Israel Defender

Text 5947 words (All emphasis mine. JLF)

Undated	Walid Shoebat, former member of the PLO who took part in terrorist attacks against Israeli targets later became an ardent critic of and supporter of Israel. Now an American citizen, author and public speaker, these extracts are from his “Discussions with Maseehi”	“The idea that the Jews forced the Palestinians out is from a well known lie and perversion of history passed down by the Arabs who were defeated in 1948 and 1967.” “It was pure Arab propaganda against Israel which made the Palestinians leave and out of pure fear, and not the Jews as you put it "kicked out modern day Palestinians". “The Arab leaders promised the Palestinians that they would soon be able to return following Israel’s destruction.”
480000	Extract from American war correspondent Kenneth Bilby’s book on 1948 war.	“After the war, the Palestine Arab leaders did try to help people—including their own—to forget that it was they who had called for the exodus in the early spring of 1948. They now blamed the leaders of the invading Arab states themselves. These had added their voices to the exodus call, though not until some weeks after the Palestine Arab Higher Committee had taken a stand.”
480130	Report in Jaffa newspaper Ash Sha'ab, January 30, 1948.	"The first of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere....At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle."
480222	Sir Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner for Palestine, in an official communication to London, February 22,1948	“British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it”.
480300	Ismayil Safwat, Commander of Palestinian Operations March, 1948	"The Jews haven't attacked any Arab village, unless attacked first."
480330	Report in Jaffa paper, As Sarih, March 30, 1948.	Report excoriating Arab villagers near Tel Aviv for "bringing down disgrace on us all by 'abandoning the villages."
480403	Cited by Anderson et al., "The Arab Refugee Problem and How It Can Be Solved," p. 22;	Near East Broadcasting Station (Cyprus) April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ."
480403	New York Times April 23, 1948	“Tens of thousands of Arab men, women and children fled towards the eastern outskirts of the city in cars, trucks, carts, and afoot in a desperate attempt to reach Arab territory until the Jews captured Rushmiya Bridge toward Samaria and Northern Palestine and cut them off. Thousands rushed every available craft, even rowboats, along the waterfront, to escape by sea toward Acco.” (Acre)
480419	Jewish Virtual Library	On April 19, 1948, Jewish forces seized Tiberias and the entire Arab population of 6,000 was evacuated under British military supervision. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course….Let no citizen touch their property."
480422	Reported by Aubrey Lippincott, U.S. Consul General in Haifa, April 22, 1948	". . . local mufti-dominated Arab leaders" were urging "all Arabs to leave the city, and large numbers did so."
480423	Faris el-Khouri, Syria’s UN delegate,	Syria’s delegate, Faris el-Khouri, interrupted the UN debate on Palestine to describe the seizure of Haifa as a "massacre" and said this action was "further evidence that the 'Zionist program' is to annihilate Arabs within the Jewish state if partition is effected." The following day, however, the British representative at the UN, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told the delegates that the fighting in Haifa had been provoked by the continuous attacks by Arabs against Jews a few days before and that reports of massacres and deportations were erroneous.
480423	Jamal Husseini, Acting Chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, speaking to the United Nations Security Council. Quoted in the UNSC Official Records (N. 62), April 23, 1948, p. 14	"The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce they rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did."
480426	Haifa District HQ of the British Police, April 26, 1948, (quoted in Battleground by Samuel Katz).	"Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."
480427	From a memorandum by The Arab National Committee in Haifa in a to the Arab League Governments 27 April 1948	"… when the delegation entered the conference room it proudly refused to sign the truce and asked that the evacuation of the Arab population and their transfer to neighboring Arab countries be facilitated.” A report from the time noted that “the military and civil authorities and the Jewish representatives expressed their profound regret. The mayor of Haifa (Mr. Shabtai Levi) adjourned the meeting with a passionate appeal to the Arab population to reconsider its decision..."
