Reply #107: Your sources somehow missed all this too....including Mahmoud Abbas admitting to it

[shira]

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"), 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.