Two Irish Rebels Who Fought for Israel - by David Lawlor

As Israel’s citizens reflect on their state’s foundation 70 (now almost 72) years ago, they will look at a past of blood and sacrifice – but it’s a past made all the richer thanks to two Irish deserters from the British army . . . brave men who saw Israel’s struggle for independence and found a common cause in which they would risk all for their place in the Promised Land.

David Lawlor..
The Wild Geese..
First Posted 11 May '18..
Link: https://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blogs/the-irish-rebels-who-fought-for-israel
H/T Tara

It was 1948, and as the military half-track drove through the Beit Netofa Valley, at the village of Madna in Galilee, shots rang out. One Israeli soldier was killed and another was hit in the head. A sniper had zeroed in on the men and was picking them off one by one.

Then, one of the half-track’s occupants, a tall, sturdy man with blue eyes and brown hair, broke cover from behind the vehicle and went to outflank the gunman. According to one witness, the soldier picked up a heavy stick and crept up behind the sniper, who was still shooting, and promptly bashed his head in.

It wasn’t the first time that Paddy Cooper saw action fighting for Israel. That same year under the hot noon-day sun in the small town of Bayt Jibrin, to the west of the Hebron Hills, a detachment of the Israeli Defence Forces were pinned down by armoured vehicles of the Jordanian Legion.

Paddy inched his way forward with a Piat anti-tank weapon (below-right) to sort out the problem. The Piat could only be fired within 50 metres, but the soldier crept even closer to make sure of his target. Alone, he cocked the weapon, fired and hit the vehicle.

On another occasion, Paddy, who was a specialist with the Vickers machine gun in World War II, took part in an attack on a police station.

A hole was blown in the wall, through which Paddy and two others entered. According to one witness, Paddy found a Vickers there, loaded it and started to fire every which way. "He was our hero that day."

Such words seem to repeat whenever people talked of the Irishman – for that’s what Paddy, whose mother was Irish, considered himself to be.

Through dogged research, his sister Veronica later managed to unearth some tales of his fascinating life fighting on the Arab front line.

‘He had no fear,’ one former comrade told her. He was "an impressive man, tall and handsome," recalled another - Yohanan Piltz, former deputy commander of the 89th battalion.

John Patrick Cooper certainly stood out from the crowd. Born to Irishwoman Agnes Collins and raised a Catholic in England, he enlisted in the British Army in 1942.

Paddy, as he was known, served in North Africa and later in Europe. Discharged from service in December 1946, he re-enlisted in October 1947, returning to the British army as a driver.

On Israel’s first day (15 May 1948) by Sarah Honig

Because its ragtag army stood its ground, despite the worst of odds, Israel is today accused of the crime of surviving and is portrayed as a menacing ogre for having dared to come into the world rather than surrender.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
First posted 27 April '12..

‘It is with great joy that I hereby close the Mandatory Police record book,” wrote an anonymous duty officer at Tel Aviv’s central precinct precisely as David Ben-Gurion recited the renascent Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence.

Just below that spontaneous hand-inscribed historic annotation, appears the first criminal entry ever in sovereign Israel’s annals. It documents the capture of a thief. He stole a book, perchance pointing to preferences peculiar to the People of the Book.

Several hours later, the first ship docked in the new state. It began its journey furtively five days earlier in Marseilles when Israel was still under British rule. Its 300 young passengers were outfitted with fake IDs, forged at the Hagana “laboratory” in France.

But the Teti would claim special distinction – it became simultaneously the last “illegal” aliya boat and the first legal one. The counterfeit visas proved superfluous. The vessel proudly hoisted the Israeli flag as the new day dawned. Because it was the Sabbath, the newcomers were issued their new country’s entry permits only at sundown.

With such seemingly ordinary bureaucratic yet emotionally charged tasks, the Jewish state adeptly began the business of self-determination. In time that would be presented to world opinion as inherently sinful. By its very brazen determination to be born, it would be asserted, Israel had displaced the Palestinians, condemning them to miserable refugee subsistence.

According to the Arab narrative, Jewish independence, in and of itself, constitutes aggressive belligerence. Incredibly, this perception sank sinister roots. It takes stronger hold abroad now than it did 64 years ago. We may speculate why. We may point to two millennia of merciless anti-Jewish hate-mongering on religious and other mundanely lucrative grounds. But whatever the motive, our legitimacy, alone among the nations, is undermined assiduously.

Expediently forgotten is the fact that never, not for a single solitary day, were Israelis allowed to savor the elation of their newfound freedom. Behind the aforementioned two matter-of-fact exemplars of sovereignty, a frightening reality festered malevolently.

Israel’s birth was legally ordained via the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. Two states – Jewish and Arab – were to be established between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Jews cheered the patchy territorial crazy-quilt they were accorded, existentially untenable though it was, and proceeded to meet all UN prerequisites for independence. The Arabs vehemently rejected the offer of a Palestinian state and, in vituperative defiance of the UN, set out to destroy the embryonic Jewish state rather than construct one of their own.

On Israel’s first day, Arab League secretary-general Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha, articulated Arab priorities. Sending forth seven Arab armies to slay the newborn “Zionist entity,” he declared: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” The Arab agenda and intentions were unmistakable. New Israel’s citizens harbored no misconceptions.

