I understand all to well, and I your complete inability to see that there is more to it then the Israeli version of the facts makes discussion difficult.
I will say it one more time.
You, Coyote, for whichever reason, is unable to understand what actually happened in 1948 after Israel declared Independence.
No. Sixtiesfan. I do understand. I just do not agree with your version of events - which at the very least is incomplete.
You do not seem to know or understand all the pieces which were going on at the same time, all the Arab leaders, the Arab League and the decisions they made for the whole Arab population i
n Israel, Gaza , Judea and Samaria.
Until you grasp an understanding of the facts of history, and not narratives from one side or another, I do not see that you or any other well meaning person as you are can evolve beyond what a group of people who have endlessly said and written that they wish to see Israel destroyed and all Jews killed are and always have been about since 1920.
What makes YOU any different than the people who endlessly say and write that they wish to see the Palestinians expelled to Jordan, that they aren't a real people, that they have no rights of place, and that they have no history or culture and that Nakba is a fraud.
I do not divert anything. I have been giving you HISTORY, which is the most important thing to any people.
Without history, without facts, anyone can come and take anyone's identity away.
EXACTLY. Thank you. So why are you so intent on stripping it from the Palestinians?
The Palestinians are a people who DID NOT consider themselves Palestinians before Arafat came up with the idea with the KGB in 1964. That is a fact which No One can change.
It doesn't matter what they called themselves - they certainly considered themselves a people of that PLACE. Every "people" STARTS somewhere. Before there were Jews here there were other peoples. How old does a history have to be for a people to be a people?
I have said it very clearly, the Arabs who were living on the land until 1948 were more than welcome to work on their own State as there had been a partition proposal since 1937 and the Jews accepted that.
I have no way of knowing what sources you read, or listen to.......and I cannot change your mind with historical facts you are unable to see.
I post my sources.
There are 1.2 Million Arab Muslims and Christians in Israel. Many are citizens. Many are applying to become citizens. They have jobs, health care, representation in the Knesset, etc, etc.
And does not even include all the Arabs who live in Areas A and B who come to work, study and for health care.
The same used to be true about the Arabs in Gaza until about 2000.
They still get weekly health from Israel and get to come into Israel for health issues, including the Leaders.
Contrast that with how many Jews work, study or get any health care in Gaza or Areas A and B.
This is why I say you are diverting - I have NO ARGUMENT with you on the above. I am not saying Israel is not a good place. I am not saying that the Palestinians have diversity problems. But none of that is relevent really to the actual discussion.
There was a Nakba? Yes, there was. One of the Arab leaders making. The Palestinians will say so themselves. There are videos of some villagers filmed by Iranian TV on how they were told to leave by their leaders. Or by the Jordanian soldiers.
Palestine-Israel Journal: <b>The Palestinian Exodus 1948</b>
Benny Morris: I do think it’s relevant, since the historian must analyze what happened on the ground. However, the first thing is to accurately define the two traditional views of what happened. Since 1948, the Jews have maintained that the Arabs fled, either what is called voluntarily, or because of orders or requests by their leaders inside or outside Palestine. This has been the basis of Israeli propaganda since 1948.
The Arab view was that the Jews expelled the Palestinians deliberately and systematically, and that this was the end-product or the crowning achievement of Zionist ideology which always maintained that the Palestinians had to be transferred outside of Palestine. In 1948 the Jews got the opportunity to implement the long-conceived plan. If this is so, then Zionism is a robber ideology and Israel is a robber state, according to the traditional Arab view.
The Jewish claim is that Israel had no intention of expelling everybody, but in fact, the Israelis took a deliberate political and military decision not to allow the refugees back.
Many Palestinians left not because they were actually expelled but because of the fear of war, the fear of battle reaching their homes, and so on. But once they had left their villages and the country, and then tried to come back and were barred - that is the point where one can talk of a policy of expulsion
He goes on to state:
In general, the Arabs fled as a result of direct Jewish attack or an attack in the neighborhood. It was the same in the countryside and towns. So one can probably safely say that, though there were other reasons, the major precip¬itant to the flight of the Arabs of Palestine throughout the war was Jewish attack or what was felt to be the threat of imminent attack by Jewish forces.
