Excerpts from Catastrophic Rot
by Ron Dermer
The Jerusalem Post
5//01
IN THIS age of moral relativism, there is one simple truth that we would be wise not to forget: There would not be one Palestinian refugee today if they had accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
The Palestinians did not lose their homes and land because Israel was created, but rather because they failed to destroy it.
Fifty-three years ago, seven Arab countries launched a war of annihilation against the Jews of Palestine.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled during that conflict, nearly all of their own free will.
In the aftermath, while Israel was busy absorbing the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees that were driven out of the Arab states in the wake of that war, the Arab world, with the exception of Jordan, didn't lift a finger to help their own "brothers."
For five decades, rather than use their oil wealth to help integrate the Palestinians into their host states, the Arabs preferred instead to use them as pawns in the propaganda war against Israel - a war whose continuation these tyrants rightly saw as affording them an excuse to avoid political liberalization at home...
So, before we Jews castigate our own people for not yet reaching an appropriate level of universalistic enlightenment, we might want to remember the stories of those who lived through the events of 1948 - people like Yaffa Rosenthal, a little girl whose mother, Rivka, came to Israel from Poland in 1931 and whose father, Joseph, sensing the rise of anti-Semitism in his native Germany, came a short time afterward.
On November 29, 1947, the precocious 11-year-old, born and raised in Gedera, a village of 500 souls not far from Rehovot, celebrated the UN vote partitioning Palestine into two states by dancing the traditional debka with Arabs from the five neighboring villages.
A few weeks later, Yaffa noticed that Rivka's euphoria over the establishment of a Jewish state had turned to despair.
After inquiring about her mother's sudden change of mood, she was told that a few days earlier, an Arab who worked with her father and who lived nearby had paid an unexpected visit to the family's home.
When her mother answered the door, the visitor told her that he and his family were leaving, but that they would be gone only long enough to allow his Arab brethren from the surrounding states to rid Palestine of the Jews once and for all. Graciously informing her that he would soon be occupying her family's home, he said that she need not worry. Though her husband would be killed along with the other Jewish men, the women would be spared.
Fortunately for me, the fate of Yaffa and Rivka, whom today I refer to as mom and grandma, was not left to Palestinian magnanimity.
A collection of historical quotations relating to
the Arab refugees:
Collected by Moshe Kohn
ON APRIL 23, 1948 Jamal Husseini, acting chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee (AHC), told the UN Security Council: "The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce ... They preferred to abandon their homes, belongings and everything they possessed."
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1948, the Beirut Daily Telegraph quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the AHC, as saying: "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..."
ON JUNE 8, 1951, Habib Issa, secretary-general of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily al-Hoda that in 1948, Azzam Pasha, then League secretary, had "assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade ... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states."
IN THE MARCH 1976 issue of Falastin a-Thaura, then the official journal of the Beirut-based PLO, Mahmud Abbas ("Abu Mazen"), PLO spokesman, wrote: "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."
ON APRIL 9, 1953, the Jordanian daily al-Urdun quoted a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying: "For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are responsible, because of the dissemination of rumours exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy."
ANOTHER refugee told the Jordanian daily a-Difaa on September 6, 1954: "The Arab governments told us, 'Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in."
THE JORDANIAN daily Falastin wrote on February 19, 1949: "The Arab states... encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies."
ON OCTOBER 2, 1948, the London Economist reported, in an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa's Arabs: "There is little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in the flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit ... And it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
THE PRIME Minister of Syria in 1948, Khaled al-Azem, in his memoirs, published in 1973, listed what he thought were the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948: " ... the fifth factor was the call by the Arab governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and leave for the bordering Arab countries ... We brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land."
"FOLLOWING a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported the following: 'But while they express no bitterness against the Jews...they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes." -
British Foreign Office Document #371/75342/XC/A/4991 [From "Revising or Devising Israel's History" by Prof. Shlomo Slonim in Jewish Action, Summer 5760/2000, Vol. 60 #4]
The above quotes were taken from http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/quotes.html
"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. Despite this, the Muslims declared holy war against them and did not hesitate to massacre their children and women... Thus a black fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandates are cancelled and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine."
The statement is from a letter sent to the French Prime Minister in June 1936 by six Syrian Alawi notables (the Alawis are the ruling class in Syria today) in support of Zionism. The grandfather of Hafez al-Assad, the former Fuhrer of Syria, was one of them. (Source, Daniel Pipes, Greater Syria, Oxford U Press, p. 179)