Very cool video regarding Israel's defensible borders and territory negotiations.

[Kev]

Myth
"Arab leaders never encouraged the Palestinians to flee."
Fact
A plethora of evidence exists demonstrating that Palestinians were encouraged to leave their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies.
The Economist, a frequent critic of the Zionists, reported on October 2, 1948: “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”
Time’s report of the battle for Haifa (May 3, 194 was similar: “The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.”
Benny Morris, the historian who documented instances where Palestinians were expelled, also found that Arab leaders encouraged their brethren to leave. Starting in December 1947, he said, “Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages in certain areas, lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments.” He concluded, “There can be no exaggerating the importance of these early Arab-initiated evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual exodus, of the remaining rural and urban populations” (Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 590.)
The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following the March 8, 1948, instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes: “Any opposition to this order... is an obstacle to the holy war... and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.” The Arab Higher Committee also ordered the evacuation of “several dozen villages, as well as the removal of dependents from dozens more” in April-July 1948. “The invading Arab armies also occasionally ordered whole villages to depart, so as not to be in their way” (Middle Eastern Studies, January 1986; See also Morris, pp. 263 & 590-592).
Morris also said that in early May units of the Arab Legion ordered the evacuation of all women and children from the town of Beisan. The Arab Liberation Army was also reported to have ordered the evacuation of another village south of Haifa. The departure of the women and children, Morris says, “tended to sap the morale of the menfolk who were left behind to guard the homes and fields, contributing ultimately to the final evacuation of villages. Such two-tier evacuation — women and children first, the men following weeks later — occurred in Qumiya in the Jezreel Valley, among the Awarna bedouin in Haifa Bay and in various other places.”
In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948-49, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave:
“Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return” (The Memoirs of Haled al Azm, Beirut, 1973, Part 1, pp. 386-387).
Who gave such orders? Leaders like such as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, who declared: “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” (Myron Kaufman, The Coming Destruction of Israel, NY: The American Library Inc., 1970, pp. 26-27).
The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: “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 re*enter and retake possession of their country” (Edward Atiyah, The Arabs, London: Penguin Books, 1955, p. 183).
“The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two,” Monsignor George Hakim, a Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada al-Janub (August 16, 194. “Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the ’Zionist gangs’ very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.”
On April 3, 1949, the Near East Broadcasting Station ( Cyprus ) said: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem” (Samuel Katz, Battleground-Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, NY: Bantam Books, 1985, p. 15).
“The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies,” according to the Jordanian newspaper Filastin, (February 19, 1949).
One refugee quoted in the Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), said: “The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.”
“The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade,” said Habib Issa in the New York Lebanese paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951). “He 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... Brotherly 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.”
The Arabs’ fear was naturally exacerbated by stories of real and imagined Jewish atrocities following the attack on Deir Yassin. The native population lacked leaders who could calm them; their spokesmen, such as the Arab Higher Committee, were operating from the safety of neighboring states and did more to arouse their fears than to pacify them. Local military leaders were of little or no comfort. In one instance the commander of Arab troops in Safed went to Damascus. The following day, his troops withdrew from the town. When the residents realized they were defenseless, they fled in panic. “As Palestinian military power was swiftly and dramatically crushed, and the Haganah demonstrated almost unchallenged superiority in successive battles,” Benny Morris noted, “Arab morale cracked, giving way to general, blind, panic, or a ‘psychosis of flight,’ as one IDF intelligence report put it” (King Abdallah, My Memoirs Completed, (London: Longman Group, Ltd., 197, p. xvi; Morris, p. 591).
According to Dr. Walid al-Qamhawi, a former member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, “it was collective fear, moral disintegration and chaos in every field that exiled the Arabs of Tiberias, Haifa and dozens of towns and villages” (Joseph Schechtman, The Refugee in the World, NY: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1963, p. 186).
As panic spread throughout Palestine, the early trickle of refugees became a flood, numbering more than 200,000 by the time the provisional government declared the independence of the State of Israel.
Even Jordan’s King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs, blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:
The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue (Yehoshofat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes To Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972, p. 364).
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.”
— Palestinian Authority (then) Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) (Falastin a-Thaura, (March 1976)

[Kirkland Laing]

Bilbo, let's assume the Israeli propaganda you got from the Jewish Virtual Library is all true and the objective assessments of Jewish and other historians and the actual historical record, the BBC monitoring radio broadcasts etc. is all wrong. Let's say the Arab armies did encourage the Palestinians to leave their homes. So what? Let's say some foreign army invades the south coast and the British government tell people living there to leave their homes as they'll be in the middle of a war zone and in great danger. So you leave your home and head north. After whatever military action is over you still own your home, right? You still own the land and the property. If that's the best excuse the Israelis have for ethnically cleansing a million Palestinians from their homes, mostly rounded up and put on trucks at gunpoint as is endlessly documented even in the memiors of former Israeli prime ministers who took part in the ethnic cleansing, then it's a pretty pathetic excuse, no?

