The Real Origin of the ”Palestinians” Catastrophe

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The real origin of the Palestinians’ catastrophe: They rejected a two-state solution with Israel in 1948 and have paid the price ever since. 

May 15 is the anniversary of Israel’s birth in 1948. It is also the date on which Palestinians in recent years have commemorated their “Nakba,” or “catastrophe.” 

The events of 1948 were indeed catastrophic for the Arab refugees, as many as 700,000, who fled their homes to escape the war that raged after Israel proclaimed its independence. But the Nakba was self-inflicted. Contrary to the mythology promoted in many quarters today, the war that created the refugees was not launched by the infant Jewish state in order to drive the Arabs out. It was launched by the Arabs to smother that infant in its crib.

The contemporary Nakba narrative is a masterpiece of ahistorical distortion and antisemitic propaganda. It casts the events of 75 years ago as a monstrous crime successfully committed by Jews against Palestinians. The opposite is closer to the truth.

In November 1947, the United Nations concluded that the only way to bring peace to Palestine was to divide it between the two populations that had “irreconcilable” claims to the land. By a lopsided majority, the General Assembly voted to partition the land — which had been under British rule since 1917 — into “independent Arab and Jewish states.” The Jews agreed to this two-state solution. The Arabs, as they had in the past and would in the future, refused. They immediately commenced a campaign of murderous aggression to prevent a Jewish state from becoming a reality. On May 15, 1948, the Zionist leaders, in accordance with the UN resolution, proclaimed Israel’s independence. Within hours, bombs were falling on Tel Aviv. Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt crossed Israel’s borders. “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre,” promised Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, “which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

They had every expectation of a quick victory. How could Israel, with a minuscule population of 600,000, hope to withstand the combined might of Arab nations that numbered in the tens of millions? “It does not matter how many [Jews] there are,” Azzam said. “We will sweep them into the sea.”

But Israel survived the Arab onslaught, albeit at a steep price — fully 1 percent of its population was killed in the fighting. Across the Middle East, meanwhile, antisemitic fury erupted against Jews living in Arab countries. “Jews In Grave Danger In All Moslem Lands” reported The New York Times. Within months, pogroms, expropriations, and expulsions had driven as many as 850,000 Jews to flee. Most made their way to Israel, which accepted them as new citizens. Over time, the traumatized and impoverished refugees rebuilt their lives, dealing with their shock and loss as best they could, starting over in a new country and moving on.

No one today speaks of the Jewish “Nakba” of 1948. That is because Israel strove to absorb the Jewish refugees into mainstream society. By contrast, many of the Palestinians who fled Israel were housed by the surrounding Arab states in permanent refugee camps, barred from citizenship, deliberately not integrated into the societies where they had ended up. With cruel cynicism, three generations of Palestinians have been encouraged to see themselves as victims of an unspeakably terrible calamity — and to believe that it is only a matter of time until the Jewish state is eliminated and replaced by an unpartitioned Palestine, the world’s 22nd Arab nation.

It is hard to overstate just how abnormal and unhealthy this is. In the years following World War II, scores of millions of human beings became refugees. At least 12 million ethnic German civilians, to take one example, were expelled from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan turned 14 million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims into refugees, unleashing a wave of ghastly violence that left as many as 2 million dead. Nearly all wars produce refugees, and refugees’ best hope nearly always lies in resettlement — not in clinging to fantasies of return, fueled by hatred and channeled into terrorism.

“Palestinian nationalism,” Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, “was based on driving all Israelis out.” That attitude is the true Palestinian catastrophe.  For 75 years, Palestinians have paid a painful price for their refusal to grasp the hand of friendship that was offered to them. Will it be another 75 before they are ready to live in peace with their neighbors? The catastrophe of 1948 was self-inflicted. It doesn’t have to be self-perpetuating.

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Commemorating The Jewish Nakba

Video Of The Week “75 years Self-Inflicted Arab Tragedy” https://tinyurl.com/yc233mjj

 A pro-“Palestinian” resolution at the UN recently declared Israel’s founding unjust passed 90-30 at the UN.

 The resolution was made to commemorate Nakba day, which means calamity – referring to the founding of the State of Israel.