Anyone Surprised? NY Times Greets Israel’s 70th With Piece Claiming 1948 Was ‘Catastrophe’ - by Ira Stoll

...anyone waiting for the Times to correct or even to independently evaluate and assess the inaccurate claim about 1948 and Haifa will have a long wait ahead. If there is a “catastrophe” here, it has to do with the damage done to whatever remains of the Times‘ reputation for accuracy.

Ira Stoll..
Algemeiner.com..
18 April '18..

The New York Times is marking Israel’s 70th birthday with an op-ed piece describing the Jewish state’s creation as a “catastrophe.”

The article also offers a historically false account of events in Haifa in 1948.

The Times article, by Ayman Odeh, who leads the vestiges of Israel’s Communist Party, begins:

HAIFA, Israel — Seventy years ago, the world changed around my family. The establishment of the state of Israel represented self-determination for Jews, but a catastrophe — “nakba” in Arabic — for Palestinians. In the area around the Mediterranean city of Haifa, where my family has lived for six generations, only 2,000 Palestinians of a population of 70,000 remained. My grandparents, A’bdel-Hai and A’dla, were among them. Their neighbors were expelled and dispossessed, and never allowed to return.

Luckily, the case of Haifa just so happens to have been the topic of extensive research by the eminent historian Efraim Karsh, who published his findings in 2000 in an authoritative and meticulously documented article in Commentary headlined, “Were The Palestinians Expelled?”

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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(Video) Old Historians, New Historians, No Historians: The Derailed Debate on 1948

Was Israel born in sin? Alleged atrocities launched by the Jews during the 1948 War, the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, the conduct of the War of Independence, and the ensuing issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict refuse to disappear from our horizon 70 years later.

TheJerusalemCenter
Published on Dec 21, 2016
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqAXFi7rWFw


Dr. Raphael Israeli contends that these recriminations are exaggerated and some historians are guilty of not having consulted the Arabic sources. They show that the basic hatred and rejection of nascent Israel by the Arabs would have been remained unchanged regardless of Israel’s actions.



Dr. Raphael Israeli, born in Fes, Morocco, currently teaches Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern History at Hebrew University. He has been a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center since the 1970s and is the author of over 50 books and some 100 scholarly articles in the fields of Islamic radicalism, Islamic terrorism, the modern Middle East, and Islam in China and Asia.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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From time immemorial? Who were the 1948 Arab refugees? - by Yoram Ettinger

...Thus, contrary to the myth of the 1948 Arab refugees -- aiming to delegitimize Israel -- Arabs have not been in the land of Israel from time immemorial; no Palestinian people was ever robbed of its land; there is no basis for an Arab "claim of return"; and most of the 320,000 Arab refugees -- who were created by the 1948 Arab invasion of Israel and their own collaboration with the invasion -- were recent immigrants and foreign workers (from neighboring Arab countries) in the land of Israel.

Yoram Ettinger..
Israel Hayom..
03 June '16..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16307

Contrary to conventional "wisdom," most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine -- and most of the 320,000 1948 Arab refugees -- were migrant workers and descendants of 1831-1947 Muslim immigrants from across the Arab world. At the time, Britain enticed Arab immigration and blocked Jewish immigration.

Thus, between 1880 and 1919, Haifa's Arab population surged from 6,000 to 80,000, mostly due to migrant workers. The eruption of World War II accelerated the demand for Arab manpower by the British Mandate's military and its civilian authorities.

Moreover, Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman Empire, and then by the British Mandate, to work on major civilian and military infrastructure projects. Legal and illegal Arab migrants were also attracted by economic growth generated by the Jewish community starting in 1882.

According to a 1937 report by the British Peel Commission (featured in the ground-breaking book "Palestine Betrayed" by Professor Efraim Karsh), "during 1922 through 1931, the increase of Arab population in the mixed-towns of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem was 86%, 62% and 37% respectively, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7% and a decrease of 2% in Gaza."

Irrespective of occasional Arab emigration from British Mandate Palestine -- due to intra-Arab terrorism, which has been an endemic feature in the Middle East -- the substantial wave of Arab immigration between 1831 and 1947 triggered dramatic growth of the Arab populations in Jaffa (17 times), Haifa (12 times) and Ramla (5 times).

According to Joan Peters' momentous book "From Time Immemorial": "The 1931 census [documented] at least 23 different languages in use by Muslims plus an additional 28 in use by Christian Arabs -- a total of 51 languages. The non-Jews in Palestine listed as their birthplaces at least 24 different countries."

In 1917, the "Arab" population of Jaffa included at least 25 nationalities, mostly Egyptians, but also Syrians, Yemenites, Persians, Afghanis, Indians and Baluchis. The British Palestine Exploration Fund documented a proliferation of Egyptian neighborhoods in the Jaffa area: Abu Kabir, Sumeil, Sheikh Munis, Salame, Fejja, etc. Hundreds of Egyptian families also settled in the inland, in Arara, Kafr Qasim‎, Tayibe and Qalansawe‎.

The 1831-1840 conquest of the land of Israel by Egypt's Mohammed Ali was solidified by a flow of Egyptian and Sudanese migrants settling between Gaza in the south, Tulkarem in the center and the Hula Valley in the north. They followed in the footsteps of thousands of Egyptian draft dodgers who fled Egypt before 1831 and settled in Acre.

