Nakba Day marked by pilgrimage to abandoned Israeli Arab villages

[Scurrilous]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/575393.html

<snip>

"The Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") Day, which commemorates the establishment of Israel in 1948, was marked Thursday by mass pilgrimages to abandoned Palestinian villages. In the morning, families of internally displaced Palestinians visited the sites of the villages that they left or from which they were expelled in 1948. In the afternoon, 5,000 people held a rally at the site of Khirbet Husha and Khirbet Ksair near Kibbutz Usha in the Galilee.

The rally was organized by the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced together with other Arab organizations and leaders and a few Jewish organizations. It began with a procession on the lands of the abandoned village of Husha, a tour of the cemetery and the ruins of homes. Both Husha and Ksair were abandoned in April 1948, after harsh battles between the Israeli forces and Arab militias.

Few know the location of the two villages. Even in the Arab sector, as the years go by, the locations of abandoned sites has disappeared from local memory. But in recent years, awareness of these sites has been growing among the Arab public, as manifested in organized tours to the sites and the preservation of churches and mosques which remained standing."

<snip>

"Some of the participants at the rally arrived from the center of the country on a bus bearing the symbolic number 194, the number of the UN resolution dealing with the Palestinians' "right of return." The bus ride was organized by Zochrot, an organization dedicated to educating the Israeli public about the state's wrong-doings against the Palestinians. Several weeks ago, Zochrot commemorated the massacre perpetrated by Jewish fighters in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem."

[Behind the Aegis]

1. 1948

And to think, had there been an acceptance of the UN Partition, today could be the Day of Independence for both Israel and Palestine. Instead, the offer was met with quotes like: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the crusades." from Azam Pasha, Arab League Secretary General, May 15, 1948.

[Alex88]

2. "The Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") Day

"And to think, had there been an acceptance of the UN Partition, today could be the Day of Independence for both Israel and Palestine. Instead, the offer was met with quotes like: "

And to think that the Palestinians would want to give away their own land, and that their not doing so is justification in the minds of some, for the barbarism that was the Nakba.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. And to think...

That they should so dislike the desire to share land with Jews, that they would rather have no homeland. Nothing excuses barbarism...on either side.

[Alex88]

4. And to think...

That the Palestinians had no moral right to their land, because the imperial racist victors of WWI and Zionists like these, didn't think they did. And if nothing excuses barbarism, then the Palestinians should get their land back, because that's the means that's been used to take it from them, for over sixty years.

[pelsar]

5. no excuse for barbarism...

can we go back further in time?.....or is there a statue of limitations on cultural attachment to the land? (if the palestenians are kept out long enough, do they "lose their rights?)

seems to me that the jews were there before...about 2,000 years ago, until the romans kicked their asses and for the most part (not all) kicked them out.....so is that "barbarism excused? which then negates the jewish right to that land?...or as I was told, this world cultural change started only in 1948, before that barbarism was excused, after 1948 its not.

Of course some one forgot to tell the French that, the Russian, the Americans, The Brits, The Serbs, the Algerians, the Syrians, the Indians, the pakistanis, the Turks........in fact I actually wonder sometimes about that cultural change....where has it occured?

signed:
an evil zionist

[Alex88]

7. Western imperial racism is the main injustice

I hope you'll excuse the delay in this response

"can we go back further in time?.....or is there a statue of limitations on cultural attachment to the land? (if the palestenians are kept out long enough, do they "lose their rights?)"

I said nothing about any so called "cultural attachment" to land. But I should point out that most Palestinians today probably have more Hebrew blood in their little fingers than most western Jews have in their whole bodies.

"seems to me that the jews were there before...about 2,000 years ago, until the romans kicked their asses and for the most part (not all) kicked them out.....so is that "barbarism excused? which then negates the jewish right to that land?...or as I was told, this world cultural change started only in 1948, before that barbarism was excused, after 1948 its not.

Of course some one forgot to tell the French that, the Russian, the Americans, The Brits, The Serbs, the Algerians, the Syrians, the Indians, the pakistanis, the Turks........in fact I actually wonder sometimes about that cultural change....where has it occured?"

I haven't excused anyone's barbarism. When I say that "the Palestinians should get their land back", it's because barbarism was needed to drive them off of it in recent history, and also because barbarism has always been needed and is needed to keep them from returning to it. This is largely because the state of Israel, a state which maintains privilege status for "Jews", can't survive without Western imperial racist backing.

With regard to your historical claims, my understanding is that the Jews were prohibited access to Jerusalem by the Romans -- and this was a vastly smaller territory than what is called Jerusalem today -- but there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine ever since, with the exception of a brief period under the Christian Crusaders and even then most of Palestine's Jewry just took temporary refuge with the Muslims. Also, other people lived in historic Palestine, including Jerusalem, before Jews ever did. But again, this history is not connected to the point I was making.

[pelsar]

18. Alex......

this history is not connected to the point I was making....au contrair....history is precisly the point.....

when I say that "the Palestinians should get their land back", it's because barbarism was needed to drive them off of it in recent history

may you define "recent history"...i find that a rather convient term. If you ask some Lebanese Christians recent history will be 100+ years...me?...2,000 yrs is "recent".

but it was also roman barbarism that kicked the jews out in "recent history" (just because my definition of recent is not similar to yours hardly makes it wrong-but even so, since when is there a statue of limitations on ones cultural home?-who made that rule?

So now that we agree that the jews also have a right to return to their cultural home as they too were kick out with violence (yes there were various restrictions on them living there, the most "gross violation" of that right was the British in the 1940's)

that leaves us with a dilema..who has "more rights"....or is there a time factor? an industrial factor (there were no videos 2,000 yrs ago to "prove the dislocation) nor could they carry the deeds of ownership with them....and which ever value you choose.....who has that right to decide?

it comes down to why is "israeli barbarism more barbaric than roman barbarism? or as you wrote..only recent history counts

(I've heard said that "the world culture, since WWII has now rejected violent take over of land by countries...well after 48 there certainly were quite a few countries that seem to disagree with that concept (France, US, USSR, China, iraq....., and still do-so much for world culture rejection.)

[bennywhale]

57. 2000 years is recent history? Right then, as an Angle from Northern

England i want my land back in Denmark, which is my cultural home. i also believe that my Celt brothers and Britons have more right to be in England than i. I further want an apology from the Vikings, Normans, Jutes, Vandals, and Saxons. from this point i believe we should culturally and racially divide into these subsets and return to our cultural homeland around the Alps.

[Behind the Aegis]

6. not really

They had no more moral right than the Jews that lived there or that bought land there. They have rights to the land. Many chose to "flee" because they were certain their Arab "brothers" would come in and "eradicate" the Jewish "threat." And, since not tolerating barbarism is equivalent to giving back land, then should we soon expect new states (countries) emerging with the Cherokee, Iroquois, Cree, Nez Perce, Creek, and countless others?

[Alex88]

8. Truth and Justice for the Palestinian people

I hope you'll excuse the delay in this response.

"Not really,
They had no more moral right than the Jews that lived there or that bought land there. They have rights to the land. Many chose to "flee" because they were certain their Arab "brothers" would come in and "eradicate" the Jewish "threat."

Until 1948, Jews held only about 7 percent of the land in Palestine and even part of that had been aquired though means made possible only by land laws put in place by the Ottoman Turks earlier. Also,
this link that I gave before leads one to the words of every Zionist leader's intention to violently expel the Palestinians from the land on which they lived. Your statement about why many Palestinians left is a canard that even the "new historians" in Israel have shown is so. Do you know what occurred at Dir Yassin?

"And, since not tolerating barbarism is equivalent to giving back land, then should we soon expect new states (countries) emerging with the Cherokee, Iroquois, Cree, Nez Perce, Creek, and countless others?"

I've said nothing about nationalism as being a remedy for injustice. It seems to me the "representatives" of the state end up being the primary beneficiaries when this avenue is undertaken. The Palestinian people are the victims of barbarism, not a "Palestinian nation".

