- POINT 1: Throughout its history, Israel has refused to accept the presence of Palestinian Arabs in Palestine.
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge stands history on its head. Just the reverse is true. The early Zionists and the state of Israel always accepted compromise proposals that envisioned the Palestinians and the Jews dividing the land between them.
- Supporting Evidence: Israel accepted Britain's Peel Commission partition plan in 1937 that would have set up a small Jewish state alongside a larger Palestinian state.
- Supporting Evidence: Israel accepted the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 (Resolution 181) that would have divided Palestine into a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state.
- Supporting Evidence: Israel tried to set up Palestinian self-government and autonomy in the Territories between 1967 and 1969 after the 1967 War. [1]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel offered the Palestinians autonomy in the Camp David Accords of 1979 as part of its peace plan with Egypt in the "Attached Letters" to the agreement, March 26, 1979. [2]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel offered the Palestinians autonomy and independence in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and at the Camp David and Taba negotiations in 2000 and 2001. 2001 when it also offered to share its capital, Jerusalem, and to remove most of the Jewish communities in the West Bank. [3]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel accepted Britain's Peel Commission partition plan in 1937 that would have set up a small Jewish state alongside a larger Palestinian state.
- COUNTERPOINT: Just the reverse is true. The Jews always anticipated that Palestinian Arabs would be equal citizens in their future state.
- 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 [4]
- 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 [5]
- 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 [6]
- Supporting Evidence: When the 1948 War ended, there were 160,000 Palestinian Arabs in the new state of Israel. Today their numbers have grown to over one million and they have all the rights of citizenship. [7]
- Question: If Jews do not tolerate Arabs in their midst, then why have Israeli Arab populations grown nearly ten-fold in the past half century and since 1967 the Arab population in the Territories grew even faster than Israel's population? In 1967, there were 954,898 Arabs in the Territories; by 1995 there were 2,534,604.? [8]
- 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 [4]
- COUNTERPOINT: It was Arab states and Palestinian leaders, not Israel, who adamantly opposed every opportunity for compromise.
- 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 [9]
- Supporting Evidence: When Israel suggested that the Palestinians set up an autonomous, independent entity in 1967, local Palestinian leaders refused to let the Territories be separated from Jordan. Eighty-two community leaders signed an open manifesto "berating as ludicrous the attempts to create a Palestinian entity." August, 1967. [10]
- Supporting Evidence: "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 [11]
- Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "[T]he worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [12]
- Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [13]
- 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 [14]
- 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 [15]
- 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 [9]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab and Palestinian leaders, not Israel, have been intent on creating a "racially pure" state by ethnically cleansing 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 [16]
- Supporting Evidence: "It is impossible for us to make an understanding with them [the Jews] or even to live with them….Their history and all their past proves that it is impossible to live with them. In all the countries where they are at present they are not wanted…because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody…If the league of Nations will not listen to the appeal of the Arabs this country will become a river of blood." 'Aref Pahsa Dajani, Jerusalem notable, 1919 [17]
- 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 [18]
- 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 [19]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab leaders even rejected the UN's alternate suggestion for Palestine to be one state with Arab and Jewish cantons joined in a federal government-known as the minority proposal. "Indeed, both the majority and the minority plans horrified them." Historian Howard Sachar [20]
- 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 [21]
- Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Authority has demanded that all "settlers"-i.e. Jews-leave its future homeland.
- Supporting Evidence: "You understand that we plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; the Jews will not want to live among us Arabs! I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews." Yassir Arafat, Speech to Arab Diplomats in the Spiegel Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, January 30, 1996 [22]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews "must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said, 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.'…Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them." Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Sermon in Gaza broadcast on PA television. October, 2000 PA-appointed religious leader. Sermon broadcast on PA television. [23]
- 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 [16]
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge stands history on its head. Just the reverse is true. The early Zionists and the state of Israel always accepted compromise proposals that envisioned the Palestinians and the Jews dividing the land between them.
- POINT 2: Zionism is a racist movement based on the principle of ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionism is not a movement based on the goal of ethnic cleansing. It is a movement for national liberation, based on the principle that the Jewish people, like any other nation, are entitled to their own homeland, to self-determination, independence and freedom from oppression.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die." Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896 [24]
- Supporting Evidence: " Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land... the fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord to all other nations of the globe."
--Martin Luther King [25]
- Supporting Evidence: " It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national center and a national home and be reunited and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?" Winston Churchill [26]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die." Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896 [24]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionism is not racism. It is a reaction against racism. The modern movement was born because Jews have been victims of one of the oldest and most pernicious forms of racism-anti-Semitism.
- Supporting Evidence: Anti-Semitism "is a remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will….[O]ur presence produces persecution…We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities….We are not permitted to do so….In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers, often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering….." The only solution: "[T]he restoration of the Jewish state." Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896. [27]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews have always "rowed all their weight in the boat of scientific, intellectual and artistic progress…" "What has been the result?..[T]hey have been described as parasites on every civilization….[I]f Christendom…can give a chance, without injury to others, to this race…[of] a Home where it will be secured from oppression…We should then have given them what every other nation has, some place….where they can develop the culture and traditions which are particularly their own." Lord Balfour 1922 [28]
- Supporting Evidence: Anti-Semitism "is a remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will….[O]ur presence produces persecution…We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities….We are not permitted to do so….In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers, often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering….." The only solution: "[T]he restoration of the Jewish state." Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896. [27]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionism's goals and practices were never based on prejudice against any racial or other minority group.
- Supporting Evidence: "The State of Israel... will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of creed, race or gender; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture." Israel's Declaration of Independence. [29]
- Supporting Evidence: "As a meeting point of Asia, Europe, and Africa, Israel is a melting pot of religions, nationalities, temperaments, and ideologies, and although Hebrew and Arabic are the official languages, many European languages are also widely spoken." Entry on Israel, Organization of American States, Office of External Relations, 2002 [30]
- Supporting Evidence: "Israel is home to a widely diverse population from many ethnic, religious, cultural and social backgrounds. A new society with ancient roots, it is still coalescing and evolving today. Of its 6.4 million people, 77.8 percent are Jews, 17.3 percent are Arabs (mostly Muslim) and the remaining 4.9 percent comprise Druze, Circassians and others not classified by religion." Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2003 [31]
- Supporting Evidence: Israeli's citizens come from over 100 countries and include people of every color of skin and racial background--Latin Americans, Arabs and Arab Jews, Asian Jews and Black African Jews.
- Supporting Evidence: "….I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy."
Martin Luther King 1968 [32]
- Supporting Evidence: "Israel is a democracy; it is multi-racial; Arab citizens can vote freely and enter civil society; there is freedom of religion and a free press. An openly gay man just won election to the Knesset." Andrew Sullivan. Sunday London Times [33]
- Supporting Evidence: "The State of Israel... will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of creed, race or gender; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture." Israel's Declaration of Independence. [29]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionists also sought to make contributions to humanity, not just preserve a Jewish homeland.
- Supporting Evidence: In no other millennial movements "was the ultimate restoration of the community (of Israel) in its own land so intimately linked …to an era of universal peace and justice." Sociologist Anthony D. Smith [34]
- Supporting Evidence: "There is still one other question arising out of the disaster of nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend….[O]nce I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans." Theodore Herzl on slavery. [35]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel became the 4th largest high tech economy in the world in the 90's; its biomedical innovations included the ingestible camera for diagnosing gastrointestinal diseases, it has developed a vaccine for the West Nile virus. Christopher Reeves visited Israel in the summer of 2003 because Israeli researchers have developed the most advanced techniques for treating paralysis. [36]
- Supporting Evidence: Shortly after its founding, Israel developed programs to aid underdeveloped countries. "[M]ost of the 4,000 Israeli advisers, scientists and technicians abroad in the Third World since 1958 [in aid programs] concentrated upon areas in which Israel had developed a unique expertise….agriculture and irrigation, rural planning and development, the formation of pioneer and youth movements, medical, academic and vocational education and community development." Historian Howard Sachar [37]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel's humanitarian missions include the Ethiopian airlifts in 1985 and 1991 when Israel rescued 28,000 black African Jews and brought them to Israel; assistance to Turkey and Greece after their devastating earthquakes; setting up its first class complete field hospitals in war-torn Rwanda and flood devastated Djibouti in 1994. [38]
- Supporting Evidence: In no other millennial movements "was the ultimate restoration of the community (of Israel) in its own land so intimately linked …to an era of universal peace and justice." Sociologist Anthony D. Smith [34]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian national movement is racist, not the Zionist movement. The Arab world has a legacy of anti-Semitism-racism-- that still fuels its outrage at the existence of a successful Jewish state..
- Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian leaders and preachers, guided by history and religion, have traditionally seen the Jews as an inferior race whose proper place was as an abased minority in a Muslim polity; and the present situation, with an Arab under Jewish rule, is regarded as a perversion of nature and divine will." Benny Morris [39]
- Supporting Evidence: "In Palestine the Arab reaction to Zionism was shaped from the start by cognitive dissonance. The Jews had always been seen as 'children of doom'-hapless, helpless victims. The Zionists did not fit that image, but the Arabs long refused to adjust their perception to the reality. Some still refuse, which is one reason why Arabs prefer to see Israel as the creature of some outside power: it makes everything more understandable." (Harvard historian David S Landes in Commentary Magazine, February 1976.)
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians did not call for "liberating" the Territories when they were under Jordanian and Egyptian-that is, Arab--control between 1948 and 1967. The 1964 PLO Charter explicitly stated that the PLO "does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, [or] on the Gaza Strip" Article 24 PLO Charter . That is, the PLO sought to "liberate" only lands from Jewish control. [40]
- Supporting Evidence: Only when Israel captured the Territories in their defensive 1967 War did the PLO and other groups expand the boundaries of what they considered to be Palestine. Their objection was to Jewish sovereignty over Arabs.
- Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian leaders and preachers, guided by history and religion, have traditionally seen the Jews as an inferior race whose proper place was as an abased minority in a Muslim polity; and the present situation, with an Arab under Jewish rule, is regarded as a perversion of nature and divine will." Benny Morris [39]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionism is not a movement based on the goal of ethnic cleansing. It is a movement for national liberation, based on the principle that the Jewish people, like any other nation, are entitled to their own homeland, to self-determination, independence and freedom from oppression.
- POINT 3: Zionists always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs.
- COUNTERPOINT: Just the opposite is true. Zionist leaders from Theodore Herzl to Chaim Weizman to David Ben Gurion were dedicated to peaceful co-existence with the local Arab residents and to having them benefit from Zionist development.
- Supporting Evidence: Herzl's vision of the future Jewish state: "Arabs and Jews lived in friendship side-by-side. 'The Jews have enriched us,' observed one Arab notable, Reshid Bey. 'Why should we have anything against them? They live with us like brothers, why should we not love them?'" Theodore Herzl's utopian novel, Alteneuland, 1902 [41]
- Supporting Evidence: "I explained to [Feisel]…the fact that there was a great deal of room in the country if intensive development were applied, and that the lot of the Arabs would be greatly improved through our work there. With all this I found the Emir in full agreement…" Chaim Weizman letter 1918 [42]
- 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…. "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 Letter to his son, 1937 and Protocol meeting, 1938 [43]
- Supporting Evidence: Early Zionists planned to have Arabic taught in their schools, and to have their children learn the Arabs' ways "in order that they learn how to live, not fight with them." 1883 [44]
- Supporting Evidence: "The State of Israel... will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of creed, race or gender; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture." Israel's Declaration of Independence. [45]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel established Arabic as an official language when it became a state in 1948. [46]
- Supporting Evidence: Herzl's vision of the future Jewish state: "Arabs and Jews lived in friendship side-by-side. 'The Jews have enriched us,' observed one Arab notable, Reshid Bey. 'Why should we have anything against them? They live with us like brothers, why should we not love them?'" Theodore Herzl's utopian novel, Alteneuland, 1902 [41]
- COUNTERPOINT: Jews repeatedly accepted partition plans to share the land-in 1937 (Peel Commission), 1947 (UN Partition Plan), 1993-2000 (Oslo Accords).
- COUNTERPOINT: It is Palestinian leaders who have always hoped to "ethnically cleanse" Palestine-of 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 [47]
- Supporting Evidence: "It is impossible for us to make an understanding with them [the Jews] or even to live with them….Their history and all their past proves that it is impossible to live with them. In all the countries where they are at present they are not wanted…because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody…If the league of Nations will not listen to the appeal of the Arabs this country will become a river of blood." 'Aref Pahsa Dajani, Jerusalem notable, 1919 [48]
- 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 [49]
- 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 [50]
- 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 [51]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinian leadership rejected all compromise proposals that would have allowed a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian Arab state-1937, 1947, 2000.
- Supporting Evidence: Arab leaders even rejected the UN's alternate suggestion for Palestine to be one state with Arab and Jewish cantons joined in a federal government-known as the minority proposal. "Indeed, both the majority and the minority plans horrified them." Historian Howard Sachar [52]
- Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Authority has demanded that all "settlers"-i.e. Jews- and all "settlements" be uprooted from its future state. "Settlements are illegal and must be dismantled." Summary of Palestinian Positions, Palestine Media Center [53]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews "must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said, 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.'…Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them." Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Sermon in Gaza broadcast on PA television. October, 2000 PA-appointed religious leader. Sermon broadcast on PA television. [54]
- Supporting Evidence: "All spears should be directed at the Jews, at the enemies of Allah, the nation that was cursed in Allah's book. Allah has described them as apes and pigs, the calf-worshipers, idol-worshipers…" Friday, August 3, 2001, sermon at the Sheik 'Ijlin Mosque in Gaza given by Sheik Ibrahim Madhi. The sermon was broadcast on Palestinian Authority television: [55]
- 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 [47]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians repeatedly rejected compromise proposals because they did not want to share the land or accept Jews in Palestine.
- COUNTERPOINT: Just the opposite is true. Zionist leaders from Theodore Herzl to Chaim Weizman to David Ben Gurion were dedicated to peaceful co-existence with the local Arab residents and to having them benefit from Zionist development.
- POINT 4: Zionists had always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Proof is in the Zionist slogan--"A land without people for a people without a land--" that Zionists adopted to convince the world that there were no Palestinians in Palestine.
- COUNTERPOINT: This was never a Zionist slogan or part of Zionist policy.
- Supporting Evidence: The phrase was coined by Britain's Lord Shaftesbury, a Protestant, in 1854 because he believed Jews should resettle the impoverished, underpopulated land. [56]
- Supporting Evidence: Forty year later, Israel Zangwill, a British novelist and Zionist, revived the phrase but his ideas were not accepted by mainstream Zionists and he broke with the Zionist movement in 1905. [57]
- Supporting Evidence: The phrase was coined by Britain's Lord Shaftesbury, a Protestant, in 1854 because he believed Jews should resettle the impoverished, underpopulated land. [56]
- COUNTERPOINT: The phrase described the reality of the land. Palestine in the 18th and 19th centuries was impoverished, underpopulated and losing population.
