Dear David Singer,

In the Arab-Israeli conflict both sides lie. I was told and I believed that the Arabs who fled their homes in the 1948 War of Independence fled because they were told to by the Arabs and would return with advancing Arab armies. It was a lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

I believed that lie and feel bothered about it. Neither the Arab nor the Israeli side can be trusted. I think it is wise to doubt both sides.

I can remember as a small child before there was a state of Israel being chased by other children who said, "Jewy pewy, go back to Palestine." I was born and lived in the United States. That was my country. I now am a resident of Australia. I have had a good life in both the United States and Australia. When someone talks about making Aliyah to Israel I think of those kids chasing me. I have a right to live where I am living and object to being told I should go to a foreign country. I find it equally objectionable to be told that by a Jew hater or a Zionist.

Dear David,

You wrote: “This lie is but one of the many lies perpetrated over the years by Arab propagandists.

Repeated over and over again and not being challenged they eventually become accepted as truth.

I hope you never make this claim again - and correct others who you see making the same claim.

Fake news was being distributed about the conflict in Palestine by Arab propagandists long before President Trump made fake news an issue.

Beware anyone who seeks to rely on Arab sources for information on the Jewish-Arab conflict. Double check the facts you use from such sources before rushing into print.”

Will you be as scrupulous about Israeli propaganda as you are asking others to be about Arab propaganda? I am referring to Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who exposed the lie about Arabs leaving their villages voluntarily during the War of Independence. That lie has been repeated over and over. I used to believe it and am angry about being lied to.

Unfortunately President Trump is a monumental liar who tries to divert attention from his lies by accusing the media of fake news when it is he who has lied. One example of his lies is his claim that the murder rate is high when it is the lowest that it has been in many years in the US. Trump would like to shut everybody up who criticizes him in any way.

#davidf

You quote Benny Morris:

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

You do this blissfully in ignorance (I would hope not deliberately) of what Morris himself wrote in the Irish Times on 21 February 2008:

"The Palestinian Arabs were not responsible "in some bizarre way" (David Norris, January 31st) for what befell them in 1948. Their responsibility was very direct and simple.

In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947 (No. 181), they launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.

It is true, as Erskine Childers pointed out long ago, that there were no Arab radio broadcasts urging the Arabs to flee en masse; indeed, there were broadcasts by several Arab radio stations urging them to stay put. But, on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22nd, plead with them to stay, to no avail.

Most of Palestine's 700,000 "refugees" fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops."

Are you prepared to admit that the Arabs fleeing Palestine did so mainly of their own volition?

According to first-hand information that I got from family-members who were in Israel in 1948, there was chaos, there was no central policy on either side: on the Arab side, different villages and towns received different instructions from their local leaders and surrounding militias and on the Israeli side, the decisions about what to do with the local Arab population was left to each individual local military commander, usually at the level of captains who were in their early 20's - some placed the Arabs on trucks and expelled them, some ignored them and others asked them to stay, all at their personal whim. Also, at least in some cases, Arab villagers fled because they had ground to believe that the Arab militias that were fighting around their villages were going to rape their women.

ear David,

I am not prepared to follow your line which is simply that Arabs lie. Israelis tell the truth. They both lie sometimes. They both tell the truth sometimes. Neither are all good. Neither are all bad. They are all human.

Yuyutsu's last post coincides with what I can make of the situation.

I feel it is bad when one ethnic or religious group dominates another which is what has happened in Israel. The only fair solution I see is to have one state which is no longer Jewish, Muslim or Arab but a state for all the people living in it which does not discriminate as to ethnicity or religion. I am sick of this crap talking about a Jewish democracy. Democracy is not tied to any ethnicity or religion. If my country were officially a Christian country I would be a second class citizen as I am a Jew. In a Jewish country non-Jews are second citizens. you know that, David. You don't live in Israel. You live in a country where most people are Christian, but if the government demanded your country to be called Christian I doubt very much that you would like it. You are a propagandist for a Jewish state, and you remain willfully blind to the consequences of supporting ethnic nationalism. Propaganda is one-sided, and an enemy of truth.

I realise that if I had been a European Jew who survived the Holocaust I would have welcomed the chance to go to Israel. I recognise that the Arab armies tried to destroy the new state, and they were fought off. However, the result was that one people now dominates another people, and that is neither good nor democratic. it is tragedy.

The truth remains that any genetic overlordship is a blot which in Ahmedinijad's words merits sweeping from the face of the earth as was Boer South Africa (which looked to be a permanent fixture until the eve of its comeuppance when the world finally became fed up with it as it will with racist Israel). Boer incursions into land outside its borders especially in South West Africa hastened its demise. The Zionist land grabs in Palestine for settlements for genetically chosen recipients is bringing the demise of racist Israel closer, and if it ends up in one state governed by Sharia "law" because of its refusal to negotiate any deal in good faith then it's asked for it (and betrayed its residents who need a secure, peaceful life).

It could always agree to the status quo ante the Zionist Nakba in which Jews and Arabs lived peaceably in the one territory for centuries, but the chance of any such solution fades daily.