There are two big differences in the way Native Americans are treated in the U.S. and the way the Palestinians are treated. The first big difference is that Native Americans can live inside the U.S. with legal rights, while the vast majority of the Palestinians are kept either outside of Israel or live on the West Bank and Gaza strip under the worst possible tyranny and harsh conditions. The second big difference is that Native Americans aren't prohibited by law from living where the rest of U.S. citizens can live or of doing anything else that the rest of U.S. citizens can do, while the Palestinians living in Israel are prohibited from doing these things.

[Alex88]

14. It makes no difference whether or not some Palestinians chose to "flee"

"Many chose to "flee" because they were certain their Arab "brothers" would come in and "eradicate" the Jewish "threat.""

A follow up to my comment in response to the age old claim you recited, quoted above, regarding the precise motives of why many Palestinians fled their villages.

Even if this accounting were true, which it isn't, the Nakba would be just as unjust and still barbaric. The Nakba was deliberate ethnic cleansing and land theft for the purpose of creating a racist "Jewish" state in historic Palestine. Furthermore, it was only possible with the backing of Western imperial racism.

[Violet_Crumble]

9. I doubt that would have happened....

For yr account of what could have been to work, you'd have to believe that the Zionists gladly accepted the UN Partition plan with no reservations and no desire for stifling the birth of the Arab state. What happened was the Zionists grudgingly accepted the partition plan, knowing that what little they were given could be expanded on at a later date. There's plenty of quotes from the time to support this and I can dig them up for you if you don't believe me. Call me cynical if you will, but even if there had of been Arab acceptance of the Partition Plan, it's highly unlikely all would have been wine and roses now...

Just rolling two replies into one here out of sheer laziness, but in another post in this thread you claimed that most Palestinians who fled the fighting did so because their 'Arab bretheren' (how would you feel if every time someone talked about the relationship between the US and Australia they spoke of the 'Caucasian bretheren'? Is that okay?) would protect them and destroy the Jewish threat and all would be well, etc. Apart from the fact that it does (despite yr intention) come across just a little bit like the Palestinians are being made to come across as selfish nasty people who had a problem with Jews, the reason many of them fled was the standard reason many civilians flee in conflicts - they were scared for their lives and it's natural to try to get out of the way of the fighting. Why is it so hard to ascribe these perfectly normal human emotions to Palestinians? They were hearing stories of what was happening in villages and towns around them and many fled out of sheer fear...

Violet...

[Behind the Aegis]

10. But we will never know...

I doubt, even after the state of Palestine is established, that wine and roses will abound. But, had the Arabs accepted things would be very different now. I also don't doubt that there were Zionists that accepted the offer in hopes that one day, Israel would grow. I am sure you can provide those quotes, the same way I can provide quotes where Arab leaders flat out refused ANY compromise that ended in a Jewish state.

As for the other thread, I said Arab "brothers" because that is how it was described in what I read. I don't think ALL Palestinians are cruel and selfish, any more than ALL Jews are saints. However, the Arab leadership at the time did not want a Jewish state, especially one that border ANY Arab state. Some did flee because of the threat of war, some fled because their 'leaders' told them do so and that they would "take care of it."

Welcome back from holiday. I hope you had a nice time!

[Violet_Crumble]

40. It fills in time to guess though...

I'm a pessimist at heart, so I share yr doubt that things will be all that great after the Palestinian state finally comes into being. I think it could take generations before things really settle down....

I also do agree that if the Arabs had accepted the Partition Plan things would be very different now, but whether it would have been different in a much worse or better way is something I think it'd be hard to guess at. 2B pointed out that the grudging acceptance by the Zionist leadership of the Partition Plan with the hope of expanding territorial gains later on was a wise and understandable move. So if the Arab states had accepted the Partition Plan in exactly the same grudging way, it would have led to conflict. Any other possible outcome always leads to conflict, but maybe that's because I'm a pessimist and I think the seeds for the conflict were sown in the early part of the 20th century and from that point on violence was inevitable....

I've read a lot of stuff where neighbouring Arab states are referred to as 'Arab bretheren'. I think some of those authors do that in an attempt to portray all Arabs as being the same and the idea of forcing them to go live somewhere else among other Arabs is no big deal. It also makes out that the aims of the neighbouring Arab states were all the same - they weren't, and they weren't in it for the Palestinian people, that's for sure. For example, Jordan's King Abdullah much preferred his new neighbour to be a Jewish state rather than an Arab one and there was tacit agreement between Jordan and Israel on carving up the spoils of war. Egypt seemed to be in it to keep an eye on Jordan and make sure it didn't do anything that would have a negative impact on Egypts interests...

On the Palestinian leadership telling some Palestinians to flee, while it may have happened to a small percentage of people where village leaders told them to get out for that reason, as far as I was aware, by that stage there was no Palestinian leadership left in Palestine. And the long-held myth about radio broadcasts from Arab states urging Palestinians to flee and return victorious were proven never to have actually happened...

Thanks for the welcome back and check yr inbox :)

Violet...

[tobeornottobe]

34. Doesn't the use of the term

Arab brethren stem from the sense that there exists a historical Arab nationalism (real or pretended not withstanding) that transcends the respective Arab nations which does not have an analogous Caucasian counterpart?

While you ask why is it so hard to ascribe perfectly normal human emotions to Palestinians, it seems that you don't do the same for the Zionists whom you say grudgingly accepted the partition plan knowing that what little they were given could be expanded on a later date. That sounds not only human, but, also wise, for they would have been stupid to not accept. The Palestinians were human as well, but, perhaps not as wise.

[Violet_Crumble]

39. No...

As far as I know, Arab nationalism was all the rage in the days of Nasser. In most of the cases where things like 'arab bretheren' get stressed, it seems to be more out of a bigoted urge to deny that Arabs are different and not all one huge homogenous group with exactly the same culture etc...

Yr joking right? I point out a term that I think can come across as bigoted and you try to make out me pointing out the blatantly obvious fact that the Zionist leadership did accept the Partition Plan grudgingly is on the same level? I pointed that out because many pro-Israeli posters seem to be in complete denial that it was grudgingly accepted. But interesting that in pointing that out about the Zionists, you'd also have to logically think it'd be wise for the Palestinians to grudgingly accept whatever Israel offers them and then expand at a later date, because that's wise and human. Or are the Palestinians exempt?

Violet...

[bemildred]

11. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

by Benny Morris "Modern Zionism began with the prophetic-programmatic writings of Moses Hess, Judah Alkalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Theodor Herzl and the immigration from Russia to Ottoman-ruled..."

A review:

In short, this book, by precisely detailing the exact origins of the Palestinian crisis-town by town-,holds Israel at least partially or perhaps fully responsible for the refugee crisis and, by implication, the entire war on terrorism. It has particular impact because Benny Morris is a tenured Jewish Israeli scholar and therefore cannot be summerly dismissed as anti-Semitic. Moreover it makes us wonder why it is that America, despite virtually no international support, came to so blindly enable and supply Israeli aggression rather than to support, with an easily assembled and very powerful international coalition, an imposed wall or peace fence at the UN established and internationally recognized 1948 or 1967 borders. The book is a long, detailed, and fully footnoted 600 pages, but if it makes us wonder if we should rethink or, more accurately, be brave enough to think for the first time about Israel and the war on terrorism, then it is well worth every page. Please write to me if this doesn't make perfect sense.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521009677/ref=pd_sxp_f/104-9859075-8318345

[Colorado Blue]

12. Benny Morris is a revisionist historian who has since

revised his revisionism.

He has been criticized for not having examined original documents, among other things, and is directly contradicted by contemporary sources - people who were THERE - many of whom were or served, the Arabs.

Before swallowing this whole one should examine ORIGINAL and CONTEMPORARY sources, like the writings of Glubb Pasha, the Englishman who commanded the Arab Legion.

A quick refresher course on just what was promised the Jewish people should their defenses fail might also help put things in perspective.

Meanwhile here is an article about Morris, which should be read by all who wish to discuss his theories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris

Here is an article about the war and events immediately preceding it.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/1948_War.html

[bemildred]

13. I am aware there is some dispute about these things.

The point is to get people informed of the various points
of view so they can form their own opinions. I selected
Mr. Morris because he seems kind of in the middle to me,
but of course that is an opinion too.

[tobeornottobe]

26. The newly revised Benny Morris maybe.

The unrevised Benny Morris is in the middle when compared say to, Alex88, I'll give you that.

