Huckabee: All presidential candidates should visit all of Israel, including W. Bank settlements

[Little Tich]

Source: Jerusalem Post

He made his statement at an unusual campaign stop for any presidential candidate, the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, which is located in the Binyamin region.

US Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called on all those running for the White House in 2016 to make a solidarity visit to Israel to show their “disgust” for the Iran deal and support for the Jewish state, including the West Bank settlements.

“I wish that every candidate, Republican or Democrat would come to Israel to show solidarity with the country that most reflects the mirror imagine of the American spirit, to show solidarity with the Israeli people and to show their extreme disgust with any deal with Iran,” the former Arkansas governor said.

He made his statement at an unusual campaign stop for any presidential candidate, the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, which is located in the Binyamin region.

“If you are going to visit Israel, you should visit all of Israel and that would include Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee told reporters.

Read more: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Huckabee-all-presidential-candidates-should-visit-all-of-Israel-including-the-settlements-412508

[Israeli]

1. dafka .....

I agree with him Little Tich....

re : " “If you are going to visit Israel, you should visit all of Israel and that would include Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee told reporters. "

Unrestricted access to all of The Wild West Bank should be compulsory for every American politician ....and for every American tourist .

Its an eye opener .

I highly recommened tours by Peace Now @
http://www.peacenow.org.il/eng/content/peace-now-tour-west-bank

and by Breaking the Silence @
http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/tours/4

[Little Tich]

2. I'm not so sure that's what the poor man meant...

But frankly, even though my opinion about the Republican presidential candidates is very low, I still think such a trip would be an eye-opener for them.

[Israeli]

19. For sure that is not ....

" what the poor man meant "

I doubt that ....Republicans support the settlers to the hilt Little Tich.
Right wing and religious ....the same the world over ...no matter the religion .

[DetlefK]

3. Israel is the mirror-image of the american spirit? WTF????

You mean, moving into a place, kicking the Natives out, stuffing them into reservations and then saying you are allowed to do that because you are God's special darling?

[grossproffit]

4. Did you type this with a straight face?

[DetlefK]

5. Okay, what else do Israel and the US have more in common with each other...

than the US does with other countries?


What was so ridiculous in my post?
That the US and Israel first had to be cleared from Natives?
That the Natives don't get full rights?
That religious extremism is used to rationalize this injustice?

[Mosby]

7. Jews are the natives

They have been living in Israel, Judea and Samaria for thousands of years, continuously.

[DetlefK]

8. And that's why the Palestinians had to get removed first when Israel was founded.

Sure.

[Mosby]

9. no one had to be "removed"

Most of the people left because they wanted to stay out of the way of the Arab armies.

The Arab's war of genocide against the Jews failed so most that left could not come back.

[Little Tich]

12. Perhaps you should stop posting that revisionist garbage.

The Palestinians were removed by force against their will. The idea that the fled their homes voluntarily to help the Arab armies is just a revisionist lie.

I suggest that you try to read some of the history books on the subject, you can start with "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited" by Benny Morris. He's an ardent Zionist, and I think that he's wrong to justify throwing the Palestinians out, but he's at least no falsifier of history. I know for a fact that the book is floating around on the interwebs and you can get it anytime, so there's no excuse for you continued ignorance.

Bleh.

[shira]

13. It's not revisionist. Here's a link for you with MANY Palestinian sources....

....confirming this allegedly "revisionist" history. Including Mahmoud Abbas. You know who he is?

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=567

[Little Tich]

17. Wow, that site is like Falsified History 101...

At least now I know where you go to get your revisionist kicks...

[shira]

18. Amazing how Mahmoud Abbas spews Zionist revisionist history...

Isn't it?



Who's forcing him to do so?

[shira]

14. Besides videos, here are quotes about the refugee issue...

The Economist, a frequent critic of the Zionists, reported on October 2, 1948: “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 in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”

Time's report of the battle for Haifa (May 3, 1948) was similar: "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city....By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."

"The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They
did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regret-
table."

-- Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin el-Thawra ("What We Have
Learned and What We Should Do&quot , Beirut, March 1976.

"Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" (Wall
Street Journal; June 5, 2003):

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the
official journal of the PLO in Beirut: "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, imposed upon them a political and ideological
blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in
Eastern Europe."

"The Arabs of Haifa fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel."
-- Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949

In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948-49, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave: 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.

In listing the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948, Khaled al-Azm (Syrian Prime Minister) notes that
"Since 1948, it is we who have demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them
leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on
them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging...we have participated in lowering their morale
and social level...Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson and throwing stones
upon men, women and children...all this in the service of political purposes..."

-- Khaled el-Azm, Syrian prime minister after the 1948 War, in his 1972 memoirs, published in 1973.

"The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade," said Habib Issa in the New York Lebanese paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951). "He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean....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."

Even Jordan's King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs, blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem: The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue.

"The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help
these refugees."

-- The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, February 19, 1949.

