Remembering the 35 Heroes of Gush Etzion - A Bravery Fiercer than Death (Video)

Toldot Yisrael presents the tragic yet inspiring story of the 35 Haganah soldiers who gave their lives in January 1948 trying to bring much needed supplies to the kibbutzim in the besieged Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem.

ToldotYisrael..
First Posted 15 January '13..

"I don't know if there was any company in the Israel Defense Forces or in any army in the world that assembled such splendid manpower, pure bravery, and spiritual abundance as this company, who will forever be known by our people as the "lamed hey" (the thirty-five)...These lions of Israel were a mix of youthful spirit and glory, superior wisdom...and bravery fiercer than death."
- David Ben Gurion



This movie is the fourth episode in the "Eyewitness 1948" short film series produced by Toldot Yisrael.

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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Great Question, Yes? Can You Capture Your Home?

...But in 1948, that connection was disrupted. The city fell during Israel’s War of Independence to the Jordanian Legion. All the Jewish homes were destroyed, the synagogues burned down, and the surviving Jews were exiled....Only after the city was liberated by the Israeli Defense Forces 19 years later was the Jewish quarter rebuilt, and Jews allowed to once again live in their historical and spiritual capital. This is history. It is the key context, without which there can be no understanding of the “issue” of Jerusalem. Yet in almost every case when the media report on events in Jerusalem, this context is left out.

Yarden Frankl..
Honest Reporting..
21 April '15..

The historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem is a well-established fact. Jews have lived in that small area for thousands of years. It is the site of the ancient Jewish Temples as well as dozens of more modern places of worship. For most of recorded history, Jews have lived inside its walls.

But in 1948, that connection was disrupted. The city fell during Israel’s War of Independence to the Jordanian Legion. All the Jewish homes were destroyed, the synagogues burned down, and the surviving Jews were exiled. Watch our video where eyewitnesses tell what it was like for the Jewish refugees of Jerusalem to have to flee their homes. The military attack was an unprovoked assault, part of a wider campaign to destroy the nascent Jewish State.



Only after the city was liberated by the Israeli Defense Forces 19 years later was the Jewish quarter rebuilt, and Jews allowed to once again live in their historical and spiritual capital.

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.

(Video) Forty-five Seconds of Enlightenment

...To those that make such claims, behind a mask of morality, we should ask: Why should anyone listen to pontifications of people who act as if they know all, but know hardly at all?

Israel Thrives..
by oldschooltwentysix..
07 January '14..

Courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, this video is for those that claim that all Palestinian Arab refugees, including descendants, have a human right to return to Israel because they were ethnically cleansed from their homes by Jews.



To those that make such claims, behind a mask of morality, we should ask: Why should anyone listen to pontifications of people who act as if they know all, but know hardly at all?

(cross-posted at oldschooltwentysix)

Israel Thrives is a non-partisan political blog for people who care about Israel and want an end to the Arab-Muslim war against the Jews in the Middle East. Mike Lumish, PhD, editor. - mike.lumish@gmail.com - Doodad, Geoffff, Jay in Philadelphia, Oldschooltwentysix, and Empress Trudy, contributors.

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. Check-it out! 
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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.”

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There are some Middle East stories which, the BBC does not attempt to tell.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
02 June '13..

There are some Middle East stories which, despite its generously staffed Jerusalem Bureau, the BBC does not attempt to tell. Whilst its accounts of the War of Independence inevitably include mention of the fact that some of the local Arab population left their homes, the Jewish communities which fell to the invading Arab armies and the resulting evacuation or expulsion of their populations remain concealed from BBC audiences. This is one such story.

In 1884 an aspiring Jewish farmer purchased land to the west of the B’not Yaakov bridge in the Galilee, on the main highway leading to Damascus. His farm – named ‘Rose of the Jordan’ – did not succeed as planned and in 1890 he abandoned the venture, selling the land to a group of pioneers composed of residents of the ancient town of Tsfat (Safed) and First Aliyah immigrants from Russia, who together established a farming community named Mishmar HaYarden – Guardian of the Jordan.

