Rewriting Israel's History

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
June 1996, pp. 19-29
Efraim Karsh is director of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of
London, and editor of the quarterly journal Israel Affairs.

One of the reasons I gave up political history was that it is very difficult not to direct it towards the
future, towards your idea of what ought to happen. And that somehow distorts your view of what has
happened.

Albert Hourani

As Israel edges toward peace with the Palestinians, old, highly controversial, and seemingly defunct
issues are back on the table, such as the legal status of Jerusalem and the question of the Palestinian
refugees. The refugees and their present rights inspire two very different approaches. The Israeli
view, based on an assessment of the 1947-49 period that ascribes primary responsibility for the
Palestinian tragedy to an extremist and short-sighted leadership, sees Palestinian wounds as
primarily self-inflicted and so not in need of compensation. In contrast, Palestinian spokesmen
justify their "right of return" to the territory that is now part of the State of Israel (or an alternative
compensation) by presenting themselves as victims of Jewish aggression in the late 1940s.

Ironically, it is a group of Israelis who have given the Palestinian argument its intellectual firepower.
Starting in 1987, an array of self-styled "new historians" has sought to debunk what it claims is a
distorted "Zionist narrative." How valid is this sustained assault on the received version of Israel's
early history? This question has real political importance, for the answer is bound to affect the
course of Israeli-Palestinian efforts at making peace.

THE NEW HISTORIANS AND THEIR CRITICS

Simha Flapan, the left-wing political activist and editor of New Outlook who inaugurated the assault
on alleged "Zionist myths," made no bones about his political motivations in rewriting Israeli
history, presenting his book as an attempt to "undermine the propaganda structures that have so
long obstructed the growth of the peace forces in my country." 1 But soon after, a group of Israeli
academics and journalists gave this approach a scholarly imprimatur, calling it the "new
history."2 Its foremost spokesmen include Avi Shlaim of Oxford University, Benny Morris of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ilan Papp of Haifa University. Other prominent adherents
include Tom Segev of the Ha'aretz newspaper, Benjamin Beit Hallahmi of Haifa University, and
researchers Uri Milstein and Yosi Amitai.

Above all, the new history signifies a set of beliefs: that Zionism was at best an aggressive and
expansionist national movement and at worst an offshoot of European imperialism; 3 and that it was
responsible for the Palestinian tragedy, the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, and even the Middle
East's violent history.

In an attempt to prove that the Jewish State was born in sin, the new historians concentrate on the
war of 1947-49 (in Israeli parlance, the War of Independence). Deriding alternative interpretations
as "old" or "mobilized," they dismiss the notion of a hostile Arab world's seeking to destroy the
Jewish state at birth as but a Zionist myth. They insist that when the Jewish Agency accepted the
U.N. Resolution of November 1947 (partitioning Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states),
it was less than sincere.

It is obviously a major service to all concerned to take a hard look at the past and, without political
intent, to debunk old myths. Is that what the new historians have done? I shall argue that, quite the
contrary, they fashion their research to suit contemporary political agendas; worse, they
systematically distort the archival evidence to invent an Israeli history in an image of their own
making. These are strong words; the following pages shall establish their accuracy.

A number of scholars have already done outstanding work showing the faults of the new history.
Itamar Rabinovich (of Tel Aviv University, currently Israel's ambassador to the United States) has
debunked the claim by Shlaim and Papp that Israel's recalcitrance explains the failure to make
peace at the end of the 1947-49 war.4 Avraham Sela (of the Hebrew University) has discredited
Shlaim's allegation that Israel and Transjordan agreed in advance of that war to limit their war
operations so as to avoid an all-out confrontation between their forces. 5 Shabtai Teveth (David Ben-
Gurion's foremost biographer) has challenged Morris's account of the birth of the Palestinian
refugee problem.6 Robert Satloff (of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) has shown, on
the basis of his own research in the Jordanian national archives in Amman, the existence of
hundreds of relevant government files readily available to foreign scholars, 7 thereby demolishing the
new historians' claim that "the archives of the Arab Governments are closed to researchers, and that
historians interested in writing about the Israeli-Arab conflict perforce must rely mainly on Israeli
and Western archives"8 -- and with it, the justification for their almost exclusive reliance on Israeli
and Western sources.

This article addresses a different question. The previous critics have looked mostly at issues of
politics or sources; we shall concentrate on the accuracy of documentation by these self-styled
champions of truth and morality. By looking at three central theses of the new historians, our
research reveals a completely different picture from the one that new historians themselves have
painted. But first, let us examine whether the alleged newness of this self-styled group is justified.

NEW FACTS?

The new historians claim to provide factual revelations about the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
According to Shlaim, "the new historiography is written with access to the official Israeli and
Western documents, whereas the earlier writers had no access, or only partial access, to the official
documents."9

The earlier writers may not have had access to an abundance of newly declassified documents, which
became available in the 1980s, but recent "old historians," such as Rabinovich and Sela, have made
no less use of them than their "new" counterparts, and they came up with very different conclusions.
Which leads to the self-evident realization that it is not the availability of new documents that
distinguishes the new historians from their opponents but the interpretation they give to this source
material.

Further, much of the fresh information claimed by the new historians turns out to be old indeed.
Consider Shlaim's major thesis about secret contacts between the Zionist movement and King
`Abdallah of Transjordan. He claims that "it is striking to observe how great is the contrast between
accounts of this period written without access to the official documents and an account such as this
one, based on documentary evidence."10 Quite the contrary, it is striking to see how little our
understanding has changed following the release of state documents. Shlaim himself concedes that
the information "that there was traffic between these two parties has been widely known for some
time and the two meetings between Golda Meir [acting head of the Jewish Agency's political
department] and King `Abdullah in November 1947, and May 1948 have even been featured in
popular films."11 Indeed, not only was the general gist of the `Abdallah-Meir conversations common
knowledge by 1960,12 but most of the early writers had access to then-classified official documents.
Dan Kurzman's 1970 account of that meeting is a near verbatim narration of the report prepared by
the Jewish Agency's political department adviser on Arab affairs, Ezra Danin. 13 Shlaim also relies on
Danin's report, adding nothing new to Kurzman's revelations.

Much of the fresh information claimed by the new historians turns out to be old indeed. . . .

. . . As for new interpretations, some are indeed new, but only because they are flat wrong.
Similarly, Shlaim places great stress on a February 1948 meeting between the prime minister of
Transjordan, Tawfiq Abu'l-Huda, and the foreign secretary of Great Britain, Ernest Bevin, claiming
the latter at that time blessed an alleged Hashemite-Jewish agreement to divide Palestine. But this
meeting was already known in 1957, when Sir John Bagot Glubb, the former commander of the Arab
Legion, wrote his memoirs,14 and most early works on the Arab-Israeli conflict used this
information.15

Morris's foremost self-laudatory "revelation" concerns the expulsion of Arabs from certain places by
Israeli forces, at times through the use of violence. This was made known decades earlier in such
works as Jon and David Kimche's Both Sides of the Hill; Rony Gabbay's A Political Study of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict; and Nadav Safran's From War to War. 16

Eager to debunk the perception of the 1947-49 war as a heroic struggle of the few against the many,
the new historians have pointed to an approximate numerical parity on the battlefield. 17Yet this too
was well known: school-children could find it in historical atlases, university students in academic
books.18 Ben-Gurion's autobiographical account of Israel's history, published nearly two decades
before the new historians made their debut on the public stage, contains illuminating data on the
Arab-Israeli military balance; his edited war diaries, published by the Ministry of Defense Press in
1983, give a detailed breakdown of the Israeli order of battle: no attempt at a cover-up here. 19

NEW INTERPRETATIONS?

As for new interpretations, some are indeed new, but only because they are flat wrong. Ilan Papp
has gone so far as to argue that the outcome of the 1947-49 war had been predetermined in the
political and diplomatic corridors of power "long before even one shot had been fired." 20To which,
one can only say that the State of Israel paid a high price indeed to effect this predetermined
outcome: the war's six thousand fatalities represented 1 percent of Israel's total Jewish population, a
higher human toll than that suffered by Great Britain in World War II. 21Further, Israel's battlefield
losses during the war were about the same as those of the Palestinians; and given that its population
was roughly half the latter's size, Israel lost proportionately twice the percentage of the
Palestinians.22

Other interpretations ring truer, but only because they are old and familiar. Shlaim concedes that his
charge of Jordanian-Israeli collusion is not a new one but was made decades before him. 23 In fact,
this conspiracy theory has been quite pervasive. In Arab historiography of an anti-Hashemite caste,
"the collusion myth became the crux of an historical indictment against the king for betraying the
Arab national cause in Palestine."24 On the Israeli side, both left- and right-wingers have levelled this
same criticism at the government's conduct of the 1947-49 war. Shlaim has hardly broken new
ground.

Shlaim's main claim to novelty lies in his challenging "the conventional view of the Arab-Israeli
conflict as a simple bipolar affair in which a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world is pitted
against the Jews."25 But this "conventional view" does not exist. Even such passionately pro-Israel
feature films on the 1947-49 war as Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow do not portray "a monolithic
and implacably hostile Arab world pitted against the Jews," but show divided Arab communities in
which some leaders would rather not fight the Jews and others would cooperate with the Jews
against their Arab "brothers." And what applies to popular movies applies all the more to scholarly
writings. Not one of the studies by the "old historians" subscribes to the stereotypical approach
attached to them by Shlaim.

The same applies to Morris. His claim that "what happened in Palestine/Israel over 1947-9 was so
complex and varied . . . that a single-cause explanation of the exodus from most sites is
untenable"26 echoes not only Aharon Cohen's and Rony Gabbay's conclusions of thirty years
earlier27 but also the standard explanation of the Palestinian exodus by such "official Zionist" writers
as Joseph Schechtman: "This mass flight of the Palestinian Arabs is a phenomenon for which no
single explanation suffices. Behind it lies a complex of apparently contradictory factors." 28
Even the claim to novelty is not new! Aharon Klieman, the quintessential "old historian," wrote in
his study of Hashemite-Zionist relations, published just two years before Shlaim's book, that "it has
been a commonplace to present the Palestine or the Arab-Israeli conflict in all its historical stages as
a simple bilateral conflict. . . . It is a mistake to present the Arab side to the equation as a monolithic
bloc. The `Arab camp' has always been divided and at war with itself." 29

At times, the new historians themselves realize they are recycling old ideas. For example, Shlaim
acknowledged that their arguments were foreshadowed by such writers as Gabbay, Israel Baer,
Gabriel Cohen, and Meir Pail.30 In all, the new historians have neither ventured to territory unknown
to earlier generations of scholars, nor made major factual discoveries, nor provided truly original
interpretations, let alone developed novel historical methodologies or approaches. They have used
precisely the same research methods and source-material as those whose work they disdain -- the
only difference between these two groups being the interpretation given to their findings. Let us now
turn to the accuracy of those interpretations.

I. PUSHING OUT THE ARABS

The new historians make three main claims about the Zionist movement in the late 1940s: it secretly
intended to expel the Palestinians, it conspired with King `Abdallah to dispossess the Palestinians of
their patrimony, and it won British support for this joint effort. Are these accusations accurate?

Morris writes that "from the mid-1930s most of the Yishuv's leaders, including Ben-Gurion, wanted
to establish a Jewish state without an Arab minority, or with as small an Arab minority as possible,
and supported a `transfer solution' to this minority problem." 31 He argues that the transfer idea "had
a basis in mainstream Jewish thinking, if not actual planning, from the late 1930s and 1940s." 32 But
Morris, the new historian who has made the greatest effort to prove this thesis, devotes a mere five
pages to this subject. He fails to prove his claim.

First, the lion's share of his "evidence" comes from a mere three meetings of the Jewish Agency
Executive (JAE) during June 7-12, 1938. Five days in the life of a national movement can scarcely
provide proof of longstanding trends or ideologies, especially since these meetings were called to
respond to specific ad hoc issues. Moreover, Morris has painted a totally false picture of the actual
proceedings of these meetings. Contrary to his claim that the meetings "debated at length various
aspects of the transfer idea,"33 the issue was discussed only in the last meeting, and even then as but
one element in the overall balance of risks and opportunities attending Britain's suggested partition
rather than as a concrete policy option. The other two meetings did not discuss the subject at all. 34

Secondly, Morris virtually ignores that the idea of transfer was forced on the Zionist agenda by the
British (in the recommendations of the 1937 Peel Royal Commission on Palestine) rather than being
self-generated.35 He downplays the commission's recommendation of transfer, creates the false
impression that the Zionists thrust this idea on a reluctant British Mandatory power (rather than
vice versa), and misleadingly suggests that Zionist interest in transfer long outlived the Peel
Commission.36

Thirdly, and most important, Morris systematically falsifies evidence, to the point that there is
scarcely a single document he relies on without twisting and misleading, either by a creative
rewriting of the original text, by taking words out of context, or by truncating texts and thereby
distorting their meaning. For example, Morris finds an alleged Zionist interest in the idea of transfer
lasting up to the outbreak of the 1948 war. Yes, Morris concedes, Ben-Gurion in a July 1947
testimony to the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) "went out of his way to
reject the 1945 British Labour Party platform `International Post-war Settlement' which supported
the encouragement of the movement of the Palestine Arabs to the neighboring countries to make
room for Jews."37 But he insinuates that Ben-Gurion was insincere; in his heart of hearts, he
subscribed to the transfer idea at the beginning of the 1947-49 war. Becoming a mind-reader, Morris
discerns the transfer in a Ben-Gurion speech in December 1947:

There was no explicit mention of the collective transfer idea.

However, there was perhaps a hint of the idea in Ben-Gurion's speech to Mapai's supporters four
days after the UN Partition resolution, just as Arab-Jewish hostilities were getting under way. Ben-
Gurion starkly outlined the emergent Jewish State's main problem -- its prospective population of
520,000 Jews and 350,000 Arabs. Including Jerusalem, the state would have a population of about
one million, 40% of which would be non-Jews. "This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and
sharpness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be complete certainty that the
government will be held by a Jewish majority. . . . There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so
long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%." The Yishuv's situation and fate, he went on, compelled
the adoption of "a new approach . . . new habits of mind" to "suit our new future. We must think like
a state."38

Morris creates the impression here that Ben-Gurion believed only transfer would resolve the
problem of a substantial Arab minority in the Jewish State.

Is this mind-reading of Ben-Gurion correct? Was there really a hint of the transfer idea in his
speech? Here is the text from which Morris draws his citation:

In the territory allotted to the Jewish State there are now above 520,000 Jews (apart from the
Jerusalem Jews who will also be citizens of the state) and about 350,000 non-Jews, almost all of
whom are Arabs. Including the Jerusalem Jews, the state would have at birth a population of about
one million, nearly 40 per cent of which would be non-Jews. This [population] composition does not
constitute a solid basis for a Jewish State; and this fact must be viewed in all its clarity and
sharpness. With such a composition, there cannot even be complete certainty that the government
will be held by a Jewish majority. . . . There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has
a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent, and so long as this majority consists of only 600,000 Jews. . . .

We have been confronted with a new destiny -- we are about to become masters of our own fate. This
requires a new approach to all our questions of life. We must reexamine all our habits of mind, all
our systems of operation to see to what extent they suit our new future. We must think in terms of a
state, in terms of independence, in terms of full responsibility for ourselves -- and for others. 39

This original text suggests that Morris has distorted the evidence in three ways.