- Supporting Evidence: "[W]e rode across the plain..of Sharon…But where were the inhabitants? This fertile plain, which might support an immense population, is almost a solitude. Two or three wretched hamlets…are the sole representatives of the numerous and thriving cities which once occupied it." Reverend Samuel Manning, 1874 [58]
- Supporting Evidence: "Here as elsewhere, as everywhere in Palestine, city and palaces have returned to the dust; also disappeared, the forests…everything has been changed into a melancholy desert of brush and grass….This melancholy of abandonment…weighs on all the Holy Land." Pierre Loti, French traveler, 1895 [59]
- Supporting Evidence: "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population," British consul James Finn noted in 1857. [60]
- Supporting Evidence: In certain parts of the country, "land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing…the local population extirpated." H.B. Tristam, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels Through Palestine, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865, p. 490
- Supporting Evidence: There were barely 260,000 Arabs in 1882 in what today is Israel and the Territories, an area that had supported approximately 5 million people in the 1st century AD.. [61]
- Supporting Evidence: "The country was…and is now, underdeveloped and under-populated. The methods of agriculture are, for the most part, primitive; the area of land now cultivated could yield a far greater product. There are…large cultivable areas that are left untilled. The summits and slopes of the hills are admirably suited to the growth of trees, but there are no forests. Miles of sand dunes that could be redeemed, are untouched." Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June 1921. [62]
- Supporting Evidence: "[W]e rode across the plain..of Sharon…But where were the inhabitants? This fertile plain, which might support an immense population, is almost a solitude. Two or three wretched hamlets…are the sole representatives of the numerous and thriving cities which once occupied it." Reverend Samuel Manning, 1874 [58]
- COUNTERPOINT: The phrase was accurate also because no nation would be displaced. Palestine was simply a neglected province, divided and attached to different administrative centers, in the sprawling Ottoman empire.
- 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 [63]
- 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: "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. [64]
- Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University. Testifying to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry,. 1946 [65]
- 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 [63]
- COUNTERPOINT: This was never a Zionist slogan or part of Zionist policy.
- POINT 5: Zionists introduced the idea of "transfer" as a way to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Proof is in Ben Gurion's support of transfer and in the creation of a Population Exchange Committee.
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionists never raised the idea of transfer. Britain's Peel Commission raised it in 1937. Zionist discussions about it were all in response to the Peel Commission proposal to divide Palestine and exchange populations so each area would be either all Jewish or all Arab.
- Supporting Evidence: "I saw in the Peel Plan two positive things….but compulsory transfer can only be effected by England and not by Jews…Not only is it inconceivable for us to carry it out, but it is also inconceivable for us to propose it." David Ben-Gurion, 1937 [66]
- Supporting Evidence: "Transfer as a concrete possibility never exceeded the bounds of the 1937 royal commission report-it was born and buried there. It was not even mentioned in the UN partition plan of 1947. Had transfer not been included in the Peel commission report, it would not have been placed on the political agenda of the Zionist movement, even though the idea itself had been mentioned occasionally in the past." Historian Itzhak Galnoor [67]
- 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 [68]
- Supporting Evidence: "I saw in the Peel Plan two positive things….but compulsory transfer can only be effected by England and not by Jews…Not only is it inconceivable for us to carry it out, but it is also inconceivable for us to propose it." David Ben-Gurion, 1937 [66]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Population Exchange Committee was set up in 1937 only to explore the pros and cons of the Peel plan's recommendation. When the Peel plan was abandoned, the Population Exchange Committee disbanded, within eight months of its founding. (Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History, 2000, p. 39 )
- COUNTERPOINT: The British and several Arab leaders raised the idea of population transfer. The Zionists did not.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1937 the Commission found that "because of the general hostility and hatred of the Jews by the Muslims, 'national assimilation between Arabs and Jews is…ruled out.'" "Partition seems to offer at least a chance of ultimate peace. We can see none in any other plan." [69]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he only just and permanent solution lay in absolute partition with an exchange of populations; to leave Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish state would inevitably lead to further trouble." King Abdullah of Jordan and Jordanian Prime Minister. ) [70]
- Supporting Evidence: Nuri Said, Iraq's senior politician and Mustafa Nahas Pasha, Egypt's prime minister, also believed that partition with transfer of the Arab population out of a future Jewish state was the only solution to the conflict, according to British officials in the mid 1940's. [71]
- Supporting Evidence: Britain's Colonial Office proposed in January 1943 that Britain set up a Jewish state in Palestine and that "the Arab population in Palestine might be dealt with by an offer of assistance to migrate to Libya for those families who find conditions in Palestine unendurable." Historian Benny Morris [72]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1937 the Commission found that "because of the general hostility and hatred of the Jews by the Muslims, 'national assimilation between Arabs and Jews is…ruled out.'" "Partition seems to offer at least a chance of ultimate peace. We can see none in any other plan." [69]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionists never raised the idea of transfer. Britain's Peel Commission raised it in 1937. Zionist discussions about it were all in response to the Peel Commission proposal to divide Palestine and exchange populations so each area would be either all Jewish or all Arab.
- POINT 6: Zionists had always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. This is the now the scholarly consensus based on the work of "new" historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe.
- COUNTERPOINT: This is not the scholarly consensus. The 'new historians' work is hotly contested. Established scholars have severely criticized them for their methods and their conclusions.
- 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 [73]
- 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 [74]
- 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 [75]
- 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 [73]
- 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." [76]
- 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 [77]
- Supporting Evidence: Pappe even admits that in his work, ideology supercedes facts. "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 [78]
- 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. [79]
- 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." [76]
- COUNTERPOINT: This is not the scholarly consensus. The 'new historians' work is hotly contested. Established scholars have severely criticized them for their methods and their conclusions.
- POINT 7: When Zionists came to Palestine, they intentionally displaced Palestinians as part of their policy of ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: Few Palestinians were uprooted from their land by the Zionist purchases.
- Supporting Evidence: "Historians have concluded that only 'several thousand' families were displaced following land sales to Jews between the 1880'sand the late 1930's." (Benny Morris) This is a "fraction of the number of people displaced by the Egyptian construction the Aswan Dam," Alan Dershowtiz reminds us. [80]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs cannot say that the Jews are driving them out of the country. If not a single Jew had come to Palestine after 1918, I believe the Arab population of Palestine would still have been around 600,000…" Malcolm MacDonald, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1938 [81]
- Supporting Evidence: "Historians have concluded that only 'several thousand' families were displaced following land sales to Jews between the 1880'sand the late 1930's." (Benny Morris) This is a "fraction of the number of people displaced by the Egyptian construction the Aswan Dam," Alan Dershowtiz reminds us. [80]
- COUNTERPOINT: Few local Palestinians were displaced because the majority of the land Zionists bought did not belong to them, but to non-Palestinian Arabs and large Palestinian landowners who did not live on the land.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he available figures…suggest that well over 60 percent of the land acquired by the Zionists before 1930 was sold by non-Palestinians." Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi. [82]
- Supporting Evidence: "Analyses of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73% of Jewish plots were purchases from large landowners, not poor fellahin. " [83]
- Supporting Evidence: "Large tracts of land in Mandate Palestine were owned not by Palestinian Arabs, but by non-Palestinian absentee landowners, including Turkish government officials, foreign diplomats and Beirut merchants." Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi [84]
- Supporting Evidence: Large absentee landowners who sold land to Zionists included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa, As'ad el-Shuqeiri (father of the first PLO Chairman) and members of the Muslim Supreme Council. Even King Abdullah leased land to Jews. [85]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he available figures…suggest that well over 60 percent of the land acquired by the Zionists before 1930 was sold by non-Palestinians." Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi. [82]
- COUNTERPOINT: As a policy, Zionists tried to buy land that would not displace the local population.
- Supporting Evidence: "[U]nder no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement should we offer to buy his land at an appropriate price." David Ben Gurion [86]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jewish National Fund's highest priority was buying "the best and largest possible land area available from a cultivability standpoint with the fewest number of owners. Acquiring land with the fewest number of fellaheen occupants was also a priority…." [87]
- Supporting Evidence: "[U]nder no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement should we offer to buy his land at an appropriate price." David Ben Gurion [86]
- COUNTERPOINT: Much of the land Zionists bought was uninhabited and uncultivated.
- Supporting Evidence: "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population," British consul James Finn noted in 1857. [88]
- Supporting Evidence: There were barely 260,000 Arabs in 1882 in what today is Israel and the Territories, an area that had supported approximately 5 million people in the 1st century AD.. [89]
- Supporting Evidence: "The country was…and is now, underdeveloped and under-populated. The methods of agriculture are, for the most part, primitive; the area of land now cultivated could yield a far greater product. There are…large cultivable areas that are left untilled. The summits and slopes of the hills are admirably suited to the growth of trees, but there are no forests. Miles of sand dunes that could be redeemed, are untouched." Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June 1921. [90]
- Supporting Evidence: "Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought." Peel Commission Report, 1937 [91]
- Supporting Evidence: Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 on an expanse of empty sand dunes.
- Supporting Evidence: "In the 1920's most purchases were of large, relatively empty, mostly uncultivated tracts from absentee effendis (landlords)…." Benny Morris [92]
- Supporting Evidence: "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population," British consul James Finn noted in 1857. [88]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian farmers who were uprooted from their land were not displaced by Zionists but by social and economic forces that had nothing to do with Zionists.
- 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 [93]
- 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." [94]
- 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." [95]
- 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." [96]
- 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 [93]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Arab population grew and benefited because of Jewish settlement.
- Supporting Evidence: "Those good Jews brought civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims and they dispersed gold and prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything by force." Syrian Alawi notables letter to French Prime Minister June, 1936 [97]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920, and it has had some share in the increased prosperity of Palestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The fellaheen are better off on the whole than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the National Home. In particular, the Arabs have benefited from social services which could not have been provided on the existing scale without the revenue obtained from the Jews." Peel Commission Report [98]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he infusion of Jewish capital--in payments for land, for agricultural produce, building materials, wages, rents and services-profoundly stimulated the Arab economy…Arab manufacturing…branched out….By 1935, no fewer than seven hundred Arab cooperatives were functioning. New opportunities were opening out in medicine, law, government employment, journalism and teaching. The number of Arab children attending schools had grown from less than 2% in 1920 to about 13% in 1936." [99]
- Supporting Evidence: "No one doubted that the Arabs had benefited from Jewish immigration. Their numbers had almost doubled between 1917 and 1940, wages had gone up, the standard of living had risen more than anywhere else in the Middle East." Historian Walter Laqueur [100]
- Supporting Evidence: The Muslim infant mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand in 1945. Life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943. [101]
- Supporting Evidence: "Those good Jews brought civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims and they dispersed gold and prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything by force." Syrian Alawi notables letter to French Prime Minister June, 1936 [97]
- COUNTERPOINT: Zionists did not displace Arabs. The reverse occurred. Arabs from outlying regions and from other countries immigrated to Jewish areas because of the economic boom the Zionists had created.
- Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, in the Middle East, it was Palestine alone that saw Arab immigration exceeding emigration: the Jews were providing a new market for Arab food and services." Historian Howard Sachar [102]
- Supporting Evidence: An estimated 25% to 37% of immigrants to pre-state Israel were Arabs, not Jews. Between 1922 and 1946 alone, "approximately 100,000 Arabs entered the country from neighboring lands." [103]
- Supporting Evidence: "This illegal[ Arab] immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Trans-Jordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery." C.S. Jarvis, Governor of the Sinai from 1923-36 [104]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he movement of Arabs within Palestine itself was largely to regions of Jewish concentration. Thus Arab population increase during the 1930s was 87% in Haifa, 61% in Jaffa, 37% in Jerusalem. A similar growth was registered in Arab towns located near Jewish agricultural villages." Historian Howard Sachar [105]
- Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, in the Middle East, it was Palestine alone that saw Arab immigration exceeding emigration: the Jews were providing a new market for Arab food and services." Historian Howard Sachar [102]
- COUNTERPOINT: Few Palestinians were uprooted from their land by the Zionist purchases.
- POINT 8: Israel created the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948 as part of its policy of ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: 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 [106]
- 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 [107]
- 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 [108]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab…." Benny Morris [106]
- 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 [109]
- 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 [110]
- 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 [111]
- 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 [109]
- COUNTERPOINT: It was the Arabs, not the Jews, who were on a campaign to forcibly expel Jews from Palestine. Arab leaders 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 [112]
- 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 [113]
- 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 [114]
- 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 [115]
- 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. [116]
- 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. [117]
- 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 [118]
- 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 [112]
- 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. [119]
- 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 [120]
- 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 [121]
- 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. [119]
- 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 [122]
- 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
[123]
- 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 [122]
- 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. [124]
- Supporting Evidence: Approximately 390,000 Palestinians-over half the total refugee population-had fled by early June, 1948, just two weeks after the full-scale war had begun. [125]
- 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. [126]
- 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. [124]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab and Palestinian spokespeople confirmed that Arab leaders had encouraged Palestinians to leave.
- 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 [127]
- 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 [128]
- 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. [129]
- 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." (future 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 [127]
- 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 [130]
- 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 [131]
- 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: [132]
- 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." [133]
- 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. [134]
- 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 [135]
- 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: [132]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not expel Palestinians. Palestinian leaders--the upper and middle classes--left before the fighting even began, setting off a mass exodus.
- 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 [136]
- 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 [137]
- 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 [138]
- 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…." [139]
- 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 [140]
- 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 [136]
- 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 deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [141]
- 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 [142]
- 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 deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [141]
- COUNTERPOINT: 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 9: Israel started the 1948 War to "ethnically cleanse" Palestine and expel the Palestinians.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, started the 1948 War.
- 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 [143]
- 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 [144]
- 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 Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, to the UN Security Council, April 16, 1948 [145]
- 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 [146]
- 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 [143]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts the facts. Arab nations, not Israel, waged a war of ethnic cleansing. They were explicit about their genocidal intentions.
- 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. [147]
- 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. [148]
- 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. [149]
- 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 [150]
- 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 [151]
- Supporting Evidence: Many Arab leaders were virulently anti-Semitic, had collaborated with the Nazis and shared Nazi goals. The Palestinians' leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a wanted war criminal for his collaboration with Hitler.The Mufti'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. [152]
- 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. [147]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Zionists' goal was just the opposite of ethnic cleansing. They repeatedly stressed that they intended to include Palestinian Arabs in their future state and treat them as full and equal citizens.
- 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 [153]
- 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 [154]
- 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 [155]
- 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 [153]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, started the 1948 War.
- POINT 10: Israel forcibly expelled the Palestinians during the 1948 War in order to ethnically cleanse their future state
- COUNTERPOINT: The Zionists frequently urged Palestinians not to flee the areas they secured and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities. Arabs left cities like Haifa, Tiberias, and the Jaffa region because they were told that those who accepted Israeli protection would be treated as defectors when the Arab forces were victorious.
- 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 [156]
- 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
[157]
- 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: "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: 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 [156]
- COUNTERPOINT: 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 [158]
- 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 [159]
- 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 [160]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab…." Benny Morris [158]
- 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 [161]
- 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 [162]
- 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 [163]
- 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 [161]
- COUNTERPOINT: It was the Arabs, not the Jews, who were on a campaign to forcibly expel Jews from Palestine. Palestinian leaders 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 [164]
- 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 [165]
- 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 [166]
- 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 [167]
- 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. [168]
- 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. [169]
- 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 [170]
- 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 [164]
- 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. [171]
- 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 [172]
- 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 [173]
- 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. [171]
- 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. [174]
- Supporting Evidence: Approximately 390,000 Palestinians-over half the total refugee population-had fled by early June, 1948, just two weeks after the full-scale war had begun. [175]
- 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. [176]
- 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. [174]
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab and Palestinian spokespeople confirmed that Arab leaders had encouraged Palestinians to leave.