The community’s isolation, together with the many deaths from fever and frequent attacks by Bedouin in the area did not make for an easy or very prosperous life and during the First World War a nearby big battle between the British and Ottoman armies severely damaged Mishmar HaYarden. When Israel declared independence in May 1948, there were some 25 families living there and attacks by the Syrian army immediately following that declaration brought about the evacuation of the community’s children and non-combatants.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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 Self-Inflicted Catastrophe - The Arab Nakba

Eli E. Hertz..
mythsandfacts.org..
29 April '13..

As the British began to dismantle their Mandate [The British Mandate] and leave western Palestine, Israel’s War of Independence began (November 30, 1947‑May 14, 1948). During the war, Palestinian Arabs became belligerents in the conflict, and by its end, rather than accept a Jewish state after five-and-a-half months of warfare, Palestinian Arabs called upon their brethren from seven surrounding countries to invade and crush the nascent Jewish state.

Six thousand Jews – 1 percent of Israel’s Jewish population – lost their lives during the War of Independence.

The Arab League's April 10, 1948 decision to invade Israel and "save Palestine," marked a watershed event, for it changed the rules of the conflict. Accordingly, Israel bears no moral responsibility for deliberately banishing Palestinian Arabs in order to "consolidate defense arrangements" in strategic areas. With the pending invasion following Israel's declaration of independence, it is no exaggeration to say that the new Jewish state's very existence hung in the balance.

When dogged determination can change the course of history - The lesson of 26 April '48

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
26 Aril '13..

It didn’t seem that way, but this day – April 26 – exactly 65 years ago was pivotal in yet-to-be-born Israel’s history. Its little-celebrated and hardly remembered events remain central for debunking the lies about the circumstances of the Jewish state’s inception. Its trials and tribulations tell a unique story of individual courage and defiant daring quite literally against all odds.

Yet shamefully too few – even among us – are at all aware of it. As time goes by, the numbers only dwindle.

April 26, 1948 was shaping up to be quite a dismal day. The single exception was the fact that on that day the IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) and the large Labor-led Hagana signed a cooperation agreement whereby the Irgun undertook to carry out only missions beforehand authorized by the Hagana, as well as to assume whatever operational roles the Hagana would assign it.

The evening of April 26 was particularly wretched for Menachem Begin. In his role as IZL commander he had decided to halt the Irgun’s attack on Jaffa’s Manshiyeh quarter, then already in its second ill-fated day.

Mounting casualties and bleak assessments had outweighed the Hagana’s green light to continue the offensive. A grim Begin explained to his men:

“Were it not for the British tanks and armored vehicles, we could have achieved our objectives. But the tanks are there, and we cannot ignore their presence… We will hold on to the line we had reached and leave a strong advance guard there for days to come. The other units will be withdrawn… This is no failure. The combined power of the enemy is many times greater than ours… I don’t think we should continue bashing our heads against strongholds reinforced by British tanks.”

It was less than three weeks before David Ben-Gurion would proclaim Israel independent but the Arabs were already plotting their invasion of the yet-to-be-born state. On that April 26 Transjordan’s King Abdullah announced belligerently that “The only way left for us is war. I will have the pleasure and honor to save Palestine.”

“Saving Palestine” was the euphemistic code phrase for annihilating the Jews of embryonic Israel. Others were more explicit. Five days after Abdullah’s crowing, Arab League Secretary-General Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha declared: “If the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash would dwarf anything which Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetrated.”

Lest any doubt linger, Azzam reiterated his message two weeks later, just as seven Arab armies began assaulting day-old Israel: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

Azzam’s bluster was intended to instill fear but, by any objective criteria, there indeed was plenty to fear.

The Arabs had vehemently rejected the November 29, 1947 UN Partition Resolution that would have created Jewish Israel and Arab Palestine side-by-side in this country. They weren’t interested in a Palestinian state. They wanted to destroy the projected Jewish state, although it was granted only disjointed and quite untenable territorial mini-shreds.

Even stunted and inherently unsustainable Jewish statehood couldn’t be tolerated by those who now portray themselves as Israel’s hapless victims. From pre-dawn on November 30, they instigated a relentless bloodletting throughout the land. They also began urging local Arabs to flee temporarily to make way for the invading Arab armies.