First, Morris omits Ben-Gurion's statement that there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so
long as the Jewish majority "consists of only 600,000 Jews." He distorts Ben-Gurion's intention by
narrowing the picture to a preoccupation with the 60-40 percent ratio, when its real scope was a
concern about the absolute size of the Jewish population.

Secondly, Morris creates the impression that Ben-Gurion's call for a "new approach . . . new habits of
mind" applied to the Arab minority problem, implicitly referring to transfer. In fact, it applied to the
challenges attending the transition from a community under colonial domination to national self-
determination.

Thirdly, he omits Ben-Gurion's statement on the need to take "full responsibility for ourselves -- and
for others." Who are these others but the non-Jewish minority of the Jewish State?

Worse, Morris chooses to rely on a secondary source rather than consult the primary document; and
for good reason, for an examination of the original would easily dispel the cloud of innuendo with
which Morris surrounded Ben-Gurion's speech:

. . . There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60
percent, and so long as this majority consists of only 600,000 Jews.

From here stems the first and principal conclusion. The creation of the state is not the formal
implementation process discussed by the UN General Assembly. . . . To ensure not only the
establishment of the Jewish State but its existence and destiny as well -- we must bring a million-
and-a-half Jews to the country and root them there. It is only when there will be at least two millions
Jews in the country -- that the state will be truly established. 40

This speech contains not a hint of the transfer idea. Ben-Gurion's long-term solution to the 60-40
percent ratio between the Jewish majority and non-Jewish minority is clear and unequivocal: mass
Jewish immigration.

As for the position of the Arabs in the Jewish State, Ben-Gurion could not be clearer:

We must think in terms of a state, in terms of independence, in terms of full responsibility for
ourselves -- and for others. In our state there will be non-Jews as well -- and all of them will be equal
citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well. 41

Ben-Gurion envisaged Jewish-Arab relations in the prospective Jewish State not based on the
transfer of the Arab population but as a true partnership among equal citizens; not "fortress Israel,"
a besieged European island in an ocean of Arab hostility, but a Jewish-Arab alliance.

These passages make it clear that Benny Morris has truncated, twisted, and distorted Ben-Gurion's
vision of Jewish-Arab relations and the Zionist position on the question of transfer. All this is
especially strange given that Morris contends that the historian "must remain honour-bound to
gather and present his facts accurately."42

II. COLLUSION ACROSS THE JORDAN

Shlaim traces Israel's and Transjordan's alleged collusion to a secret meeting on November 17, 1947,
in which King `Abdallah and Golda Meir agreed supposedly to frustrate the impending U.N.
Resolution on Palestine and instead divide Palestine between themselves. He writes that

In 1947 an explicit agreement was reached between the Hashemites and the Zionists on the carving
up of Palestine following the termination of the British mandate . . . it was consciously and
deliberately intended to frustrate the will of the international community, as expressed through the
United Nations General Assembly, in favour of creating an independent Arab state in part of
Palestine.43

Is there any evidence for this alleged conspiracy? No, none at all. First, a careful examination of the
two documents used to substantiate the claim of collusion -- reports by Ezra Danin and Eliyahu
Sasson, two Zionist officials -- proves that Meir implacably opposed any agreement that would
violate the U.N. partition resolution passed twelve days later. In no way did she consent to the
Transjordan annexation of Arab areas of Palestine. Rather, Meir made it eminently clear that:

* Any Zionist-Hashemite arrangement would have to be compatible with the U.N. resolution. In
Danin's words: "We explained that our matter was being discussed at the UN, that we hoped that it
would be decided there to establish two states, one Jewish and one Arab, and that we wished to
speak now about an agreement with him [i.e., `Abdallah] based on these resolutions." 44 In Sasson's
words: "Replied we prepared [to] give every assistance within [the] frame [of the] UN Charter." 45

* The sole purpose of Transjordan's intervention in post-Mandatory Palestine would be, in Meir's
words, "to maintain law and order and to preserve peace until the UN could establish a government
in that area,"46 namely, a short-lived law-enforcement operation aimed at facilitating the
establishment of a legitimate Palestinian government. Indeed, even `Abdallah did not expect the
meeting to produce any concrete agreement. In Danin's words: "At the end he reiterated that
concrete matters could be discussed only after the UN had passed its resolution, and said that we
must meet again immediately afterwards."47
Secondly, Meir's account of her conversation with `Abdallah -- strangely omitted in this context by
Shlaim (though he cites it elsewhere in his study) -- further confirms that Mandatory Palestine was
not divided on November 17, 1947.

For our part we told him then that we could not promise to help his incursion into the country [i.e.,
Mandatory Palestine], since we would be obliged to observe the UN Resolution which, as we already
reckoned at the time, would provide for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Hence, we
could not -- so we said -- give active support to the violation of this resolution. 48

Thirdly, Shlaim's thesis is predicated on the idea of a single diplomatic encounter's profoundly
affecting the course of history. He navely subscribes to the notion that a critical decision about the
making of war and peace or the division of foreign lands is made in the course of a single
conversation, without consultations or extended bargaining. This account reflects a complete lack of
understanding about the nature of foreign policymaking in general and of the Zionist decision-
making process in particular.

Fourthly, as mere acting head of the Jewish Agency's political department, Meir was in no position
to commit her movement to a binding deal with King `Abdallah, especially since that deal would run
counter to the Jewish Agency's simultaneous efforts to win a U.N. resolution on partition. All she
could do was try to convince `Abdallah not to oppose the impending U.N. partition resolution
violently and give him the gist of Zionist thinking.

Fifthly, Meir's conversation with `Abdallah was never discussed by the Jewish Agency Executive, the
Yishuv's effective government. The Yishuv's military operations during the 1947-49 war show not a
trace of the alleged deal in either their planning or their execution. Quite the contrary, the Zionist
leadership remained deeply suspicious of `Abdallah's expansionist ambitions up to May 1948.

Lastly, while the Jewish Agency unquestionably preferred `Abdallah to his Palestinian rival, the
Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni, this preference did not lead the agency to preclude the
possibility of a Palestinian state. As late as December 1948 (or more than a year after `Abdallah and
Meir had allegedly divided Palestine), Ben-Gurion stated his preference for an independent
Palestinian state to Transjordan's annexing the Arab parts of Mandatory Palestine. "An Arab State in
Western Palestine is less dangerous than a state that is tied to Transjordan, and tomorrow --
probably to Iraq," he told his advisers. "Why should we vainly antagonize the Russians? Why should
we do this [i.e., agree to Transjordan's annexation of Western Palestine] against the [wishes of the]
rest of the Arab states?"49

In short, not only did the Zionist movement not collude with King `Abdallah to divide Mandatory
Palestine between themselves but it was reconciled to the advent of a Palestinian state. `Abdallah
was the one who was violently opposed to such an eventuality and who caused it to fail by seizing the
bulk of the territory the United Nations had allocated to the Palestinians.

III. COLLUSION WITH GREAT BRITAIN

Shlaim writes that "Britain knew and approved of this secret Hashemite-Zionist agreement to divide
up Palestine between themselves, not along the lines of the U.N. partition plan." 50 This alleged
British blessing was given in the above-noted conversation between Bevin and Abu'l-Huda, in which
the foreign secretary gave the Transjordanian prime minister

The green light to send the Arab Legion into Palestine immediately following the departure of the
British forces. But Bevin also warned [Trans]jordan not to invade the area allocated by the U.N. to
the Jews. An attack on Jewish state territory, he said, would compel Britain to withdraw her subsidy
and officers from the Arab Legion.51

This thesis is fundamentally flawed. True, the British were resigned to Transjordan's military foray
into post-Mandatory Palestine, but this was not out of a wish to protect Jewish interests. Rather, it
was directed against those interests: Israel was intended to be the victim of the Transjordanian
intervention -- not its beneficiary.

* Contrary to Shlaim's claim, the British government did not know of a Hashemite-Zionist
agreement to divide up Palestine, both because this agreement did not exist and because `Abdallah
kept London in the dark about his contacts with the Jewish Agency. The influential British
ambassador to Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbride, was not aware of the secret Meir-`Abdallah meeting
until well after the event.52 How then could the British bless a Hashemite-Zionist deal?

* Glubb's memoirs alone indicate that Bevin gave Abu'l-Huda a green light to invade while warning
him, "do not go and invade the areas allotted to the Jews." 53 In contrast, declassified British
documents unequivocally show that Bevin neither encouraged Abu'l-Huda to invade the Arab parts
of Palestine as "the obvious thing to do," as claimed by Glubb, nor warned him off invading the
Jewish areas. Bevin said only that he "would study the statements which his Excellency had
made."54 Shlaim's choosing an old and partisan account over a newly released official document
suggests a desperate attempt to prove the existence of such a warning.

* The British archives are bursting with evidence that the foreign secretary and his advisers cared
not at all whether `Abdallah transgressed Jewish territory; they only wanted to be sure he did not
implicate Britain in an embarrassing international situation. Shortly after the Bevin-Abu'l-Huda
meeting, Bernard Burrows, head of the Eastern department, wrote (with Bevin's approval) that

It is tempting to think that Transjordan might transgress the boundaries of the United Nations
Jewish State to the extent of establishing a corridor across the Southern Negeb [i.e., Negev] joining
the existing Transjordan territory to the Mediterranean and Gaza . . . [thereby] cutting the Jewish
State, and therefore Communist influence, off from the Red Sea. 55

More important, on May 7, 1948, a week before the all-Arab attack on Israel, Burrows suggested to
the Foreign Office intimate to King `Abdallah that "we could in practice presumably not object to
Arab Legion occupation of the Nejeb [i.e., Negev]."56 In other words, not only was the Foreign Office
not opposed to Transjordan's occupation of the Jewish State's territory but it encouraged `Abdallah
to go in and occupy about half of it.

* Having grudgingly recognized their inability to prevent the partition of Palestine, British
officialdom wished to see a far smaller and weaker Jewish state than that envisaged by the U.N.
partition resolution and did its utmost to bring about such an eventuality. Limitations of space do
not allow a presentation of the overwhelming documentary evidence of British efforts to cut Israel
"down to size" and stunt its population growth through the prevention of future Jewish
immigration.57 Suffice to say that British policymakers sought to forestall an Israeli-Transjordanian
peace agreement unless it detached the Negev from the Israeli state.

CONCLUSIONS

Recently declassified documents in Israeli and Western archives fail to confirm the picture of the
origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict painted by the new historians. The self-styled new historiography
is really a "distortiography." It is anything but new: much of what it presents is old and much of the
new is distortion. The "new historians" are neither new nor true historians but rather partisans
seeking to give academic respectability to longstanding misconceptions and prejudice on the Arab-
Israeli conflict. To borrow the words of the eminent British historian E.H. Carr, what the new
historians are doing is to "write propaganda or historical fiction, and merely use facts of the past to
embroider a kind of writing which has nothing to do with history." 58

Returning to political issues of today: the Palestinian claim to national self-determination stands on
its own and does not need buttressing from historical falsification. Quite the contrary, fabricating an
Israeli history to cater to interests of the moment does great disservice not only to historical truth
but also to the Palestinians that the new historians seek to champion. Instead, they should heed
Albert Hourani's advice. Securing the future means coming to terms with one's past, however
painful that might be, not denying it.

1
The Birth of Israel: Myths and Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 4; see also pp. 10 and 233.
2
The new historians make much of their relatively young age: "Most of them, born around 1948,
have matured in a more open, doubting, and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973, and pre-
Lebanon War Israel of the old historians." Of course, biological age indicates little about outlook.
The opponents of the new historians also matured "in a more open, doubting, and self-critical
Israel," many of them belonging to the same age group and having lived in the same milieu as the
new historians. Moreover, some new historians are older than the "old" historians, especially
Flapan, who was born in 1911 and thus precisely a member of that generation that "had lived
through 1948 as highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish
commonwealth" and that was consequently derided by the new historians as being "unable to
separate their lives from the events they later recounted, unable to distance themselves from and
regard impartially the facts and processes through which they had lived." Benny Morris, 1948 and
After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 7.
3
Avi Shlaim writes: "At the time of the Basle Congress, Palestine was under the control of the
Ottoman Turks. It was inhabited by nearly half a million Arabs and some 50,000 Jews. . . . But, in
keeping with the spirit of the age of European imperialism, the Jews did not allow these local
realities to stand in the way of their own national aspirations." Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the
Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988), p. 2.
Ilan Papp has been far more outspoken in articulating Zionism as a brand of Western colonialism
that "gained control over a land that is not theirs at the end of the nineteenth century." See, for
example, "Damning the Historical Forgery," Kol Ha-ir, Oct. 6, 1995, p. 61.
4
Itamar Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
5
Avraham Sela, "Transjordan, Israel and the 1948 War: Myth, Historiography, and Reality," Middle
Eastern Studies, vol. 28, No. 4Oct. 1992, pp. 623-89.
6
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), p. 286; Shabtai Teveth, "The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and its Origins," Middle
Eastern Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2Apr. 1990, pp. 214-49.
7
Robert Satloff's review of Morris's Israel's Border Wars, in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 31,
Number 4 Oct. 1995, p. 954.
8
Benny Morris, "A Second Look at the `Missed Peace,' or Smoothing Out History: A Review Essay,"
Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1994, p. 86.
9
Avi Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Aug. 1995, p.
289. See also Morris, 1948 and After, p. 7.
10
Shlaim, Collusion, p. viii.
11
Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," p. 296.
12
Jon Kimche and David Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), p. 60;
Marie Syrkin, Golda Meir: Woman with a Cause (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), pp. 195-202.
13
Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New York: New American Library, 1972),
pp. 42-44.
14
Sir John Bagot Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1957), pp. 63-66.
15
For example, Kurzman, Genesis 1948, pp. 116-17; Zeev Sharef, Three Days (London: W.H. Allen,
1962), p. 77; and Kimche and Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill, p. 39. As we shall see (on p. XX), the
newly released official British documents do shed fresh light on the Bevin-Abu'l-Huda meeting but
completely in the opposite direction from that claimed by Shlaim.
16
Kimche and Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill, pp. 227-28; Rony Gabbay, A Political Study of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Arab Refugee Problem (A Case Study) (Geneva: Libraire E. Droz, 1959),
pp. 108-11; and Nadav Safran, From War to War: The Arab-Israeli Confrontation 1948-1967
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Pegasus, 1969), pp. 34-35.
17
Morris, 1948 and After, pp. 13-16; Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," pp. 294-95.
18
See, for example, Moshe Lissak, Yehuda Wallach, and Eviatar Nur, eds., Atlas Karta Le-toldot
Medinat Israel: Shanim Rishonot, Tashah-Tashak (Karta Atlas of Israel: the First Years, 1948-61),
(Jerusalem: Karta, 1978); Safran, From War to War, p. 30.
19
David Ben-Gurion, Medinat Israel Ha'mehudeshet, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1969), pp. 70-71, 98,
102, 106, and 115; idem, Israel: A Personal History (London: New English Library, 1972), pp. 61, 90;
G. Rivlin and E. Orren, eds., Yoman Ha-milhama, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv: Misrael Ha-bitahchom, Ha-
hotsa'a La-or, 1983), particularly vol. 3, pp. 1013-19.
20
Ilan Papp, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1992), p. 271.
21
See, for example, Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (London: Fontana, 1990), p. 746;
National Register of the United Kingdom and the Isle of Man, Statistics of Population on 29
September 1939 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office (hereafter HMSO), 1939.
22
"Casualties in Palestine since the United Nations Decision, Period 30th November, 1947 to 3rd
April, 1945," CO 733/483/5, p. 19.
23
Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," p. 296. On the Jordanian side, Col. `Abdallah at-Tall, who
served as a messenger between King `Abdallah and the Zionists during the armistice talks at the end
of the 1947-49 war, then defected to Egypt and wrote about his experiences in Karithat Filastin:
Mudhakkirat `Abdallah at-Tall, Qa'id Ma`rakat al-Quds (Cairo: Al-Qalam, 1959). On the Israeli side,
Lt. Col. Israel Baer, an adviser to Ben-Gurion later convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, told
about the negotiations in Bithon Israel: Etmol, ha-Yom, Mahar (Tel Aviv: Amikam, 1966).
24
Sela, "Transjordan, Israel and the 1948 War," pp. 623-24. See also his article "Arab Historiography
of the 1948 War: The Quest for Legitimacy," in Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., New Perspectives on
Israeli History (New York: New York University Press, 1991), pp. 124-54.
25
Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," p. 297.
26
Morris, Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 294.
27
Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), pp. 458-66; Gabbay, A
Political Study, pp. 54, 85-98.
28
Joseph B. Schechtman, The Arab Refugee Problem (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), p. 4.
29
Aharon Klieman, Du Kium Le-lo Shalom (Unpeaceful Coexistence: Israel, Jordan, and the
Palestinians) (Tel Aviv: Ma`ariv, 1986), pp. 15-16.
30
Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," p. 289. And, years earlier, Arnold Toynbee, Alfred Lillienthal,
Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said all used these same arguments.
31
Morris, 1948 and After, p. 17. "Yishuv" refers to the Zionist community in Palestine before the
establishment of Israel.
32
Morris, Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 24.
33
Ibid., pp. 25-26.
34
Protocols of the Jewish Agency Executive meetings of June 7, 9, and 12, 1938, Central Zionist
Archives, Jerusalem.
35
The Peel report suggested the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish;
to reduce frictions between the two communities, the commission also suggested a land and
population exchange, similar to that effected between Turkey and Greece after the First World War.
See Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to
Parliament by Command of His Majesty, July 1937, Cmd. 5479 (London: HMSO, 1937), pp. 291-95.
There being far more Arabs in the Jewish state-to-be than the other way around (225,000 vs. 1,250),
Ben-Gurion and some other Zionist proponents of partition viewed this exchange (or transfer, as it
came to be known) as a partial compensation for the confinement of the prospective Jewish state to
a tiny fraction of the Land of Israel.