- 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 [177]
- 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 [178]
- 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. [179]
- 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 [177]
- 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 [180]
- 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 [181]
- 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: [182]
- 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." [183]
- 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. [184]
- 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 [185]
- 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: [182]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not expel Palestinians. Palestinian leaders--the upper and middle classes--left before the fighting even began, setting off a mass exodus.
- 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 [186]
- 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 [187]
- 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 [188]
- 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…." [189]
- 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 [190]
- 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 [186]
- 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 deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [191]
- 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 [192]
- 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 deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [191]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Zionists frequently urged Palestinians not to flee the areas they secured and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities. Arabs left cities like Haifa, Tiberias, and the Jaffa region because they were told that those who accepted Israeli protection would be treated as defectors when the Arab forces were victorious.
- POINT 11: The expulsion of the Palestinians Arabs in 1948 was one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in modern history.
- COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian Arabs were not expelled in 1948 nor were they victims of an ethnic cleansing campaign. Arab leaders launched the war which produced a mass flight of Palestinians. They left to avoid the battle zones, out of panic and fear and at the urging of Arab leaders who promised them a quick victory and a quick return. Israelis troops forced only a small percentage of them to leave their villages, and this was done because of the exigencies of the war.
- 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 deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [193]
- 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 [194]
- 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 deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [193]
- COUNTERPOINT: The fate of the Palestinian Arabs was not "one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in modern history." The reverse is true. Arab leaders launched a war against Israel. Palestinians were the aggressors. They were not a helpless population suddenly set upon by a hostile military force. Israel was forced into a defensive war.
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians were not killed en masse or in large numbers in the 1948 War. Quite the reverse was true, which is why there are so many Palestinian refugees. A majority fled the country to avoid the battles and their fatality figures in the 1948 War remained low. Palestinian spokespeople don't even bring up the issue probably because they have no case to make.
- Supporting Evidence: Israel's casualties in 1948 were approximately 6,373, one percent of its total population. [195]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab forces of all six invading countries lost almost an equal number-an estimated 8,000-an infinitesimal percentage of their combined populations. [196]
- Supporting Evidence: We don't even have clear data on the number of Palestinian Arabs killed in the 1948 War. Estimates of the number of refugees are often deduced by comparing the number of Arabs who lived in pre-state Israel from the number who remained after the 1948 War. Casualties are never included in these estimates.
- Supporting Evidence: A recent estimate put the number of Palestinian Arab casualties in 1948 at about 2,000-one-third of Jewish casualties in a population twice as large as the Jews (1.2 million Palestinian Arabs vs. approximately 650,000 Jews). [197]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel's casualties in 1948 were approximately 6,373, one percent of its total population. [195]
- COUNTERPOINT: The fate of the Palestinian Arabs was one not "one of the great ethnic cleansings of modern history." Quite the reverse is true. At the very time they became refugees, tens of millions of other people had also become refugees because of ethnic hostilities. The Palestinians comprised less than 2% of the world's 50 million refugees of the last 50 years.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1923, after the Greek-Turkish War, 2 million Greeks who had been Turkish citizens relocated to Greece. 500,000 Turks who had been Greek citizens relocated to Turkey. Immovable property left behind was seized by the respective governments and used to resettle the incoming refugees. [198]
- Supporting Evidence: After World War II, 13 million Germans were expelled from eastern and central Europe, where many had lived for centuries. They were relocated into the new, smaller borders of Germany. These refugees received no compensation for the property they left behind. [199]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance. [200]
- Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [201]
- Supporting Evidence: By 1958, 450,000 Jews had been forced to leave their homes in Arab lands.(*) By the early 1960's, the total number of Jews forced to leave reached 850,000.(**) [202]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1923, after the Greek-Turkish War, 2 million Greeks who had been Turkish citizens relocated to Greece. 500,000 Turks who had been Greek citizens relocated to Turkey. Immovable property left behind was seized by the respective governments and used to resettle the incoming refugees. [198]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian experience is unique not because refugees were created by the 1948 War, but because Arab countries would not absorb and resettle them. In contrast, all the world's other refugees had been resettled in host countries.
- Supporting Evidence: "Unlike refugees in other parts of the world, the Palestine refugees are no different in language and social organization from the other Arabs. Resettlement therefore would be in a familiar environment. If the local governments are unwilling to tackle the problem except on their own terms there is little incentive for outside governments to continue financial support." Report of Special Study Commission to the Near East and Africa by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 19, 1958 [203]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [204]
- Supporting Evidence: "The history of UNRWA has been a clinical study in frustration. No Agency has been better led or more devoutly served but the organized instransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arab states concerned have brought all its plans to nought…The net result is that relief is being provided in 1957 to refugees who could have been rehabilitated in 1951 with 'home and jobs' without prejudice to their just claims." Dr. Elfan Rees, Century of the Homeless Man, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, November 1957. [205]
- Supporting Evidence: "The official attitude of the (Arab) host countries is well known. It is one of seeking to prevent any sort of adaptation and integration…." Research Group for European Migration, 1957 [206]
- Supporting Evidence: "Unlike refugees in other parts of the world, the Palestine refugees are no different in language and social organization from the other Arabs. Resettlement therefore would be in a familiar environment. If the local governments are unwilling to tackle the problem except on their own terms there is little incentive for outside governments to continue financial support." Report of Special Study Commission to the Near East and Africa by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 19, 1958 [203]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian Arabs were not expelled in 1948 nor were they victims of an ethnic cleansing campaign. Arab leaders launched the war which produced a mass flight of Palestinians. They left to avoid the battle zones, out of panic and fear and at the urging of Arab leaders who promised them a quick victory and a quick return. Israelis troops forced only a small percentage of them to leave their villages, and this was done because of the exigencies of the war.
- POINT 12: As part of its program of ethnic cleansing, Israel now tries to eradicate all traces of the indigenous Palestinians and their culture to deny Palestinians' ancient connection to the land.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not tried to eradicate traces of other cultures. To the contrary, Israeli scholars and archeologists research and preserve the remains of all ancient peoples, not just Jews.
- Supporting Evidence: Israeli archeologists and the Israeli Antiquities Authority have carefully excavated and preserved pre-Biblical, Jewish, Christian and Muslim sites and those of other people such as the Philistines to promote scholarly study of the past. Its archeologists have unearthed major Muslim structures, such as the Omayyad palaces south of the Temple Mount, the Muslim Nimrod Fortress as well as Neolithic and Canaanite sites, Crusader Churches and the Church of John the Baptist. [207]
- Supporting Evidence: "Twentieth-century histories of ancient Israel are distinguished from their predecessors precisely by their attention to the literature of inhabitants of ancient Canaan/Palestine, who were hitherto known only from tendentious portraits in Biblical and other sacred texts." Professor Benjamin D. Sommer 1998 [208]
- Supporting Evidence: : "Israeli archaeology is not conducted on behalf of any ideology, nor does it explicitly serve the heritage of the Jewish people on its land…". Israeli excavations and preservations include "the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic city [in Nablus]…hundreds of Byzantine churches and monasteries….[and] grand palaces built by Umayyad (Muslim) rulers were uncovered. There is no indication of these palaces before their excavation. They did not appear in any written historical source, until the Israeli excavations discovered them….[and there are] hundreds of published excavations with strata from Islamic periods… proving that the pinnacle of church and monastery construction in Israel took place during the Umayyad period under Islamic rule." Deputy Director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, 2003
- Supporting Evidence: Israeli archeologists and the Israeli Antiquities Authority have carefully excavated and preserved pre-Biblical, Jewish, Christian and Muslim sites and those of other people such as the Philistines to promote scholarly study of the past. Its archeologists have unearthed major Muslim structures, such as the Omayyad palaces south of the Temple Mount, the Muslim Nimrod Fortress as well as Neolithic and Canaanite sites, Crusader Churches and the Church of John the Baptist. [207]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts reality. It is the pro-Palestinians who have tried to eradicate all physical traces of the historical Jewish presence in Palestine.
- Supporting Evidence: Jordan desecrated Jewish holy places, destroyed the ancient Jewish quarter and expelled the Jews when it gained control of East Jerusalem in the 1948 War. 58 synagogues, some centuries old, were razed, ruined or turned into stables and chicken coops. The gravestones of the ancient Jewish burial ground on the Mount of Olives were uprooted and used for footpaths and urinals. [209]
- Supporting Evidence: The Waqf (Muslim authorities who control the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) began carelessly destroying layers of archeological remains when they started a series of renovations in late 1999. The site is filled with precious artifacts vital for reconstructing pre-biblical, biblical, Jewish and Muslim history, but the Waqf refused to cooperate with archeologists. They bulldozed the area and threw the artifact-rich soil in landfills. Archeologists periodically recover the artifacts from dumping areas, as students from Bar-Ilan University did in piles of fill in the Kidron Valley in 1999. [210]
- Supporting Evidence: Jordan desecrated Jewish holy places, destroyed the ancient Jewish quarter and expelled the Jews when it gained control of East Jerusalem in the 1948 War. 58 synagogues, some centuries old, were razed, ruined or turned into stables and chicken coops. The gravestones of the ancient Jewish burial ground on the Mount of Olives were uprooted and used for footpaths and urinals. [209]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts reality. It is Palestinians and their supporters who deny the ancient presence of the Jews and their historical connection to the land.
- Supporting Evidence: "The rewriting [of history] makes Jews disappear from the ancient Middle East. The historical museum in Amman tells through objects and inscriptions the history of all the ancient peoples of the region-with one exception. The kings and prophets of ancient Israel are entirely missing." Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis. [211]
- Supporting Evidence: "It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world. But they can't do it to us. There is not a single stone in the Wailing Wall relating to Jewish history. The Jews cannot legitimately claim this wall, neither religiously nor historically. The Committee of the League of Nations recommended in 1930 to allow the Jews to pray there in order to keep them quiet. But by no means did it acknowledge that the wall belongs to them….In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history." Sheikh 'Ikrima Sabri, PA-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem. January 2001 [212]
- Supporting Evidence: "[The Israelis] claim that 2000 years ago they had a Temple [on the Temple Mount]. I challenge the claim that this is so." Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen in Kul Al-Arab, August 25, 2000. [213]
- Supporting Evidence: "For 34 years, [the Israelis] have dug tunnels [around the Temple Mount]…they found not a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there, because historically the Temple was not in Palestine (at all)…They are now trying to put in place a number of stones so they can say 'We were here.'" Yasser Arafat, Oct. 5, 2002 in Al-Hayat [214]
- Supporting Evidence: "The rewriting [of history] makes Jews disappear from the ancient Middle East. The historical museum in Amman tells through objects and inscriptions the history of all the ancient peoples of the region-with one exception. The kings and prophets of ancient Israel are entirely missing." Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis. [211]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not tried to eradicate traces of other cultures. To the contrary, Israeli scholars and archeologists research and preserve the remains of all ancient peoples, not just Jews.
- POINT 13: Israel got control of the Territories in 1967 to carry out its policy of military occupation and ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge confuses cause and effect and distorts reality. Israel's occupation of the Territories began because in 1967 Arab states once again prepared for a full-scale invasion to eliminate the Jewish state. Israel captured the Territories during its defensive actions, and was obliged to administer them until peace was established. Arab states refused to make peace.
- Supporting Evidence: "Our forces now are entirely ready…to initiate the act of liberation itself and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united….I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into the battle of liberation." Defense Minister Hafez Assad, May 20, 1967. [215]
- Supporting Evidence: "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel…to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria,, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. Today they will know the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived." King Hussein of Jordan, May 30, 1967. [216]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he limits to which Arab states are committed: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel…." Arab states declaration after the 1967 War. Khartoum, August 1967. [217]
- Supporting Evidence: "Our forces now are entirely ready…to initiate the act of liberation itself and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united….I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into the battle of liberation." Defense Minister Hafez Assad, May 20, 1967. [215]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did just the opposite of ethnic cleansing during its administration of the Territories. The Palestinian population flourished-just the opposite of what would occur if there were policies of ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did just the opposite of ethnic cleansing. It built up and developed the Territories and gave freedoms, rights and opportunities to Palestinians that Jordan had denied them during its 19-year rule. Palestinians may not have wanted to be under Israeli rule, but they flourished during it.
- Supporting Evidence: Life expectancy soared from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 while infant mortality plummeted from 60 per thousand live births to 15 per 1000 and childhood diseases disappeared due to systematic Israeli programs to eradicate them. [219]
- Supporting Evidence: The Territories became the fourth fastest growing economy in the world in the 1970's due to Israeli investment in business, industry and infrastructure and to the opening of its borders to labor. Unemployment dropped from an average of 40% or more to below 5%. [220]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel fostered educational development, building 7 universities and 20 community colleges for the Palestinians. Illiteracy dropped from 50% to 30% just between 1967 and 1980. By 1990, only 14% of adults over age 15 were illiterate. [221]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel offered political and civil freedoms, including freedom of association, trade unions, civic organizations and opposition parties, none of which had been allowed under Jordan. It also established freedom of the press, even for newspapers hostile to Israel, giving the Palestinians the freest press in the Arab world. [222]
- Supporting Evidence: "They [Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank] don't know what freedom is. If anyone over there dared to say one word against Hussein, they would throw him into prison. They don't believe that I can go to Dizengoff Square and shout at the top of my voice against Golda Meir without anything happening to me." Member of the village council of J'at, an Israeli-Arab village. 1970 [223]
- Supporting Evidence: Life expectancy soared from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 while infant mortality plummeted from 60 per thousand live births to 15 per 1000 and childhood diseases disappeared due to systematic Israeli programs to eradicate them. [219]
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge confuses cause and effect and distorts reality. Israel's occupation of the Territories began because in 1967 Arab states once again prepared for a full-scale invasion to eliminate the Jewish state. Israel captured the Territories during its defensive actions, and was obliged to administer them until peace was established. Arab states refused to make peace.
- POINT 14: Arabs cannot buy land in Israel. This discrimination is for the purpose of ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: If this charge is true, then Ariel Sharon is also discriminated against. He can't buy state land in Israel either.
- COUNTERPOINT: In fact, this charge is based on ignorance of Israel's land policies. Those policies are not discriminatory nor do they promote ethnic cleansing. Jews cannot buy most of the land in Israel, either. The State of Israel owns 80% of the land and no private purchaser can buy it. It can only be leased through the Israel Land Administration (ILA). Jews and non-Jews alike have equal access to these leases.
- Supporting Evidence: Even Ariel Sharon does not own his two ranches. Both are leased from the government.
- Supporting Evidence: "The land-owning situation in Israel today is as follows: 80.4 percent is owned by the government, 13.1 percent is privately owned by the JNF, and 6.5 percent is evenly divided between private Arab and Jewish owners. Thus, the ILA administers 93.5 percent of the land in Israel.14 Put differently, 93.5 percent of the land is unavailable for private ownership; such land is sold neither to Jews nor to Arabs but is leased out by the ILA. Thus, while it is true that Israeli law prevents the sale of state-owned land to Israeli Arabs, this alone is extremely misleading, for it is equally unavailable for sale to Jewish citizens of Israel." [224]
- Supporting Evidence: Half of the land Israeli-Arabs cultivate is leased to them by the ILA. [225]
- Supporting Evidence: Even Ariel Sharon does not own his two ranches. Both are leased from the government.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has done just the opposite of ethnic cleansing with some of the state lands. At times, it gives more favorable lease terms to non-Jews than to Jews as a form of affirmative action.