[Violet_Crumble]

41. I think you may need to fill me in here...

What puts the unrevised Benny Morris near the end of a spectrum, while the more recent Benny Morris is in the middle? I thought I knew what the differences were between 'Birth' and 'Revisited', but I'm a bit surprised to find you'd consider someone who, amidst a brainfart conversion to right-wing thought, not only stands by the expulsions and atrocities that he's documented, but goes on to document more and then in a very refreshing way, justifies it. I think I may have missed a major component of the revision - that or being so totally silly as to not read the Wikipedia entry before hitting the intro and conclusions of Benny Morris and Ephraim Karsh is taking its toll on me at last!

[Englander]

20. Would his revisionism be more appealing...

if "Nazi Arabs",or "Anti-Semite British" made an
appearance?

:)

[bemildred]

21. I was wondering what a "revisionist historian" was.

I hadn't realized there was a historical orthodoxy one could violate.

[Englander]

23. Who knows?

It would appear,that by using this phrase,one
is saved the bother of having to examine any claims
that the offending historian makes; nevermind that
history is constantly being updated,& rewritten.
If what is discovered isn't sufficiently "Zionist",
it must be wrong! :)

[Violet_Crumble]

43. Wikipedia would!!

I bet they've got an entry written by a gaggle of internet Joe Blows that go into great detail explaining how there is no such thing as healthy historical revision and that the tag revisionist historian should be hurled with the sort of venom that discourages anyone from wondering to themselves why it's suddenly not okay to re-examine and look at BIG historical meat pies like the Great War from different angles etc. See, that's where I've gone wrong. I made the huge balls-up of assuming that before one tries discussing Benny Morris, one should try reading Benny Morris. I should have just headed straight to Wikipedia for da FaCtS and forgotten about books! *snarf*

On a serious note, I suspect there's one or two in this thread who have absolutely no idea about studying history and for who the word 'revision' when coupled with 'history' automatically leads to something that wasn't and isn't historical revision, even though they labelled themselves as such - the Holocaust Deniers...


Violet...

[Englander]

50. Ha! Although,to be fair to Wiki..

the discussion pages on the articles are entertaining,
& I've found one or two useful linked articles there,
but yer right, they're only a limited refernce tool.

Yeah,they're only words,with no meaning,and as for 'context',
or 'perspective',well! I was half-expecting Jabotinsky to make
an appearance...;)

[Colorado Blue]

46. More on these "new historians" from scholars.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2000144/entry/1004562/
Reviews and discussion

From: Hillel Halkin
Subject: Mature Revisionism or Puerile Cynicism?
Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2000, at 10:02 AM PT

Dear Tom,
We seem to agree on at least one thing--that neither Benny Morris nor Avi Shlaim's new books add much to our knowledge of Israeli history, or even to Morris' and Shlaim's previous work. Fifteen years after the opening of Israeli archives to historians like Morris and Shlaim, little surprising has turned up in them. Whereas you speak of "new material" pertaining to such areas as Israeli "war crimes," Arab refugees, and military confrontations that Israel provoked, well-informed Israelis of all political stripes were always aware of these things. In a small country like Israel, in which everybody who is anybody knows everybody, and in which until recently nearly everybody served in the army and was privy to the stories circulating there, it has rarely been possible to keep major secrets for long.

This is why what is new about the "new history" is not the facts it cites, nor even its interpretation of them, but rather the acceptance of this interpretation by an unprecedentedly large and influential segment of Israeli society. Although, for example, every Israeli of your and my generation who did not deliberately stop his ears knew his share of atrocity stories long before the "new historians" came along, such acts were not generally considered to reflect fundamental flaws in Israeli society, let alone to call into question the legitimacy of Israel's case. Today they are widely assumed to do just that.

War crimes are always something to be disturbed by. But there has never been a war without them, and the question is not whether Israel fought, say, its 1948 war of independence with moral impeccability (it did not), but whether it fought it with moral justification. The confusion of these two things, even though you speak of the "new history" as an indication of a growing Israeli "maturity," is intellectually immature in the precise sense of the word; for it is typical of the young to be driven to disproportionate reactions by revelations of imperfection in their elders that a more experienced mind views with greater balance. Myth-puncturing as a step toward the historical truth is a part of the historian's task; as a shocked or cynical deflation of the world of one's parents, which is what a great deal of the "new Israeli history" strikes me as being, it is puerile.

My reference to Isaiah and the Bible yesterday was not glib. We Jews are an old people but one with little experience in self-government, so that to this day our attitudes toward politics tend to be influenced by religious traditions and modes of thought that we may be unconscious of not having entirely abandoned. Both on the Israeli left and the Israeli right there is often the implicit assumption that we are, if not a chosen people, at least unique in the demands that can be made on us; and if, as I wrote yesterday, this is sometimes expressed on the right by viewing Israel as an agent of manifest destiny exempt from normal moral standards, it takes the form on the left of holding ourselves to standards that are only partially applicable in the political domain. In either case, we continue to have the same difficulty as the biblical prophets, and as Jewish thinkers throughout the ages, in conceiving of politics as the merely pragmatic exercise in enlightened self-interest that a politically sophisticated people understands it to be.

The real dividing line in the contemporary writing of Israeli history does not, I think, pass between the "new historians" and the old ones, but between those of the "new historians" (a category in which I would certainly include Benny Morris and possibly even Avi Shlaim) who understand that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a supreme example of enlightened self-interest and those (like Ilan Pappe) who do not. That this state's establishment was not in the interest of the Palestinians is hardly debatable; but the responsibility for Palestinian interests in 1948 did not rest with the Jews. It became a Jewish responsibility, and one that was inevitably carried out badly, in 1967, when the Palestinians were conquered by us; and one reason that I have, since the early '70s, written in support of a Palestinian state is that only by giving the Palestinians the political means to defend their interests can we as Jews once more concentrate with a clear conscience on our own.

I wish I could agree with your judgment that "the very existence of Israel is no longer in danger." Perhaps I have an overly morbid Jewish imagination, but I can easily think of several scenarios to the contrary--one of which would be a combination of Palestinian irredentism, continued Arab political and military pressure, and Jewish demoralization leading to a series of piecemeal concessions having a disastrous cumulative effect. Although a nation's morale is not easily measured, it is a crucial factor in political behavior, and my main fear regarding the long-term effects of the "new history," and of the ideological revisionism associated with it, is that these will continue to undermine Israelis' confidence in the justice of their own cause to the point of imperiling the cause itself. The historical truth does not frighten me. Drawing the wrong conclusions from it does.

Sincerely,
Hillel

I'll be posting more scholarly links later. I hope people will actually read them so they can understand what the heck we're talking about, and not just diss us for using the term "revisionism" - which is, in fact, accurate.

[Lithos]

55. I am looking forward to this

BTW, I do not consider a letter to Slate as being either academic or scholarly.

Also, Mr. Halkin is neither a scholar or an academic, but rather an editor/journalist and translator of literature books.



L-

[Colorado Blue]

59. As always, I am pleased to oblige.

First, I'd like to point out that the letter to Slade was actually a conversation between Hillel Halkin and Tom Segev, which one can follow by clicking on the link I provided in my previous post.

Tom Segev is, in fact, one of the New Historians and he speaks in response to Hillel.

Here are a few paragraphs from his rebuttal to Mr. Hillel. It's interesting and worth reading.

I'm trying to follow guidelines by posting a few paragraphs and a link:) So here, again, is the link:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2000144/entry/1004562

From: Tom Segev
Subject: Re-examining the Cause
Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2000, at 10:43 AM PT
Dear Hillel,

You fear that new history may undermine Israel's confidence in the justice of its own cause. Why should it? It may simply lead Israelis to re-examine their "cause." So what? You state that you are not frightened of the truth. Aren't you?

In an article you wrote for Commentary, you warned against "post-Zionists" tendencies you detect in Israel's new textbooks. They are, you claim "damnable," because they are intended for ninth-graders, many of whom have older brothers who are fighting in Lebanon and nearly all of whom will soon be fighting in the army themselves. "To educate them in such a manner," you state, "deprived of the faintest notion what it is all ultimately about, is to let them down cruelly." Furthermore, you accuse "post-Zionist" historians of letting down "an entire society." Strong words, indeed; I feel on my way to the hanging tree already.

