Jews were not an armed fighting force-and no Arabs were killed or wounded. (Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 44)
- COUNTERPOINT: Israeli forces did not commit a massacre. Pro-Palestinian spokespeople keep pointing to Deir Yassin because they have no other examples to use. But these are fabricated charges.
- POINT 10: Israeli forces committed massacres during the 1948 War like the one at Tantura.
- COUNTERPOINT: There was no massacre at Tantura. Like many of the charges leveled by Palestinian supporters, this was invented to promote a political agenda. Teddy Katz, the student who made the charges in his Master's thesis retracted them when he was sued for libel in 2000. Mainstream scholars rejected his findings.
- Supporting Evidence: "At the 2000 trial, Katz' interview tapes were played and the Arabs interviewed turned out to be saying something quite different from what Katz had them saying. Several of the Arab sources insisted there had been no massacre at all. Some Arabs cited by Katz confirmed that Katz had misquoted them…The University of Haifa set un an internal committee of inquiry…that found Katz had systematically misquoted the Arab witnesses he had interviewed for the thesis; and that he had otherwise falsified evidence." Solomon Socrates [96]
- Supporting Evidence: "It…became clear that the author of the thesis had not always been very exact in quoting what the witnesses had stated and, allegedly, in some instances had even written precisely the opposite of what had been said in [their] testimony." Historian Anita Shapira [97]
- Supporting Evidence: The Tantura accusation fits the pattern of fringe, "new historians" rewriting history to push their political agenda. Revisionists "have fashioned their research precisely to 'suit contemporary political agendas' and have systematically distorted 'the archival evidence to invent an Israeli history in an image of their own making.'" Historian Efraim Karsh [98]
- Supporting Evidence: "…the Alexandroni brigade took over the coastal village of Tantura to deny the Arab enclave in Carmet ridge access to the sea. The encircled villagers could not run away and a few dozens were killed in the course of the battle as well as 14 Israeli soldiers. Accusations that have been recently publicized in the Israeli press, blaming Alexandroni for a deliberate massacre after the attack, appear unsubstantiated." Historian Yoav Gelber [99]
- Supporting Evidence: "At the 2000 trial, Katz' interview tapes were played and the Arabs interviewed turned out to be saying something quite different from what Katz had them saying. Several of the Arab sources insisted there had been no massacre at all. Some Arabs cited by Katz confirmed that Katz had misquoted them…The University of Haifa set un an internal committee of inquiry…that found Katz had systematically misquoted the Arab witnesses he had interviewed for the thesis; and that he had otherwise falsified evidence." Solomon Socrates [96]
- COUNTERPOINT: There was no massacre at Tantura. Like many of the charges leveled by Palestinian supporters, this was invented to promote a political agenda. Teddy Katz, the student who made the charges in his Master's thesis retracted them when he was sued for libel in 2000. Mainstream scholars rejected his findings.
- POINT 11: Israel caused the "Nakba" when it forcibly expelled the Palestinians during the 1948 War and created the refugee problem.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not create the refugee problem. Arab policies did. Had Arab leaders accepted the UN Partition Resolution instead of going to war, there would have been a Palestinian state and no refugees.
- Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [100]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he creation of the refugee problem…was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians-and in their wake, the surrounding Arab states-had launched." Historian Benny Morris [101]
- Supporting Evidence: "[P]sychological preparation for the removal of dependents from the battlefield had begun in 1946-47 when the AHC and the Arab League had periodically endorsed such a move when contemplating the future war in Palestine." Historian Benny Morris [102]
- Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [100]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Zionists frequently urged Palestinians not to flee the areas they secured and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities.
- Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces secured Tiberias on April 18, 1948, its 6500 Jewish residents urged its 2000 Arab residents to stay. Instead, they asked to be evacuated by British troops. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course…Let no citizen touch their property." New York Times, April 23, 1948 [103]
- Supporting Evidence: The same was true when the Jews secured Haifa on April 22, 1948. "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe." Instead, the Arabs told the British "that the Arab population wished to evacuate Haifa and that they would be grateful for military assistance." Haifa District HQ of the British Palestine Police, April 26, 1948 and Report of Major-General Hugh Stockwell, April 1948 [104]
- Supporting Evidence: Even after the war ended, some Palestinians chose to leave rather than live under Israeli rule. The 3,000 Arabs of Faluja, a village near Tel Aviv, asked to be evacuated in March 1949. "Observers feel that with proper counsel after the Israeli-Egyptian armistice, the Arab population might have advantageously remained. They state that the Israeli Government had given guarantees of security of person and property. However, no effort was made by Egypt, Transjordan or even the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission to advise the Faluja Arabs one way or the other." New York Times, March 4, 1949.
- Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces secured Tiberias on April 18, 1948, its 6500 Jewish residents urged its 2000 Arab residents to stay. Instead, they asked to be evacuated by British troops. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course…Let no citizen touch their property." New York Times, April 23, 1948 [103]
- COUNTERPOINT: The majority of Palestinians fled before full-scale hostilities began and without even seeing an Israeli soldier.
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies estimated that 68% of the refugees left without even seeing an Israeli soldier. [105]
- Supporting Evidence: Approximately 390,000 Palestinians-over half the highest estimate of the total refugee population-had fled by early June, 1948, just two weeks after the full-scale war had begun. [106]
- Supporting Evidence: "The first of our fifth-column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses to go to live elsewhere…At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle." As Sha'ab (Jaffa Newspaper) January 30, 1948. [107]
- Supporting Evidence: "Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war." General John Bagot Glubb, British commander of the Arab Legion. London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies estimated that 68% of the refugees left without even seeing an Israeli soldier. [105]
- COUNTERPOINT: Though there is much scholarly dispute today about whether Arab and Palestinian spokespeople encouraged Palestinians to leave their homes, there is incontrovertible evidence that shortly after the war, Palestinians believed they had been duped into leaving their homes by Arab leaders.
- Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return." Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm, 1948-49 [108]
- Supporting Evidence: "Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading armies mow them down." Habib Issa, Secretary general of the Arab League, in Al Hoda Newspaper, June 8, 1951. [109]
- Supporting Evidence: "Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestine Arabs were misled by their declarations." Arab Higher Command Memorandum to the Arab League, 1952 [110]
- Supporting Evidence: "The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two…Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile." Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada-al-Janub, August 16, 1948. [111]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab armies "forced them [the Palestinians] to emigrate and leave their homeland and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettoes in which the Jews used to live." Abu Mazen, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2003.
- Supporting Evidence: "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." (Mahmoud Abbas, later Prime Minister of the PA, in 1976. In Falastin a-Thaura, March 1976) [112]
- Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return." Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm, 1948-49 [108]
- COUNTERPOINT: Independent fact-finding commissions and contemporary news accounts confirmed that Arab leaders had encouraged Palestinians to leave.
- Supporting Evidence: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained…and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades." The Economist, October 2, 1948.
- Supporting Evidence: After the war, a British fact-finding commission found that the Palestinian refugees were bitter at the Arab states "who 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 do come in and take the district over." Sir John Troutback report, 1949 [113]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in." Palestinian refugee, 1954 [114]
- Supporting Evidence: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained…and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades." The Economist, October 2, 1948.
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians fled because of Arab policies. Propaganda about Israeli atrocities backfired and created panicked flight.
