The Saudi Peace Initiative: A Discrete Way to Destroy Israel, Based on an Ethical Lie
Most journalists haven't really gotten a good foothold into how they're going to frame the coming failure of Hamas-Israeli negotiations. But when it somehow works out that the Israelis are unable to come to an arrangement suitable to the terrorist group that wants to wipe out Israel, you'll read a lot about how Israel wasn't sufficiently gracious to the Saudi Initiative. The Saudi Initiative circumvents the US Road Map, which is a problem because Israel has already made concessions on the basis of the Road Map that the Palestinians are now unwilling to reciprocate - because they've got a new peace plan where they and Israel start negotiating all over again, but where they get to start with the unreciprocated concessions that Israel made under the Road Map. But that's not really the problem with it. The Saudi Initiative on its own would be unacceptable anyway, because of the small problem where it demands an uncondition return of 1948 Palestinian refugees into Israel proper. That's millions and millions of the most virulently anti-Israel Arabs on the planet overrunning Israel. So it's like what a two-state solution (one Jewish and one Arab) would look like, if you replaced the word "two" with "one" and took out any references to" Jewish". And from where does this magical right to deny Jewish self-determination come from? It's one of the oldest canards in the Middle East - the mythical, sacrosanct, UN-mandated, UN-reiterated, UN-celebrated totally unjustified and pathological "Palestinian Right of Return".
On May 14, 1948, the Jewish leadership declared independence for the Jewish State of Israel within the land that the UN had reserved for the Jewish State of Israel. While this might seem a natural way to declare a state to some, the combined Arab of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt invaded the next day - signaling that they, at least, did not consider it OK for Jews to declare a state on where Jews had been told it was OK to declare a state. The UN Secretary General called it "the first armed aggression which the world had seen since the end of" WWII, but it was actually just a very well-armed and foreign extension of the fight that Arab irregulars had been waging against local Jews since at least November 29, 1947. On that morning Arab snipers reacted to the UN resolution ending the British mandate over Palestine and reserving land for two states (one Jewish and one Arab) by murdering seven Jews in three separate attacks on buses.
By the time the war was over, 750,000 Arabs had left for the other side of the newly-created Jewish state. They were soon declared "refugees" by the Arab League and the United Nations, and today they - and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren - are still demanding to be let back into Israel. Fed and cared for in the safety of UN-run but significantly US-funded camps, these sometimes fifth-generation Palestinian "refugees" are some of the most extreme anti-Israel populations in the Arab world. Their "demands" take three forms: violent marches through the camps that the UN maintains for them, pathetic cries of victimization to the UN and the international community, and support for violence against Jews in Israel and abroad. They are the only permanent population of refugees in the world, yet they live in Arab countries. And no progress can be made on anything in the entire Middle East, because idiot Leftist activists and mendacious Arab countries still insist that the right of these people to flood Israel with three or four million of their closest, very hostile friends is a fundamental truth in international relations that must not be denied. The only way that it could be more absurd is if the entire mess was actually the Arab countries' fault. And, well, obviously...
There are still Palestinian refugees that hand the keys of their old houses - houses that no longer exist - from son to son and generation to generation. They are driven by a deep, pathological resentment that blames their miserable, UN-enabled existence on the evil Zionists. The entire mythos of Palestinian refugee life - from the actual Palestinian in the street to Leftist tourists who show up for a couple days to empathize and' show solidarity' - revolves around this festering hatred, built on this decade-old victim complex. Their hatred for Israel is a twisted narrative of reclaiming what is theirs by right (or was their father's, or grandfather's, or great-grandfather's), and it's buoyed by the moral indignation of activists who tell them that their version of justice will eventually be fulfilled if only they refuse to compromise long enough. And so you get these literally twisted images all over refugee camps. This one that was created by a Brit and photographed by a different Brit in celebration of the 'Palestinian cause':
The description under it includes: "The fact of the matter is that the people of Ayda camp, like so many other Palestinian refugee camps have not forgotten or relinguished their belief in their rights to live on their ancestral lands... This mural was created a year or two ago... it was designed by the children and youth of Ayda and it tells the story of their parents and grandparents lives and of course their own... I enjoyed seeing the great work that is going on with children and young people in the camp". Our point isn't that this photographer is an anti-Israel lunatic or even that he's malicious - his description makes him seem like a reasonably nice, misguided peacenik. What's scary is that this myth of a "right" to overrun Israel in the name of justice is an unquestioned and central part of the worldwide antipathy towards Israeli policy and people, even by people who just want everybody to get along.
