Arab-Israeli Conflict

INTRODUCTION

The October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel were a long time coming. The suffering of the Palestinians, ignored by the world, which allowed the bombing of Gaza to go on since at least 2006. 

I created the CATEGORY PALESTINE as a result. I have read and will continue to read books and listen to enlightening videos to inform readers about issues in the decades-long conflict between the Palestinians and the Zionists.

OTTOMAN TURKISH EMPIRE

Palestine was politically fragmented during the late Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, “the first stirrings of an Arab national movement existed in Palestine, led by educated Christian Arabs.” The Muslim Arabs supported the Ottoman Empire and were politically independent. An anti-Jewish newspaper was published but did not express Palestinian nationalism. The Arabs viewed Jewish settlement as a foreign incursion. In 1891, Arab dignitaries petitioned the Ottoman Sultan “to stop the wave of Jewish immigrants coming to Palestine,” which he did. (Shapira. 53)

In 1901, Ottoman Turkey expressed willingness for individual Jews only to migrate to Palestine. (Shapira. 708)

Herman Melville visited Jaffa and wrote, “Here is the impeccable nudity of desolation. . . . No other land could dissipate so quickly the romantic expectations of the Jews. . . . In the vacuum of Jerusalem’s dead antiquity, the Jewish immigrants will be like flies who have elected to live with an empty skull.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 112) This, too, is the belief that the Arabs in Palestine did not contribute to civilization. 

“Islam in its arrogance built the Mosque of el-Askar on the site of the razed Second Temple, of which only the Western Wall remains today.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 114)

About “25,000 Jews reached Palestine between 1882 and 1903. . . . many of them lived by tilling the soil and by recourse to the financial support of the Rothschild family, which had for several years encouraged the work of Jews on the land and in the vineyards which the Rothschilds owned.” (Gilbert. 5)

The Balfour Declaration was a letter to British Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917. After the First World War excited Jews throughout the world migrated to Palestine. (Gilbert. 34)

David Ben-Gurion cautioned that the Jews would have to make it their land and “bring about their national redemption.” (Gilbert. 35)

In 1918 Ben-Gurion cited a study that claimed that “the country’s irrigable plains are capable of supporting a population of six million . . . It is on these vacant lands that the Jewish people demands the right to establish its homeland.” (Gilbert. 38)

“The status of Palestine with regard to the Jewish National Home depended entirely upon the fate of the Balfour Declaration. (Gilbert. 41)

THE BIBLE

Our knowledge of the Jews comes from the Bible. Canaanites then occupied the land that God promised the Jews. The Romans called this land Philistine, which had various racial and ethnic groups. (Margolis. 8) The Jews had occupied or ruled Palestine from 1200 BCE to 200 CE. After Jewish resistance to Roman rule, the Romans forced Jews to leave. This is commonly known as the Diaspora. (Morris. 1)

“The Jews have dreamt this kingly dream all through the long nights of their history. Next year in Jerusalem is our old phrase. It is now a question of showing that the dream can be converted into a living reality.” (Herzl. 96) “For two thousand years the revival of the Jewish state in Palestine had been the passion.” (Gilbert. 186)

Zionism strategically utilized the Bible to gain support from Christian Britain and America. However, it is crucial to recognize that Zionism was, in essence, a 'colonial national movement.' Despite its use of the Bible to argue for Palestine as the Jewish homeland, this was an attempt to counter the colonial argument. (Khalidi. 9)

Justification for their nationalism came from the Bible, which presented something of a paradox since until the nineteenth century the Bible was considered secondary to Jewish oral law. . . . The Protestants discovered the Bible and extolled its importance in educating the younger generation. Even the idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland as the first step to world redemption seems to have originated among a specific group of evangelical English Protestants that flourished in England in the 1840s.” (Shapira. 15)

“Never did I accept the idea of the Jews’ historical rights to the Promised Land as self-evident. When I became a university student and studied the phonology of human history that followed the invention of writing, the Jewish return - after more than eighteen centuries - seemed to me to constitute a delusional jump in time.” (Sand. 15)

There never was a united Jewish nation in ancient times. The land occupied by Judea and Israel was called Canaan. (Sand. 24)

“Few Israelis are aware that David, son of Jesse, and King Josiah ruled in a place known as Canaan or Judea, and that the group suicide at Masada did not take place in the Land of Israel.” (Sand. 26)

“I am equally convinced that Zionism did not succeed in creating a worldwide Jewish nation but rather only an Israeli nation.” (Sand. 16) Most Jews who “express solidarity with the self-declared Jewish state - prefer not to live in Israel and make no effort to immigrate to the country and live with other Israelis within the terms of the national culture. (Sand. 17)

The “historical right to the Land of Israel, the only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory.” (Sand. 29)

“The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries, between 1200BCE and the second century CE.” (Morris. 1)

“Before the Jews, the Canaanite tribes were prosperous along the Mediterranean seaboard, and there were a few interior settlements. But the Hebrew arrival brought importance to the Negev and hill area. From Joshua’s time on, the history of the Land of Israel was one of steady development. That development always stopped abruptly when conquest put an end today Jewish power.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 113) So, only the Jews can develop the area?

Flapan found that the justification of Israel was a myth. (Flapan. 8)

“Since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70, the Jews, who were dispersed all over the Roman Empire, had prayed for a return to Zion. Next year in Jerusalem was - and remains - the hope expressed at the end of every Passover meal commemorating the ancient exodus from Egypt.” (Gilbert. 3)

Ben-Gurion states his readiness to negotiate with Arab nations. “Israel has indeed remained true to the ideas of peace and love of mankind on which the Bible rests.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 70). He also uses the Bible as justification for the establishment by Europeans of the State of Israel in Palestine. However, as Miko Peled states in his many lectures (see YouTube), the Bible is not a historical document. So many people don’t realize or accept this. I had a well-known professor decades ago whose first question was, ‘How many of you have read the Bible?’ While opinions split, I sided with those who did not view him highly.

Ben-Gurion conducted Bible study classes “and promoted two concepts to characterize the State of Israel’s moral character and its destiny and duty to itself and the world: the first was chosen people, a term coming from the convenient between God and the people of Israel (Exodus 19:5-6).” (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 12)

ZIONISM

Despite the desire to escape the horrors of Europe historians now view Zionism as an extension of “nineteenth-century Christian millenarianism and European colonialism.” (Pappe. Ethnic Cleansing. 41)

Teachers were the “heroes” of Zionism in the settlements of Palestine. They “formulated a Hebrew vernacular and teaching language . . . wrote textbooks.” (Shapira. 58)

It was the teachers who changed “the Hanukkah festival . . . to a celebration of the heroism of the Maccabees.” (Shapira. 58)

Zionism relied on the Bible. One Zionist leader described it as a “sort of birth certificate that . . . nurtured the sense of homeland. . . . a Bible in almost every worker’s room.” (Shapira. 58-59)

Two sides developed in Zionism. One point of view, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky believed “that a clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism was inevitable and that Zionism could not be realized without an active British policy establishing a colonial regime in Palestine that would grant state lands to the Jews, enable mass immigration and large-scale settlements, and stop any Arab resistance by force. For its part, Brit Shalom advocated reaching an agreement with the Arab national movement at any price. Its watchword was binationalism, which neutralized the issue of majority versus minority by agreeing that in Palestine there were two peoples entitled to an equal share in the country, each of which would have an autonomous cultural life (an idea known as cultural Zionism as it related to the Jews).” The British would act as mediators between the Arabs and the Jews. Brit have been Shalom believed “not a majority but many” but the Arabs were not impressed. “Brit Shalom was now prepared to consider capping Jewish immigration, if only as a way to reach an agreement with the Arabs.” (Shapira. 82)

Russian Jews reacted to the Balfour Declaration by making Zionism a mass movement. A “pioneer” movement formed “in the Crimea to train youngsters before they immigrated to Palestine.” There were pogroms in Ukraine. (Shapira. 104)

Jewish life in Russia changed following World War I and the Russian Revolution. “Religious practice was forbidden and Zionists prosecuted.” (Shapira. 104)

Zionists inculcated in the children arriving in and born in Palestine a love and connection to the land. They instilled “a sense of togetherness . . . They acquired the feeling of being masters of the country from Jewish history and Zionist ideology. . . . If on their field trips, they encountered Arab villages, they perceived these as part of the scenery.” (Shapira. 150) 

The new Zionist home for the Jews will be founded voluntarily. Hmmm. Tell that to your descendants. (Herzl. 151)

The growth of Zionist organizations that would fund Jewish settlements in Palestine concerned the Arabs. (Gilbert. 59)

Zionism developed in the late nineteenth century. At that time, Muslim Arabs comprised the vast majority of the population. (Morris. 2)

Thirty thousand Zionists arrived in Palestine between 1882 and 1903. Their goal was to grow so that they could establish a Jewish majority and, therefore, a Jewish state. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area, resisted. (Morris. 2-3)

The idea that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land” was fallacious, as the Zionists quickly learned upon arriving in Palestine. Palestine had a majority Arab and majority Muslim population and was quite populous. The plan, unabashedly, was to take the land from them. (3) To do this, the Zionists would buy land. Nevertheless, most Jews were not Zionists. (Morris. 3)

“Like most European colonists in the third world, the settlers saw the locals as devious and untrustworthy and, at the same time, as simple, dirty, and lazy. Most did not bother to learn Arabic, and some mistreated their Arab workers . . . The natives, in turn, regarded the foreign influx as inexplicable and the settlers as strange, foolish, infidel, and vaguely minatory.” (Morris. 4)

Throughout history, “creative” Jews have been isolated. Therefore, they need their own “national community.” And Israel is it (Ben-Gurion. 21-22).

Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at the University of Tel Aviv, has no sympathy for Zionism. He believes it was invented to gain sympathy from Europe. In addition, Jews who migrated to America or Europe did not do so with the intent of creating a Jewish country. (Sand. 15-16)

The Alfred Dreyfus trial spurred Zionism. The French accused Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason, stating that he gave military secrets to Germany. Being Jewish, this was significant to Jews. (Sand. 17) Some Jews came to believe that they were not allowed to assimilate and, therefore, should settle in their own country. (Shapira. 17)

Anita Shapira explores the essence of Zionism in her book, Israel: A History. “In 1881, Dr. Yehuda Leib Pinsker published a pamphlet titled Auto-Emancipation. Writing in the wake of the wave of pogroms that engulfed Jews in the Tsarist Empire. Pinsker analyzed antisemitism in-depth and concluded by calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland,” where Jews would be the “masters.” (Shapira. 3)

Attacks on Jews in Eastern followed by “modern anti-Semitism” in "Western Europe.” The new religious hatred added racism against the Jews and employed nineteenth-century Social Darwinism. (Shapira. 13)

Jews were accused of “all of capitalist societies’ ills, inciting to revolution and undermining the existing order. They pictured the Jews as parasites, incapable of establishing a society or culture of their own, who rode on the backs of other peoples and copied or prevented their cultures.” (Shapira. 13)

However, “instead of passively waiting the coming for the coming of the Messiah, the Jewish people would take their own action. This concept met with bitter opposition from conservative religious circles, who saw it as opposing divine will. The left, on the other hand, objected that this concept was based upon religion - something enlightened Jews should keep their distance from.” (Shapira. 15)

Russian Zionists “stopped talking about the Land of Israel as a mythical land and began referring to it as a real country that could be settled.” (Shapira. 16)

Zionists raised many questions about Zionism. One issue was the Ottoman Empire’s reluctance to allow the “immigration of Jews and their settlement in Palestine. Palestine was not empty; some half a million Arabs lived there. What would the Zionists do with them? Force them out, or allow them to remain? Would they be declared aliens in their homeland? And if the Zionists did not discriminate between them and the new immigrants, who would guarantee that in time the Jews would not become a minority in their own country and find themselves once again in the situate they had sought to escape.” (Shapira. 4)  

Early Zionists bought land. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing.42)

The trial of French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, for treason caused journalist Theodore Herzl, to consider the “Jewish question.” On its own, this situation may not have been significant. But taken with the history of European anti-semitism, especially recently, Herzl expressed concern. For Herzl, this was a “political” issue, not an economic or religious one. “The Jews, he reasoned, were a nation and one united nation. From this premise he drew the conclusion the Jews must create a state of their own - in the Argentine or in Palestine.” (Shapira. 703)

Negotiations for land would be made by an “organization called the Society of Jews. . . . Another organization, The Jewish Company, with its seat in London and under the protection of the British Government . . . was to regulate the migration . . . and build up the new community.” (Shapira. 703-704)

Nevertheless, several Jewish intellectuals responded positively. In addition, anti-Semitism in Austria rose in the late 19th century, and this alarmed Herzl. Austrian Jews believed it was a passing phase. (Shapira. 705)

Jews in Eastern Europe decided to emigrate to Palestine.