- Supporting Evidence: The fabricated atrocity stories about Deir Yassin "were our biggest mistake because Palestinians fled in terror and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims." Hazem Nusseibeh, editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948. BBC Report: [115]
- Supporting Evidence: "News of [Deir Yassin] rapidly circulated…was embellished and soon dramatically exaggerated. The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible, for they knew well how their own guerillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors….entire Arab communities were fleeing in terror even before Jewish forces overran their homes." [116]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab exodus from other villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews." Yunes Ahmed Assad, refugee from Deir Yassin. April 9, 1953. [117]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously…." General John Bagot Glubb Pasha, British Commander of the Arab Legion. London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948.
- Supporting Evidence: When the Jews attacked Haifa, "Immediately everyone was consumed with terror, and soon the evacuation started. In the hospitals, the drivers of cars and ambulances took their vehicles, assembled their families, and fled in complete disregard of their responsibilities. Many of the ill, nurses, even physicians, departed the hospital wearing the clothes they had on, and fled to the countryside. For all of them the one obsession was to escape at any cost." Jacques de Reynier, a Swiss observer [118]
- Supporting Evidence: The fabricated atrocity stories about Deir Yassin "were our biggest mistake because Palestinians fled in terror and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims." Hazem Nusseibeh, editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948. BBC Report: [115]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not expel Palestinians. Palestinian leaders--the upper and middle classes--left before the fighting even began, setting off a mass exodus. Incontrovertible evidence indicates that the great mass of Palestinians fled to avoid the fighting or out of fear of Israeli troops.
- Supporting Evidence: "The collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them (Palestinians) to leave the country…For instance, in Jaffa the Mayor went on four days' leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the National Committee 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…." General Sir Alan Cunningham, British High Commissioner for Palestine. Telegram to British Colonial Secretary, April 26, 1948 [119]
- Supporting Evidence: "Forty days after the declaration of a jihad, and I am shattered. Everyone has left me…..Everyone is leaving. Everyone who has a check or some money-off he goes to Egypt, to Lebanon, to Damascus." Hussein Khalidi, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, January 2, 1948 [120]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he leadership itself was the first to take refuge in neighboring lands. The Husseinis and Nashashibis were precisely the intellectual and political elite who were absent when the Palestinians needed them most." Historian Howard Sachar [121]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinian civil society collapsed. "The flight of the upper and middle classes entailed the closure of schools, clinics and hospitals, businesses and offices, and in turn engendered unemployment and impoverishment. This was the background to the second state, the mass flight from urban neighborhoods and rural areas…." [122]
- Supporting Evidence: A "psychosis of flight" gripped the Palestinians. "Flight proved to be contagious….[it] radiated pessimism and despair to surrounding villages. In the countryside flight by one clan led to that of neighboring clans and flight from one village to flight from neighboring villages." Historian Benny Morris [123]
- Supporting Evidence: "It was collective fear, moral disintegration and chaos in every field that exiled the Arabs from Tiberius, Haifa and dozens of towns and villages." Dr. Walid al-Qamhawi, Executive member of the PLO, in his historical survey of 1948 War, 1962 [124]
- Supporting Evidence: "From the beginning of hostilities to the end of the mandate, between 250,000 and 300,000 Arabs abandoned their homes in Palestine…. The mass flight also included an unknown number-probably many thousands-of Egyptians, Syrians and Lebanese who lived or worked in Palestine…these refugees of the civil war…fled and were not banished. Until April 1948, they ran away primarily from the chaos, the anarchy, the economic deterioration and the miserable living conditions under circumstances of civil war. During April and May they fled because the fighting was approaching their doorsteps, directly hit them or threatened to subordinate them to a Jewish rule." Historian Yoav Gelber [125]
- Supporting Evidence: "The collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them (Palestinians) to leave the country…For instance, in Jaffa the Mayor went on four days' leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the National Committee 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…." General Sir Alan Cunningham, British High Commissioner for Palestine. Telegram to British Colonial Secretary, April 26, 1948 [119]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israeli troops encouraged or forced only a small percentage of Arabs to leave and this was due to the exigencies of the war itself. Even Benny Morris, the historian most often cited for this claim, reached this conclusion.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestine refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a byproduct of Jewish and Arab fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Israeli-Arab war; in smaller part it was the deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [126]
- Supporting Evidence: "Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinians. But this accounted for only a small fraction of the total exodus, occurred not within the framework of a premeditated plan but in the heat of battle, and was dictated predominantly by ad hoc military considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them)." Historian Efraim Karsh [127]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestine refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a byproduct of Jewish and Arab fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Israeli-Arab war; in smaller part it was the deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [126]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not create the refugee problem. Arab policies did. Had Arab leaders accepted the UN Partition Resolution instead of going to war, there would have been a Palestinian state and no refugees.
- POINT 12: During the expulsions, Israel uprooted Palestinians who had lived in their villages for centuries.
- COUNTERPOINT: A large percentage of the people counted as Palestinians were actually foreigners who had settled in the region only over the course of the preceding century.
- Supporting Evidence: In the 19th century, "[T]he Ottoman authorities-in an effort at Islamization-transferred tens of thousands of Muslims from the empire's northern and Balkan peripheries (Bukhara, the Caucasus, Albania and Bosnia) to its Levantine core, including Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. This increased the Muslim proportion of the population and, perhaps, intensified Islamic consciousness as well." Historian Benny Morris [128]
- Supporting Evidence: During Egypt's rule of Palestine (1831-1840), the ruler, Mohammed Ali, "sent new settlers to consolidate his rule. The Egyptian settlers scattered to many urban and rural points, appropriated large tracts of land, and lent variety and numbers to the existing population….In a number of villages….there are hundreds of families of Egyptian origin who accompanied the conquering forces….Similarly, in the cities of Samaria and Judea there are hundreds of families which, to this day, are named Masri. The origin of all of them is traceable to those who left Egypt at the time of …" Mohammed Ali. [129]
- Supporting Evidence: Moslems from Algeria and other parts of North Africa (Berbers, called Mugrabis) fled to Palestine seeking asylum from the French after 1830. In some areas, travelers would find "a colony of Algerian Arabs, refugees, who still wear the Algerian bournous, and built the gourbis of Mount Atlas. They cordially responded to me when addressed in the patois of North Africa." H.B. Tristam, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels Through Palestine, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865, p. 590
- Supporting Evidence: Circassian refugees settled in Palestine after 1878; Turkoman tribes from Iraq arrived in the same period; Arab Yemenites settled in the Jaffa area in 1908. [130]
- Supporting Evidence: "The German Templars began their colonization project for religious reasons in 1869." [131]
- Supporting Evidence: European companies that contracted to build railroads hired Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese laborers in the late 19th century. After World War I, the British Army of Occupation brought in thousands of Egyptians for police duties and building projects. [132]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain brought in addition foreigners, many of whom would stay and claim their were "native Palestinians.". "Berl Repetur, a board member of the Center for Aliya and Labor, recalls that the case made with the representatives of British rule was that the Palestine Government (the British) employed 15,000 foreigners as against only 500 permanent Jewish residents of the country." [133]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain brought 30,000 foreign Arab workers into Palestine to assist in the war effort during World War II, at a time when it had closed off immigration to Jews. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. 1946 [134]
- Supporting Evidence: In the 19th century, "[T]he Ottoman authorities-in an effort at Islamization-transferred tens of thousands of Muslims from the empire's northern and Balkan peripheries (Bukhara, the Caucasus, Albania and Bosnia) to its Levantine core, including Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. This increased the Muslim proportion of the population and, perhaps, intensified Islamic consciousness as well." Historian Benny Morris [128]
- COUNTERPOINT: A large proportion of Palestinians had been uprooted by the forces of modernization, not by the 1948 War.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]housands.[of small farmers].during the period 1880-1920 moved from the rural areas to the towns or other villages, as a result of debts, a multiplicity of heirs, famine or other causes unconnected to Jewish land purchases." Historian Benny Morris [135]
- Supporting Evidence: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, " Vast land-holdings, in amounts exceeding five thousand dunams or more, were accumulated in large part owing to fellaheen indebtedness. This [indebtedness] was mostly caused by poor crop yields and unproductive methods of land use. Merchants, rural shaykhs and notables, and urban professionals gradually amassed areas of land as financial investments." [136]
- Supporting Evidence: As modernization began after World War I, rural people left the countryside for opportunities in the growing cities, a pattern also occurring in America and Europe. As Benny Morris observed: "[T]here was a growing shift of population from the countryside to urban shantytowns and slums; to some degree this led to both physical and psychological divorce from the land." [137]
- Supporting Evidence: "[S]uccessive years of agricultural setback such as those from 1911 to 1920 and from 1930 to 1935 battered the Palestinian fellaheen….Coincidentally, the influx of Jewish capital into Palestine acted as a magnet pulling economically weak fellaheen away from the lands they worked." [138]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]housands.[of small farmers].during the period 1880-1920 moved from the rural areas to the towns or other villages, as a result of debts, a multiplicity of heirs, famine or other causes unconnected to Jewish land purchases." Historian Benny Morris [135]
- COUNTERPOINT: Many Palestinians who claim they are refugees in fact are not in any normal sense of the term.
