WATCH: American Muslims talk about Israel

[Mosby]

Yes it's Frank luntz, but all he does is ask questions and facilitate the discussion. I think the participants do a good job representing the Palestinian narrative using revisionist history, logical fallacies and outright lies.

Enjoy!

http://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/watch-american-muslims-talk-about-israel/

[jonno99]

1. The thing I've never fully comprehended is how or why the Palistinians ended up on the

west bank. Were they forced there - or did they leave the new "State of Israel" of their own volition?

Too many conflicting reports...

[Mosby]

2. It's complicated

When the Arabs declared war on the new country of Israel many Arabs left the area to get out of the way of the invading Arab armies, others formed local militias to fight the Zionists and others were forced out, either directly or as the result of fear towards irregular Zionist militias, some of which was legit and some based on made up incidents.

Believe it or not, the west bank (part of the future Palestinian state) maintains refugee camps of displaced Palestinians who's ancestors left israel for the reasons I listed above. They are the descendents of those Arabs who fled israel proper during the war of independence, I think there are about one million living in 18 camps.

[jonno99]

4. Complicated - yes & frustrating. Depending on who you ask you get a completely different

narrative it seems.

Thank you for your response.

[Little Tich]

22. There's too much revisionism in this thread.

Very few Palestinians abandoned their homes on Arab orders. I took a quick look at Benny Morris' (an Israeli historian) "The Birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited" which has a map (Map 2) of Palestinian settlements abandoned in 1947 to 1948. Out of a total of 377 Palestinian settlements, only 6 (six) of them were abandoned on Arab orders.

Fortunately, this book can be downloaded from the interwebs, if you're at all interested in Israeli history. I'm not a fan of Benny Morris, his Zionist views makes him justify the removal of Palestinians against their will, but he's not a liar.

"The Birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited": Decisive causes of abandoment:
A Abandonment on Arab orders
C Influence of nearby town's fall
E Expulsion by Jewish forces
F Fear (of being caught up in fighting)
M Military assault on senlement
W Whispering campaigns - psychological warfare by Haganah/IDF

Palestinian settlements that were abandoned on Arab orders:
105 Ma'dhar - A, 6 April 1948
106 Hadatha - A, 6 April 1948
107 'Ulam - A, 6 April 1948
108 Sirin - A, 6 April 1948
172 (Arab) Haifa - M, A, 21 April-I May 1948
222 Beit Nabala - A, 13 May 1948

[shira]

24. Speaking of revisionism, here's more Morris....

There was a war which they started, the Palestinians attacked the Jewish community, maybe wanting to destroy it, maybe not, but they attacked the Jewish community and said ‘no’ to the compromise. They were joined subsequently by the armies of surrounding Arab states in an attack on the newborn State of Israel, and in the course of the war, the Israeli side, for reasons of war, ended up conquering territory and conquering hundreds of Arab villages and towns. This is what was necessitated by the circumstances of the war, and Palestinians fled in large numbers as a result of these military operations. Here and there, some of them were expelled by Jewish troops; here and there, some of them fled because Arab leaders told them to; by and large, people left their homes as a result of fear of the encroaching war.

In most cases, as I say, there weren’t expulsion orders. We know that in places like Ramla there were large expulsions, but we know in other places, like Haifa, the local Arab leadership instructed the Arabs to leave the town and in most places people just left because it was war. That’s what people do in most places if they don’t want to be in a war zone — because you can get killed, your daughter can get raped, all sorts of nasty things happen in war, especially in civil wars.

The war was begun by the Arabs; they were the ones who launched aggression; they were the ones who killed many, many Jews in the course of the war — 6,000 people or 1 percent of the Israeli population was killed in this war. One percent of Americans dead today would be 3 million — that’s what happened to the Jewish community in Palestine at the time, so the Israelis had good reason to feel anger in response to Arab violence.

http://fathomjournal.org/there-is-a-clash-of-civilisations-an-interview-with-benny-morris/

[Little Tich]

25. The Fathom Journal seems to be deliberately misleading in most of their articles,

but at least they're not 100% inaccurate like CAMERA.

Anyway, the article is more about Benny Morris' political views than anything else, and I certainly disagree with most of them.

I did find an interesting comment at the end though, and while it's not related to the OP, it's still worth mentioning:

BM: This is true. The early Zionists settlers, when they came here, were like Europeans in most third world countries — the settlers among them, like Nairobi or wherever the British or the French settled. They didn’t really see the natives. This is what Europeans were like at the end of the 19th century. A native wasn’t part of the geography, he wasn’t seen as human, certainly not on par with a European.

Source: http://fathomjournal.org/there-is-a-clash-of-civilisations-an-interview-with-benny-morris/

[shira]

26. Deliberately misleading is something like your trusty source - Illan Pappe.

He's an admitted liar and propagandist.