Not a single Arab refugee would have had to leave his or her home, of course, if the Arab armies had never started the war in the first place. But in fairness, the length of the conflict and the constant low-level fighting surely contributed to the number of Arabs who ended up outside the Jewish State. Jewish fighters fought with desperation, often preferring death to surrender. This desperation was not just devotion to the cause: if it was only Arab desire for Jewish wealth and land that was behind the invasion, you might have seen more surrenders. But as news spread that advancing Arab forces were committing mass executions of captured soldiers, it became clear that Jewry was facing the prospect of another mass genocide, just a few years after the Holocaust. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - already known for broadcasting things like "Arabs, arise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you" - exhorted Arab armies to invade the new Jewish State. He announced: "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" Many anti-Israel advocates used to outright deny that these incitements ever took place, so debating those people has become a lot easier since primary documents on the Grand Mufti's sermons have been cataloged and made public in an organized way. Wars where the side defending its land knows that the two choices are to die fighting or die unarmed do not lend themselves to easy resolution.
As it was, Israel was almost entirely overrun in the first desperate days of the invasion. Jewish forces backed by 3 tanks and 5 artillery pieces were stretched across four fronts to meet Arab armies equipped with 270 tanks, 150 field guns, and 300 aircraft. Egyptian forces advanced to within 21 miles of Tel Aviv and were stopped only by a last stand of Jewish militia armed mostly with old rifles and Molotov cocktails. Jordanian troops advanced across the West Bank, wiping out Jewish communities and executing fighters who surrendered.
Arabs in the path of the invading armies often left for one or more of three reasons:
(1) They were told to get out of the way so that Arab armies would have an easier time committing genocide: as the foreign Arab armies advanced, they broadcast charming little radio messages to local Arabs about how they were about to cleanse Palestine of Jew. They told local Arabs to get out of the way so that the Arab armies could conduct their "war of extermination and a momentous massacre" without having to worry about hurting innocents (read: non-Jews). Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, said that "we will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." United recently these statements were not really in dispute. In the 1950s it wasn't all that controversial for a Palestinian refugee to complain in a Jordanian newspaper that "[t]he Arab government told us: get out so that we can get in". An official from the London Arab League Office could state matter-of-factly that "this wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to reenter and retake possession of their country". In many cases it was Arab armies themselves that expelled Arab villagers to make it easier for them to control the territory they were intending to overrun: even at the height of his blame-Israel scholarship, uber-New Historian Benny Morris (the founder of revisionist post-Zionist historiography) never denied that incontrovertible evidence exists for the claim that Arab soldiers repeatedly ordered Arab women and children out of villages, with Arab men following afterwards. These statements are all quite well-documented, and most Arabs didn't dream of denying them - until people realized that if you cocoon activists in insulated academic communities for long enough, you can just shamelessly lie.
(2) They were bribed with the promise of Jewish property: Arab villagers were also told that if they left they could come back to their villages later and pick up all the possessions of the by-then recently-murdered Jews. News of massacres of Jewish fighters and villagers by Arab invaders undoubtedly gave credence to these claims. The "Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha... pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean... advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down." It is now indisputable that up to 10 percent of the Arabs who are described as 'fleeing' from the Jewish state left before Israel even existed. They left because they knew that the Arab armies would attack the Jews sooner or later (and how did they know this even though we all know that Arab anti-Semitism didn't exist until the State of Israel... they must have been really good guessers). Declassified British documents about this phenomenon are also now regularly quoted back at anti-Israel advocates who deny that Arabs ever left their homes voluntarily.