- Supporting Evidence: The government recently charged Jews $24,000 for a land lease while it charged Bedouin families only $150 for a similar lease in the same vicinity.(*) When a Jewish-Israeli sued the government because he wanted similarly favorable terms, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the government's action in the interests of affirmative action. 1988 (**) [226]
- Supporting Evidence: The government recently charged Jews $24,000 for a land lease while it charged Bedouin families only $150 for a similar lease in the same vicinity.(*) When a Jewish-Israeli sued the government because he wanted similarly favorable terms, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the government's action in the interests of affirmative action. 1988 (**) [226]
- COUNTERPOINT: Thirteen-percent of Israel's land is privately owned by the Jewish National Fund. The government now administers that land. In principle, it is to be leased only to Jews but in practice it is also leased to Arab-Israelis. (Alexander Safian, “Can Arabs Buy Land in Israel?” Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, at http://www.meforum.org/article/370 ) But Arab-Israeli communities also have restrictive laws. It is illegal for Jews to buy land in Arab villages. ( Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, p. 157)
- COUNTERPOINT: Private land in Israel-6% of its total land-is open to any purchaser, Israeli citizen or non-citizen and is owned in equal amounts by Arabs and Jews. The Palestinian Authority has been encouraging wealthy Palestinians to purchase this land.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian Authority is encouraging purchases of land in Israeli territory by wealthy Palestinians It is a matter of Palestinian figures tied to the real estate business, and living mainly in London, who try to purchase homes and lands in Jerusalem through agents and lawyers who live mainly in Ramallah." Meir Porush, Israel's Deputy Housing Minister. 1997 [227]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab Waqf owns land that is for the express use and benefit of Muslim Arabs.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian Authority is encouraging purchases of land in Israeli territory by wealthy Palestinians It is a matter of Palestinian figures tied to the real estate business, and living mainly in London, who try to purchase homes and lands in Jerusalem through agents and lawyers who live mainly in Ramallah." Meir Porush, Israel's Deputy Housing Minister. 1997 [227]
- COUNTERPOINT: It is not Israel but rather the Palestinian Authority and Jordan that have land laws that are discriminatory, intent on ethnic cleansing, and enforced with threat of the death penalty.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1973, Jordan passed the "Law for Preventing the Sale of Immovable Property to the Enemy"-Israel. Any Jordanian selling land to an Israeli faced the death penalty and forfeiture of all his property. After the Israeli-Jordan Peace Treaty in 1994, this law was amended but it still barred Israelis from purchasing or leasing land in Jordan. [228]
- Supporting Evidence: Though the Palestinian Authority rescinded the Jordanian law during Oslo II, it continues to be enforced. Both the Palestinian Authority Mufti, Iremah Sabri and the Palestinian Authority Justice Minister Frieh Abu Middein have declared Palestinian land sales to Jews a capital offence. [229]
- Supporting Evidence: The PA admitted to the execution of seven men in 1996 alone on the grounds of selling land to Jews. The PA continues to arrest land dealers for selling land to Jews under the Jordanian law prohibiting the sale of land to foreigners. - Amnest International [230]
- Supporting Evidence: "Torture of those accused of "collaboration" with Israel or selling land to Israelis appeared to be systematic. Muhammad Bakr, accused of "collaboration" with Israel and land-dealing, was arrested in June and beaten while hung by the wrists in detention centres in Qalqilya and Nablus. Torture or ill-treatment of criminal detainees appeared to be widespread in Gaza." Amnesty International Report 1998 [231]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian Legislative Council has passed the first reading of a draft law …This new law reportedly bar sales to "occupiers" whom it defines as the "Israeli occupying government and its civil and military institutions, settlements and whomever is under their authority." It declares the sale of land in "Palestine" to such occupiers to be "high treason" punishable "according to the criminal law." And it states that foreign violators have "committed harm to the national security and will be punished according to the criminal law." The draft law is vague about punishment, but according to the Jordanian Penal Code, which is still in effect on the West Bank, the crime for treason is death.." Alex Safian, PhD, 1997 [232]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1973, Jordan passed the "Law for Preventing the Sale of Immovable Property to the Enemy"-Israel. Any Jordanian selling land to an Israeli faced the death penalty and forfeiture of all his property. After the Israeli-Jordan Peace Treaty in 1994, this law was amended but it still barred Israelis from purchasing or leasing land in Jordan. [228]
- COUNTERPOINT: If this charge is true, then Ariel Sharon is also discriminated against. He can't buy state land in Israel either.
- POINT 15: Israel steals Palestinian land in the Territories, displaces the owners and settles it as part of its ethnic cleansing campaign.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not stolen land in the Territories or displaced owners. The overwhelming majority of Jewish communities were built on government land that was barren, rock-strewn hillside and uninhabited. Other land was purchased legally from owners.
- Supporting Evidence: "Settlements are only established on public land after an exhaustive investigation has confirmed that no private rights exist in the land in question. The process of investigation includes an appeals process through which any individual claiming rights in the land can object. Decisions of the Appeals Board and any declaration that land is state-owned can also be appealed to the High Court of Justice." [233]
- Supporting Evidence: Ariel, one of the largest Jewish communities in the West Bank, was built on barren, rock-strewn hillside.
- Supporting Evidence: "Settlements are only established on public land after an exhaustive investigation has confirmed that no private rights exist in the land in question. The process of investigation includes an appeals process through which any individual claiming rights in the land can object. Decisions of the Appeals Board and any declaration that land is state-owned can also be appealed to the High Court of Justice." [233]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Jewish communities ("settlements") are not big enough to displace Palestinians or to compromise their land.
- Supporting Evidence: The Jewish communities (settlements) are on only 1.3% to 1.7% of the land area in the West Bank, according to B'Tselem, the human rights watchdog group. The much larger percentages sometimes suggested include the roads, adjacent areas and land between settlements that are all nearly unpopulated. [234]
- Supporting Evidence: Only approximately 200,000 Israelis live in the Territories, comprising just 6% of the population. [235]
- Supporting Evidence: 80% of the Israelis in the Territories are in communities that were built along the Green Line and did not displace the Palestinian population. [236]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jewish communities (settlements) are on only 1.3% to 1.7% of the land area in the West Bank, according to B'Tselem, the human rights watchdog group. The much larger percentages sometimes suggested include the roads, adjacent areas and land between settlements that are all nearly unpopulated. [234]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did expropriate some land around Jerusalem under the state's right to eminent domain. The majority of the land was expropriated from Jewish owners, not Arab owners, and all were compensated for their loss. (http://palestinefacts.org/pf_current_settlements.php )
- COUNTERPOINT: In some cases, Jews were not displacing others, but merely reclaiming their own land which Jordan had expropriated during its nineteen year rule after the 1948 War.
- Supporting Evidence: The vacant land in the Gilo area of Jerusalem had been purchased by a group of Jewish lawyers, including Dov Yosef, before World War II. Jordan expropriated it from them after the 1948 War. After Israel captured the Territories, the land was returned to them. [237]
- Supporting Evidence: Gush Etzion, Kfar Etzion and other villages in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem corridor had fallen to Arab forces in May 1948 and those captured were massacred. Sons and daughters of Jews who lived there until 1948 were the first to return after the 1967 War to reclaim their families' homes. [238]
- Supporting Evidence: The vacant land in the Gilo area of Jerusalem had been purchased by a group of Jewish lawyers, including Dov Yosef, before World War II. Jordan expropriated it from them after the 1948 War. After Israel captured the Territories, the land was returned to them. [237]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians have not been displaced or robbed of their land. They have built settlements in the Territories, often without proper permits, at twice the rate of Israelis. More than 260 new Palestinian settlements have been constructed vs. 144 new Israeli ones. (Jeffrey Helmreich, “Diplomatic and Legal Aspects of the Settlement Issue,” at http://www.jcpa.org/brief/brief2-16.htm)
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians may even be awarded the communities that Israelis bought and developed. Israel has offered to vacate many of the settlements in order to find a peaceful resolution of the ongoing conflict.
- Supporting Evidence: At Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, Prime Minister Barak offered to uproot settlements from 95% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. [239]
- Supporting Evidence: At the same negotiations, Prime Minister Barak offered a land exchange for the 5% of the land with Jewish communities that would become part of Israel. [240]
- Supporting Evidence: A majority of the settlers have indicated a willingness to relocate if a final agreement requires it, according to a poll taken by Peace Now in 2002. [241]
- Supporting Evidence: At Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, Prime Minister Barak offered to uproot settlements from 95% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. [239]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not stolen land in the Territories or displaced owners. The overwhelming majority of Jewish communities were built on government land that was barren, rock-strewn hillside and uninhabited. Other land was purchased legally from owners.
- POINT 16: Israel is trying to "Judaize" the Territories.
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim distorts reality. Denying that Jews were part of the population of the Territories contradicts the historical record. Jews had lived in Judea and Samaria (what Jordan renamed the West Bank) for thousands of years until the 1948 War. Their return merely restores the pre-1948 character of the culture.
- Supporting Evidence: Judea and Samaria are the cradle of Jewish civilization and contain some of Judaism's holiest sites.
- Supporting Evidence: "For centuries, Jews have owned land in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and have of course lived there. They lived on these lands during the period of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate." Chaim Herzog, Israeli Ambassador to the UN (1975-1978). [242]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]hroughout the Middle Ages, sizeable Jewish communities existed in Jerusalem and Safed, and smaller ones in Nablus and Hebron." Historian Walter Laqueur [243]
- Supporting Evidence: Judaism's second holiest city is Hebron, "revered as the birthplace of King David and as the reputed gravesite of the Hebrew patriarchs." As late as 1890, Hebron had 1500 Jews and three or four Talmudic academies. [244]
- Supporting Evidence: In the 1920's, there were Jewish communities in the Judean Hills, such as Emeq Arazim, Migdal-Eder, Kfar Uriah and Har-Tuv and in the Jordan Valley. [245]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians and then Jordan have tried to de-Judaize-expel Jews from-all of Palestine and especially the West Bank since the 1920's and to deny the Jewish connection to the land. They are the group bent on ethnic cleansing.
- 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 [246]
- 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 [247]
- 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 [248]
- Supporting Evidence: The centuries-old Jewish community in Hebron was massacred and destroyed during Arab riots in the summer of 1929. Though the survivors attempted to rebuild the community in 1936, the British prevented them from doing so. [249]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab troops destroyed the Jewish communities in the Gush Etzion bloc (south of Jerusalem in what today is called the West Bank) and razed them in May 1948, during the 1948 War. [250]
- Supporting Evidence: Jordan desecrated Jewish holy places, destroyed the ancient Jewish quarter and expelled the Jews when it gained control of East Jerusalem in the 1948 War. 58 synagogues, some centuries old, were razed, ruined or turned into stables and chicken coops. The gravestones of the ancient Jewish burial ground on the Mount of Olives were uprooted and used for footpaths and urinals. [251]
- Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Authority has re-established the law that makes it a capital crime to sell land to Jews. The PA admitted to the execution of seven men in 1996 alone on the grounds of selling land to Jews. The PA continues to arrest land dealers for selling land to Jews under the Jordanian law prohibiting the sale of land to foreigners. - State Department. Human Rights Report. [252]
- Supporting Evidence: Judea and Samaria are the cradle of Jewish civilization and contain some of Judaism's holiest sites.
- COUNTERPOINT: Jews in the Territories do not threaten the Arab character of the region.
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab population grew and grew even faster than the Israeli population during Israel's administration. In 1967, there were 954,898 Arabs in the Territories; by 1995 there were 2,534,604. [253]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jewish communities (settlements) are on only 1.3% to 1.7% of the land area in the West Bank, according to B'Tselem, the human rights watchdog group. The much larger percentages sometimes suggested include the roads, adjacent areas and land between settlements that are all nearly unpopulated. [254]
- Supporting Evidence: Only approximately 200,000 Israelis live in the Territories, comprising just 6% of the population. [255]
- Supporting Evidence: 80% of the Israelis in the Territories are in communities along the Green Line and do not disrpt the Palestinian population. [256]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab population grew and grew even faster than the Israeli population during Israel's administration. In 1967, there were 954,898 Arabs in the Territories; by 1995 there were 2,534,604. [253]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim distorts reality. Denying that Jews were part of the population of the Territories contradicts the historical record. Jews had lived in Judea and Samaria (what Jordan renamed the West Bank) for thousands of years until the 1948 War. Their return merely restores the pre-1948 character of the culture.
- POINT 17: Jerusalem was an Arab city. Israel is trying to "Judaize" Jerusalem.
- COUNTERPOINT: Jerusalem has always been Jewish. It was the capitol of the Jewish state for a thousand years until the Romans conquered and expelled them from the capitol in 70 AD. Subsequently, hope for a return to Jerusalem was at the core of Jewish religious beliefs.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he cause, the concept of Zion, has been present throughout Jewish history. A survey of the origins of Zionism must take at its starting point the central place of Zion in the thoughts, the prayers, and the dreams of the Jews in their dispersion…The longing for Zion manifested itself in the appearance of many messiahs….in the meditations of generations of mystics. Physical contact between the Jews and their former homeland was never completely broken…." Historian Walter Laqueur [257]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he cause, the concept of Zion, has been present throughout Jewish history. A survey of the origins of Zionism must take at its starting point the central place of Zion in the thoughts, the prayers, and the dreams of the Jews in their dispersion…The longing for Zion manifested itself in the appearance of many messiahs….in the meditations of generations of mystics. Physical contact between the Jews and their former homeland was never completely broken…." Historian Walter Laqueur [257]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim is absurd. Jerusalem has always been at the center of Jewish life, not Arab life. It was never the capital of any of the Muslim empires that dominated the region after the Roman conquest.
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. The Muslim holy city is Mecca which is the object of pilgrimages. [258]
- Supporting Evidence: When Muslims conquered Palestine in the late 7th century, they did not use Jerusalem as the major administrative center. When Suleiman became ruler in 715, he made Ramla, a town he founded, his administrative center, not Jerusalem. [259]
- Supporting Evidence: During the 400 years of Ottoman rule, Jerusalem was neglected and deteriorated. In the 19th century, "The ancient capital, now shrunken behind its medieval wall to a provincial Ottoman town of 17,000, vegetated in unspeakable squalor. Hygienic facilities were all but nonexistent. Year in and year out, Jerusalem was racked by summer epidemics of typhoid and typhus…." Historian Howard Sachar [260]
- Supporting Evidence: When King Hussein of Jordan captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1948, he did not make Jerusalem his capital. He kept Amman as his capital and tried to build a mosque there that would compete in importance with the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. [261]
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. The Muslim holy city is Mecca which is the object of pilgrimages. [258]
- COUNTERPOINT: This claim is absurd. Jerusalem has been a Jewish majority city since the mid-19th century. To claim that Israel is trying to Judaize Jerusalem is like saying France tries to Frenchify Paris.