In 1865, the British traveler H.B. Tristram, in "The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels in Palestine," documented Egyptian migrants in the Beit Shean Valley, Acre, Hadera, Netanya and Jaffa.

According to the August 12, 1934 issue of the Syrian daily La Syrie, "30,000-36,000 Syrian migrants, from the Hauran region, entered Palestine during the last few months alone." The role model of Hamas terrorism, Izzedine al-Qassam, who terrorized Jews in British Mandate Palestine, was Syrian, as was Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the chief Arab terrorist in British Mandate Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s.

On Israel’s first day (15 May '48) by Sarah Honig

Because its ragtag army stood its ground, despite the worst of odds, Israel is today accused of the crime of surviving and is portrayed as a menacing ogre for having dared to come into the world rather than surrender.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
First posted 27 April '12..

‘It is with great joy that I hereby close the Mandatory Police record book,” wrote an anonymous duty officer at Tel Aviv’s central precinct precisely as David Ben-Gurion recited the renascent Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence.

Just below that spontaneous hand-inscribed historic annotation, appears the first criminal entry ever in sovereign Israel’s annals. It documents the capture of a thief. He stole a book, perchance pointing to preferences peculiar to the People of the Book.

Several hours later, the first ship docked in the new state. It began its journey furtively five days earlier in Marseilles when Israel was still under British rule. Its 300 young passengers were outfitted with fake IDs, forged at the Hagana “laboratory” in France.

But the Teti would claim special distinction – it became simultaneously the last “illegal” aliya boat and the first legal one. The counterfeit visas proved superfluous. The vessel proudly hoisted the Israeli flag as the new day dawned. Because it was the Sabbath, the newcomers were issued their new country’s entry permits only at sundown.

With such seemingly ordinary bureaucratic yet emotionally charged tasks, the Jewish state adeptly began the business of self-determination. In time that would be presented to world opinion as inherently sinful. By its very brazen determination to be born, it would be asserted, Israel had displaced the Palestinians, condemning them to miserable refugee subsistence.

According to the Arab narrative, Jewish independence, in and of itself, constitutes aggressive belligerence. Incredibly, this perception sank sinister roots. It takes stronger hold abroad now than it did 64 years ago. We may speculate why. We may point to two millennia of merciless anti-Jewish hate-mongering on religious and other mundanely lucrative grounds. But whatever the motive, our legitimacy, alone among the nations, is undermined assiduously.

Expediently forgotten is the fact that never, not for a single solitary day, were Israelis allowed to savor the elation of their newfound freedom. Behind the aforementioned two matter-of-fact exemplars of sovereignty, a frightening reality festered malevolently.

Israel’s birth was legally ordained via the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. Two states – Jewish and Arab – were to be established between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Jews cheered the patchy territorial crazy-quilt they were accorded, existentially untenable though it was, and proceeded to meet all UN prerequisites for independence. The Arabs vehemently rejected the offer of a Palestinian state and, in vituperative defiance of the UN, set out to destroy the embryonic Jewish state rather than construct one of their own.

On Israel’s first day, Arab League secretary-general Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha, articulated Arab priorities. Sending forth seven Arab armies to slay the newborn “Zionist entity,” he declared: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” The Arab agenda and intentions were unmistakable. New Israel’s citizens harbored no misconceptions.

Israel’s Founding - Choosing To Survive, Rather Than Not To by Robert Werdine

...But the Pappe-Munayyer-Nakba narrative is but a fairy tale, not to mention an astonishingly brazen distortion of the historical record.

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
11 April '13..

(Still an excellent piece, first posted last year! Y.)

It is only natural that the 65th (now 66th) anniversary of the First Arab-Israeli War (War of Independence to the winners, Nakba to the losers) would occasion some fairly provocative retrospectives on the subject, and it is a certainty that we have not seen the last of them. (Just wait till “Nakba Day”). Anyone who has read the articles of Yousef Munayyer in Peter Beinart’s Open Zion, will have little trouble discerning his solid conviction that Israel is a colonialist, racist, apartheid state, that has murdered, oppressed, and ethnically cleansed its way to statehood, and who only plans more of the same in the future.

In a recent article, Munayyer gives forth what might be called the BDS-reliable version of Israel’s founding: Several months following the passing of the partition plan in late March 1948, the Zionists, fearing the ruin of their “colonial project,” took matters into their own hands when America announced its withdrawal of support for the partition plan at the UN. Said Munayyer:

“If the international community wasn’t going to give the Zionists a state of their own in Palestine at the expense of the natives, the Zionists were determined to take it by force. Mobilization was key. It was during this period that Zionist militant activity, both by the Haganah and the Irgun, aggressively increased.”The means by which this nefarious act of aggression would be accomplished was in the Haganah’s Plan Dalet, which Munayyer calls “the military plan for the conquest of Palestine….adopted by the Zionists.”

Thus, in Munayyer’s telling, it was the Zionists, fearing the ruin of their “colonial” enterprise, who then wantonly disturbed the peace and harmony that were then prevailing throughout Palestine, and, hastening to send the Arabs packing, attacked a “vastly civilian population that stood little chance against the organized fighting force of the Zionists,” depopulated some 200 towns and villages, and put to flight some 400,000 Arab refugees. All this, Munayyer notes, took place before the Pan-Arab invasion of May 15, 1948.