(3) They were inspired by actual and constructed fear of Jews: Let's be blunt - in what was a civil war that had been simmering for decades, there were atrocities. There were undoubtedly some incidents where local Jews expelled local Arabs, although back then there was actually some credibility to the 'cycle of violence' claim of tit for tat ethnic retaliations. Many times the Jews were genuinely afraid that local Arabs would embrace the Mufti's call to his "Moslem brothers" to "murder all the Jews". Other times, there were some Jews who just didn't want to live among Arabs - many were sick of conflict, and some had been building up resentment for years in the face of the whole 'Arab irregulars murdering Jews' thing. But two claims have been blown way, way out of proportions.
The claim made - and made often - that there was a national Jewish conspiracy to throw out the Arabs is just insane insane. The desire of the internationalist, socialist Jewish leadership for a multi-ethnic state was so strong that the Proclamation of Independence literally begged Arabs to stay: "In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions....We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all." If Jewish leaders were in the habit of exterminating Arabs, they sure did a bad job - 14 percent of Israel's current population is Arab, made up of the people who stayed and their children. There are plenty of accounts of major cities and minor towns where Jewish leaders met with Arab leaders and committed Jewish resources to protecting and developing the local Arab populations - and in most of those places, the Arabs left anyway. There are documents of British officials expressing their outright dismay at irrational Arab fears of Jews and inexplicable Arab commitments to leave Israel.
The reason they were fleeing was because Arab leaders were lying about or magnifying Jewish atrocities. You can't get a pamphlet about the Palestinian issue on a college campus without having to read "factoids" about Dir Yassin (it's such a central part of the Palestinian victim-narrative that it comes up all the time - it's even in the caption of the picture linked to above). Dir Yassin was a village being used as a base for irregular Arab forces when it was attacked by Israeli forces (sound familiar?) What was it being used for, you ask, and why would it become a target of Jewish forces? Well, an honest historian would answer, it was one of the main strongholds in a siege that Arab irregulars were laying to Jerusalem during the "battle of the roads" that took place before the big Arab invasion - these irregulars used it to fire down on convoys delivering things like food and supplies to Jews who lived in the area. It was attacked as part of a military campaign to lift the siege.
Before the attack, a loudspeaker mounted on a truck by the Jewish soldiers to warn civilians to leave the location (sound familiar?) - although now there are common claims that the loudspeaker truck wasn't heard or didn't make it in time or wasn't authentic (sound... never mind, you understand). What happened next is one of the most bitterly contested historical questions in the Arab-Israeli conflict (unlike, say, the massacre three days later of 77 Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients - which the Arabs proudly boasted about... or, for that matter, the deliberate desecration of the bodies of the captured Israeli POWs that were murdered by Arab troops - which the Arabs proudly boasted about) On the Arab side, the number published at the time was 250-260 Arabs killed - that was almost certainly a lie by a good 150 civilians, but it was accepted because the figure was parroted by the New York Times (sound familiar?). On the Israeli side, 40 percent of the troops ended up as casualties - it would have been significantly less if the attack had been a surprise, but the loudspeaker... (sound familiar?)
The real ideologically and historically significant stories about the battle come from Arab accounts of atrocities: children murdered, pregnant women raped, etc. Those stories come from a number of sources, and it would be absurd to deny that the civilians who stayed in their houses rather than leave after the warning did not suffer casualties as Israeli troops had to fight irregulars hiding in those houses (sound familiar?). In addition, however, there are horrific tales of families being intentionally riddled with bullets, stories of organized rapes and humiliations, etc. For decades, these were used to besmirch Israel, both by left-leaning Israelis and by anti-Israel advocates (and we all know that war heroes turn peace activists are never inclined to confirm precisely the most politicized tales of massacres from the other side... unless they're setting up a run for office... or have an agenda relating to a recent conflict...) Now there are interviews from the people who got the tales off the ground in the first place - people like the editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news at the time, Hazem Nusseibeh - that indicate that these were fabrications that took on a politicized life of their own. Not only does he admit that the tales were fabricated so that "the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews", but he goes further and directly links these lies to the Palestinian refugee problem: it was "our biggest mistake," because "Palestinians fled in terror" rather than staying and fighting. The truth is somewhere in the middle - but the results are definitely known. It is almost universally accepted that the tales of Dir Yassin were a significant if not primary motivator for the Arabs who fled because they feared Israeli attacks – so even the Arabs that left out of fear and not because they wanted to come back to a Jew-free Palestine left in part because of exaggerations by Arab leaders.