 The UN resolution calls for a “commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nakba, including by organizing a high-level event at the General Assembly Hall” in May 2023. It also urges the “dissemination of relevant archives and testimonies.”

So why is there no voting commemorating the Jewish Nakba when almost 1 million Jews were kicked out of Arab lands?

 

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Nakba? Arab Regimes Told "Leave Your Homes"

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On Nakba Day this year (May 15, 2022), Ibrahim Al-Madhoun, a Gazan journalist affiliated with Hamas, published an article on the Hamas website palinfo.com discussing the reasons for the Nakba and for the situation of the Palestinians today.

The following are translated excerpts from his article:[1]

"We are now marking 74 years since the loss of Palestine and the dispersal of its people across the world in what is known as the Nakba [literally, the catastrophe]. This [is how we refer to it] because of the torments and the [harsh] consequences that have been suffered by every Palestinian for decades, which we could not have imagined would ensue. The Palestinian people is a living people that adheres to its identity and its land, is rebellious by nature, makes sacrifices and is capable of defending its land. However, the loss of Palestine for all this time raises many questions and queries.

"When our parents left their lands, their cities and their homes [in 1948] they left their money, belongings, clothing and jewelry behind, and took with them only the deeds to their homes and their keys, because [they thought] they were leaving only temporarily. Had they realized it would last [longer, even] for a single year, they would have preferred to die in their homes, their orchards and their fields.

"Sadly, the armies of several Arab regimes had a hand in persuading the people and the villages to leave and to abandon their homes, on the pretext of protecting [the villages] and fighting the Zionist gangs. The Palestinians believed and trusted them and the families left, hoping that the Zionist gangs would be defeated and their strength would be broken…

"Palestinians sold their wives' jewelry to buy a single rifle to defend their village, but the Arab armies collected their weapons and promised them they would fight on their behalf. They took the weapons and sent the [Palestinian] fighters away, and then they withdrew without putting up a fight.

"Had the Arab leaders only supported the Palestinian fighters with weapons and funds, or refrained from interfering and let them to do as they chose, Palestine would not have been lost. But they did not do that. [Instead] they interfered, planned, came together -- and then simply handed over the country [to the Jews].

"Today the ball and idea are back in the same court and the Arab regimes are playing the same role of colluding with the occupation. These regimes are besieging our people, fighting it and treating to it with hostility, and pressuring it to surrender its weapons and surrender to "Israel." The Arab regimes condemn our Palestinian people in Gaza for possessing weapons and insisting on manufacturing rockets and building tunnels. They [are trying to] convince it to hand over all of this, but today our people are [more] aware and experienced, and thus the Nakba will not recur as long as our people is armed and as long as the jihad fighters build their tunnels.

"The occupation gambled on the Palestinians surrendering of losing their sense of identity. Its leaders said: The adults will die and the younger ones will forget. But the next generations of Palestinians are [even] more attached and committed to their land. The Zionist idea was defeated to the core, as was the occupation's plan to diffuse the Palestinians and destroy their identity.  We are moving closer to Jerusalem with every rocket produced by a member of the 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades [Hamas' military wing], with every tunnel built in the east of the [Gaza] Strip, with every knife and explosive belt in the West Bank, with every intellectual, pen and voice in the Triangle [the concentration of Israeli Arab towns and villages in northern Israel] and the Galilee, and with every voice and key in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Today there are more than seven million Palestinians in historic Palestine between the [Mediterranean] sea and the [Jordan] river, and another seven million outside [Palestine]. Not even one of these Palestinians who has forgotten his rights or his land or who considers forgetting Palestine or renouncing his right to return.

Today, 74 years after the Nakba and one year after the Sword of Jerusalem Campaign in Gaza [i.e. the May 2021 Hamas-Israel military conflict], and after the heroic operations carried out by individuals and by organizations in the West Bank, the ribat [mobilization on the frontlines] of the residents of Jerusalem at Al-Aqsa Mosque, the fidelity of the '48 Palestinians [i.e. the Israeli Arabs] to their national identity, the struggles of the Palestinians outside Palestine, their longing to return and their direct participation [in the struggle] – we are closer to victory and liberation. We are on the verge of the return that we discern from afar, and here we come."