One who expects an Israeli textbook for ninth-graders to teach them why they should fight in Lebanon, presumably three years from now at the earliest, is not a better Zionist than one who teaches them why Israel should pull out of there as soon as possible, in accordance with the present policy of the Government of Israel, headed by former Chief of Staff Barak and supported by most Israelis. I am not sure to what extent new history books change a society; I feel that they reflect change. Still, some of Israel's new history might, hopefully, teach at least some of those ninth-graders to think about what Israel's "cause" should be, rather than take it for granted.

Benny Morris has written a thorough account of what he calls the "Zionist-Arab conflict." The more common term is "Jewish-Arab conflict." Today, most people speak about the "Israeli-Palestinian" conflict. Morris is correct. It has not been a conflict between the Jews and the Arabs but only between those relatively few Jews who regarded themselves as Zionists or somehow found themselves involved with the Zionist experience. In contrast to the view of most Palestinian Arabs and some Israelis, it has not merely been a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians either. Shlaim's subtitle is "Israel and the Arab World," which is also correct.

snip

I am saying this in acknowledgment of my own mistake. Years ago I also tended to believe that recently declassified Israeli documents show that in the early 1950s Israel deliberately ignored possibilities of reaching agreements with its Arab neighbors. Israel has always blamed the Arabs for refusing to negotiate peace. This, according to Israel, was the main reason for the continued conflict. If the Arabs only agreed to sit down and talk--we would reach a compromise, Israel maintained.

Official Israeli documents now open to research show that in fact there never was a problem of communication between Jerusalem and the Arab capitals. The problem was that at least until 1967 there was no basis for agreement. No peace opportunity was "missed" as result of Israel's refusal to accept an Arab offer to talk. They talked all right, both directly and indirectly, but could reach no agreement. Both Morris and Shlaim, I think, make too much of those possibly "missed opportunities," although as serious historians, both admit that they are quoting speculations, not stating facts.

The situation in the Middle East radically changed in 1967, as result of the Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of vast Arab territory. Avi Shlaim's account of the events leading up to that war, and its results, is superb, and better than Morris'. Israel should never have occupied the West Bank, one learns from Shlaim's account, for once it got in--there was no way out, not for many years, at any rate. This, to be sure, is not an "anti-Israeli" statement at all. In fact, Shlaim writes on Page 241 that the Six Day War was a defensive war. "It was launched by Israel to safeguard its security, not to expand its territory," Shlaim writes, additional war aims emerged only in course of the fighting.

snip

Here are a couple of links about Tom Segev. He is the author of several books, including the following titles:

1. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate -- by Tom Segev;
2. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust -- by Tom Segev;
3. Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel -- by Tom Segev;
4. 1949, The First Israelis -- by Tom Segev, Arlen Neal Weinstein (Translator)
5. The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent -- by Tom Segev

A little information about Mr. Segev and his work:

http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/academic/Book/BookDisplay.asp?BookKey=814904

http://www.gazette.de/Archiv/Gazette-Juni2002/Interview.html

[Colorado Blue]

60. The Past Is Not a Foreign Country

Prof. Anita Shapira - Head of the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, writes the following long and rich article. It's much too long to post in entirety.

Her point of view is different from Segev's, so I present it as a matter of interest and information and to round out the vision.

Her topic titles: Benny Morris' Righteous Victims and Avi Sclaim's Iron Wall.

http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Shapira.htm

THE FAILURE OF ISRAEL'S "NEW HISTORIANS" TO EXPLAIN WAR AND PEACE.
The Past Is Not a Foreign Country
by Anita Shapira

Post date 12.01.00 | Issue Date 11.29.99

Righteous Victims: A History
of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999
by Benny Morris
(Knopf, 751pp.)

The Iron Wall: Israel and
The Arab World since 1948
by Avi Shlaim
(Norton, 704pp.)

I.

In the fall of 1988, the journal Tikkun published an article called "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past." Its author was a relatively unknown historian named Benny Morris. A year before, Morris had brought out The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, a richly and rigorously detailed book that had not yet made much of a splash. His Tikkun article would fix that. In his article, Morris described himself and three of his confederates (Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe from academia, and Simha Flappan from political journalism) as "new historians," arguing that they had together undertaken to expose the skeletons in Zionism's closet, to declare war on the dogmas of Israeli history. The label stuck, and soon the Israeli media was abuzz about the "new historians," who were catapulted into notoriety.

Morris also accused Israel of creating the Palestinian refugee problem, a charge that he had not levelled in his book. In his view, Israel bore a terrible burden of guilt. The vehemence of his accusations, and the moralizing tone in which they were delivered, fell on receptive ears: Morris was writing in the inflamed days of the Intifada. It is unlikely that the scholarly tomes of Morris and his fellow revisionists had many readers, but many Israelis were exposed to their heterodoxies in the media, which relish positions that are brief and barbed. And in this respect the "new historians" certainly delivered the goods. Suddenly an argument raged over the true nature of what Israelis call the War of Independence, or what Palestinians call al-naqba or the Catastrophe, or what historians call, more neutrally, the 1948 war. That war furnished the founding myth of the state of Israel; and it is but a short step from questioning its justice to doubting Israel's very right to exist.

In fact, the ideas advanced by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe, the vanguard of the "new historians," were nothing new. An anti-narrative of Zionism, counterposed to the Zionist (and Israeli) narrative of Zionism, had existed since the very inception of the Zionist movement. Opponents of the movement, Jewish and non-Jewish, had created an entire literature explaining what was foul in Zionism and why Zionism was destined to fail, and later why the state of Israel was an illegitimate and unjust construct that had to be resisted. The Soviet propaganda machine excelled in developing this anti-narrative, and in proliferating it. Arab propaganda also did its work. And at the margins of the Israeli left, there had always been groups and currents that doubted the right of Israel to exist and stressed the wrongs that were perpetrated against the Arabs. Yet those heretical elements remained marginal in Israeli politics and culture, and failed to gain wide public support. The advent of the "new historians" changed all that. These views now gained a certain legitimacy, since they appeared in the context of a debate between ostensibly objective scholars.

Revision in history is salutary. A critical look at premises refreshes historical inquiry and helps to generate new understanding. Every generation reexamines the present and the past under the impact of changing realities. Sometimes revisionism is the result of a generational shift among historians, and sometimes it springs from dramatic historical developments that throw an unexpected light on the past. The Vietnam War led American historians to reconsider certain accepted accounts of the cold war. Forty years after the end of World War II, a heated debate flared among historians in Germany about how to interpret the Nazi era: was it a rupture in Germany's past, or evidence of its continuity? Some British historians have responded to the belligerence of Thatcherism by attempting to rehabilitate Chamberlain and the Munich agreement. To be sure, not all revisions are laudable; the denial of the Holocaust is also a variety of revisionism. But historical revisionism does not take place in a vacuum. It is surrounded by politics. The revisionist scholar feels obligated to a particular political purpose, and proceeds with his research, and sometimes with his ready conclusions, to substantiate that purpose.

The "new historians" of Israel have not exactly pioneered fresh critical approaches in Israeli historiography. Already in the 1970s, scholars had begun to develop new and sophisticated views of Jewish-British relations under the Mandate, of Zionism's relation to the Arab problem, of the rise of the Arab national movement, of the nature of Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. There was a tense and constant dialogue between collective memory and historical scholarship, as the new approaches slowly penetrated into the educational system and public consciousness. Since the advent of the "new historians," however, a new polarization has set in. For the "new historians" dismissed all previous historiography as apologetic. Whoever dares to oppose or to criticize the pronouncements of these self-styled iconoclasts is savagely maligned.


snip

[Colorado Blue]

61. Benny Morris's Reign of Error, Revisited

Efraim Karsh is director of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of London, and editor of the quarterly journal Israel Affairs. He is the author of Arafat's War: the Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (Grove Press).