***

The tale of the planned dispossession of Palestine’s Arabs by the Yishuv is, of course, an old, familiar one, and Munayyer embroiders it here with his usual lurid imagery, and paranoid, hysterical anti-Zionism. For here, in unexpurgated form, is the narrative of the Nakba: one that has the Jewish state waging a war of unprovoked aggression, ethnic cleansing, and territorial expansion against a helpless Palestinian victim. The narrative has been gaining ground in some unlikely quarters, as of late. Phrases like the “rape of Palestine” and the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine” have now become commonplace in academic and even diplomatic circles, and student activists touting the new narrative have recently even disrupted classes being taught on the subject at colleges and universities across the country. With sleepless vigilance, they are combating “Nakba denial.”

Indeed, in historian Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (2006), the war fought in Palestine in the 5 ½ months following the passing of the United Nations partition creating a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, is virtually invisible. There really is no war recounted here; just one long catalogue of Jewish aggression, expulsion, land-theft, and wanton depravity.

But the Pappe-Munayyer-Nakba narrative is but a fairy tale, not to mention an astonishingly brazen distortion of the historical record. The truth is, between the passing of the partition on November 30, 1947, and April 2, 1948, the various Arab and Palestinian militias launched company sized (80-225 soldiers) and battalion sized (300-1200 soldiers) assaults against the Efal neighborhood outside Tel-Aviv (December 4), the Hatikva quarter of Tel-Aviv (December 8 &10), Jewish Jerusalem (December 10), a major convoy to Ben-Shemen (December 14), the settlements of Kfar Yavetz (December 27), Kfar-Szold (January 10), Kfar Uriah (January 11), and on January 14, a Palestinian militia attacked Etzion Bloc, taking heavy casualties, but, in the next two days, wiping out a platoon of 35 Jewish fighters sent in as reinforcements, and brutally mutilating their bodies. The Arab Liberation Army also attacked the Jewish settlements of Yechiam (January 20), Tirat Svi (February 16), Magdiel (March 2), Ramot-Naftali (March 4), and Arab militias also successfully ambushed three major Jewish convoys on March 27, 28, & 31, 1948.

The elephant in the room and what primary sources tell us about Lydda 1948

...Operation Dani, which precipitated the mass exodus of the Arabs from Lydda and Ramla, was the first in a series of three initiatives, the ultimate goal of which was to free the road to Jerusalem to feed the 100,000 Jews living there. When I tried to explain this to my Jewish book club, nobody had heard of the War of the Roads, or of the Jewish children who were starving in Jerusalem. I couldn't forget, of course, because my father was one of those children.

Naomi Friedman..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
17 February '14..

On July 13, 1948, thousands of Arabs left their homes in Lydda (now Lod) and marched in the heat of the summer toward Ramallah, then held by the Arab Legion. Why they did this has been the subject of great historical and political debate.

One account explains the exodus as a product of the civil war that preceded the May 1948 attack on Israel by its Arab neighbors.

Another account, now making the rounds of Jewish book clubs across the United States, is Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Ignoring the recent work of prominent Israeli academicians and the growing body of first-hand narratives and other primary sources, Shavit paints the exodus as an act of ethnic cleansing.

Citing primary sources, from by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) telegrams and reports, to documents found at the Lydda Military Command, to personal accounts by both Jewish and Arab participants, Israeli academicians Avraham Sela, Alon Kadish and Arnon Golan’s book, The Occupation of Lod, July 1948, meticulously documents the unfolding of events. Here is the account, in brief.

On November 30, 1947, the day after the UN voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine, Arab fighters launched the War of the Roads. Stationed in Lydda and other towns along the major trade routes, they attacked trucks and later convoys carrying supplies to Jewish Jerusalem and other Jewish villages. In July 1948, the IDF implemented Operation Dani whose ultimate goal was to gain control of the road to Jerusalem. The first objective of the operation was to capture Lydda.

The attack on Lydda was not organized or carried out as planned, as indicated by IDF reports and telegrams. It was led by the Palmach, a part of the IDF. On July 11, Moshe Dayan’s jeep force drove into the city, opened fire, got lost, came under heavy attack by the Arab Legion, and withdrew permanently.

Then 300 foot soldiers, led by Palmach commander Mula Cohen, with no heavy arms (and not aware of Dayan’s intention not to support their push) entered the city. They took tenuous hold of part of the city center.

According to accounts by both Jewish and Arab sources, Arab fighters gathered at their headquarters, olive groves, and the police station.

This is well-established by first-hand accounts of Shmaryahu Gutman, the Palmach leader in charge of negotiating with the Arab population of Lydda, and Arab civilian guard member Spiro Munayyer.

On the following day, July 12, two or three Arab Legion tanks entered Lydda and opened fire on Jewish forces. Arab Legion forces stationed at the police station and other local fighters launched a counterattack. After heavy fighting, the Palmach maintained its precarious hold on part of the city center. The Palmach exchanged fire with soldiers at the police station throughout the night and by the morning of July 13, they discovered that all but one injured fighter in the police station had abandoned the city.

Meanwhile, Shmaryahu Gutman, according to his 1948 testimony, had spent two days negotiating with the Arab leaders of Lydda asking them to lay down their arms. They had sent a town crier to announce that all arms were to be placed in the front of the houses.