[Kev]

Bilbo, let's assume the Israeli propaganda you got from the Jewish Virtual Library is all true and the objective assessments of Jewish and other historians and the actual historical record, the BBC monitoring radio broadcasts etc. is all wrong. Let's say the Arab armies did encourage the Palestinians to leave their homes. So what? Let's say some foreign army invades the south coast and the British government tell people living there to leave their homes as they'll be in the middle of a war zone and in great danger. So you leave your home and head north. After whatever military action is over you still own your home, right? You still own the land and the property. If that's the best excuse the Israelis have for ethnically cleansing a million Palestinians from their homes, mostly rounded up and put on trucks at gunpoint as is endlessly documented even in the memiors of former Israeli prime ministers who took part in the ethnic cleansing, then it's a pretty pathetic excuse, no?

It's the Arab's who invaded the Jews mate that caused the Palestinains to flee not the other round. The Arabs invaded on three different fronts the day after the British mandate expired. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria all went to war with Israel and they told the Palestinians (who were on the Arab side) to get out the way whilst they wiped the Jews out.

Only they didn't, they got their asses kicked utterly by a nation only a day old. They also expelled 800,000 Jews from their own Arab lands. Israel took them in at no cost to the rest of the world whilst the Arabs left the Palestinians to rot so they could continue to use them as a propaganda campaign against Israel.

To continue your analagy further if Britain, or indeed any Western World country had a colony of settlers somewhere and then told them to move aside for a moment whilst we conquer the rest of the land for you, but then got utterly beaten, my guess is they would be legally obligated to take the colonists back and offer them homes seeing as their aggression had lost their's originally.

If they had also expelled 800,000 people who shared ancestory with the side they were fighting, and took billions of pounds worth of property and land in so doing, they would probably use that land, property and money towards rehousing their own colonists and giving them full citizenship rights in their countries, just like Israel did for the 800,00 Arab Jewish refugees the above nations made homeless and destitute.

I guess you'll continue to ignore this point however and not even address it.

[Gandalf]

Kirkland isn't the only one who misses points, Bilbo.

I gave you a very basic list covering some of the issues which are pertinent to today and you completely avoided all of them. I guess they aren't very easy for any rational person to defend, but I was sure you would find some kind of off the wall spin.

[Gandalf]

Mind you, I should have kept quiet. I almost had the last word!

[Kirkland Laing]

Bilbo, let's assume the Israeli propaganda you got from the Jewish Virtual Library is all true and the objective assessments of Jewish and other historians and the actual historical record, the BBC monitoring radio broadcasts etc. is all wrong. Let's say the Arab armies did encourage the Palestinians to leave their homes. So what? Let's say some foreign army invades the south coast and the British government tell people living there to leave their homes as they'll be in the middle of a war zone and in great danger. So you leave your home and head north. After whatever military action is over you still own your home, right? You still own the land and the property. If that's the best excuse the Israelis have for ethnically cleansing a million Palestinians from their homes, mostly rounded up and put on trucks at gunpoint as is endlessly documented even in the memiors of former Israeli prime ministers who took part in the ethnic cleansing, then it's a pretty pathetic excuse, no?

It's the Arab's who invaded the Jews mate that caused the Palestinains to flee not the other round. The Arabs invaded on three different fronts the day after the British mandate expired. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria all went to war with Israel and they told the Palestinians (who were on the Arab side) to get out the way whilst they wiped the Jews out.

Only they didn't, they got their asses kicked utterly by a nation only a day old. They also expelled 800,000 Jews from their own Arab lands. Israel took them in at no cost to the rest of the world whilst the Arabs left the Palestinians to rot so they could continue to use them as a propaganda campaign against Israel.

To continue your analagy further if Britain, or indeed any Western World country had a colony of settlers somewhere and then told them to move aside for a moment whilst we conquer the rest of the land for you, but then got utterly beaten, my guess is they would be legally obligated to take the colonists back and offer them homes seeing as their aggression had lost their's originally.

If they had also expelled 800,000 people who shared ancestory with the side they were fighting, and took billions of pounds worth of property and land in so doing, they would probably use that land, property and money towards rehousing their own colonists and giving them full citizenship rights in their countries, just like Israel did for the 800,00 Arab Jewish refugees the above nations made homeless and destitute.

I guess you'll continue to ignore this point however and not even address it.