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Nakba the Big Myth

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The historical discourse on issues of the War of Independence, the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Nakba has become so false and distorted – it is a collection of tall tales and myths. . Nobody claims that the Arabs of the Land of Israel did not experience a catastrophe at the end of the 1940s. Yes, they did experience a catastrophe, a Nakba, as they call it.

However, the concept of "the Nakba" does not seek to express a personal catastrophe, it seeks to establish a false political myth, a myth which is an unprecedented and unabashed misrepresentation that aims at rewriting history.

According to this fictive version of history, the aggressor is represented as the victim, and the side that defended against massacre is accused of having committed war crimes. In the name of the Nakba it is considered fair to falsify facts, to concoct fictive fables, to elaborate lies and to invent blood libels that accuse Israel of having committed the most heinous crime – the crime of ethnic cleansing.

The myth of the Nakba is a bluff. It's an enormous lie which is meant to undermine the international recognition of Israel's right to exist within secure and defensible borders. It is meant to criminalize Israel and to frame Israel of having perpetrated a crime which it did not commit. It's an attempt to shirk the responsibility of the Arabs for the results of their own aggression and to whitewash the crimes of the Palestinian national movement with the aim of justifying its struggle to destroy Israel.

A large part of the hundreds of thousands of the "Palestinian refugees" came here in the wake of the prosperity which the Zionist movement brought to the region. These were migrant workers who had arrived here in the 1920'-40's. Some came before that. Where did  the family of the man called El Masri who is building a new city near Ramallah come from? El Masri means "the Egyptian" and this family originated from Egypt. And the large clan named Haurani originally came from the Syrian region of Hauran, and became one of the most well known and established of the Palestinian clans.

In 1947 the UN General Assembly's approved the  partition plan to establish in the Land of Israel - a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arabs rejected the plan. Immeduatly afterwards, , the Arabs in the land of Israel initiated a campaign of murder and mayhem. Upon the Israeli declaration of independence in May 1948, the Arab armies of the neighboring countries joined the fray in an attempt to destroy the Jewish community in Israel.

”This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be remembered like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades”. Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, May 15, 1948 - the day that Israel proclaimed its independence.. Azzam Pasha,  was not the only murderous psychopath among the Arab leaders of 1947 who declared their intent to liquidate the Jewish community in Israel . 

Because the Arabs countries attacked they  are responsible for creation of the Refugee problem.

 Only in a post-modernist world where historical and intellectual discourse has been corrupted thus becoming superficial, shallow and trendy, after so many years of propaganda, deceit and misrepresentation, the extreme left has succeeded in taking over the historical discourse on the Middle East conflict in the media and in academic circles.

Once they achieved that, historical facts became irrelevant and the false Arab narrative gained traction through the power of Arab propaganda and the enormous resources that have been invested in its dissemination.

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Abbas’ Message of Hopelessness at the UN

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• PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ statement to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2021, was almost identical to Yasser Arafat’s statement at the 2001 Durban Conference. Nothing has changed in the Palestinian message and narrative.
• Citing the “Nakba” (catastrophe), Abbas deliberately inverted history and ignored decades of organized violence by Arab groups and forces against Jewish communities, including massacres of Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1938, all aimed at terrorizing the Jewish residents and removing any Jewish presence from the area.
• He misled the General Assembly into believing that General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) created a “right of return” for Palestinians. The truth is that the resolution was a non-obligatory recommendation and did not create legal rights.
• In violation of UN resolutions and international conventions criminalizing the financing of terror, Abbas blatantly and unabashedly defended and justified the PA’s “pay to slay” policy that provides salaries to prisoners guilty of acts of terror and murder, knowing that such payments serve as incentives and encouragement for more acts of terror.
• To come to the UN General Assembly with delusional, misleading, and misguided accusations and threats does not serve the interests of peace and does not advance the chances of a return to peace negotiations one iota.

Anybody reading or listening to the PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ statement to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2021,¹ could not but be transformed back to the almost identical statement made by then-head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, at the 2001 Durban Conference.

Evidently, nothing has changed in the Palestinian message and narrative.