Not a single weapon was handed over. Like the Jews, the Arabs anticipated a counterattack by the Arab Legion and hoped to wait it out. The Palmach, however, had gathered approximately 4,000 men of military age, held in a mosque and a church. Still, the Arabs refused to surrender. Only after the city leaders realized that the Arab Legion forces had abandoned the police station on the morning of July 13, did they agree to make a deal. If the 4,000 men were released, the Arabs would leave the city. And so it was that most, but not all of the Arab residents left Lydda.

Shavit’s account rests on two false premises.

The story of 1948 as told in 1948 and by those who lived it

The stark difference between today and the years following the Israeli War of Independence, however, is that journalists then were willing and even eager to challenge the accounts that they heard in order to ensure veracity. Coverage of the Middle East today is all too often a stale mix of cliché and condescension peddled as fact. It is an exceedingly rare thing to see a Palestinian account taken as anything less than the Gospel by today’s Western press.

Philippe Assouline..
Times of Israel..
01 July '13..

Robert F. Kennedy, martyred liberal icon, was a reporter for the Boston Post in 1948. He was sent in the spring of that year to Mandatory Palestine to cover the lead up to the British withdrawal. His dispatches are a fascinating glimpse back in time and invaluable historical records. And yet they are also a testament to the ideological stagnation of the Arab world vis a vis Israel.

Then, as now, Israelis saw themselves as fighting for survival against irrational enmity. Then as now, the Arab world abounded in hostility to the very idea of a Jewish presence in its midst which it justified by casting itself as the victim of Western conspiracies. R.F.K.’s accounts and other primary sources would appear to vindicate Israel’s version of events.

At the heart of Arab grievances against Zionism lay the claim that an indigenous people (the Palestinian Arabs) were ethnically cleansed by Zionist colonialists aided by the West. Zionists have long held that, though the Holy Land was not empty at the dawn of political Zionism, the Turkish backwater was in no way inhabited by a distinct people, nor did the Zionists ever adopt a policy of ethnic cleansing.

Kennedy in his first dispatch, puts the Arab claim (which was perhaps more controversial then) to rest almost as an afterthought:

“The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state. This is the only country in the Near and Middle East where an Arab middle class is in existence.”

Kennedy later interviewed many people on the ground, on both sides of the conflict, and found himself focusing on the struggle for Jerusalem. The ancient Jewish Quarter of the city had been besieged by Arab forces and almost cut off from the rest of the Jewish population centers, long before the British left Palestine in May of 1948. What Kennedy observed is rampant hatred of Jews – not merely Zionists – on the part of ordinary Jerusalem Arabs, i.e., their neighbours:

The Arabs living in the old city of Jerusalem have kept the age-old habit of procuring their water from the individual cisterns that exist in almost every home. The Jews being more “educated” (an Arab told me that this was their trouble and now the Jews were going to really pay for it) had a central water system installed with pipes bringing fresh hot and cold water. Unfortunately for them, the reservoir is situated in the mountains and it and the whole pipe line are controlled by the Arabs. The British would not let them cut the water off until after May 15th but an Arab told me they would not even do it then. First they would poison it.

Within the Old City of Jerusalem there exists a small community of orthodox Jews. They wanted no part of this fight but just wanted to be left alone with their wailing wall. Unfortunately for them, the Arabs are unkindly disposed toward any kind of Jew and their annihilation would now undoubtedly have been a fact had it not been that at the beginning of hostilities the Haganah moved several hundred well-equipped men into their quarter. (Emphasis throughout is mine)

Kennedy went on to recount how the Arabs had been arming volunteer fighters from as far as Pakistan and sending them into the borders of Mandatory Palestine long before May 1948, that is, under British noses. Once the war of 48 started in earnest, after May 15 of that year, R.F.K. made the following observation that, 65 years on, remains an accurate description of the current impasse:

The die has long since been cast; the fight will take place. The Jews with their backs to the sea, fighting for their very homes, with 101 percent morale, will accept no compromise. On the other hand, the Arabs say: “We shall bring Moslem brigades from Pakistan, we shall lead a religious crusade for all loyal followers of Mohammed, we shall crush forever the invader. Whether it takes three months, three years, or 30, we will carry on the fight. Palestine will be Arab. We shall accept no compromise.”

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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CAMERA Backgrounder - Palestinian Arab and Jewish Refugees

Ruth Orkin's famous photo of Iraqi
Jewish refugees arriving in Israel

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
First posted 12 May '09..

On May 15, many Palestinians and their supporters mark what they call "Nakba Day," a commemoration focusing on their view that the reconstitution of a Jewish state in Israel was a "catastrophe."

The commemoration is often accompanied by a flurry of opinion pieces and news stories conveying the Palestinian narrative of Israel’s independence, which frequently contain false charges.

In May 2008, for example, an Op-Ed in the New York Times claimed "a people had been expelled from their land in a comprehensive ethnic cleansing operation, given the name ‘Plan D’ by Israelis" (Elias Khoury, 5/18/08, "For Israelis, an Anniversary. For Palestinians, a Nakba"). In fact, notwithstanding a limited number of tactical expulsions, "a people" was certainly not expelled. And Plan D was not at all a "comprehensive ethnic cleansing operation" — you can read the text of that plan here.