So now it's 1948 and there are 750,000 Arabs living outside the borders of the Israeli State. None of them would have ever have left their homes if the Arab world had accepted the 1947 UN partition that created separate Israeli and Palestinian states, but they thought it would be better to start a genocidal war and wipe out Jews. It was a pattern that would become quite typical in the Arab-Israeli wars: the Arabs ignored the United Nations when they were starting the war and ran screaming for a UN ceasefire and preaching about UN legitimacy as soon as Israel started winning (the Syrian Prime Minister from the time later wrote in his memoirs that "only a few months separated our call to [local Arabs] to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return"). And so the United Nations passed a bunch of resolutions and began a ritual - still going strong for more than half a century - of condemning Israel for the plight of the Palestinians. It should be surreal, but it's so normal that people don't even notice how absurd it is.
And of course, no narrative of the total and complete injustice of Israel being blamed for Palestinian refugees would be complete without the final, standard, and absolutely true height of Arab and UN hypocrisy: 750,000+ Jews who were thrown out of Arab countries during the 1940s. More than the Arabs who left Israel. Unlike those Arabs, these Jews were actually thrown out of the (Arab) countries where they lived by (Arab) governments - and many got not a little roughed up as they were leaving. They aren't in UN camps. They aren't supporting suicide bombings. They aren't demanding access to homes that no longer exist. They were absorbed by Israel, and are now normal human beings who live normal lives without any advocacy of suicide bombing whatsoever. So spare us the pretentious sob story about how some Palestinian terrorist's great-grandfather had to leave his village, so in return a bunch of Jewish schoolchildren simply have to get blown up by a suicide bomber strapped to a belt of shrapnel and explosives.
Palestinian refugees never had to be refugees, they never should have been refugees, and it's not Israel's fault that they still are refugees. And even if they were forced out by Israel, it would still be well past time for them and the Arab states that keep them locked in camps to come to grips with reality and settle where they are. No matter what misguided peaceniks and slightly creepy activists say, they don't have a right to overrun a civilized nation-state with fanatical hysteria borne of unleashed resentment - and when Israel points that out in negotiations, you should expect those negotiations to fail and the failure to be blamed on Israel anyway.
On May 14, 1948, the Jewish leadership declared independence for the Jewish State of Israel within the land that the UN had reserved for the Jewish State of Israel. While this might seem a natural way to declare a state to some, the combined Arab of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt invaded the next day - signaling that they, at least, did not consider it OK for Jews to declare a state on where Jews had been told it was OK to declare a state. The UN Secretary General called it "the first armed aggression which the world had seen since the end of" WWII, but it was actually just a very well-armed and foreign extension of the fight that Arab irregulars had been waging against local Jews since at least November 29, 1947. On that morning Arab snipers reacted to the UN resolution ending the British mandate over Palestine and reserving land for two states (one Jewish and one Arab) by murdering seven Jews in three separate attacks on buses.
By the time the war was over, 750,000 Arabs had left for the other side of the newly-created Jewish state. They were soon declared "refugees" by the Arab League and the United Nations, and today they - and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren - are still demanding to be let back into Israel. Fed and cared for in the safety of UN-run but significantly US-funded camps, these sometimes fifth-generation Palestinian "refugees" are some of the most extreme anti-Israel populations in the Arab world. Their "demands" take three forms: violent marches through the camps that the UN maintains for them, pathetic cries of victimization to the UN and the international community, and support for violence against Jews in Israel and abroad. They are the only permanent population of refugees in the world, yet they live in Arab countries. And no progress can be made on anything in the entire Middle East, because idiot Leftist activists and mendacious Arab countries still insist that the right of these people to flood Israel with three or four million of their closest, very hostile friends is a fundamental truth in international relations that must not be denied. The only way that it could be more absurd is if the entire mess was actually the Arab countries' fault. And, well, obviously...