And proud of it.

[aranthus]

18. To further complicate the issue

The area that is now the West Bank was the core of what was suggested to be the Arab state in the 1947 Partition Resolution. It was already majority Arab. Most of the Arabs living in the West Bank are descendants of people who were already there in 1947. There were also Jewish communities in the West Bank (Kfar Etzion is one) that were destroyed by the Arabs in the 1947 war, and then restored by Israel after 1967.

As to why the Arabs became refugees, there are three reasons, and one root cause. Some left of their own volition. Some of those (mostly the wealthy) left before the war started. Some were forced out, especially those on the ridge above the road to Jerusalem. Most ran from fighting in and around their villages for the same reasons that most people become refugees. But the root cause of all of those refugees is the war that was started by the Palestinian leadership. No war. No refugees.

A good unbiased history of the period can be found in "Elusive Victory" by Trevor DuPuy.

[jonno99]

20. Very interesting - thank you for the response. nt

[Little Tich]

23. I would recommend that you read "The Birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited" by Benny

Morris. He's one of the New Israeli Historians, and his book can be found on the interwebs.

[mwrguy]

3. Many were herded at gunpoint

the ones who weren't killed outright.

Think "Trail of Tears".

[jonno99]

5. I've not heard this. Do you have a source/link? thx nt

[oberliner]

6. 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus_from_Lydda_and_Ramle

[jonno99]

7. Thanks for your response. This is what is frustrating; again it depends on who you talk to....

From your link:

In an interview with The New York Times two days later, Yigal Allon took issue with Rabin's version of events. "With all my high esteem for Rabin during the war of independence, I was his commander and my knowledge of the facts is therefore more accurate," he told Shipler. "I did not ask the late Ben-Gurion for permission to expel the population of Lydda. I did not receive such permission and did not give such orders." He said the residents left in part because they were told to by the Arab Legion, so the latter could recapture Lydda at a later date, and in part because they were panic-stricken.[53] Yoav Gelber also takes issue with Rabin's account. He writes that Ben-Gurion was in the habit of expressing his orders clearly, whether verbally or in writing, and would not have issued an order by waving his hand; he adds that there is no record of any meetings before the invasion that indicate expulsion was discussed. He attributes the expulsions to Allon, who he says was known for his scorched earth policy. Wherever Allon was in charge of Israeli troops, Gelber writes, no Palestinians remained.[54] Whereas traditional historiography in Israel has insisted that Palestinian refugees left their lands under the orders of Arab leaders, some Israeli scholars have challenged this view in recent years.[55]

[oberliner]

8. You are exactly right

That's why it is good to read a variety of sources from different perspectives.

[jonno99]

9. I agree. However, what is often lost it seems is that "the truth is the truth" -

and is not dependent on the "majority view".

If a cop responds the scene of an accident and asks eight different "eye-witnesses" what happened, he may very well get eight conflicting accounts. Who to believe? How to know when a source is biased/unbiased? It may be that only one witness is giving a true account.

It's frustrating to try to get to the bottom - to get the "truth"...

[azurnoir]

10. I'll bet you misseed this part huh? Expulsion orders signed by Yitzhak Rabin

Benny Morris writes that David Ben-Gurion and the IDF were largely left to their own devices to decide how Palestinian Arab residents were to be treated, without the involvement of the Cabinet and other ministers. As a result, their policy was haphazard and circumstantial, depending in part on the location, but also on the religion and ethnicity of the town. The Palestinian Arabs of Western and Lower Galilee, mainly Christian and Druze, were allowed to stay in place, but Lydda and Ramle, mainly Muslim, were almost completely emptied. There was no official policy to expel the Palestinian population, he writes, but the idea of transfer was "in the air", and the leadership understood this.

Yitzhak Rabin (1922–95) signed the expulsion order.
As the shooting in Lydda continued, a meeting was held on 12 July at Operation Dani headquarters between Ben-Gurion, Yigael Yadin and Zvi Ayalon, generals in the IDF, and Yisrael Galili, formerly of the Haganah, the pre-IDF army. Also present were Yigal Allon, commanding officer of Operation Dani, and Yitzhak Rabin.[50] At one point Ben-Gurion, Allon, and Rabin left the room. Rabin has offered two accounts of what happened next. In a 1977 interview with Michael Bar-Zohar, Rabin said Allon asked what was to be done with the residents; in response, Ben-Gurion had waved his hand and said, "garesh otam"—"expel them."[51] In the manuscript of his memoirs in 1979, Rabin wrote that Ben-Gurion had not spoken, but had only waved his hand, and that Rabin had understand this to mean "drive them out."The expulsion order for Lydda was issued at 13:30 hours on 12 July, signed by Rabin.

