THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # 128, May 20, 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
ABBAS'S FABLE
By Dr. Efraim Karsh
MAHMOUD ABBAS: HIS DISTORTED SAGA OF THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL AS A SOVEREIGN NATION-STATE -- TURNING
THE ARAB AGGRESSORS INTO HAPLESS VICTIMS & THE JEWISH VICTIMS INTO MERCILESS CONQUERORS -- NOTHING SAID
ABOUT THE JEWISH ACCEPTANCE OF PALESTINIAN ARAB STATEHOOD, AS PART OF THE UNITED NATIONS PARTITION
RESOLUTION OF NOVEMBER, 1947, LET ALONE THE VIOLENT PALESTINIAN RESPONSE TO THE RESOLUTION -- NO MENTION
OF THE FACT THAT HUGE NUMBERS OF PALESTINIAN REFUGEES WERE DRIVEN FROM THEIR HOMES BY THEIR OWN
LEADERS &/OR ARAB MILITARY MILITARY FORCES WHICH HAD ENTERED THE COUNTRY TO FIGHT THE JEWS & PREVENT
PALESTINIAN ARABS FROM BECOMING CITIZENS OF THE PROSPECTIVE JEWISH STATE -- NO ACTS OF FORCIBLE ARAB
EXPULSION ON THE PART OF THE JEWS -- LACK OF COMMUNAL COHESION AMONG PALESTINIAN ARABS -- RAPID
UNRAVELING OF PALESTINIAN SOCIETY
FULL STORY:
In the opening episode of the iconic series, Boardwalk Empire, Nucky Thompson, Atlantic City's bootlegging
strongman, tells a group of pro-prohibition women activists a gutwrenching story about his abject childhood, ravaged
by the vagaries of alcoholism. Asked by his driver, a young aspiring gangster, about the story's veracity, Thompson
retorts: "The first law of politics is to never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
This episode comes to mind upon reading Mahmoud Abbas's recent New York Times op-ed. Turning the saga
of Israel's birth upside down, the socalled "moderate" PLO Chairman and President of the Palestinian National
Authority says not a word of the Jewish acceptance of Palestinian Arab statehood, as part of the UN partition
resolution of November, 1947, let alone the violent Palestinian response to the resolution. Instead, he reminisces on his
childhood in an attempt to turn aggressors into hapless victims and vice versa.
"Sixty-three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean City of Safed and flee
with his family to Syria," Abbas writes.
"He took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all
the arriving refugees. Though he and his family
wished for decades to return to their home and
homeland, they were denied that most basic of
human rights. That child's story, like that of so
many other Palestinians, is mine."
But was he expelled? Hardly. Not only did Abbas reveal a couple of years ago, in an Arabic interview, that his family
had not been forcefully expelled and that his father was affluent enough to provide for them for a year after their flight
(so no canvas tent), but none of the 170,000-180,000 Palestinian Arabs fleeing urban centers, in the five-and-a-half
months from the passing of the UN resolution to Israel's proclamation on May 14, 1948, were expelled by the Jews.
Quite the reverse, in fact, huge numbers of these refugees were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by
Arab military forces which had entered the country to fight the Jews, whether out of military considerations or to
prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state.
In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the City of
Haifa (on April 21-22) on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective "government" of the Palestinian
Arabs, despite strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier, Tiberias's 6,000-strong Arab
community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes. In Jaffa, Palestine's largest
Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the Arab
Higher Committee ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several
neighborhoods.
And what about Safed? Having declined an offer by General Hugh Stockwell, commander of the British forces in
northern Palestine, to mediate a truce, the Arabs responded to the British evacuation of the city with a heavy assault
on the tiny Jewish community, less than a quarter their size. "Upon the British evacuation on April 16, we occupied all
the City's strategic positions: the Citadel, the Government House, and the police post on Mount Canaan," recalled a
local Arab fighter.
"We were the majority, and the feeling among us
was that we would defeat the Jews with sticks
and rocks."
What this prognosis failed to consider was the tenacity of the Jewish resolve to hold on to Safed, awarded by the
partition resolution to the prospective Jewish state, on the one hand, and the intensity of Arab flight psychosis, on the
other. As tens of thousands of Arabs streamed out of Tiberias and Haifa within days of the British evacuation of Safed,
members of the City's leading families and ordinary residents alike decided that now was the time to escape – which is
probably when Abbas's affluent family fled. In the words of a British intelligence report, "Such is their state of fear [that]
Arabs are beginning to evacuate Safed, although the Jews have not yet attacked them."
In a desperate bid to save the day, a delegation of local notables traveled to Damascus, only to be reprimanded as
cowards fleeing the battlefield and ordered to keep on fighting. A subsequent visit by Mayor Zaki Qadura to the royal
court in Amman was far more affable, yet equally inconclusive. While King Abdullah was evidently moved by the
mayor's pleas, he argued that there was nothing he could do before the termination of the mandate on May 15 and that
Qadura had better return to Damascus and put his case to President Shukri Quwatly. The Mayor dutifully complied,
and, following his visit to Damascus, some 130 pan-Arab fighters (of the socalled Arab Liberation Army) were sent to
Safed, arriving in the city on May 9.
This was too little, too late. As fighting intensified, the trickle of escapees turned into a hemorrhage.
On May 2, following the bombing of the Arab quarter by the deafening, albeit highly ineffective, home-made "David's
mortar," scores of Arabs fled Safed en route to the Jordan Valley, accompanied by a substantial number of Arab
Liberation Army fighters. Four days later, the ALA's regional commander reported that "the majority of the inhabitants
have left [Safed's neighboring] villages.
He added: "Their morale has collapsed completely."
Heavy artillery bombardments of Jewish neighborhoods failed to do the trick, and, as the final battle for the City was
joined on the night of May 9, a mass flight ensued. By the time fighting was over the next morning, Safed's entire Arab
population had taken to the road; a day later, Hagana patrols reported that "the [Arab] quarter had emptied to a man,"
with evacuees leaving behind "a huge quantity of weapons and ammunition."
Such were the circumstances of the fall of Safed. There was no act of Jewish expulsion, as there were none in other
cities that were rapidly emptying of their Arab residents at the time.
Rather it was fear that acted as the foremost catalyst of the rapid unraveling of Palestinian Arab society, reinforced by
the local Palestinians' disillusionment with their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in forcing widespread
evacuations, and, above all, a lack of communal cohesion or of a willingness, especially at the highest levels, to
subordinate personal interest to the general good.
But why let the truth get in the way of a good story?
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Efraim Karsh, author most recently of the book, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven & London: Yale
University Press, 2007) and Research Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University
of London, U.K., is incoming Director of the Middle East Forum. A graduate in Arabic and Modern Middle East History
from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and holding the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in International Relations from Tel Aviv
University, Dr. Karsh has held academic posts at Harvard University, Columbia University, the Sorbonne, the London
School of Economics, Helsinki University, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Kennan
Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C., and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv
University.
Founder and Editor of the scholarly journal Israel Affairs, Dr. Karsh has written extensively on Middle East
politics, Soviet foreign policy, and European affairs. A regular media commentator, he has appeared on U.K. and U.S.
television and radio and contributed articles to leading newspapers in Britain and the U.S.A., among them the Wall
Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Telegraph, and The
Times (of London).
The foregoing article by Dr. Efraim Karsh was originally published in the Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2011, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(URL: http://www.meforum.org/2909/abbas-fable)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
May 20, 2011
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