- Supporting Evidence: Once Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem in the 4th century, they maintained a continuous presence there. By the mid-19th century, Jews were the majority religion in Jerusalem and by the 1880's, they formed the majority of the population. [262]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1844, there were 7,120 Jews in Jerusalem as opposed to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. [263]
- Supporting Evidence: By 1858, the British consul in Jerusalem reported that the Jews were the majority of the population in the city and that Muslims "scarcely exceeded one quarter of the whole population." [264]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1876, there were 12,000 Jews, 7,560 Muslims and 5,470 Christians in Jerusalem. [265]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1922, there were 33,971 Jews, 13,411 Muslims and 4,699 Christians in Jerusalem. [266]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1948, there were 100,000 Jews, 40,000 Muslims and 25,000 Christians in Jerusalem. [267]
- Supporting Evidence: Once Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem in the 4th century, they maintained a continuous presence there. By the mid-19th century, Jews were the majority religion in Jerusalem and by the 1880's, they formed the majority of the population. [262]
- COUNTERPOINT: Jerusalem has always been Jewish. It was the capitol of the Jewish state for a thousand years until the Romans conquered and expelled them from the capitol in 70 AD. Subsequently, hope for a return to Jerusalem was at the core of Jewish religious beliefs.
- POINT 18: Israel has tried to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem since 1967.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has NOT ethnically cleansed Jerusalem of Palestinians. Jerusalem had been a Jewish majority city for over a century by 1967.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1844, there were 7,120 Jews in Jerusalem as opposed to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. [268]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1876, there were 12,000 Jews, 7,560 Muslims and 5,470 Christians in Jerusalem.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1922, there were 33,971 Jews, 13,411 Muslims and 4,699 Christians in Jerusalem. [269]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1948, there were 100,000 Jews, 40,000 Muslims and 25,000 Christians in Jerusalem. [270]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1967, after Israel reunified Jerusalem, there were 195,700 Jews, 54,963 Muslims and 12,646 Christians.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1844, there were 7,120 Jews in Jerusalem as opposed to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. [268]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not try to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem after 1967. The proportion of the Arab population increased between 1967 and 2002, from 27% to 32% of the total population of Jerusalem. (Justus Reid Weiner, Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation on an Alarming Global Pattern, 2003 at http://www.jcpa.org/jlmbldg.htm )
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not tried to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem since 1967. To the contrary, the Arab population of Jerusalem grew at a far faster rate than the Jewish population between 1967 and 1997-163% growth for Arabs versus 113% growth for Jews. (Justus Reid Weiner, Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation on an Alarming Global Pattern, 2003 at http://www.jcpa.org/jlmbldg.htm )
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has NOT ethnically cleansed Jerusalem of Palestinians. Jerusalem had been a Jewish majority city for over a century by 1967.
- POINT 19: Israel has tried to cleanse Jerusalem of Palestinians by preventing them from building housing and by not granting them building permits.
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian Arabs are not prevented from constructing homes and maintaining their presence in Jerusalem. Indeed, Arab construction in Jerusalem outpaced Jewish construction between 1967 and 1997.
- COUNTERPOINT: Jerusalem's permit policies are no more onerous than those of any rapidly growing modern city. They differ in one major respect however: Israel tries to preserve the special historical character of Jerusalem, a city holy to three religions. But these restrictions are no more onerous for Arab than for Jewish residents. (Justus Reid Weiner, Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation on an Alarming Global Pattern, 2003 at http://www.jcpa.org/jlmbldg.htm )
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian Arabs get building permit approvals at the same rate as Israeli Jews. In some cases, the city grants them permits beyond what they even request. This is just the opposite of a policy of ethnic cleansing.
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem's Arab community received building permits for more square meters of residential construction than did the demographically similar (in terms of total numbers and family size) Jewish ultra-Orthodox community between 1974 and 1995. [272]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1998, a greater percentage of Arab permit requests were granted than Jewish permit requests: 79% approval for Arab requests as opposed to 73% for Jewish requests. [273]
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem has recently authorized plans to issue more than 33,600 permits for new housing units in the Arab sector until 2020. This quantity significantly exceeds the 20,000 new units that Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, the PA Representative with the Portfolio for Jerusalem, has insisted were needed for future Arab growth. [274]
- Supporting Evidence: The city of Jerusalem set up a program to make professionals available to help Arab residents with the permit process, at no charge. Some Jewish residents have balked at this extra assistance given to Arab residents but not to them. [275]
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem's Arab community received building permits for more square meters of residential construction than did the demographically similar (in terms of total numbers and family size) Jewish ultra-Orthodox community between 1974 and 1995. [272]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian Arabs are not prevented from constructing homes and maintaining their presence in Jerusalem. Indeed, Arab construction in Jerusalem outpaced Jewish construction between 1967 and 1997.
- POINT 20: Jerusalem city authorities demolish Palestinian homes under the pretext that they are illegal or lack permits. They never demolish Jewish homes.
- COUNTERPOINT: The city of Jerusalem does not demolish many structures, but when it does, it demolishes buildings in both the Jewish and Arab sectors. An equal number of demolitions occur in each sector.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1996, there were 12 demolitions in Jerusalem. Half of them (6) were in the Arab sector; half of them were in the Jewish sector (6). [276]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1997, there were 28 demolitions in Jerusalem. Seventeen of them were in the Arab sector; fourteen in the Jewish sector. [277]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1998, there were 25 demolitions. Twelve of them were in the Arab sector; thirteen in the Jewish sector. [278]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1996, there were 12 demolitions in Jerusalem. Half of them (6) were in the Arab sector; half of them were in the Jewish sector (6). [276]
- COUNTERPOINT: These are not trumped up charges. Illegal construction is a real and serious problem in the fast-growing city-as it is in all rapidly modernizing cities. Jerusalem has established urban planning to facilitate growth, set up zoning, green and brown areas for parks, roads and schools, to centralize city services such as sewage, water and electrical services and to establish safety codes. These regulations must be followed for the city to function appropriately.
- Supporting Evidence: Illegal construction "poses a very serious threat to the future viability of the city as a whole and in particular to the viability of the neighborhoods where Arabs are the bulk of the population, because they're the one's who are going to suffer first because their neighbors are building too big, too many floors without parking, sewage, drainage, electricity, without adequate schools, clinics, mosques." Human Rights Attorney, Justice Reid Weiner May 17 2004 [279]
- Supporting Evidence: Illegal construction "poses a very serious threat to the future viability of the city as a whole and in particular to the viability of the neighborhoods where Arabs are the bulk of the population, because they're the one's who are going to suffer first because their neighbors are building too big, too many floors without parking, sewage, drainage, electricity, without adequate schools, clinics, mosques." Human Rights Attorney, Justice Reid Weiner May 17 2004 [279]
- COUNTERPOINT: Illegal construction in the Arab sector of Jerusalem is a serious problem.
- Supporting Evidence: Illegal Arab construction has "expanded to a magnitude hitherto unknown," particularly in the northern part of the city where "uninhabited buildings are being built at an alarming rate…" June, 2000 in Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper. [280]
- Supporting Evidence: "The question should really be what can Israel do to preserve the environmental quality and the future viaibility of the city of Jerusalem given the fact that over the past 10 or 11 years about 1000 new illegal living units have been built in the Arab sector each year since the peace process started in 1993. This poses not just a colossal legal problem for the courts and for the inspectors. It poses a very serious threat to the future viability of the city as a whole…."." Human Rights Attorney, Justice Reid Weiner May 17 2004 [281]
- Supporting Evidence: "[W]e can build inside Jerusalem, legal, illegal, rebuild a house…Maybe we lose ten houses, but in the end we build 40 more houses in East Jerusalem." Khalil Tufakji, Palestinian demographer, CNN interview 1997. [282]
- Supporting Evidence: Accompanying the Tufakji interview on CNN "were scenes of unmolested Arab construction, a sight commonplace in the city." [283]
- Supporting Evidence: A Palestinian Legislative Council member who represents Jerusalem boasted in 2001 that Palestinians had built 6,000 homes without permit between 1997 and 2001 and that less than 198 were demolished by the authorities. [284]
- Supporting Evidence: One of the most serious infractions has been that illegal builders put structures on property they do not own or else forge ownership papers. The real Arab owners of these properties then register complaints with the municipal authorities. [285]
- Supporting Evidence: Illegal Arab construction has "expanded to a magnitude hitherto unknown," particularly in the northern part of the city where "uninhabited buildings are being built at an alarming rate…" June, 2000 in Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper. [280]
- COUNTERPOINT: Often, it is aggrieved Arab residents who report on the illegal building of other Palestinians and ask the municipal authorities to take action against them.
- Supporting Evidence: "Fifty percent of the building violations in the Arab neighborhoods come to the City's attention when neighbors, who have been adversely affected by the illegal building, lodge complaints." Assistant Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Interview 2001 [286]
- Supporting Evidence: Several Arab landowners of the Beit Hanina section of Jerusalem published warnings in Al-Quds (the Palestinian newspaper) so that unsuspecting buyers would not purchase land from fraudulent sellers who claimed the land belonged to them. Al-Quds 2/4/02, Appendix 8B [287]
- Supporting Evidence: Residents of Jerusalem's Arab Beit Hanina neighborhood became so exasperated that in November 1999 they signed a charter with city authorities to being joint urban planning. The city granted 1000 new construction permits. But squatting and rapid building of unpermitted structures, partially subsidized by the PA, caused residents to abandon the plans. Instead, they erected cement walls around the perimeter of their properties to defend it against illegal encroachment. [288]
- Supporting Evidence: "Fifty percent of the building violations in the Arab neighborhoods come to the City's attention when neighbors, who have been adversely affected by the illegal building, lodge complaints." Assistant Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Interview 2001 [286]
- COUNTERPOINT: Municipal authorities have rigorous codes about building demolitions to prevent harm to residents. Reports of wanton or excessive numbers of demolitions are highly suspect.
- Supporting Evidence: Demolitions are prohibited if the residence has been occupied for 30 days or more. Deputy Manager of Licensing and Inspection, Department of Jerusalem, June 2002. [289]
- Supporting Evidence: Five signatures from city officials are required before an administrative demolition can be carried out. [290]
- Supporting Evidence: If the demolition is appealed, the Court stays the demolition until the matter is decided. [291]
- Supporting Evidence: If the family has inhabited the structure for less than 30 days, the Municipality is required to provide temporary residence that can include a hotel room at the city's expense. [292]
- Supporting Evidence: There have been several documented instances of activist Palestinian groups using demolitions as political theater for the media. They move families into the structure for a few days prior to the demolition. After the demolition, they move the families into tents to protest against Israeli policies instead of availing themselves of the city's offer for hotel rooms. [293]
- Supporting Evidence: Demolitions are prohibited if the residence has been occupied for 30 days or more. Deputy Manager of Licensing and Inspection, Department of Jerusalem, June 2002. [289]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel's policies are not discriminatory. Indeed, a majority of East Jerusalem's Arab residents indicated they wish to remain under Israeli jurisdiction instead of being joined to the Palestinian Authority.
- Supporting Evidence: When Barak's peace plan in 2000 recommended putting East Jerusalem under PA control, "Zuhair Hamda, a prominent leader of a large family in the Arab neighborhood of Su Baher, gathered a petition with more than 10,000 signatures of Arabs from Jerusalem who preferred not to be transferred to Arafat's governance…." According to media reports, Hamdan was shot and critically wounded in September 2001, apparently by members of Arafat's Fatah faction, for his efforts. [294]
- Supporting Evidence: "I estimate that close to 70% of the Arab residents (of Jerusalem) want to remain under Israeli rule because of the economic benefits…." Fadal Tahabub, a member of the Palestinian Council and a resident of East Jerusalem. July 2000 [295]
- Supporting Evidence: Alarmed by Arab Jerusalemites apparent preference to remain under Israeli control, Faisal Husseini, then holder of the Jerusalem file for the PA, urgently summoned journalists from three Palestinian dailies to put out message to East Jerusalem's Arab residents, telling them not to worry about losses they might experience in insurance rights, freedom of movement into Israel and Israel's higher salaries-if sovereignty were to change. 8/28/00 Jerusalem Report.
- Supporting Evidence: When Barak's peace plan in 2000 recommended putting East Jerusalem under PA control, "Zuhair Hamda, a prominent leader of a large family in the Arab neighborhood of Su Baher, gathered a petition with more than 10,000 signatures of Arabs from Jerusalem who preferred not to be transferred to Arafat's governance…." According to media reports, Hamdan was shot and critically wounded in September 2001, apparently by members of Arafat's Fatah faction, for his efforts. [294]
- COUNTERPOINT: The city of Jerusalem does not demolish many structures, but when it does, it demolishes buildings in both the Jewish and Arab sectors. An equal number of demolitions occur in each sector.
- POINT 21: Israel has committed genocide to ethnically cleanse the Territories.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not committed genocide of Palestinians and to suggest that it has is to pervert the very meaning of the term. Israel has used enormous restraint in trying to quell the terrorist war launched by the Palestinians.
- Supporting Evidence: Even when Edward Said recited his long list of supposed atrocities Israel commits against Palestinians, he admitted that what they did was "short of genocide." Edward Said, Lecture at UCLA 2/20/03
- Supporting Evidence: Israel has one of the largest and most advanced militaries in the world. It could have attacked Palestinian cities much as the US attacked in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, Israel chose tactics that would minimize civilian casualties even as it risked greater casualties among its own troops. In Jenin in the spring of 2002, Israel sent in troops to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure instead of bombing from the air. As a result, 23 Israeli troops were killed as opposed to the 52 Palestinians.
- Supporting Evidence: Even when Edward Said recited his long list of supposed atrocities Israel commits against Palestinians, he admitted that what they did was "short of genocide." Edward Said, Lecture at UCLA 2/20/03
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel's tremendous restraint is especially praiseworthy when compared to how other nations have handled similar problems. They have not risked their own troops to spare civilian casualties.
- Supporting Evidence: An op ed piece urged American commanders to use Israel as a model for urban combat. "Twenty-nine Israeli soldiers were killed in these battles, all but six of them in the battle for the Jenin refugee camp. Although the number of Palestinian deaths is, of course, hotly debated, the Israeli estimate is 132 killed in Nablus and Jenin. Compared with casualty figures from urban combat in recent years-such as the fighting in Chechnya, where Russia's army lost at least 1500 soldiers during its first assault on Grozny-these numbers are astonishingly low." Yigal Henkin, "The Best Way into Baghdad,: New York Times Op Ed, April 20, 2003.
- Supporting Evidence: "[I]n battle, the Israeli army regularly accepted risks to its own men in order to reduce the risks that it posed on the civilian population. The contrast with the way the Russians fought at Grozny, to take the most recent example of large-scale urban warfare, is striking, and the crucial mark of that contrast is the very small number of civilian casualties in the Palestinian cities despite the fierceness of the fighting." Professor Michael Walzer of Princeton University. 2002 [296]
- Supporting Evidence: An op ed piece urged American commanders to use Israel as a model for urban combat. "Twenty-nine Israeli soldiers were killed in these battles, all but six of them in the battle for the Jenin refugee camp. Although the number of Palestinian deaths is, of course, hotly debated, the Israeli estimate is 132 killed in Nablus and Jenin. Compared with casualty figures from urban combat in recent years-such as the fighting in Chechnya, where Russia's army lost at least 1500 soldiers during its first assault on Grozny-these numbers are astonishingly low." Yigal Henkin, "The Best Way into Baghdad,: New York Times Op Ed, April 20, 2003.
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians themselves, not Israelis, caused a significant proportion of the Palestinian deaths in both the first and second intifadas.