The collapse and dispersion of Palestine's Arab society during the 1948 war is one of the most charged issues in the politics and historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Initially, Palestinians blamed the Arab world for having promised military support that never materialized.<1> Arab host states in turn regarded the Palestinians as having shamefully deserted their homeland. With the passage of time and the dimming of historical memory, the story of the 1948 war was gradually rewritten with Israel rather than the Arab states and the extremist and shortsighted Palestinian leadership becoming the main if not only culprit of the Palestinian dispersion. This false narrative received a major boost in the late 1980s with the rise of several left-leaning Israeli academics and journalists calling themselves the New Historians, who sought to question and revise understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict.<2> Ostensibly basing their research on recently declassified documents from the British Mandate period and the first years of Israeli independence, they systematically redrew the history of Zionism, turning upside down the saga of Israel's struggle for survival. Among the new historians, none has been more visible or more influential than Benny Morris, a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, whose 1987 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, became the New Historian's definitive work.

Prominent Palestinian politicians such as Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Hanan Ashrawi cited the "findings" of the New Historians to support extreme Palestinian territorial and political claims. Academics lauded Morris for using newly available documents to expose the allegedly immoral circumstances of Israel's creation. With frequent media exposure, the New Historians had an impact on mainstream Israeli opinion, which became increasingly receptive to the notion that both the fault and the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict lay disproportionately with Israel's own actions.

Such plaudits, however, were undeserved. Far from unearthing new facts or offering a novel interpretation of the Palestinian exodus, The Birth recycled the standard Arab narrative of the conflict. Morris portrayed the Palestinians as the hapless victims of unprovoked Jewish aggression. Israel's very creation became the "original sin" underlying the perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Had there been an academic foundation to Morris's revisionism, such acclaim may have been warranted. But rather than incorporate new Israeli source material, Morris did little more than rehash old historiography. While laying blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis on the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces and its pre-state precursor, the Haganah, Morris failed to consult the millions of declassified documents in their archives, even as other historians used them in painstaking research.<3>

Once this fact was publicly exposed,<4> Morris conceded that he had "no access to the materials in the IDFA or Haganah archive and precious little to firsthand military materials deposited elsewhere."<5> Yet instead of acknowledging the implications of this omission upon his conclusions, Morris sought to use this "major methodological flaw" as the rationale for a new edition of The Birth, which he claimed would include new source-material.<6>

Dishonest Revisionism Readers will be disappointed if they hope to find evidence of renewed intellectual honesty in this new edition, published in 2004 as The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.<7> Morris continues to ignore archival evidence both of relentless Arab rejection of Jewish statehood and of demonstrated commitment to Israel's destruction. Available Arabic sources little utilized by Morris include not only official documents but also religious incitement and numerous statements by politicians, intellectuals, and journalists.

While Morris perfunctorily acknowledges Palestinian and Arab culpability for the 1948 war,<8> The Birth Revisited continues to portray Israeli actions as the main trigger of the Palestinian exodus. Morris explains,

this is not a history of the 1948 war or a history of what the Arabs did to the Jews but a history of how and why the Palestinian refugee problem came about. In this context, what Jews did to Arabs, including massacres, played a role; what Arabs did to Jews was barely relevant.<9>

It is doubtful whether Morris believes his own assertion. In his writings and interviews over the past few years, he acknowledged that in war, the activities of one belligerent affect all others. "From the moment the Yishuv was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population," he argued in January 2004.<10> Four months later he put the same idea in somewhat blunter terms: "When an armed thug tries to murder you in your home, you have every right to defend yourself, even by throwing him out."<11>

snip

Another long article, please follow the link to read the entire piece.

http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_18334.shtml

[Colorado Blue]

62. Finally, let's hear from Benny Himself.

In this moving piece, originally published in "The Guardian", Benny Morris discusses his evolving view of history, and the growing sense of despair he feels the struggle for peace.

It is beautifully written of course, but more to our point, discusses frankly the process of a scholar's philosophy, and how he came to be of another mind since his earlier works.

This article speaks to the topic of "revisionism" - he himself uses the term to describe his own work. It is pertinent as well, to other questions that arose in this thread.

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/arafathusseini.html

The rumour that I have undergone a brain transplant is (as far as I can remember) unfounded - or at least premature. But my thinking about the current Middle East crisis and its protagonists has in fact radically changed during the past two years. I imagine that I feel a bit like one of those western fellow travellers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956.

Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present, I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace. I was never a wild optimist; and my gradual study during the mid-1990s of the pre-1948 history of Palestinian-Zionist relations brought home to me the depth and breadth of the problems and antagonisms. But at least the Israelis and Palestinians were talking peace; had agreed to mutual recognition; and had signed the Oslo agreement, a first step that promised gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the emergence of a Palestinian state, and a peace treaty between the two peoples. The Palestinians appeared to have given up their decades-old dream and objective of destroying and supplanting the Jewish state, and the Israelis had given up their dream of a "Greater Israel", stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river. And, given the centrality of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the Arab-Israeli conflict, a final, comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and all of its Arab neighbours seemed within reach.

But by the time I had completed the book, my restrained optimism had given way to grave doubts - and within a year had crumbled into a cosmic pessimism. One reason was the Syrians' rejection of the deal offered by the prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1993-96 and Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, involving Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for a full-fledged bilateral peace treaty. What appears to have stayed the hands of President Hafez Assad and subsequently his son and successor, Bashar Assad, was not quibbles about a few hundred yards here or there but a basic refusal to make peace with the Jewish state. What counted, in the end, was the presence, on a wall in the Assads' office, of a portrait of Saladin, the legendary 12th-century Kurdish Muslim warrior who had beaten the crusaders, to whom the Arabs often compared the Zionists. I can see the father, on his deathbed, telling his son: "Whatever you do, don't make peace with the Jews; like the crusaders, they too will vanish."

But my main reason, around which my pessimism gathered and crystallised, was the figure of Yasser Arafat, who has led the Palestinian national movement since the late 1960s and, by virtue of the Oslo accords, governs the cities of the West Bank (Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqilya) and their environs, and the bulk of the Gaza Strip. Arafat is the symbol of the movement, accurately reflecting his people's miseries and collective aspirations. Unfortunately, he has proven himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion against the British mandate government and during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) - but also a trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied rejectionism - a rejection of any compromise with the Zionist movement. He had rejected two international proposals to partition the country into Jewish and Arab polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937 and by the UN general assembly in November 1947. In between, he spent the war years (1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht.

snip

[Name removed]

47. Deleted message

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[tobeornottobe]

27. Would you not say

that David Irving violates a historical orthodoxy?

[bemildred]

31. No, just a bad "historian". There is no historical orthodoxy.

And certainly, to compare Morris to such a twit is unfair to Morris,
who appears to have been thorough and conscientious, whatever one
might think of his interpretation of the sources.

[tobeornottobe]

32. I wasn't comparing the two, heaven forbid.

Benny Morris deserves a fair amount of respect whereas David Irving deserves a fair amount of spit.

I was questioning your thesis on whether there is such a thing as historical orthodoxy, which you have turned around into a question of whether there are bad historians. Fine.

[bemildred]

33. Yeah, I'm one of those relativists.

I think it is both possible and useful to look at things from
various points of view and to consider wildly different interpretations,
so long as they are done "well", with integrity.

[tobeornottobe]

35. Yes, I have noticed that you are a relativist.

But, there are some things that are absolute.

Like for instance that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Or like that you are an absolute relativist.

edit: sp.

[bemildred]

36. Some things are relatively absolute, it's true. nt

[bemildred]

37. Does relative power make you relatively corrupt?

And I guess being powerless would make you incorruptable.

Or maybe we are all corrupt, it's just that some of us
have greater scope to exercise our corruption. I like
that better.

[Name removed]

45. Deleted message

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[Englander]

49. "Or maybe I'm missing something..."

"Maybe?" How about def.. oh, nevermind.

Also,how long has it been since the end of the British
Mandate,& WWII?

In other words,how relevant to the present situation
are those pesky "Nazi Arabs" & "Anti-semite British"?

