They call it the Nakba, the disaster, pretending they were expelled. We call it a lot of people turning tail. Whatever you call it, it happened after the nascent State of Israel was attacked by multiple Arab nations, just for declaring independence from British rule.
The vast majority of Arab residents left Israel of their own volition. No one forced them out of their homes. They could have stayed. But they didn’t.
Why did the Arabs flee? For one things, the leaders of the invading Arab armies told them to leave. In effect, the Arabs who fled at the behest of Arab heads of state, were told that they should get out of the way while they made short shrift of the Jews and pushed them into the sea. Then, they intimated, the Arab residents who fled could return to their homes, free of Jews forever, while enjoying the spoils left behind by a presumably exterminated people.
History, however, proved these leaders, and the runners who listened to them, wrong. Little Israel/David defeated Goliath, in the form of the multitude of soldiers who poured into the new Jewish State from five separate Arab countries to murder Jews and take their land. It may have been a Nakba/Disaster, but it was a disaster of their own making (the idjits). Not only because they lost, but because they became political pawns in perpetuity, kept in refugee camps by their own people—but the losers—blaming it on Israel.
On the bright side, the Arabist world of antisemites, took their side and called them “refugees,” changing the definition of that word forever, but only for those who ran away from Israel in 1948. That meant they could get lots of money and stuff from UNRWA, and be lamented by the media and other entities and people biased against Jews and their indigenous land rights. They also inflated the number of “refugees” so the situation looked far worse than it was, and so more people could claim hereditary rights to land that was never theirs in the first place.
It’s all one big sack of lies. Expulsion? Nonsense. The kind of nonsense that froufrou psychopathic self-hating Israelis just love to trumpet. From the Im Tirtzu booklet “Nakba Nonsense” (Erez Tadmor, Erel Segal):
Teddy Katz, a graduate student from Haifa University, wrote an MA thesis entitled ”The Tantura Massacre.” Katz determined that the soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade had perpetrated a massacre on approximately 200 unarmed men who had resided in the village of Tantura. Veterans of the brigade sued Katz for having published a libel, and in a compromise agreement it was determined that Katz would retract his accusation and would publish an apology in the press. Katz signed the agreement and the press release, but soon went back on his word and submitted a petition to the Supreme Court that was eventually rejected. It was discovered that Katz had distorted and completely modified witness accounts he had collected from the villagers. The archives which had documented the battle, the comparison of the alleged numbers of casualties with the number of residents of the village and a book which had been written by one of the villagers all proved that Katz’s thesis had been false. Apparently, until Katz had appeared, not even the residents of the village had claimed that a massacre had taken place there. Haifa University had no other choice but to disqualify the thesis.
Do not delude yourself in thinking that this was just one false claim in a sea of truth. The Nakba is rather, a lie cut from whole synthetic cloth. There was no ethnic cleansing, they could have stayed and lived in peace.
But the lies have flowed for decade, from one mouth to the next to the entire world, all of them telling lies about Israel. More from “Nakba Nonsense”:
One of the most prominent stories concerns the case of Haifa. In 1948 the second-largest Arab community in the country resided in Haifa; the largest Arab community resided in Jaffa. Haifa was the home of the Arab elite and leadership classes of the northern part of the country and before the war erupted counted 62,500 Arab inhabitants. At the end of the war no more than a few thousand remained. No less than a tenth of the Arab refugees who had left the country in the years 1947-1949 originated from Haifa.
One of [Efraim] Karsh’s most interesting findings is that although the fighting in Haifa reached its peak on April 21-22, 1948, the mass desertion of Arabs from the city had already begun in October 1947, a month prior to the UN Resolution of November 29th that had prompted the start of the war. A British intelligence brief dated October 23, 1947 reveals that the city’s most prominent families realized that the confrontation was imminent and began to evacuate their families to the Arab countries.
On November 21, a week before the UN vote, there were already reports about a wave of evacuations, and two weeks after the war began there were reports of a mass evacuation of 15,000-20,000 of the city’s Arabs. The evacuation created mass hysteria among the remaining inhabitants. Business owners sold their property and moved their enterprises to Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. At the same time, the city was filled by a stream of volunteer combatants from Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
The Arab leadership of Haifa was slack and passive and it quickly lost control of both the local armed gangs and the fighters who had come from outside the country. The desertion of a third of the city’s Arabs before the fighting had even begun led the Haifa Arab National Committee to ask Arab governments to arrange appropriate shelter for refugees from the city. In March, the city’s Arab Committee had already called for an orderly evacuation of the women and children. An Egyptian ship was leased to assist in the evacuation. When the Haganah arrived in the city on April 21, 1948 only about half of the city’s inhabitants remained.