There are still Palestinian refugees that hand the keys of their old houses - houses that no longer exist - from son to son and generation to generation. They are driven by a deep, pathological resentment that blames their miserable, UN-enabled existence on the evil Zionists. The entire mythos of Palestinian refugee life - from the actual Palestinian in the street to Leftist tourists who show up for a couple days to empathize and' show solidarity' - revolves around this festering hatred, built on this decade-old victim complex. Their hatred for Israel is a twisted narrative of reclaiming what is theirs by right (or was their father's, or grandfather's, or great-grandfather's), and it's buoyed by the moral indignation of activists who tell them that their version of justice will eventually be fulfilled if only they refuse to compromise long enough. And so you get these literally twisted images all over refugee camps. This one that was created by a Brit and photographed by a different Brit in celebration of the 'Palestinian cause':
The description under it includes: "The fact of the matter is that the people of Ayda camp, like so many other Palestinian refugee camps have not forgotten or relinguished their belief in their rights to live on their ancestral lands... This mural was created a year or two ago... it was designed by the children and youth of Ayda and it tells the story of their parents and grandparents lives and of course their own... I enjoyed seeing the great work that is going on with children and young people in the camp". Our point isn't that this photographer is an anti-Israel lunatic or even that he's malicious - his description makes him seem like a reasonably nice, misguided peacenik. What's scary is that this myth of a "right" to overrun Israel in the name of justice is an unquestioned and central part of the worldwide antipathy towards Israeli policy and people, even by people who just want everybody to get along.
Not a single Arab refugee would have had to leave his or her home, of course, if the Arab armies had never started the war in the first place. But in fairness, the length of the conflict and the constant low-level fighting surely contributed to the number of Arabs who ended up outside the Jewish State. Jewish fighters fought with desperation, often preferring death to surrender. This desperation was not just devotion to the cause: if it was only Arab desire for Jewish wealth and land that was behind the invasion, you might have seen more surrenders. But as news spread that advancing Arab forces were committing mass executions of captured soldiers, it became clear that Jewry was facing the prospect of another mass genocide, just a few years after the Holocaust. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - already known for broadcasting things like "Arabs, arise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you" - exhorted Arab armies to invade the new Jewish State. He announced: "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" Many anti-Israel advocates used to outright deny that these incitements ever took place, so debating those people has become a lot easier since primary documents on the Grand Mufti's sermons have been cataloged and made public in an organized way. Wars where the side defending its land knows that the two choices are to die fighting or die unarmed do not lend themselves to easy resolution.
As it was, Israel was almost entirely overrun in the first desperate days of the invasion. Jewish forces backed by 3 tanks and 5 artillery pieces were stretched across four fronts to meet Arab armies equipped with 270 tanks, 150 field guns, and 300 aircraft. Egyptian forces advanced to within 21 miles of Tel Aviv and were stopped only by a last stand of Jewish militia armed mostly with old rifles and Molotov cocktails. Jordanian troops advanced across the West Bank, wiping out Jewish communities and executing fighters who surrendered.
Arabs in the path of the invading armies often left for one or more of three reasons:
(1) They were told to get out of the way so that Arab armies would have an easier time committing genocide: as the foreign Arab armies advanced, they broadcast charming little radio messages to local Arabs about how they were about to cleanse Palestine of Jew. They told local Arabs to get out of the way so that the Arab armies could conduct their "war of extermination and a momentous massacre" without having to worry about hurting innocents (read: non-Jews). Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, said that "we will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." United recently these statements were not really in dispute. In the 1950s it wasn't all that controversial for a Palestinian refugee to complain in a Jordanian newspaper that "[t]he Arab government told us: get out so that we can get in". An official from the London Arab League Office could state matter-of-factly that "this wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to reenter and retake possession of their country". In many cases it was Arab armies themselves that expelled Arab villagers to make it easier for them to control the territory they were intending to overrun: even at the height of his blame-Israel scholarship, uber-New Historian Benny Morris (the founder of revisionist post-Zionist historiography) never denied that incontrovertible evidence exists for the claim that Arab soldiers repeatedly ordered Arab women and children out of villages, with Arab men following afterwards. These statements are all quite well-documented, and most Arabs didn't dream of denying them - until people realized that if you cocoon activists in insulated academic communities for long enough, you can just shamelessly lie.