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians caused about one-third of the Palestinian deaths during the first Intifada (Dec. 1987-1992). Of an estimated 1377 casualties, 473 were Arabs killed by Palestinians. [297]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians caused close to 20% of Palestinian casualties in the current Intifada (September 29, 2000-September 17, 2003). Of 2405 casualties, 306 were Palestinians killed by Palestinians; 131 were suicide bombers. [298]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinian terrorists have used civilians and put them at risk by encouraging them to join violent demonstrations and by hiding in civilian centers, putting them at high risk for becoming "civilian casualties."
- Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian residents of Al Barka and areas close to the community of Kfar Darom have called on the Nationalists and Islamic forces to stop firing, and especially from firing mortar bombs, from areas close to inhabited houses. Firing from densely populated areas just brings damage and destruction to the residents and their property." Al-Hayat Al Jadida (PA daily newspaper) November 7, 2002. [299]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians caused about one-third of the Palestinian deaths during the first Intifada (Dec. 1987-1992). Of an estimated 1377 casualties, 473 were Arabs killed by Palestinians. [297]
- COUNTERPOINT: It is Palestinians who have consistently tried to perpetrate genocide-killing innocent civilians-not Israel.
- Supporting Evidence: "The attacks against civilians by Palestinian armed groups are widespread, systematic and in pursuit of an explicit policy to attack civilians. They therefore constitute war crimes against humanity under international law. They may also constitute war crimes…." Amnesty International, July 13, 2002 [300]
- Supporting Evidence: Suicide bombers consistently target civilian sites and people-public buses, Bar Mitzvah celebrations, University cafeterias, young adult hang-outs like night clubs and cafes.
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians have targeted innocent civilians. Since the current Intifada began, 36% of Palestinian casualties have been civilians. In contrast, 77% of Israeli casualties have been civilians. [301]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians target women. Since the current Intifada began, 31% of Israeli casualties have been women. Only 4% of Palestinian casualties have been women. [302]
- Supporting Evidence: Palestinians target older people who are not combatants. Since the Intifada began, 25% of Israeli casualties have been over the age of 45. Only 3% of Palestinian casualties have been over the age of 45. [303]
- Supporting Evidence: "The attacks against civilians by Palestinian armed groups are widespread, systematic and in pursuit of an explicit policy to attack civilians. They therefore constitute war crimes against humanity under international law. They may also constitute war crimes…." Amnesty International, July 13, 2002 [300]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not committed genocide of Palestinians and to suggest that it has is to pervert the very meaning of the term. Israel has used enormous restraint in trying to quell the terrorist war launched by the Palestinians.
- POINT 22: Israel ruthlessly kills Palestinians under the pretext that it is defending itself against Terrorism. This spurious defense defies "the credulity of the most gullible intelligence." It is part of Israel's policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge distorts reality and "defies credulity." Israel's security needs are brutally real. Palestinians are attacking and Israelis are dying.
- Supporting Evidence: After rejecting Prime Minister Barak's compromise proposals, the Palestinians effectively declared war on Israel on September 29, 2000.
- Supporting Evidence: From September 2000 until the Hudna on June 29, 2003, there were 18,144 attempted or successful terrorist attacks against Israelis, the equivalent of 17 a day in a population of only 6 million people.
- Supporting Evidence: 820 Israelis have been killed, over 70% of them civilians, including children, the elderly and women. 5,640 have been injured, some so seriously that they are permanently crippled. Children have become orphans; parents have lost their children when they go or return from school. [304]
- Supporting Evidence: After rejecting Prime Minister Barak's compromise proposals, the Palestinians effectively declared war on Israel on September 29, 2000.
- COUNTERPOINT: The counterterrorist measures are not a pretext. The Palestinian leadership in effect openly declared war against Israel. These attacks are not the work of marginal criminals. Violence was planned and coordinated long before Ariel Sharon walked on the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000.
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestinian people did not cease throughout the seven years of negotiations [since Oslo] from carrying out Intifadas against Israel and stating its positions by means other than the negotiating table." "The choice is not at all between options of negotiation and fighting: You can have negotiations and fight at the same time... the Palestinian people fight with weapons, with jihad, with Intifadas and suicide actions... and it is destined to always fight and negotiate at the same time…" Nabil Sha'ath, PA Minister of Planning and International Cooperation. January 1996 [305]
- Supporting Evidence: "The popular recruitment in the PA's territories has significantly increased, and a Palestinian Liberation Army was established under the Fatah Leadership. The PA has already distributed weapons to the citizens and is supervising training and preparation for the possible confrontation with the forces of the Israeli occupation." Statement by PA security official, July 21, 2000 (two months before the Intifada erupted). Reported in Kul Al-Arab, Israeli-Arab newspaper. [306]
- Supporting Evidence: "The failure to reach a final agreement [at Camp David] will force the Palestinians to opt for military action."-Hasan Al-Khashef, Director-General of the PA Ministry of Information inAl-Quds Al Arabi [London] August 24, 2000. ) [307]
- Supporting Evidence: "Violence is around the corner, and the Palestinians are willing to sacrifice even 5,000 casualties." Freih Abu Middein, PA Justice Minister, August 24, 2000 in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA newspaper). [308]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestinian people did not cease throughout the seven years of negotiations [since Oslo] from carrying out Intifadas against Israel and stating its positions by means other than the negotiating table." "The choice is not at all between options of negotiation and fighting: You can have negotiations and fight at the same time... the Palestinian people fight with weapons, with jihad, with Intifadas and suicide actions... and it is destined to always fight and negotiate at the same time…" Nabil Sha'ath, PA Minister of Planning and International Cooperation. January 1996 [305]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has overwhelming justification for defending itself. The PA has maintained the machinery of war and incitement throughout its governance. In its children's schoolbooks, its mosques, and government-controlled media, the PA has kept up a campaign of hate and vilification of Israelis and Jews, denied the legitimacy of the Jewish state, insisted that all the land belongs to Palestinians, and called for the killing of Jews.
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews "must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said, 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.'…Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them." Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Sermon in Gaza broadcast on PA television. October, 2000 PA-appointed religious leader. Sermon broadcast on PA television.
- Supporting Evidence: An end-of-the-year ceremony for 1650 kindergarten students run by Hamas 'included a skit by children that encouraged the murder of Jews as a religious commandment. 2002 [309]
- Supporting Evidence: "Notice, oh worshippers of Allah, the Jews are the most loathsome creatures on the face of the earth. For the Christians, despite their abominations, asked of Omar bin Al-Khattab one condition from among four-not to permit the Jews to live in Palestine. We want people like [Saladin] to liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque…." Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, Friday sermon on PA TV August 15, 2003 [310]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews "must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said, 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.'…Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them." Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Sermon in Gaza broadcast on PA television. October, 2000 PA-appointed religious leader. Sermon broadcast on PA television.
- COUNTERPOINT: No nation can or should tolerate this assault on its people. No nation can neglect to take defensive security measures to protect its citizens.
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge distorts reality and "defies credulity." Israel's security needs are brutally real. Palestinians are attacking and Israelis are dying.
- POINT 23: Israel is waging the current war against the Palestinians to drive them out of their homes and conquer more of their land.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has already shown that it is willing to give the West Bank and Gaza strip to a Palestinian State, if the PA accepts an end to violence.
- COUNTERPOINT: The majority of Palestinians see the current Intifada as a way for Palestinians to conquer all of Israel.
- Supporting Evidence: 71% of Palestinians support continuing the terrorist/military campaign against Israel. In a random sample of 1199 Palestinians conducted by JMCC Public Opinion Polls in September of 2002, 64.3% of Palestinians supported suicide bombings against civilians and 43% of Palestinians believed the goal of the current Intifada should be the elimination of Israel. [311]
- Supporting Evidence: In a 2002 Poll taken at Najah University in Nablus, "87% of Palestinians surveyed were in favor of continuing terror attacks," and, "87.5% were in favor of 'liberating all of Palestine'." [312]
- Supporting Evidence: 71% of Palestinians support continuing the terrorist/military campaign against Israel. In a random sample of 1199 Palestinians conducted by JMCC Public Opinion Polls in September of 2002, 64.3% of Palestinians supported suicide bombings against civilians and 43% of Palestinians believed the goal of the current Intifada should be the elimination of Israel. [311]
- COUNTERPOINT: It is the Palestinians who throughout the Peace Process proclaimed that their goal was the conquest of all of Israel.
- Supporting Evidence: "You understand that we plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; the Jews will not want to live among us Arabs! I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews." - Yassir Arafat, speech to Arab diplomats in the Spiegel Salon at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, Jan 30, 1996. [313]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Oslo Accords were a Trojan horse; the strategic goal is the liberation of Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea." - Faisal Husseini, PA Administrator for Jerusalem Affairs, July 13, 2001. [314]
- Supporting Evidence: "At this stage we talk about a state within the 1967 borders, but this is not the end of the story.... because I aspire, historically, culturally and geographically, to a unified Palestine. ...It can be established through peace, if the Israelis accept the logic of a [unified] democratic Palestinian state. If they don't accept this logic, then the logic of history will lead to a confrontation [ie war]." - Bilal Al-Hassan, representing the position of the Palestinian left, Al-Jazeera, November 17, 2000. [315]
- Supporting Evidence: "You understand that we plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; the Jews will not want to live among us Arabs! I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews." - Yassir Arafat, speech to Arab diplomats in the Spiegel Salon at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, Jan 30, 1996. [313]
- COUNTERPOINT: Since the Intifada, it is Palestinians - and many anti-Israel speakers - who seem bent on rejecting all compromise and on pushing for a campaign for irreversible conquest of Israeli land and society, not Israel.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has already shown that it is willing to give the West Bank and Gaza strip to a Palestinian State, if the PA accepts an end to violence.
- POINT 24: Israel employs a program of land confiscation and settlement building to ethnically cleanse the Territories of Palestinians.
- COUNTERPOINT: During its administration of the Territories, the Palestinian population grew enormously and its standard of living improved. This does not happen under a regime of ethnic cleansing.
- Supporting Evidence: Under Israeli governance, the Palestinian population grew even faster than the Israeli population. If ethnic cleansing were occurring, the population should have dropped, not grown 2.5 times. In 1967, there were 954,898 Arabs in the Territories; by 1995 there were 2,534,604. [316]
- Supporting Evidence: Under Israeli governance, the Palestinian population grew even faster than the Israeli population. If ethnic cleansing were occurring, the population should have dropped, not grown 2.5 times. In 1967, there were 954,898 Arabs in the Territories; by 1995 there were 2,534,604. [316]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians have not been displaced or robbed of their land. They have built settlements in the Territories and homes in Jerusalem, often without proper permits, at twice the rate of Israelis. More than 260 new Palestinian settlements have been constructed vs. 144 new Israeli ones. (Jeffrey Helmreich, “Diplomatic and Legal Aspects of the Settlement Issue,” at http://www.jcpa.org/brief/brief2-16.htm )
- Supporting Evidence: In Jerusalem, the number of flats in the Arab sector grew by 122% while the number of flats for the Jewish population grew by 113.5% between 1967 and 1997. [317]
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem's Arab community received building permits for more square meters of residential construction than did the demographically similar (in terms of total numbers and family size) Jewish ultra-Orthodox community between 1974 and 1995. [318]
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem has recently authorized plans to issue more than 33,600 permits for new housing units in the Arab sector until 2020. This quantity significantly exceeds the 20,000 new units that Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, the PA Representative with the Portfolio for Jerusalem, has insisted were needed for future Arab growth. [319]
- Supporting Evidence: In Jerusalem, the number of flats in the Arab sector grew by 122% while the number of flats for the Jewish population grew by 113.5% between 1967 and 1997. [317]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not confiscated land in the Territories or displaced owners. The overwhelming majority of Jewish communities were built on the Green Line and on government land that was barren, rock-strewn hillside and uninhabited. Other land was purchased legally from owners.
- Supporting Evidence: 80% of the Israelis in the Territories are in communities that were built along the Green Line and did not displace the Palestinian population. [320]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jewish communities (settlements) are on only 1.3% to 1.7% of the land area in the West Bank, according to B'Tselem, the human rights watchdog group. The much larger percentages sometimes suggested include the roads, adjacent areas and land between settlements that are all nearly unpopulated. [321]
- Supporting Evidence: "Settlements are only established on public land after an exhaustive investigation has confirmed that no private rights exist in the land in question. The process of investigation includes an appeals process through which any individual claiming rights in the land can object. Decisions of the Appeals Board and any declaration that land is state-owned can also be appealed to the High Court of Justice." [322]
- Supporting Evidence: Ariel, one of the largest Jewish communities in the interior of Judea in the West Bank, was built on barren, rock-strewn hillside.
- Supporting Evidence: 80% of the Israelis in the Territories are in communities that were built along the Green Line and did not displace the Palestinian population. [320]
- COUNTERPOINT: Even the PLO and Fatah do not identify Jewish communities in the Territories as "illegal settlements."
- Supporting Evidence: Even the PLO and Fatah do not identify Jewish communities in the Territories as "illegal settlements." Their websites identify "illegal settlements" only as those that overran or replaced Arab villages. All 544 of them are located in Israel. The 144 Jewish communities are called "settlements" because NONE of them overran Arab villages. . [323]
- Supporting Evidence: Even the PLO and Fatah do not identify Jewish communities in the Territories as "illegal settlements." Their websites identify "illegal settlements" only as those that overran or replaced Arab villages. All 544 of them are located in Israel. The 144 Jewish communities are called "settlements" because NONE of them overran Arab villages. . [323]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians may even be awarded the communities that Israelis bought and developed. Israel has offered to vacate many of the settlements in order to find a peaceful resolution of the ongoing conflict.
- Supporting Evidence: At Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, Prime Minister Barak offered to uproot settlements from 95% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. [324]
- Supporting Evidence: At the same negotiations, Prime Minister Barak offered a land exchange for the 5% of the land with Jewish communities that would become part of Israel. [325]
- Supporting Evidence: A majority of the settlers have indicated a willingness to relocate if a final agreement requires it, according to a poll taken by Peace Now in 2002. [326]
- Supporting Evidence: At Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, Prime Minister Barak offered to uproot settlements from 95% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. [324]
- COUNTERPOINT: During its administration of the Territories, the Palestinian population grew enormously and its standard of living improved. This does not happen under a regime of ethnic cleansing.
- POINT 25: Israel's recent offensive against the Palestinians is a continuation of the 1948 policy of expulsion and expropriation.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel never had a policy of expulsion and expropriation, in 1948 or at any other time. Arab policies, not Israel, created the refugee problem. The refugees were a product of the 1948 War. Had Arab leaders accepted the UN Partition Resolution in 1947 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 [the UN plan for] partition and the [creation of a] 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. [327]
- 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 [328]
- 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 [329]
- 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 [Arab] armies mow them down." (Habib Issa, Secretary general of the Arab League, in Al Hoda Newspaper, June 8, 1951.)
- Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing [the UN plan for] partition and the [creation of a] 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. [327]
- COUNTERPOINT: The idea that Israel's recent offensive is part of a policy of expulsion and expropriation turns the facts upside down. Israel had withdrawn from the Territories so that Palestinians could form an independent, self-governing entity. By 1997, 98% of Palestinians were ruled by the Palestinian Authority. Israel's recent offensive is an effort to fight the war against it initiated by the Palestinians-a campaign of rampant terrorism that murdered 900 innocent Israeli civilians between October 2000 and March 2004.