480433	From The Jewish Virtual Library	“In early April (1948), an estimated 25,000 Arabs left the Haifa area following an offensive by the irregular forces led by Fawzi al-Qawukji, and rumors that Arab air forces would soon bomb the Jewish areas around Mt. Carmel. On April 23, the Haganah captured Haifa. A British police report from Haifa, dated April 26, explained that "every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe. In fact, Ben Gurion had sent Golda Meir to Haifa to try to persuade the Arabs to stay, but she was unable to convince them because of their fear of being judged traitors to the Arab cause. By the end of the battle, more than 50,000 Palestinians had left.”
480503	Time Magazine, May 3, 1948, page 25	"The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city.... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."
480505	London Times, May 5 1948.	"The Arab streets are curiously deserted and, evidently following the poor example of the more moneyed class there has been an exodus from Jerusalem too, though not to the same extent as in Jaffa and Haifa."
480812	John Bagot Glubb, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, in the London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948.	"Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war"
480516	Report in the New York Times, May 16, 1948.	On the day that Israel declared its independence, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, at Cairo press conference declared "jihad", a holy war. He said that the Arab states rejected partition and would set up a "United State of Palestine." Pasha added: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”
480816	Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee, in Beirut newspaper, Sada al-Janub, August 16, 1948	"The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile."
481002	Report by The Economist, October 2, 1948.	"Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight.  There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit...It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”
490219	Jordanian daily newspaper Falistin, Feb 19, 1949.	"The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees."
490906	Secretary of Palestine Higher Committee interviewed in Beirut Telegraph, September 6, 1949	The Beirut Telegraph carried an interview with Mr. Emile Ghoury, Secretary of the Palestine Higher Committee, in which he said: "The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State."
500000	Extracts from American war correspondent Kenneth Bilby's book "New Star in the East", (Doubleday 1950) part of which deals with the Arab exodus in 1948.	"The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea." "After the war, the Palestine Arab leaders did try to help people-including their own-to forget that it was they who had called for the exodus in the early spring of 1948. They now blamed the leaders of the invading Arab states themselves. These had added their voices to the exodus call, though not until some weeks after the Palestine Arab Higher Committee had taken a stand."
500427	Statement by the Arab National Committee of Haifa in memorandum to the Arab States, April 27, 1950. Cited by Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat, “River Without Bridges. - A Study of the Exodus of the 1967Arab Palestinian Refugees”. Beirut 1969. p. 43	"The removal of the Arab inhabitants ... was voluntary and was carried out at our request ... The Arab delegation proudly asked for the evacuation of the Arabs and their removal to the neighboring Arab countries.... We are very glad to state that the Arabs guarded their honour and traditions with pride and greatness."
510608	Report by Habib Issa in Lebanese newspaper, Al Hoda, June 8, 1951	"The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade.  He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean.  “Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down."
510819	The Beirut Muslim weekly Kul-Shay, Aug. 19, 1951.	"Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor nor conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their honor? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it."
530409	Jordanian daily Al Urdun, , quotes a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying: April 9, 1953	"The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy."
540906	A refugee quoted in Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa, September 6, 1954.	"The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in," one refugee said.  "So we got out, but they did not get in."
550000	Edward Atiyah, London Secretary, The Arab League, in his book “The Arabs”p.183. London: Penguin Books 1955	"This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could only be a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country.”
550000	Nimr el Hawari, a Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, from his book: Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster)	Nimr el Hawari, the Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, in his book Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster, published in Nazareth in 1955), quoted the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said as saying "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."
630000	Joseph Schechtman, The Refugee in the World, (NY: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1963 p. 184.	“The beginning of the Arab exodus can be traced to the weeks immediately following the announcement of the UN partition resolution.  The first to leave were the wealthy Arabs who anticipated the upcoming war and fled to neighboring Arab countries to await its end. Less affluent Arabs from the mixed cities of Palestine moved to all-Arab towns to stay with relatives or friends.  This practice of avoiding trouble was by no means a novelty in Palestine: During the fierce 1936-39 riots, some 40,000 upper class Arabs also left the country.”
