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ON MAY 16, 2011, the New York Times published an op-ed titled “The Long Overdue Palestinian State” by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority. To support his argument that the United Nations should recognize an independent Palestinian state in fall 2011, Abbas recounted the story of his own “expulsion” from Palestine 63 years before, at the age of 13. Abbas declared that “shortly after” the U.N. General Assembly voted to partition the “Palestinian homeland” into two states in 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.” Abbas also claimed that he and his family were forced out of their home in the Galilean city of Safed by the Jews and fled to Syria, where they “took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees.” For dramatic effect, the Times provided an illustration above Abbas’s article depicting a young boy standing next to his tent in the desert and gazing forlornly at the verdant hills of the Galilee just over the horizon.
It was a coup for Abbas to get the Palestinian “nakba” myth (nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe) published in America’s “paper of record.” The article ran soon after Israel’s Independence Day celebrations and the Palestinians’ annual nakba commemoration, marked by violent confrontations on Israel’s borders as third-generation Palestinian refugees tried to exercise their “right of return” to their ancestral lands. The article appeared just days before Barack Obama’s much anticipated speech on the “Arab Spring,” in which the president also tried to jump-start peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. To reach agreement on a two-state solution, Obama declared, Israel must agree to return to the 1967 borders, modified only by mutually agreed “land swaps.” Dealing with the Palestinian claim of a “right of return” for the 1948 refugees and their descendants could be deferred to a later date, said the president.
In a tense meeting at the White House the following day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu objected to President Obama’s intervention, particularly the idea of deciding Israel’s final borders before the refugee question was settled. Many liberal commentators, including the New York Times editorial board, blasted Netanyahu for publicly scolding the president of the United States and concluded that Israel was foolishly rejecting a reasonable peace plan put forward by its strongest ally.
Largely unnoticed was President Abbas’s description of the 1948 war that had just appeared in the Times – an account based on blatant lies about Zionism and the founding of Israel and even about Abbas’s own life story. Resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is tough enough; it becomes much harder when one side insists on lying about the conflict’s origins.
In his Times op-ed, Abbas wrote, “Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.” Abbas didn’t explain how anyone could have recognized a United Nations-designated Palestinian state that Palestinian leaders and the Arab states themselves rejected. The Arab Higher Committee (AHC) was the recognized representative of the Palestinian people at the time of the U.N. partition vote. The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledgling Jewish state in rivers of blood.
Following instructions from the AHC, Palestinian militias and volunteers from neighboring Arab countries began attacking Jewish settlements after the U.N. partition plan was announced in November 1947. The irregular Arab units were ordered to take strategic strongholds and hold on until the expected invasion of Israel by regular Arab armies after the British withdrawal on May 15, 1948. What happened in Safed was typical of the bloody intercommunal warfare that soon convulsed the country.
Under the partition plan, Safed was assigned to the Jewish state, although Jews were vastly outnumbered by Arabs in the city. Elements of the Arab Liberation Army, the main Palestinian armed force, plus Jordanian irregular units, entered Safed’s Arab neighborhoods and began sporadic attacks on the Jewish quarter. Facing an invasion of the Galilee from Syria and Jordan, Jewish military commanders couldn’t afford to have armed Palestinian units behind their lines. On the night of May 8, reinforcements from the Palmach, the elite Jewish strike force, counterattacked and took the key Arab strongholds. Almost immediately, Safed’s Arabs began streaming out of the city toward the Syrian border.
Abbas even contradicted previous accounts he had offered in which he conceded that his family left Safed voluntarily – in part because of fear that the Jews would seek revenge for a murderous rampage by local Arabs against the Jewish community in 1929. In an interview on Palestinian radio, Abbas said, “We left [Safed] on foot at night to the Jordan River.… Eventually, we settled in Damascus. My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work.” There was no mention by Abbas in that earlier interview of living in a canvas tent.1
President Abbas’s historical distortions are at the very heart of the nakba myth (clearly not fact-checked by the Times) and are emblematic of the Palestinian leadership’s century-long refusal to accept a Jewish state in any part of the Arab Middle East. That obstinate rejection, not Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demurrals about Israel’s borders, remains the number one obstacle to peace in the Holy Land.
Of the troubles in Ireland, the poet William Butler Yeats once wrote, “Great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start.” In Palestine at the start, there was plenty of room – more than enough room for a prosperous Jewish state and a prosperous Arab state. After World War I ended with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations established the Mandate for Palestine, including all of the land that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, plus the entire territory east of the Jordan River now called the Kingdom of Jordan. The area Great Britain was expected to govern under the mandate was as large as Syria and about half as large as Iraq. Yet the total population at the time was less than 1 million, of whom 10 percent were Jews. It was in that vast, underdeveloped, and underpopulated territory that the British had promised, in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, to “support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
President Abbas’s historical distortions are at the very heart of the nakba myth
Prince Faisal – oldest son of Hussein, sharif of Mecca, and the leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks – was the only Arab leader to concede any rights to the Jews in Palestine. Having helped England achieve victory in the Great War, Faisal was promised the throne of Damascus in return. With British support assured for his own aspirations, Faisal was (briefly) in a generous mood about Jewish claims in Palestine. In 1919, he signed a joint statement with Chaim Weizmann, leader of the world Zionist movement, saying that “all necessary measures should be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.”
By the time Faisal was king of Syria, he had changed his mind about the Jews. He now declared that Britain should junk the Balfour Declaration and give all of Palestine to the Arabs. Despite this turnabout, the British remained quite indulgent with