Abbas presented the same re-hashing of the familiar Palestinian accusations, clichés, and buzzwords of racism, colonialism, apartheid, nakba, and ethnic cleansing; unceasing whining about having been neglected by the international community; misrepresentation of, and delusional reliance on old, non-binding UN General Assembly resolutions, none of which have any legal authority or practical relevance; and finally their penchant for threatening – whether to continue their “peaceful popular resistance” of rocket-firing, terror infiltration, stabbings, ecological and agricultural terror, or complaining to international juridical bodies.

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Arabs Must Turn a New Page with Israel

By Fred Maroun 10-7-2016

For the full article go to Gatestone Institute - http://tinyurl.com/z3gp678

This is part two of a two-part series. The first part examined the mistakes that we Arabs made in our interactions with Israel.

There is much that we can do to improve our relationship with Israel -- if we want to -- and there is good reason to think that it would be in both our short- and long-term interest if we did. The most critical change is in approach. Changing that would start to repair the foundation of the relationship and would provide a basis for mutual respect and trust, without which any solution would remain fragile.

Understand Israel

We must see the real Israel rather than the monstrosity that Arabs have been brainwashed to see. We are so afraid to call Israel by its real name that we refer to it as the "Zionist entity". The name is "Israel"; as written in Haaretz, "Israel has been the name of an ethnic group in the Levant going back at least 3200 years".

The standard Arab narrative about Israel is that it is the result of Western colonialism. This language has also been adopted by many, who claim that "settler colonialism that began with the Nakba ... in 1948", implying that all of Israel is a colony. This claim is not true, and no healthy relationship can be built while one side keeps repeating lies about the other.

Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, a people with a long and complex history on that land. Attempts to kill them and exile them came from many sources over the centuries, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans and the Crusaders. These are historical facts.

Israel's then Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1973, "We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs -- we have no place to go". No matter how much pressure Arabs put on Jews to leave, they are not going anywhere; in fact, that pressure only hardens their resolve. Israel is their home.

We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.

Not our enemy

We must stop calling Israel our enemy. We deliberately chose to make Israel our enemy when we attacked it, rather than accept the existence of a tiny Jewish state in our midst.

Israel is only 19% of British Mandate Palestine (which included Jordan), on which Britain promised in 1924 to build a "Jewish National Home". Israel is so small that it would have to be duplicated 595 times to cover the entire Arab world.

We made self-defeating decisions in our relationship with Israel, based on the belief that it is our enemy and that we can only deal with it though force -- but the tiny state of Israel is not a threat to the Arab world.

Every year, Palestinians hold rallies, often violent ones, to commemorate the Nakba ("catastrophe"), which is name they give to the Arab loss in the war of 1948/49. They carry keys, symbolizing the keys to homes that their ancestors fled during that war. This commemoration, like much of the Arab rhetoric about Israel, is a one-sided view that demonizes Israel while it absolves Arabs of all responsibility for starting and continuing a conflict that resulted in decades of violence as well as displacements of both Arabs and Jews.

This false narrative does not leave much room for peace with Israel. How can peace be acceptable to Arabs who are repeatedly fed the false narrative that everything is Israel's fault, when, in fact, "everything" is not "all Israel's fault"?

Building a positive future requires accepting that the past is gone and cannot be restored.

Resolving the Palestinian Question

For a successful resolution of the Palestinian question, we must understand the few fundamental issues on which Israel cannot compromise. At present, the Arab world, and particularly the Palestinians, shows so little understanding of Israel's fundamental issues that the Israeli public's faith in peace negotiations is low. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, "most Israelis (67.7%) do not believe that negotiations will bring peace in the coming years and less than a third (29.1%) think it will ever yield such a result".

Israel's ability to remain a Jewish state and a haven for Jews worldwide is its most basic existential necessity. Without it, Israel would be only a name. For this reason, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated unequivocally that there is "no room to maneuver" on the Palestinian claim of a "right of return" for the descendants of Palestinian refugees. It may be unreasonable to expect relatively small and weak countries like Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to absorb all the refugees residing there, but rich Gulf countries have the ability to help. If Europe can absorb millions of Muslim refugees, why could we not do it too?