A news story published in the Washington Post likewise passed along this false charge of mass expulsion. Reporter Sylvia Moreno relayed, from organizers of an anti-Israel rally, the accusation that every Palestinian that fled the war was actually "expelled." She wrote: "To make way for Israel, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and more than 400 of their villages were destroyed, organizers of the event said" (5/18/08, "Palestinian Quilt Presents a Different Viewpoint; Creation of Israel Came At Great Cost, Some Say"). The reporter didn’t bother pointing out that this accusation has been debunked by prominent historians.

The piece below provides needed facts and context about the frequently distorted refugee issue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

During and after the 1948 war, hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Jews fled, and in some cases were forced from, their homes in Mandate Palestine and beyond. The effects of this flight are still today a major issue, as politicians, diplomats and other concerned parties try to resolve the Palestinian "refugee problem" — the status of the original Arab refugees and millions of their descendants, many of whom still live in refugee camps. The vast majority of Jewish refugees went to Israel, where they were absorbed with great difficulty. Despite having found a country committed to taking them in, they still seek redress and acknowledgment of their largely ignored plight.

(Continue reading)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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Understanding how the Jews felt in 1948 about the Arabs who fled.

...There was sadness that day; the sadness of a deserted village; of destruction; of fellahin torn from their field. But sadness was hardly the predominant emotion. We'd have been saints or liars if we said so. The predominating emotion was relief. Only here on the spot could we realize the horrible potentialities of this “delicate cameo” which had been sniping at us from a height...Our losses were not as the wishful thinking of some Arabs caused them to write then, "Oh Jewish mothers, if you could see the bodies of hundreds of your sons strewn in pieces on the rocks around Zer'in" etc. -— but the number was high for the subordination of a small village whose strength lay in her height.

Elder of Ziyon..
07 May '13..

A couple of days ago a group of Palestinian Arabs visited the ruins of an Arab town that was destroyed in the War of Independence, Zer'in. It was written up in an Israeli Arab newspaper, Panorama.

The article notes that participants in the tour stopped to gaze at ruins of houses demolished and the remaining ruins, especially the mosque and the school and the one house which still exists, "to witness the history of this stricken village."

A writer for the Palestine Post in 1948, Dorothy Bar-Adon, lived near Zer'in. She wrote about it a couple of times - how the snipers from the village would take potshots at the Jews, how the Iraqis took over the village and how the Jews had to counterattack to be able to live. I have mentioned an excellent article of hers beforehand and reproduced it.

This is the complete text version. It is truly a must-read to understand how the Jews felt in 1948 about the Arabs who fled.

(Continue)

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The remarkable story of Isaac Shushan - Our man in Beirut

Matti Friedman..
Times of Israel..
15 April '13..





When the state of Israel was declared in the spring of 1948, Abdul Karim Muhammad didn’t know about it.

A young Palestinian refugee recently arrived in Beirut, Muhammad knew only what was reported in the Arab papers: The victorious Arab Liberation Army was in Haifa. The Syrians were at Degania, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and the Egyptians had reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

A few weeks earlier, when Muhammad crossed the Lebanon border on a northbound bus packed with refugees from Haifa, he saw military convoys rumbling past in the opposite direction to participate in the crushing of the Jews — trucks, howitzers, armored vehicles. “We had never seen such weapons before,” he remembered.

Only weeks later, when a wireless set finally arrived in Beirut concealed inside an ordinary radio, and after Muhammad stretched the antenna wire across the rooftop outside his rented room, did he hear the truth in a coded Hebrew transmission from the south.

The state had been established. It was called “Israel.” The fighting was desperate but Jewish forces were holding out.

Abdul Karim Muhammad was 24, and that was not his real name. He was Isaac Shushan, born in poverty in Aleppo, Syria, the son of a janitor at an elementary school. He was a Jew, and a spy.

Isaac is now a slight 89-year-old with glasses and a memory like a sharp steel blade. He laughs easily. The account here comes from a series of interviews conducted at his apartment block outside Tel Aviv.

On Israel’s first day (15 May '48)

Because its ragtag army stood its ground, despite the worst of odds, Israel is today accused of the crime of surviving and is portrayed as a menacing ogre for having dared to come into the world rather than surrender.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
First posted 27 April '12..

‘It is with great joy that I hereby close the Mandatory Police record book,” wrote an anonymous duty officer at Tel Aviv’s central precinct precisely as David Ben-Gurion recited the renascent Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence.

Just below that spontaneous hand-inscribed historic annotation, appears the first criminal entry ever in sovereign Israel’s annals. It documents the capture of a thief. He stole a book, perchance pointing to preferences peculiar to the People of the Book.

Several hours later, the first ship docked in the new state. It began its journey furtively five days earlier in Marseilles when Israel was still under British rule. Its 300 young passengers were outfitted with fake IDs, forged at the Hagana “laboratory” in France.

But the Teti would claim special distinction – it became simultaneously the last “illegal” aliya boat and the first legal one. The counterfeit visas proved superfluous. The vessel proudly hoisted the Israeli flag as the new day dawned. Because it was the Sabbath, the newcomers were issued their new country’s entry permits only at sundown.

With such seemingly ordinary bureaucratic yet emotionally charged tasks, the Jewish state adeptly began the business of self-determination. In time that would be presented to world opinion as inherently sinful. By its very brazen determination to be born, it would be asserted, Israel had displaced the Palestinians, condemning them to miserable refugee subsistence.

Israel’s Founding - Choosing To Survive, Rather Than Not To

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
11 April '13..