Zionism became powerful in European politics. (Shapira. 708) Zionist societies developed and promoted “a revival of literature and art and in the rebuilding of a manly spirit through the cultivation of physical exercise in gymnastic societies.” (Shapira. 708)

Zionists continued to bring attention to East European pogroms against the Jews, policies subjugating Jews, and in “Rumania, an anti-Semitic League, organized in 1895 and using any means to to attain its end, strove to render the situation of the Jews unbearable and thus to force them out of the country . . . bloody pogrom [in Russia].” (Shapira. 709)

In 1903 the British offered the Zionists part of Uganda. The Zionist Congress vociferously debated the offer as a vocal minority from Russia opposed settlement in Uganda. (Shapira. 711)

In 1904 Pope Pius X told Herzl he opposed “Jewish possession of Palestine.” (Shapira. 711)

To calm peoples’ nerves Wolffsohn pulled back on calling for a Jewish state and instead “spoke of the future of Palestinian settlement as a national home.” (Shapira. 712)

Those who insisted that Palestine be the Zionist target put forth “small scale . . . Zionist activity.” (Shapira. 713)

In 1909, Zionists founded Tel Aviv, which is next to Jaffa. (Shapira. 713)

Some Zionist settlers insisted that the new migrants speak Hebrew. (Shapira. 713)

As the Turks withdrew from Palestine ahead of British forces at the end of World War I Zionist leaders entered Palestine. (Shapira. 731)

European leaders wanted to rid their countries of Jews but did not want to provoke the Ottoman Empire. Wealthy Jews thought Zionism was a pipe dream. (Morris. 5)

There were conflicts within the Zionist movement. Martin Buber and Menachem Ussishkin opposed excluding the majority of Arabs from any rights in the new State of Israel. Ben-Gurion reacted by saying that they should act like Jews, as if all Jews agreed with the Zionist program. He also told them that their idea of reaching an “agreement with the Arabs, you will be in Hitler’s camp.” As the book title says, Ben-Gurion wanted a state at any cost. (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 309-310)

Today, Israelis believe in “Herzl’s message: Zionism and the settlements of Israel was a miracle.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 8) Herzl was “openly and proudly, a colonialist. . . . He often spoke of colonizing Palestine as the master plan of Zionism.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 9) Herzl had no sympathy for the Arabs. They “should be expelled unnoticed and discreetly and circumspectly.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 10) While expressing concern for the native inhabitants of Palestine he actually began the “double-talk” of future Zionist and Israeli leaders used to fool “the world for so many years.” Pappe cites Herzl’s diaries.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 10) In the 1950s Haifa’s mayor eradicated what he could of the “Arab past.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 13)

“In 1883 a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Rueben Lehrer, built a house in an Arab village, Wadi Henin, in the coastal plain. Several other Jews, among them a fellow immigrant from Russia, Avraham Yalofsky, soon joined him. Until the War of Independence in 1948, Jews and Arabs lived peacefully side by side in the village. . . . [They] planted citrus groves and engaged in bee-keeping. . . .[Nevertheless] Arabs - not from the village - ambushed Yalofsky and killed him.” (Gilbert. 7)

Most Zionists concentrated on “agriculture” so that “they “could redeem the land.” (Gilbert. 8)

Other European Jewish villages were attacked as well. (Gilbert. 9)

While the end of the nineteenth century saw “considerable Jewish activity in Palestine.” This was not universally known among European Jews. They looked at Palestinian Jews as medieval. (Gilbert. 9)

Interestingly, the chosen architect and founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl knew nothing of this. (Gilbert. 9) For Herzl the deciding issue for the Jews in Europe was the Dreyfus trial in France where a Jewish officer was falsely accused of treason. Many believed the trial an act of anti-semitism. (Gilbert. 10) He was revolted by the German phrase Out with the Jews. (Herzl. 101)

Many considered Herzl insane for his vehement advocacy of a return to Palestine by the Jews. (Gilbert. 10)

Herzl never traveled to Palestine. He wanted massive migration, mainly from Russia, to Palestine. (Gilbert. 10)

In 1898 a Zionist reported that “the most fertile parts of our land are occupied by Arabs. . . . He warned of innumerable clashes between Jews and incited Arabs that had taken place there. In his closing speech, Herzl made no reference to these uncomfortable, ominous facts.” (Gilbert. 17)

The murder of Jews by Arabs in 1909, perhaps overwork being given “exclusively” to Jews, caused the settlers to organize defense. (Gilbert. 27)

In 1914 90,000 Jews lived in Palestine. 75,000 were immigrants. Their population grew. (Gilbert. 30)

BALFOUR DECLARATION

The Balfour Declaration promised “in 1927 to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine.” But this conflicted with Palestinian national rights. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 42)

The consequences would be violence between the two groups claiming hundreds of Palestinian and Jewish lives. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 43) The post-World War I San Remo Conference allowed the Balfour Declaration to rule Palestine. (Shapira. 734) Most British officers opposed Zionism. Arabs rioted against the Jews and many Jews were imprisoned. 

Shapira describes the Balfour Declaration as from a time when “a handful of statesmen in smoke-filled rooms decided the fates of peoples and states and how to divide up declining empires, with no participation by the media or the masses.” (Shapira. 73) 

The Western powers ignored “the opposition of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine.” Balfour stated, “The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism.” (Shapira. 73)

“The British conquest of Palestine in 1918 did not take place under the banner of the Balfour Declaration. The Declaration was not officially published in Palestine, although its contents were known to Jews and Arabs.” From the Jewish point of view, this was what Herzl wanted; from the Arab point of view, the Balfour Declaration undermined “their centuries-old superiority in Palestine.” They understood that they would have a new ruler. (Shapira. 74)

In the 1920s, Russian Jews were inspired by the Balfour Declaration. (Shapira. 104)

Chaim Weizmann inspired the Balfour Declaration, arguing that “the Palestinians were not entitled to national independence.” However, our view of him is as a liberal and humanist. (Flapan. 11)

Ben-Gurion claims that “the Balfour Declaration [of 1917] acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.” (71). Not so fast, the right recognized as a “homeland for the Jewish people,” not an exclusive Jewish state. As Miko Peled has noted the Balfour Declaration was made by white, European men who had never been to Palestine and, no Arabs were involved in the decision. I’ll leave it to Miko Peled to debate this. I do not have the fortitude to do so. 

Sand’s analysis of the Balfour Declaration is to ask why Lord Balfour promised the Jews Scotland. The goal of many European Christians was to rid Europe of Jews. “In 1905 . . . anti-immigration legislation meant primarily to prevent Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe from entering Britain.” (Sand. 14-15)

Sand further states that this gives the right of Arabs to resettle Spain since they had been forced out of Spain during the Reconquista. That the Puritans would have the right to retake England. That Native Americans have the right to retake “Manhattan and to expel its white, black, Asian, and Latino inhabitants?” He gives other historical examples. (Sand. 15) 

Sand reproduces the letter that became the Balfour Declaration, which was approved by the British cabinet in 1917. (Sand. 168-169) As other historians have noted, the Balfour Declaration made no mention of the Arab population of Palestine, which overwhelmed the Jewish population 10 to 1. There were more Jews in Britain than in Palestine! In addition, an agreement with the Arabs and the British for Arab independence was threatened. (Sand. 169-170)

Lord Balfour referred to the Arabs “as the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” (Khalidi. 24)

Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann secured the support of the British during World War I. (Khalidi. 24)

Once the British occupied Palestine they would not allow the population to be informed of the Balfour Declaration. Soldiers traveling through Syria or Egypt found out and protested to the British Foreign Office. They were horrified that their home would become a home for European Jews. (Khalidi. 26)

Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi understood this danger more than most of the Palestinian population. Believed that the Jews would expel the Arabs. (Khalidi. 26)

BRITISH MANDATE PERIOD

In 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote that “the Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” He was the mastermind of ethnic cleansing. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 56)

Ben-Gurion wanted all of Palestine, so any agreement between the two states was only temporary. To the Zionists, the Balfour Declaration meant “the country as a whole.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 58)

After 1946 the Zionists developed Plan C. This called for attacking and killing any Palestinians even remotely connected to attacking the Jewish settlements. In addition, the political leadership of Palestine would be assassinated. Attacks included public places, poisoning water and food supplies. They relied on their “village files” for detailed information about every Palestinian, every building, and every village. One of the Palestinians who provided this information would be assassinated by other Palestinians for doing this. Later Plan Dalet, Plan D, was created. This called for the “systematic and total expulsion [of the Palestinians] from their homeland.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 63-64)

Also, Jews in 1947 owned only 5.8% of the land. Most of the immigrant Jews preferred living in the cities over living on farms. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 66)

Peace terms in Palestine have always ignored the Palestinians. The Zionists presented their dream of controlling all of Palestine except for the West Bank. The UN rejected this but gave the minority population the majority of the land, 56%. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 69)

The Palestinians boycotted these negotiations which Israel continues to use as “proof” they never wanted peace. However, Pappe cites famed Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi who wrote that like all other peoples the Palestinians “refused to divide their land with a settler community.”(Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 71)

The Jews received the “most fertile land . . . as well as almost all the Jewish urban and rural space in Palestine.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing.72)

Also, Walid Khalidi pointed out that the UN-sanctioned “ethnic cleansing” of a group that had always wanted to “de Arabise Palestine.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing.72)

The Zionists under Ben-Gurion would both “accept and ignore the UN Partition Resolution on November 1947.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 73) That resolution also required Jerusalem to be an “international city.” Ben-Gurion “was determined to make the entire city his Jewish capital.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 74)

Because the Palestinians rejected the UN resolution dividing their country Ben-Gurion stated that the creation of the Jewish state would “be determined by force.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 75)

The Palestinians wanted more negotiation with the UN and the Zionists and, did not want to partition Palestine. “The Partition Resolution was adopted on 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighborhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centers that had been vandalized in the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 80)

Further armed “skirmishes” were won by the Jews and they changed their “tactics from retaliation to cleansing operations.” In February 1948 residents of five villages were expelled. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 80) Since the 1930s “a handful of Zionists leaders recognized the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabization of Palestine, I.e. making Palestine free of Arabs.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 81)

Ben-Gurion told one of his top generals that the army “should start preparing for the occupation of the country as a whole.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 83)

After World War I the British ruled Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate. They encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine. (Khalidi. 8)

“14 to 17 percent of the Palestinian adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled” by the destruction of the “Great 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British rule.” In addition, the Jews flooded Palestine fleeing the Nazis in Germany. As a result, the Jewish population in Palestine rose from 18 percent in 1932 to 31 percent in 1939. “This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.” (Khalidi. 8)

“Historians have documented that Zionists sabotaged efforts to find safe havens for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in order to convince the world that Jews could only be safe in a Jewish state.” (Weir. 30)

“There was even a certain amount of collusion between Zionists and Nazi leaders.” (Weir. 31)

The administration of Palestine by the British favored the Zionists. The majority of Palestinians bristled at this as they were 80-90% of the Palestine population. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 43)

The British destroyed Palestinian leadership as they crushed the Arab revolt of 1936. This meant that they were not able to resist the “Jewish forces in 1947.” The Zionists were committed to “an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 44)

Under the British Mandate for Palestine, the Zionists were able to “carve out the infrastructure for a future state.” To do this they built a military organization and received funding from overseas Jews. British officer Orde Wingate [a guerrilla warfare specialist] taught the Jews that “statehood had to be associated with militarism and an army . . . because acts of armed aggression were an effective deterrent against the possible resistance of the local Palestinians. From there, the road to contemplating the enforced transfer of the entire indigenous population would prove to be very short indeed.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 45-46) In addition, many Haganah soldiers served with the British forces during World War II. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 47)

The thirty-year transitional Mandate period enabled the Jews to establish a society and economy in Palestine. With British bayonets, the Jewish community could develop in size and strength once it passed the point of no return. 