- Supporting Evidence: Since the beginning of the Intifada, Israeli intelligence has received approximately 40 terrorist warnings a day. [330]
- Supporting Evidence: "whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque is wrong... This Intifada was planned in advance." - PA Communications Minister, Imad al Faluji. In Al-Safir, March 3, 2001. [331]
- Supporting Evidence: "Imad Faluji, the Palestinian National Authority's Communications Minister, said during a PLO rally in Ain al-Hilweh refutifada [...] that the five-month-old uprising against Israel had been planned since the Camp David peace talks failed in July, contradicting past contentions of a spontaneous outburst from Palestinians on the street." - Semi-governmental Lebanese Newspaper, Beirut "Daily Star", March 3, 2001. [332]
- Supporting Evidence: "Mr. Falouji went on to state that Arafat launched this intifada as a culminating state to the immutable Palestinian stance in the negotiations." - Al-Ayyam, the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper. December 6, 2000. [333]
- Supporting Evidence: "The issues of Jerusalem, the refugees and sovereignty are one and will be finalized on the ground and not in negotiations. At this point it is important to prepare Palestinian society for the challenge of the next step because we will inevitably find ourselves in a violent confrontation with Israel in order to create new facts on the ground. [...] I believe that the situation in the future will be more violent than the Intifada." - Abu-Ali Mustafa of the Palestinian Authority. July 23, 2000 (two months before the outbreak of the current Intifada). [334]
- Question: Quoting from the semi-governmental, Beirut "Daily Star" (March 3, 2001), "Imad Faluji, the Palestinian National Authority's Communications Minister, said during a PLO rally in Ain al-Hilweh refutifada [...] that the five-month-old uprising against Israel had been planned since the Camp David peace talks failed in July, contradicting past contentions of a spontaneous outburst from Palestinians on the street." Why, in light of the Palestinian Authority's admission that the current Intifada was planned and orchestrated from above, do you still claim that it is spontaneous?
- Supporting Evidence: Since the beginning of the Intifada, Israeli intelligence has received approximately 40 terrorist warnings a day. [330]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel never had a policy of expulsion and expropriation, in 1948 or at any other time. Arab policies, not Israel, created the refugee problem. The refugees were a product of the 1948 War. Had Arab leaders accepted the UN Partition Resolution in 1947 instead of going to war, there would have been a Palestinian state and no refugees.
- POINT 26: The Israeli Mayor of Jerusalem wants to rid the holy city of its Palestinian residents and any symbols of Palestinian identity in Jerusalem as home demolitions have become a monthly occurrence in the city.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has NOT tried to change the character of Jerusalem. It had been a Jewish majority city for over a century by 1967.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1844, there were 7,120 Jews in Jerusalem as opposed to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. [335]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1876, there were 12,000 Jews, 7,560 Muslims and 5,470 Christians in Jerusalem. [336]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1922, there were 33,971 Jews, 13,411 Muslims and 4,699 Christians in Jerusalem. [337]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1948, there were 100,000 Jews, 40,000 Muslims and 25,000 Christians in Jerusalem. [338]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1967, after Israel reunified Jerusalem, there were 195,700 Jews, 54,963 Muslims and 12,646 Christians.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1844, there were 7,120 Jews in Jerusalem as opposed to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. [335]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not try to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem after 1967. The proportion of the Arab population increased between 1967 and 2002, from 27% to 32% of the total population of Jerusalem and the Arab population of Jerusalem grew at a faster rate than the Jewish population between 1967 and 1997-163% growth for Arabs versus 113% growth for Jews. (Justus Reid Weiner, Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation on an Alarming Global Pattern, 2003 at http://www.jcpa.org/jlmbldg.htm )
- Question: Your lead this audience to believe that Israel has engaged in the systematic removal of Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Don't you consider this a problem given the fact that this is untrue? The Arab population has soared, and grew at a far faster rate than the Jewish population between 1967 and 1997-163% growth for Arabs versus 113% growth for Jews. (*) In addition, the proportion of the Arab population increased between 1967 and 2002, from 27% to 32% of the total population of Jerusalem. (**) Aren't you concerned about you are giving this audience such incorrect impressions of the real situation? [339]
- Question: Your lead this audience to believe that Israel has engaged in the systematic removal of Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Don't you consider this a problem given the fact that this is untrue? The Arab population has soared, and grew at a far faster rate than the Jewish population between 1967 and 1997-163% growth for Arabs versus 113% growth for Jews. (*) In addition, the proportion of the Arab population increased between 1967 and 2002, from 27% to 32% of the total population of Jerusalem. (**) Aren't you concerned about you are giving this audience such incorrect impressions of the real situation? [339]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not tried to rid Jerusalem of symbols of Palestinian national identity or religious identity. To the contrary, Israel has preserved historic buildings and districts and permitted continuing Muslim control of holy Muslim sites.
- Supporting Evidence: "There is unimpeded access today [to holy sites]. There wasn't from 1948-1967" when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and prevented access to Jews and Christians. President Jimmy Carter [340]
- Supporting Evidence: In one of its first act after the 1967 War, Israel announced that it would let the Waqf (the Muslim Trust) maintain control over the mosques on Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount, and promised that Jews would be allowed to pray only at the adjacent Wailing Wall, not on the Temple Mount itself, in order to not offend Muslims. [341]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel entrusted administration of the Christian and Muslim holy sites to their respective religious authorities. [342]
- Supporting Evidence: Israeli archeologists and the Israeli Antiquities Authority have carefully excavated and preserved pre-Biblical, Jewish, Christian and Muslim sites and those of other people such as the Philistines to promote scholarly study of the past. Its archeologists have unearthed major Muslim structures, such as the Omayad palaces south of the Temple Mount, the Muslim Nimrod Fortress as well as Neolithic and Canaanite sites, Crusader Churches and the Church of John the Baptist. [343]
- Supporting Evidence: "There is unimpeded access today [to holy sites]. There wasn't from 1948-1967" when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and prevented access to Jews and Christians. President Jimmy Carter [340]
- COUNTERPOINT: The city of Jerusalem is not demolishing more Arab homes than Jewish homes. It does not demolish many structures, but when it does because of zoning violations, an almost equal number of demolitions occur in each sector.
- Supporting Evidence: In 1996, there were 12 demolitions in Jerusalem. Half of them (6) were in the Arab sector; half of them were in the Jewish sector (6). [344]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1997, there were 28 demolitions in Jerusalem. Seventeen of them were in the Arab sector; fourteen in the Jewish sector. [345]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1998, there were 25 demolitions. Twelve of them were in the Arab sector; thirteen in the Jewish sector. [346]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1996, there were 12 demolitions in Jerusalem. Half of them (6) were in the Arab sector; half of them were in the Jewish sector (6). [344]
- COUNTERPOINT: The city does not demolish Arab homes to eradicate the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem. It does so because llegal construction is a real and serious problem in the fast-growing city-as it is in all rapidly modernizing cities. Jerusalem has established urban planning to facilitate growth, set up zoning, green and brown areas for parks, roads and schools, to centralize city services such as sewage, water and electrical services and to establish safety codes. These regulations must be followed for the city to function appropriately.
- Supporting Evidence: Illegal Arab construction has "expanded to a magnitude hitherto unknown," particularly in the northern part of the city where "uninhabited buildings are being built at an alarming rate…" June, 2000 in Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper. [347]
- Supporting Evidence: "[W]e can build inside Jerusalem, legal, illegal, rebuild a house…Maybe we lose ten houses, but in the end we build 40 more houses in East Jerusalem." Khalil Tufakji, Palestinian demographer, CNN interview 1997. [348]
- Supporting Evidence: Accompanying the Tufakji interview on CNN "were scenes of unmolested Arab construction, a sight commonplace in the city." [349]
- Supporting Evidence: A Palestinian Legislative Council member who represents Jerusalem boasted in 2001 that Palestinians had built 6,000 homes without permit between 1997 and 2001 and that less than 198 were demolished by the authorities. [350]
- Supporting Evidence: One of the most serious infractions has been that illegal builders put structures on property they do not own or else forge ownership papers. The real Arab owners of these properties then register complaints with the municipal authorities. [351]
- Supporting Evidence: Illegal Arab construction has "expanded to a magnitude hitherto unknown," particularly in the northern part of the city where "uninhabited buildings are being built at an alarming rate…" June, 2000 in Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper. [347]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has NOT tried to change the character of Jerusalem. It had been a Jewish majority city for over a century by 1967.
- POINT 27: In fact, for many decades, Israel-and the US, following its lead-denied the very existence of this [Arab Palestinian] population. Golda Meir once said that there is no such thing as a Palestinian.
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge is a gross distortion of the facts about the history of the region. Neither Israel nor Golda Meir ever denied there was an Arab population in Palestine. But they did deny that there were Arabs who considered themselves a distinctive nation and people called Palestinians, as demonstrated by Golda Meir's full comment on the question.
- COUNTERPOINT: Arab spokesmen also denied that there was a distinctive Palestinian nation. For decades, the term Palestinian had been identified with Jews. Arabs in Palestine were always called Arabs and, in fact, were outraged by the very use of the term Palestine.
- 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. [352]
- Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University. 1946.
- Supporting Evidence: "Palestine was 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, submitted to the General Assembly in May 1947.
- 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.
- 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. [352]
- COUNTERPOINT: The Arabs of Palestine had no sense of national identity and certainly would not call themselves Palestinians. Golda Meir was not alone in making this claim. Arab leaders also made it.
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism." Zahir Muhsein, PLO executive committee member. Interview March 31, 1977 in the Dutch newspaper Trouw [353]
- Supporting Evidence: Customs between Arab areas were so similar that the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations adopted a resolution that stated: "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds." 1919 [354]
- Supporting Evidence: "[T]he sympathy of the Palestinian Arabs with their kinsmen in Syria had been plainly shown….Both peoples clung to the principle that Palestine was part of Syria and should never have been cut off from it." Peel Commission 1937 [355]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestine Arabs have at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak." Count Folk Bernadotte, UN Envoy to Palestine, 1948 [356]
- Supporting Evidence: "By 1947, much of the Palestine Arab population had only an indistinct, if any, idea of national purpose or statehood…..[O]n the whole, save for the numerically small circle of the elite, the Palestinians were unready for the national message…Palestine Arabs, still caught up in a village-centered…political outlook, by and large completely lacked…a clear concept of the nation and of national belonging….Most Palestine Arabs had no sense of separate national or cultural identity to distinguish them from, say, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt." Historian Benny Morris. [357]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism." Zahir Muhsein, PLO executive committee member. Interview March 31, 1977 in the Dutch newspaper Trouw [353]
- COUNTERPOINT: Palestine as a name was largely associated with Jewish organizations and businesses, not Arab ones.
- Supporting Evidence: The primary Jewish newspaper was called the Palestine Post though today it is known as the Jerusalem Post.
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews established the Palestine Colonization Association to buy and settle land even before the Mandate was established. [358]
- Supporting Evidence: The Jews named their organization to develop tracts of land the Palestine Development Company. [359]
- Supporting Evidence: Infrastructure and industry that Jews developed often were named "Palestine" such as the Palestine Electric Corporation and the Palestine Potash Company." [360]
- Supporting Evidence: The primary Jewish newspaper was called the Palestine Post though today it is known as the Jerusalem Post.
- COUNTERPOINT: Once the Palestine Mandate ended, its territory was divided among three nations and the inhabitants either became citizens of those nations or lived under other national jurisdictions. When Golda Meir spoke, these arrangements were accepted as de facto realities. In essence, people who had lived in the Palestine Mandate-Jews and Arabs once identified as Palestinians-had taken on modern identities.
- Supporting Evidence: After the creation of Israel in 1948, the Jews and Arabs who resided in its borders became Israelis.
- Supporting Evidence: The Arabs of the former Mandate who lived in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) became Jordanians.
- Supporting Evidence: The Arabs of the former Mandate who lived in the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian jurisdiction.
- Supporting Evidence: Though Jordan's and Egypt's capture of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were illegal and not recognized by the international community, when Golda Meir spoke, these arrangements were accepted as de facto realities.
- Supporting Evidence: After the creation of Israel in 1948, the Jews and Arabs who resided in its borders became Israelis.
- COUNTERPOINT: This charge is a gross distortion of the facts about the history of the region. Neither Israel nor Golda Meir ever denied there was an Arab population in Palestine. But they did deny that there were Arabs who considered themselves a distinctive nation and people called Palestinians, as demonstrated by Golda Meir's full comment on the question.
- POINT 28: Israel has carried out daily ethnic cleansing in the Territories.
- COUNTERPOINT: This is an absurd claim. Israel's policies between 1967 and 1993 promoted just the opposite. When Israel administered the Territories, the Palestinian population grew dramatically as did its standard of living because of Israel's progressive, humanitarian policies. This would never have happened had Israel's goal been ethnic cleansing.
- Supporting Evidence: Under Israeli governance, the Palestinian population grew even faster than the Israeli population. The Arab population in the Territories grew 2.5 times between 1967 and 1995, from 954,898 to 2,534,604. [361]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel brought economic prosperity to Palestinians. Israeli investment in business, industry and infrastructure and the opening of its borders to labor made the Territories the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world in the 1970's and unemployment dropped from an average of 40% or more to below 5%. [362]
- Supporting Evidence: Israel built up and developed the Territories and gave freedoms, rights, and opportunities to Palestinians that Jordan, during its 19-year rule, had denied them. Palestinians may not have wanted to be under Israeli rule, but they flourished. [363]
- Supporting Evidence: Under Israeli governance, the Palestinian population grew even faster than the Israeli population. The Arab population in the Territories grew 2.5 times between 1967 and 1995, from 954,898 to 2,534,604. [361]
- COUNTERPOINT: Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel clearly has not done anything remotely resembling ethnic cleansing. Just the opposite is true. Israel turned more and more of the Territories over to Palestinian control. Between 1996 and 1999, the Palestinian Authority gradually came to govern 99% of the Palestinian people and the Territories' main urban centers.
- Supporting Evidence: "Very few Palestinians live in occupied territory. 97% of the Palestinians are under the control of the PA since Israel's redeployment. Israel does not exert military authority over the Palestinians. The PA fully controls all the major Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as mandated by the signed agreements. The PA controls 98% of the territory in the Gaza Strip and 40% of the territory in the West Bank, with the remainder to be decided in the negotiations." Institute of Public Affairs [364]
- Supporting Evidence: In Oslo II (1995) "The Palestinians were given complete civilian and security control over "Area A," which initially consisted of the seven major Palestinian towns--Jenin, Qalqilya, Tulkarem, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. "Area B"--comprised of all other Palestinian population centers (except for some refugee camps)--remained under the "overriding security responsibility" of Israel. Israel retained sole security and civil control over "Area C," which includes all Israeli settlements, military bases and areas, and state lands." Geoffrey Ahronson, Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine [365]
- Supporting Evidence: "In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment from Hebron in January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation." Historian Ephraim Karsh [366]
- Supporting Evidence: "Very few Palestinians live in occupied territory. 97% of the Palestinians are under the control of the PA since Israel's redeployment. Israel does not exert military authority over the Palestinians. The PA fully controls all the major Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as mandated by the signed agreements. The PA controls 98% of the territory in the Gaza Strip and 40% of the territory in the West Bank, with the remainder to be decided in the negotiations." Institute of Public Affairs [364]
- COUNTERPOINT: The only Palestinian Arabs that Israel has "ethnically cleansed" -that is, arrested or killed-are the terrorists who have attempted to mass murder Israeli civilians and who have wreaked havoc on civil society in the Territories.