630000	Dr. Walid al-Qamhawi, former PLO executive committee member. Joseph Schechtman, “The Refugee in the World” (NY: A.S. Barnes and Co.1963. p. 186.	“it was collective fear, moral disintegration and chaos in every field that exiled the Arabs of Tiberias, Haifa and dozens of towns and villages”
630120	Newsweek, January 20, 1963	"Israelis argue that the Arab states encouraged the Palestinians to flee. And, in fact, Arabs still living in Israel recall being urged to evacuate Haifa by Arab military commanders who wanted to bomb the city."
631012	The Egyptian daily Akhbar El Yom, Oct 12, 1963.	"The 15th May, 1948 arrived... on that day the Mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab countries were about to enter and fight in their stead."
690110	H.C. Stebbens, British Port Officer, in London Evening Standard January 10, 1969.	"Long before the end of the British mandate, between January and April, 48, practically all my Arab Palestinian staff of some 200 men and women and all of the 1800 labor force had left Haifa in spite of every possible effort to assure them of their safety if they stayed.” "They all left for one or more of the following reasons: The Arab terrorism engendered by the November, 1947, U.N. partition resolution frightened them to death of their imaginative souls and they feared Jewish retaliation. Propagandists promised a blood bath as soon as the mandate ended in which the street of all the cities would run with blood. The promised invasion by the foreign Arab armies (which started on May 14, 1948, with the Arab Legion massacre of some 200 Jewish settlers at Kfar Etzion) was preceded by extensive broadcasts from Cairo, Damascus, Amman, and Beirut to the effect that any Arabs who stayed would be hanged as collaborators with the Jews. "The Palestinian Arabs were the victims then, as in 1967, of their own propaganda, and having on the average no stomach for violence they ran. I have met many of my Palestinian Arab friends since in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and in the Persian Gulf states, and they have all without exception gladly told me that they had wished they had listened to me and stayed - as did some 200,000 who became and still are the most economically advanced Arabs in the Middle East. The massacre of Kfar Etzion, the massacre of the hospital convoy killed 48 Jewish doctors and nurses, the continued shelling and blasting of Jewish settlement for more than 20 years, has not caused one single Israeli to move away. They sit tight and if necessary in their shelters while across the river, where the shooting comes from, the towns and villages are deserted, last year's crops still rot on the trees and the refugees move still further away from any trouble. How long will the Palestinian Arabs continue the myth that they were kicked out, every time they ran away from trouble and got themselves into more trouble?"
690000	Sir Geoffrey Furlonge, "Palestine Is My Country: The Story of Musa Alami (Praeger Press, 1969)]	“Prior to the 1948 war against Israel, the Iraqi Prime Minister said all the Arabs would need would be ‘a few brooms’ to drive the Jews into the sea. All they were waiting for was the British and said, ‘once we get the green light from the British we can easily throw out the Jews."
700000	Nuri Said, Iraqi Prime Minister, cited by Myron Kaufman, “The Coming Destruction of Israel” The American Library Inc., 1970 pp. 26-27.	"We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."
720000	Yehoshofat Harkabi, “Arab Attitudes To Israel” Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972, p. 369.	“All of those who left fully anticipated being able to return to their homes after an early Arab victory, as Palestinian nationalist Aref el-Aref explained in his history of the war: ‘The Arabs thought they would win in less than the twinkling of an eye and that it would take no more than a day or two from the time the Arab armies crossed the border until all the colonies were conquered and the enemy would throw down his arms and cast himself on their mercy.’
730000	Khaled al-`Azm, Syrian Prime Minister, from his memoirs. Beirut 1973.	Khaled al-`Azm, who served as Prime Minister of Syria in 1948 and 1949, wrote that among the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948 was "the call by the Arab Governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and to leave for the bordering Arab countries, after having sown terror among them...Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave...We have brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees, by calling upon them and pleading with them to leave their land, their homes, their work and business..." (Part 1, pp. 386-387).
760000	Abu Mazen, in his article "Madha `Alamna wa-Madha Yajib An Na`mal" [What We Have Learned and What We Should Do] "Falastineth-Thawra" [Revolutionary Palestine], official journal of the PLO, Beirut, March 1976,	"The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable."
