This report is more than a year and a half old. Here's the
source.
One more time; there have been many arguments about the land and the situation as it currently exists on this thread.
You are not engaging in debate when you ignore arguments and facts and continue to post non sequiturs.
One-sided propaganda is not probative. Want to actually debate? Start here:
The claim that the area that is now Israel proper was obtained by force alone is bogus.
… in 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left (many in fear of retaliation by their own brethren, the Arabs), without ever seeing an Israeli soldier. The ones who stayed were afforded the same peace, civility, and citizenship rights as everyone else.
This is verified by multiple reports and editorials
in Arab newspapers of the time. You like to quote sources? Here are some --
Arab sources:
From
here:
Arab Leaders Provoke Exodus
A plethora of evidence exists demonstrating that Palestinians were encouraged to leave their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. The U.S. ConsulÂGeneral in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott, wrote on April 22, 1948, for example, that “local muftiÂdominated Arab leadersâ€� were urging “all Arabs to leave the city, and large numbers did so.â€�
The Economist, a frequent critic of the Zionists, reported on 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.�
Time's report of the battle for Haifa (May 3, 1948) was similar: “The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city....By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.�
Benny Morris, the historian who documented instances where Palestinians were expelled, also found that Arab leaders encouraged their brethren to leave. Starting in December 1947, he said, “Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages in certain areas, lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments.� He concluded, “There can be no exaggerating the importance of these arly Arab-initiated evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual
exodus, of the remaining rural and urban populations� (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 590).
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� (Morris, Middle Eastern Studies, January 1986). Morris also documented that the Arab Higher Committee ordered the evacuation of “several dozenvillages, as well as the removal of dependents from dozens more� in April-July 1948. “The invading Arab armies also occasionally ordered whole villages to depart, so as not to be in their way� (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 592).
Morris also said that 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, Morris says, “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.�
Who gave such orders? Leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, who declared: “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.�
The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: “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 be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to reÂenter and retake possession of their country.â€�
In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948Â49, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave:
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. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.
“The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two,â€� Monsignor George Hakim, a Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada alÂJanub (August 16, 1948). “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.â€�
On April 3, 1949, the Near East Broadcasting Station (Cyprus) said: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem.�
“The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies,� according to the Jordanian newspaper Filastin (February 19, 1949).
One refugee quoted in the Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), said: “The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.�
“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,� said Habib Issa in the New York Lebanese paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951). “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.�
Even Jordan's King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs, blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:
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.
There are Arab and Muslim citizens of Israel today, and have been from the beginning of the nation and before. Few Arabs were forced to leave, and this is proven by the simple fact that so many of them chose to stay and are still there.
At one time, Jews and Arabs and Muslims lived together as neighbors. War is not inevitable here, and one side desiring the extinction of the other, which is the openly stated position of the terrorists, is not a route back to that time. The approach of Israel, a famously multicultural and pluralistic free and democratic society where Arab and Muslim citizens live in peace alongside their Jewish neighbors, is.
The oft-repeated allegation that the Israelis “stole Palestinian land� is also bogus:
Look
here, here, and
here; Note this:
1. As far back as 1893, the Jews not only were already far from being a small minority in the areas where they had settled, but were the largest single group there (if one divides the non-Jewish population into Muslim and Christian), and
2. Substantial immigration of Arabs to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century; from 1893 to 1947 while the Palestinian Arab population slightly more than doubled in areas where no Jews were settled, it quintupled in the main areas of Jewish settlement.
Look
here, too. Note the chart on this page; at the time of the armistice in 1949, 8.54% of Israel was owned by either the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, the Jewish National Fund, or Jewish individuals. Less than half that, 3.96%, was owned by Arab individuals. The rest was state land, which was transferred from the Arab government to the new Israeli government by UN mandate.
The idea that Israel was “stolen� from the Arabs is, simply put, a myth; and the proof of that, as I keep saying without response or acknowledgment, is that very many Arabs did not leave during the War of Independence; they remained in Israel, were left in peace, and they and their descendants live in Israel today. Arabs in Israel own land, do business, vote, serve in the Knesset, worship freely, and live as full, peaceful and participatory citizens of their nation. Other than Tunisia and Morocco, are there Jews in Arab countries who can say that? Will there be Jews who may do that in the Judenrein Palestinian state?
From yet another post you skipped:
The idea that the Israelis brutally invaded Palestine, murdered thousands of Arabs, and drove them off their ancestral lands is simply untrue. There were atrocities, but those occurred on both sides; and the FACT is that
the Arab refugees who left Israel were welcome to return in 1948. That’s
a matter of record, and the reasons it didn’t happen are not the fault of the Israelis.
From Resolution 194 of the United Nations General Assembly, passed on December 11, 1948, before the end of the War of Independence: Notice the portion marked in boldface.
Article 11 reads:
Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
The Arab nations initially
opposed this resolution, and few Arabs took the offer, specifically
because of the refusal of the nations which attacked Israel to accept peace. Any Arabs who wanted to come home
at the very beginning could have done so. Claiming that the “right of return� should extend two generations into the future, when a few hundred thousand refugees -- carefully and deliberately made to remain refugees for 62 years, unlike any “refugees� in human history anywhere in the world -- have multiplied into millions,
and still have no intention of “living in peace with their neighbours,� is beyond ridiculous, no matter how heavily that idea is promoted in the Arab world.
There are a great many other facts and arguments that you have skipped over on this thread. If you want to debate, as opposed to just PRETEND to be debating while you post propaganda, you don’t get to ignore cogent, on-point arguments and misrepresent what others are saying about yours.
And, of course, we still have this:
Again, no acknowledgment of the decades-long campaign of Palestinian attacks against unarmed civilians chosen as primary targets for mass murder; no acknowledgment of the responsibility of the Palestinian terrorists for the deaths of Palestinian civilians due to their own inarguably criminal tactics; no acknowledgment of the openly and explicitly stated, and never renounced, Palestinian goal of the total eradication of Israel and the extermination or expulsion of every Jew in the Mideast; no acknowledgment of the Palestinian goal of “ethnic cleansing� in order to establish a Judenrein Arab nation in the West Bank, and eventually from the Jordan to the sea; no acknowledgment of endlessly repeated Israeli offers of “land for peace�; no acknowledgment of the blatant anti-Israel bias of the UN; and, finally, no acknowledgment of the FACT that looking to mutually exclusive historical narratives of the past offers no solutions, only more endless conflict. In short, no acknowledgment of anything but the unquestioning embrace of pure Palestinian propaganda, including fake and fabricated quotes clearly intended to inflame and promote hatred and resentment.
When you're ready to actually acknowledge and talk about some of the FACTS above, and therefore to actually engage in meaningful debate as opposed to peddling one-sided propaganda, let me know.
Now: Will you debate these points, or will you keep ignoring them and posting more
non sequiturs?