- Supporting Evidence: In the first three months of 2002, Palestinian terrorists launched 40 terrorist attacks within the Green Line and in March 2002 alone, 17 suicide bombers detonated themselves among innocent civilians. In 2003, innocent Israelis experienced 3838 terrorist attacks-the equivalent of 320 a month or 10 a day, according to recent IDF summaries. Reported in the liberal newspaper Ha'aretz. [367]
- Supporting Evidence: In the first three months of 2002, Palestinian terrorists launched 40 terrorist attacks within the Green Line and in March 2002 alone, 17 suicide bombers detonated themselves among innocent civilians. In 2003, innocent Israelis experienced 3838 terrorist attacks-the equivalent of 320 a month or 10 a day, according to recent IDF summaries. Reported in the liberal newspaper Ha'aretz. [367]
- COUNTERPOINT: The idea that Israel's recent offensive is part of a policy of expulsion and expropriation turns the facts upside down. Israel had withdrawn from the Territories so that Palestinians could govern themselves. Israel's recent offensive is an effort to fight the war against it initiated by the Palestinians-a campaign of rampant terrorism that murdered 900 innocent Israeli civilians between October 2000 and March 2004.
- Supporting Evidence: Since the beginning of the Intifada, Israeli intelligence has received approximately 40 terrorist warnings a day. [368]
- Supporting Evidence: "whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque is wrong... This Intifada was planned in advance." - PA Communications Minister, Imad al Faluji. In Al-Safir, March 3, 2001. [369]
- Supporting Evidence: "Imad Faluji, the Palestinian National Authority's Communications Minister, said during a PLO rally in Ain al-Hilweh refutifada [...] that the five-month-old uprising against Israel had been planned since the Camp David peace talks failed in July, contradicting past contentions of a spontaneous outburst from Palestinians on the street." - Semi-governmental Lebanese Newspaper, Beirut "Daily Star", March 3, 2001. [370]
- Supporting Evidence: "Mr. Falouji went on to state that Arafat launched this intifada as a culminating state to the immutable Palestinian stance in the negotiations." - Al-Ayyam, the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper. December 6, 2000. [371]
- Supporting Evidence: "The issues of Jerusalem, the refugees and sovereignty are one and will be finalized on the ground and not in negotiations. At this point it is important to prepare Palestinian society for the challenge of the next step because we will inevitably find ourselves in a violent confrontation with Israel in order to create new facts on the ground. [...] I believe that the situation in the future will be more violent than the Intifada." - Abu-Ali Mustafa of the Palestinian Authority. July 23, 2000 (two months before the outbreak of the current Intifada). [372]
- Question: Quoting from the semi-governmental, Beirut "Daily Star" (March 3, 2001), "Imad Faluji, the Palestinian National Authority's Communications Minister, said during a PLO rally in Ain al-Hilweh refutifada [...] that the five-month-old uprising against Israel had been planned since the Camp David peace talks failed in July, contradicting past contentions of a spontaneous outburst from Palestinians on the street." Why, in light of the Palestinian Authority's admission that the current Intifada was planned and orchestrated from above, do you still claim that it is spontaneous?
- Supporting Evidence: Since the beginning of the Intifada, Israeli intelligence has received approximately 40 terrorist warnings a day. [368]
- COUNTERPOINT: If any government is causing "ethnic cleansing"-the migration of some of the local population to other countries--, it is the Palestinian Authority. The PA's failure to establish a viable, uncorrupt government, its hostility to Christians, and its launching of the Intifada in 2000 created impossible living conditions. The corrupt regime, the proliferation of competing terrorist groups, and the corruption in the PA itself have created anarchy in the Territories. It is little wonder that some have chosen to leave if they can.
- Supporting Evidence: "The fawda (anarchy) is running rampant in the territories, notwithstanding Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia's statements about the need to fight it." In Jenin and Nablus militias are engaged in both criminal and terrorist activity. They extort protection fees from merchants and kidnap businesspeople to supplement their income. Or they threaten political activists in an attempt to squeeze benefits from the PA." Ha'aretz January 2 2004 [373]
- Supporting Evidence: "Speaking off the record, residents in Nablus admit that they welcomed the curfew that Israel Defense Forces troops enforced in their city on Thursday. The curfew prevented, or at least delayed, a collapse of internal order and security in the large West Bank city, a locale which in recent months has been convulsed by a series of killings and reprisal murders and by shooting sprees on the street perpetrated by gunmen whose aim is to intimidate the locals or to carve out turf for themselves." Ha'aretz, August 27 2003 [374]
- Supporting Evidence: "Since the start of the intifada a year ago, there has been a dramatic rise of hundreds of percent in the number of Palestinians who want to leave the Territories and move to a Western country…The impression gleaned in embassies here (Israel) and in immigration offices around the world is that a visa to a Western country is the most sought after commodity in the Territories…" "The Secret Exodus-Palestinian Emigration" in Ha'aretz Magazine October 5, 2001 [375]
- Supporting Evidence: "In a survey we conducted two years ago (1999), we found that even then 20 to 25% of the Palestinians were considering the possibility of emigrating. The number of young, educated people who said they were thinking of leaving was double the average. People wanted a democratic society, they wanted work, and they didn't get what they wanted." Bassem Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Ha'aretz Magazine October 5 2001." Bassem Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Ha'aretz Magazine October 5 2001 [376]
- Supporting Evidence: "The [World Council of Churches] report notes with alarm that more and more Palestinian Christians - two to three families per week - are emigrating because of the violence and economic crisis." August 6 2001 [377]
- Supporting Evidence: "The emigration phenomenon, Eid says, is a well-kept secret. 'No Palestinian journalist has written about the wave of emigration, which is still increasing. The thinking is that from a national point of view, that story shouldn't be given publicity. There are journalists who think that the emigration story could be detrimental to the national interest…." ." Bassem Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Ha'aretz Magazine October 5 2001 [378]
- Supporting Evidence: "The fawda (anarchy) is running rampant in the territories, notwithstanding Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia's statements about the need to fight it." In Jenin and Nablus militias are engaged in both criminal and terrorist activity. They extort protection fees from merchants and kidnap businesspeople to supplement their income. Or they threaten political activists in an attempt to squeeze benefits from the PA." Ha'aretz January 2 2004 [373]
- COUNTERPOINT: It is the Palestinians who throughout the Peace Process proclaimed that their goal was the conquest of all of Israel--and the expulsion of Jewish Israelis.
- Supporting Evidence: "You understand that we plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; the Jews will not want to live among us Arabs! I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews." - Yassir Arafat, speech to Arab diplomats in the Spiegel Salon at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, Jan 30, 1996. [379]
- Supporting Evidence: "The Oslo Accords were a Trojan horse; the strategic goal is the liberation of Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea." - Faisal Husseini, PA Administrator for Jerusalem Affairs, July 13, 2001. [380]
- Supporting Evidence: "At this stage we talk about a state within the 1967 borders, but this is not the end of the story.... because I aspire, historically, culturally and geographically, to a unified Palestine. ...It can be established through peace, if the Israelis accept the logic of a [unified] democratic Palestinian state. If they don't accept this logic, then the logic of history will lead to a confrontation [ie war]." - Bilal Al-Hassan, representing the position of the Palestinian left, Al-Jazeera, November 17, 2000. [381]
- Supporting Evidence: "You understand that we plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; the Jews will not want to live among us Arabs! I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews." - Yassir Arafat, speech to Arab diplomats in the Spiegel Salon at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, Jan 30, 1996. [379]
- COUNTERPOINT: The idea that Israel's recent offensive is part of a policy of expulsion and expropriation turns the facts upside down. Israel had withdrawn from the Territories so that Palestinians could form an independent, self-governing entity. By 1997, 98% of Palestinians were ruled by the Palestinian Authority. Israel's recent offensive is an effort to fight the war against it initiated by the Palestinians-a campaign of rampant terrorism that murdered 900 innocent Israeli civilians between October 2000 and March 2004.
- Supporting Evidence: Since the beginning of the Intifada, Israeli intelligence has received approximately 40 terrorist warnings a day. [382]
- Supporting Evidence: "whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque is wrong... This Intifada was planned in advance." - PA Communications Minister, Imad al Faluji. In Al-Safir, March 3, 2001. [383]
- Supporting Evidence: "Imad Faluji, the Palestinian National Authority's Communications Minister, said during a PLO rally in Ain al-Hilweh refutifada [...] that the five-month-old uprising against Israel had been planned since the Camp David peace talks failed in July, contradicting past contentions of a spontaneous outburst from Palestinians on the street." - Semi-governmental Lebanese Newspaper, Beirut "Daily Star", March 3, 2001. [384]
- Supporting Evidence: "Mr. Falouji went on to state that Arafat launched this intifada as a culminating state to the immutable Palestinian stance in the negotiations." - Al-Ayyam, the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper. December 6, 2000. [385]
- Supporting Evidence: "The issues of Jerusalem, the refugees and sovereignty are one and will be finalized on the ground and not in negotiations. At this point it is important to prepare Palestinian society for the challenge of the next step because we will inevitably find ourselves in a violent confrontation with Israel in order to create new facts on the ground. [...] I believe that the situation in the future will be more violent than the Intifada." - Abu-Ali Mustafa of the Palestinian Authority. July 23, 2000 (two months before the outbreak of the current Intifada). [386]
- Question: Quoting from the semi-governmental, Beirut "Daily Star" (March 3, 2001), "Imad Faluji, the Palestinian National Authority's Communications Minister, said during a PLO rally in Ain al-Hilweh refutifada [...] that the five-month-old uprising against Israel had been planned since the Camp David peace talks failed in July, contradicting past contentions of a spontaneous outburst from Palestinians on the street." Why, in light of the Palestinian Authority's admission that the current Intifada was planned and orchestrated from above, do you still claim that it is spontaneous?
- Supporting Evidence: Since the beginning of the Intifada, Israeli intelligence has received approximately 40 terrorist warnings a day. [382]
- COUNTERPOINT: Whatever ethnic cleansing is occurring in the Territories-people fleeing to other countries-is because of the PA and the miserable conditions it has created since it launched the Intifada, not because of Israel.
- COUNTERPOINT: This is an absurd claim. Israel's policies between 1967 and 1993 promoted just the opposite. When Israel administered the Territories, the Palestinian population grew dramatically as did its standard of living because of Israel's progressive, humanitarian policies. This would never have happened had Israel's goal been ethnic cleansing.
- POINT 29: Israel has confiscated lands in Jerusalem and unjustly annexed East Jerusalem.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel expropriated some land around Jerusalem under the state's right to eminent domain. The majority of the land was expropriated from Jewish owners, not Arab owners, and all were compensated for their loss. (http://palestinefacts.org/pf_current_settlements.php )
- COUNTERPOINT: In some cases, Jews were merely reclaiming their own land which Jordan had expropriated during its nineteen year rule after the 1948 War.
- Supporting Evidence: The vacant land in the Gilo area of Jerusalem had been purchased by a group of Jewish lawyers, including Dov Yosef, before World War II. Jordan expropriated it from them after the 1948 War. After Israel captured the Territories, the land was returned to them. [387]
- Supporting Evidence: Gush Etzion, Kfar Etzion and other villages in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem corridor had fallen to Arab forces in May 1948 and those captured were massacred. Sons and daughters of Jews who lived there until 1948 were the first to return after the 1967 War to reclaim their families' homes. [388]
- Supporting Evidence: The vacant land in the Gilo area of Jerusalem had been purchased by a group of Jewish lawyers, including Dov Yosef, before World War II. Jordan expropriated it from them after the 1948 War. After Israel captured the Territories, the land was returned to them. [387]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel has not inhibited the growth of the Arab population in Jerusalem nor the growth of the Arab housing sector.
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab population of Jerusalem grew at a far faster rate than the Jewish population between 1967 and 1997-163% growth for Arabs versus 113% growth for Jews. [389]
- Supporting Evidence: Arab construction in Jerusalem outpaced Jewish construction between 1967 and 1997. The number of flats in the Arab sector grew by 122% while the number of flats for the Jewish population grew by 113.5% between 1967 and 1997. [390]
- Supporting Evidence: The Arab population of Jerusalem grew at a far faster rate than the Jewish population between 1967 and 1997-163% growth for Arabs versus 113% growth for Jews. [389]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel's annexation of eastern Jerusalem is hardly unjust. Jerusalem has always been at the center of Jewish life, not Arab life. It was never the capital of any of the Muslim empires that dominated the region after the Roman conquest.
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. The Muslim holy city is Mecca which is the object of pilgrimages. [391]
- Supporting Evidence: When Muslims conquered Palestine in the late 7th century, they did not use Jerusalem as the major administrative center. When Suleiman became ruler in 715, he made Ramla, a town he founded, his administrative center, not Jerusalem. [392]
- Supporting Evidence: During the 400 years of Ottoman rule, Jerusalem was neglected and deteriorated. In the 19th century, "The ancient capital, now shrunken behind its medieval wall to a provincial Ottoman town of 17,000, vegetated in unspeakable squalor. Hygienic facilities were all but nonexistent. Year in and year out, Jerusalem was racked by summer epidemics of typhoid and typhus…." Historian Howard Sachar [393]
- Supporting Evidence: When King Hussein of Jordan captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1948, he did not make Jerusalem his capital. He kept Amman as his capital and tried to build a mosque there that would compete in importance with the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. [394]
- Supporting Evidence: Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. The Muslim holy city is Mecca which is the object of pilgrimages. [391]
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel's annexation of eastern Jerusalem is hardly unjust. Jerusalem has been a Jewish majority city since the mid-19th century.
- Supporting Evidence: Once Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem in the 4th century, they maintained a continuous presence there. By the mid-19th century, Jews were the majority religion in Jerusalem and by the 1880's, they formed the majority of the population. [395]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1844, there were 7,120 Jews in Jerusalem as opposed to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. [396]
- Supporting Evidence: By 1858, the British consul in Jerusalem reported that the Jews were the majority of the population in the city and that Muslims "scarcely exceeded one quarter of the whole population." [397]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1876, there were 12,000 Jews, 7,560 Muslims and 5,470 Christians in Jerusalem. [398]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1922, there were 33,971 Jews, 13,411 Muslims and 4,699 Christians in Jerusalem. [399]
- Supporting Evidence: In 1948, there were 100,000 Jews, 40,000 Muslims and 25,000 Christians in Jerusalem. [400]
- Supporting Evidence: Once Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem in the 4th century, they maintained a continuous presence there. By the mid-19th century, Jews were the majority religion in Jerusalem and by the 1880's, they formed the majority of the population. [395]
- COUNTERPOINT: At the Camp David negotiations in 2000, Israel, in the interests of ending the conflict, offered to share its capital and let Arab Palestinians have eastern Jerusalem for their capital. They refused the offer.
- COUNTERPOINT: Israel expropriated some land around Jerusalem under the state's right to eminent domain. The majority of the land was expropriated from Jewish owners, not Arab owners, and all were compensated for their loss. (http://palestinefacts.org/pf_current_settlements.php )
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