British Jewish politician Sir Herbert Louis Samuel became the first High Commissioner of Palestine under the League of Nations mandate. “His first official act was to grant a general amnesty . . . A second enactment declared Hebrew as an official language on a par with English and Arabic.” The League of Nations accepted this in 1923. (Shapira. 735)

In 1947 the population of Palestine was mixed with Arabs and Jews. The native Palestinians constituted a 2/3 “majority, down from 90% at the start of the Mandate. One-third were Jewish newcomers, i.e., Zionist settlers and refugees from war-torn Europe, most of whom had arrived in Palestine since the 1920s.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 65)

President Harry S. Truman supported the creation of the State of Israel based on the votes he could get in the 1948 election. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, and Presidential Advisor Clarke Clifford opposed making international decisions based on domestic concerns. Forrestal was outraged and feared that our country was in danger. (Weir. 45-46)

Zionists pressured delegates at the United Nations General Assembly to vote for the partition of Palestine to such an extent that delegates changed their minds. After an impassioned speech opposing partition as racist, theocratic, and archaic the delegate changed to support the Zionist cause. (Weir. 50)

He claims that Jewish nationalism predates Arab nationalism, including Palestinian nationalism, by four thousand years. So, Palestinian nationalism is “highly artificial, emanating from British inspiration.” The British used divide-and-conquer techniques to cause conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 116)

Criticizes the Arab accusations of atrocities by the Israeli armies. “Arab atrocities against Jews extend back to 1921.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 167)

In 1937, Ben-Gurion expressed his desire for Jordan. (Flapan. 52)

The ultra-Zionists of Irgun and Lehi deliberately sabotaged Arab-Jewish relationships in the 1920s and 1930s to make a stronger claim for an exclusively Jewish state. (Flapan. 67)

The British left Palestine “embroiled in civil war - or a war between national communities - that rapidly evolved in a war between countries.” The Jews survived the war to create the State of Israel. (Shapira. 74)

Jewish immigration to Palestine in the early 1930s concerned the Arabs who viewed their country’s domination by Europeans; they were losing their country, “which only a few years earlier had been essentially theirs.” (Shapira. 81)

“Old privileged families” in Palestine formed a modern political party that drew in young, educated Arabs. They targeted the British, not the Jews. They demonstrated for self-government. (Shapira. 81)

Famed Jewish philosopher Martin Buber disagreed with the political, military Zionist goals and “sense of moral superiority” Israelis held. He believed that “an internal revolution” was needed to “heal our people of their murderous sickness and causeless hatred. . . . how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees  in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought from afar; whose gardens, orchids and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed, we put houses of education, charity and prayer while we babble and rave about being the ‘people of the book’ and the ‘light of the nations’.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 4-5)

Early Zionist Arthur Rubin proposed in 1925 a “bi-national State in Palestine.” However, other Zionists rejected the idea. (Gilbert. 62)

In 1934 Ben-Gurion told an Arab leader that the Jews wanted a homeland on “Palestine on both sides of the Jordan, not as a minority but as a community of several millions.” (Gilbert. 74)

Ben-Gurion belittled Palestinian nationalism by stating that the Arabs had all the other Arab countries and the Jews wanted only Palestine. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion insisted that the “Arabs of Palestine would remain where they are.”  (Gilbert. 75)

British captain Orde Wingate trained Jewish forces in a “night ambush,” which indicates British support for the Zionists. (Gilbert. 93)

In 1947-1948 David Ben-Gurion told Haganah commanders “to prepare for a war on a scale never before envisioned. (Gilbert. 143)

In the late 1930s’ as hostilities between the Arabs and the Zionists grew many in Britain believed “biblical prophecies about the return of the Jews to their land as something, to be welcomed.” Haganah soldiers also believed that they were fulfilling God’s and Jewish will in fighting against the Arabs. (Gilbert. 93)

Describes the period from 1917 to 1939 as the first declaration of war. Before World War I “many prescient Palestinians had begun to regard the Zionist movement as a threat, the Balfour Declaration introduced a new and fearsome element.” (Khalidi. 24)

There were two newspapers that criticized the alliance between the British and the Zionists. “And the danger that it posed to the Arab majority in Palestine.” (Khalidi. 28)

A new rail line built in 1929 favored the Jewish settlers, and the Palestinians were ignored. Some wrote of the complacency of the Palestinians in the face of this threat. (Khalidi. 29)

Palestinians organized and had “a series of seven Palestine Arab congresses which demanded Palestinian independence, “rejection of the Balfour Declaration, support for majority rule, and ending unlimited Jewish immigration and land purchases.” The British dismissed them. (Khalidi. 31)

The village of Atlit demonstrated cooperation between Jews and Arabs. “However, in the 1940s the Hagana turned the Jewish part of the village into a training ground for its members, whose intimidating presence soon reduced the number of Palestinians.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 131)

WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

In 1948, Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the majority of Palestinians did not want to fight the Zionists.” (Flapan. 55)

One of the architects of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine “remained unmoved by the sight of tractors destroying whole villages.” To the Israeli public and the world at large they were "making the desert bloom.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 329)

“One study has estimated that seventy percent of the land belonging to the Palestinians in Israel has been either confiscated or made inaccessible to them.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 332)

Fear dominated the thinking and policies of the Israelis. The Arabs were always a threat, such as poisoning the water. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 332)

Not only did the Jews throw the Palestinians off their land they claimed they had been Hebrew in the past. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 333)

Ilan Pappe identifies this as “The Reinvention of Palestine”. Israel renames the places it seizes, “destroyed and recreated.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 334)

They would “de-Arabize the terrain.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 335)

In addition, the goal of Israel was to maintain its European roots. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 336)

While the Israelis boast of having made the desert bloom they, in the words of Miko Peled, took a blooming land and, in my words, made it boom. So-called barren land had “been covered with the houses and the  cultivated lands of Palestinian villages bustling with life.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 343)

Some of Israel’s attempts to connect areas with the Bible failed. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 345)

Israel continues to deny this and deny the Nakba. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 346)

Most survivors of the Holocaust did not settle in Israel but in the United States or they remained in Europe. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 372)

Pappe tells us of the intense “indoctrination” of academia by what he calls “Israeli ideology.” (Pappe, Out of Frame.)

“Powerful as the Zionist grip is on one’s thoughts and life, as an Israeli Jew, one hour have extracted yourself from its hold, you cannot understand how you could ever have been captivated by its lure, logic or vision.” (Pappe, Out of Frame.)

Young Israelis don’t know who Herzl was! (Pappe, Out of Frame. 3)

Another village named after Herzl “was built on the ruins of several Palestinian villages.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 3)

Pappe cites his own book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951, to prove that Britain was not the enemy of Zionism and Israel.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 17)

Later, Pappe came to understand that the Palestinian version 1948 Arab-Zionist conflict was correct. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 20)

Israel established a layer of “denial and distortion. The villages from which the Palestinian population was evicted in 1948 were renamed and resettled in a matter of months.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 22)

Pappe received death threats and was called a traitor following the publication of his thesis as a book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. He did not have tenure and believes that many critics did not read his book. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 23-24)

Benny Morris who was one of the first to question the Zionist narrative of the 1948 war “rejected . . . many Palestinian points, such as the depiction of Zionism as a colonialist movement or of the 1948 expulsion as an ethnic cleansing operation.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 38)

In the fall of 2000, there was another Intifada. “Within two years, critical voices in academia, in the electronic and printed media and in other sites of cultural and knowledge production were silenced.” Israelis had closed their minds and the “militarization of public space occurred.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 40)

Jewish identity now revolved around the military. It used the military requirement for young people to indoctrinate society. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 42)

Israeli media created “the mythology of Israeli heroism in the battlefield, even when the raw material was spun out of bloody reprisal operations against a civilian population in the 1950s. These heroes would become the core group from which many future leaders of Israel would emerge: Yitzhak Rabin, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 43)

All political views in Israel believed that Israel was Palestine. The fewer Palestinians, the better. “The argument was about tactics, not goals.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 61)

Pappe struggled “against Nakbah denial in my homeland.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 63)

Israel successfully removed the issue of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, the Nakbah, to such an extent that they refused to allow their diplomats to discuss it or its consequences and causes for the contemporary conflict. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 65) Things are different now. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 66)

Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the government “initiated the systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that referred to the Nakbah, even marginally.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 66)

“After 2000, the expulsion to many in the political centre to be an inevitable and justifiable consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine.  If there was any lament, it was that the expulsions were not complete.” Even Benny Morris thought more Palestinians would have been expelled. This aided the “Israeli plans for further ethnic cleansing.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 67)

Teddy Katz lived on a kibbutz near Haifa and enrolled in Ilan Pappe’s class about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Haifa. He studied his kibbutz action in the 1948 war. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 71) He found that the “Kibbutz was built on the ruins of an Arab village called Zeyta.” The government evicted these people after the war “Because the site was coveted by the kibbutz movement for its fertile soil and convenient location.” However, the Arab’s new location was also desired by the kibbutz because they didn’t like seeing “from their windows those who had been dispossessed in order to give them a home.” So, the Arabs moved again. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 71)

Katz found that Jewish military units murdered “possibly up to 225” people at Tantura who were unarmed and had surrendered. The Alexandroni Brigade committed this act, but they disagreed that they did commit this act. “The association of Alexandroni veterans decided to sue Katz for libel. . . . There were many Palestinian survivors, but their testimony did not count in Israel.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 73)

The University of Haifa erased Teddy Katz from its enrollment, and he was threatened and harassed. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 74)

Pappe learned that the “Alexandroni Brigade veterans were regularly meeting the managers of the university, I knew that normal academic procedures and ethics were not being followed in this case.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 75)

At this time Katz was in his mid-50s and consequently suffered a stroke. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 76)

As a result, Katz signed an apology. Later, he would retract his retraction. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 77)

Nevertheless, Pappe researched on his own and more than confirmed Katz’s conclusion. “The Alexandrondi veterans did not dare to sue me . . . they knew that I would not crack under the pressure of a trial.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 88)

As a result, Pappe “became a pariah in my own university community. Old colleagues and friends canceled invitations to take part in seminars, symposia, and conferences which had been sent to me before the affair broke out.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 90)