- Supporting Evidence: Yasser Arafat was born and raised in Egypt and had Egyptian citizenship. His parents had been Palestinian, but had relocated to Cairo in 1927-twenty-one years before there were any Palestinian refugees. [139]
- Supporting Evidence: Edward Said was born while his family was visiting Jerusalem. His family home and business were in Cairo where he was raised. [140]
- Supporting Evidence: The UN defined a refugee as anyone "whose normal pace of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948." By this criteria, the many people who were flocking to the economic opportunities in Jewish areas were counted as refugees even though they had come from other parts of the Mandate and other Arab countries only recently and could likely have returned to their original communities. [141]
- Supporting Evidence: The Red Cross pressured the United Nations Relief headquarters to recognize as refugees any destitute Arabs who lived in areas where refugees congregated, and urged that they be allowed to receive refugee aid even though they hadn't lived in what became Israel, still lived in their own homes and were not refugees. [142]
- Supporting Evidence: Yasser Arafat was born and raised in Egypt and had Egyptian citizenship. His parents had been Palestinian, but had relocated to Cairo in 1927-twenty-one years before there were any Palestinian refugees. [139]
- COUNTERPOINT: A large percentage of the people counted as Palestinians were actually foreigners who had settled in the region only over the course of the preceding century.
- POINT 13: Palestinians were the only refugees created by the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab forces expelled thousands of Jews from their homes during the 1948 War and would not let them return.
- Supporting Evidence: "There were some 10,000 Jewish refugees in the early stages of the war…..[who] fled in fear from mixed neighborhoods such as the border areas between Jaffa and Tel Aviv…." When Arab forces conquered Jewish communities such as Gush Etzion, Neveh Ya'akov and Atarot, the Jews were killed or taken prisoner and their communities "were totally obliterated." They were not permitted to return. Historian Anita Shapira [143]
- Supporting Evidence: "All the residents of the Jewish quarter in the Old City in Jerusalem, conquered by local forces with the aid of the Arab Legion, were taken captive. No Jew was allowed to return to settle in the Old City-not even the ultra-Orthodox who detested Zionism and were prepared to live under Arab rule." Historian Anita Shapira [144]
- Supporting Evidence: "There were some 10,000 Jewish refugees in the early stages of the war…..[who] fled in fear from mixed neighborhoods such as the border areas between Jaffa and Tel Aviv…." When Arab forces conquered Jewish communities such as Gush Etzion, Neveh Ya'akov and Atarot, the Jews were killed or taken prisoner and their communities "were totally obliterated." They were not permitted to return. Historian Anita Shapira [143]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab countries turned their 950,000 Jewish residents, who had lived in their countries for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, into refugees.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Jews of the Arab states were driven out of their ancient homes [and] shamefully deported after their property had been commandeered or taken over at the lowest possible valuation…This is true for the majority of the Jews in question." Sabri Jiryis, Israeli-Arab lawyer in Al-Nahar (Beirut) May 15, 1975 [145]
- Supporting Evidence: Iraq "took a series of steps, including anti-Semitic legislation, against its Jewish population. This began with a 1948 amendment to the Penal Code of Baghdad, adding Zionism to other ideologies and behavior (communism, anarchism, and immorality) whose propagation constituted a punishable offense. Laws in 1950 and 1951 deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality and their property in Iraq, respectively…. Similar patterns…. existed in other Arabic-speaking countries, including Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan." Historian Ya'akov Meron [146]
- Supporting Evidence: Beginning in 1948, Israel absorbed 650,000 of these Arab Jews who fled their countries, leaving their possessions behind. [147]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Jews of the Arab states were driven out of their ancient homes [and] shamefully deported after their property had been commandeered or taken over at the lowest possible valuation…This is true for the majority of the Jews in question." Sabri Jiryis, Israeli-Arab lawyer in Al-Nahar (Beirut) May 15, 1975 [145]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab forces expelled thousands of Jews from their homes during the 1948 War and would not let them return.
