Book Review: Palestine Betrayed

Elder of Ziyon
21 May '10

(I believe this is the 4th review I'm posting on Palestine Betrayed, each reviewer with a slightly different take. The one thing they have in common, Great Book! I purchase through Amazon, with an average shipping time to Israel of about 8 days from the order being placed. With shipping it comes out to slightly less than the list price. Elder of Ziyon has Amazon for this book on his post.)

Efraim Karsh's "Palestine Betrayed" is an answer to the "New Historians'" view of Israel during the War of Independence. In it, Karsh makes a strong argument that the vast majority of the tragedy of the "naqba" was because of Arab, not Jewish, actions.

Karsh makes a startlingly effective case for the fact that the mainstream Zionist leadership wanted to live with their Arab cousins in peace. He brings quote after quote, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion, that shows that the plan of ethnic cleansing that we are told so incessantly about by Arabs today is simply a fiction. He goes into some detail about Arab-Jewish cooperation immediately after the Balfour Declaration - and before the Mufti.

Much of the blame for the severe deterioration on the relationship between the communities goes directly to Hajj Amin Husseini, who almost single-handedly led the Palestinian Arabs to disaster - as Mufti of Jerusalem, as president of the Superme Muslim Council, and as president of the Arab Higher Committee. His unwavering anti-semitism combined with his positions of power and his ability to outmaneuver his rivals created an atmosphere where compromise was unthinkable. Karsh also shows that Husseini, far from being a nationalist, was always more interested in a pan-Arab nation - first as part of Greater Syria, but even later he viewed the Arab Palestine as being a stepping-stone to pan-Arab unification. Karsh follows his career from Jerusalem to becoming a Nazi sympathizer.

The centerpiece of the book is the description of the fighting and Arab flight during the first part of the War of Independence. Karsh puts forth a strong argument that the vast majority of Arabs fled their homes as a result of fear, and often in spite of Jewish entreaties to stay put. He goes into detail of the flight of Arabs from Haifa and Jaffa, into the complete breakdown of Arab leadership and the almost non-existence of a unified Arab front, neither within Palestine nor without.(A fascinating detail from Haifa: the Arab flight occurred during Passover, and the rabbinate of Haifa gave a special dispensation for Jewish bakers to bake bread for Arabs during that time to help them out as their infrastructure evaporated.)

(Read full review)

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.
.

Happy Nakba! Jaffa, 1948

Elder of Ziyon
16 May '10

The Palestinian Arab press is filled with articles about the "nakba" and all the horrible things that the Jews supposedly did to the Arabs in 1948.

Here's a typical piece, by Nabil Sha'ath:

For Palestinians, today marks the 62nd year since the Nakba – our national and personal catastrophe, involving the loss of our ancestral homeland and the dispersal of three-quarters of our people into exile.

To date, the Palestinian people await Israeli recognition of its responsibility in the catastrophe and agreement to resolve the conflict based on international law, including UN resolutions.

I experienced exile first-hand. On 13 May 1948 one day before Israel’s declaration of independence, my hometown of Jaffa was captured by Zionist forces. Seventy thousand Palestinian inhabitants of the city were forced to leave, most of them by sea to Gaza, Egypt, and Lebanon. We Jaffans were literally driven out to the sea. I was 10. We were never allowed to return.

What really happened in Jaffa in 1948?

The fighting in Jaffa did not start in May, 1948, as Sha'ath implies. In fact, the first people to become refugees in the War of Independence were not Arabs - but Jews from Jaffa, forced out of their homes in August 1947 as Arabs from Jaffa started a shooting and stabbing spree.

Another 5000 Jaffa Jews lost their homes when Arabs from Jaffa attacked them in the immediate aftermath of the UN Partition resolution.

The real reason that Arabs left Jaffa was because of a combination of factors.

As soon as the fighting erupted in December, many of Jaffa's richer Arabs fled to Lebanon and Syria. These were the same people who left during the 1936-9 riots, and they assumed that they would be able to return after things calmed down. Yet their departure left Jaffa without much of their practical leadership. This fact was not lost on the middle class of Jaffa, who felt abandoned.

(Read full post)

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.
.

Sheikh Jarrah in 1948

Elder of Ziyon
10 May '10

The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood has been in the news a lot lately. What is hardly mentioned is that it was the epicenter of Arab attacks on Jews in 1948.

In fact, that area - where Jews lived as well as Muslims before 1948, in quarters known as Shimon HaTzadik and Nahalat Shimon - was the scene of many Arab attacks in 1948 on their neighboring Jews.

Arabs from Sheikh Jarrah started attacking their Jewish neighbors almost immediately after the UN Partition vote. This article is from January 12, 1948, where it mentions that attacks had been coming from that area for three weeks already:



(Read Elder of Ziyon's full post)

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.
.

Palestine Betrayed

by Efraim Karsh
Yale, 336 pp., $32.50

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes
National Review
May 17, 2010

Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," has entered the English language in reference to the Arab–Israeli conflict. As defined by the anti-Israel website The Electronic Intifada, Nakba means "the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands [of] Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948."

Those who wish Israel to disappear actively promote the Nakba narrative. For example, Nakba Day serves as a mournful Palestinian counterpart to Israel's Independence Day festivities, annually publicizing Israel's alleged sins. So established has this day become that Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations — the very institution that created the State of Israel — has sent his support to "the Palestinian people on Nakba Day." Even Neve Shalom, a Jewish-Palestinian community in Israel claiming to be "engaged in educational work for peace, equality, and understanding between the two peoples," dutifully commemorates Nakba Day.

The Nakba ideology presents Palestinians as victims without choices and therefore without responsibility for the ills that befell them. It blames Israel alone for the Palestinian-refugee problem. This view has an intuitive appeal, for Muslim and Christian Palestinians had long formed a majority on the land that became Israel, whereas most Jews were relative newcomers.

Intuitive sense, however, does not equal historical accuracy. In his new tour de force, Palestine Betrayed, Efraim Karsh of the University of London offers the latter. With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.

In Karsh's words: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." More broadly, he observes, "there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab–Israeli conflict."

(Read full article)

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.
.

1948: Palestine Betrayed

Elliot Jager
jewishideasdaily.com
20 April '10

Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.

This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.

The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.

Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.

In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough. Elliot Jager interviewed Efraim Karsh for Jewish Ideas Daily.

Who "betrayed" Palestine?

Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.

You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?

A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.

(Read full interview)

Please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.