Mandel - Wearing their predicament as a badge of honor

Daniel Mandel..
The Washington Times..
14 May '12..

Today (Tuesday), Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over the years, mark what they call the “naqba” (Arabic for catastrophe) day. But commemoration is only one aspect of the day. The clue to the real meaning of the naqba lies on the previous day, May 14, the day Israel declared independence upon the termination of British rule.

On the actual day in 1948 now commemorated as the naqba,neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responded to Israel’s declaration of independence with full-scale hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air, and the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben-Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment - the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents - and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At the war’s end, more than 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes.

In the immediate years that followed, the refugees generally resisted the term naqba. That implied a permanence never contemplated. After all, they largely had evacuated the scene of hostilities under the impression that they would be returning speedily on the heels of Israel’s imminent defeat. When that failed to materialize, they yet hoped for a speedy return upon the destruction of Israel in a renewed round of fighting. When that, too, failed to materialize, however, the term naqba and the commemorations around it held on May 15 became fixtures.

So the term naqba is misleading. It smacks of falsehood, inasmuch as it implies a tragedy inflicted by others. The tragedy, of course, was self-inflicted.

Roth - Their history, our history

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
15 May '12..

It's May 15. On this day in 1948, the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish presence in Palestine, declared itself independent and announced the establishment of the State of Israel.

This year's anniversary celebrations in Israel have already been completed. Jews throughout the world, including here in Israel, mark the day according to the Hebrew lunar calendar: the 5th day of the month of Iyar which this year was April 26 and which was marked with great joy.

The Arab residents in the new state, as well as the Arab armies of all the surrounding countries (and some that were further away than that) had already begun waging a cruel and disproportionate war against the 600,000 Jews of Palestine during the months before the proclamation of Israel's independence.

A blog posting by Robert Werdine, "The Forgotten War" published a few days ago in the Times of Israel, will provide some surprises for people misled by the refashioned history of that period that has become the standard - but wrong - narrative. He reminds us of how bad things were for Palestine's Jews from November 29, 1947 when the United Nations voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine into a state for the Jews and yet another Arab state - to add to the two dozen already created during the twentieth century - for the Arabs.

A Pen Portrait of Israel on the Eve of Statehood

Daphne Anson
14 September '10

As a brief respite from contemporary polemics, here's a visitor’s view of Eretz Israel in the year before the proclamation of Israeli Statehood. It's by Dr Simon Lehrman (1900-80), a Russian-born British Orthodox rabbi who made aliya to Israel in 1966. In this article, called “Some Palestine Impressions”, printed in the London Jewish Chronicle (10 October 1947), he writes evocatively and powerfully. But since his country had responsibility for the Mandate, it's possible that his avoidance of discussing the political situation was based on that old adage "Discretion is the better part of valour". I hope you find it interesting, or perhaps nostalgic:

‘Who can speak of holy Jerusalem, mystical Safed, ancient Tiberias, bustling Tev-Aviv, or beautiful Haifa without encroaching on the preserves of the poet and the artist? Similarly, who can describe the peaceful but laborious life in the settlements, or speak of the achievements in the Negev, without rifling exhaustively the vocabulary of praise and legend!

The foremost impression received on my recent visit is that the Yishuv has come to stay. No power on earth will be able to uproot that which has been so courageously built up with brawn and brain. Despite the many obstacles, natural and artificial, the network of the Histadrut and the Solel Boneh goes on building. The Jew has here been endowed with resilience and the inexhaustible fund of creative power now that he has struck roots once again in the land promised unto him already in the days of Abraham.

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Arab Refugees: The Real Story

Abba Eban
The Jewish Press
Posted: 14 April '10

http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/43324/

Editor's Note: Tuesday, April 20 (Tuesday,May 10 this year) was Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day. To mark the occasion, we've excerpted portions of an address by then-Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban to the UN General Assembly's Special Political Committee on November 17, 1958. The speech makes for remarkable reading, as it was written and delivered just ten years after Israel's founding. The events described were still fresh in people's minds; the historical distortions popularized by the ensuing decades' relentless drumbeat of anti-Israel propaganda had yet to gain traction.

The Arab refugee problem was caused by a war of aggression, launched by the Arab states against Israel in 1947 and 1948. Let there be no mistake. If there had been no war against Israel, with its consequent harvest of bloodshed, misery, panic and flight, there would be no problem of Arab refugees today.

Once you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem. Nothing in the history of our generation is clearer or less controversial than the initiative of Arab governments for the conflict out of which the refugee tragedy emerged.

The origins of that conflict are clearly defined by the confessions of Arab governments themselves: "This will be a war of extermination," declared the secretary-general of the Arab League speaking for the governments of six Arab states, "it will be a momentous massacre to be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."

The assault began on the last day of November 1947. From then until the expiration of the British Mandate in May 1948 the Arab states, in concert with Palestine Arab leaders, plunged the land into turmoil and chaos. On the day of Israel's Declaration of Independence, the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, supported by contingents from Saudi Arabia and the Yemen, crossed their frontiers and marched against Israel.

The perils which then confronted our community; the danger which darkened every life and home; and the successful repulse of the assault and the emergence of Israel into the life of the world community are all chapters of past history, gone but not forgotten. But the traces of that conflict still remain deeply inscribed upon our region's life. Caught up in the havoc and tension of war; demoralized by the flight of their leaders; urged on by irresponsible promises that they would return to inherit the spoils of Israel's destruction, hundreds of thousands of Arabs sought the shelter of Arab lands.

A survey by an international body in 1957 described these violent events in the following terms: "As early as the first months of 1948 the Arab League issued orders exhorting the people to seek a temporary refuge in neighboring countries, later to return to their abodes in the wake of the victorious Arab armies and obtain their share of abandoned Jewish property" (Research Group for European Migration Problems Bulletin, Vol. V, No. 1, 1957).

Contemporary statements by Arab leaders fully confirm this version. On 16 August 1948 Msgr. George Hakini, the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Galilee, recalled: "The refugees had been confident that their absence from Palestine would not last long; that they would return within a few days [or] within a week or two; their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there would be no need for panic or fear of a long exile."

A month later, on 15 September 1948, Emile Ghoury, who had been the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee at the time of the Arab invasion of Israel, declared: "I do not want to impugn anyone but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem."

No less compelling than these avowals by Arab leaders are the judgments of United Nations organs. In April 1948, when the flight of the refugees was in full swing, the United Nations Palestine Commission inscribed its verdict on the tablets of history:

"Arab opposition to the plan of the Assembly of 29 November 1947 has taken the form of organized efforts by strong Arab elements, both inside and outside Palestine, to prevent its implementation and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including repeated armed incursions into Palestine territory. The Commission has had to report to the Security Council that powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of' the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."

* * * * *
Even after a full decade it is difficult to sit here with equanimity and listen to Arab representatives disengaging themselves from any responsibility for the travail and anguish which they caused. The claim of the world community on the cooperation of Arab governments is all the more compelling when we reflect that these states, in their vast lands, command all the resources and conditions which would enable them to liberate the refugees from their plight, in full dignity and freedom.

The refugee problem was not created by the General Assembly's recommendation for the establishment of Israel. It was created by the attempts of Arab governments to destroy that recommendation by force. The crisis arose not, as Arab spokesmen have said, because the United Nations adopted a resolution eleven years ago; it arose because Arab governments attacked that resolution by force. If the United Nations proposal had been peacefully accepted, there would be no refugee problem today hanging as a cloud upon the tense horizons of the Middle East.