- POINT 14: Historians now agree that Israel engaged in a deliberate policy of forcible expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: Just the opposite is true. Historians agree that Israel did NOT have a deliberate policy for expelling Arabs during the 1948 War. Even Benny Morris, one of the most prominent 'new historians' denies that such a policy existed.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab…." Benny Morris [148]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]here was no Zionist policy to expel the Arabs or intimidate them into flight" in either the first or second stages of the mass panic flight of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948. Benny Morris [149]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]here is not a shred of evidence that the transfer idea supplanted the idea of immigration as a means to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine" in Zionist thinking and policy. Historian Anita Shapira [150]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab…." Benny Morris [148]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionists and the new Israeli nation repeatedly stressed they wanted the Jewish state to be a home for both Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
- Supporting Evidence: "All our aspiration is built on the assumption-proven through all our activity in the land-that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." David Ben-Gurion, 1937 [151]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab policy of the Jewish state must be aimed not only at full equality for the Arabs, but at their cultural, social and economic equalization, namely, at raising their standard of living to that of the Jews." David Ben-Gurion, 1938 [152]
- Supporting Evidence: "In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent." Israel's Declaration of Independence May 14, 1948 [153]
- Supporting Evidence: "All our aspiration is built on the assumption-proven through all our activity in the land-that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." David Ben-Gurion, 1937 [151]
- COUNTERPOINT: It was the Arabs, not the Jews, who were on a campaign to forcibly expel Jews from Palestine. They repeatedly stressed that they wanted Palestine to be a home only for one group-the Arabs-and that they wanted to forcibly expel the Jews.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian national movement, from its inception…has stuck fast to the vision of a 'Greater Palestine,' meaning a Muslim-Arab populated and Arab controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious minority." Historian Benny Morris [154]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab representatives told the UN that they "rejected partition and advocated a unitary, democratic state from which the illegal immigrants [i.e. Jews] would be expelled and where the remaining Jews would have no political rights." 1947 Historian Benny Morris [155]
- Supporting Evidence: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'" Mufti of Jerusalem, Leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Memoirs [156]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians." All others would be forced to leave. Article 6, PLO Charter, 1968 [157]
- Supporting Evidence: "I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Palestinian government. [158]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out." Arab Higher Committee circular. 1947. [159]
- Supporting Evidence: "The surviving Jews would be helped to return to their native countries, but my estimation is that none will survive." Ahmed Shuqeiri who would later be head of the PLO, 1948. [160]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian national movement, from its inception…has stuck fast to the vision of a 'Greater Palestine,' meaning a Muslim-Arab populated and Arab controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious minority." Historian Benny Morris [154]
- COUNTERPOINT: Just the opposite is true. Historians agree that Israel did NOT have a deliberate policy for expelling Arabs during the 1948 War. Even Benny Morris, one of the most prominent 'new historians' denies that such a policy existed.
- POINT 15: Historian Ilan Pappe has proved that the Israeli military's Dalet Plan or Plan D was a master plan to systematcially expel Arabs and seize their communities during the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: Nowhere did Plan D call for systematic expulsion of Palestinians or for expropriating their communities. To the contrary, the section of the plan dealing with Arab communities specified that local residents were to stay and continue to run their internal affairs. Only if resistance continued was the population to be removed.
- Supporting Evidence: "In the absence of resistance, garrison troops will enter the village [and]….detain all politically suspect individuals….bodies will be appointed consisting of people from the village to administer the internal affairs of the village." Plan Dalet, Part 3 b 4 [161]
- Supporting Evidence: "In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state." Plan Dalet Part 3 [162]
- Supporting Evidence: "In the absence of resistance, garrison troops will enter the village [and]….detain all politically suspect individuals….bodies will be appointed consisting of people from the village to administer the internal affairs of the village." Plan Dalet, Part 3 b 4 [161]
- COUNTERPOINT: Plan D did not call for expulsion of Palestinians. It was an overall military plan developed in March 1948 to take the offensive against the Palestinian Arabs because they were winning this early stage of the war.
- Supporting Evidence: "It is becoming increasingly apparent that the [Jewish community] and its leaders are deeply worried about the future…the Arabs have won the second round in the struggle…." British Report, April 1948 [163]
- Supporting Evidence: On April 1, 1948, the Haganah commander of operations….report[ed] that (*) " the Arab guerillas were strangling the Yishuv (the Jewish community)…The one remaining alternative was for the Haganah to go on the offensive…." (**) [164]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arabs were strangling the Jewish community and its chances for survival by cutting all lines of transportation. They "cut the roads between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, between Haifa and western Galilee, between Tiberias and eastern Galilee and between Afula and the Besian Valley. Jewish farm colonies in the Negev soon were isolated from the rest of Palestine….(*) "In Jerusalem, the situation of the Jews was particularly grave…"(**) [165]
- Supporting Evidence: "[A]n early operational breakthrough became, literally, a matter of life and death for the Yishuv…..Plan D sought to turn the tables on the Arabs by seizing the operational initiative." Historian Efraim Karsh [166]
- Supporting Evidence: "It is becoming increasingly apparent that the [Jewish community] and its leaders are deeply worried about the future…the Arabs have won the second round in the struggle…." British Report, April 1948 [163]
- COUNTERPOINT: Plan D laid out many strategies for the Jewish defense. Only one section addressed Palestinian communities. The goal was to "capture certain Palestinian towns and villages in order to undermine the guerilla campaign…." (Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, p. 42 ) Nowhere was there a plan to expel Palestinians. The Zionists did not have a plan for expulsion.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab…." Benny Morris. [167]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]here was no Zionist policy to expel the Arabs or intimidate them into flight in either the first or second stages of the mass panic flight of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, and later there was "no systematic expulsion policy; it was never, as far as we know, discussed or decided upon at Cabinet or IDF general staff meetings.". Benny Morris. [168]
- Supporting Evidence: "Contrary to later accusations, the documentary evidence proves that throughout this period [December 1947-May 1948] the Yishuv (Jewish community) had no comprehensive strategy of expulsion. Furthermore, its leaders lacked policy on Arab affairs in general. The circumstances of civil war dictated attitudes towards the Palestinians, and developed in response to challenges to the security of Jewish inhabitants. Local initiatives to settle past accounts between Jewish settlements and Arab villages by driving out unwanted neighbors were rare." Historian Yoav Gelber [169]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab…." Benny Morris. [167]
- COUNTERPOINT: The military's position regarding Arab populations was exactly the reverse of what Ilan Pappe contends. It insisted that Arab rights be respected.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he behavior of the Hagana towards the Arabs in the territory of the Hebrew state, or in predominantly Jewish areas containing Arab enclaves, stems from the Arab policy of the Zionist Movement, that is, acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for co-existence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity." Israel Galili, Hagana Chief of State, Message to his Commanders [170]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he behavior of the Hagana towards the Arabs in the territory of the Hebrew state, or in predominantly Jewish areas containing Arab enclaves, stems from the Arab policy of the Zionist Movement, that is, acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for co-existence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity." Israel Galili, Hagana Chief of State, Message to his Commanders [170]
- COUNTERPOINT: Even Ilan Pappe admits that a systematic policy to expel Palestinians is not stated anywhere in Plan D. He has simply inferred it because the claim fits his ideological views. Pappe does not believe that facts are the most important part of an argument.
- Supporting Evidence: If, as Pappe claims, the Zionists "were cautious enough not to write it" down explicitly, what proof does he have that there was such a plan?. Ilan Pappe, 11/29/99 [171]
- Supporting Evidence: "Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers." Ilan Pappe, 1999. [172]
- Supporting Evidence: If, as Pappe claims, the Zionists "were cautious enough not to write it" down explicitly, what proof does he have that there was such a plan?. Ilan Pappe, 11/29/99 [171]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab and Palestinian spokespeople did not claim that Israel had an expulsion policy. They blamed the Arab League for creating the refugees.
- Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return." Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm, 1948-49 [173]
- Supporting Evidence: "Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading armies mow them down." Habib Issa, Secretary general of the Arab League, in Al Hoda Newspaper, June 8, 1951.
- Supporting Evidence: "Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestine Arabs were misled by their declarations." Arab Higher Command Memorandum to the Arab League, 1952 [174]
- Supporting Evidence: The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two…Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile." Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada-al-Janub, August 16, 1948. [175]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab armies "forced them [the Palestinians] to emigrate and leave their homeland and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettoes in which the Jews used to live." Abu Mazen, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2003.