Only the Palestinians weren't the colony, they were the people living there for centuries. The Israelis were the colonists. And the historical record, BBC and American radio monitoring shows zero radio broadcasts were made telling the Palestinians to evacuate. And the million Palestinian refugees were caused by actual ethnic cleansing, not by people running away from their houses. Cities of 50 000 people were ordered onto trucks at gunpoint and dumped in Gaza or forced over the border into neighbouring countries.

But you're not answering my question. If your family, who have been living on the south coast for generations, are told to evacuate by the British government for their own safety because they're in a war zone, move out of their house for the duration of any military conflcit, does that mean they lose all title to their property? Bear in mind that under international law, like the people Slobodan Milosevic booted out of Bosnia and elsewhere, you'd have both the right to return to your property and the right to reclaim it if occupied.

[Kirkland Laing]

And about the 800 000 Jewish refugees. They also have the absolute right of return to their former properties and land too. The right of return of refugees is international law.

[Kev]

And about the 800 000 Jewish refugees. They also have the absolute right of return to their former properties and land too. The right of return of refugees is international law.

Oh that makes it alright then. Both sides got fucked, and both sides can legally claim but in reality do nothing about it.

To me the Palestinian plight was brought about by the Arabs. The Jews had agreed to the mandate and two nation state. It was the Arabs who rejected it and went to war. The Jews wanted (and still want) nothing more but to live in their land in peace.

The conflict persists because the Arab world will only be happy when the Jews are driven out of the middle east.

Until then there will never be peace. They will never agree to Israel being there and Isreal will never agree to commit suicide and cease to exist.

On the contrary they will do whatever they need to do to defend themselves.

Answer me this honestly, if Britian, America or indeed any other nation would be in the same place as Israel, would they act any differently?

They do what's necessary to survive in a continent where they are universally despised, not because of what they have done, but because of what they represent. The Arab world hates the Jews, they are sworn enemies as long as the human race continures.

There is no solution, or peace plan that would ever be sufficient for the Arab world other than Jewish annihilation.

[Kirkland Laing]

And about the 800 000 Jewish refugees. They also have the absolute right of return to their former properties and land too. The right of return of refugees is international law.

Oh that makes it alright then. Both sides got fucked, and both sides can legally claim but in reality do nothing about it.

To me the Palestinian plight was brought about by the Arabs. The Jews had agreed to the mandate and two nation state. It was the Arabs who rejected it and went to war. The Jews wanted (and still want) nothing more but to live in their land in peace.

The conflict persists because the Arab world will only be happy when the Jews are driven out of the middle east.

Until then there will never be peace. They will never agree to Israel being there and Isreal will never agree to commit suicide and cease to exist.

On the contrary they will do whatever they need to do to defend themselves.

Answer me this honestly, if Britian, America or indeed any other nation would be in the same place as Israel, would they act any differently?

They do what's necessary to survive in a continent where they are universally despised, not because of what they have done, but because of what they represent. The Arab world hates the Jews, they are sworn enemies as long as the human race continures.

There is no solution, or peace plan that would ever be sufficient for the Arab world other than Jewish annihilation.

Whoever brought about the plight of the Palestinians, they still have the right to return to their homes and land. And they were ethnically cleansed from them in the first place. The people who didn't flee the Jewish terrorist groups, massacres, killings, and various other tactics to get them to flee were removed from their homes and land at gunpoint anyway, so even if they had been advised to flee and remained where they were they would have still ended up being ethnically cleansed anyway.


The conflict persists because Israel are carrying out an illegal half century military occupation of another people while they colonise the 20% of historic Palestine that they didn't ethnically cleanse previously. Here's the former Israeli Attorney Genral to explain :

The Six-Day War was forced upon us; however, the war's seventh day, which began on June 12, 1967 and has continued to this day, is the product of our choice. We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.

The war's seventh day - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News


The Arabs have zero say in any peace plan. They've already offered a comprehensive peace plan to Israel but Israel won't discuss it, they're continuing the plan laid out by the Israeli AG.

Arab Peace Initiative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Israel aren't defending themselves. They're the aggressor here. They're carrying out a half-century-long illegal military occupation of another people, like the AG also points out. They're defending themselves against the Palestinians in the same way that Germany defended itself against Poland in 1939. We did not call the Polish people resisting them terrorists, we called them freedom fighters or resistance. The right of resistance to military occupation is another right enshrined in international law. Surely the right of defence isn't only allowed to military aggressors, right? The aggressees surely should be able to defend themselves againstr aggression? International law says they have the right.

Britain and America have both carried out various military occupations over the years. Britain actually carried one out in America at one point. Obviously they've all ended with the occupied eventually booting out the occupier, as will happen eventually in Palestine.