Yet they quickly dismissed this idea, as shown by the fact that not one of the 30-odd submissions the
JAE made to the Palestine Partition Commission (the Woodhead Commission, 1938) suggested
population exchange and transfer.
36
Morris, The Birth, pp. 27-28.
37
Ibid., p. 28.
38
Ibid. Morris traces the speech to Dec. 3, 1947, as is done in the secondary source from which he
borrowed it. In the original source, however, the date given is Dec. 13, 1947.
39
Rivlin and Orren, eds., Yoman Ha-milhama, vol. I, p. 22.
40
Ben-Gurion, Ba-ma'araha, vol. IV, part 2 (Tel Aviv: Hotsa'at Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisra'el, 1959),
pp. 258-59 (emphasis added).
41
Ibid., p. 260.
42
Morris, 1948 and After, p. 47.
43
Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan, p. 1; idem, The Politics of Partition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. viii (this is an abridged and slightly revised edition of Collusion). Other
new historians have taken up this thesis. Thus, Papp: "The common ground for the agreement was
a mutual objection to the creation of a Palestinian state. . . . The Jewish Agency in particular
abhorred such a possibility, asserting that the creation of a Palestinian state would perpetuate the
ideological conflict in Palestine" (The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 118).
44
Ezra Danin, "Siha in Abdallah, 17.11.47," Central Zionist Archives, S25/4004.
45
Sasson to Shertok, Nov. 20, 1947, Central Zionist Archives, S25/1699.
46
Danin, "Siha in Abdallah."
47
Ibid.
48
Golda Meir's verbal report to the Provisional State Council on May 12, 1948, Israel State Archives,
Provisional State Council: Protocols, 18 April - 13 May 1948, Jerusalem, 1978, p. 40.[Eds: the
collection had an English title. Yeshivat Minhelet Ha-am, 12/5/48.]
49
Ben-Gurion, Yoman Ha-milhama, vol. III, Dec. 18, 1948, p. 885.
50
Shlaim, "The Debate," p. 297.
51
Ibid., p. 293.
52
See, for example, Kirkbride's telegram to Bevin dated Nov. 17, 1947, displaying total ignorance of
the Abdullah-Meir meeting, which was held that very day (FO 816/89). For further evidence of
British ignorance of the alleged Hashemite-Jewish deal, see a personal and secret letter from H.
Beeley, Eastern Department, Foreign Office, to T.E. Bromley, Jan. 20, 1948, FO 371/68403/E1877;
and Michael Wright, "Brief for Conversation with Transjordan Prime on Palestine," Feb. 6, 1948, FO
371/6837/E1980G.
53
Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs, p. 66.
54
Mr. Bevin to Sir Alec Kirkbride (Amman), "Conversation with the Transjordan Prime Minister,"
Feb. 9, 1948, FO 371/68366/E1916/G.
55
Memorandum by Bernard Burrows, Feb. 9, 1948, FO 371/68368/E296.
56
Bernard Burrows, "Palestine After May 14," May 7, 1948, FO 371/68854/E6778.
57
For a discussion of this issue, see Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: "The New Historians"
(London: Frank Cass, forthcoming).
58
E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 29

Historical Fictions
by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
September 1996, pp. 55-60

My article, "Rewriting Israel's History," argued that the self-styled "new historians" are neither new
nor true historians but partisans seeking to provide academic respectability to long-standing
misconceptions and prejudices about the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are scarcely "new" since most of
their "factual discoveries" (and some of their interpretations) effectively reinvent the wheel; and they
are anything but true historians because, taking in vain the name of the archives, they violate all
tenets of bona fide research in their endeavor to rewrite Israeli history in an image of their own
devising. The replies by Benny Morris, Ilan Papp, and Avi Shlaim to my article fully vindicate this
thesis.

Benny Morris

For years, Benny Morris has had it easy. By inundating his readers with primary sources, he created
the impression, one that even his critics accepted, that his work is solidly grounded in facts. But this
is a false picture, for he has been misusing those facts. My article shows that on one of the most
bitter bones of contention in the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the issue of
"transfer," Morris has been prepared systematically to falsify evidence in an attempt to create history
in an image of his own devising. There is scarcely a single document he has not twisted either by
creative rewriting, taking things out of context, truncating texts, or giving a false description of the
contents of documents.

That Morris dismisses my article as undeserving of "serious attention or reply" is not difficult to
understand: facts speak for themselves and he has nothing to say to mitigate the damning evidence.

Ilan Papp

Papp resembles an old music box, which, no matters when one turns it on, invariably plays back the
same tune. He faults me for confusing reality and ideology; but is that not precisely what he does
when he accuses me of subscribing to the "Zionist historiographical perspective," a bogey the new
historians created to discredit their critics and divert the debate from the real issue: good vs. bad
scholarship?

Papp fails to address a single factual assertion made in my article, let alone refute it; rather, he
takes issue with a string of assertions of his own devising, not addressing those I brought up in the
article. For example, he holds that my facts "are mostly claims made by mainstream historians."
Wrong: not one of my facts comes from other historians, mainstream or otherwise. Rather, I
introduced the article by mentioning what others have written on the new historians to acquaint the
reader with the state of the debate, a common scholarly practice. Moreover, had Papp troubled
himself to read my article, he would have noted that it does what no one else has done before --
namely, examine the archival source-material used by the new historians and thus prove their foul
play.

Similarly, Papp announces that the new historians proved "that there was parity on the battlefield
in the 1948 war" and lauds this as part of a "de-Zionized view" of history. If this is the case, then
most Israeli writings on the war, including David Ben-Gurion's war diaries and autobiographical
account, are "de-Zionized." For, as my article showed, the existence of approximate numerical parity
on the battlefield had been known in Israel for decades before the new historians appeared.

Avi Shlaim

Shlaim offers a far more sophisticated, though equally misconceived, reply. Unlike Morris or Papp,
he attempts to rebut my facts; like Papp, his rebuttal contains distortions about his and my
writings.

Broadly speaking, Shlaim recalls the man of the joke who, having killed his parents, pleads for
clemency on grounds of orphanhood. Having made his reputation as a leading new historian, and
stating at the outset of his reply that there is a "`new' or revisionist school of writing about Israel's
history" to which he belongs, Shlaim then denies membership in this self-styled group and seeks to
disguise its ideological luggage and virulently anti-Israel agenda. "[I]t should be stressed at the
outset that there is no club, society, or trade union, let alone a political party with card-carrying
members, of new historians," he writes, as if the new historians had ever been conceived in such
absurd terms. Shlaim should have the integrity to stand up and be counted.

Shlaim also attempts to disown the two primary factors on which the new historians, including
himself, have consistently based their claim to newness: relatively young age and access to newly
declassified documents. He accuses me of charging the new historians of making much of their age
as if it is me, and not the new historians themselves, who made this meaningless allegation in the
first place. Shlaim then accuses me of a "totalitarian conception of history" by writing that I expect
"all readers of official documents to come up with the same conclusions." But I did not say this and
do not believe it. I actually wrote that mere access to newly released documents is not in itself reason
to claim newness, for documents are open to alternative interpretations -- precisely the opposite of
what Shlaim misattributed to me.

Shlaim charges me of trying to have it both ways by criticizing his collusion theory as familiar while
taking him to task for this interpretation. I see no contradiction in simultaneously faulting Shlaim
for taking up an old conspiracy theory and calling it totally misconceived. This new historian is not
even new in being wrong.

Shlaim argues that "surely what matters is not whether the interpretation I advance is old or new . . .
but whether it is sound or not." True, of course; but it sounds hollow coming from a new historian. If
it matters not whether one's interpretation is new or old, why then the hullabaloo about a "new
historiography"? My article will have achieved one of its main objectives if Shlaim drops his title of
new historian and focuses instead on issues of substance.

The `Abdallah-Meir Meeting

Concerning the important `Abdallah-Meir meeting in November 1947, Shlaim says that "extensive
quotations from the reports of all three Jewish participants support [his] account of this meeting,"
while my article gives "a highly selective and tendentious account designed to exonerate the Jewish
side of any responsibility for frustrating the U.N. partition plan." A few responses:

First, why does Shlaim presume that I see a need to "exonerate the Jewish side" for such
cooperation? He himself has praised the alleged collusion as "a reasonable and realistic strategy for
both sides."1

Secondly, extensive quotations from the reports of all three Jewish participants do not support
Shlaim's account. My article shows that the report of Golda Meir (the most important Israeli
participant and the person who allegedly clinched the deal with `Abdallah) is conspicuously missing
from Shlaim's book, despite his awareness of its existence.

Thirdly, my account is not "selective and tendentious"; Meir did not accept `Abdallah's intention to
annex the Arab parts of Western Palestine but emphasized her intent only to speak about an
agreement based on the imminent U.N. Partition Resolution; and she would only accept
Transjordan's intervention in Palestine "to maintain law and order until the UN could establish a
government in that area," namely, a short-lived law-enforcement operation to implement the U.N.
Partition Resolution, not obstruct it. In his reply, Shlaim cites only the second point in Meir's above
response (though failing to grasp its true meaning) and ignores her first. Who is tendentious here?

Further, having now to deal with Meir's report, Shlaim concedes she told `Abdallah that "we could
not promise to help his incursion into the country." But he then twists her words by claiming that

The understanding was not that the Jews would actively help `Abdallah capture the Arab part of
Palestine (in defiance of the U.N.) but that (1) he would take it himself, (2) the Zionists would set up
their own state, and (3) after the dust had settled, the two parties would make peace.
But there is not a hint in Meir's report of anything remotely reminiscent of this claim. Had he not
(tendentiously) truncated Meir's statement as quoted in my article, the reader would easily realize
that she insisted on abiding by the U.N. Resolution, not violating it.

Shlaim's emphatic claim that his collusion thesis is predicated on more than a single episode does
not hold water. Yes, Shlaim's Collusion across the Jordan ostensibly deals with thirty years of
contacts between `Abdallah and the Zionist movement, but it focuses on the short period around the
1947-49 war: of the book's 623 pages, less than 30 concern pre-1947 Hashemite-Zionist relations.

Shlaim traces the "collusion" to the November 1947 Meir-`Abdallah conversation, which can
scarcely qualify as the culmination of a sustained and protracted Hashemite-Zionist dialogue, let
alone a negotiations process.

Limitations of space do not allow a detailed rebuttal of the collusion myth; I invite the interested
reader to consult my forthcoming book Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians." 2 Let me
state here only that Shlaim's book ignores the Zionist decision-making mechanism and process,
which explains why his reply does not address my critical points: a) Meir was not authorized to make
a decision of this magnitude; b) no agreement that bound the Zionist movement could conceivably
be reached without the authorization of the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE), the effective
government of the Yishuv; c) the JAE showed no awareness of the existence of any such agreement;
and d) the people who mattered most in the formulation of Zionist foreign policy, David Ben-Gurion
and Moshe Sharett, preferred an independent Palestinian state to Transjordanian expansion, and
they did so well after the Abdallah-Meir meeting.

Great Britain's Role

Shlaim's other thesis, about Great Britain, is equally misconceived. In his reply, Shlaim cites the
following passage from his book:

By secretly endorsing Abdullah's plan to enlarge his kingdom, Britain became an accomplice in the
Hashemite-Zionist collusion to frustrate the United Nations partition resolution of 29 November
1947 and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state. 3
One need go no further than Shlaim's concluding chapter to belie this fantastic claim:
Britain was careful not to get involved in active collusion with Abdullah in frustrating the United
Nations partition scheme and gave only implicit agreement to Abdullah's plan. The point of the
agreement was not to prevent the birth of a Palestinian state, since by that time it was clear that the
Palestinian leaders were not prepared to set up a state in part of Palestine, but to prevent the Jews
from occupying the whole of Palestine.4
Shlaim here concedes that the Anglo-Transjordanian collaboration was aimed not against
Palestinians but against Jews.

Shlaim himself having debunked the main thrust of his own conspiracy theory, I limit the remainder
of my response to dispelling his claims about its specifics:

* I wrote that London did not know of a Hashemite-Zionist agreement to divide up Palestine
between themselves; ipso facto it could not have blessed such an agreement. In his reply, Shlaim
does not contest this extensively referenced assertion; I take his silence for agreement.

* Shlaim charges me of distorting his account of the February 1948 meeting between Foreign
Secretary Ernest Bevin and Tawfiq Abul Huda, the Transjordan Prime Minister, in which Britain
allegedly approved the Hashemite-Zionist collusion. Let's look at the record.

First, Shlaim overlooked a critical piece of primary source-material on the meeting, which makes his
account partial at best. He has identified two records: the 1957 memoirs of Sir John Glubb and a
minute dated February 9, 1948, by Bernard Burrows, head of the Middle East Department at the
Foreign Office. He neglects another contemporary report, prepared by Bevin on February 10 and
cabled to the British ambassador in Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbride, the following morning. This third
report negates Shlaim's account of the meeting.