:think:

[pelsar]

51. Englander....actually you are....

as much as I would love to ignore the British Mandate, WWII, 48 war, WWI, riots of 36, blood libels of 1800, intifada I ...and all of that going back 2,000 years it seems some one is always bring up "rights" based on historical something or land ownership, be it next to the wall today, or 100 yrs ago....in short, whether you like it or not, whether its comfortable or not, England is part of this. Granted I have no idea whether they did the wise thing or dumb thing interms of its relationships within the middle east-impossible to know (butterfly affect works here)-could have been worse...but your part of this mess, and partly responsable as well.

[Englander]

52. So,who is (at least) partially responsible...

for the events of the last sixty years?

Could it be,y'know,this entity;

Israel Government;
http://www.gov.il/FirstGov/english

[pelsar]

53. of course they've got a part...

and so does everyone else involved...just dont shirk away from yours....now as to the percentage or how much is impossible to tell, but England played a very serious part with consequences (israeli law) that affect us today.

[Lithos]

56. Pelsar

You are correct, but please realize that England did what they thought best for England, the local natives "be damned". Often times geo-political considerations over-road local considerations.

And while I agree England's actions prior to 1948 still have ramifications in today's situation, their actions cannot be judged solely on the basis of such a limited viewpoint.

As a side note, I also think that the actions by players from the US, France, Russia/Soviet Union, Germany (Imperial/Nazi), Italy, Greece, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire as well as many local and regional players (Israeli/Jewish/Christian/Arab) still have effect today, even if their actions occured a 1, 25, 50, 100 or a 1000 years ago.


L-

[pelsar]

58. lithos...

I have no doubt that what England did was in their own best interests....and i really have no "ill will" toward england in that respect. Its just a matter of acknowleding ones part in the "wonderful mess of the middle east".

of course we have no idea what could have been if only......

[Name removed]

54. Deleted message

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[Englander]

19. "The War for Palestine Rewriting the History of 1948"

(Cambridge Middle East Studies)

"The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the most intense and intractable international conflicts of modern times. This book is about the historical roots of that conflict. It re-examines the history of 1948, the war in which the newly-born state of Israel defeated the Palestinians and the regular Arab armies of the neighbouring states so decisively. The book includes chapters on all the principal participants, on the reasons for the Palestinian exodus, and on the political and moral consequences of the war. The chapters are written by leading Arab, Israeli and western scholars who draw on primary sources in all relevant languages to offer alternative interpretations and new insights into this defining moment in Middle East history. The result is a major contribution to the literature on the 1948 war. It will command a wide audience from among students and general readers with an interest in the region.


Contributors

Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Laila Parsons, Avi Shlaim, Eugene Rogan, Charles Tripp, Fawaz Gerges, Joshua Landis, Edward Said"

http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521794765#contributors

__________________________

Institute of Historical Research (IHR)

Reviewed by: Dr Matthew Hughes
University of Salford

Introduction
In an earlier review in the IHR 'Reviews in History' series (number 154) of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), I pointed to the intense historiographical conflict raging over the formation of Israel in 1948, the cause(s) of the Palestinian refugee crisis and the nature of Israel's subsequent relations with its Arab neighbours. For those readers unfamiliar with the debate, the essential fault line is between those who say that Israel was in some measure responsible for the Palestinian diaspora in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli conflict, and those who argue that the Palestinian refugee crisis was not, fundamentally, Israel's fault and that chances for peace were scuppered not by Israel but by obstinacy on the part of the Arabs. The debate has shifted over time. Until the 1970s it was dominated by an 'old' or 'mobilised' Israeli history that portrayed a Jewish state under serious threat from the Arabs and so reluctantly forced into a series of wars of survival. This changed in the 1980s with the arrival of what became known as the 'new' or 'revisionist' historians - sometimes also called the 'critical sociologists' - who offered radically contrary perspectives on the formation of Israel, the causes of the Palestinian refugee crisis and the origins of the Arab-Israeli wars. These 'Young Turks', led by the likes of Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, set out to overturn received history.1 They argued that the historiography on Israel had for too long been dominated by an approach that has sought to exculpate Israel from the charge that it stole Palestinian land and forcibly evicted the inhabitants.2 While the conclusions of the 'new' historians were not necessarily pro-Palestinian, they stressed that Israel needed to take some of the blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars and the failed peace of 1949, and that the image of Israel put forward by the 'old' historians was both misleading and determined by the political need to be pro-Zionist.

>snip

What do these chapters contain and what to they add to our understanding of the debate around the formation of Israel? In the two chapters on the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis, Parsons disagrees with Morris's findings that the refugee crisis 'was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab.'7 Rather, in a stimulating case study, Parsons looks at the interchange between the Israeli army (the IDF) and the Druze community in Galilee during the IDF's conquest of the region. For Parsons, Israeli policy towards the Druze helps us to understand the wider picture of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. She attacks the argument that Israel's expulsions of Palestinians were essentially random and based on local factors and the actions of subordinate IDF commanders by showing how the IDF (which contained some Druze troops) left Druze villages unmolested, even when they had been fired on from these villages. For Parsons, the actions of the IDF in sparing the Druze show the grand design in an Israeli policy that would target one community perceived as a threat (the Palestinians) and leave alone another seen as a potential ally (the Druze) even when the former were pacific and the latter bellicose towards the IDF. Parsons also claims (p.67) that Morris made two errors in his earlier The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-49 (1987): firstly, some Druze did fire on IDF - and lived to tell the tale; secondly, villagers from 'Amqa, expelled by the IDF, were not, as Morris claimed, Druze, but, in fact, Muslims, thus confirming Parsons' thesis that the IDF acted within a carefully structured plan in the 1948 war to drive out only the Palestinians so as to make a viable Zionist state (p.68): 'If you have a policy not to do something it implies that you also have a position on what you are doing.' The second part of Parsons' chapter moves the emphasis from the history itself to the writing of the history. In line with the 'rewriting history' theme detailed by the editors in the introduction, she claims that Israeli historiography and perceptions of the Druze were consciously skewed to create a common past to prove a Jewish-Druze friendship. This 'invention of tradition' has, of course, its own logic as if people are told they have a bond with another group this can well become a reality regardless of historical truth.8

Morris complements Parsons' analysis of Israeli relations with the Druze by concentrating on two discrete but interconnected areas of enquiry: pre-war Zionist transfer thinking on the Palestinians, and supposed atrocities by IDF troops during the 1948 war that were designed to drive out the Palestinian population of Galilee. While Morris provides some revision in his chapter, broadly speaking, the evidence he presents, as he himself admits, is in line with his earlier works such as The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-49 (1987) and 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (1990). Morris concludes that there was a crystallisation of consensus among Zionist leaders on expulsion before the war. Having trawled through the Israeli archives, he then presents a nuanced if inchoate study of the claim that the IDF committed massacres of Palestinians. These findings, based on new archival research in Israel, will be presented in a fuller form in a planned revised version of 1948 and After.

>snip

Shlaim takes up the baton of challenging the myth of an Israeli David versus an Arab Goliath in the 1948 war in his chapter on Israel and the Arab coalition in 1948. Developing themes from his recent Iron Wall, Shlaim gels with the arguments in the other chapters in the volume and slams into the David versus Goliath thesis so popular in the 'old' history. Shlaim does not pull his punches, arguing that the Arab coalition (p.82) 'was one of the most divided, disorganised and ramshackle coalitions in the entire history of warfare.' The fissiparous Arab bloc set Hashemites against anti-Hashemites in the Arab League; Abdullah of Jordan, keen to create a 'greater Syria' under his rule, schemed against the Syrians and others; King Faruq of Egypt looked on aghast at Abdullah's evident ambitions; all the while, the Palestinian leadership, such as it was, worked against itself as different nodes of power jockeyed for position. As Shlaim concluded, as the Arabs attacked Israel (p.89) 'the politicians of the Arab League continued their backstage manoeuvres, labyrinthine intrigues and sordid attempts to stab each other in the back - all in the name of the highest pan-Arab ideals.'

Shlaim's chapter paints a broad brush across the canvas and his conclusions are sure to annoy the 'new old' historians (p.100): '...when one probes the politics of the war and not merely the military operations, the picture that emerges is not the familiar one of Israel standing alone against the combined military might of the entire Arab world but rather one of a remarkable convergence between the interests of Israel and those of Transjordan against the other members of the Arab coalition and especially against the Palestinians. My purpose in writing this survey was not to pass moral judgement on Israel's conduct in 1948 or to delegitimize Zionism but to suggest that the traditional Zionist narrative of the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war is deeply flawed.'"

