Updates

Update from AIJAC

May 8, 2008
Number 05/08 #03

This Update highlights just a few of the many articles being printed around the globe to celebrate or mark Yom Hatzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day) today, the sixtieth anniversary (in the Jewish calendar) of Israel’s foundation.

First up is Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who emphasises the many achievements Israel has brought to the world, and not simply the Jewish people, in terms of medicine, the environment, the arts, literature and science, as well as fighting of terrorism while maintaining the rule of law. Dershowitz expands at length on the last point, both as a lesson for the rest of the world as it deals with terrorism and also exploring the ways Israel’s enemies have learned to exploit Israel’s higher standards of morality. For Dershowitz’s full argument, CLICK HERE. Meanwhile, emphasising the ongoing regional rejectionism and threats to Israel’s survival are American writer and media analyst David Brumer, and former Jerusalem Post editor Bret Stephens.

Next up, the British-Israel Communications and Research Centre has a good summary of the way Israelis are approaching this anniversary – with confidence and satisfaction about Israel’s future and their own lives, but also a very real sense of threat. The article cites polling data which makes this dichotomy clear, and also summarises well the economic, social and political achievements which underlie the feeling of confidence, and the regional environment which create a realistic sense of threat. For this valuable summary of how Israelis feel about their country and its current predicament, CLICK HERE.

Finally, Prof. Efraim Karsh, noted London University academic expert on the Middle East, explains at length the events at the centre of the controversy over Israel’s existence, the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948.  Based on his archival research, he makes it clear that the exodus was primarily the result of decisions made by Arab leaders, especially Palestinian leaders, whose motives were mostly personal, tribal or venal, and the consequences of which were essentially a collapse of Palestinian society. He also makes some interesting points about the persistence of the same sort of counter-productive leadership both among Palestinians and across the Arab world. For this vital article for purposes of understanding what really happened in 1948, CLICK HERE. For those who haven’t seen it, AIJAC’s Adam Frey had a piece on the truth about the Palestinian refugee exodus in yesterday’s Canberra Times.

Readers may also be interested in:

• Also in a historical vein, a memoir of the declaration of Israel’s independence from a participant. Plus, here’s  the text of a 1958 interview with then-Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, in which many of the same themes that come up now – refugees, territorial compromise, anti-Zionist Jews, allegations Israelis are comparable to “Nazis”  – are discussed.
• The story of how the US came to be the first state to recognise Israel.
• A Hamas children’s show marks Israel’s 60th.
• Martin Luther King on Israel and the Jews.

 

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ISRAEL’S GIFT TO THE WORLD

ON HER BIRTHDAY, IT’S WHAT SHE HAS GIVEN US THAT MATTERS

By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

New York Post,  May 4, 2008

As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, the world should recognize the enormous gifts the Jewish state has given the world. Israel has exported more lifesaving medical technology to the far-flung corners of the earth than any nation of comparable size. It has done more to protect the environment, to promote literature, music, the arts and sciences, to spread agricultural advances and to fight terrorism within the rule of law.

Israel has created a legal system that is the envy of the world, with a Supreme Court that is open to all with few, if any, restrictions on its jurisdiction. As America’s most liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan observed when he visited Israel in 1988:

“It may well be Israel, not the United States, that provides the best hope for building a jurisprudence that can protect civil liberties against the demands of national security. For it is Israel that has been facing real and serious threats to its security for the last 40 years and seems destined to continue facing such threats in the foreseeable future. The struggle to establish civil liberties against the backdrop of these security threats, while difficult, promises to build bulwarks of liberty that can endure the fears and frenzy of sudden danger – bulwarks to help guarantee that a nation fighting for its survival does not sacrifice those national values that make the fight worthwhile.”

Yet despite these disproportionate contributions to the world, Israel has proportionally more enemies than any nation on earth. Moreover, the intensity of the enmity directed against the Mideast’s only democracy is unexplainable on any rational basis.

It is remarkable indeed that a democratic nation born in response to a decision of the United Nations should still not be accepted by so many nations, groups and individuals. No other United Nations member is threatened with physical annihilation by other member states so openly and without rebuke from the general assembly or security counsel.

No other nation has been subjected to so many threats of boycott, divestiture, and delegitimation than the Jewish state. No other nation with such high standards of morality has ever been regarded as so immoral by so many members of the media, academia, and the intellectual elite.

Israel’s enemies have learned how to take advantage of its high standards of morality. They understand what Golda Meir meant when she said to the terrorists: “We can perhaps forgive you for killing our children but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children.” Islamic extremist leaders who preach the culture of death are indeed trying to make you kill their children, because they know that every time you accidentally do, they win as big a victory as when they deliberately kill one of your children. That is why they fire their rockets from densely-populated areas knowing that you have no choice but to try to destroy their launching pads and knowing that in the process you may kill some innocent people. It is a win-win situation for them and a lose-lose situation for you.

