04 February '11
Yisrael Medad (My Right Word) recently visited the BBC4's site for Editor Lindsey Hilsum's review of "The Promise". The comments that Yisrael left there unfortunately, seemed to not find favor and are nowhere to be found. What did he have to say?
In writing "When the Jewish state was created, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee...", Ms. Hilsum is displaying not only ignorance but insidious and wilful distortion. Her sentence should have been composed so: "Upon the UN decision to seek territorial compromise by partitioning the Mandate, the Arabs refused to accept that recommendation, while the Jewish side did. The Arabs, first locally and then on May 15, 1948 from other Arab countries, engaged in an aggressive war of extinction, as they declared. Their attempts at ethnic cleansing failed and in the end, they themselves either left their towns and villages voluntarily, hoping to return after a surmised Arab victory, or in losing battles, were necessitated, as every other losing side, to re-adapt their living conditions.
Moreover, in writing "For Jews, it was the promised land. For Palestinians, it was the 'nakba' - the catastrophe" only highlights a basic problem: was this a "national homeland" for the local Arabs? Why did they not even have an Arabic name for their country but needed a Roman name? Why was it not even a recognizable administrative unit within the Ottoman Empire but rather three (or more at times)? Why does Ms. Hilsom not remind us that in 1922, the eastern section of "Palestine" was lopped off the Mandate territory for a Jewish national home and awarded to a Saudi Arabian, Abdullah the Hashemite?
Good points, yes?
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