A second existential necessity for Israel is its need for defensible borders, as explained in an extensive report. Israel has been defending its very existence against Arab attacks for seven decades. It has been attacked from all sides using all methods imaginable, from missiles to suicide belts to tunnels. Israel does not see the pre-1967 armistice lines as defensible, as was explained as far back as 1977 by then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, widely considered a pro-peace moderate.

A third fundamental point is Jewish access to holy sites, starting with the most important one, the Old City in East Jerusalem. Jews see their win in East Jerusalem in the war of 1967 not as a conquest, but as the liberation and reunification of their historic home since the time of King David, ca. 1000 BCE. Although Israeli governments, both in 2000 and in 2008, offered to give up control over part of Jerusalem, one should not assume that a similar offer will be likely in the future. In June of this year, PM Netanyahu pledged that, "The idea of a divided, split, wounded city is one we will never return to." Other issues such as borders, compensation for refugees, removal of some settlements, and the level of Palestinian sovereignty appear to be negotiable. Netanyahu further stated, "Israel wants peace. I want peace. I want to renew the diplomatic process to achieve peace".

But we Arabs must understand that this can only be possible within the constraints of the three fundamental issues.

The Arab League's Peace Initiative

A peace initiative was endorsed by the Arab League in 2002 and again in 2007, but this initiative falls short in two ways, first in its substance and second in its form.

The initiative demands that Israel go back to the pre-1967 armistice lines. Not only does Israel not consider those borders defensible, but during the fifty years that elapsed since then, Israel has built large settlement blocks in the West Bank. We Arabs had previously expelled the Jews who were native to that land, and it is unrealistic to expect that Israel would agree to victimize its own Jewish citizens yet again.

The initiative declares that Arab states reject "all forms of Palestinian patriation which conflict with the special circumstances of the Arab host countries", implying that Israel and the new Palestinian state would be responsible for absorbing the descendants of all Palestinian refugees. For the new Palestinian state, it would be a huge burden to add to the task of building a new state, as it would mean an increase to its population from 6 million to 9 million. This would leave Israel to receive the refugees, which it will not do.

Equally unrealistic is the initiative's casual reference to "the establishment of a Sovereign Independent Palestinian State". The creation of such a state under today's conditions is likely to result in a Hamas-dominated state that is violently hostile towards Israel. The Palestinian Authority must be transitioned into a peaceful and stable entity before it can be expected to run a state.

There was no need to write this document at all. All that the Arab League had to do was to declare that Arab states are open to making peace with Israel, accept Sharon's offer to attend, then send a delegation to Israel as a sign of goodwill.

Sadat in His Own Words

We should take inspiration from and follow the lead of Sadat, an Arab leader who took a bold step towards peace and achieved a peace agreement that even the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt felt compelled to respect 35 years later.

We should take inspiration from and follow the lead of Sadat, an Arab leader who took a bold step towards peace and achieved a peace agreement that even the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt felt compelled to respect. Pictured: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (right) acknowledge applause during a Joint Session of Congress in which U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced the results of the Camp David Accords, September 18, 1978. (Image source: Warren K. Leffler/Library of Congress)

Sadat knew that taking steps towards peace requires more than simply writing documents and speaking from afar, which is why he went to Israel to present his vision. He said to the Israeli Knesset, "There are moments in the life of nations and peoples when it is incumbent on those known for their wisdom and clarity of vision to overlook the past, with all its complexities and weighing memories, in a bold drive towards new horizons".

Sadat demonstrated that he understood some of Israel's fundamental issues when he said, "What is peace for Israel? It means that Israel lives in the region with her Arab neighbors, in security and safety".

A New Page

The Arab world has an abysmal record on human rights, is mired in internal wars, and continues pointless hostility towards Israel, a neighbor that is far ahead of us scientifically and economically, and from which we could benefit greatly.

We must take ownership of our past actions towards Israel, and we must make the changes needed to turn the page. In the words of Sadat, "We must all rise above all forms of fanaticism, self-deception and obsolete theories of superiority". It is up to us.

Fred Maroun, a left-leaning Arab based in Canada, has authored op-eds for New Canadian Media, among other outlets. From 1961-1984, he lived in Lebanon.

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