...(re Ben-Gurion)...At this point, he begins to think of exploiting the situation. If they are already moving by themselves without a Jewish policy of moving them, per¬haps with a little more deliberate nudging we can get even more to leave. So in terms of the leader of the Yishllv Oewish community), the vital change I think, if there is a change, occurs in February 1948. He understands that we have to exploit the situation to establish the Jewish state and to increase its ter¬ritory beyond what the United Nations had earmarked for Jewish statehood.
The change among other leaders was slower. Ben-Gurion acted as a lob¬byist and was also able to instruct and order the military establishment under his command about what he wanted. You can see the change occur¬ring among other Israeli leaders and officials from April onwards. Up to then, they were thinking in terms of the Arabs staying. Then they, too, adopt¬ed the idea of exploiting the military situation in order to evacuate the Arabs.
This article is in fact really interesting and in depth. And the history was clearly full of miscalculations on both sides, most certainly the Arabs.
This is a bit of a sidetrack (and I had not realized this either) but it explains I guess some of the actions back then:
One of the contradictions many Israelis ask me all the time to explain is if the Arabs are so attached to their land, why (unlike the Jews) did they seemingly leave so quickly?
One thing which the Jews didn’t grasp in 1948 and afterwards, is how deep the fear of the Jews was among the Arabs. The Jews thought of themselves - their self-image was, we are civilized and Europeans and so on. Why should anybody fear us?
But the fact is that the retaliatory policy of the Hagana in the late 1930’s and the IZL’s (Irgun) terrorism in the 1930s and 1940s had ingrained in the Arabs a deep fear of the Jews. More immediately, when the war began, they sensed their villages would be destroyed, their people massacred, their women raped.
And the Jews, in fact, gave them a whole series of examples on which to build this fear. Each atrocity, such as Oeir Yassin, generated -like a stone in pool-little waves which went to the neighboring villages and beyond. Arab propaganda also inflated this fear.
So things were
very chaotic, with many factions in play. It was nothing so simplistic as "the Arab leaders told them to flee and they did creating thus their own catostrophe" as you state..
The Nakba is a catastrophe brought by the leaders on the Arabs who were made to flee in order to kill all the Jews and destroy Israel.
That is a fact no one can change.
The catastrophe was 5 Arab Armies losing to a much small number of Jews who had to fight for their survival.
That is not a fact. That is your opinion.
And let me bring a historical fact you may forget.
This is ONLY three years after the discovery of what Germany had done to the Jews of Europe.
And it is about Seven years after the Palestinian Arab Leader Husseini
went to Iraq and incited the Arab population there to riot against the Jews there. Nearly 2000 dead, many thousands more injured.
THAT is the mentality going on with the Arab leaders, one of them Husseini himself.
INTENT is very much what determines how history is to look at an event, and NOT the narrative of one side or another.
The INTENT of the Arabs was to kill all Jews.
No. Not at all. "Intent" is often subjective. "Intent" depends on who is viewing. Intent is often the least clear part of history. History is written by the victor and it is that person that records it until later people start examining the "facts" a bit more closely.
We had our "cowboys and indians" version of history for decades. The Turks had their version of the Armenian genocide. Russia has rewritten it's own history endlessly.
Had they succeeded, are you still reading this, how much of a shrug would it have gotten as the massacre in Iraq did. Or what kept happening during WWII which was endlessly shrugged and ignored until the concentration camps were opened?
No one is disputing this least of all myself.
I want you to think, Coyote. As long as it takes you to do it. Research and all. I know you can.
History matters. Period.
Patterns matter. 1300 years of Muslim on Jews pattern does matter.
History matters a great deal. And no one has the right to take the Palestinians history from them any more then they have the right to take the Jew's history from them.