At this point in Israeli history, McCarthyist tactics were used “in Israeli academia and the media.” Continuing this censorship, "the director of the library at Haifa University formally removed Katz’s dissertation from the shelf of MA and PhD theses.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 82)

Ephraim Karsh is a historian whose work is considered by many to be unreliable. He vilifies the “New Historians” as being “pro-Palestinian, and hence suspect as professionally inept.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 84)

Israelis depicted the Palestinians as Nazis. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 91)

In May 2002 Ilan Pappe was brought before an academic court in which the accusers demanded his dismissal from the university because of my position on the Katz affair. The accusers viewed “themselves as the guardians of national history. . . . Most important, the history of 1948, especially of the ethnic cleansing, is directly connected to the peace process today and to the shape of any future solution.” (92)

For the 2002 to 2003 academic year, Pappe proposed a course at the University of Haifa about the Nakbah. Palestinians as a subject had been “introduced only in the 1980s - not out of empathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but as part of an intelligence effort to ‘know the enemy.’” Pappe’s course, considered heresy, had many students. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 93-94)

Pappe walks with Fatima who remembers the 1948 Nakbah. Her village is gone, replaced with a kibbutz “tourist bungalows,; the village graveyard is now a “car park.” (110) At the time of the Nakbah Fatima knew “that the British were leaving and that the Jews were occupying nearby villages at a frightening rate.” The Arab countries did not help despite “their rhetoric.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 113)

Fatima had hidden from the armed Jews who had Arab villagers pile bodies and who were then shot and piled on top of the bodies. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 115) Later, the Israelis buried the bodies with bulldozers, and in later years, the area would be covered with pine trees. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 121-122)

An Israeli man named Yaacov found old letters from his father-in-law who had been a Jewish officer in the 1948 war. “One of the entries detailed the frenzied events that ended with the slaughter of all the men and male teenagers in Fatima’s village.” Following a press release, more soldiers came out to confess to “atrocities committed by the Israelis in the 1948 war. Massacres were revealed, tales of rape and loot were exposed, and the initially confident and condescending official Israeli responses soon replaced with indignation, panic, and in some more thoughtful Israeli circles, remorse.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 117-118)

Pappe would later present documents to a large group of people who met at his home. The first document recounts an Israeli commander in 1948 telling already expelled Arabs to move again. One Arab called it “racism.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 135-136)

In another case, Pappe recounts that Israeli soldiers looted and stole anything of value the Arabs had. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 139)

Pappe finally broke with Zionism and the brutal policies of the Israeli state toward the Palestinians during the Lebanese War of 1982. Even some senior Israeli army officers abhorred the invasion of Lebanon. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 144)

However, many Israeli generals wanted a big war not an incursion into Lebanon. They wanted this to maintain Israel’s deterrence and to prove to themselves that they could fight a war. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 145)

Gazans used to work in the homes and clean the streets of the people of Tel Aviv. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 167)

Israeli hatred for Gaza knows no limits. 100 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis in 2008-2009 “merely for getting too close to the fences.” From 2000-2009 they killed 3,000 Gaza’s. After the 1967 war Israelis stole Gaza’s water. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 168)

Israeli academia portrayed the Palestinians as demons “if it was led by Hamas.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 171)

Zionism ceased to be about finding a safe place for Jews in Europe once they decided to colonize and dispossess Palestinians. (Pappe, Out of Frame. 180)

Since the 1930s Zionist policy in Palestine has “been made by generals.” The entire Israeli society is “geared to service in the army. . . . Israel indeed became an army with a state.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 184)

“Atom bombs are still considered in Israel a doomsday weapon to be used only in case of imminent defeat of the Jewish state.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 189)

Theodor Herzl set foot in Palestine only once, in 1898. (Khalidi. 4)

Others have cited this quote from Herzl, that, “We must appropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Khalidi. 4)

Herzl and other Zionists ignored the population of Palestine. (Khalidi. 5)

Herzl argued that the Jewish state in Palestine “would form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” (Khalidi. 10)

Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land; the Jews made Palestine bloom. (Khalidi. 11)

The Balfour Declaration “never mentioned the Palestinians.” (Khalidi. 11)

The now highly dismissed book, From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters meant to prove that the Palestinians did not exist. (Khalidi. 11) This propaganda is contained in the absurd Leon Uris novel Exodus, which was made into a star-studded movie. None of these works or those of similar points of view used Palestinian, British Mandate, or even Zionist immigrant sources. Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee proclaimed in 2015 “There’s really no such thing as the Palestinians.” (Khalidi. 11-12)

The right-wing Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923, “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel.” Interestingly, most Zionists “protested the innocent purity of their aims.” Not Jabotinsky. (Khalidi. 12)

Everyone knew that Zionism was colonialism. This was not acceptable post-World War II. However, Israel got away with it. (Khalidi. 13) It is hard for people to understand that Zionism is colonialism just as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are. (Khalidi. 14)

After the Nakba the Palestinians were devastated. 80% of the Palestinians were “forced from their homes and lost their lands and property.” The origins of this disaster can be traced to their defeat in the Revolt of 1939.” It did not help that there was internecine conflict among the Palestinians. (Khalidi. 58)

Palestinian experience in World War II was fragmented, unlike the Jews who served in cohesive units. (Khalidi. 59)

President Truman made Israel a part of “the emerging American hegemony in the Middle East. (Khalidi. 60)

The Palestinians did not have an established state, or effective relationships with other Arab countries, and “this proved to be a fatal weakness militarily, financially, and diplomatically.” (Khalidi. 62)

“By contrast, the Zionist movement applied a highly developed understanding of global politics.” (Khalidi. 70)

From November 1947 to May 15, 1948 the Zionist paramilitary defeated the Arab resistance which was “poorly armed and organized Palestinians and the Arab volunteers who had come to help them.” (Khalidi. 72)

“Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.” (Khalidi. 72)

Although Jaffa was supposed to be part of the Palestinian Arab state no one challenged Israel’s conquest. Israel argued that this was a spoil of war. (Khalidi. 72-73)

As the Jewish forces massacred Palestinians, Dayr Yasin, most notable, “people fled.” Before May 15, 1948, Israel’s date of independence, saw the “expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers.” (Khalidi. 74) None of these refugees would be allowed to return under Israeli law. More Palestinians have been forced out since 1948 so the Nakba is “an ongoing process.” (Khalidi. 75)

The Nakba is one of the most significant events in Palestinian history. For over a thousand years, there had been an Arab majority; after the Nakba, Palestine, or Israel, became a Jewish majority. (Khalidi. 75)

The experienced and British-led Arab Legion of Jordan “succeeded in keeping Israel from conquering the West Bank and Was Jerusalem.” (Khalidi. 77)

One of the Zionist lies is that Israel was outnumbered and outgunned in 1948. The opposite is true. The British would not allow the Arab Legion to attack areas assigned by the UN to the Jews. (Khalidi. 77)

The State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA opposed the Truman Administration’s support for Zionism. However, this would quickly change. (Khalidi. 79)

The 160,000 Arabs who remained in Israel were viewed “as a potential fifth column. Until 1966, most Palestinians lived under strict martial law, and much of their land was seized (along with that of those who had been forced from the country and were now refugees). (Khalidi. 82)

The Palestinians, formerly the majority in their own country, bow found themselves “a despised minority” ruled by outsiders. (Khalidi. 82)

King Abdullah of Jordan annexed the West Bank after the 1948 War and gave the Palestinians their Jordanian citizenship. This refutes the Israeli claim that the Arab countries refused to allow the refugees to enter their countries. (Khalidi. 84)

The Arabs were not happy with King “Abdullah’s fealty to the hated British colonial masters, his opposition to Palestinian independence, and his widely rumored contacts with the Zionists.” (Khalidi. 84)

The 1948 defeat of the Arab armies at the hand of Israel caused political turmoil in the nearby Arab nations as well as great fear of Israel’s military. The latter also because the Israelis conducted military reprisals against Arab villages for refugee attacks or they trying to return to their homes. The United Nations reports of these attacks differed from the Israeli’s view as well as the view in the American press. (Khalidi. 87)

An attempt to establish a Palestinian government in exile or in Gaza failed because of a lack of support from the Arab countries. (Khalidi. 87) This would see the last of the participation of “the Palestinian old guard” in politics. Few Palestinian organizations survived the Nakba. (Khalidi. 88)

Most Arab nations “hindered” Palestinian resistance to the Israelis, King Abdullah foremost. One reason, any attacks on Israel by guerrilla forces would result in severe retaliation from Israel. As a result, Fatah was formed in 1959. (Khalidi. 89)

Egypt became a leader in the Arab world with the revolution of 1952. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, “sought to avoid in particular to avoid providing Israel.” Years later Yasser Arafat and other Fatah leaders spoke of Egyptian intelligence arresting, torturing, and harassing Palestinians trying to fight Israel. (Khalidi. 90)

Israel inflicted massive and disproportionate casualties, particularly against the Gaza Strip for Palestinian attacks. The West Bank also suffered from Unit 101 commanded by Ariel Sharon who in 1953 “blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.” This was in response to a Palestinian attack that killed three Israelis. Jordan did as Egypt did by imprisoning and even killing possible Palestinian “infiltrators”. (Khalidi. 91)

Israeli Likud prime ministers, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu “were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood. . . . Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people, with national rights did not exist.” (Khalidi. 136)

War occurred because the Arabs refused to give up their land for a settler colonial state organized by Zionists. The Jews did accept partition. One Zionist declared that they stood for peace. (Gilbert. 149)

Organized Arab armies faced the Jews in 1948. (Gilbert. 153)

Native-born Palestinian Jew Moshe Dayan believed that this was “the victory of Judaism, which for two thousand years of exile from the Land of Israel had withstood persecutions.” (Gilbert. 153)

“The Arabs of Palestine had turned violently against the United Nations decision.” (Gilbert. 154)

Gilbert recounts Arab attacks on Jews. (Gilbert. 154-155)

Some in the Jewish Agency viewed the war as an opportunity to create more Jewish settlements. “Yosef Weitz, the Director of the Lands Department of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his diary, with regard to Arab tenant farmers in two villages in a predominantly Jewish area in north of Palestine, Is it not now the time to be rid of them?” (Gilbert. 159) 

In February 1948 the Arabs tried to remove Jewish settlements. Gilbert recounts “besieged” Jewish settlements in the Hebron Hills in January of that year. “A thousand Arabs, drawn from the villages in the area, had surrounded the bloc . . . there were fewer than thirty armed defenders. On the eve of the attack, hundreds of Arab men, women, and even children arrived from their villages carrying empty bags in which to put the loot they anticipated would be theirs within a few hours. But the attack was driven off, and 150 Arabs killed.” (Gilbert. 160) 

“In the next four months, while the British Mandate was still in place, the question of the expulsion of the Arabs from their villages, and the subsequent blowing up of Arab houses, was to be much discussed and acted upon.” (Gilbert. 160)

Remote Jewish settlements were cut off by the Arabs. (Gilbert. 160)

A thousand Arabs surrounded “four isolated Jewish settlements in the Hebron Hills” defended by thirty Jews. Arab civilians planned their looting of these villages, but they were defeated. (Gilbert. 161)

Deserters from the British Army and former German Prisoners of War joined the Arab armies. Gilbert describes them as the first foreign soldiers involved in the war. They drove a bomb-loaded truck into the “centre of Jewish Jerusalem.” (Gilbert. 162)

Gilbert portrays a Jewish army under siege with its back against the wall. Such being their interpretation of the situation, the “Haganah felt obliged to rethink its policy” and attack military and civilian personnel alike. (Gilbert. 162)