Secondly, Shlaim concedes that "what Glubb represents as an explicit warning appears [in the
original report] as a question." Yet he gives Glubb's old and partisan account priority over the newly
released official document. Further, he twists the original report in order to prove its concomitance
with Glubb's claim. "When Glubb's account is taken in conjunction with the briefs prepared for
Bevin," he writes, "it appears highly probable that the latter in fact used the opportunity to warn
Abul Huda against attempting to seize any of the Jewish areas." 5 There is no need for Shlaim's
elaborate detective work of second-guessing Bevin through tertiary accounts because the two
contemporary reports of the meeting are perfectly clear: Bevin did not tell Abul Huda that invading
the Arab parts of Palestine was "the obvious thing to do," as claimed by Glubb, and he did not warn
him off invading the Jewish areas. All he said was that he "would study the statements which his
Excellency had made."

But even if we read the original reports in conjunction with the briefs prepared for Bevin by his
advisers, Shlaim's conspiracy theory does not stand. There were two such briefs, both of which
underscored the dilemma confronting British policymakers at the time: whether to limit `Abdallah's
intervention to the Arab parts of Palestine and let him be damned in Arab eyes forever, or to
encourage him to invade the Jewish areas and run the risk of a harsh international response.
Contrary to Shlaim's claim, Bevin's advisers could not make up their mind between these two evils
and their clear preference was therefore for the foreign secretary to reserve any comment.
Significantly enough, in his book Shlaim omits this recommendation, thus misrepresenting the gist
of the briefs.6 But even if both briefs would have made the recommendation alleged by Shlaim, then,
as is clearly borne out by Bevin's two reports, their advice was not acted upon. In actual fact, Bevin
did follow the advice by refraining from commenting on Abul Huda's proposed line of action.

* Shlaim charges me of distorting the gist of another memorandum, written by Burrows following
the meeting and envisaging the detachment of the Negev from the Jewish state-to-be. "Karsh does
not say," writes Shlaim, "that Burrows himself described this as one of several considerations not
suitable for circulation outside the Foreign Office." Several problems here: First, the detachment of
the Negev (and other territories) from the prospective Jewish state was not just "one of several
considerations" but a key element of Bevin's political-strategic vision, as evidenced by countless
documents in the British archives7 of which Shlaim seems to be unaware. Secondly, I challenge
Shlaim to explain why he believes that the memorandum was "not suitable for circulation outside
the Foreign Office," when it is minuted at its bottom that "this was briefly discussed with the S.ofS.
[i.e., Secretary of State Bevin] who did not object to the substance of the above minute being
confidentially discussed with the State Depat. I attach a draft tel." 8 Shlaim has inverted Burrows's
memorandum, turning black into white. This is not a matter of having a different interpretation
from mine; it is a blatant misrepresentation of the substance of a historical document. And it was to
caution against precisely this form of malpractice, all too common in the new historians' writing,
that I wrote my article.

* The most preposterous of Shlaim's misperceptions is his depiction of Bevin as "the guardian angel
of the infant [Israeli] state."9 My heart goes out to Shlaim, whose mother persuaded him into eating
his porridge on false pretences. (Fortunately, Bevin never figured in my childhood memories.) But
for the rest of us, it clear that Bevin did not hold the view Shlaim ascribes to him but was an arch
enemy of the Jewish struggle for national revival. He adamantly refused to help implement the U.N.
Partition Resolution of November 1947; he had a long record of trying to prevent Jewish
immigration to the British Palestine and then the State of Israel; he oversaw the policy of detaining
tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors in camps in Cyprus; he would not recognize Israel for nine
months and vehemently opposed Israel's admission to the United Nations; and, despite his
awareness that "life for the Jews in such a small State would sooner or later become intolerable and
it could be eliminated altogether,"10 he tirelessly worked to make the Jewish state smaller and
weaker than what was envisaged by the U.N. Partition Resolution.

In conclusion, to Shlaim's accusing me of "distorting and misrepresenting the work of [my]

opponents," I can only say that he who dwells in a glass house should not cast the first stone. In his
reply, Shlaim misrepresented Burrows's memorandum and falsely claims to have used the reports of
all three Jewish participants in the Meir-`Abdallah meeting when in fact he deliberately withheld
Meir's report. Had I not pointed out this fact in my article, he would still pretend this invaluable
primary source does not exist. Who is distorting and misrepresenting?

That Shlaim, Papp, and Morris remain unmoved by the damning evidence in my article is scarcely
surprising. Yet I hope that readers will see that their supposed works of history are, in E.H. Carr's
words, "propaganda or historical fiction [which uses] facts of the past to embroider a kind of writing
which has nothing to do with history." 11
1
Avi Shlaim, "The Debate about 1948," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Aug. 1995, p.
298.
2
Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (London: Frank Cass, forthcoming).
3
Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition
of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 1.
4
Ibid., p. 618.
5
Ibid., pp. 137-38.
6
Ibid., p. 135.
7
See telegram from Bevin to Sir Alec Kirkbride, Nov. 11, 1947, telegram 493, FO 816/89; Harold
Beeley, "Possible Forms of Arab Resistance to the Decision of the United Nations," Dec. 22, 1947, FO
371/68364/E11504; "Relations Between H.M.G. and Transjordan," comments by Bevin's advisers on
Clayton's conversation with Samir Pasha on Dec. 11, 1948 (Cairo telegram 67 of Dec. 12, 1948), FO
371/62226/E11928; M.T. Walker, "Arab Legion after May 15th," Mar. 3, 1948, FO
371/38366/E1916/G; Bernard Burrows, "Palestine After May 14", May 7, 1948, FO
371/68554/E6778; and "Record of Meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to Discuss the Palestine
Situation", May 25, 1948, FO 800/487.
8
FO 371/68368/E2696.
9
Shlaim, Collusion, p. 618.
10
Bernard Burrows, "Conversation with Musa el-Alami", Dec. 6, 1947, FO 371/61585/E11764.
11
E.H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 29.

Benny Morris and the Reign of Error

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
March 1999, pp. 15-28

Efraim Karsh is professor of Mediterranean studies at King's College, University of London, and
editor of Israel Affairs.

As a general rule, every war is fought twice: first on the battlefield, then in the historiographical
arena. The Arabs failed to destroy the State of Israel in 1948; in the next fifty years, they and their
Western partisans waged a sustained propaganda battle to cast the birth of Israel as the source of all
evil. In the late 1980s this effort received a major boost with the advent of a group of Israeli
academics calling themselves the New Historians who claim to have discovered archival evidence
substantiating the anti-Israeli case.

These politicized historians have turned the saga of Israel's birth upside down, with aggressors
turned into hapless victims and the reverse. The Jewish acceptance of the United Nations Resolution
of November 29, 1947, partitioning Mandatory Palestine into two new statesJewish and Arabis
completely ignored or dismissed as a disingenuous ploy; similarly, the violent Palestinian and Arab
attempt to abort this resolution is overlooked. The concerted Arab attack on the newly-established
State of Israel in mid-May 1948 is whitewashed as a haphazard move by ill-equipped and poorly
trained armies confronted with a formidable Jewish force. It has even been suggested that the
Palestinians, rather than the Israelis, were the target of this concerted Arab attack. 1

So successful has this effort been that what began as propaganda has become received dogma. It is
striking to see how popularity has widely come to be equated with veracity, as if the most commonly
held position must by definition be the correct one. I personally learned this when some critics
rejected my exposure of the New Historians methods 2 not on scholarly grounds but because my work
ran counter to the popular view. Thus Joel Beinin of Stanford University questioned my conclusions
on the grounds that "many of the arguments of the `new historians' are widely accepted today in
liberal Israeli intellectual circles."3 Of course, fashion and popularity cannot authenticate incorrect
historical facts and argument. For this reason, it is important to return to the heart of the matter and
reexamine the factual basis underlying the anti-Israel indictment.

Toward this end, I shall focus on a key charge: the claim by Benny Morris of

Ben-Gurion University, a leading New Historian, that the Zionist and Israeli establishments have
systematically falsified archival source material to conceal the Jewish state's less-than-immaculate
conception.4 Through a detailed reexamination of the same documentation used by Morris, I shall
seek to establish just how reliable his work is and whether it forms a legitimate basis for the
revisionist theories he espouses.
First, a note of caution: A rigorous scrutinizing of primary source-material, especially in translation,
does not make for the easiest of reading; comparing texts requires more than the usual
concentration. I hope the reader will bear with me, though, for this is the only way to get at the
bottom of some vexing and critical disputes.

Morris engages in five types of distortion: he misrepresents documents, resorts to partial quotes,
withholds evidence, makes false assertions, and rewrites original documents.

MISREPRESENTATION

The first problem concerns a faulty account of the contents of documents. Morris tells of statements
never made, decisions never taken, events that never happened. Consider, for example, the Israeli
cabinet meeting of June 16, 1948, about which Morris
commits a double misrepresentation: he misattributes a decision to bar the return of the Palestinian
refugees to this meeting; then he charges the Israeli establishment with concealing this nonexistent
decision!

On the first matter, Morris writes that

The cabinet meeting of 16 June 1948 was one of the war's most important. It was at
that session that, without a formal vote, agreement was reached among the thirteen
ministers of Israel's "Provisional Government" to bar a refugee return. The decision
in effect sealed the fate of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who had become, or were to
become, dispossessed exiles.5

Did it seal their fate? This cabinet meeting took place one month after the war began, at the time of
the conflict's first armistice, with fighting to be resumed within three weeks. Its protocol tells
nothing of a decision "to bar a refugee return." In fact, it indicates there was no discussion of this
issue, much less a decision. Only three participants (Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion, and Agriculture Minister Aharon Tzisling) referred to refugees at all,
and they did so only in the context of a general survey of the situation. All three cabinet members
feared that so long as the war was not over, the return of refugees would tilt the scales in the Arabs'
favor. However, while two cabinet members (Sharett and Ben-Gurion) believed that the refugees
should not return after the war, a third (Tzisling) emphatically argued they should. Where is the
consensus of the cabinet Morris alleges?

On the second matter, Morris charges that later published accounts of this cabinet meeting hide
what happened at it. But a look at the works in question, notably two of David Ben-Gurion's
books,6 shows not a shred of evidence to support this contention. Ben-Gurion's account of the
meeting (as quoted by Morris) is a near-verbatim reiteration of the original minutes, espousing Ben-
Gurion's view that the refugees should not be allowed back.

The following discussion demonstrates the intricate dynamics of distortion, whereby one
misrepresentation inevitably leads to another. Having falsely claimed the existence of an Israeli
cabinet decision to bar a refugee return, Morris has no choice but to distort not only the documents
related to this meeting but also those of a subsequent Israeli consultation, about the possibility of
refugee return, so as to avoid exposure of his original claim.

This high-level consultation was held on August 18, 1948. Morris writes that the meeting, which
included Ben-Gurion, his Arab affairs advisers, and his key ministers, was called "to discuss the
problem of the Arab refugees and ways to prevent their return."7 In fact, as the meeting's
agenda8 and Ben-Gurion's diary9 make clear, it attempted to determine the issue of "whether or not
to return Arabs." The preliminary remarks of another participant, Director of the Jewish National
Fund's (JNF) Land Development Division Yosef Weitz confirms this point: "We should not discuss
the [abandoned] property here: there is a custodian attached to the treasury. Discussion of this
matter will divert us from the main issue: to return [the refugees] or not to return?" 10 In the event,
no collective recommendations were made on this issue, which was left for a government
decision.11 Morris withholds these facts from his readers.12

Rather than give the full title of the meeting's original minutes, as recorded by Yaacov Shimoni of
the foreign office ("A Prcis of a Meeting at the Prime Minister's Office on the Problems of the Arab
Refugees and their Return"), Morris truncates it to merely "A Prcis,"13 thereby omitting any
mention of a possible Palestinian return.

Morris also hides from his readers the widespread consensus among participants at this August
1948 meeting to allow Arabs who had fled to other parts of Israel from their places of residence to
return to their original dwellings. In the words of Minister of Police and Minorities Bechor Shalom
Shitrit: "The Arabs of Israel who had left their places but remained insidethose should be
returned."14 Under a section of the discussion titled "The return of Arabs who had fled their places
but remained inside Israel?" Sharett put the idea in far more elaborate form:

These should be returned to their places, with full ownership of their lands etc., and with full
[citizenship] rights. We should not, as a matter of principle, discriminate against an Arab who had
stayed inside [Israel] and thereby accepted its rule. He should enjoy full rights, including his
property [rights]unless there are decisive emergency considerations, security-wise. This should be
the instruction to governors, commanders, etc.15

To return to the cabinet meeting of June 16, 1948, the original, untruncated text of Foreign Minister
Sharett's words as recorded by Ben-Gurion reads:

Apart from the boundaries question, namely the external perimeter of the state's territory, there is
the question of the future of the Arab community which had existed in Israel's territory prior to the
outbreak of the present war: Do we imagine to ourselves [ha'im anahnu metaarim le'atsmenu] a
return to the status quo ante, or do we accept the [present] situation as a fait accompli and fight
over it?16

Morris presents it this way:

"Can we imagine to ourselves a return to the status quo ante?" the foreign minister
asked rhetorically. "They are not returning [or "they will not return" "hem einam
hozrim"], and that is our policy: they are not returning."17

Morris omits both the beginning of Sharett's presentation, which places his words in context, and
the second half of his question (about accepting the situation or fighting it). These changes permit
him to turn a weighty issue for decision into a rhetorical question. He further exacerbates the
distortion by mistranslating Sharett's genuine question, "Do we imagine to ourselves," as the
rhetorical assertion "Can we imagine to ourselves." Moreover, by linking Sharett's conclusion
to his truncated question, he jumps over the lengthy consideration of the pros and cons of each
option.18 Revealingly, in a Hebrew version of this same article, Morris did not misrepresent Sharett's
words,19 perhaps because Hebrew readers can check for themselves the veracity of his citation.

II. PARTIAL QUOTES

Through the omission of key passages, Morris repeatedly distorts many quotations. He makes a
specialty of partial quotes from Ben-Gurion's books, in the process turning their original intention
upside down. Morris claims that Ben-Gurion sought to hide his own views, 20 but this is also wrong.

Departed Palestinians. Consider, for example, the following partial quote, about the same meeting
and from a book by Ben-Gurion, in which he discusses the departed Palestinians. The original text
reads as follows:

And we must prevent at all costs their return meanwhile [i.e., until the end of the war]. We, as well
as world public opinion cannot ignore the horrible fact that 700,000 [Jewish] people are confronted
here with 27 million [Arabs], one against forty. Humanity's conscience was not shocked when 27
million attacked 700,000after six million Jews had been slaughtered in Europe. It will not be just
if they demand of us to allow back to Abu Kabir and Jaffa those who tried to destroy us. 21

Morris provides only this truncated text:

And we must prevent at all costs their return meanwhile ... . It will not be just if they
demand of us to allow back to Abu Kabir and Jaffa those who tried to destroy us. 22

The innocent looking ellipses hide an insightful glimpse into Ben-Gurion's mindset, namely, his
perception of the 1948 War as a concerted attempt by the Arab world to destroy the Yishuv (the
Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) shortly after the Holocaust. This was a central
component in the prime minister's thinking, one that Morris must deny in his attempt to
misrepresent the 1948 War as a confrontation between a Jewish Goliath and an Arab David. And
again, by omitting a key passage, Morris misleads his readers into thinking that this paragraph in
Ben-Gurion's book differs from the original meeting protocol; in fact, it is a near-verbatim rendition
of it, and not the "falsification" that Morris claims to find.