(Still an excellent piece, first posted last year! Y.)

It is only natural that the 65th (now 66th) anniversary of the First Arab-Israeli War (War of Independence to the winners, Nakba to the losers) would occasion some fairly provocative retrospectives on the subject, and it is a certainty that we have not seen the last of them. (Just wait till “Nakba Day”). Anyone who has read the articles of Yousef Munayyer in Peter Beinart’s Open Zion, will have little trouble discerning his solid conviction that Israel is a colonialist, racist, apartheid state, that has murdered, oppressed, and ethnically cleansed its way to statehood, and who only plans more of the same in the future.

In a recent article, Munayyer gives forth what might be called the BDS-reliable version of Israel’s founding: Several months following the passing of the partition plan in late March 1948, the Zionists, fearing the ruin of their “colonial project,” took matters into their own hands when America announced its withdrawal of support for the partition plan at the UN. Said Munayyer:

“If the international community wasn’t going to give the Zionists a state of their own in Palestine at the expense of the natives, the Zionists were determined to take it by force. Mobilization was key. It was during this period that Zionist militant activity, both by the Haganah and the Irgun, aggressively increased.”The means by which this nefarious act of aggression would be accomplished was in the Haganah’s Plan Dalet, which Munayyer calls “the military plan for the conquest of Palestine….adopted by the Zionists.”

Thus, in Munayyer’s telling, it was the Zionists, fearing the ruin of their “colonial” enterprise, who then wantonly disturbed the peace and harmony that were then prevailing throughout Palestine, and, hastening to send the Arabs packing, attacked a “vastly civilian population that stood little chance against the organized fighting force of the Zionists,” depopulated some 200 towns and villages, and put to flight some 400,000 Arab refugees. All this, Munayyer notes, took place before the Pan-Arab invasion of May 15, 1948.

***

The tale of the planned dispossession of Palestine’s Arabs by the Yishuv is, of course, an old, familiar one, and Munayyer embroiders it here with his usual lurid imagery, and paranoid, hysterical anti-Zionism. For here, in unexpurgated form, is the narrative of the Nakba: one that has the Jewish state waging a war of unprovoked aggression, ethnic cleansing, and territorial expansion against a helpless Palestinian victim. The narrative has been gaining ground in some unlikely quarters, as of late. Phrases like the “rape of Palestine” and the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine” have now become commonplace in academic and even diplomatic circles, and student activists touting the new narrative have recently even disrupted classes being taught on the subject at colleges and universities across the country. With sleepless vigilance, they are combating “Nakba denial.”

Indeed, in historian Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (2006), the war fought in Palestine in the 5 ½ months following the passing of the United Nations partition creating a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, is virtually invisible. There really is no war recounted here; just one long catalogue of Jewish aggression, expulsion, land-theft, and wanton depravity.

But the Pappe-Munayyer-Nakba narrative is but a fairy tale, not to mention an astonishingly brazen distortion of the historical record. The truth is, between the passing of the partition on November 30, 1947, and April 2, 1948, the various Arab and Palestinian militias launched company sized (80-225 soldiers) and battalion sized (300-1200 soldiers) assaults against the Efal neighborhood outside Tel-Aviv (December 4), the Hatikva quarter of Tel-Aviv (December 8 &10), Jewish Jerusalem (December 10), a major convoy to Ben-Shemen (December 14), the settlements of Kfar Yavetz (December 27), Kfar-Szold (January 10), Kfar Uriah (January 11), and on January 14, a Palestinian militia attacked Etzion Bloc, taking heavy casualties, but, in the next two days, wiping out a platoon of 35 Jewish fighters sent in as reinforcements, and brutally mutilating their bodies. The Arab Liberation Army also attacked the Jewish settlements of Yechiam (January 20), Tirat Svi (February 16), Magdiel (March 2), Ramot-Naftali (March 4), and Arab militias also successfully ambushed three major Jewish convoys on March 27, 28, & 31, 1948.

(Video) Yael Ben-Dov - "Go home!" A Story of the 1948 Generation

Yael Ben-Dov talks about how she got her start at a young age in the struggle for Israel's founding as part of The Founders: The Story of the 1948 Generation, a jointly produced project of Toldot Yisrael and the History Channel.


ToldotYisrael on Jun 23, 2010

About Toldot Yisrael: Toldot Yisrael is a Jerusalem based nonprofit organization dedicated to recording and sharing the firsthand testimonies of the men and women who helped found and build the State of Israel. Over 500 video interviews have been conducted with those who were involved during the pre-State struggle and the momentous events of 1948. Our aim is to conduct hundreds more over the next several years while it is still possible.

Like to learn more? Please come visit Toldot Yisrael's site by clicking here

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.
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The mission that stopped Egypt from advancing on Tel Aviv. 'It was all destiny'

Yaakov Katz..
JPost..
16 July '12..

His story has inspired thousands and is retold in the corridors of the Israel Air Force’s training school with deep admiration.

But despite the 64 years that have passed, Lou Lenart has no doubt that everything comes down to destiny. Touted as the “man who saved Tel Aviv,” the 91-year-old Lenart recalls the fateful events of May 29, 1948 with great emotion and down to the smallest of details.

A few weeks ago, the IAF held a ceremony to honor Lenart, one of the last living pilots from the original group that founded it.