Day of rejoicing, day of self-inflicted disaster

All over the world, tens of millions of refugees have been transferred and resettled in new places, but the Palestinian refugee camps still exist, a reminder of the destruction. Not their destruction, but the hope of ours. Indeed, the day of our rejoicing was the day of their disaster.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
19 April '13..

1. Yet again we are being told the story of the Nakba (Catastrophe) and being tormented for establishing our state.

"It's absurd," said MK Ahmad Tibi. "At a time when Arabs were uprooted from their land, Jews were being brought by ship from their homes all over the world." Indeed, we are guilty of having fought for our independence and not waiting for the rioters' axes. We are guilty of having returned to our ancestral homeland, and we were willing to divide our poor man's lamb with Tibi's ancestors, whose answer was to declare a war of blood on the Hebrew yishuv.

The area where I grew up in eastern Petach Tikvah sits on the land of the Arab village of Faja, which was established in the 1840s by Egyptian farmers who came during the short period of Egyptian rule over Palestine. The name, which was taken from a corruption of the Greek word for "springs," appears in the Mishna with evidence of Jewish settlement. The few farmers arrived in a desolate area and took hold of the land there.

When the founders of Petach Tikvah arrived in the summer of 1878, the poor villagers enjoyed an economic blessing in working for the Jewish farmers and selling the land they had obtained decades earlier. That did not prevent the people of Faja from treating the fields they had sold to the Jews as their own. I spoke with Amnon Malamud, who grew up during the 1930s in a local neighborhood named Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) that lay east of Route 40 on land that had been purchased from the Arabs of Faja. He told of regular attacks by the villagers against the Jewish farmers. "They used to bring their flocks of goats and sheep to our fields," he said. Complaints to the British police were of no avail.

2. When the British entered the Land of Israel, the village began to grow. From 200 people in early 1920, it grew to some 1,500 people just before the state was established in May 1948. The growth stemmed mainly from the immigration of people seeking work. At the same time, since the riots of 1921, cells of attackers used the village as a departure point, planting bombs and taking part in raids on Jewish communities for the purpose of robbery and murder. The great Arab revolt began in 1936. In addition to strikes, it included many acts of looting and murder. The Arabs of Faja joined the party in August. The newspaper Davar reported: "Many gunshots were fired from various directions on the environs of Petach Tikvah. This is the first time during the riots that the village of Faja, which is surrounded by Jewish-owned fields, has fired on Petach Tikvah. The bullets of Faja reached the outskirts of Ein Ganim, the neighborhood of the Sephardim and Kibbutz Rodges [Kfar Avraham]."

In September, Davar reported: "Last night at 8 p.m., Arabs set ablaze the outermost hut in the Bulgarian section, on the border of the Arab village of Faja." The newspaper added that this was not the first attempt. And on and on it went.

In May 1947, a mother and her daughter were murdered in a neighborhood to the west that abutted Faja's border. The murderer knew the Sephardi families who lived in the neighborhood and had won their trust. That was how he was able to enter the little house so easily and slaughter both women who were there. The tracks led to Faja, and fears rose that with the success of the attack, the Arabs of the village would be motivated to attack further. The Haganah ordered the Palmach to capture the attackers. The unit was led by Shlomo Miller, the first child born on Kibbutz Givat Hashloshah (then in Petach Tikvah). The unit broke into the village's cafe, where the gang members had been spotted earlier. During the break-in, Miller was shot in the forehead and evacuated to Beilinson Hospital, where he died. The Palmach's demolition squad blew up the cafe, which was empty. On Nov. 30, 1947, a day after the U.N. decision to partition the country for the establishment of the State of Israel, two Egged buses were attacked near Faja. Some of the accounts tied the murderer of the two Jewish women to the attack. In any case, the first shot of the War of Independence was fired in Faja.

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.

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.

Who are you Private Mizrachi?

Aryeh Savir..
Tazpit News Agency..
10 April '13..

Private Yitzchak Mizrachi is the only soldier who fell in the battle for Gush Etzion in the War of Independence whose relative have not been located.

During one of the bitterest battles fought by the Haganah prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, 241 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed in the final battle for Gush Etzion, which finally succumbed to the attacks of Jordanian Legionnaires and local Arabs on the fourth of, May 13, 1948.