Jaffa. Here is the complete text of a paragraph from a book Ben-Gurion published in 1951:

Jaffa will become a Jewish city. War is war; it is not us who wanted war. Tel-Aviv did not wage war
on Jaffa, Jaffa waged war on Tel-Aviv. And this should not happen again. We will not be "foolish
hasidim." Bringing back the Arabs to Jaffa is not just but rather is foolish. Those who had gone to
war against uslet them carry the responsibility after having lost. 23

As quoted by Morris, this paragraph reads:

Jaffa will become a Jewish city ... . Bringing back the Arabs to Jaffa is not just but
rather is foolish. Those who had gone to war against uslet them carry the
responsibility after having lost.24

By dropping the middle part of this passage, Morris withholds from his readers Ben-Gurion's
elaborate reasoning for barring an Arab return to Jaffa. He also hides the striking similarity between
this later rendition and the original protocolwhich would refute his charge that Israelis falsify the
historical record.

In another passage, Morris writes:

Interestingly, in Medinat Yisrael Ben-Gurion did not republish his statement that
"Jaffa will become a Jewish city." Perhaps he felt in 1969 that Israelor the world
had become somewhat more sensitive than it had been in 1952 to anything smacking
of racism.25

Leaving aside the curious expectation that two books on different subjects should precisely replicate
each other, a glance at Ben-Gurion's account of the cabinet meeting reveals that "Jaffa will become a
Jewish city" meant that through the vicissitudes of the war, Jaffa would become part of the Jewish
state rather than of an Arab state, as envisaged by the U.N. partition resolution. Morris omits
Sharett's words at the same meeting that explain this:

As regards Jaffa, a very serious question arises yet again: can we agree, after the experience we had
just gone through, to the restoration of the status quo ante: that Jaffa will return to be an Arab city,
at a time when the risk is so great? Even then, when we agreed to the exclusion of Jaffa from the
territory of the [Israeli] state, many [people] questioned [our decision]; but there was the
assumption that just as they held [Jewish] Jerusalem [hostage], we held Jaffa. But now we realize
what a fifth column it was! And having removed this troublesome spot, returning Jaffa to foreign
sovereignty, which is likely to be [our] enemy for many years to comeis a very grave question. 26
Arab rights. Ben-Gurion had the following to say about Arab rights, according to the original
protocol of a meeting:

We must start working in Jaffa. Jaffa must employ Arab workers. And there is a question of their
wages. I believe that they should receive the same wage as a Jewish worker. An Arab has also the
right to be elected president of the state, should he be elected by all. If in America a Jew or a black
cannot become president of the stateI do not believe in the quality of its civil rights. Indeed,
despite the democracy there, I know that there are plots that are not sold to Jews, and the law
tolerates this; and a person can sell his plot to a dealer on condition that it not be bought by a Jew ...
Should we have such a regimethen we would have missed the purpose of the Jewish State. And I
would add that we would have denied the most precious thing in Jewish tradition. But war is war.
We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us, Haifa waged war on us, Bet
She'an waged war on us. And I do not want them again to make war. That would be not just but
foolish. This would be a "foolish hasid." Do we have to bring back the enemy, so that he again fights
us in Bet She'an? No! You made war [and] you lost. 27

His later account of his words read:

Jaffa must employ Arab workers. And there is a question of their wages. I believe that they should
receive the same wage as a Jewish worker. An Arab has also the right to be elected president of the
state, should he be elected. If in America a Jew or a black cannot become president of the stateI do
not believe in the quality of its civil rights. But war is war. 28

But then here is Morris reporting on Ben-Gurion's views:

He favored giving work to the Arabs who had remained in Jaffa (about 3,000 of the
original 70,000): "I believe that they should receive the same wage as a Jewish
worker. An Arab has the right also to be elected president of the state ... . But war is
war."29

Why Morris omitted key passages from his article is easy to guess, for it was precisely Ben-Gurion's
relentless commitment to democracy and his perception of Israel's Arabs as full and equal members
of the Jewish state (i.e., Israel as a genuine "state of all its citizens") 30 that Morris has so vehemently
denied. Moreover, the original protocol offers a more elaborate exposition of Ben-Gurion's
democratic values than the shorter account he chose to bring in his book. Where, then, is Ben-
Gurion's attempt at a cover-up?

III. WITHHOLDING VITAL EVIDENCE

Morris repeatedly omits key words or even sentences from his quotations, thus distorting their
meaning; or he places the quotes out of context; or he portrays them in false light. At times he even
omits entire passages, then has the nerve to castigate the speaker or writer for the absence of these
very passages!

Take Ben-Gurion's discussions with his advisers on January 1-2, 1948, to determine the strategy of
the Yishuv against Palestinian attempts to subvert the U.N. Partition Resolution of November 1947
through violence. Morris compares the thirteen-page description of these deliberations in Ben-
Gurion's diary with the eighty-one page stenographic typescript of the proceedings and found a "few
but telling" differences.31 Leaving aside the fact that it is technically impossible for a thirteen-page
diary entry to replicate a eighty-one page stenographic typescript fully, Morris neglects to inform his
readers of much key information.

The first of these differences concerns a statement by Gad Machnes, one of Ben-Gurion's advisers on
Arab affairs. Morris writes that:

Machnes kicked off the discussion by stating: " ... The Arabs were not ready when they
began the disturbances. Moreover, most of the Arab public did not want them." Ben-
Gurion, in his diary, rendered this passage thus: "The Arabs were not ready"
completely omitting Machnes's opinion that "most" of the Arabs did not want the
disturbances.32

Morris does not mention that Ben-Gurion's diary entry is replete with references to the Arab masses'
lack of interest in war.33

Indeed, Ben-Gurion repeatedly tells of his conviction that the Palestinian masses did not want war
but had this imposed on them by an intransigent leadership. He reiterated this theme both in his
meetings with Sir Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner in Palestine, 34 and expressed it
publicly. On November 25, 1947, for example, he stated that "it should be borne in mind that the
masses of the Arab peopleforcibly silenced and deprived of political expressionare not keen to
rush to battle."35

Second, Morris writes that "Machnes went on to enjoin the Haganah to retaliate against
Arab provocations with strength and brutality,' even hitting women and
children."36 Morris withholds from his readers, however, that "strength and brutality" refers here
not to indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian society as a whole, but as a means of last resort and
to pinpoint retaliation against specific and well-identified perpetrators of armed attacks on Jews.
Here is the full citation of Machnes's words from the meeting's original protocol:

I think that today there is no question whether or not to respond. But for the response to be
effective, it must come in the right time and the right place and take the form of a strong
punishment. Blowing up a house is not enough. Blowing up a house of innocent people is certainly
not enough! The response must be strong and harsh because it must create the [right] impression,
must punish [the perpetrators of violence] and must serve as a warning. If our responses are not
impressivethey will create the opposite impression. These matters necessitate the utmost precision
in terms of time, place, and whom and what to hit ... If we operate against, say, a specific family in
a known place, a known village [i.e., identified perpetrators of violence], then there should be no
mercy! But only a direct blow and no touching of innocent people! We have already reached a
position that necessitates a strong response. Today one should not even avoid hitting women and
children. For otherwise, the response cannot be effective. 37

Whereas Machnes recommended a highly discriminate response, Morris misquotes him as

suggesting precisely the opposite.

Third, Morris misrepresents Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach, as advocating political
assassinations: " ... Eliminating a few personalities at the right timeis very
important."38 The actual text reads as follows:

In conclusion, I would like to say that we cannot shift to a pattern of personal terrorism. But the
elimination of a few individuals at the right time is a very important thing. 39

By removing Allon's first sentence Morris turned his position upside down. Allon rejected political
assassination as a modus operandi, as opposed to the targeting of specific individuals who had a
direct bearing on the prosecution of the war.

Apart from this meeting, Morris distorts the views of Yosef Weitz (a secondary Zionist figure who
Morris inflates into a straw-man of gigantic proportions) and thereby withholds revealing
information on the Palestinian side. Weitz' diary as found in the archive tells about an incident on
May 4, 1948, as follows:

A delegation from the Jezreel Valley and Bet She'an informs that the Arab Legion entered the [Arab]
town of Bet She'an; ordered the women and children to leave the town and barricaded itself inside it.
The question arose: should we attack the town or lay siege to it? This issue was discussed yesterday
at the regional headquarters. An attack necessitates far larger forces than those available at the area,
while the siege might take a long time and might trigger an invasion of foreign forces from
Transjordan and an increase of the [Arab] Legion's forces [in the area]. No decision was reached.
The local committee [of Jewish settlements] supports an attack, and came to ask me to influence the
commanders here. I complained that this valley was still seething with enemies. And I am afraid that
we are on the verge of defeat, because the British army, which had suddenly returned to the country,
intends forcefully to impose "peace" on both parties and will prevent us from undertaking vigorous
actions at a time when we have the upper hand. "The Bet She'an Valley is the gate to our state in the
Galilee, and nobody should stand on its threshold to disturb us,"I said"the evacuation of the
valley [pinuyo shel ha-`emek] is the order of the day."40

Morris reports this episode as follows, writing about Weitz:

On 4 May, he complained to the local Jewish leaders that "the valley was still seething
with enemies ... I saidthe eviction [of the Arabs] from the valley is the order of the
day." The passage was deleted from the published diary. 41

Note that Morris mistranslates "evacuation" of the valley as "eviction [of the Arabs]," though
Weitz clearly refers to the valley, not the Arabs. Even if Weitz implies their eviction, Morris
undoubtedly has taken liberties with the translation. Also, by quoting a tiny fraction of this lengthy
paragraph out of its real context, Morris withholds from his readers Weitz's thinking about the
strategic importance of the Bet She'an Valley for Israel's security and his recurrent fears of Jewish
defeat (a far cry from the militant mood misattributed to him by Morris). 42

No less importantly, Morris hides revealing information about the departure of Palestinians as the
result of Arab pressure. For example, on March 28, 1948, Weitz recorded in his published diary:

HaifaR. Baum told me that the inhabitants of Qumia, about three hundred people, left the village
yesterday having asked the [British] authorities to vacate them. They were in a difficult economic
position and the [Arab] gangs had struck fear into them. The people cried on Baum's shoulders
about the difficulty of leaving their place.43

Morris ignores this entry altogether.

IV. MAKING FALSE ASSERTIONS

Unconcerned with the necessities of scholarly rigor, at times Morris does not even take the trouble to
provide evidence for his charge of Zionist wrongdoing. He expects his readers to take on trust his
assertions that fundamental contradictions exist between published accounts and the underlying
documents. In fact, these contradictions do not exist.

For example, Morris charges Ben-Gurion of omitting passages from the protocol of the (above-
noted) consultation on August 18, 1948:

Both Shitrit and Weitz spoke of the need to buy land. As Shitrit put it: "There are many
Arabs who wish to leavethey must be found and bought out."

Morris then recounts what other participants said and then returns to these two:

Ben-Gurion's three-and-a-half page diary description of that meeting completely

omits mention of Weitz's proposals to destroy the villages and prevent Arab
harvesting. It also fails to mention Weitz's and Shitrit's proposal to encourage Arab
emigration through offers to purchase land.44

But did Ben-Gurion's diary actually not mention these proposals? Here is the original text:

Shitrit: Many Arabs do not want to return to the country and we must immediately buy their land.
Weitz: As for the cultivation of the land: if we do not wish the Arabs to return, and we require only
foodthen we should cultivate only the land necessary for growing food100,000 dunams of the
best land, and from the restlease and buy as much as possible ... one has to prepare plans for
settling the Arabs in the neighboring states.45

In fact, Ben-Gurion scrupulously recorded the meeting in his diary.

Similarly, Morris charges Yosef Weitz of another distortion:

On 12 January 1948, six weeks into the war, Weitz traveled to Yoqne'am, an
agricultural settlement southeast of Haifa, where he discussed with Yehuda Burstein,
the local Haganah intelligence officer, "the question of the eviction of [Arab] tenant-
farmers from Yoqne'am and [neighboring] Daliyat [al-Ruha] with the methods now
acceptable. The matter has been left in the hands of the defense people [the Haganah]
and during the afternoon I spoke with the [Haganah] deputy district commander."
This whole passage was omitted from the published diary. 46

Was it? Let us look at the published diary:

Haifa, 11.1: I discussed with the Haifa people [i.e., officials] the question of the [Arab] tenant-
farmers in Yoqne'am and Daliya. Is it not the time now to get rid of them? Why should we continue
to keep these thorns among us, at a time when they pose a threat to us? Our people weigh and reflect
[on the matter].47

Equally false is Morris's claim that Weitz omitted from the published diary his advocacy that
Bedouin farmer tenants from the Ghawarna clan be vacated from Jewish land in the Haifa bay. As
Morris puts it:

A member of Kfar Masaryk came to see Weitz in Tel Aviv and complained,
"astonished," that these bedouin had not yet been evicted. Weitz promptly wrote a
letter "to the [Haganah] commander there and to [Mordechai] Shachevitz [Weitz's
land-purchasing agent in the area] to move quickly in this matter." A week later,
Shachevitz informed Weitz that "most of the beduins in the [Haifa] bay [area] had
gone, [but] some fifteen-twenty men had stayed behind to guard [the clans' property].
I demanded that they also be evicted and that the fields be plowed over so that no trace
of them remains." Again, no trace of any of this is to be found in Weitz's published
diary entries.48

Really? A look at Weitz's published account reveals the following:

Haifa, 27.3Today we discussed the Ghawarna Bedouins in our bay, who must be sent away from
there so as to prevent them from joining our enemies...

Haifa, 26.4 ... In the bay [area] I saw the lands cleared of the Ghawarna, most of whom had left. In
the northern part [of the bay] the shacks had been destroyed and the land was being plowed over. In
the southern part, the operation had yet to be completed. In waras in war. 49

It gets worse. Morris misrepresents the latter entry from Weitz's diary. He holds that
Weitz"recorded that the northern part of the Zevulun Valley was completely clear of
bedouin."50 Not so: as we have just seen, Weitz's published account specifically refers to the
departure of the Ghawarna Bedouins, rather than of Bedouins as a whole, and from the Haifa Bay,
rather than the Zevulun Valleyprecisely as it appears in the original diary. 51 Had Morris quoted the
diary correctly, he would have negated his false claim that no trace of this episode is to be found in
the published diary entries, since he had himself acknowledged that "Weitz included this
passage in his published entry for 26 April."52
Morris then accuses Weitz of wholesale falsification of the personal diaries of Yosef Nahmani,
longtime director of the JNF Office in the eastern Galilee, which Weitz edited after Nahmani's death.
Morris writes:

On 30 December 1947, a squad of IZL terrorists threw a bomb at a bus stop outside the
oil refinery complex just north of Haifa, killing about half a dozen Arabs, some of
them workers at the plant, and wounding others. Within hours, in a spontaneous act
of vengeance, Arab workers at the plant turned on their Jewish colleagues with knives
and sticks, slaughtering thirty-nine of them. Nahmani jotted down in his diary (on 30
December):

... [I] was told about the bomb that Jews threw into a crowd of Arab workers from the
refinery and there are dead. The Arabs [then] attacked the Jewish clerks ... and killed
some of them ... . This incident depressed me greatly. After all, the Arabs [in Haifa]
had declared a truce and why cause the death of innocent people and again ignite the
Arabs ...