780000	Trans Jordan’s King Abdullah, “My Memoirs Completed” London: Longman Group, Ltd., 1978. p. xvi.	"The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue.”
860000	Historian Benny Morris, "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948," Middle Eastern Studies January 1986 p. 16.]	“The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following the March 8, 1948, instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes: "Any opposition to this order...is an obstacle to the holy war...and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts."
860100	Historian Benny Morris, January 1986, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited” MA: p.16. Cambridge University Press.	“In early May units of the Arab Legion reportedly ordered the evacuation of all women and children from the town of Beisan.  The Arab Liberation Army was also reported to have ordered the evacuation of another village south of Haifa.” “The departure of the women and children tended to sap the morale of the menfolk who were left behind to guard the homes and fields, contributing ultimately to the final evacuation of villages. Such two-tier evacuation - women and children first, the men following weeks later - occurred in Qumiya in the Jezreel Valley, among the Awarna Bedouin in Haifa Bay and in various other places."
010319	Fuad Abu Higla, columnist, writing in PA daily Al Hayat Al Jadida, March 19, 2001. He quotes a prisoner from the 1948 generation. per Palestinian Media Watch	“To the [Arab and Muslim] Kings and Presidents, “Poverty is killing us, the symptoms are exhausting us and the souls are leaving our body, yet you are still searching for the way to provide aid, like one who is looking for a needle in a haystack or like the armies of your predecessors in the year of 1948, who forced us to leave [Israel], on the pretext of clearing the battlefields of civilians... So what will your summit do now?"
020000	Shlomo Slonim "Revising or Devising Israel's History" by in Jewish Action, Summer 5760/2000, Vol. 60 #4)	Following a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported the following Foreign Office Document: #371/75342/XC/A/4991 'But while they express no bitterness against the Jews...they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes."
020000	Dr. Yuval Arnon-Ohana, expert on Palestinian issues. HaUmma Quarterly #141 and 142. Autumn and winter 2000.	“The British Mandate ordered Arabs and Jews to evacuate towns, where they were a minority. Arabs left (e.g. Tiberias), with encouragement of Arab countries, while Jews remained (e.g. Safed and its Arabs of Algerian origin). Arab evacuation - and the fall of Abd al-Kader al-Husseini in the Castel battle - was highlighted by Arab media, triggering a Domino Effect of further evacuations.”
020700	Efraim Karsh quotes Sir John Troutbeck in his July 2000 Commentary Magazine article: “Were the Palestinians Expelled?”	During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, reported that he was surprised to discover that while the refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. ”We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home . . .."
060516	Quoted from Al-Ayyam May 16, 2006 per Palestinian Media Watch.	From Asmaa Jabir Balasimah Um Hasan, who fled Israel in 1948. "We heard sounds of explosions and of gunfire at the beginning of the summer in the year of the Nakbah [1948]. They told us: The Jews attacked our region and it is better to evacuate the village and return, after the battle is over. And indeed there were among us [who fled Israel] those who left a fire burning under the pot, those who left their flock [of sheep] and those who left their money and gold behind, based on the assumption that we would return after a few hours."
061213	Journalist Mahmud Al-Habbash, in the official PA paper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, in his column "The Pulse of Life"	"The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the "Catastrophe" [the establishment of Israel and the creation of refugee problem] in 1948, that the duration of the exile will not be long, and that it will not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees will return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those "Arkuvian" promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events."
061217	By Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, Palestinian Media Watch. Bulletin - Dec. 17, 2006	“An Arab viewer called Palestinian Authority TV April 30, 1999 and quoted his father and grandfather, complaining that in 1948 the Arab District Officer ordered all Arabs to leave Palestine or be labeled traitors. (He said:} "Mr. Ibrahim [Sarsur]. I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me that during the "Catastrophe" [establishment of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion from the land], our district officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel is a traitor, he is a traitor." In response, Arab MK Ibrahim Sarsur, Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, cursed the leaders who ordered Arabs to leave, thus, acknowledging Israel's assertion. Said Mr. Sarsur: "The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for this, in this life and the Afterlife throughout history until Resurrection Day."