1948, Israel, and the Palestinians - The True Story
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1948, Israel, and the Palestinians - The True Story
http://tinyurl. com/4apu47
by Efraim KARSH
or
www.commenta rymagazine. com/viewarticle. cfm/1948- -israel-- a
nd-the-palestinians -br--the- true-story- 11355
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally
recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the
only state in the world that is subjected to a constant
outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and
blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively
condemned by the international community; and whose right to
exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its
Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the
West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the
Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of
these
educated Westerners. The "one-state solution," as
it is
called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement
of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of
historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the
status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can
expiate the "original sin" of Israel´s
founding, an act
built (in the words of one critic) "on the ruins of Arab
Palestine" and achieved through the deliberate and
aggressive dispossession of its native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent
creation of the longstanding Palestinian "refugee
problem"
forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars
pressed by Israel´s alleged victims and their Western
supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed.
As early as the mid-1950´s, the eminent American historian
J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his
findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of
scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most
influential of Israel´s revisionist "new
historians," and
one who went out of his way to establish the case for
Israel´s "original sin," grudgingly
stipulated that there
was no "design" to displace the Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from
the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel´s
early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of
writers and ignored or distorted by the "new
historians,"
paint a much more definitive picture of the historical
record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not
only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What
follows is based on fresh research into these documents,
which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.
Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist
assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early
1920´s onward, and very much against the wishes of their
own
constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate
the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the
violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29,
1947, which called for the establishment of two states in
Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the
neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there
would have been no war and no dislocation in the first
place.
The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been
amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a
substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal
footing "throughout all sectors of the country´s
public
life." The words are those of Ze´ev Jabotinsky, the
founding
father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of
today´s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky
voiced his readiness "to take an oath binding ourselves
and
our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to
the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try
to eject anyone."
Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of
a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its
provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the
prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most
notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were
to enjoy the same legal standing, and "in every cabinet
where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership
shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa."
If this was the position of the more "militant"
faction of
the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only
took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in
the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster
Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann,
then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a
peace-and-cooperati on agreement with the Hashemite emir
Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent
pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the
state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held
hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These
included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal´s elder brother and
founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of
Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz
ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab
elites of all hues.
As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing
of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys
were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab
League´s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict
"was
uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,"
and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit "from
active policies of cooperation and development." Behind
this
proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material
progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would
ease the path for the local Arab populace to become
permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to
the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David
Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel´s first prime minister,
argued in December 1947:
If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, ...
if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way
to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the
Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly
subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab
alliance.
On the face of it, Ben-Gurion´s hope rested on reasonable
grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after
World War I had revived Palestine´s hitherto static
condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab
inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states.
The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially
in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the
capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to
improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the
world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as
did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive
groves quadrupled.
No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare.
Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim
population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from
37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in
Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a
third.
That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the
neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention
India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish
contribution to Mandate Palestine´s socioeconomic
well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in
a 1937 report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord
Peel:
The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on
Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in
the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected
by Jewish development. A comparison of the census returns in
1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase
percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while
in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only
7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.
Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to
their own devices, they would most probably have been
content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded
them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the
Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded
those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of
only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately
for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of
ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely
are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of
civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world,
moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who
have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst
deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among
the better educated and more moneyed classes of society.
So it was with the Palestinians. In the words of the Peel
report:
We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by
the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration,
this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary . . .
with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the
economic situation in Palestine [has] meant the
deterioration of the political situation.
In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by
their alleged betters for the crime of "selling
Palestine"
to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching
themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel
Hadi, who vowed to fight "until Palestine is either placed
under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all
the Jews in the country," facilitated the transfer of
7,500
acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives,
all respected political and religious figures, went a step
further by selling actual plots of land. So did numerous
members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian
Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad
Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of
Jerusalem.
It was the mufti´s concern with solidifying his political
position that largely underlay the 1929 carnage in which 133
Jews were massacred and hundreds more were wounded-just as
it was the struggle for political preeminence that triggered
the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian Arab violence in
1936-39. This was widely portrayed as a nationalist revolt
against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then
streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution. In
fact, it was a massive exercise in violence that saw far
more Arabs than Jews or Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs,
that repressed and abused the general Arab population, and
that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country in a
foretaste of the 1947-48 exodus.
Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back
against their inciters, often in collaboration with the
British authorities and the Hagana, the largest Jewish
underground defense organization. Still others sought
shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. For despite the paralytic
atmosphere of terror and a ruthlessly enforced economic
boycott, Arab-Jewish coexistence continued on many practical
levels even during such periods of turmoil, and was largely
restored after their subsidence.
Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that
most Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent
attempt ten years later by the mufti-led Arab Higher
Committee (AHC), the effective "government" of the
Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 UN partition
resolution. With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in
their minds, many opted to stay out of the fight. In no
time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban areas) were
negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors;
other localities throughout the country acted similarly
without the benefit of a formal agreement.
Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying
their supreme leadership. In his numerous tours around the
region, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of
Jerusalem and the mufti´s close relative, found the
populace
indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms.
In Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the
salaried force he sought to form in that city; his efforts
in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya were hardly
more successful. Arab villagers, for their part, proved even
less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa,
Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven
out by angry residents protesting their village´s
transformation into a hub of anti-Jewish attacks. Even the
few who answered his call did so, by and large, in order to
obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then
return home.
There was an economic aspect to this peaceableness. The
outbreak of hostilities orchestrated by the AHC led to a
sharp drop in trade and an accompanying spike in the cost of
basic commodities. Many villages, dependent for their
livelihood on the Jewish or mixed-population cities, saw no
point in supporting the AHC´s explicit goal of starving
the
Jews into submission. Such was the general lack of appetite
for war that in early February 1948, more than two months
after the AHC initiated its campaign of violence, Ben-Gurion
maintained that "the villages, in most part, have remained
on the sidelines."
Ben-Gurion´s analysis was echoed by the Iraqi general
Ismail
Safwat, commander-in- chief of the Arab Liberation Army
(ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the
fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel´s
proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800
of the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from
Palestine itself, and that most of these had deserted either
before completing their training or immediately afterward.
Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, was no
less scathing, having found the Palestinians "unreliable,
excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized
warfare virtually unemployable."
This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the
fateful six months of fighting after the passing of the
partition resolution. Even as these months saw the all but
complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab society, nowhere
was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by
Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely
viewed by Arab leaders as "Zionist in inspiration, Zionist
in principle, Zionist in substance, and Zionist in most
details" (in the words of the Palestinian academic Walid
Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid about
their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there
was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the
bloodletting.
Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the
Jews set out to lay the groundwork for their nascent state
while simultaneously striving to convince their Arab
compatriots that they would be (as Ben-Gurion put it)
"equal
citizens, equal in everything without any exception,"
Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that "should partition be
implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the
Arabs of Palestine, their sons, and their women." Qawuqji
vowed "to drive all Jews into the sea." Abdel Qader
Husseini
stated that "the Palestine problem will only be solved by
the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine."
They and their fellow Arab abetters did their utmost to make
these threats come true, with every means at their disposal.
In addition to regular forces like the ALA, guerrilla and
terror groups wreaked havoc, as much among noncombatants as
among Jewish fighting units. Shooting, sniping, ambushes,
bombings, which in today´s world would be condemned as war
crimes, were daily events in the lives of civilians.
"[I]nnocent and harmless people, going about their daily
business," wrote the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem,
Robert Macatee, in December 1947,
are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the
streets, and stray shots even find them while asleep in
their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of five children, was
shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the roof. The
ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned,
and finally the mourners following her to the funeral were
attacked and one of them stabbed to death.
As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well,
and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale
violence. Thus, the December 1947 murder of six Arab workers
near the Haifa oil refinery by the small Jewish underground
group IZL was followed by the immediate slaughter of 39 Jews
by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some 100
Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in
April 1948 was "avenged" within days by the killing
of 77
Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital
on Mount Scopus.
Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these
gruesome events for what they were, at times withholding
details so as to avoid panic and keep the door open for
Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts not only
inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented
numerous nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April
21-22), for example, gave rise to totally false claims of a
large-scale slaughter, which circulated throughout the
Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false
rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18),
during the battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa,
where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of
"hundreds of Arab men and women." Accounts of Deir
Yasin in
the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed
hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and
accusations of havoc and rape.