I agree with the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he said that Israel should try to make peace as if there were no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there were no peace process. No nation can be expected to endure repeated and systematic attacks against its civilian population, even when those attacks come from civilian areas. No nation can make peace with terrorists who seek not compromise, but total defeat of their enemy.

Israel’s continuing efforts to fight terrorists within the rule of law and within the reasonable constraints of human rights and civil liberties may be among Israel’s most enduring contributions to the civilized world. Israel’s fight is our fight. Israel’s struggles are our struggles. Israel’s victory over terrorism will be our victory – a victory that will benefit the entire world.

So let the entire free world join Israel in its celebration of sixty years of nationhood, since no nation in the world has contributed more per capita to the general welfare of the people of this planet than Israel.

Happy Birthday to Israel – may she go from strength to strength and from success to success, and may she finally experience the kind of peace and legitimacy she has sought since her creation on the ashes of the Holocaust 60 years ago.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. His latest book is “Is There A Right to Remain Silent?”

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ISRAEL AT 60: INTERNAL PROMISE, EXTERNAL THREATS

BICOM Analysis, 06/05/2008

Executive Summary

Israel at 60 is a society poised between ongoing internal economic and social achievement, and the persistence of external threat. Public opinion research in Israel shows a striking reflection of this reality in the opinions of Israelis. There is a very clear distinction between a sense of optimism regarding how Israelis view their own lives, and a much gloomier sense regarding the general situation faced by Israel. The ‘bottom line’ issue is whether Israeli society continues to generate the internal strength sufficient to deal effectively with external threats. Polling results and other evidence suggest that the answer is positive. Israel has undergone very significant social and economic changes over the past two decades. But at 60, it remains a free society in which a sense of common mission and identity remains – though this sense has declined in recent years. It is this combination which has enabled Israel to be integrated as a successful member of the global economy, while retaining the ability to defend itself from local threats. This underlying reality forms a solid basis for the hope with which Israel enters its seventh decade.

The dichotomy

On the one hand, Israel’s economic achievements are startling. The country is second only to Silicon Valley in the number of hi-tech start ups, and is third in the number of IPOs on NASDAQ. The list of Israeli contributions in the field of scientific and technological innovation in recent years has been immense and outstanding. From the development of most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems by Microsoft Israel, to the creation of the first ingestible video camera by the Israeli company Given Imaging (an invention with potentially revolutionary consequences in the health field) Israel’s economic growth has remained steady, despite conflict and instability in the region.[i] Indeed, the country experienced record economic growth in the last quarter of 2006, despite the war in Lebanon which took place in that year. Overall GDP growth remained steady at 5.1% in 2007.[ii] Economic success supports and is accompanied by a vibrant, open culture and a stable, democratic political system.

But alongside Israel’s internal flourishing is the persistence and even intensification of conflict. In the 1990s, it appeared that the long contest between Jews and Arabs was undergoing a process of ‘winding down’ – moving toward the hoped for conclusion of a final status accord between Israelis and Palestinians. The collapse of the Oslo process in 2000 marked the disappointment of these hopes. In more recent years, the emergence of a new regional coalition based on Iran has sought to revive hopes among the region’s radicals for Israel’s destruction. Iran, with its Holocaust denial, its nuclear ambitions, its sponsorship of terror organizations and its openly stated desire to wipe Israel off the face of the map, has revived a language and a strategy which seemed at one time to be almost defunct. Iran and its allies are engaged in an openly stated, long war of attrition designed to lead ultimately to Israel’s demise. This war is being fought on a number of fronts, and is impacting on the lives of Israelis. The ongoing, implacable campaign of violence emanating from Hamas-controlled Gaza is one aspect of this. The ominous re-arming of the Iranian client Hezbollah organization in Lebanon is another. An ongoing international campaign of delegitimisation of Israel forms an additional aspect – with Iran’s open calls for Israel’s destruction forming the centerpiece of a notable return to mainstream debate in recent years of the question of Israel’s long-term existence and viability.

The dichotomy as reflected in the attitudes of Israelis

This dichotomy of internal promise and external threat is reflected in the attitudes of Israelis on the 60th anniversary of the state’s founding. A telephone survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day this year found that 38% of Israeli adults believe Israel to be under ‘serious threat of destruction.’ A further 39% believe the country to be under a ‘certain’ (certain as in ‘existing’, rather than ‘sure’) threat of destruction. The same survey found that when Israeli teenagers were asked the same question, the results were even more clear: 32% of teenagers felt that Israel is under a ‘serious’ threat of destruction, and a further 52% consider the country to be under a ‘certain’ threat of destruction. 9% of Israeli adults consider a second Holocaust a ‘real possibility, and 24% consider it a ‘certain’ possibility. For teenagers, the figures were 9% and 30%, respectively.[iii]

Yet when Israelis are asked about their own lives, and the place of Israel within them, a far less gloomy picture emerges. A survey conducted in late 2007 by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 84% of Israeli adults were convinced that Israel will continue to exist despite the problems and crises. 64% said that they were convinced in their desire to remain in Israel over the long term.[iv] The latter figure represented a slight decline when compared to earlier years, but still shows a large majority of Israelis confident of their own futures within the country. The IDI poll was conducted among a ‘representative sample of Israel’s adult population.'[v] It is very possible and even likely that there would be variation in the levels of optimism among specific population groups – for example, residents of the western Negev might be more likely to be less optimistic, and to find the general political situation impacting more directly on their own sense of their own lives.