- Supporting Evidence: "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." (PLO Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, 1976. In Falastin a-Thaura, March 1976)
- Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return." Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm, 1948-49 [173]
- COUNTERPOINT: Nowhere did Plan D call for systematic expulsion of Palestinians or for expropriating their communities. To the contrary, the section of the plan dealing with Arab communities specified that local residents were to stay and continue to run their internal affairs. Only if resistance continued was the population to be removed.
- POINT 16: Israel robbed Palestinians of their state in the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: There was no state to rob. No independent Arab or Palestinian state had ever existed in Palestine.
- Supporting Evidence: After Rome conquered the Jewish state in 135 AD, successive empires ruled the area for the next 1900 years and Palestine ceased to be a distinct political entity.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917-18 …never made it a separate, distinct administrative district." Its boundaries kept shifting. Parts of it were attached to Damascus, parts to Beirut and parts were independent. Historian Benny Morris [176]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestine was not a state but simply "a geographical name of rather loose application…." It did not have " a boundary by which Palestine can be separated exactly from the rest of Syria in the north, or from the Sinaitic and Arabian deserts in the south…" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 p. 600).
- Supporting Evidence: After Rome conquered the Jewish state in 135 AD, successive empires ruled the area for the next 1900 years and Palestine ceased to be a distinct political entity.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders did not recognize the existence of a distinctive Palestinian political entity let alone a state.
- Supporting Evidence: "There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!….Our country for centuries was part of Syria." Local Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission in 1937. [177]
- Supporting Evidence: "Geographically Palestine is part of Syria; its indigenous inhabitants belong to the Syrian branch of the Arab family of nations; and until 1917 Palestine formed part of the Ottoman Empire…"Arab Office Report to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, March 1946 [178]
- Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University. 1946.
- Supporting Evidence: "[P]rior to the First World War…Palestine was included in the Ottoman Empire as part of the Province of Syria….Politically, the Arabs of Palestine… were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the UN General Assembly, May 9 1947.United Nations Records of the Meeting of the First Special Assembly. [179]
- Supporting Evidence: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Ahmed Shuqeiri, later chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council. [180]
- Supporting Evidence: "There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!….Our country for centuries was part of Syria." Local Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission in 1937. [177]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian Arabs made no effort to create the institutions for a state during the Mandate period.
- Supporting Evidence: "During the entire mandatory period, Arab leaders had refused to cooperate with the British in any scheme of national autonomy as long as the Jews were similarly included…The Arabs possessed nothing comparable to the Jewish quasi-state. At no time had the Supreme Moslem Council or the Arab Higher Committee ever served as more than organs for propaganda or violence. Neither organization had provided administrative training or governmental experience." Historian Howard Sachar [181]
- Supporting Evidence: "As regards the parts of Palestine under Arab control, no central authority exists and no independent Arab State has been organized or attempted….The Partition Plan presumed that effective organs of state government could be more or less immediately set up in the Arab part of Palestine. This does not seem possible today in view of the lack of organized authority springing from Arab Palestine itself…. There now exists in Palestine a form of partition, though an Arab State for which the Partition Plan provided has not materialized…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report July 30, 1949. [182]
- Supporting Evidence: "During the entire mandatory period, Arab leaders had refused to cooperate with the British in any scheme of national autonomy as long as the Jews were similarly included…The Arabs possessed nothing comparable to the Jewish quasi-state. At no time had the Supreme Moslem Council or the Arab Higher Committee ever served as more than organs for propaganda or violence. Neither organization had provided administrative training or governmental experience." Historian Howard Sachar [181]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders' refusal to compromise cost them the state the UN had offered them in the 1947 Partition Resolution.
- Supporting Evidence: In "the parts of Palestine under Arab control….no independent Arab state has been organized or attempted. This situation may be explained….by Arab unwillingness to undertake any step which would suggest even tacit acceptance of partition…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report. July 30, 1949 [183]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Governments of the Arab States emphasize, on this occasion, what they have already declared before the London Conference and the United Nations, that the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State…" Statement by the Arab League States, May 15, 1948 [184]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha [185]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [186]
- Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [187]
- Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [188]
- Supporting Evidence: In "the parts of Palestine under Arab control….no independent Arab state has been organized or attempted. This situation may be explained….by Arab unwillingness to undertake any step which would suggest even tacit acceptance of partition…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report. July 30, 1949 [183]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments, not Israel, robbed the Palestinians of the opportunity to create a state after the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments would have robbed Palestinians of a state even if they had won the war. They wanted the territory for themselves.
- Supporting Evidence: "If the United Nations decided to partition Palestine, Abdullah [King of Jordan] explained, he frankly preferred to annex the Arab sector to his kingdom." King Abdullah, 1947 [189]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Mufti and Kuwatly [the Syrian president] want to set up an independent Arab state in Palestine with the Mufti as its head. If that were to happen I would be encircled on almost all sides by enemies…My forces will therefore occupy every place evacuated by the British." King Abdullah of Jordan, 1947.(*) The king had told the Arab League that "under no circumstances would he countenance a Palestinian government, with or without the Mufti." Oct. 14, 1947 (**) [190]
- Supporting Evidence: The Syrians…were determined to seize as much as they could of northern Palestine." Historian Howard Sachar [191]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Arab war plan changed in conception and essence from a united effort to conquer parts of the nascent Jewish state and perhaps destroy it, into a multilateral land grab focusing on the Arab areas of the country." Historian Benny Morris [192]
- Supporting Evidence: "When Egypt and Syria (and Jordan) fought Israel, it was as part of their own scramble for leadership of the Arab world. They never really did battle for Arab Palestine. They used anti-Zionism as a prop in their own political pyrotechnics. Had the outside Arabs ever won a war against Israel, Palestine would have been carved up by the victors, and its name would have evaporated into history. (This is just about what happened when the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was policed by Egypt.)" Martin Peretz [193]
- Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, had the Jewish State lost the war, its territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians but rather divided among the invading forces, for the simple reason that none of the Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation." Historian Efraim Karsh [194]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdullah, and the South to Egypt, and it might well end in annexation of this pattern. The center remains uncertain." High Commissioner Cunningham to Colonial Secretary Creech Jones on the most likely outcome of the early stages of the 1948 War. February 1948 [195]
- Supporting Evidence: "If the United Nations decided to partition Palestine, Abdullah [King of Jordan] explained, he frankly preferred to annex the Arab sector to his kingdom." King Abdullah, 1947 [189]
- COUNTERPOINT: There was no state to rob. No independent Arab or Palestinian state had ever existed in Palestine.
- POINT 17: Israel colluded with Jordan to divide Palestine between itself and Jordan instead of allowing an independent state to develop. Historian Avi Shlaim recently uncovered this secret agreement between Golda Meir and King Abdullah of Jordan.
- COUNTERPOINT: Avi Shlaim did not uncover anything new. The two secret meetings Meir had with King Abdullah have been known since the 1950's.