The Arabs left Jerusalem. “Ben-Gurion instructed the Haganah to allow Jewish civilians to move into abandoned and conquered Arab districts in Jerusalem.” Ben-Gurion told these Jews that “there are no strangers left [in Jerusalem] One hundred percent Jews. Claims that Jerusalem was a Jewish city until the Romans drove them out. And the Jews have returned after 2,000 years. “In many Arab districts in the West - one sees not one Arab.” Ben-Gurion is happy with that. (Gilbert. 163)

The Haganah developed Plan D which dealt with “how to deal with Arab towns and villages. “The strategic basis of the plan was that if an Arab town or village was close to a Jewish settlement or town, and prevented continuity between the Jewish cities and neighboring settlements, or disrupted the essential military lines of communication, it should be occupied.” Earlier, however, the Haganah espoused the that they would not “dominate others.” Also, they would not turn an Arab village into a Jewish one. The Israelis defend their ethnic cleansing of Arab villages and cities by saying they mean to protect “the right of Jews to come to their country, to settle it and to lead in it a free and sovereign existence.” (166) Further justification came after a Haganah rescue convoy was slaughtered by Arab forces. (Gilbert. 167)

“On October 21 [1948] the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs. Regulations promulgated for these areas established security zones and prohibited permanent residents from leaving them without a permit. Entry into the zones was also not allowed to those who were not permanent residents unless they were in possession of a permit. . . . this led in the summer of 1949 to the expulsion of the Arab residents of three villages . . . who were not subsequently permitted to return.” (Gilbert. 234)

Following independence Gilbert claims that “Israel tried not to neglect the rights and well-being of not Arab minority.” Ironically, Gilbert continues, a military administration was established immediately which he blames on the conflict with Arab countries. (Gilbert. 345)

Gilbert then describes the regulations of the Israeli Military Administration. “Arrest of a person in a prohibited area . . . police supervision over a person for up to one year . . . administrative detention by military commanders . . . “ special permits required. Nevertheless, the Arabs had the right to vote. (Gilbert. 345)

Ben-Gurion believed the deaths from the establishment of the State of Israel would be compensation for the Holocaust.

As the United Nations planned the partition of Palestine, Ben-Gurion believed that Israel should include the southern Negev Desert. Although this would mean “we will have to change inverse in the Bible.” (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 404-405)

After the 1948 war, the stunned Israeli Arabs had no leadership. “Israel seized abandoned Arab property and expropriated Arab land for Jewish settlement.” Estimates are that 40 to 60% of Arab land “transferred to Jewish settlement.”Although Israel had written guarantees of “equal rights” for Arabs, “Ben-Gurion was persuaded that the Arabs could not be trusted and military government should be imposed on them for security reasons - meaning that they were excluded from the right to defend themselves in the Israeli judicial system.” (Shapira. 147) 

Interestingly, Israel used British Mandate Laws, which had been used against them against the Arabs. The “military government restricted Arab inhabitants’ freedom of movement. “They needed permits to leave their towns and villages, a situation that prevented them from obtaining employment in the center of the country or higher education. The military administration was entitled to demolish buildings and confiscate land if it thought they had been used to perpetrate hostile actions.” (Shapira. 197)

It is a myth that Israel compromised during UN negotiations in 1947-1948. (Flapan. 15)

Israel claimed it accepted the UN resolution establishing Palestine and Israel. However, they continually violated the resolution. (Flapan. 16)

The Zionists argued over whether their Jewish state should include Both sides of the Jordan River. (Flapan. 18)

David Ben-Gurion stated, “Since the Arabs could never agree to a partition plan that would satisfy the Zionists, he argued, the borders of the country would have to be determined by military confrontation.” There would not be a Palestinian state. (Flapan. 37)

Israel built its nation on its own “sweat, on digging the soil with our own hands, fertilizing, planting, harvesting . . .” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 70)

“It is again possible to say categorically that not a single bullet or act of violence have Israel or the Jewish people in the twentieth century enforced their claim to this land. . . . We have resorted to force in defense only.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 70)

The Arabs in Israel have benefitted from the Zionist development of the land. “The Arabs, like ourselves, no longer die of malaria, no longer live out their days in near starvation, unemployment, hopelessness. More and more, they are integrating themselves into the Israeli population, what with their representation in Parliament, the enrollment of their young into our system of compulsory education, the emancipation of their womenfolk and their presences as volunteers in the military. . . . our relations with the Arab minority is more of mutual respect.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 71)

The Palestinians were about to be destroyed by the Zionists. These same Zionists the Arabs had welcomed and aided in the early nineteenth century. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 109-110)

Arab attacks in December 1947 did not include settlements. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 110) Nevertheless, the Zionists proposed getting rid of the Arabs. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 110) They proposed ‘transferring’ the Palestinians to other Arab countries. “Not a single village or single tribe must be left off.” The Jews would thus obtain  already cultivated land. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 111)

One influential Zionist was Youssef Weitz. He declared “the takeover of all Arab land was a sacred duty.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 111)

The Zionists believed that without removing the Arabs “there will be no Jewish state.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 112)

Pathetically, one of the leaders of the terrorism against the Arabs in 1948 admitted in the 1960s that, “if it had not been for the open [Zionist military] preparations which had a provocative nature, the drift into war [in 1948] could have been averted.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 113)

Nevertheless, in 1948, Ben-Gurion approved the policy to “kill as many villagers as possible.” He no longer cared about distinguishing between innocents and, as he put it, the guilty. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 113)

Yigal Yadin believed that it was time to instill in the Hagana “aggression.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 114)

Yigal Allon argued that “We have to go for a series of collective punishments even if there are children in the [attacked] houses.” Allon said that “a call for peace will be weakness.” Moshe Dayan and Ben-Gurion agreed. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 114)

The Hagana spread false accusations of assaults by Arabs. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 117)

Ben-Gurion ordered the eviction of Arabs from a village and that Jews settle in that village. He later bragged to a Jewish council that Jerusalem was a Jewish city; you don’t see Arabs. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 119) He also did not care that some military activity was not authorized, as long as the Arabs were evicted. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 120) “There happened to be thirty settlements in the UN-designated Arab state. One of the most effective ways to incorporate them into the Jewish state was to build new settlement belts between them and the Jewish-designated areas. These were the same tactics Israel would use again in the occupied West Bank during the years of the Oslo accord and again in the early years of the twenty-first century.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 120-121)

January 9, 1948, the Arabs sent forces to the Arab sector. Rarely did they attack Jewish settlements. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 124)

Although the Palestinians never had an equally sized or equipped army Ben-Gurion told his advisors that the war was “aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community.” Any Jews killed in any fighting Ben-Gurion referred to as “victims of a second Holocaust.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 125)

Ben-Gurion and the other Zionists portrayed the Palestinians and Nazis in order to motivate their soldiers. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 125)

The Zionists chose three villages on the Palestine coast to conquer. They produced “a wide range of agricultural” products and had no defenses. “The order came February 5 [1948] to occupy, expel and destroy them.” Although nearby the British did nothing. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 130) 

In February 1948, the Zionists coveted the lush village of Daliyat al Radha. So, they attacked it. Again, ironically, this is a place where Jews and Arabs lived in harmony with each other. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 131-132)

In April 1948 Jewish troops again “entered a village and began attaching TNT to the houses.” An Arab guard was shot dead. “We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60-80 dead bodies (quite a few of them children.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 132-133)

Nevertheless, the Palestinians did not fight back, and this was noted by Zionist intelligence. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 133)

Plan D culminated in March 1948. Destruction of Arab villages, “planting mines in the rubble.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 138-139)

Throughout Israeli history the military lies “to the politicians as to its real intentions.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 140)

“Special political officers” would motivate their “troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operations ahead.” Yigal Yadin knew this was hogwash. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 141)

Standard Israeli historiography cites April 1948 as a dangerous time for their forces. Pappe writes that nothing could be further from the truth. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 142)

Interesting, at least according to Ben-Gurion’s diary, he ignored military affairs from April to May 1948. And, he did not express a sense of danger. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 144)

He did say that “our enemies are the Arab peasants.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 144)

Plan Dalet, or D, is ingrained in the Israeli sense of history. There is a plaque honoring the Hagana where a Palestinian village used to be. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 148-149)

Deir Yasin is the most famous of the Zionist massacres of an Arab village. The Zionists entered the village and killed and raped at will. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 149-150)

All Arabs were the enemy. So, combatants and villagers were the same. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 150)

Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. Jewish soldiers stole Arab possessions. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 151)

“The entry of the Jordanian Arab Legion into the fighting changed the picture, and the cleansing operations were halted in the middle of May 1948. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 162)

The International Red Cross suspected the Hagana of injecting typhoid germs into the water supply to an Arab village near Haifa. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 163) The Zionists had been working on biological warfare at this time. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 164)

Palestinians in Jaffa "were literally pushed into the sea” by Zionist forces. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 167)

Tel Aviv University sits on some of the Arab land taken in the Jaffa and Tel-Aviv area. One of the remaining Arab houses is now the “university’s faculty club.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 168)

“Almost half of the Arab villages had already been attacked by the time the Arab governments eventually and, as we know, reluctantly decided to send in their troops.” Those villages were wiped out, and their residents were killed or expelled. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 169)

Many Arab villages “had signed non-aggression pacts with the kibbutzim in their vicinity.” However, even a small Arab attack, which resulted in the deaths of three civilians, caused the Zionists to counterattack and ethnically cleanse villages. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 173)

War correspondents seemingly did not report Jewish atrocities because it was so soon after the Holocaust. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 176)

As it became clear that the Jews had won the 1948 war most Arab leaders did not care. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 187)

Some of the Arab Legion commanders resented the limitations put on them by their leadership and King Abdullah. Interestingly, the Arab Legion, essentially the “Jordanian Army was the best trained in the whole Arab world.” In some ways, it was superior to the Zionist forces. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 189)

“The Palestinian community for all intents and purposes was a leaderless nation.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 193)

While the Israelis and the West propagate that a second Holocaust was about to happen with the intervention of the Arab armies in the 1948 war the truth is that they had little effect. It was the Palestinians who were expelled from their homes. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 194)

President Harry Truman succumbed to the pressure from the Zionist lobby to support Israel. In the process, the State Department Arab experts were left out of decision-making. This Zionist influence extended to Congress as well. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 195)

Because they withdrew from Palestine, leaving the Palestinians high and dry, the British received the brunt of criticism for the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 198)

One Israeli officer believes that Israel should be honest about what they did at Tantura. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 201) 

It is a lie that the Jews tried to convince the Arabs to stay. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 206)

“Tantura’s captured villagers were herded at gunpoint down to the beach.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 210) After the villagers surrendered many were slaughtered. Some Israeli soldiers were ashamed, others quite delighted. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 210, 212)

As soon as the British Mandate ended, the Jews destroyed the Arab villages in Galilee even though these were to be part of the Arab stay. Ben-Gurion viewed this as the liberation of the Galilee. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 221)

Ben-Gurion was delighted by reports of ethnic cleansing. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 228)

Although the United Nations demanded the return of Arabs to their homes the Israelis in August 1948 decided to “destroy all the evicted villages and transform them into new Jewish settlements or natural forests.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 283)

The Israelis prevented Arab refugees from returning to their destroyed homes and villages. They were termed “infiltrators.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 285)

“For almost thirty years the UN uncritically adopted the rhetorical obfuscations of Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, who referred to the refugees as constituting a human problem for which no one could be held accountable or responsible.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 287)

In October 1948 the Israelis took southern Lebanon and executed eighty villagers in just one village! (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 290) Although the Israelis left Lebanon in 1949 they returned again in 1978 and 1982 continuing ethnic cleansing and creating “a lot of bad blood and . . . feelings of revenge.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 291)