(2) They were bribed with the promise of Jewish property: Arab villagers were also told that if they left they could come back to their villages later and pick up all the possessions of the by-then recently-murdered Jews. News of massacres of Jewish fighters and villagers by Arab invaders undoubtedly gave credence to these claims. The "Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha... pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean... advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down." It is now indisputable that up to 10 percent of the Arabs who are described as 'fleeing' from the Jewish state left before Israel even existed. They left because they knew that the Arab armies would attack the Jews sooner or later (and how did they know this even though we all know that Arab anti-Semitism didn't exist until the State of Israel... they must have been really good guessers). Declassified British documents about this phenomenon are also now regularly quoted back at anti-Israel advocates who deny that Arabs ever left their homes voluntarily.
(3) They were inspired by actual and constructed fear of Jews: Let's be blunt - in what was a civil war that had been simmering for decades, there were atrocities. There were undoubtedly some incidents where local Jews expelled local Arabs, although back then there was actually some credibility to the 'cycle of violence' claim of tit for tat ethnic retaliations. Many times the Jews were genuinely afraid that local Arabs would embrace the Mufti's call to his "Moslem brothers" to "murder all the Jews". Other times, there were some Jews who just didn't want to live among Arabs - many were sick of conflict, and some had been building up resentment for years in the face of the whole 'Arab irregulars murdering Jews' thing. But two claims have been blown way, way out of proportions.
The claim made - and made often - that there was a national Jewish conspiracy to throw out the Arabs is just insane insane. The desire of the internationalist, socialist Jewish leadership for a multi-ethnic state was so strong that the Proclamation of Independence literally begged Arabs to stay: "In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions....We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all." If Jewish leaders were in the habit of exterminating Arabs, they sure did a bad job - 14 percent of Israel's current population is Arab, made up of the people who stayed and their children. There are plenty of accounts of major cities and minor towns where Jewish leaders met with Arab leaders and committed Jewish resources to protecting and developing the local Arab populations - and in most of those places, the Arabs left anyway. There are documents of British officials expressing their outright dismay at irrational Arab fears of Jews and inexplicable Arab commitments to leave Israel.
The reason they were fleeing was because Arab leaders were lying about or magnifying Jewish atrocities. You can't get a pamphlet about the Palestinian issue on a college campus without having to read "factoids" about Dir Yassin (it's such a central part of the Palestinian victim-narrative that it comes up all the time - it's even in the caption of the picture linked to above). Dir Yassin was a village being used as a base for irregular Arab forces when it was attacked by Israeli forces (sound familiar?) What was it being used for, you ask, and why would it become a target of Jewish forces? Well, an honest historian would answer, it was one of the main strongholds in a siege that Arab irregulars were laying to Jerusalem during the "battle of the roads" that took place before the big Arab invasion - these irregulars used it to fire down on convoys delivering things like food and supplies to Jews who lived in the area. It was attacked as part of a military campaign to lift the siege.
Before the attack, a loudspeaker mounted on a truck by the Jewish soldiers to warn civilians to leave the location (sound familiar?) - although now there are common claims that the loudspeaker truck wasn't heard or didn't make it in time or wasn't authentic (sound... never mind, you understand). What happened next is one of the most bitterly contested historical questions in the Arab-Israeli conflict (unlike, say, the massacre three days later of 77 Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients - which the Arabs proudly boasted about... or, for that matter, the deliberate desecration of the bodies of the captured Israeli POWs that were murdered by Arab troops - which the Arabs proudly boasted about) On the Arab side, the number published at the time was 250-260 Arabs killed - that was almost certainly a lie by a good 150 civilians, but it was accepted because the figure was parroted by the New York Times (sound familiar?). On the Israeli side, 40 percent of the troops ended up as casualties - it would have been significantly less if the attack had been a surprise, but the loudspeaker... (sound familiar?)