"The 15th May, 1948, arrived ... On that day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead."
-- The Cairo daily Akhbar el Yom, October 12, 1963

"Arabs still living in Israel recall being urged to evacuate Haifa by Arab military commanders who wanted to bomb the city."
-- Newsweek, January 20, 1963

"The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread
by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is
our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish
crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of
Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the
Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy."
-- The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.

[shira]

15. And now, Benny Morris....

Benny Morris considers that there was no master plan nor ethnic cleansing.[124] Morris wrote, "The fact ... that during 1948 Ben-Gurion and most of the Yishuv's leaders wished to see as few Arabs remaining as possible, does not mean that the Yishuv adopted and implemented a policy of expulsion."[125] He later expounded:

There was no Zionist "plan" or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of "ethnic cleansing". Plan Dalet (Plan D), of 10 March 1948, (it is open and available for all to read in the IDF Archive and in various publications), was the master plan of the Haganah—the Jewish military force that became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state.[126]

[Little Tich]

16. You have obviously not read the book.

Benny Morris categorically denies that there was a plan to throw out the Palestinians, not that they were removed against their will. He argues that it was justified to remove them due to strategical purposes.

Please, read the book...

[Little Tich]

20. I can quote Benny Morris too!

Here are some selected snippets from an article written by Benny Morris about his book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited":

For the record, by Benny Morris
Source: The Guardian, 14 Jan 2004

The faces and the documents together sparked my interest and I began to research and write my book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. The book that emerged undermined both the official Zionist and the traditional Arab narratives. The documents showed that the 700,000 or so Arabs who had fled or been driven from their homes in the area that became the state of Israel in 1948-49 had not done so, by and large, on orders from or at the behest of Palestinian or outside Arab leaders, as Israelis were educated to believe; but, at the same time, they had not been expelled by the Israelis in compliance with a preset master plan or in line with a systematic policy, as the Arabs, in their demonisation of Israel, have been taught.

The picture that emerged was a complex one - of frightened communities fleeing their homes at the first whiff of grapeshot, as they or neighbouring villages were attacked; of communities expelled by conquering Israeli troops; of villagers ordered by Arab commanders to send away women, children and the old to safety in inland areas; and of economic privation, unemployment and general chaos as the British mandate government wound down and allowed the two native communities to slug it out. The better-organised, economically more robust and ideologically more cohesive and motivated Jewish community weathered the flail of war; Palestinian society fell apart.

----

But this did not translate into an expulsion masterplan; there was no such plan or policy in 1948. Indeed, as late as March 24 1948, the high command of the Haganah had instructed all its units to recognise "the full rights, needs and freedom of the Arabs in the Jewish state without discrimination, and a striving for coexistence with freedom and respect".

But this pre-1948 transfer thinking had been significant: it had readied hearts and minds in the Jewish community for the denouement of 1948. From April, most Jewish officers and officials had acted as if transfer was the state's desire, if not policy.

----

Birth Revisited describes many more atrocities and expulsions than were recorded in the original version of the book. But, at the same time, a far greater proportion of the 700,000 Arab refugees were ordered or advised by their fellow Arabs to abandon their homes than I had previously registered. It is clear from the new documentation that the Palestinian leadership in principle opposed the Arab flight from December 1947 to April 1948, while at the same time encouraging or ordering a great many villages to send away their women, children and old folk, to be out of harm's way. Whole villages, especially in the Jewish- dominated coastal plain, were also ordered to evacuate. There is no doubt that, throughout, the departure of dependents lowered the morale of the remaining males and paved the way for their eventual departure as well.

----

To many in the west, the right of refugees to return to their homes seems natural and just. But this "right of return" needs to be weighed against the right to life and well-being of the five million Jews who currently live in Israel, about half of whom were born in the country, have known no other country and have no other homeland. Wouldn't the destruction or, at the least, the forced displacement of these 5 million - and this would be the necessary upshot of a mass Palestinian refugee return, whatever Arab spokesmen say - constitute a far greater tragedy than what befell the Palestinians in 1948 and, currently, a graver injustice than the perpetuation of the refugeedom of fewer than 4 million Palestinians?

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/14/israel

As you can see, Morris describes a very complex situation, and personally, I think he's trying to downplay the role of Israel in creating the refugee problem, but unlike Pappe, this book is readily accessed by anyone.

[grossproffit]

10. Your little "because you are God's special darling?" jeer has been noted.

[geek tragedy]

11. .

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm

[DetlefK]

21. Tell that the jewish extremists who are willing to kill and die for religious reasons...

so God's chosen people can own the Westbank again.


I'm not saying that all Jews are like that, but Judaism has its fair share of religious extremists. And without those extremists the Israel-problem wouldn't be nearly as severe.

[geek tragedy]

6. How many presidential candidates will join him on that crazy train?

I'm guessing Ted Cruz will. Marco Rubio maybe, outside chance Scottie Walker will as well.

Ben Carson and Trump, who knows with those guys?