The Legionnaires took 320 men and women into captivity, where they were to languish for many months. The next day, on the fifth of Iyar, David Ben Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence. Gush Etzion was resettled after the Six-Day War in 1967, and many of those who returned to the Gush were children who were evacuated before the falling of Gush Etzion.

There is detailed archival documentation on all those who heroically gave their lives during these acrimonious clashes, except for one, Private Yitzchak Mizrachi.

All that is known is that he served in squad 9 of platoon 6, under the command of the renowned composer Tzvi Ben Yosef.

(+Video) The Lamed Heh - Remembering the heroic saga of Gush Etzion

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
17 January '13..




The days following the partition vote of November 29, 1947 found the folk of Gush Etzion in celebration leavened with sorrow. The diaries of those inside the bloc tell the story:

”There is the sound of rejoicing and salvation among the hosts of Israel. The dream of many generations is being realized before our eyes. The State of Israel will soon become a reality, transforming the very foundations of our life in this country and our standing among the nations of the world…About midnight we heard the first news of how the voting had gone. A wave of joy swept through the village. We sang songs of rejoicing on the surrounding hillsides and danced in the farmyard…”

And,

“There is rejoicing in our hearts, but our joy is not complete. Our kibbutz is one of more than thirty Jewish settlements which have not been included in the borders of the Jewish state which is to arise…The painful partition of the Land causes every faithful Jew to feel a sense of distress in his heart. Jerusalem, the capital city of the Land of Israel, which has through the generations been the object of the yearnings and hopes of Israel, remains outside the borders…Nevertheless, we will not forget Jerusalem, nor Hebron nor Shechem nor hundreds of other Biblical sites that must be redeemed.”

Zipporah Porath, a Jewish-American student who came in the fall of 1947 to study at the Hebrew University, wrote home to her parents about her visit to Etzion Bloc in October 1947:

“About my tour to Gush Etzion. I went with G.I. Dov and Oded, a Sabra who lives in our student house and goes out of his way to bring the Americans closer to what he calls the real Eretz Yisrael [Land of Israel]. Oded, who served as our guide, joined the group when it went on hityashvut [settlement on the land] and was able to point out what had been accomplished in the two months since he had been there….The only problem is that they are smack in the heart of Arab territory. So what sense of security can there be?”

Indeed. Situated south of the City of David (Jerusalem), north of the City of the Patriarchs (Hebron), east of the Valley of Elah, and west of the Judean Desert, the settlement had seen two previously unsuccessful attempts to put down communal roots, in 1927 and 1935, both aborted in the face of Arab violence. A third attempt in 1943 to settle Kfar Etzion took hold, the young pioneers persisting in the face of the harsh environment, scarcity of resources, and Arab hostility. In time, the neighboring kibbutzim of Massuot Yitzchak, named in honor of the chief Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog, and those of Revadim and Ein Tzurim were established nearby, populating the bloc to some 470 at the time of the partition vote in late 1947, which placed them outside the Jewish state.

In the days following the vote, the Arabs had already begun to lay siege to the bloc, on December 11 successfully ambushing a four-vehicle supply convoy in which ten of the bloc’s defenders were killed. Among the 10 were one of Kfar Etzion’s founding fathers, Shalom Karniel, formerly the famous leader of the Hashomer Hadati youth movement in Krakow, Poland. Just a few days earlier he had written,

“Our homeland is the value without which we can expect ruin and constant degradation – we, in the land of our forefathers, and all the more so, our millions of brothers in the Diaspora who cry out for the Redemption.”

(Video) The 35 Heroes of Gush Etzion - A Bravery Fiercer than Death

ToldotYisrael..
15 January '13..

Toldot Yisrael (http://www.toldotyisrael.org) presents the tragic yet inspiring story of the 35 Haganah soldiers who gave their lives in January 1948 trying to bring much needed supplies to the kibbutzim in the besieged Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem.



"I don't know if there was any company in the Israel Defense Forces or in any army in the world that assembled such splendid manpower, pure bravery, and spiritual abundance as this company, who will forever be known by our people as the "lamed hey" (the thirty-five)...These lions of Israel were a mix of youthful spirit and glory, superior wisdom...and bravery fiercer than death."
- David Ben Gurion

This movie is the fourth episode in the "Eyewitness 1948" short film series produced by Toldot Yisrael.

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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.

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.