Few people actually remember the IAF’s first battle – yet it was so decisive for Israel that it is believed to have saved Tel Aviv from capture by Egyptian forces. On Thursday, Lenart will speak at a conference at Tel Aviv University about the mission.

Lenart, who today divides his time between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, was born in 1921 in Hungary and immigrated to the United States with his family nine years later. A regular target for anti-Semitic beatings and taunts in a small town in Pennsylvania, Lenart said he learned early in life that he needed to be strong to survive. Accordingly, just weeks after graduating from high school, he enlisted in the US Marine Corps.

By the end of his seven-year service in the Marines, Lenart fought in the Pacific and became a fighter pilot, flying missions in the Battle for Okinawa as well as attacks on the Japanese mainland. After the war, he learned that his relatives who had remained in Hungary had been killed in Auschwitz. Lenart returned to Los Angeles and began thinking about Israel, or as it was then known – Palestine.

“I knew that my people were being killed and my family had been killed in Auschwitz, and I felt that the remnants of the Holocaust had a right to life and some happiness – and no one wanted them except their own people in Israel,” he said.

Dear Minister Davies, the UN did not demarcate Israel’s borders in 1948.

LOTL..
28 June '12..

While Emmanuel Navon has been otherwise occupied for the last few months, today he has returned in full force with a new post "Hopeless or Infinite?" on his For the Sake of Zion blog. A hearty welcome back and now to the issue at hand.

Last month, South Africa’s Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies declared that he intended to issue an official notice “to require traders in South Africa not to incorrectly label products that originate from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) as products of Israel.” Davies added that Pretoria recognizes the State of Israel “only within the borders demarcated by the United Nations (UN) in 1948.”

The UN did not demarcate Israel’s borders in 1948. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to divide the British Mandate on Palestine between an Arab state and a Jewish state (Resolution 181). This vote constituted a mere recommendation since General Assembly resolutions are not binding in international law. Thus, the idea that the UN “created” the state of Israel with Resolution 181 is mistaken (the General Assembly can approve the admission of new states to the UN, but it cannot create states). This resolution became moot as soon as it was passed since the Arab states flatly rejected it.

Fresnozionism - Who created the state of Israel?

Fresnozionism.org..
30 April '12..




In a NY Times obituary for Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel’s PM, who died today (Monday) at the age of 102, this sentence appears:

Ultimately, Israel was created as a result of the partition the revisionists opposed.

The “revisionists,” of course, are the followers of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinski, who believed that the state of Israel should comprise all of historical Eretz Yisrael, which includes all of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan (plus some parts east of the Jordan that were given to the Arabs by the British in 1922). They saw the proposed partition, which gave the Jews only a sliver of the original Mandate, as unacceptable.

Much can be written about revisionist Benzion Netanyahu (who once served as Jabotinsky’s secretary) and his son, including the true but trivial remark of an unfriendly commentator that “to understand Bibi you must understand the father.” This is true for all of us that have fathers, but the PM has certainly taken a different political path than his father.

But I digress. I want to talk about the sentence from the obituary that I quoted above. Was the state of Israel created as a result of the 1947 partition resolution?

Stern - History of Israel...in a Picture

Paula R. Stern..
A Soldier's Mother..
27 April '12..






Wanna learn the history of Israel in a nutshell? Here it is - in a single headline.

The Zionists proclaim new State of Israel

Read here the new state because even then, everyone recognized there had once been another. As for the reference to Zionists - it was written in a time when the world did not judge Zionism to be evil, when they recognized it was, quite simply, the fulfillment of our dream, our hope.

Truman recognized it and hopes for peace

So, to those who have written to me to say that the US was opposed to the creation of Israel and only gave into "Zionist" pressure - I would say this proves you wrong. There was no time for such a lobby, such pressure. US recognition came eleven minutes after the State was declared and the US has been one of Israel's staunchest allies ever since.

Elder - It isn't only "Who Started?" - it is "Who wanted to live in peace?"

Elder of Ziyon
19 June '11


Last week, Shlomo Avineri wrote a nice essay in Ha'aretz called "The truth should be taught about the 1948 war." Excerpts:

In recent debates about the Palestinian "Nakba," the claim has been made that there are two "narratives," an Israeli one and a Palestinian one, and we should pay attention to both of them. That, of course, is true: Alongside the Israeli-Zionist claims regarding the Jewish people's connection to its historic homeland and the Jews' miserable situation, there are Palestinian claims that regard the Jews as a religious group only and Zionism as an imperialist movement.


But above and beyond these claims is the simple fact - and it is a fact, not a "narrative" - that in 1947, the Zionist movement accepted the United Nations partition plan, whereas the Arab side rejected it and went to war against it. A decision to go to war has consequences, just as it did in 1939 or 1941.


The importance of this distinction becomes clear upon perusing the op-ed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently published in The New York Times. Abbas mentioned the partition decision in his article, but said not one single word about the facts - who accepted it and who rejected it. He merely wrote that "Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs."


That is like those Germans who talk about the horrors of the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945, but fail to mention the Nazi attack on Poland, or the Japanese who talk about Hiroshima, but fail to mention their attack on Pearl Harbor. That is not a "narrative," it is simply not telling the truth. Effects cannot be divorced from causes.

(Read full "It isn't only "Who Started?" - it is "Who wanted to live in peace?")

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