- Supporting Evidence: Shlaim himself admits that "that there was traffic between these two parties has been widely known for some time and…have even been featured in popular films." Avi Shlaim, 1995 [196]
- Supporting Evidence: "Not only was the general gist of the Abdullah-Meir conversations common knowledge by the early 1960's, but there is little doubt that the authors of most of the early works had access to the then-classified official documents." Historian Efraim Karsh [197]
- Supporting Evidence: Among the early books that discuss the secret meetings are: Jon and Kavid Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill, 1960; Marie Syrkin, Golda Meir: Woman with a Cause 1964; Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, 1972
- Supporting Evidence: Shlaim himself admits that "that there was traffic between these two parties has been widely known for some time and…have even been featured in popular films." Avi Shlaim, 1995 [196]
- COUNTERPOINT: No agreement was reached between Golda Meir and King Abdullah. Meir informed Abdullah that Zionist policy was to honor the Partition Agreement.
- Supporting Evidence: "For our part we told him [King Abdullah] that we could not promise to help his incursion into the country [Mandatory Palestine], since we would be obliged to observe the UN Resolution which, as we already reckoned at the time, would provide for the establishment of two states in Palestine. We could not therefore-so we said-give active support to the violation of this resolution." Golda Meir's verbal report at the Provisional State Council's meeting May 12, 1948. [198]
- Supporting Evidence: Even after the war ended, the Israeli government did not know how the issue of the Arab portion of Palestine would be settled. "[W]e should clarify [to Abdullah] from the outset that, apart from a truce, there is not yet any agreement between us and that the discussion is on the basis of a tabula rasa." David Ben Gurion, Dec. 18, 1948 [199]
- Supporting Evidence: "For our part we told him [King Abdullah] that we could not promise to help his incursion into the country [Mandatory Palestine], since we would be obliged to observe the UN Resolution which, as we already reckoned at the time, would provide for the establishment of two states in Palestine. We could not therefore-so we said-give active support to the violation of this resolution." Golda Meir's verbal report at the Provisional State Council's meeting May 12, 1948. [198]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel had no obligation to determine how the Arab portion of the Mandate would be settled when its chief concern was survival and securing its own state. Both Abdullah and Israel regarded the Mufti as an enemy. Meir confirmed that "the Jews would themselves do nothing to breach the Partition line envisaged in the UN Resolution, but what would happen in the Arab area was no business of theirs." (Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 322)
- COUNTERPOINT: Avi Shlaim did not uncover anything new. The two secret meetings Meir had with King Abdullah have been known since the 1950's.
- POINT 18: Israel refused to make peace after the 1948 War.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, refused to make peace after the 1948 War. Though it seemed that permanent peace agreements would come after the Armistices were signed, Arab nations grew more radical and intransigent.
- Supporting Evidence: "[D]uring the first two decades of Israeli independence, the Arab nations underwent some twenty political revolutions, nearly all of them…by army juntas. None of the successor military regimes dared adopt less than a hostile policy toward Israel for fear of losing popular support. It was a unique kind of hostility…not confined to one particular area of Israel's life or territory…As Israel saw it, [this hostility] was flatly committed to the destruction of Israel as an independent state." Howard Sachar [200]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab people will not be embarrassed to declare: We shall not be satisfied except by the final obliteration of Israel from the map of the Middle East." Muhammad Salah al-din, Egyptian Foreign Minister, 1954 [201]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab people ….will never allow Israel and those supporting Israel to realize their objectives in keeping Israel in existence in Palestine." Abdel Gamal Nasser, Leader of Egypt, August 17 1961 [202]
- Supporting Evidence: "[D]uring the first two decades of Israeli independence, the Arab nations underwent some twenty political revolutions, nearly all of them…by army juntas. None of the successor military regimes dared adopt less than a hostile policy toward Israel for fear of losing popular support. It was a unique kind of hostility…not confined to one particular area of Israel's life or territory…As Israel saw it, [this hostility] was flatly committed to the destruction of Israel as an independent state." Howard Sachar [200]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab delegations voted against the UN plan (Resolution 194, December 11 1949) for establishing peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Record of the UN vote on Resolution 194: "Against: Afghanistan, Byelorussian SSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Ukrainian SSR, USSR, Yemen, Yugoslavia." UN Res 194 vote Yearbook of the United Nations, 1948-1949, December 31 1949 (Archived at the UN website on Palestine, UNISPAL at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/2dac0ed54bcd6af68525629f00718b98!OpenDocument)
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab nations demanded that Israel retreat to the borders outlined in the 1947 Partition Plan and absorb all Arab refugees BEFORE they would even begin to negotiate a peace agreement. This demand violated all the Armistice agreements. (Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 430-436)
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab nations took increasingly belligerent, hostile actions against Israel.
- Supporting Evidence: They set up economic boycotts and blockades against Israel and boycotted businesses or states that traded with Israel, hoping to cripple the Israeli economy. [203]
- Supporting Evidence: They cut off all sea, air road and rail communications between Israel and neighboring Arab states and blocked Israel's international waterways. [204]
- Supporting Evidence: They began virulent propaganda campaigns against Jews and the Jewish state. [205]
- Supporting Evidence: They instituted diplomatic quarantine, not permitting any person whose passport bore an Israeli visa to enter their countries and began relentless efforts to dissuade other nations from establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. [206]
- Supporting Evidence: They began aggressively arming. [207]
- Supporting Evidence: They began a campaign of constant border violence.(*) Between 1951-1956, over 400 Israelis were killed and 900 injured as a result of terrorist infiltrations and attacks.(**) [208]
- Supporting Evidence: They set up economic boycotts and blockades against Israel and boycotted businesses or states that traded with Israel, hoping to cripple the Israeli economy. [203]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, refused to make peace after the 1948 War. Though it seemed that permanent peace agreements would come after the Armistices were signed, Arab nations grew more radical and intransigent.
- POINT 19: Israeli and Zionist propaganda has hidden the ugly aspects of Israel's War of Independence. Only with the 'new historians' is it being uncovered.
- COUNTERPOINT: The 'new' historians are not uncovering anything new. They are peddling a highly politicized view of events, a propaganda of their own.
- Supporting Evidence: "Far from unearthing new facts or offering fresh interpretations that would transform the general understanding of events, the new historians were effectively reiterating the standard Arab narrative of the conflict, in an attempt to give it academic respectability." Historian Efraim Karsh [209]
- Supporting Evidence: "Awarding the revisionist historians' standing as impartial and free from ideological bias is equally unwarranted. Althugh the fashionable tendency to exhibit Israel as 'conceived in sin' has not necessarily been the motivation fuelling all revisionist scholars, they have rendered this charge a valuable service…In their works, the Israelis emerge as having no other worry in the most difficult time in their history than cynically plotting their enemies' expulsion from their own homeland. This double simplicity appears unconvincing to anyone familiar with the sources-who has studied that period-unless the reader is utterly prejudiced...Any study describing solely palestinian suffering is one-sided and incomplete…." Historian Yoav Gelber [210]
- Supporting Evidence: The 'new historians' have a "a political-ideological axe to grind." "It would be erroneous to call this 'myth debunking'. The work done before our eyes is merely the rewriting of the one-hundred-year Zionist history in the spirit of its enemies and opponents." Aharon Megged. Ha'aretz Weekly Magazine [211]
- Supporting Evidence: "Since the advent of the 'new historians,'…a new polarization has set in. For the 'new historians' dismissed all previous historiography as apoogetic. Whoever dares to oppose or criticize the pronouncements of these self-styled iconoclasts is savagely maligned…..[T]hey sought to undermine the state's moral and philosophical foundations, to dismantle the Jewish identity of the state and reconfigure it as a state of 'all its citizens.'" Historian Anita Shapira [212]
- Supporting Evidence: "[S]uch is the politicization of modern Middle Eastern studies, especially in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, that partisan rewriting of history in line with contemporary political agendas has not only become the norm, its practitioners are even applauded as courageous revisionists…." Historian Efraim Karsh [213]
- Supporting Evidence: "Far from unearthing new facts or offering fresh interpretations that would transform the general understanding of events, the new historians were effectively reiterating the standard Arab narrative of the conflict, in an attempt to give it academic respectability." Historian Efraim Karsh [209]
- COUNTERPOINT: The 'new historians' are not presenting anything new and their work is contested by mainstream scholars who.criticize their findings and methods. Their research doesn't meet scholarly standards, they distort evidence and the larger historical context and, in some cases, fabricate evidence to match their political views.