In his memoirs Rabin wrote: "'Driving out' is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion." An Israeli censorship board removed this section from his manuscript, but Peretz Kidron, the Israeli journalist who translated the memoirs into English, passed the censored text to David Shipler of The New York Times, who published it on 23 October 1979.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus_from_Lydda_and_Ramle#Expulsion_orders

[jonno99]

11. Fair enough. But I find that seldom do events occur in a vacuum. Further up towards the top

of this article it states:

"The exodus, constituting 'the biggest expulsion of the war',[4] took place at the end of a truce period, when fighting resumed, prompting Israel to try to improve its control over the Jerusalem road and its coastal route which were under pressure from the Jordanian Arab Legion, Egyptian and Palestinian forces. From the Israeli perspective, the conquest of the towns averted an Arab threat to Tel Aviv, thwarted an Arab Legion advance by clogging the roads with refugees, forcing the Arab Legion to assume a logistical burden that would undermine its military capacities, and helped demoralize nearby Arab cities..."


The above begs the question: who ended the truce - how or why did the fighting resume? If it was the Arabs, what would have been a more reasonable response? I don't know...

[azurnoir]

12. the wording " the end of a truce period" would indicate that the truce was called for a limited

period of time not that it was intentionally ended by someone breaking it

[jonno99]

13. Ok, so there was a truce period that ended, and then fighting resumed - why?

Who (re)started the fighting?

If it was the Arabs, what would have been a more reasonable response from Israel?

[azurnoir]

14. are you attempting to justify the expulsion of the Arab population from Ramle and Lydda?

why so concerned about who resumed fighting then?

[jonno99]

15. I'm interested in the truth - so I'm asking questions. What is becoming clear however,

is that you seem intent on avoiding answering questions. I ask myself - why the avoidance? To me this a clear indication of someone who is not so much interested in the truth - as they are in maintaining a narrative.

Thanks for your time, but I fear I've wasted mine.

Good day.

[azurnoir]

16. you have the truth Yitzhak Rabin signed orders to expel the Arab populations of Ramle and Lydda

I avoided nothing except a Gish Gallop

[jonno99]

17. The irony is that you are engaging in your own "gallop".

I have offered no opinion accept to state that "seldom do events occur in a vacuum".

You seem to be comfortable mouthing the standard narrative.

Sorry, I'm less easily satisfied...

[azurnoir]

21. no gallop I stated facts from the link suggested to you about the expulsion from Ramle

and Lydda and because we've had several comments between then and now I shall repeat that

Benny Morris writes that David Ben-Gurion and the IDF were largely left to their own devices to decide how Palestinian Arab residents were to be treated, without the involvement of the Cabinet and other ministers. As a result, their policy was haphazard and circumstantial, depending in part on the location, but also on the religion and ethnicity of the town. The Palestinian Arabs of Western and Lower Galilee, mainly Christian and Druze, were allowed to stay in place, but Lydda and Ramle, mainly Muslim, were almost completely emptied. There was no official policy to expel the Palestinian population, he writes, but the idea of transfer was "in the air", and the leadership understood this.

Yitzhak Rabin (1922–95) signed the expulsion order.
As the shooting in Lydda continued, a meeting was held on 12 July at Operation Dani headquarters between Ben-Gurion, Yigael Yadin and Zvi Ayalon, generals in the IDF, and Yisrael Galili, formerly of the Haganah, the pre-IDF army. Also present were Yigal Allon, commanding officer of Operation Dani, and Yitzhak Rabin. At one point Ben-Gurion, Allon, and Rabin left the room. Rabin has offered two accounts of what happened next. In a 1977 interview with Michael Bar-Zohar, Rabin said Allon asked what was to be done with the residents; in response, Ben-Gurion had waved his hand and said, "garesh otam"—"expel them." In the manuscript of his memoirs in 1979, Rabin wrote that Ben-Gurion had not spoken, but had only waved his hand, and that Rabin had understand this to mean "drive them out."The expulsion order for Lydda was issued at 13:30 hours on 12 July, signed by Rabin.

In his memoirs Rabin wrote: "'Driving out' is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion." An Israeli censorship board removed this section from his manuscript, but Peretz Kidron, the Israeli journalist who translated the memoirs into English, passed the censored text to David Shipler of The New York Times, who published it on 23 October 1979.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus_from_Lydda_and_Ramle#Expulsion_orders

[aranthus]

19. I've seen and heard worse.

I've had discussions with several Palestinians who don't even recognize Jewish peoplehood. The question I have had for years and to which I have no answer is how to bridge the gap between the Jewish/Israeli narrative which is much more historically based, and the Palestinian narrative, which though passionately held, is historical nonsense. How to make peace with a people from another reality?