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/hughesMatthew.html

[bemildred]

22. Ah, Mr. Said. He is rather eloquent on the subject as well.

Although, unlike Mr. Morris, he makes no pretense of being "objective".

[Violet_Crumble]

44. Quick poll - who's read Benny Morris?

I'll take a lack of response from anyone who's uttered any sort of opinion of his work as meaning they haven't seen the need to read his work...

So, I'll start...

I've read:

because I wanted to

Righteous Victims

because I had to

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
1948 And Beyond


And has anyone else read Ephraim Karsh's 'Fabricating History'? I did it at the time to balance things out with one of the more reputable detractors of the New Historians, but now I found out all I had to do was bypass both of them and just hit Wikipedia I'm feeling all foolish! ;)

Violet...

[newyorican]

15. Palestinian loss of land

It's NOT slow motion ethnic cleansing...honest...hey, what are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes!

[pelsar]

16. newyorican.....good point....

they should stop fighting and attempt to make peace.....this continual fighting us is obviously a losing proposition.....life isnt fair, sometimes, like in our own personal lives, nations have to realize that and simply 'make due". Only the idiote in life holds out for the "perfect job, perfect partner, perfect whatever....and more so looking at those maps makes it perfectly clear: the more they fight us, the more they lose...(and the more miserable their lives have become).

[Behind the Aegis]

17. Peel Partition

The Peel Commission in 1937 concluded the only logical solution to resolving the contradictory aspirations of the Jews and Arabs was to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Arabs rejected the plan because it forced them to accept the creation of a Jewish state, and required some Palestinians to live under "Jewish domination." The Zionists opposed the Peel Plan's boundaries because they would have been confined to little more than a ghetto of 1,900 out of the 10,310 square miles remaining in Palestine. Nevertheless, the Zionists decided to negotiate with the British, while the Arabs refused to consider any compromises.

Again, in 1939, the British White Paper called for the establishment of an Arab state in Palestine within 10 years, and for limiting Jewish immigration to no more than 75,000 over the following five years. Afterward, no one would be allowed in without the consent of the Arab population. Though the Arabs had been granted a concession on Jewish immigration, and been offered independence — the goal of Arab nationalists — they repudiated the White Paper.

With partition, the Palestinians were given a state and the opportunity for self-determination. This too was rejected.

Emphasis mine.

[Malikshah]

24. True,,,,but a bit incomplete

Peel's a good one to deal w/ Better to start with the MacDonald paper fiasco though-- we get a better idea of the politics involved.

RE: Peel, though--



Let's get a topographical, agricultural map out and look

Where was the most fertile, useful land?

The other issues that need to be addressed when discussing the Peel Commission period

--aftermath of 36-39 revolt
-- GB dealings with Palestinian population vs. dealings with Yishuv
--demographics
-- splits within the Yishuv leadership regarding tactics etc.

[Behind the Aegis]

25. Perhaps.

However, the ONLY plan that would have been acceptable to the Arabs in power at the time, would have been an Arab state and NO Jewish state. The various plans would have still left more Jews under Arab rule, than the other way around. The fertile land was divided up more in favor of the Arab population, but they felt too much land was given to the Jews. 60% of the UN partition plan was the Negev Desert to Israel. Nothing pleased the Arab leadership.

[Malikshah]

29. Yup-- go back to the time and look at the demographic numbers

and ownership of land

and the culture of those coming in (foreign)

and those that were in control (GB) who were determining the fate.

Oh, those intransigent Arab folks (leadership is too good a term for the "Arab leaders")

Forgot where I was for a second.

[Behind the Aegis]

30. Demographics

These boundaries were based solely on demographics. The borders of the Jewish State were arranged with no consideration of security; hence, the new state's frontiers were virtually indefensible. Overall, the Jewish State was to be comprised of roughly 5,500 square miles and the population was to be 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. The Arab State was to be 4,500 square miles with a population of 804,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Though the Jews were allotted more total land, the majority of that land was in the desert.

--snip--

Critics claim the UN gave the Jews fertile land while the Arabs were allotted hilly, arid land. This is untrue. Approximately 60 percent of the Jewish state was to be the arid desert in the Negev.

--snip--

According to British statistics, more than 70% of the land in what would become Israel was not owned by Arab farmers, it belonged to the mandatory government. Those lands reverted to Israeli control after the departure of the British. Nearly 9% of the land was owned by Jews and about 3% by `Arabs who became citizens of Israel. That means only about 18% belonged to Arabs who left the country before and after the Arab invasion of Israel.

source

Why did you say: "Oh, those intransigent Arab folks (leadership is too good a term for the "Arab leaders")?" Should they have continued until they had all of the area?

Seems, all in all, that several plans were put forth, some better than others. However, nothing was good enough for one side. Some did lose their lands, but the vast majority SOLD their land for outrageous prices, then when it was developed, whined that the land had been stolen.

[tobeornottobe]

28. If they made a movie titled

"Honey, you shrunk our land", the villains responsible would include Palestinian and Arab and other world leaders, it's not ethnic cleansing in the sense that you make the accusation.

[newyorican]

38. Fooled...

by my lying eyes again. :eyes:

[Name removed]

42. Deleted message

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[Colorado Blue]

48. Here's a United Nations map, from 1946, showing Arab and

Jewish land.

Incidentally, Arabs own land in modern Israel.

And, it has to be pointed out, when people say, oh, the Jews, they only owned thus & such a percentage of the land in 1948 - they would gladly have bought more but they were FORBIDDEN to buy more - in their own homeland, on the eve of World War II.

Talk about a Catch-22.

[Name removed]

63. Deleted message

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[Bridget Burke]

64. Can you find a neutral site that details the "expulsion"....

References only appeared in Zionist websites.

Plus Freerepublic & "Christian" sites who want the Jews to rebuild the Temple, then be converted to Christianity (or not) as part of "The Rapture."

[pelsar]

65. good luck....

I never understood what a "zionist" website is...sounds like disease....anyway the expulsion as far as understand was, as is most things in life a combination of factors.

what i am writing is my own understanding- i havent done any recent book reading on the subject so this is "just me."

some arab villages that were determined to be in strategic places were destroyed, the inhabitants either expelled or "scared out by a combo IDF forces and arab leaders.

Other villages which had good relations with the israelis made simple deals with the local IDF commanders:"we wont join the war, and you leave us alone. (a village called pharadese comes to mind)

still others were forced out by over zealose israelis clearing the land....and other arabs left out of fear as do people when they hear the thunder or war.

as in Dir Yassin, there were probably other killings that had no obviouse military reason that emptied out villages,

In short there is no doubt in my mind that on one hand the IDF took advantage of the war to straighten out borders and remove the villages that interfered with that...that said some arabs sat tight and their villages remain (and are considered traitors by some because they are living in israel)..others left of their own accord and their villages were reduced to rubble.....what is the percentage of all of those various aspects?....I dont know.

[Bridget Burke]

66. I'm asking about expulsion of Jews from Arab countries....

Which was mentioned in the post I was answering. And there appears to be no real evidence of that.

Yes, Palestinians were expelled from their homes. And it is still happening.

[pelsar]

67. jews expelled from arab countries...

there are all kinds of sites......of course if you dismiss the fact that they are written by "zionists"....(why is that?.)....you will have less to chose from. But then if you discount those narratives I would assume that you discount the arab/palestenian sites as well, since one doesnt want to be racist.....

anyway heres a link to an american article...but I warn you its written by a "jew"

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/06/INGM2BJH7U1.DTL

or an egytian jew....
http://www.hsje.org/The%20Jews%20of%20Egypt.htm

not hard to find.....as long as you dont discount jews as well as "zionists"

[Behind the Aegis]

68. Will this do?

"Welcome to NationMaster.com, a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and OECD. Using the form above, you can generate maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease."

Encyclopedia: Jewish exodus from Arab lands

[Colorado Blue]

69. Oh - of COURSE this happened. There are articles in

Wikipedia about it, and of course many others. Some 900,000 people! This is mentioned in the second paragraph.