In February 1948 the Haganah established a process for whether or not to keep prisoners of war or simply kill them. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 303)

Interestingly, the Arabs treated their Jewish prisoners of war quite well. Reports of this in the Israeli press angered Ben-Gurion.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 305)

A UN observer noted that the Israelis “violated frequently the guarantee given several times . . . to respect all buildings belonging to the religious community.” In addition, the Jews had no compunction about stealing from the homes they took over. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 307)

The reason the Zionist forces gave for looting was that they were searching for weapons. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 307)

They arrested Arabs for no reason. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 308)

One Zionist commanding officer complained that his troops made fun of him as they ignored his orders not to burn buildings. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 308)

Although Arabs in one village had the keys to the buildings that they were glad to hand over to the Israelis, the latter preferred to break in. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 309)

While enduring the expulsion and burning of their homes what mostly hurt the Palestinians was the turning of their mosques into restaurants or shops. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 324)

On March 10, 1948, Zionist leaders and their young military officers agreed to “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” They would intimidate, lay siege, bombard civilian areas, burn Palestinian homes, and use mines to prevent any of the Palestinians from returning. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 15)

This was Plan D, “Dalet in Hebrew.” “The Palestinians had to go.” This was and is Zionism. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 16) Although conflicts between the indigenous Arabs and the settler colonial Zionists had been ongoing for decades the current conflict began in February 1947 with “retaliation against Palestinian attacks. . . . It took six months to complete the mission.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 16)

The Nakba, as the Palestinians refer to the events of 1948, had been “denied, and is still today not recognized as a historical fact.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 17)

The Zionist decision to expel the native inhabitants of Palestine took place in a building called the Red House. Marxist posters abound in the building. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 17)

It is absurd to claim “that the Palestinians had left of their own accord.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 19)

The Zionists justified their war against the Palestinians. “We had to destroy them, otherwise we would have had Arabs here.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 32)

The story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 “has been eradicated almost totally from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 36)

Ben-Gurion intensely hated the Arabs. He opposed putting on trial the killers of the villagers at Dier Yasin and said nothing when the famed philosopher Martine Buber protested building “a Jewish neighborhood over the village’s ruins.” (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 420)

Ben-Gurion “believed he was acting in the name of the yearnings of generations of Jews; that was his lifelong belief.”

Following the Israeli conquest of Lod Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon “asked Ben-Gurion what to do with Lod’s Arab inhabitants, and that Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a manner that Rabin interpreted as a directive to expel them.” (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 438)

Ben-Gurion “was entirely at peace with the fact that the Arabs had been displaced - between 500,000 and 600,000 of them at his estimate, according to others about 750,000. That was the price of Jewish independence in the Land of Israel, a captured land, as he put it. War is war . . . One [of his colleagues] termed the exit of the Arabs a divine miracle, a second remarked that the country’s landscape was much finer without them . . . The transfer of the Arabs out of the country is, in my eyes, one of the most just, moral, and correct things that needs to be done.” After the war, the feeling was that the 100,000 Arabs who remained in the country were too many. (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 452)

Nevertheless, “Ben-Gurion always denied that the Arabs had been forced to flee.” In addition, he claimed that those Arabs who did flee were “enemies.” He remained obsessed with ridding Israel of Arabs. (Segev. A State at Any Cost. 452)

Unlike the Germans after World War II, who claimed they were following orders, committing the atrocities they did are not like the Jews. “For us, right and wrong are between the individual and his own conscience. The Jew who commits evil must, therefore, act in defiance of what his inner being affirms as right. So he carries an extra burden of wickedness.” Tell it to the Arabs!! (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 15-16)

The War of Independence for the Israelis meant the Jews “achieved a state of their own after two thousand years of exile and more than fifty years of intensive Zionist colonization. . . . The Palestinians, meanwhile, became a nation of refugees.” (Flapan. 4)

Following the Israeli War of Independence Israeli policy was “to move them [the Arabs] out of most of the areas in which they lived and to concentrate them in the north-eastern part of the negate and to the north of Beersheba.” (Gilbert. 359)

The Zionist War of Independence continually discussed terror against the Arabs, such as expulsion and blowing up houses. Weitz thought Bedouin herders should be forced into Transjordan. (Gilbert. 160)

Mount Herzl in Israel sits on “two villages that were depopulated in July 1948 during Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine or in the local jargon “Israel’s War of Independence.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 3)

British policy toward the Arabs was hostile. There was “a collusion between Israel, Jordan, and Britain that almost wiped out the Palestinians.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 16)

The Arabs opposed the 1947 United Nations resolution, which created the State of Palestine and the State of Israel. (Shapira. 179)

The Zionists declared independence which included an explanation of “the connections of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the international recognition of the Jews’ right to their country. . . . The country’s borders were not mentioned. The declaration emphasized the nature of the state as a democracy that would ensure complete equality of social and political rights for all its citizens, and it appealed to the neighboring states and their Arab citizens with an offer of peace.” (Shapira. 180)

Israel’s Declaration of Independence aims “the right of Jews to immigrate.” (Shapira. 184)

The Israelis established the Law of Return in 1950, which granted “the unconditional right to Israeli citizenship from the day of their arrival in the country. . . . it did not explain how to define who is a Jew.” (Shapira. 185)

For the Arabs the Nakba or Israeli War of Independence in 1948 “made them a minority in their own land. . . . that have become the focus of a national myth [Shapira argues that all nationalities rely on myth] emphasizing their victimhood at the hands of the Zionist state.” (Shapira. 461)

Shapira writes that some scholars that “most Israeli Arabs . . . have accepted Israel’s existence as the Jewish state, and as citizens seek equal opportunities and cultural autonomy.” However, Arab leaders disagree. (Shapira. 462)

The concept of “the Arab problem” came from “internal Jewish attitudes toward the Arabs. Two Jewish writers criticized Zionist “mistreatment of their Arab workers” and the “dispossession of Arab tenant farmers.”

Demonstrating the wholly out-of-proportion thinking of the future Israelis, their army chief of operations, Yigal Yadin, believed this was “total war.” Dayan supported this. (Flapan. 77)

The Jews looked at the decision to Partition Palestine as a “divine miracle.” The Arabs believed it a “flagrant wrong, a miscarriage of justice, and an act of coercion. They were being called upon to consent to the partitioning of a country that only thirty years earlier had been considered Arab and to the establishment of a Jewish state in it. They resorted to “armed resistance.”

The Jews call the 1948 war, the War of Sovereignty,” but it is known as the War of Independence, although the war was against the Arabs and not the British. (156) “It was not a war of liberation, but between two peoples striving for control over the same land. For their part, the Arabs referred to the war with the neutral phrase, “1948 war,” implying that it was just one in a series that had been and would be waged.” Most important was 700,000 refugees. Thus, it was called the Nakba. (Shapira. 156-157)

“The war’s biggest losers were the Palestinians.” The first cause was the “collapse of governmental systems in Palestinian society.” After the Arabs invaded, “the IDF expelled the Arab population and destroyed its villages to prevent its return.” (Shapira. 174). Officers of the IDF blamed the Palestinians for the war and abuses. Shapiro claims that both the Jews and the Arabs committed massacres. (Shapira. 174)

“Shapira claims the Israelis were “aghast” at the Palestinians fleeing their villages. This was another miracle for the Israelis. She claims all of the Jewish villages assigned to the Arab area were destroyed. Coupled with the Palestinians fleeing their villages, “a new reality materialized: two ethnically homogeneous states, a mainly Jewish one and a purely Arab one. The conclusion was that the State of Israel could not allow the Arabs to return to their homes.” (Shapira. 174)

Moshe Sharett claimed it was incredulous to believe the Zionists forced the Palestinians to leave their homes. (Shapira. 174) However, the IDF was ordered to “prevent the Arabs from returning to their villages, either by force or by destroying the villages.” (Shapira. 175)

Unfortunately, Shapira cites World War II actions as precedents justifying Israeli behavior. (Shapira. 175)

Shapira also claims that the Palestinians have unrealistic demands to return to their homes “for the war erased the reality to which they wanted to return.” In addition, the Arabs refused to acknowledge the existence of Israel. (Shapira. 175)

Shapira also describes their desire to return as a myth. (176)

Nevertheless, after the War of Independence the best IDF officers left the military and it “experienced a period of disorganization and weakness . . . unsuccessful battle . . . near the Sea of Galilee to destroy a Syrian force that had taken a position in the demilitarized zone.” (Shapira. 275)

After the 1948 war the Israelis removed the Arabic names of conquered towns because, “we do not recognize the Arabs’ proprietorship of the land.” (Sand. 28)

“The War of 1948 was the almost inevitable result of more than half a century of Arab-Jewish friction and conflict that began with the arrival in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), or Palestine, of the first Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1880s. These Zionists (Zion, one of Jerusalem’s hills, was, by extension, a biblical name for Jerusalem and, by further extension, a name for the Land of Israel) were driven both by the age-old messianic dream embedded in Judaism’s daily prayers, of reestablish a Jewish state in the ancient homeland  and by European anti-Semitism, which erupted in a wave of pogroms in the czarist empire.” Nationalism had spread throughout Europe and the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, influencing the formation of Zionism. (Morris. 1)

Ben-Gurion writes that in 1947 the Jews received “the rump we didn’t think that settlement very fair since we know that our work here deserved a greater assignment of land.” We didn’t, however, press the point . . . We had, therefore, absolutely no designs on Arab-assigned areas.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 71)

On May 15, 1948, Egyptian bombers flew over Tel Aviv to attack the new State of Israel. “The infant nation was in a life-and-death struggle against seven better equipped, numerically superior, British trained - and in some cases led - Arab armies invading its meager territory from every side. With inadequate weapons, farm implements, their bare hands and indomitable spirit, the Israelis sent the enemy reeling.” The plan had been to take over Israel by May 25th, however, the Israelis revealed by June 10th. Israel would extend its territory before “an armistice signed with the Arab powers in 1949.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 79)

Claims the British aided Arab military build-up while the Jews, under the Mandate of the League of Nations, forbade them from also building an army. (79-80) Ben-Gurion forgets Orde Wingate’s training of the Haganah in the 1930s.

Ben-Gurion understood that the Arabs were hostile to Israel. However, his understanding of Palestine was skewed. He denies Palestinian nationalism. Writes that “in 1948 it was the Arab powers and not the Jews who exhorted the local Moslem population to leave their homes and their land. We asked them to stay and help us build a modern country.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 83)

These refugees are “stunted, embittered, and I fear half-crazed . . . due to the tragic error of their parents.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 84)

Agrees with Miko Peled (YouTube.com presentations) that the Zionists had 45,000 soldiers and others who were in “private armies.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 85)

In April 1948 the “Arabs had cut off the water supply to the modern Western sector of the city [Jerusalem] where the Jewish population predominated.” Ben-Gurion compares this to the Roman siege of 70AD. (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 86)

The British were of no help; in fact, they disarmed the Jews and gave the weapons to the Arabs. (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 87) This is a theme of the film Exodus.

“Israel has always remained true to its founding principles of representative government, an independent judiciary (the true safeguard of any democracy), the guarantee of civil rights for all citizens, freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of worship and a fundamental belief in the dignity of the individual.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 90)

“Moreover, the Jews are the only inhabitants of Canaan-Israel since the time of Joshua, in the fourteenth century BCE, to prosper in this place and to make the earth prosper.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 111) This is an expression of ‘we made the desert bloom’ instead of the Zionists taking a blooming land.