The real ideologically and historically significant stories about the battle come from Arab accounts of atrocities: children murdered, pregnant women raped, etc. Those stories come from a number of sources, and it would be absurd to deny that the civilians who stayed in their houses rather than leave after the warning did not suffer casualties as Israeli troops had to fight irregulars hiding in those houses (sound familiar?). In addition, however, there are horrific tales of families being intentionally riddled with bullets, stories of organized rapes and humiliations, etc. For decades, these were used to besmirch Israel, both by left-leaning Israelis and by anti-Israel advocates (and we all know that war heroes turn peace activists are never inclined to confirm precisely the most politicized tales of massacres from the other side... unless they're setting up a run for office... or have an agenda relating to a recent conflict...) Now there are interviews from the people who got the tales off the ground in the first place - people like the editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news at the time, Hazem Nusseibeh - that indicate that these were fabrications that took on a politicized life of their own. Not only does he admit that the tales were fabricated so that "the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews", but he goes further and directly links these lies to the Palestinian refugee problem: it was "our biggest mistake," because "Palestinians fled in terror" rather than staying and fighting. The truth is somewhere in the middle - but the results are definitely known. It is almost universally accepted that the tales of Dir Yassin were a significant if not primary motivator for the Arabs who fled because they feared Israeli attacks – so even the Arabs that left out of fear and not because they wanted to come back to a Jew-free Palestine left in part because of exaggerations by Arab leaders.
So now it's 1948 and there are 750,000 Arabs living outside the borders of the Israeli State. None of them would have ever have left their homes if the Arab world had accepted the 1947 UN partition that created separate Israeli and Palestinian states, but they thought it would be better to start a genocidal war and wipe out Jews. It was a pattern that would become quite typical in the Arab-Israeli wars: the Arabs ignored the United Nations when they were starting the war and ran screaming for a UN ceasefire and preaching about UN legitimacy as soon as Israel started winning (the Syrian Prime Minister from the time later wrote in his memoirs that "only a few months separated our call to [local Arabs] to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return"). And so the United Nations passed a bunch of resolutions and began a ritual - still going strong for more than half a century - of condemning Israel for the plight of the Palestinians. It should be surreal, but it's so normal that people don't even notice how absurd it is.
And of course, no narrative of the total and complete injustice of Israel being blamed for Palestinian refugees would be complete without the final, standard, and absolutely true height of Arab and UN hypocrisy: 750,000+ Jews who were thrown out of Arab countries during the 1940s. More than the Arabs who left Israel. Unlike those Arabs, these Jews were actually thrown out of the (Arab) countries where they lived by (Arab) governments - and many got not a little roughed up as they were leaving. They aren't in UN camps. They aren't supporting suicide bombings. They aren't demanding access to homes that no longer exist. They were absorbed by Israel, and are now normal human beings who live normal lives without any advocacy of suicide bombing whatsoever. So spare us the pretentious sob story about how some Palestinian terrorist's great-grandfather had to leave his village, so in return a bunch of Jewish schoolchildren simply have to get blown up by a suicide bomber strapped to a belt of shrapnel and explosives.
Palestinian refugees never had to be refugees, they never should have been refugees, and it's not Israel's fault that they still are refugees. And even if they were forced out by Israel, it would still be well past time for them and the Arab states that keep them locked in camps to come to grips with reality and settle where they are. No matter what misguided peaceniks and slightly creepy activists say, they don't have a right to overrun a civilized nation-state with fanatical hysteria borne of unleashed resentment - and when Israel points that out in negotiations, you should expect those negotiations to fail and the failure to be blamed on Israel anyway.