On April 22, as Haganah forces approached the city’s marketplace, thousands fled in a mass panic. At this stage we get a glimpse of the astonishing picture of what actually transpired throughout the entire war. We see the truth of the big Nakba lie. The leadership of those Arabs who had remained in the city urgently appealed to Haifa’s British military commander, Major General Stockwell, and requested him to arrange an immediate truce with the Jewish forces. The Haganah submitted its terms for the truce and the Arab Committee requested 24 hours before responding. When they returned to the negotiations, the Arab Committee announced that they were not in control of the military elements and guerrilla forces in the city and that, even if they did have control over them, they would not be in a position to sign the truce. They therefore requested the British Commander to provide assistance for an orderly evacuation of the city’s population.
Their statement astounded their interlocutors. The mayor of the city, Shabtai Levy, who had for years maintained personal friendships with some of the Arab notables, begged them to reconsider saying that they were ”committing a cruel crime against their own people”. Yaacov Salomon, the Haganah liaison in the negotiations gave his word on behalf of the regional commander that the Arabs who remained in the city would be allowed to live in peace and would enjoy equal rights, saying that the leadership of the Jewish community was interested in continuing to maintain harmonious relations in the city. The British Major-General Stockwell told the Arabs in an agitated tone: ”You have made a foolish decision. Think it over, as you’ll regret it afterward. You must accept the conditions of the Jews. They are fair enough. … After all, it was you who began the fighting, and the Jews have won.”
The following day, the Arabs again met with Stockwell to discuss the practicalities of the upcoming evacuation. They requested eighty trucks a day and assistance for food and other provisions; only a few of the city’s thousands of Arab inhabitants were interested in staying behind. Even after the Arabs’ announcement, the Haganah forces informed Arab residents in a variety of ways, including radio and leaflet distribution, that they had no intention of harming them. During Passover, the Haganah even instructed bakeries to bake bread for the Arabs who remained in the city. The British Police Commander noted in a letter that “Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives.”
Similar reports appear in the documents of the American and British consulates, as well as in the archives of the Haganah. The British continued to beseech the Arab leadership to reconsider its decision, but the response was always given: “We will not sign … All is already lost, and it does not matter if everyone is killed so long as we do not sign the document.”
The Arabs have since argued that the terms they were offered were humiliating, but the real reason can be found in the documents of the time. Karsh has revealed that many Arabs were warned that if they returned to their homes they would be denounced as traitors who deserved to die. The Arab Emergency Committee, which consisted of prominent Arab leaders, warned a large group of Arabs from Wadi Nisnas who were about to return to their homes that the Jews would not spare anyone and that even women and children would be murdered. To this was added a promise to the remaining Arab residents that the evacuation to a safe haven would be orderly.
As Karsh writes, the significance of all of this cannot be overstated. The fact of the matter is that the massive evacuation of the Arabs of Haifa was carried out and managed by the official local representatives of the Higher Arab Committee. ”The only question is whether those representatives did what they did on their own, or under specific instructions from above,” notes Karsh.
Throughout the negotiations between the Arab Committee and the Haganah, the former sought to receive authorization from the Higher Arab Committee and the Arab League to sign the compromise agreement. Again and again, the Committee received negative answers and was instructed to evacuate immediately. When they protested the decision, they were told that Arab forces were expected to invade within days and that consequently a vast number of casualties were foreseen. Further, they were told that they would be held responsible for any deaths among the Arabs who remain in the city.
In addition, members of Haifa’s Arab Committee testified that they had been warned by the Higher Arab Committee that if they signed the agreement they would be subject to the death penalty at the hands of their own people, with the reference being mainly to the Mufti Al Husseini and his men. On April 25, 1948, the American consulate reported that local leaders taking orders from the Mufti were urging the residents to evacuate. Sir Alan Cunningham, the British High Commissioner of Palestine, said: ”British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it.”
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| A Yemenite family walking through the desert to a reception camp set up by the American Joint Distribution Committee near Aden (Copyright: Israel National Photo Archive) |
Of the wild inflation of the number of Arabs who left, Tadmor and Segal say:
In contrast to the 560,000 Arab refugees from the War of Independence, most of who left without having seen a single Israeli soldier, between 800,000 and 900,000 Jews fled Arab countries. To restate those numbers, for every displaced Arab, one and half Jews were forcibly evicted from their homes. While the Arabs in Israel participated in the military conflict in which they sought to eliminate the Jewish presence in Israel, the Arabs in Arab countries repeatedly massacred Jews without any provocation or military excuse, but simply because they were Jewish. Thanks only to the establishment of the State of Israel, these Jews had somewhere to flee . . .
