Dear David,

You posted on Wednesday, 22 February 2017 12:54:46 PM

“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.”

You then posted on Saturday, 25 February 2017 9:43:32 PM

“Here are some contemporary Arab sources as evidence:”

Others should beware, but you rely on Arab sources when it suits you.

The Arabs could have left for several reasons:

1. Fear of what they would suffer from both armies.
2. They were driven out by Jewish forces
3. They were encouraged to leave by Arab broadcasts

All of the above could be true. You have not presented any reliable evidence that most left for reason 3.

I understand why you will not answer my question about the reason for not allowing the Arabs to return to their homes. The fact is there is no good reason. It was to establish a Jewish state. To admit that would be admitting that the Jewish state was founded on ethnic cleansing.

Australia, countries in the Americas and other nations were founded on getting rid of indigenous people. If we are to believe the Book of Joshua the ancient Israelites exterminated many of the Canaanites.

Joshua 6:21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

The Book of Joshua may be and probably is legend. However, the Jewish claim to Israel is based on the Bible, and the Bible describes genocide.

It is unreasonable to demand that Jews be better than English, Spanish, Americans and others who have taken the land from people who were living there. Ancient biblical mythology is no justification for taking Israel. Jew hatred promoted during centuries of Christianity caused Jews to seek a place of refuge. Unfortunately other people were living in that homeland claimed on the basis of past genocide.

There should be no Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim states. No state should discriminate among its citizenry.

It seems Yuyutsu's family lived peacefully side by side with Arabs for generations. It is the murder rampage by Zionists in 1948 that generated the well justified hatred by its Arab victims that has put Yuyuysu's family at risk. Whether they would take it out on a family that lives in Palestine by birthright who knows? History tells how the Russians went through East Prussia like a packet of salts. It was the Huns, not the Russians, that put the people of East Prussia at risk by their own arrogance while in Russia. Certainly the dismantling of Israel needs to be negotiated step by step to preserve the human rights of families born there so that the status quo prior to the foreign terrorist invasion can be restored, including religious freedom and no ethnic overlords.

The alternative is Sharia, which couldn't happen to more deserving people than the foreign settlers but would be a gross injustice to locally born inhabitants.

Dear EmperorJulian,

There were many outbreaks of violence in the area of Palestine before 1948. The Hebron Massacre was just one of many:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre

"The Hebron massacre refers to the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.[1] The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked. Many of the 435 Jews who survived were hidden by local Arab families.[2][3] Soon after, all Hebron's Jews were evacuated by the British authorities.[4] Many returned in 1931, but almost all were evacuated at the outbreak of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. The massacre formed part of the 1929 Palestine riots, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed, and brought the centuries-old Jewish presence in Hebron to an end.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

The massacre, together with that of Jews in Safed, sent shock waves through Jewish communities in Palestine and around the world. It led to the re-organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Haganah, which later became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces.[13] In the metanarrative of Zionism, according to Michelle Campos, the event became 'a central symbol of Jewish persecution at the hands of bloodthirsty Arabs'[14] and was 'engraved in the national psyche of Israeli Jews', particularly those who settled in Hebron after 1967.[15] Hillel Cohen regards the massacre as marking a point-of-no-return in Arab-Jewish relations, and forcing the Mizrahi Jews to join forces with Zionism.[16]"

It is a tragedy in which both sides have played their part.

#davidf

We are getting closer to a meeting of minds as you now agree:

"The Arabs could have left for several reasons:

1.Fear of what they would suffer from both armies
2. They were driven out by Jewish forces
3. They were encouraged to leave by Arab broadcasts."

You misunderstand my observation to double check Arab sources.

THe Arab sources that you seek to deny are contemporaneous accounts of what transpired - not AArab propaganda sources.

Here is another contemporaneous account from a non-Arab

Kenneth O.Bilby, the correspondent in Palestine for the New York Herald Tribune during the War of Independence wrote in a book published shortly afterwards:

"The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.

After the war, the Palestine Arab leaders did try to help people -- including their own -- to forget that it was they who had called for the exodus in the early spring of 1948. They now blamed the leaders of the invading Arab states themselves. These had added their voices to the exodus call, though not until some weeks after the Palestine Arab Higher Committee had taken a stand."
- Kenneth O. Bilby, New Star in the Middle East, (Doubleday, 1950).

How many teeth do I have to draw and how many contemporary accounts do I have to post before you agree that the majority of the Arabs left of their own volition and were not uprooted by the Jews.

Dear David,

I don't deny that some Arabs left of their own volition. You keep wanting me to agree that most of the Arabs left of their own volition, but I have not seen any evidence that most of them left of their own volition.

Whether they left of their own volition or not why should they not be allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? There is nothing wrong in fleeing a war zone for any reason. Even if most of them fled of their own volition they should be able to return to their homes once the war was over. It seems that you are condemning people for fleeing a war zone. To flee a war zone rather than staying in a war zone where one may be killed seems only good sense regardless of the reason that they fled.

Even if you presented evidence that most of them fled of their own volition I would still question why they were not allowed to come back to their homes.

continued

continued

One could go back to the Alien Exclusion Act of 1905 in Great Britain and the 1924 restriction of immigration by the US in 1924. The Alien Exclusion Act promoted by Balfour kept Jews fleeing oppression in czarist Russia from coming to England, but Balfour who seems to be an antisemite made a declaration which promoted a Jewish homeland in the territory of another country in 1917. The restrictive 1924 immigration law in the US made it difficult for Jews fleeing the Nazis to come to the USA. Most countries attending the Evian conference on refugees in 1938 denied Jewish refugees entry into their country. In desperation Jews turned to Palestine. If other countries had been more willing to accept Jews the state of Israel would have been unnecessary. As it was Jews were compelled to make a nation where other people were living. The Arabs who were not allowed to return to their homes were in part the victims not only of the state of Israel but of those nations who refused entry to Jews fleeing persecution.

The Jewish soldiers who established the state of Israel were not blood-thirsty monsters as EmperorJulian would have it, but the Arabs who fled a war zone for various reasons and were not allowed to return to their homes were victims. Ultimately they were victims in part of the Jew hatred promoted for centuries by Christianity. In establishing a country where state and religion were separate the US was a country which developed a way for people of different religions to live in peace. Unfortunately Christian promoted Jew hatred still existed in the US so the US excluded many Jewish refugees. It is a pity that Israel which calls itself democratic is a state where religion and the government are not separate as is necessary for democracy.