-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 12, 2007 2:31:00 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Israel's Embarrassing History
Israel's Embarrassing History
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Emerging_Threats/Analysis/
2007/08/06/commentary_embarrassing_history/1248/print_view/
WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war
of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or
forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly
rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its
anti-Semitic horror.
Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below
the media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved
a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war
that gave birth to Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The
textbook refers to the “expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and
the “confiscation of many Arab-owned lands.”
Textbooks for Jewish Israelis in the same grade make no such verbal
concession. But Israel’s “new wave” historians have been combing
through fresh material now available from the British mandate
period and Israeli archives that document the history of Israel
before and after it became a state. Long-lived myths are being
debunked.
Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and Haifa University lecturer,
whose ninth book is titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,”
documents how Israel was born with lands forcibly seized from its
Palestinian inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years.
During the British mandate (1920-1948), Zionist leaders concluded
Palestinians, who owned 90 percent of the land (with 5.8 percent
owned by Jews), would have to be forcibly expelled to make a Jewish
state possible. Pappe quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime
minister, addressing the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, as
saying, “I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything
immoral in it.”
Pappe outlines Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), which followed earlier
plans A, B and C, and included forcible expulsion of some 800,000
Palestinians from both urban and rural areas with the objective of
creating by any means necessary an exclusive Jewish state without
an Arab presence. The methods ranged from a campaign of
disinformation -- “get out immediately because the Jews are on
their way to kill you” -- to Jewish militia attacks to terrorize
the Palestinians.
The first Jewish militia attacks, says Pappe, began before the May
1948 end of the British mandate. In December 1947 two villages in
the central plain -- Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa -- were raided, and
their panicked Palestinian inhabitants fled. Jewish leaders gave
the order to drive out as many Palestinians as possible on March
10, 1948. The terror campaign ended six months later. Pappe writes
531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods
in cities were emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants.
There is no doubt in Pappe’s mind that Plan D “was a clear-cut case
of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law
today as a crime against humanity.”
Plan Dalet began in the rural hills on the western slopes of the
Jerusalem mountains halfway on the road to Tel Aviv, according to
Pappe. It was called Operation Nachshon, and served as a model for
massive expulsions using terror tactics. Pappe also details what he
calls the “urbicide of Palestine” that included attacking and
cleansing the major urban centers of Tiberias, Haifa, Tel Aviv,
Safad and what he calls the “Phantom City of Jerusalem” once Jewish
troops shelled, attacked and occupied its western Arab
neighborhoods in April 1948. The British did not interfere.
Lobbied by the World Zionist Organization and its guiding spirit
Chaim Weizmann, who became the first president of Israel (1949-52),
the British decided in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine in the
1917 Balfour Declaration. This was a letter from the British
Foreign Secretary to Lord Rothschild (Walter, 2nd Baron
Rothschild), the leader of the British Jewish community, for relay
to the Zionist Federation. The British also pledged indigenous Arab
rights would be protected as they divvied up the Ottoman Empire.
The myth was then created of “a land without people for a people
without a land” even though the “empty land” had a flourishing
Palestinian Arab population. The U.N. partition plan of Nov. 29,
1947, gave the Jews 56 percent of Palestine, with one-third of the
population, while making Jerusalem an international city. The
Jewish part included the most fertile land and almost all urban areas.
When the British handed power to the Jews on May 15, 1948,
including the influx of survivors from Hitler’s concentration
camps, two-thirds of the population was still Palestinian.
The first Arab-Israeli war quickly followed as the armies of Egypt,
Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Lebanon and Iraq joined
Palestinian and other Arab guerrillas who had been attacking Jewish
forces since November 1947. The Arabs failed to prevent the
establishment of a Jewish state and were defeated. The war ended
with four U.N.-arranged armistice agreements between Israel and
Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Commenting on Pappe’s historical research, Rami Khouri, director of
the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and
editor at large of the Beirut Daily Star, writes, “Many Israelis
will challenge Pappe’s account. Such a process should ideally spark
an honest, comprehensive analysis that could lead us to an accurate
narrative of what happened in 1947-48 -- accurate for both sides,
if it is to have meaning for either side.”
An Israeli official textbook for Palestinian third-graders, says
Fares, “that fleetingly acknowledges the Palestinian trauma of
exile and occupation in 1948 is an intriguing sign of something
that remains largely unclear.” The “something” is worth exploring
and reciprocating, “if it indicates a capacity to move toward the
elusive shared, accurate, truthful account of Israeli and
Palestinian history that must anchor any progress toward a
negotiated peace.”
The consensus in Israel today, says Pappe, is for a state
comprising 90 percent of Palestine “surrounded by electric fences
and visible and invisible walls” with Palestinians given only
worthless cantonized scrub lands of little value to the Jewish state.
In 2006, Pappe sees that 1.4 million Palestinians live in Israel on
2 percent of the land allotted to them plus another 1 percent for
agricultural use with 6 million Jews on most of the rest. “Another
3.9 million Palestinians live concentrated in Israel’s unwanted
portions of the West Bank and concentrated in Gaza that has three
times the population density of Manhattan,” notes Pappe.
Back from the Middle East last week, U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said prospects are good for a two-state solution.
A “viable and contiguous” Palestinian state, pledged by the Bush
administration, remains a pipe dream.
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