Morris quotes more of Nahmani, musing on the significance of this event, then adds his own
comment:

Weitz, in Nahmani, completely omitted this passage (though he did include a brief
excerpt from Nahmani's entry for 30 Decemberdealing with other matters
altogether). However, he published part of Nahmani's entry for 31 December, reading:
"The disaster that struck the workers at the Haifa oil refinery depressed me greatly."
For Israeli readers in 1969, this passage, in the way it appears, could only be taken to
refer to the massacre of the Jewish refinery workers and not to the killing of the Arab
workers at the bus stop that preceded it.53

But did Weitz really seek to shield his fellow Israelis from the less savory aspects of their past by
expunging all traces of Jewish-initiated violence? Hardly. The page in Nahmani's published diary
that Morris quotes contains no less than two other entries specifically dedicated to this issue:

Tiberias, 19.12this morning we learnt from the Galileans who came to Tiberias about the bombing
of houses in Kasas [in retaliation for a mob attack on a Jewish guard] and there are fatalities: ten
dead Arabs, including five children. This is appalling. Indiscriminate acts of retaliation hitting
innocent people will mobilize all of the Arabs against us and help the extremists who will immerse
the country in a whirlpool of bloodletting. The Kasas incident greatly depressed me.

Tiberias, 21.12I participated in a meeting of representatives of those Galilee settlements which

maintain contacts with Arabs and propagate the preservation of relations with them [i.e., the Arabs].
I raised the Kasas incident and said that this act indicated that the generation at the helm had no
moral inhibitions against bloodshed.54

Further showing the complete inaccuracy of Morris's claim that Weitz hid the less savory episodes,
Weitz's own published diary offered a candid description of the refinery episode four years before
Nahmani's was published:

What happened this week at the Haifa refinery shocked all of us, on both accounts: the bomb
throwing into a crowd of Arab workers was a crime on the part of our "secessionists" [i.e., the IZL].
For while we favor "a retaliatory action," we are totally opposed to a provocative attack. I do not find
any supportive circumstances, not even one in a thousand, to justify this act by the secessionists,
which caused to a certain extent the Arab riots in the refinery and the massacre of forty Jews. I said
to a certain extent, because it is argued that incitement for an attack of the Jewish workers has been
sensed for quite some time and that the attack would probably have occurred in any event. However,
it is clear today that this provocative act caused the spilling of our precious blood. 55
Thus did Weitz make not the slightest attempt to cover up IZL's responsibility for what he called a
"crime" in the refinery. His omission of the above entry in Nahmani's diary obviously had nothing to
do with the "political and propagandistic intent" Morris attributes to him.56 To the contrary, as
activists in the Labor movement, Weitz and Nahmani had no compunction about publicly disowning
the activities of the smaller underground groups, the IZL and Lohamei Herut Israel (LEHI, Fighters
for Israel's Freedom), which they deemed as morally reprehensible and politically detrimental.
Hence the striking similarity in Weitz's and Nahmani's responses to the IZL attack at the refinery;
hence the negative references to IZL terrorist acts recurring in their published diaries. Where is the
cover up?

V. REWRITING ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS

Falsification means the reader is presented with allegedly direct quotations from original documents
that are in fact rewritten texts containing at best altered words or sentences, and at worst sentences
invented by Morris and then misrepresented by him as authentic.

Take Morris's citation of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's words at the Israeli cabinet meeting of June
16, 1948:

But war is war. We did not start the war. They made the war, Jaffa went to war against
us. So did Haifa. And I do not want those who fled to return. I do not want them again
to make war.57

The key sentence here ("I do not want those who fled to return") is simply not found in the
text of the meeting protocol. It reads as follows:

But war is war. We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us, Haifa waged
war on us, Bet She'an waged war on us. And I do not want them again to make war. That would be
not just but foolish. This would be a "foolish hasid." Do we have to bring back the enemy, so that he
again fights us in Bet She'an? No! You made war [and] you lost. 58

It bears noting that in the Hebrew version of his article, Morris did not put words into Ben-Gurion's
mouth,59 presumably because Hebrew readers can check for themselves the veracity of his citation.

Morris has Ben-Gurion telling a Jewish Agency Executive meeting (on June 7, 1938) that

"The starting point for a solution of the Arab problem in the Jewish state" was the conclusion of an
agreement with the Arab states that would pave the way for a transfer of the Arabs out of the Jewish
State to the Arab countries.60

The original protocol has nothing about transferring "Arabs out of the Jewish State to the
Arab countries," a phrase entirely of Morris' own making. The actual text reads:

The starting point for a solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish State is, in his [i.e., Ben-
Gurion's] view, the need to prepare the ground for an Arab-Jewish agreement. 61

On another occasion, Morris rewrites words or sentences in primary documents to misrepresent

their meaning. He quotes the January 12, 1948, entry in Yosef Weitz's diary and has Weitz
discussing the eviction of Arab tenant-farmers from "Daliyat,"62 which he identifies as "Daliyat al-
Ruha," an Arab locality. Weitz's diary in fact refers to Dalia, a Hebrew kibbutz, a neighboring and
wholly different place from "Daliyat." By Arabizing the name of a Hebrew settlement Morris creates
the absolutely false impression that the tenant farmers were to be evicted from Arab, rather than
from Jewish land.

On other occasions, Morris rewrites entries in the Weitz and Ben-Gurion diaries to implicate the
prime minister in Weitz's (alleged) activities. Writes Morris:
According to the original Weitz diary entry for 5 June, Weitz had informed Ben-
Gurion that the committee had already begun "here and there destroying villages." In
the published diary, Weitz had amended this to "here and there improving' villages"
(the single quotes presumably designed to signal his more perceptive readers what
was actually meant). In both versions, Weitz wrote that Ben-Gurion "gave his
approval" to this work.63

Morris goes on to characterize these as "the Transfer Committee's proposals" and to indicate
that Ben-Gurion approved of them.64 But did Weitz really tell Ben-Gurion that the "committee had
already begun" destroying villages? Did Ben-Gurion authorize "the Transfer Committee's
proposals"? Not at all, as Weitz himself explains:

I said that I [and not the "Transfer Committee" as misquoted by Morris] had already given
instructions to start here and there "improving" villagesand he approved it. I contented myself
with this.65

Weitz's resort to the first person is important: as director of the Jewish National Fund's Land
Development Division he was directly involved in the question of abandoned Palestinian villages.
Moreover, the "Transfer Committee" Morris writes of never came into being. During this same
meeting, Ben-Gurion specifically told Weitz that he rejected outright the very existence of such a
committee. As Weitz put it: "He would like to convene a narrow meeting and to appoint a committee
to handle the issue. He does not agree to the [existence] of our temporary committee." 66

Having withheld these critical facts, Morris then has the nerve to charge Ben-Gurion with taking
great care "to avoid leaving footprints of his own involvement"67 in the activities of the
Transfer Committee. To substantiate this false claim, Morris rewrites the entry in Ben-Gurion's
diary pertaining to the meeting. The actual text reads as follows:

He [i.e., Weitz] proposes to discuss with the Arab Governments help in settling these Arabs in the
Arab states. This is [far too] premature and untimely.68

Morris turns this into:

But how did Ben-Gurion record the self-same meeting? "It is too early and untimely ...
to discuss with the Arab Governments help in resettling these Arabs in the Arab
states ... ."69

Morris restructures Ben-Gurion's diary entry to remove the fact that Weitz proposed resettling
refugees in the Arab states and Ben-Gurion rejected the idea. This permits Morris to conceal Ben-
Gurion's rejection of a pivotal component of Weitz's thinking and to paint a false picture of a
complete meeting of minds, if not a straightforward collusion. As Morris puts it:

Indeed, according to Weitz, Ben-Gurion had not only approved the "whole policy," but
had thought that the proposed actions in Israel (destruction of villages, prevention of
harvesting, settlement of Jews in abandoned sites) should take precedence over
efforts to resettle refugees elsewhere (meaning negotiating with Arab countries about
resettlement, assessing compensation and so forth). 70

The reality was quite different. Ben-Gurion did not accept Weitz's suggestions about settling the
Arabs abroad. Rather, Ben-Gurion deemed the latter issue irrelevant and unwarranted because the
war was far from over and he had not yet made up his mind about the solution to the refugee
problem.

CONCLUSION

A deep-rooted and pervasive distortion lies at the heart of the revisionists' rewriting of Israel's early
history. A close inspection shows Morris's claim that the Zionist movement and the State of Israel
are "among the more accomplished practitioners of this strange craft"71 of record
falsification to be totally false. If anything, it shows that Morris himself is a master at that very same
"strange craft." Morris not only fails to show rewriting by the authorities but he himself is the one
who systematically falsifies evidence. Indeed, there is scarcely a document that he does not twist.

This casts serious doubt on the validity of his entire work. For, if the veracity of one's quotes and
factual assertions cannot be taken for granted, then the entire raison d'tre of the historical
discourse will have been lost. It also fits the psychological pattern of projection: a falsifier tends to
see in others a mirror image of himself. In the colloquial, it takes one to know one.

Regrettably, Morris's distortions in the article under consideration are neither a fluke nor an
exception. As I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere, they typify the New Historians' whole
approach.72 Lacking evidence, they invent an Israeli history in the image of their own choosing.

1
Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement
1949-1993 (Oxford and Washington DC: Clarendon Press and the Institute for Palestine Studies,
1998), p. 3.
2
Efraim Karsh, "Rewriting Israel's History," Middle East Quarterly, June 1996, pp. 19-29;
idem., Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (London: Frank Cass, 1997).
3
Joel Beinin, review of Fabricating Israeli History in the Middle East Journal, Summer 1998, p.
449.
4
Benny Morris, "Falsifying the Record: A Fresh Look at Zionist Documentation of 1948,"Journal of
Palestine Studies, Spring 1995, pp. 44-62.
5
Ibid., p. 56. For clarity's sake, we are placing all quotations from Morris in bold and all additions by
this author in brackets [].
6
Be-hilahem Israel (Tel-Aviv: Hotsaat Mifleget Poalei Eretz Israel, 1951), pp. 130-131 andMedinat
Israel Ha-mehudeshet (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1969), pp. 163-168.
7
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 49.
8
Yaacov Shimoni, "Beayot Gush Bet: Hahzarat Plitim O Ii Hahzaratam." Recorded in "Tamtsit
Dvarim Be-yeshiva Be-misrad Rosh Ha-memshala al Beayot Ha-plitim Ha-arvim Ve-shuvam," Aug.
18, 1948, ISA, FM 2444/19, p. 2. The other item on the agenda was the question of abandoned Arab
property.
9
Diary of David Ben-Gurion, Aug. 18, 1948, Ben-Gurion Archive, Sde Boker (hereafter BGA); David
Ben-Gurion, Yoman Ha-milhama (Tel-Aviv: Misrad Ha-bitahon, Ha-hotsa'a La'or, 1983), vol. II, p.
652 (emphasis added).
10
Shimoni, "Tamtsit," p. 1.
11
Ibid., p. 4; BGA; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Ha-milhama, vol. II, p. 654.
12
Morris, "Falsifying", p. 49.
13
Ibid., p. 61, fn. 21.
14
Shimoni, "Tamtsit," p. 2 (emphasis in the original).
15
Ibid., p. 3 (emphasis in the original).
16
Ben-Gurion, Medinat Israel, p. 164.
17
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 57.
18
Ben-Gurion, Medinat Israel, pp. 164-165; "PartikolYeshivat Ha-memshala Ha-zmanit," June 16,
1948, Israel State Archives, pp. 19-20.
19
Benny Morris, "U-sfarim U-gvilim Be-zikna Regilim': Mabat Hadash al Mismachim Zioni'im
Merkazi'im," Alpayim, 12 (1996): 98.
20
Morris, "Falsifying", pp. 50-51.
21
Ben-Gurion, Be-hilahem Israel, p. 131. See also "PartikolYeshivat Ha-memshala Ha-zmanit,"
June 16, 1948, p. 36.
22
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 57.
23
Ben-Gurion, Be-hilahem Israel, pp. 130-131.
24
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 57.
25
Ibid.
26
"PartikolYeshivat Ha-memshala Ha-zmanit," June 16, 1948, pp. 15-16.
27
Ibid., pp. 34-35.
28
Ben-Gurion, Medinat Israel, p. 167.
29
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 57.
30
David Ben-Gurion, Ba-ma'araha, vol. IV, part 2 (Tel-Aviv: Hotsaat Mifleget Polaei Eretz Israel,
1959), p. 260.
31
Morris, "Falsifying", p. 51.
32
Ibid.
33
Ben-Gurion quoted Eliyahu Sasson, director of the Arab section of the Jewish Agency's Political
Department: "It is true that the wider Arab public was not swayed by the disturbances; the villager,
the merchant, the worker, and the citrus-grower did not want [war] and do not want [it] now. But
the Mufti wantedand succeeded in implicating the country." Ben-Gurion recorded another Arab
specialist, Ezra Danin: "He [Danin] disputes Sasson's opinion that the Mufti achieved more than he
had hoped. To the contrary, he expected the Arabs to follow him more than it actually happened."
And yet another comment in the same vein, this time by Joshua Palmon: "Are there or are there not
disturbances? In the vicinity of Beit-Govrin, in the south up to Yazur there are no disturbances. Most
of the Arabs want peace." BGA; Ben-Gurion,Yoman Ha-milhama, vol. I, pp. 99-102.
34
Thus, for example, in his meeting with Cunningham on October 2, 1947, Ben-Gurion argued that
"he himself felt that the mass of the people in Palestine wished peace." Eleven days later he told
Cunningham that "there were a large section of Arabs who were against the Mufti and wished to
cooperate." On January 6, 1948, four days after the meeting cited by Morris, Ben-Gurion claimed
that "the felaheen did not want trouble and the Jews were not going to provoke them." Cunningham
Papers, St. Antony's College, Oxford, V/1.
35
Ben-Gurion, Ba-ma'araha, p. 254.
36
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 51.
37
"Partikol Meha-yeshiva Be-inyanei Shem," Jan. 1-2, 1948, Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuhad Archive,
Ramat-Efal, Israel, Galili Section, Box 45, File 1-4, pp. 3-4.
38
Morris, "Falsifying," pp. 51-52.
39
"Partikol Meha-yeshiva Be-inyanei Shem," p. 46.
40
Yosef Weitz diary, May 4, 1948, Central Zionist Archives, A246/13, pp. 2373-74.
41
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 47.
42
Ibid.
43
Yosef Weitz, Yomani Ve-igrotai La-banim (Tel-Aviv: Masada, 1965), vol. III, p. 257.
44
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 49.
45
BGA; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Ha-milhama, vol. II, pp. 653-54.
46
Morris, "Falsifying," pp. 46-47.
47
Weitz, Yomani, vol. III, p. 223. Though dated January 11, 1948, rather than January 12 as in the
original diary, there is no doubt that this is the meeting referred to by Morris, not least since Weitz
held his meetings in Haifa (and not in Yoqneam as Morris states). See, Yosef Weitz diary, Jan. 12,
1948, A246/12, p. 2290.
48
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 47. Kfar Masaryk is a kibbutz.
49
Weitz, Yomani, vol. III, pp. 257, 273.
50
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 47.
51
Yosef Weitz diary, Apr. 26, 1948, A246/13, p. 2367.
52
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 47.
53
Ibid., pp. 53-54. IZL stands for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization.
54
Yosef Nahmani, Ish Ha-Galil (Ramat-Gan: Masada, 1969), p. 246.
55
Weitz, Yomani, vol. III, p. 218 (entry for Jan. 3, 1948).
56
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 53.
57
Ibid., p. 58.
58
"PartikolYeshivat Ha-memshala Ha-zmanit," June 16, 1948, pp. 35-36.
59
Morris, "U-sfarim U-gvilim Be-zikna Regilim'," p. 99.
60
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 24.
61
"Partikol Yeshivat Hanhalat Ha-sokhnut Ha-yehudit Le-Eretz Israel, Shenitqaima Be-Yerushalaim
Be-yom," June 7, 1938, Central Zionist Archives, p. 11.
62
Morris, "Falsifying," pp. 46-47.
63
Ibid., p. 48.
64
Ibid.
65
Weitz, Yomani, vol. III, p. 298 (diary entry for June 5, 1948). See also Yosef Weitz diary, June 5,
1948, A246/13, p. 2411.
66
Ibid.
67
Morris, "Falsifying," p. 49.
68
BGA, entry for June 5, 1948; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Ha-milhama, vol. II, p. 487.
69
Morris, "Falsifying", p. 49.
70
Ibid., p. 48.
71
Ibid., p. 44.
72
See, for example, Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History, passim, and "Falsifying the Record': Benny
Morris, David Ben-Gurion, and the Transfer' Idea," Israel Affairs, Winter 1997, pp. 47-71.