. . . The Palestinian refugees paid the price for their leaders’ declarations of war and destruction, yet despite the passage of 60 years, they are still stewing in their own juices and wallowing in self-pity. Why? Political motives. So long as the goal of their rehabilitation is not met, the purpose of preserving their refugee status is the elimination of the Jewish State by the right of return. The Jewish property that was expropriated or left behind in Arab countries is worth considerably more than the Arab property left behind in Israel. Economist Sidney Zabludoff, estimates that the value of the Arab property is 3.9 billion dollars, compared with the value of the Jewish property which calculated to be 6 billion dollars (according to 2007 values).
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| Operation “Magic Carpet”- Jews from Yemen in an airplane on their way to Israel (Copyright: Beit Hatfutsot) |
Select quotes from “Palestinian Refugees, Invited to leave in 1948” from Eretz Yisroel add additional proof that the “Nakba” was a disaster of Arab making:
The people are in great need of a “myth” to fill their consciousness and imagination….
— Musa Alami, 1948
Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner…. they have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal.
— King Hussein of Jordan, 1960
Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees… while it is we who made them leave…. We brought disaster upon … Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave…. We have rendered them dispossessed…. We have accustomed them to begging…. We have participated in lowering their moral and social level…. Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon … men, women and children-all this in the service of political purposes.
— Khaled Al-Azm, Syria’s Prime Minister after the 1948 war
The nations of Western Europe condemned Israel’s position despite their guarantee of her security…. They understood that … their dependence upon sources of energy precluded their allowing themselves to incur Arab wrath.
— Al-Haytham Al-Ayubi, Arab Palestinian military strategist, 1974
For years we have lived together in our city, Haifa…. Do not fear: Do not destroy your homes with your own hands … do not bring upon yourself tragedy by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens…. But in this city, yours and ours, Haifa, the gates are open for work, for life, and for peace for you and your families.”
–Jewish Haifa Workers’ Council appeal to the Arab residents of Haifa [See Official British Police Report ]
The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die.
— 1958, Former Director of UNRWA Ralph Galloway, 1958, while in Jordan.
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.
— Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948
The “Nakba,” in short, is a propaganda tool. An effective one, at that. Not long ago, a distant cousin of my husband’s contacted me on Twitter. When he googled the family, my name came up, because I am a writer. So he DM’d me and for a while, we had a nice time getting to know each other.
When I mentioned the new acquaintance to my husband, he looked him up and saw that his Jewish relative had married a non-Jew and the man I was direct messaging with, was their son. He was a doctor, so at least that particular Jewish DNA got passed along. But when we got on the topic of Israel, our conversation took a sudden awful turn.
We got into a debate, something I do not like to do. But I went along with it, because hey! He’s family. An unknown genealogy-style relative, but family nonetheless. I gave him facts, and supported them with excellent, factual sources. But as it goes with any debate where one side is playing dirty, that side impugns the source, since they have no facts to support their own side. They have no facts because their own side is, in matter of fact, insupportable.
The weapon said relative wielded to impugn my sources, was none other than the “Nakba.” “The link you sent me literally doesn’t even mention the word “Nakba” in an article supposedly fact-checking whether or not Israeli land is “stolen,” but you tell me it’s unbiased,” he said.
Our correspondence continued on in that vein for a short time, and then he blocked me.
Because why listen to the truth when you can damn the Jews?
Even when you yourself are Zera Yehudi.*
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| Yemenite Jews awaiting airlift to Israel, Aden, 1949 (Copyright: Israel National Photo Archive) |
*of Jewish seed
UPDATE: A reader reached out to Elder, stating that Teddy Katz had been right about Tantura, citing a Times of Israel piece about new research that led to a documentary suggesting the massacre in fact occurred. I haven’t seen the documentary, but the TOI piece cites notorious anti-Israel Israeli academic Ilan Pappe as backing the massacre assertions (as he did when Katz first came out with his thesis). That already casts doubts on these “new” claims.
I googled *Teddy Katz Tantura* and up came a gazillion articles from every known anti-Israel website, for example Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and Haaretz, boasting of new “proof” that there was a massacre in Tantura. A lot of Arab media websites had also written up the allegations in the documentary. I remain unpersuaded.
{Reposted from the EoZ website}