This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the
widest possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and
casting the Jews as brutal predators. But it backfired
disastrously by spreading panic within the disoriented
Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by
April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this
phase of the Arab war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing
was the second, wider, and more prolonged phase involving
the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded Palestine
in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to
join the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to
the road, leaving their homes either for places elsewhere in
the country or fleeing to neighboring Arab lands.
Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of
hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the
war reached their own doorstep. "Arabs are leaving the
country with their families in considerable numbers, and
there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab
centers," reported Alan Cunningham, the British high
commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that
the "panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a
steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the
country."
Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted
in mid-December an "evacuation frenzy that has taken hold
of
entire Arab villages." Before the month was over, many
Palestinian Arab cities were bemoaning the severe problems
created by the huge influx of villagers and pleading with
the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the
Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early
exodus, demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs
to stay put and fight.
But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the
AHC or from anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack
of national cohesion, let alone any sense of shared destiny.
Cities and towns acted as if they were self-contained units,
attending to their own needs and eschewing the smallest
sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many "national
committees" (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export
of
food and drink from well-stocked cities to needy outlying
towns and villages. Haifa´s Arab merchants refused to
alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin, while Gaza
refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron,
armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time
there was extensive smuggling, especially in the
mixed-population cities, with Arab foodstuffs going to
Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.
The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by
the abysmal treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands
of refugees scattered throughout the country. Not only was
there no collective effort to relieve their plight, or even
a wider empathy beyond one´s immediate neighborhood, but
many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and
subjected to ridicule and abuse for their supposed
cowardice. In the words of one Jewish intelligence report:
"The refugees are hated wherever they have
arrived."
Even the ultimate war victims-the survivors of Deir
Yasin-did not escape their share of indignities. Finding
refuge in the neighboring village of Silwan, many were soon
at loggerheads with the locals, to the point where on April
14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan delegation
approached the AHC´s Jerusalem office demanding that the
survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their
relocation was forthcoming.
Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all,
for fear of overstraining existing resources. In Acre
(Akko), the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from
disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian
population organized its own militia-not so much to fight
the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many
exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially
by fleecing them for such basic necessities as
transportation and accommodation.
Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever
growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though
the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to
evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the
outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in- chief Safwat noted
with some astonishment that the Jews "have so far not
attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.") By
the time of Israel´s declaration of independence on May
14,
the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even
then, none of the 170,000-180, 000 Arabs fleeing urban
centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160, 000 villagers
who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.
The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were
uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military
considerations- reducing civilian casualties, denying
sites
to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces
to repel them-rather than political design. They were,
moreover, matched by efforts to prevent flight and/or to
encourage the return of those who fled. To cite only one
example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top
Arab-affairs advisers, local notables, and municipal heads
with close contacts with neighboring Arab localities
traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying
at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their
inhabitants to stay put.
What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is
that they took place at a time when huge numbers of
Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their
homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces,
whether out of military considerations or in order to
prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective
Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of
thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the
city of Haifa on the AHC´s instructions, despite
strenuous
Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier,
Tiberias´ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly
forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes.
In Jaffa, Palestine´s largest Arab city, the municipality
organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and
sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and
children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of
several neighborhoods.
Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced
out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA.
Within weeks of the latter´s arrival in Palestine in
January
1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to
Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages
so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce
the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.
By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of
the country. It gained considerable momentum in April and
May as ALA and AHC forces throughout Palestine were being
comprehensively routed. On April 18, the Hagana´s
intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general
order to remove the women and children from all villages
bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa
counterpart reported an ALA command to evacuate all Arab
villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new
general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in
the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer
all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the
Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan´s Arab Legion likewise
ordered the emptying of scores of villages.
As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had
placed their reluctant constituents on a collision course
with Zionism in the 1920´s and 1930´s and had now
dragged
them helpless into a mortal conflict, they hastened to get
themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most
critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local
leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High
Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with
quintessential British understatement:
You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine
is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those
who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For
instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days
ago and has not returned, and half the national committee
has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left
some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army
left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab
magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi
class has been evacuating in large numbers over a
considerable period and the tempo is increasing.
Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate
era and the doyen of Palestinian historians, described the
prevailing atmosphere at the time: "Wherever one went
throughout the country one heard the same refrain: `Where
are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the
AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine,
their own country, needs them?´"
Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during
the 1948 war, would sum up the situation in these words:
"The Palestinians had neighboring Arab states which opened
their borders and doors to the refugees, while the Jews had
no alternative but to triumph or to die."
This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason
for the refugees´ flight and radically distorts the
quality
of their reception elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy
from their brethren at home, the reaction throughout the
Arab world was, if anything, harsher still. There were
repeated calls for the forcible return of the refugees, or
at the very least of young men of military age, many of whom
had arrived under the (false) pretense of volunteering for
the ALA. As the end of the Mandate loomed nearer, the
Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian males
between eighteen and fifty and ordered all "healthy and
fit
men" who had already entered the country to register
officially or be considered illegal aliens and face the full
weight of the law.
The Syrian government took an even more stringent approach,
banning from its territory all Palestinian males between
sixteen and fifty. In Egypt, a large number of demonstrators
marched to the Arab League´s Cairo headquarters and lodged
a
petition demanding that "every able-bodied Palestinian
capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay
abroad." Such was the extent of Arab resentment toward the
Palestinian refugees that the rector of Cairo´s al-Azhar
institution of religious learning, probably the foremost
Islamic authority, felt obliged to issue a ruling that made
the sheltering of Palestinian Arab refugees a religious
duty.
Contempt for the Palestinians only intensified with time.
"Fright has struck the Palestinian Arabs and they fled
their
country," commented Radio Baghdad on the eve of the
pan-Arab
invasion of the new-born state of Israel in mid-May.
"These
are hard words indeed, yet they are true."
Lebanon´s
minister of the interior (and future president) Camille
Chamoun was more delicate, intoning that "The people of
Palestine, in their previous resistance to imperialists and
Zionists, proved they were worthy of independence," but
"at
this decisive stage of the fighting they have not remained
so dignified."
No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees
themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews.
During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John
Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo
and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to
discover that while the refugees
express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that
matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with
the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab
states. "We know who our enemies are," they will
say, and
they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare,
persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I
even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a
welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the
district over.
Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and
their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they
have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished
on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders
have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.
It is indeed the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two
leaders who determined their national development during the
20th century-Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasir Arafat, the
latter
of whom dominated Palestinian politics since the
mid-1960´s
to his death in November 2004-were megalomaniacal
extremists
blinded by anti-Jewish hatred and profoundly obsessed with
violence. Had the mufti chosen to lead his people to peace
and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he had
promised the British officials who appointed him to his high
rank in the early 1920´s, the Palestinians would have had
their independent state over a substantial part of Mandate
Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the traumatic
experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO
from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation,
instead of turning it into one of the most murderous
terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state
could have been established in the late 1960´s or the
early
1970´s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli
peace
treaty; by May 1999 as part of the Oslo process; or at the
very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000.
Instead, Arafat transformed the territories placed under his
control in the 1990´s into an effective terror state from
where he launched an all-out war (the "al-Aqsa
intifada")
shortly after being offered an independent Palestinian state
in the Gaza Strip and 92 percent of the West Bank, with East
Jerusalem as its capital. In the process, he subjected the
Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
to a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of
Arab dictatorships and plunged their standard of living to
unprecedented depths.
What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is
that, far from being unfortunate aberrations, Hajj Amin and
Arafat were quintessential representatives of the cynical
and self-seeking leaders produced by the Arab political
system. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the
Mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents
against Zionism and the Jews, while lining its own pockets
from the fruits of Jewish entrepreneurship, so PLO officials
used the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states
and, during the Oslo era, by the international community to
finance their luxurious style of life while ordinary
Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.
And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen
condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN
partition resolution, their reckless decisions are being
reenacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders.
This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006
replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority
(PA), but also to the supposedly moderate Palestinian
leadership-from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia
(negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to
prime minister Salam Fayad-which refuses to recognize
Israel´s very existence as a Jewish state and insists on
the
full implementation of the "right of return."
And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the
name of justice (no less) call today not for a new and
fundamentally different Arab leadership but for the
dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when these
dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look
forward to putting their self-inflicted
"catastrophe" behind
them.