Why the Middle East Is So Volatile

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
December 2000, pp. 13-22

In the four centuries before World War I, the Middle East was a singularly unchanging place.
Since that time, it has been perhaps the most hyperactive of regions. Why this dramatic change?
When scholars debate the reasons for twentieth-century volatility, they usually point to outside
powers. Efraim Karsh turns this equation on its head; then three leading analysts reply to his
argument.

The Editors

Since its formation in the wake of World War I, the contemporary Middle Eastern system based on
territorial states has been under sustained assault. In past years, the foremost challenge to this
system came from the doctrine of pan-Arabism (or qawmiya ), which sought to "eliminate the traces
of Western imperialism" and unify the "Arab nation," and the associated ideology of Greater Syria
(or Suriya al-Kubra ), which stresses the territorial and historical indivisibility of most of the Fertile
Crescent. Today, the leading challenge comes from Islamist notions of a single Muslim community
(the umma ). Intellectuals and politicians, denouncing the current system as an artificial creation of
Western imperialism at variance with yearnings for regional unity, have repeatedly urged its
destruction. National leadersfrom Gamal Abdel Nasser to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to
Saddam Husaynhave justified their interference in the affairs of other states by claiming to pursue
that unity. Yet the system of territorial states has proven extremely resilient.

That resilience raises questions. From what does it result? Does it suggest that the system of
territorial states is more in line with Middle Eastern realities than the vision of a unified regional
order? We review the role of pan-Arabism, pan-Syrianism, and pan-Islam, then consider how the
rejection of the territorial state system has affected that most intractable conflict, the disposition of
the Palestinians.

The Hashemite Attempt

Pan-Arabism gives short shrift to the notion of the territorial state, declaring it to be a temporary
aberration destined to wither away before long. This doctrine also postulates the existence of "a
single nation bound by the common ties of language, religion and history.... behind the facade of a
multiplicity of sovereign states."1 The territorial expanse of this supposed nation has varied among
the exponents of the ideology, ranging from merely the Fertile Crescent to the entire territory "from
the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf." But the unity of the Arabic-speaking populations inhabiting
these vast territories is never questioned.

This doctrine was first articulated by a number of pre-World War I intellectuals, most notably the
Syrian political exiles Abd ar-Rahman al-Kawakibi (18541902) and Najib Azuri (18731916), as
well as by some of the secret Arab societies operating in the Ottoman Empire before its collapse. Yet
it is highly doubtful whether these early beginnings would have ever amounted to anything more
than intellectual musings had it not been for the huge ambitions of the sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn
Ali of the Hashemite family, and his two prominent sons, Abdullah and Faysal. Together, they
perpetrated the "Great Arab Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire.

When Husayn proposed to the British that he rise against his Ottoman master, he styled himself
champion of "the whole of the Arab nation without any exception." Befitting that role, he demanded
the creation of a vast empire on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, stretching from Asia Minor to the
Indian Ocean and from Iraq to the Mediterranean. 2 When this grandiose vision failed to materialize
in its full scope, the Hashemites quickly complained of being "robbed" of the fruits of victory
promised to them during the war. (They were, as it happens, generously rewarded in the form of vast
territories several times the size of the British Isles.) Thus arose the standard grievance that Arab
intellectuals and politicians leveled at the Western powers, Britain in particular, and thus emerged
the "pan-" doctrine of Arab nationalism with the avowed aim of redressing this alleged grievance.

Likewise the imperial ambitions of Faysal and Abdullah placed the Greater Syria ideal on the Arab
political agenda. Already during the revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Faysal began toying with
the idea of winning his own Syrian empire independently of his father's prospective empire. He tried
to gain great-power endorsement for this ambition by telling the Paris Peace Conference that "Syria
claimed her unity and her independence" and that it was "sufficiently advanced politically to manage
her own internal affairs" if given adequate foreign and technical assistance. 3 When the conference
planned to send a special commission of inquiry to the Middle East, Faysal quickly assembled (a
highly unrepresentative) General Syrian Congress that would "make clear the wishes of the Syrian
people."4 And by way of leaving nothing to chance, Faysal manipulated Syrian public opinion
through extensive propaganda, orchestrated demonstrations, and intimidation of opponents.

When all these efforts came to naught, and his position in Syria was increasingly threatened by the
French, Faysal allowed the General Syrian Congress to proclaim him the constitutional monarch of
Syria "within its natural boundaries, including Palestine" and in political and economic union with
Iraq. On March 8, 1920, he was crowned as King Faysal I at the Damascus City Hall, and France and
Britain were asked to vacate the western (that is, Lebanese) and the southern (that is, Palestinian)
parts of Syria. The seed of the Greater Syria ideal had been sown.

Neither did Faysal abandon the Greater Syrian dream after his expulsion from Damascus by the
French in July 1920. Quite the reverse. Using his subsequent position as the first monarch of Iraq,
Faysal toiled ceaselessly to bring about the unification of the Fertile Crescent under his rule. This
policy was sustained, following his untimely death in September 1933, by successive Iraqi leaders.
Nuri as-Said, Faysal's comrade-in-arms and a perpetual prime minister, did so, as did Abdullah,
Faysal's older brother, who articulated his own version of the Greater Syria ideal. While Abdullah
had some success, with the occupation and annexation of some 6,000 square kilometers of western
Palestine to his kingdom in the late 1940s (an area to be subsequently known as the West Bank), his
coveted Syrian empire remained unattainable.

As Hashemite ambitions faded away, following Abdullah's assassination in 1951 and the overthrow
of the Iraqi monarchy seven years later, the championship of "pan-" movements migrated to other
leaders. Cairo became the standard bearer of a wider pan-Arab ideal. Egypt's sense of pan-Arabism
had already manifested itself in the 1930s but it peaked in the 1950s with the rise to power of Gamal
Abdel Nasser. For a while, Abdel Nasser's hegemonic aspirations seemed to be within reach. His
subversive campaign against the pro-Western states drove the Lebanese and Jordanian regimes to
the verge of collapse and pushed Saudi Arabia and Iran onto the defensive. An Egyptian-Syrian
union in 1958 seemed to bring the ideal of pan-Arab unity to fruition. By the early 1960s, however,
Abdel Nasser's dreams were in tatters. The pro-Western regimes were weathering the Egyptian
onslaught; Syria acrimoniously seceded from the bilateral union; and the Egyptian army bogged
down in an unwinable civil war in Yemen. Abdel Nasser's inter-Arab standing took a steep plunge.
Then came the 1967 Six Day War, dealing his ambitionsand the pan-Arab ideal as a whole a
mortal blow. While there would never be a shortage of contenders to Abdel Nasser's role as pan-
Arabism's champion, notably Saddam Husayn, the dream of the "Arab nation" would not regain its
earlier vibrancy or appeal.

The Greater Syria scheme, pursued by Faysal and Abdullah, was appropriated by successive Syrian
rulers, most notably by Hafiz al-Asad. He saw Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan as integral parts of
Syria, all of them undeserving of independent self-determination. This explains Asad's denial of
Israel's legitimacy and his relentless efforts to dominate the Palestinian national movement; more
importantly, it accounts for Syria's de facto annexation of Lebanon that began in 1976 and
culminated in 2000 with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Why Did Pan-Arabism Fail?

Why, for all the sustained intellectual and political efforts behind it, did pan-Arabism make such
little headway towards its goal of unifying the "Arab nation"? Because there is not and has never
existed an "Arab nation." Rather, its invocation has been a clever ploy to harness popular support to
the quest for regional mastery by successive Middle Eastern dynasties, rulers, and regimes.

If a nation is a group of people sharing such attributes as common descent, language, culture,
tradition, and history, then nationalism is the desire of such a group for self-determination in a
specific territory that they consider to be their patrimony. The only common denominators among
the widely diverse Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle Eastthe broad sharing of language
and religionare remnants of the early imperial Islamic epoch. But these have generated no general
sense of Arab solidarity, not to speak of deeply rooted sentiments of shared history, destiny, or
attachment to an ancestral homeland, for both Islam and the Arabic language have far transcended
their Arabian origins. The former has become a thriving universal religion boasting a worldwide
community of believers of which Arabs are but a small minority. The latter, like other imperial
languages such as English, Spanish, and French, has been widely assimilated by former subject
populations, often superseding their native tongues. As T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), the
foremost early champion of the pan-Arab cause, admitted in his later days: "Arab unity is a
madman's notionfor this century or next, probably. English-speaking unity is a fair parallel." 5

Moreover, even under universal Islamic empires, from the Umayyad to the Ottoman, there was no
unified historical development of the Middle East's Arabic-speaking populations. There were, rather,
parallel courses of development in the various kingdoms and empires competing for regional
mastery. As the American Arab scholar Hisham Sharabi aptly noted, "the Arab world has not
constituted a single political entity since the brief period of Islam's expansion and consolidation into
a Muslim empire during the seventh and eighth centuries." 6

Neither had the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire experienced the processes of
secularization and modernization that preceded the development of nationalism in western Europe
in the late 1700s. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, its Arab populations still thought only in
local or imperial terms. Their intricate webs of local loyalties (to one's clan, tribe, village, town,
religious sect, or localized ethnic minority) were superseded only by submission to the Ottoman
sultan-caliph in his capacity as the head of the Muslim community. They were wholly unfamiliar
with the idea of national self-determination and so created no pressure for states.

Into this vacuum moved ambitious political leaders, speaking the Western rhetoric "Arab
nationalism," but actually aiming to create new empires for themselves. The problem with this state
of affairs was that the extreme diversity and fragmentation of the Arabic-speaking world had made
its disparate societies better disposed to local patriotism than to a unified regional order. But then,
rather than allow this disposition to run its natural course and develop into modern-day state
nationalism (or wataniya ), Arab rulers systematically convinced their peoples to think that the
independent existence of their respective states was a temporary aberration that would be rectified
before too long. The result was a dissonance that was to haunt the Middle East for most of the
twentieth century, between the reality of state nationalism and the dream of an empire packaged as
a unified "Arab nation."
A New Arab Empire?

This dissonance (speaking the language of nationalism while pursuing imperial aggrandizement)
was introduced into the political discourse by the Hashemites. Though styling themselves
representatives of the "Arab nation," Sharif Husayn and his sons were no champions of national
liberation but rather imperialist aspirants anxious to exploit a unique window of opportunity to
substitute their own empire for that of the Ottomans. Husayn had demonstrated no nationalist
sentiments prior to the war when he had generally been considered a loyal Ottoman apparatchik;
and neither he nor his sons changed in this respect during the revolt. They did not regard themselves
as part of a wider Arab nation, bound together by a shared language, religion, history, or culture.
Rather, they held themselves superior to those ignorant creatures whom they were "destined" to rule
and educate. David Hogarth, director of the Cairo Arab Bureau, held several conversations with
Husayn in January 1918 and reported his attitude as follows: "Arabs as a whole have not asked him
to be their king; but seeing how ignorant and disunited they are, how can this be expected of them
until he is called?"7 It was the "white man's burden," Hijaz-style.

Faysal was likewise disparaging of nearly all non-Hijazi Arabic-speaking communities. Yemenites in
his view were the most docile and easy to hold and to rule among Arabs: "To imprison an officer, his
sheikh had only to knot a thin string about his neck and state his sentence, and the man would
henceforward follow him about with pretensions of innocence and appeals to be set at liberty."
Egyptians were "weather cocks, with no political principle except dissatisfaction, and intent only on
pleasure and money getting"; Sudanese"ignorant Negroes, armed with broad-bladed spears, and
bows, and shields"; Iraqis"unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any national
consciousness or sense of unity, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, receptive to evil,
prone to anarchy and always willing to rise against the government." 8

What the Hashemites demanded of the post-war peace conference, therefore, was not self-
determination for the Arabic-speaking subjects of the defunct Ottoman Empire but the formation of
a successor empire, extending well beyond the predominantly Arabic-speaking territories and
comprising such diverse ethnic and national groups as Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Greeks, Assyrians,
Chechens, Circassians, and Jews, among others, apart of course from the Arabs. As Husayn told T.E.
Lawrence in the summer of 1917: "If advisable, we will pursue the Turks to Constantinople and
Erzurumso why talk about Beirut, Aleppo, and Hailo?" 9 And Abdullah put it in similar terms when
asking Sir Mark Sykes (in April 1917) that Britain abide by the vast territorial promises made to
Sharif Husayn: "it was... up to the British government to see that the Arab kingdom is such as will
make it a substitute for the Ottoman Empire." 10 This imperial mindset was vividly illustrated by the
frequent Hashemite allusion to past Arab and Islamic imperial glory, rather than to national rights,
as justification of their territorial claims.

Thus, for example, Husayn based his objection to British attempts to exclude Iraq from the
prospective Arab empire on the fact that "the Iraqi velayets are parts of the pure Arab kingdom, and
were in fact the seat of its government in the time of Ali Ibn-Abu-Talib [the son-in-law of the
Prophet Muhammad], and in the time of all the khalifs [caliphs] who succeeded him." 11Similarly,
Abdullah rejected the French occupation of Syria not on the ground that this territory had
constituted an integral part of the "Arab homeland" but because it was inconceivable for the
Umayyad capital of Damascus to become a French colony. 12

This substitution of imperial domination for national unity was not confined to the Hashemites but
is evident in the writings and preachings of successive pan-Arab ideologues and politicians. At times
the justification of Arab unification has been based on the recent imperial past. The Iraqi case for the
annexation of Kuwait in August 1990, for instance, was predicated on Kuwait at times having
allegedly been part of the Ottoman velayet (province) of Basra. Baghdad presented the 1990
annexation as a rectification of a historic wrong (European disruption of the alleged unity of the
Arab world in the wake of World War I) and claimed this event would "return the part and branch,
Kuwait, to the whole root, Iraq."13

More often, however, the invocation of past glory dates back to the earliest Arab and Islamic
empires, or even to the distant pre-Islamic Arab past. Similarly, justifications for Greater Syria date
back to the Umayyad Empire. Nuri as-Said defined the alleged yearning for unification among the
Arab peoples as the "aspiration to restore the great tolerant civilization of the early
Caliphate."14 Likewise, in an attempt to prove the historic continuity of an "Arab nation," the
Palestinian intellectual and political leader Yusuf Haykal traced Arab imperial greatness to the
ancient Fertile Crescent peoples such as the Hittites, Canaanites, Amourites, et al., ignoring the
minor problem that these diverse peoples never constituted a single people, let alone an Arab
one.15 Abu Khaldun Sati al-Husri, perhaps the foremost theoretician of pan-Arabism, lauded Abdel
Nasser as "one of the greatest [leaders] in modern Arab history, rivaled perhaps only by Muhammad
Ali the Great of Egypt and Faysal I of the Arab Revolt." 16 Trouble is, Muhammad Ali, the celebrated
nineteenth century Egyptian governor, did not speak Arabic and did not identify as an Arab; and
Faysal, as we have seen, was not an Arab nationalist seeking to liberate the "Arab nation" but an
aspiring imperialist seeking to substitute his empire for that of the Ottomans.