At a more fundamental level, when asked about their attitudes toward their own lives, 83% of Israelis said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their lives.[vi]

Resolving the contradiction

Thus, there is a clear contradiction between an underlying optimism and confidence expressed by Israelis regarding their own and their country’s situation, and a very real sense of looming threat. This contradiction is nevertheless a quite rational response to the dichotomous reality presented above. A coalition of countries and movements exists which has committed itself to Israel’s destruction, and is working tirelessly toward that goal. But it is important to remember that this coalition does not represent the mainstream of the region. Rather, it is an alliance of radical movements, along with a single, small regional state (Syria), all grouped around a non-Arab country.

This radical alliance has not managed to put in danger Israel’s peace treaties with its two most important neighbours (Egypt and Jordan). It has not managed to interfere with Israel’s developing relations with the countries of the Arab Gulf. It has not managed to dent Israel’s ongoing economic and social progress. And even the efforts of its client Palestinian terror groups are largely – though not entirely – being contained. Unlike in the past – when the conventional armies of powerful Arab states were arrayed against Israel – the current radical coalition is technologically, economically and socially vastly inferior to the de facto pro-western coalition of which Israel forms a part. So while the concern is justified and in place, the underlying sense of confidence is equally so. The actual, real impact of the revival of conflict on the lives of Israelis as citizens of a prosperous and successful democracy has been relatively minor – far less than would be suggested in much western media coverage of Israel.

The radical coalition is aware of this discrepancy in real strength between its own capabilities and those of Israel. It places its confidence in what it regards, however, as its own greater inner cohesion and ability to suffer and endure. In the propaganda of its enemies, Israel is presented as a fragmented, confused, disunited place – perhaps strong in material terms, but lacking the inner resources and will of its enemies, which will prove decisive in the end.

This picture is familiar from anti-Israel propaganda. Indeed, something resembling it has formed a staple of attempts to portray Israel as an artificial, brittle society since its birth and even before it. But the facts do not support this view. A survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, for example, found that 79% of Jewish Israelis expressed their readiness to fight for Israel if called. In an international ISSP survey which asked citizens of a number of democratic countries if they would fight for their countries when called, 78.6% of Israelis said they would. This response placed Israelis at the absolute head of the list in this regard, out of 26 countries polled. The countries polled included the USA, where just over 60% expressed their willingness to serve if called, and the UK, where the figure was just over 40%.[vii] This readiness has been expressed in moments of crisis in the last years.  When summoned to service in the spring of 2002, and again in the summer of 2006, IDF reservists responded overwhelmingly – belying even the pessimistic predictions of some Israeli researchers.  Society has shown no sign of cracking under the strain of the ongoing conflict.[viii]

Conclusion

Israel at 60 remains poised between ongoing internal achievement, and the persistence of external threat. The ‘bottom line’, of course, is the issue of whether Israeli society continues to generate the internal strength sufficient to deal effectively with external threats. As suggested by the facts quoted above, the answer to this is clearly positive. Despite very significant social and economic changes over the past two decades, Israel at 60 is a free society in which a sense of common mission and identity remains (though this sense has undoubtedly declined to a degree in recent years.) It is this combination which has enabled Israel to be integrated as a successful member of the global economy, while retaining the ability to defend itself from local threats. This underlying reality forms a solid basis for the hope with which Israel enters its seventh decade.

Notes
[i] Ilan Friedman, ‘Tapping into Israeli innovation,’  Adept Strategies, www.adeptstrategies.com
[ii] Tobias Buck, ‘Israel’s Economic growth defies experts,’ Financial Times, 4 November 2007. www.ft.com
[iii] “Research into Anti-Semitism awareness among Israeli teenagers and adults,” April 2008, Anti-Defamation League.www.adl.org; Also see, ‘War and Peace Index: April 2008,’ Tel Aviv University,  www.tau.ac.il/peace/
[iv] Asher Arian, Nir Atmor, Yael Hadar, “Israel Democracy Index 2007,” Israel Democracy Institute, www.idi.org.il
[v] IDI, p.16.
[vi] Motti Basok, “Survey: 83% of Israelis satisfied with their lives,” Haaretz, 3 September 2003.
[vii] Op Cit. IDI.
[viii] Stuart Cohen, Israel and its army: from cohesion to confusion, Routledge, 2008: 54-81. 

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1948, Israel, and the Palestinians—The True Story

Efraim Karsh

Commentary, May 2008

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.
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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-cooperation 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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?’”
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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.
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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.

Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author most recently of Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale). Mr. Karsh gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Roger and Susan Hertog in supporting the research on which the present article is based.

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