- Supporting Evidence: "The self-proclaimed title "new historians" that these scholarsh have adopted-implying possession of objectivity and open-mindedness that was not the province of 'old' historians, alleged to harbor a partisanship and involvement-has been particularly irritating. This school's emergence has not brought about a scholarly breakthrough, neither in revealing new horizons nor in methodological originality. It has, however, generated a questionable revision of accepted standards of presentation, based on incomplete use of the newly accessible source material that has been open to professional criticism no less than its predecessors." Historian Yoav Gelber [214]
- Supporting Evidence: "Violating every tenet of bona fide research, the misrepresentation of the historical record by the 'new historiography' has ranged from the more innocent act of reading into documents what is not there, to tendentious truncation of documents in a way that distorts their original meaning, ot 'creative rewriting' of the original texts by putting words in people's mouths and/or giving false descriptions of the contents of these documents." Historian Efraim Karsh [215]
- Supporting Evidence: "It would be erroneous to call this [new history] 'myth debunking.' The work done before our eyes is merely the rewriting of the one-hundred-year Zionist history in the spirit of its enemies and opponents." Aharon Megged 1994 [216]
- Supporting Evidence: "The theses of the 'new historians' and their research methods have precisely been questioned by fellow historians…Violating every tenet of bona fide research, the misrepresentation of the historical record by the 'new historians' has ranged from the more 'innocent' act of reading into documents what is not there, to tendentious truncation of documents in a way that distorts their original meaning, to 'creative rewriting' of original texts by putting words in peoples' mouths and/or giving false descriptions of the contents of these documents." Professor Efraim Karsh [217]
- Supporting Evidence: "[A] large number of professors who espouse extremist views have flourished despite a record of minimal academic publishing and performance. In some cases, they publish mainly or exclusively in politicized journals, such as those published by the Palestine Liberation Organization and its affiliates…" Solomon Socrates 2001 [218]
- Supporting Evidence: Bona fide scholars are especially disturbed by comments like the following by Ilan Pappe: "Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers." [219]
- Supporting Evidence: "The self-proclaimed title "new historians" that these scholarsh have adopted-implying possession of objectivity and open-mindedness that was not the province of 'old' historians, alleged to harbor a partisanship and involvement-has been particularly irritating. This school's emergence has not brought about a scholarly breakthrough, neither in revealing new horizons nor in methodological originality. It has, however, generated a questionable revision of accepted standards of presentation, based on incomplete use of the newly accessible source material that has been open to professional criticism no less than its predecessors." Historian Yoav Gelber [214]
- COUNTERPOINT: Scholars have especially criticized Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe.
- Supporting Evidence: On "the issue of "transfer," Morris has been prepared systematically to falsify evidence in an attempt to create history in an image of his own devising. There is scarcely a single document he has not twisted either by creative rewriting, taking things out of context, truncating texts, or giving a false description of the contents of the documents." [220]
- Supporting Evidence: Pappe"is perhaps the most tendentious of the New Historians. Unlike Morris, who purports to search archives and present facts, Pappe has been the most contemptuous of any necessity to base the charges against Israel on facts and insists that creating some sort of Palestinian narrative suffices." Solomon Socrates, 2001 [221]
- Supporting Evidence: Ilan Pappe's academic credibility was seriously challenged in 2000, when one of his students at Haifa University was forced to retract libelous and falsified accusations in his Masters thesis about an alleged 1948 Israeli massacre on Palestinians no evidence could substantiate. The student, Theodore Katz, was forced to retract his claims and was found by the University to have falsified testimony "gravely and severely" in 14 different places in his thesis. The university ultimately denied his research M.A. In spite of the seriousness of the academic fraud perpetrated, Pappe continued to support Katz's original findings, nearly costing him his job at the university in the process. [222]
- Supporting Evidence: On "the issue of "transfer," Morris has been prepared systematically to falsify evidence in an attempt to create history in an image of his own devising. There is scarcely a single document he has not twisted either by creative rewriting, taking things out of context, truncating texts, or giving a false description of the contents of the documents." [220]
- COUNTERPOINT: The 'new' historians can present only a one-sided picture in part because Arab archives have not been opened to researchers.
- Supporting Evidence: "True, the historiography of the 1947-48 war is…almost entirely based on Israeli accounts for the simple reason that Arab archives have not been made accessible and because Arab historians have not been particularly eager to explore the war as conducted by their side…We do not even know what can be found in the Arab archives…But short of having this information, no definitive can be reasonably expected." Historian Walter Lacqueur [223]
- Supporting Evidence: "Yet, archival material at the disposal of scholars has been Israeli, British and American. No Arab parallel documentation has been made available to date. Studying the Arab perspective of the war is still confined mainly to British and American diplomats' reports from Arab capitals, British and Israeli intelligence material…and Arab apologetics and denunciations. Several Israeli scholars have studied the Arab side of the war. No parallel interest in the Jewish perspective has developed among their Arab colleagues." Historian Yoav Gelber [224]
- Supporting Evidence: "True, the historiography of the 1947-48 war is…almost entirely based on Israeli accounts for the simple reason that Arab archives have not been made accessible and because Arab historians have not been particularly eager to explore the war as conducted by their side…We do not even know what can be found in the Arab archives…But short of having this information, no definitive can be reasonably expected." Historian Walter Lacqueur [223]
- COUNTERPOINT: The 'new' historians are not uncovering anything new. They are peddling a highly politicized view of events, a propaganda of their own.
- POINT 20: Israel intentionally cleared cities of their Palestinian populations in 1948, such as Haifa, Tiberias and Jaffa.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did just the opposite in Tiberias, Haifa and Jaffa. It urged Palestinians not to flee these areas and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities.
- Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces secured Tiberias on April 18, 1948, its 6500 Jewish residents urged its 2000 Arab residents to stay. Instead, the Arab residents asked to be evacuated by British troops. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course…Let no citizen touch their property." New York Times, April 23, 1948 [225]
- Supporting Evidence: The same was true when the Jews secured Haifa on April 22, 1948. "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."