The 1948 war saw the Jews fielding 30,000 soldiers. They had “a small air force and navy . . . armored cars and heavy artillery.” The Palestinians had a paramilitary force of “no more than 7,000 troops,” which were unorganized. Soon, the Jews would have 80,000 soldiers and the Arabs 50,000. While the Jews received arms from Czechoslovakia, the Arabs received arms from the British, which soon ended their aid. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 86-87)

Although the Arab leaders stated that they would go to war against the Zionists over a portion, the Zionist leaders never felt “their future state was in danger.” Nevertheless, in public, the “Jewish leaders” spoke of a “second Holocaust.” They knew that the Arabs had not prepared for war. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 88)

Furthermore, the Arab armies did not intervene until “five and a half months after the UN partition Resolution had been adopted.” At this time many Palestinian villages were vulnerable to Zionist attack. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 90)

Regardless of the danger they faced the Palestinians just wanted a normal life. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 96)

After invading villages the Jewish soldiers used informants to identify those who had attacked Jews or who were part of the Palestinian resistance. Those people were shot. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 98)

Jewish intelligence reported that the Palestinian elite left, as they did in times of crisis. According to Pappe, this is not voluntary but done in the face of danger. In addition, they fully intended to return to their homes, which the Israelis would not allow. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 99)

At the end of 1947, the Irgun and the Hagana terrorized the Arabs of Haifa. Jewish houses were high up on a hill looking down at Haifa. The Jews easily sniped and fired shells at the residents. They “rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited.” As the Palestinians ran out of their homes, they machine-gunned. Where the Arabs and Jews got along the Hagana “brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 105-106)

The Irgun threw bombs into groups of Arabs in areas where the two peoples worked together. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 106)

The British did nothing. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 107)

Destroyed Arab villages were turned into Jewish sites: schools, parks, and housing.

Ben-Gurion refused to condemn Irgun terrorist actions. The British made weak complaints but to no avail. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 108-109)

The British blamed the Zionists for the conflict saying that it was the Arabs who worked for peace. Ben-Gurion did not disagree. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 108-109)

Shapira cites November 30, 1947, as the date the Arabs began the war against the Jews. “Roads linking Jewish settlements all over the country suddenly became dangerous, since they passed through Arab villages.” (Shapira. 157)

“The Arabs’ fighting capacity appeared serious and their military resources limitless.” (Shapira. 158)

“Palestine Arab society started to disintegrate.” The ruling elites were unable to impose either civil or military authority. The Arab militias were not formed into an army. . . . the wealthy rushed to depart for the neighboring Arab states.” (Shapira. 158)

Arab propaganda declared that they would drive “the Jews into the sea - in other words, total war.” However, the tens of thousands of Arab soldiers were poorly trained, and their armies poorly led. Therefore, they were not coordinated. At first, the Arab armies outnumbered the Jews. However, the IDF finally organized to recruit enough soldiers to meet the Arabs. (Shapira. 157-158)

Shapira describes a Jewish army that was just being organized in 1947. They didn’t have proper analysis and made plans on bravado rather than facts. Consequently, the Israelis remember the war as being “fought for the nation’s very existence . . . endless sacrifice . . . and many casualties.” (Shapira. 158)

She writes of 60,000 Jewish refugees.

However, there were too few Zionists in Palestine at the time, and they had little to offer the Arabs. (Shapira. 53-54)

Conflicts between Arabs and Jews centered around “land, water, and grazing.” The Jews protected themselves, and this was “an inseparable part” of Zionist beliefs. (Shapira. 54)

A Zionist chant, “In fire and blood did Judea fall; in blood and fire Judea shall rise.” (Shapira. 54)

Claiming that Israelis “abhor war and military things as ends in themselves. Nevertheless, the IDF is a source of great national pride.” It brings a diverse country together. Israelis would gladly “live in peace” with their neighbors. But the military is necessary for Israel’s survival. (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 66-67)

The Arabs should accept Israel. (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 69)

Ben-Gurion denies any destruction of non-Jewish churches or mosques. (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 114)

The Jordanian Arab Legion was the best-trained Arab army. (Shapira. 162)

SINAI CAMPAIGN

Moshe Dayan became Chief of Staff in 1956 and improved elite units, including 101. 

Infiltration from Jordan occurred in 1956 with help from the then-lax Jordanian army. Ariel Sharon’s infamous Unit 101 carried out reprisal raids. On one raid, many women and children were killed inside their homes. (Shapira. 275)

Just before the Sinai Campaign of  1956, an IDF commander changed the curfew for Arabs without telling field workers. Forty-seven men, women, and children were shot for violating the curfew. The defense establishment was in shock but covered up the atrocity. (197) The Arabs never forgot. (Shapira. 198)

An IDF reprisal raid in the Gaza Strip in Egypt in 1955 is believed to have inflamed Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser took his army’s failure to defend against the attack as humiliating.

He switched from sponsoring limited raids by Palestinians to training units to go “inside Israeli territory, killing civilians, destroying installations, and undermining security along the border and inside Israel.” (Shapira. 276)

In addition, in 1955, Nasser declared his “commitment to armed struggle against Israel.” Consequently, the Israeli General Staff concluded, “a preventative war against Egypt was unavoidable.” (Shapira. 279)

The result would be “Israeli control of the Gaza Strip, open the Straits of Tirana, and perhaps even give Israel control of the Gulf of Eilat coastal strip leading to the straits. The idea of a preventative war was based on Israel’s vulnerability. Because Israel was so small, an attacking enemy “could quickly cut the country in half.” (Shapira. 279)

“Ben-Gurion . . . . proposed that Israel conquer the Gaza Strip.” Interestingly, he had opposed “Yigal Allon’s proposals to conquer the West Bank [in 1949], which was militarily achievable.” He was concerned about “governing hundreds of thousands of Arabs.” (280)

In 1956, Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal led the British, the French, and the Israelis into an alliance. (Shapira. 281)

The 1956 Suez War or Sinai Campaign “was a great Israeli military success.” The Israelis quickly took the Sinai Peninsula just short of the Suez Canal. However, the British and French attacks against the Egyptians drew the ire of the Soviet Union and the United States. “Gunboat diplomacy had ended with World War Two.”  (Shapira. 281-282)

The Israelis claimed they wanted to prevent guerrilla attacks on their country. Nevertheless, the U.S. told the Israelis to withdraw. (Shapira. 282) Interestingly, for the next ten years, the Palestinian attacks from Egypt stopped. (Shapira. 283)

In 1956, Ben-Gurion planned the “partition of Jordan” with Iraq. (Flapan. 51)

Israel continually massacred Palestinian civilians: 1956 “villagers returning from their fields” and, others in the 1950s and 1960s. (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 378) Israeli historians conveniently ignored these atrocities because Pappe writes they “are more comfortable serving as the mouthpiece for the hegemonic ideology.” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing. 378-379)

In 1963 the Arab position in the Negev Desert was precarious. (Gilbert. 359)

Ben-Gurion ordered the attacks to force the Arabs to recognize Israel. Interesting Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett believed this counterproductive. Nevertheless, both did not want to allow the “return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.” (Khalidi. 91)

Seemingly related, Ben-Gurion proposed a full-scale attack on Egypt in 1955. The attack would take place in 1956. (Khalidi. 91)

Major military leaders throughout Israel’s history implemented Ben-Gurion’s aggressive policies. These generals were Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon. Nothing has changed throughout Israel’s history. (Khalidi. 91-92)

Before attacking Egypt in 1956, the Israelis attacked Egyptian police stations and villages, killing many Egyptian soldiers and civilians, including Palestinians. This caused the Egyptians to try to build up their military. First, they purchased from the West, which refused, so they agreed to buy weapons from Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the Egyptians began helping the Palestinians in their attacks on Israel which most Arab governments did not like. Thus, Israel launched the “Suez War of October 1956.” (Khalidi. 91-92)

Israel swept through Gaza, killing more than 450 people, “most of them summarily executed.” (93) No one in Israel or America heard of this. (Khalidi. 94)

SIX-DAY WAR

After the Day War, liberal Israeli activists accepted a two-state solution to the conflict. After the Second Intifada these same activists “publicly and privately confessed how wrong they had been to trust the Palestinians.” (Pappe, Out of Frame. 58)

The tensions building before the Six Day War of 1967 caused many American Jews to fear for the Jewish state as Arab leaders shouted what turned out to be empty threats. (Khalidi. 96) President Johnson did not believe Israel was in danger as the Pentagon assessed that Israel would win in just a few days. Besides, the Arabs were not ready to attack. And, “Israel’s military was far superior to the militaries of all the Arab Staes combined. . . . Yet, the myth prevails: in 1967, a tiny, vulnerable country faced constant, existential peril, and it continues to do so.” (Khalidi. 97) 

Rashid Khalidi addresses the causes of the Six-Day War. One was the increase in Palestinian commando attacks on Israel. Two, “the Israeli government had recently begun to divert the waters of the Jordan River to the center of the country despite great Arab popular dishes and even greater impotence on the part of the Arab regimes.” (Khalidi. 97)

Egypt was fighting in the Yemeni civil war and had limited soldiers for its defense. They didn’t help the situation by moving more of their soldiers into the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt also wanted to aid the Syrians who sponsored Palestinian attacks from their territory. This gave the Israelis the opportunity to attack in self-defense. (Khalidi. 98)

The Arabs felt tricked by the Americans who claimed they would restrain the Israelis. However, it became known that the Johnson administration had given the Israelis the “go-ahead for its surprise attack.” (Khalidi. 104)

The Americans allowed the Israelis to keep the conquered territory and the United Nations Resolution 242 was ambiguous on the subject. As a result, the Israelis have colonized the West Bank and controlled Gaza and the Golan Heights. Again, the Palestinians were never consulted; “instead it contains a bland reference to a just solution of the refugee problem.” (Khalidi. 105-106)

This meant that the issue was the Arab refusal to recognize Israel. (Khalidi. 106)

In 1969 Israeli Prime Minister claimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians . . . they did not exist.” However, another writer pointed out that she held Palestinian identity papers while living in Palestine under the British. Khalidi argues that “she thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.” (Khalidi. 106)

“1967 marked an extraordinary resurgence of Palestinian national consciousness and resistance to Israel’s negation of Palestinian identity, a negation made possible by the complicity of much of the world community. In the words of one seasoned observer: A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.” (Khalidi. 108)

The June 1967 Arab-Israeli War was known to the world as The Six-Day War but referred to as “the June War” by the Arabs. Shapira writes that it “broke out without premeditation on either side and without anyone having predicted that it would occur when it did.” (Shapira. 295)

The Arabs exchanged accusations with each other, and the Arabs and Israelis did the same.  Arab threats concerned Israeli citizens who feared another Holocaust. Also, Western behavior during the crisis left Israel feeling abandoned. “Over and over commentators compared Israel to Czechoslovakia.” (Shapira. 298)

Again, the IDF believed it would win a war against Egypt if it could launch a preemptive attack. (Shapira. 299)

While the Israeli government was reluctant to go to war the General Staff “pressed for approval going to war.” (Shapira. 299)

A retired David Ben-Gurion thought Israel needed a powerful ally. He criticized Chief of Staff Rabin for “belligerent statements and mobilization of the reserves. . . . had led Israel into a trap.” (Shapira. 300)

Public pressure led to retired General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli hero of the Sinai Campaign, to be appointed Defense Minister. 

According to Shapira, “Israel was drawn into this war under duress and without preplanned objectives. . . . Israel went to war to defeat the Egyptian army and open the Straits of Titan to Israeli shipping. (Shapira. 301)

In November 1967, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242; however, the Arabs refused to recognize Israel. Israel, in turn, refused to withdraw from the territory it had just conquered. 