Naturally the list of JEWISH refugees and expulsions, worldwide, is quite long. And growing: West Bank and Gaza Jews are going to lose their homes as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_refugees

Partial list of events that prompted major streams of Jewish refugees
1960s-1991 State-sponsored persecution in the Soviet Union prompted approx. 1 million Soviet Jews to emigrate. Emigration continued, and between 1991 and 2005 another 1 million emigrated Israel, 250,000 emigrated to the United States (with "refugee" status), and 100,000 emigrated to Germany (controversially, given that country's history). See also rootless cosmopolitan, Doctors' plot, Jackson-Vanik amendment, refusenik, Zionology, Pamyat.

1952. A tent city for Jewish refugees in Israel1948-1955 The exodus of Jews from the Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa. The combined population of Jewish communities in the Middle East (excluding Israel) was reduced from about 900,000 in 1948 to less than 8,000 today. Some of these communities were more than 2,500 years old. The State of Israel absorbed approximately 600,000 of these refugees, many of whom were temporarily settled in tent cities called Maabarot. They were eventually absorbed into Israeli society, and the last Maabarah was dismantled in 1958.

1935-1945 The Nazi persecution culminated in the Holocaust of European Jewry. The British Mandate of Palestine prohibited Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. The Bermuda Conference, Evian Conference and other attempts failed to resolve the problem of Jewish refugees, a fact widely used in Nazi propaganda.
1881-1884, 1903-1906, 1914-1921 Repeated waves of pogroms swept Russia, propelling mass Jewish emigration (about 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in the period 1881-1920). During World War I, some 250,000 Jews were transferred from western Russia. See also Pale of Settlement, May Laws, Russian Civil War.

*****

1744-1790s The reforms of Frederick II, Joseph_II and Maria Theresa sent masses of impoverished German and Austrian Jews east.
1648-1654 Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky destroyed hundreds of Jewish communities and committed mass atrocities. Ukraine was annexed by the Russian Empire, where officially no Jews were allowed.
1654 The fall of the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil to the Portuguese prompted the first group of Jews to flee to North America.
1492 Ferdinand_II and Isabella issued General Edict on the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (approx. 200,000), from Sicily (1493, approx. 37,000), from Portugal (1496).
1348 European Jews were blamed for poisoning wells during the Black Death. Many of those who survived the epidemic and pogroms were either expelled or fled.
1290 King Edward I of England expelled all Jews from England. The policy was reversed by Oliver Cromwell in 1655.
12th-14th centuries, France. The practice of expelling the Jews accompanied by confiscation of their property, followed by temporary readmissions for ransom, was used to enrich the crown: expulsions from Paris by Philip Augustus in 1182, from France by Louis IX in 1254, by Charles IV in 1322, by Charles V in 1359, by Charles VI in 1394.
Mid-12th century The invasion of Almohades brought to end the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain. Among other refugees was Maimonides, who fled to Morocco, then Egypt, then Eretz Israel.
1095 - mid-13th century The waves of Crusades destroyed hundreds of Jewish communities in Europe and in the Middle East, including Jerusalem.
135 The Romans defeated Bar Kokhba's revolt. Emperor Hadrian expelled hundreds of thousands Jews from Judea, wiped the name off the maps, replaced it with Syria Palaestina, forbade Jews to set foot in Jerusalem.
70 The defeat of the Great Jewish Revolt. Masses of Jews were sold to slavery across the Roman Empire, many fled.
597 BCE The Babylonian captivity. In 537 BCE the Persians, who conquered Babylon two years earlier, allowed Jews to return and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple.
722 BCE The Assyrians led by Shalmaneser conquered the (Northern) Kingdom of Israel and sent the Israelites into captivity at Khorasan. Ten of twelve Tribes of Israel are lost.

***

Israeli
A large amount of population movement occurred at the time of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and during the following years. The majority of the Arab population of the area of the State of Israel, approximately 720,000 people, fled in 1948-9. After that war, most of the Jews, approximately 900,000 people, fled from a number of Arab countries (as well as Iran), mostly to Israel. The role of governments and official institutions as instigators or in support of these population movements is hotly contested. See Palestinian exodus and also Moledet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer#Middle_East

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-Palestinian_conflict

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Israeli_conflict

[Colorado Blue]

70. Here is a personal story, by an Iraqi Jew.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/06/INGM2BJH7U1.DTL

In discussions about refugees in the Middle East, a major piece of the narrative is routinely omitted, and my life is part of the tapestry of what's missing. I am a Jew, and I, too, am a refugee. Some of my childhood was spent in a refugee camp in Israel (yes, Israel). And I am far from being alone.

This experience is shared by hundreds of thousands of other indigenous Jewish Middle Easterners who share a similar background to my own. However, unlike the Palestinian Arabs, our narrative is largely ignored by the world because our story -- that of some 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries dispossessed by Arab governments -- is an inconvenience for those who seek to blame Israel for all the problems in the Middle East.

Our lives in the Israel of the 1950s were difficult. We had no money, no property; there were food shortages, few employment prospects. Israel was a new and poor country with very limited resources. It absorbed not only hundreds of thousands of us, but also an equal number of survivors of Hitler's genocide. We lived in dusty tents in "transit camps," their official name because these were to be temporary, not permanent.

Housing was eventually built for us, we became Israeli citizens, and we ceased being refugees. The refugee camps in Israel that I knew as a child were phased out, and no trace of them remains. Israel did this without receiving a single cent from the international community, relying instead on the resourcefulness of its citizens and donations from Diaspora Jewish communities. Today, many of Israel's top leaders are from families that were forced to flee Arab countries, and we make up more than half of Israel's Jewish population.

I was born in Baghdad, and like most other Iraqis, my mother tongue is Arabic. My family's cuisine, our mannerisms, our outlook, are all strongly influenced by our synthesized Judeo-Arabic culture.

There once was a vibrant presence of nearly 1 million Jews residing in 10 Arab countries. Our Middle Eastern Jewish culture existed long before the Arab world dominated and rewrote the history of the Middle East. Today, however, fewer than 12,000 Jews remain in these lands -- almost none in Iraq.

What happened to us, the indigenous Jews of the Arab world? Why were 150, 000 Iraqi Jews -- my family included -- forced out of Iraq? Why were an additional 800,000 Jews from nine other Arab countries also compelled to leave after 1948?

snip

[Colorado Blue]

71. Tunisia - a case history.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~shaked/Tunisia/Jews.html

The Jews in Islam - Tunisia

Presentation at the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway, 6-13 Aug. 2000

Edith Haddad Shaked. On the State of Being (Jewish) Between "Orient" and "Occident". In Jewish Locations: Traversing Racialized Landscapes, Lisa Tessman and Bat-Ami Bar On, eds., Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 185-199. pdf (with permission of the publisher.)
______________________________________________________________________________

Case study: The Tunisian Jewish minority in the face of oppression
The end of one of the oldest Jewish Minority in Tunisia, 1881-1967

Oppression of each group/minority has its own distinctive character and its own specifity. The testimony of the Jews in Arab countries has gone practically unheard - the more than one million forgotten. This work describes the Jewish minority experience in its search for dignity, equality and national identity, and the kind of Jewish identity that has arisen out of the modern conditions of Tunisian Jewry. It explores how a community with more than 100,000 members disappeared after a Jewish presence exceeding 2000 years, within 10 years after Tunisia’s independence in 1956.

In the minority, the Tunisian Jew lived under a threat, intermittently hit by catastrophes. He was essentially oppressed, and was always an outsider, being recasted in different terms during different historical periods.

This study presents an analysis of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic transformations that “othered” Tunisian Jews in different ways, and that by the 1960s, led to the Jewish exodus to Israel or France.

snip

PLEASE READ. This happened to ancient Jewish communities all across the Middle East. This in only one example.

I do find upsetting, the implication that we are inventing this tragedy.

In fact, the Sephardic and Mizrachi communities in Israel - the Middle Eastern Jews, are now going to sue for reparations. That should maybe help to get the information out there.

Attempts to destroy our history are ongoing. Just like Holocaust denial, denial of the JEWISH exodus is an attempt to erase our history (and us) from the planet. It's wrong.