Instead, the Arabs told the British "that the Arab population wished to evacuate Haifa and that they would be grateful for military assistance." Britain gave them that assistance. Haifa District HQ of the British Palestine Police, April 26, 1948 and Report of Major-General Hugh Stockwell, April 1948 [226]
- Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces were about to capture Jaffa in May 1948, "the local population fled in terror," according to historian Howard Sachar.(*) British observers thought "one of the major causes of the mass exodus from Jaffa….was the flight of the city leaders before and during the battle." Another reason was that Arab irregular troops had been looting, robbing and "defiling women." The remaining Jaffa Arabs "asked that the Jews be allowed to take over and restore law and order." Historian Benny Morris(**) [227]
- Supporting Evidence: Even after the war ended, some Palestinians chose to leave rather than live under Israeli rule. The 3,000 Arabs of Faluja, a village near Tel Aviv, asked to be evacuated in March 1949. "Observers feel that with proper counsel after the Israeli-Egyptian armistice, the Arab population might have advantageously remained. They state that the Israeli Government had given guarantees of security of person and property. However, no effort was made by Egypt, Transjordan or even the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission to advise the Faluja Arabs one way or the other." New York Times, March 4, 1949. [228]
- Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces secured Tiberias on April 18, 1948, its 6500 Jewish residents urged its 2000 Arab residents to stay. Instead, the Arab residents asked to be evacuated by British troops. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course…Let no citizen touch their property." New York Times, April 23, 1948 [225]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did just the opposite in Tiberias, Haifa and Jaffa. It urged Palestinians not to flee these areas and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities.
- POINT 21: You call this your nation's [Israel's] 'War of Independence.' Please explain this to me. Independence from whom? From the farmers whose ancestors had tilled that land for centuries? .... Independence from humanity? From morality? From normality? From everyone else in the world?
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim reveals a notable ignorance about the history of Israel and of the region. Just the reverse of these charges is true. When the world community, through the United Nations, recognized Israel's legitimacy as a state, Israel declared its independence and celebrated its first Independence Day on May 14 1948. Recognition of the new Jewish state meant Jews had joined humanity, normality, and everyone else in the world. They had joined the family of nations.
- Supporting Evidence: "The United States recognized the provisional Jewish government as de facto authority of the Jewish state within minutes of its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The Soviet Union also granted de jure recognition almost immediately. Within five days, seven other state quickly did soas well: Guatemala, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. [229]
- Supporting Evidence: "Israel's application for membership in the United Nations was approved….. As the Israeli flag was ceremoniously hoisted in the plaza of the General Assembly building….[many] asked themselves whether only four years had passed since the Star of David had been identified primarily as the seal of doom worn by concentration camp inmates. The rise to independence of history's most cruelly ravaged people transcended the experience, even the powers of description, of case-hardened journalists and social scientists alike. It appeared somehow as if a new law of nature had been born." Historian Howard Sachar [230]
- Supporting Evidence: "The United States recognized the provisional Jewish government as de facto authority of the Jewish state within minutes of its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The Soviet Union also granted de jure recognition almost immediately. Within five days, seven other state quickly did soas well: Guatemala, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. [229]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim reveals notable ignorance about the history of Israel and the region. Israel gained its independence from Britain. The Jews were anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. They developed a resistance movement to end Britain's yoke of colonial power. Israel's Independence Day commemorates the day it declared itself a state free of British control, and the world community also recognized its independence.
- Supporting Evidence: "We….on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel." Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14 1948 [231]
- Supporting Evidence: "Zionism was an ideology unlike other ideologies, even if its decolonization struggle looks very much like other decolonizations, in the Indian subcontinent, for example. The State of Israel was born when the Zionists sent the British packing (it was the Jews who sent them packing, not the Arabs); and, at that very moment, the British (and the French and the Belgians and the Dutch) were also packing elsewhere in Africa and Asia. Israel was an anti-imperialist creation." Martin Peretz [232]
- Supporting Evidence: "We….on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel." Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14 1948 [231]
- COUNTERPOINT: The new state of Israel did not try to get independence from-or disadvantage-local Arab populations within its new state. To the contrary, Israel welcomed the minority Arab population in its new state, and offered them equal rights as equal citizens.
- Supporting Evidence: "The State of Israel…. will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations." Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14 1948 [233]
- Supporting Evidence: "The State of Israel…. will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations." Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14 1948 [233]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel had to fight a war of independence because the surrounding Arab states refused to join the world community in recognizing and accepting Israel's existence as a new nation in the family of nations. They went to war to destroy the young state, take the land for themselves and expel or exterminate the Jews. Israel fought the war to preserve its independence and to defend Jewish lives.
- Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [234]
- Supporting Evidence: "You will achieve nothing with talk of compromise or peace. For us there is only one test, the test of strength….We will try to rout you. I am not sure we will succeed, but we will try. We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. But it is too late for a peaceable solution." Abd al-Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, to delegation of Zionists. September 1947 [235]
- Supporting Evidence: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. May 15, 1947 BBC broadcast. [236]
- Supporting Evidence: "I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Palestinian government. 1948. [237]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out." Arab Higher Committee circular. 1947. [238]
- Supporting Evidence: Damascus radio called on all Arabs to "undertake the liberation battle that will tear the hearts from the bodies of the hateful Jews and trample them in the dust." Time Magazine, June 2, 1948, p. 20 [239]
- Supporting Evidence: "The surviving Jews would be helped to return to their native countries, but my estimation is that none will survive." Ahmed Shuqeiri who would later be head of the PLO, 1948 [240]
- Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [234]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim reveals a notable ignorance about the history of Israel and of the region. Just the reverse of these charges is true. When the world community, through the United Nations, recognized Israel's legitimacy as a state, Israel declared its independence and celebrated its first Independence Day on May 14 1948. Recognition of the new Jewish state meant Jews had joined humanity, normality, and everyone else in the world. They had joined the family of nations.
- POINT 22: After the 1948 War, Israel got 78% of Palestine.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not get 78% of the Palestine Mandate. Close to 80% of the Mandate lands had already been cut off and awarded as an Arab-only region that became the state of Jordan.
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim implies that Israel got more land than it was entitled to and that this was unjust. But the Mandate had stipulated that Jews could settle the whole Palestine Mandate as their homeland. In deference to the Arabs, Jews had nonetheless been willing to compromise and accepted the UN Partition Resolution which would have created an Arab state alongside an Arab state. Palestinian and Arab leaders rejected the compromise. They chose to get on the battlefield what they could not get from the world community: a unitary Palestinian state with few Jews in it. They gambled and lost.
- Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [241]
- Supporting Evidence: "You will achieve nothing with talk of compromise or peace. For us there is only one test, the test of strength….We will try to rout you. I am not sure we will succeed, but we will try. We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. But it is too late for a peaceable solution." Abd al-Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, to delegation of Zionists. September 1947 [242]
- Supporting Evidence: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. May 15, 1947 BBC broadcast. [243]
- Supporting Evidence: "Powerful interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein." UN Palestine Commission Report, Feb. 16, 1948 [244]
- Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [241]
- COUNTERPOINT: The armistice lines that emerged after the 1948 War were not unjust. As the victor in its defensive war in 1948, Israel retained the lands it had captured. It had clear and legitimate claims to the land. The lands did not belong to an independent nation or state. They had been part of the unallocated lands of the Mandate. The international community regarded these armistice lines as the de facto border of Israel.
- COUNTERPOINT: Had Palestinians and Arabs not gone to war, today a Palestinian Arab state would be 54 years old.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not get 78% of the Palestine Mandate. Close to 80% of the Mandate lands had already been cut off and awarded as an Arab-only region that became the state of Jordan.
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