A consequence of the war Shapira writes “was the re-emergence of the Palestinian problem. After the War of Independence, the Arab states and Israel appropriated the territories assigned to the Palestinian state.” (Shapira. 305)

After the Six-Day War, Israel could no longer ignore the Palestinians. “The awakening of Palestinian nationalism was a direct result of the Arab states’ failure to destroy Israel militarily.” (Shapira. 305)

Israel’s 1967 victory worsened its relations with the Arabs. (Shapira. 307)

“Rule over new territories became a leading topic in Israeli political discourse.” Are they “bargaining chips”? Are they needed for security? How moral is it to rule other people? (Shapira. 307) Jews fulfilling their views of Israel settled in the newly conquered territories. (Shapira. 307)

Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and his eye patch symbolized Israeli daring and defiance. He “sought to maintain a soft occupation of the West Bank that interfered as little as possible in the lives of the Arabs.” (Shapira. 310) Furthermore, Dayan opposed annexing the newly conquered territories. (Shapira. 311)

Even “Ben-Gurion spoke openly about returning all the occupied territories, except for Jerusalem, in return for peace.” (Shapira. 312)

Nevertheless, following the victory of 1967, Israelis became arrogant and condescending. The victorious generals became celebrities. (Shapira. 312)

However, according to Shapira, the sight of fleeing Arab soldiers during the war and seeing refugees left them feeling pity. “They felt no hatred toward the Arabs.” (Shapira. 314)

Not surprisingly, conquering areas mentioned in the Bible impressed Israeli soldiers. Some “hoped that the uncompleted mission of 1948 could be fulfilled. But they were the minority.” Israel did not want “to rule these territories.” (Shapira. 314)

A leader of the settler movement stated that Israel is “not permitted to relinquish any part of the Greater Land of Israel: We are bound by loyalty to the integrity of our country . . . and no government in Israel has the right to Surender that integrity.” (Shapira. 316)

The 1967 victory did not impress young Israelis as it did those who experienced the 1948 war and who “still retained the notion of a Greater Israel.” However, messianism captivated “religious-Zionist youth.” (Shapira. 316)

In 1968, Israelis who held these views “flouted” the government and settled in Arab areas. They received government support from “disparate circles” in Israel. (Shapira. 317) 

At first, these Zionists planned to settle “areas thinly populated by Arabs.” Reminiscent of General Yigal Allon’s sincere wish to take the West Bank after the 1948 war, Allon now looked to a more balanced occupation order to avoid “rule over Arabs and what he perceived as the country’s security needs.” (Shapira. 317)

The issue of “defensible borders” for Israel came up. They wanted to keep the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, the Rafa approach, and southern Mount Hebron. Israel allowed Jews to settle in those areas. (Shapira. 317)

Although there was hope among Israelis that the Six-Day War would bring peace, it did not. The Israelis and the Arabs dug in. (Shapira. 319)

Israeli and Egyptian forces clashed. The Egyptians had superior artillery against the Israelis Bar-Lev Line. The IDF “raided Egyptian positions on the western bank of the Gulf of Suez. This did not stop the Egyptians, so the Israelis bombed military installations and infrastructures. The cities along the canal were turned into heaps of ruins, and hundreds of thousands of Egyptian refugees fled toward Cairo.” (Shapira. 319)

On the Jordanian border in the fall of “1967 Palestinian terror groups began organizing . . . which hoped to rouse the West Bank population into a guerrilla war against the occupation.” (Shapira. 320)

The Palestinians attacked Jewish settlements in the West Bank, so the Israelis destroyed settlements in Jordan. (Shapira. 320)

In addition, these conflicts and the wake of the Six-Day War disrupted Israeli society. (Shapira. 321) Exposed was the “psychological difficulty of withstanding a protracted war, the sensitivity to the loss of life, and the longing for peace.” Most Israelis felt they “were in a war of choice.” Also, the Israelis claimed there was no one to talk peace with. (Shapira. 324)

Prior to the Six-Day War, the Israeli public panicked over the actions and threats from Egyptian President Nasser. They demanded the return of General Moshe Dayan to lead the armed forces. (Gilbert. 380)

“Israel’s military position was, on paper, precarious. On the Egyptian front, at least 100,000 troops and 900 tanks were in Sinai. On the Golan Heights Syria had more than 75,000 men and 400 tanks ready for action. The Jordanians had 32,000 men under arms, and almost 300 tanks. This made a total force of 207,000 soldiers and at least 1600 tanks. A further 150 tanks were moving into Jordan from Iraq, which was determined to join what was being called in the Arab world the final battle. Should it become necessary Egypt was able to send from the west of Sinai a further 140,000 troops and 300 tanks into that battle. Against this substantial Arab force, Israel had, with full mobilization of the civilian reserves, 264,000 soldiers and 800 tanks. An estimated 700 Arab combat aircraft were also ready for action. Israel had only 300.” (Gilbert. 381)

Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban told his government that the “frenzy in the Arab streets belonged to the tradition of hot fanaticism which, in earlier periods of history, had sent the Muslim armies flowing murderously across three continents.” Also, Egyptian generals appeared to oppose Nasser’s wait to be attacked view and they wanted to attack Israel. (Gilbert. 382)

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, “a few people urged with urgency that the West Bank and Gaza Strip ought to be given back as quickly as possible, that even a temporary occupation would hold grave disadvantages to the occupying power. (Gilbert. 396)

Dayan vehemently opposed the forced removal of West Bank residents. (Gilbert. 397) He did not want to interfere in daily life or become like the British under the mandate. “It will be bad for us.” (Gilbert. 398)

Many Israelis “felt an affinity” to the West Bank. “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were buried in it . . . David had ruled from Bethlehem, two Jewish kingdoms had been established over it, in Judea and Samaria.” (Gilbert. 397)

The consequences of the Six-Day War of 1967 are that Israelis and Palestinians born after the war believe the occupation of Arab land is normal. (Flapan. 11)

Sand recounts that during the Six-Day War, his unit entered the West Bank and fought for a neighborhood in Jerusalem. While he thought this was his first time “abroad” his fellow soldiers said, “What are you talking about? This is the true land of your forefathers.” (Sand. 2)

Nasser threatened Israel in 1967, facing Israel’s “most populous, built-up and flattest area, Israel’s single most vulnerable territory.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 73) He claims that the Syrians threatened “Kibbutzim from the Golan Heights, killing Israeli civilians every day.” (Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. 73) However, years later Moshe Dayan stated unequivocally that the Israelis provoked Syrian attacks. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/24/099r-122499-idx.html)

ARABS

Arab resistance through suicide bombings left “fatigue in Israeli society.” (615) Nurit Peled-Elchanan, the sister of Miko Peled, blamed the death of her daughter in a suicide bombing on the Netanyahu government, saying, “When you put people under a border closure, when you humiliate, starve and oppress them, when you raze their villages and demos their houses, whey they grow up in garbage and in holding pens, that is what happens.” (Gilbert. 615)

Ben-Gurion and others believed the Arabs “were descendants of the ancient Jews who had converted first to Christianity and then to Islam; now, with Jewish settlement, they would assimilate among the Jews.” (Shapira. 53)

Before the War of Independence, “Arab nationals were developing far more rapidly than the rate of Jewish immigration to Palestine.” (Shapira. 82). “The Arabs refused to recognize any Jewish right whatsoever to the country. They were prepared to allow Jews who had come to Palestine before the Balfour Declaration to remain, but not recognize them as a collective with a historical connection to the country.” (Shapira. 82) 

Arab public opinion in response to “Jews’ alleged brutality” caused pressure on the Arab countries to aid the Palestinians. (Shapira. 162)

The Jordanian Arab Legion was the best-trained Arab army. (Shapira. 162)

Shapira claims that Israel is one of the few democratic nations created after World War II.  (Shapira. 179)

Some American Jewish elites avoided Zionism. The American Council for Judaism spread “virulent anti-Zionist propaganda” and helped Arabs a the United Nations. (Shapira. 191)

ARABS

Arab resistance through suicide bombings left “fatigue in Israeli society.” (615) Nurit Peled-Elchanan, the sister of Miko Peled, blamed the death of her daughter in a suicide bombing on the Netanyahu government, saying, “When you put people under a border closure, when you humiliate, starve and oppress them, when you raze their villages and demos their houses, whey they grow up in garbage and in holding pens, that is what happens.” (Gilbert. 615)

Ben-Gurion and others believed the Arabs “were descendants of the ancient Jews who had converted first to Christianity and then to Islam; now, with Jewish settlement, they would assimilate among the Jews.” (Shapira. 53)

Before the War of Independence, “Arab nationals were developing far more rapidly than the rate of Jewish immigration to Palestine.” (Shapira. 82). “The Arabs refused to recognize any Jewish right whatsoever to the country. They were prepared to allow Jews who had come to Palestine before the Balfour Declaration to remain, but not recognize them as a collective with a historical connection to the country.” (Shapira. 82) 

Arab public opinion in response to “Jews’ alleged brutality” caused pressure on the Arab countries to aid the Palestinians. (Shapira. 162)

Shapira claims that Israel is one of the few democratic nations created after World War II.  (Shapira. 179)

Some American Jewish elites avoided Zionism. The American Council for Judaism spread “virulent anti-Zionist propaganda” and helped Arabs a the United Nations. (Shapira. 191)

Following Israel’s crushing of the Arab armies during the Six Day War of 1967 the Israelis produced a document stating that “the Land of Israel is now held by the Jewish people. . . . we are loyally obligated to the integrity of our Land, and no government of Israel has the right to concede this integrity.” After that, Israelis were encouraged to settle in the West Bank. (Sand. 242) The Israelis figured that since no one complained about 1948, no one would complain about 1967. (Sand. 244)

“Fatah was founded in Kuwait in 1959 by a group of Palestinian engineers, teachers, and other professionals, headed by Yasser Arafat.” (Khalidi. 114)

Fatah launched its first attack against Israel by sabotaging a “water pumping station in central Israel.” However, the Egyptians worried that this would provoke Israel. In addition, with this attack “Fatah deliberately tried to show up the Arab states for their lack of true commitment to Palestine. Fatah’s appeal to the Arab population led to “early success of the Palestinian resistance groups.” (Khalidi. 115) In the end, however, these attacks contributed to Israel attacking Egypt in June 1967. Western countries had the image of tiny Israel against large, hostile Arab nations. The Arabs believed that Israel, especially with nuclear weapons, was incredibly powerful. (Khalidi. 116)

The Arab nations created the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Six-Day War in order to counter Palestinian independent actions. However, “militant resistance groups took over the PLO.” (Khalidi. 116)

“Hardline Zionists” believed that Israel replaced Palestine. Mere mention of Palestine or Palestinians “constituted a mortal threat to Israel.” Zionists associated Palestinians with terrorism and hatred” in their worldwide public relations campaign. (Khalidi. 117)

Evidence supporting Miko Peled’s recent arguments that Israel is not an invincible force, Khalidi recounts a March 1968 Israeli attack in Jordan against Palestinian soldiers. This was less than a year after the Israeli victory of 1967. However, the Jordanian army and the PLO forced the Israelis to withdraw. (Khalidi. 118)

Overall however, the PLO failed to develop “a successful guerrilla strategy that might have countered the superiority of Israel’s conventional forces or the limitations of being based in Arab countries vulnerable to Israeli military pressure.” (Khalidi. 119)

In the 1970s the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked commercial aircraft. In addition, Palestinian arrogance in Jordan led King Hussein to use military force to push them out. (Khalidi. 121)

Israel attacked Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon. (Khalidi. 121)

During the 1967 Six-Day War, the U.S. gave the go-ahead for Israel to attack. (Khalidi. 161)