Benny Morris gets his history a bit muddled, as do most Zionists.
Q: When did the Arab states declare war?
A: On May 15, 1948.
Wrong, camel herder. Arabs attacked the Jews on Nov. 30, 1947, one day after issuance of UN Res. 181.
Camel herder, you have not even read Plan Dalet. Plan Dalet was a DEFENSIVE plan to prevent Arab aggression against Jews, NOT an offensive plan. And, Palestine was Ottoman Turkish land, not Arab land. The Turks transferred sovereignty to the Jews via the Treaty of Sevres, the San Remo Resolution and Palestine Mandate.
Arabs were never landowners, just backward, indigent tenant farmers. Like today.
I know one-third of all Arabs are illiterate, according to the Arab League, but, surely, Habib, you can at least try to read.
Benny Morris is the acknowledged authority on the 1948 War and his book, "1948," is the definitive study of the war. You're done, Habib.
The Palestinian Arabs were not responsible in some bizarre way for what befell them in 1948. Their responsibility was very direct and simple.
In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947 (No. 181), they launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.
on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22nd, plead with them to stay, to no avail.
Most of Palestine's 700,000 "refugees" fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders).
The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became "refugees" - and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee) - was not a racist crime but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.
There was no Zionist "plan" or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of "ethnic cleansing".
Plan Dalet (Plan D), of March 10th, 1948 (it is open and available for all to read in the IDF Archive and in various publications), was the master plan of the Haganah - the Jewish military force that became the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) - to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state. That's what it explicitly states and that's what it was. And the invasion of the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq duly occurred, on May 15th.
1948 - Morris, Benny - Yale University Press