Another example: at a secret meeting in September 1947 between Zionist officials and Abd ar-
Rahman Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League, the latter warned the Jews of Arab efforts:
"We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine." 17 In
other words, he rejected a Jewish right to statehood not from concern for the national rights of the
Palestinian Arabs but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab
patrimony.

The Palestine Question

Which brings us to the "Palestine question," an issue that has constituted an integral part of inter-
Arab politics since the mid-1930s, with anti-Zionism forming the main common denominator of
pan-Arab solidarity and its most effective rallying cry. But the actual policies of the Arab states show
they have been less motivated by concern for pan-Arabism, let alone for the protection of the
Palestinians, than by their own interests. Indeed, nothing has done more to expose the hollowness of
pan-Arabism than this, its most celebrated cause.

Consider, for instance, the pan-Arab invasion of the newly proclaimed State of Israel in mid-May
1948. This, on the face of it, was a shining demonstration of pan-Arab solidarity. But the invasion
had less to do with concern for the Palestinian struggle to liberate a part of the Arab homeland than
with Abdullah's desire to incorporate substantial parts of Mandatory Palestine into his kingdom
and the determination of other Arab players, notably Egypt, to prevent that eventuality. Had the
Jewish state lost the war, its territory would have been divided among the invading forces.

During the decades of Palestinian dispersal following the 1948 war, the Arab states manipulated the
Palestinian national cause to their own ends. Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-
determination in the parts of Palestine they occupied during the 1948 war (respectively, the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip). Palestinian refugees were kept in squalid camps for decades as a means
for whipping Israel and stirring pan-Arab sentiments. Abdel Nasser cloaked his hegemonic goals by
invoking the restoration of "the full rights of the Palestinian people." 18Likewise, Saddam Husayn
disguised his predatory designs on Kuwait by linking the crisis caused by his invasion of that country
with "the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in
Palestine."19

Self-serving interventionism under the pretence of pan-Arab solidarity had the effect of
transforming the bilateral Palestinian-Israeli dispute into a multilateral Arab-Israeli conflict,
thereby prolonging its duration, increasing its intensity, and making its resolution far more complex
and tortuous. By refusing to recognize Palestinian nationalism (or for that matter any other Arab
state nationalism) and insisting on its incorporation into a wider Arab framework, Arab
intellectuals, rulers, and regimes disrupted the natural national development of this community.
They instilled unrealistic visions, hopes, and expectations in Palestinian political circles at key
junctures. The consequence has been to deny Palestinians the right to determine their own fate.

The late Hafiz al-Asad was perhaps the most persistent obstacle to the Palestinians' right of self-
determination. Asad pledged allegiance to any solution amenable to the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) so long as it did not deviate from the Syrian line advocating the destruction of
the State of Israel. When the PLO, for example, recognized Israel in 1988, Syria immediately
opposed the move, and when the PLO carried this recognition a step further by signing the
September 1993 Declaration of Principles with Israel, it was strongly condemned by the Syrian
regime, while the Damascus-based Palestinian terrorist, Ahmad Jibril, threatened Yasir Arafat with
death.

Such a patronizing attitude might have carried some weight in 1920, when Faysal advocated the
inclusion of Palestine within Greater Syria; at the time, there was not yet a cohesive Palestinian
nation. But the attitude was already anachronistic by 1943, when Nuri as-Said, Iraq's prime
minister, suggested that "Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan shall be reunited into one
state,"20 let alone in 1946 when the American academic of Lebanese origins, Philip Hitti made his
dismissive assertion that "there is no such thing as Palestine," 21 or in 1974 when Asad referred to
Palestine as being "not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria." 22

There is now a Palestinian nation, just as there are now Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, Jordanian, and other
Arab nations. However strongly they may feel for each other, each of them pursues its distinct path
of development within its own territorial state and in accordance with its national interests. That by
the onset of the twenty-first century this reality had not been internalized by all regional leaderships,
as evidenced by Asad's belief in his right to dictate to the Palestinians, is a stark reminder of the
tenacity of the imperialist dream.

The Quest for the Empire of God

The other great challenge to state ideals was voiced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual father
of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which he created in 1979 on the ruins of the Pahlavi monarchy. Like
pan-Arab ideologues, Khomeini viewed Western imperialism as the source of all evil. But while the
former invoked Muslim past glory as the justification for the creation of a unified pan-Arab empire,
Khomeini viewed it as a precedent for the unification of the world's Muslim community, the umma.
In his understanding, having partitioned the umma into artificial separate states after World War I,
the great powers did their best to keep Muslim communities in a permanent state of ignorance and
fragmentation. "The imperialists, the oppressive and treacherous rulers, the Jews, Christians, and
materialists are all attempting to distort the truth of Islam and lead the Muslims astray," he
cautioned:
We see today that the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Qur'an... We
must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the
very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they
are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear thatGod forbid!they may one day achieve
their goal, and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day. 23
This meant that Middle Eastern statesindeed, the entire contemporary international systemwere
totally illegitimate, for they perpetuated an unjust order imposed on "oppressed" Muslims by the
"oppressive" great powers. Muslims were obliged to "overthrow the oppressive governments
installed by the imperialists and bring into existence an Islamic government of justice that will be in
the service of the people."24 An Islamic world order would see the state transcended by the
territorial broader entity of the umma.

As the only country where the "government of God" had been established, ran Khomeini's line of
reasoning, Iran had a sacred obligation to serve as the core of the umma and the springboard for
worldwide dissemination of Islam's holy message:
The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any
particular people... We will export our revolution throughout the world because it is an Islamic
revolution. The struggle will continue until the calls "there is no god but God and Muhammad is the
messenger of God" are echoed all over the world.25
Khomeini made good on his promise. In November 1979 and February 1980 widespread riots
erupted in the Shii towns of the oil-rich Saudi province of Hasa, exacting many casualties. Similar
disturbances occurred in Bahrain and Kuwait which became the target of a sustained terrorist and
subversive campaign. Iraq suffered from a special subversive effort, whereby the Iranians sought to
topple the ruling Bath regime, headed since July 1979 by Saddam Husayn at-Tikriti. They urged the
Iraqi people to rise against their government; supported the Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq and
underground Shii movements; and they launched terrorist attacks against prominent Iraqi officials.
When these pressures eventually led to the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980, Khomeini
wholeheartedly embraced "the imposed war" as a means of consolidating his regime and furthering
its influence throughout the region. The war would continue, he vowed, "until the downfall of the
regime governing Baghdad."26

Eventually, the exorbitant human toll and economic dislocation of the Iran-Iraq war drove the
Iranian leadership to bend its high principles and Khomeini was finally convinced to "drink from the
poisoned chalice" and authorize the cessation of hostilities. On July 18, 1988, after eight years of
bitter fighting, Iran accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 on a cease-fire in the
Iran-Iraq war, and shortly afterwards embarked on a vigorous campaign to break its international
isolation. It mended its fences with the Gulf states, reestablished diplomatic ties with the major west
European powers, and even alluded to a possible dialogue with the United States, the "Great Satan."
Yet when a combination of international and regional developments offered new opportunities in
the early 1990s, the mullahs' ambitions were quickly reasserted. An expansion of the country's
military arsenal was accompanied by sustained efforts to project Iranian influence in the Persian
Gulf, the Middle East, and in Central Asia and Transcaucasia.

Despite these efforts, Iran's pan-Islamic doctrine has had no greater success than did pan-Arabism
in denting the Middle Eastern territorial state system. Not only did most Sunnis reject it as a
distinctly Shii doctrine, but even Iraq's majority Shii community found it unconvincing and gave
more allegiance to the Iraqi territorial state instead. And Iran's only successful export of its
revolution, namely Hizbullah in Lebanon, had more to do with the struggle against Israel than with
dreams of establishing a unified community of believers.

Conclusions

The Middle East's experience in the twentieth century has been marked by frustration, and much of
it has resulted from a gap between delusions of grandeur and the grim realities of weakness and
fragmentation. Just as the challenge to the continental order by the European "pan-" movements,
notably pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, led to mass suffering and dislocation, so the rejection of
the contemporary Middle Eastern state system by pan-Arabs and pan-Islamists has triggered many
wars among Arabs and Jews, Arabs and Arabs, Arabs and Kurds, Arabs and Iranians, and others.

Over eighty years, Arab leaders have had many opportunities to undo the much-maligned
international order established on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, only to miss them all. The Iraqi
and the Transjordanian branches of the Hashemite dynasty, for instance, could have promoted the
unification of their respective kingdoms rather than undermine each other's regional position. So,
today, could the avowedly pan-Arabist Bathist regimes in Syria and Iraq. But just as Faysal and his
Iraqi successors would not acquiesce in Abdullah's supremacy, so Saddam Husayn would never
accept Hafiz al-Asad as primus inter pares. Syria did not wish to foot the bill for Abdel Nasser's high
pan-Arab ideals by becoming an Egyptian-dominated province in the United Arab Republic. Nor did
Kuwaitis relish their designated role under Saddam Husayn's foot.

Surprisingly enough, despite this legacy of failure, the "pan-" dreams live on. Palestinian academic
Walid Khalidi demonstrates this when he writes that "The Arab states' system is first and foremost a
pan' system.... In pan-Arab ideology, this nation is actual, not potential. The manifest failure even to
approximate unity does not negate the empirical reality of the Arab nation... The Arab nation both
is, and should be, one."27 This assertion could not be further from the truth. The Arab state system,
as demonstrated by its extraordinary resistance to ideological assaults, is anything but "pan-"; rather
it is a regional state system of the kind that underpins the contemporary international order around
the globe.

Only when the "pan-" factor is banished from the Middle East's political scene and replaced by
general acceptance of the region's diversity will its inhabitants look forward to a better future. Any
attempt to impose a national or religious unity on the region's individual states is not only bound to
fail but it will perpetuate the violence and acrimony that have for too long plagued the Middle East.
Only when the political elites reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism (wataniya )
and forswear the imperial dream of a unified "Arab nation" will regional stability be attained.
Efraim Karsh, professor and director of Mediterranean studies at King's College, University of
London, is the author, most recently, with Inari Karsh, of Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for
Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Harvard University Press, 1999).
1
Walid Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State," Foreign Affairs, July
1978, pp. 695-96; Hisham Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1966), p. 3.
2
"Husayn to McMahon" (Cairo), July 1915-Mar. 1916, presented to British Parliament, Cmd. 5957,
London, 1939, p. 3.
3
"Memorandum by the Emir Feisal, Jan. 1, 1919," FO 608/80.
4
Abu Khaldun Sati' al-Husri, Yawm Maisalun: Safha min Tarikh al-'Arab al-Hadith, rev. ed.
(Beirut: Dar al-Ittihad, 1964), p. 261.
5
T.E. Lawrence to his Biographers Robert Graves and Liddell Hart (London: Cassell, 1963), p. 101.
6
Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution, p. 7.
7
David Hogarth, "Mission to King Hussein," Arab Bulletin, Jan. 27, 1918, pp. 22-23.
8
T.E. Lawrence, "Faisal's Table Talk," report to Colonel Wilson, Jan. 8, 1917, FO 686/6, pp. 121, 123;
Abd ar-Razaq al-Hasani, Ta'rikh al-Wizarat al-Iraqiyya, Part 3 (Sidon: Matba'at al-Ifran, 1939), pp.
189-195.
9
Lawrence, July 30, 1917, FO 686/8.
10
Mark Sykes, "Notes on Conversations with the Emirs Abdullah and Faisal," May 1, 1917, FO
882/16, p. 233.
11
Husayn to McMahon, p. 10.
12
Munib al-Madi and Sulayman Musa, Ta'rikh al-Urdunn fi'l-Qarn al-'Ashrin (Amman: Maktabat
Ra's Bayrut, 1959), pp. 132-136.
13
Baghdad Domestic Service, Aug. 8, 1990; Iraqi News Agency, Aug. 28, 1990.
14
Nuri al-Said, Arab Independence and Unity: A Note on the Arab Cause with Particular Reference
to Palestine, and Suggestions for a Permanent Settlement to which are attached Texts of all the
Relevant Documents (Baghdad: Government Press, 1943), p. 8.
15
Yusuf Haykal, Filastin Qabla wa-Bad (Beirut: Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, 1971), pp. 20-41.
16
Khaldun al-Husri, review of Anthony Nutting's Nasser, Journal of Palestinian Studies, Winter
1972, p. 135.
17
Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), p. 381.
18
Gamal Abdel Nasser, "Speech to National Assembly Members on May 29, 1967," ed. Walter
Laqueur, The Arab-Israeli Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 228.
19
Baghdad Domestic Service, Aug. 12, 1990.
20
Nuri Al-Said, Arab Independence and Unity, p. 11.
21
Hearing before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Washington D.C., State Department,
Jan. 11, 1946, Central Zionist Archive (Jerusalem), V/9960/g, p. 6.
22
Damascus Domestic Service, Mar. 8, 1974.
23
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, trans. and ed. Hamid Algar (Berkeley:
Mizan, 1981), pp. 127, 140.
24
Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, pp. 31, 48-49; James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-
States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 113.
25
Farhad Rajaee, Islamic Values and World View: Khomeini on Man, the State and International
Politics (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 82-83.
26
Summary of World Broadcasts, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Apr. 4, 1983.
27
Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable," pp. 695-96.

Misunderstanding Arab Nationalism

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2001, pp. 59-61
The December 2000 issue of the Middle East Quarterly featured an article by Efraim Karsh, "Why
the Middle East Is So Volatile," followed by responses from Graham Fuller, Martin Kramer, and
David Wurmser. Mr. Karsh here has a chance to answer his critics.
In my article "Why the Middle East is so volatile," I argued that the region's endemic instability
stems first and foremost from the failure of local political and intellectual elites to internalize the
reality of state nationalism and their continued subscription to dated notions of imperialism.

These notions, as aptly noted by David Wurmser, are deeply rooted in indigenous soil; the story of
the Middle East has long been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less
importantly, of imperial dreams. This has been so from the ancient empires of Mesopotamia and the
Fertile Crescent (for example, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Carthage, Persia, Assyria, Babylon, and so on),
through the early Muslim states and the Ottoman Empire. Politics during this lengthy period were
characterized by a constant struggle for regional mastery; again and again, the dominant power
sought to subdue, and preferably to eliminate, all potential challengers, so as to bring the entire
region under its domination.

Such imperialist ambitions, however, often remained largely unsatisfied as the determined pursuit
of absolutism was matched by the equally formidable forces of fragmentation and degeneration. This
wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the stark realities of weakness, between the imperial
dream and the centrifugal forces of parochialism and local patriotism, has survived the demise of the
Ottoman Empire to haunt Middle Eastern politics for generations to come.

Regrettably, as Martin Kramer points out, these notions of regional imperialism have often been
endorsed by Western political intellectual circles that have viewed them as beneficial to their own
interests. Indeed, one needs to look no further than Graham Fuller's response to my article to realize
the depth and tenacity of this support. Ignoring the historical evidence that points to both the
untenable nature of the pan-Arab ideal and the exorbitant human and material cost attending its
pursuit, Fuller argues that "there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this idea; to the contrary . . . a
quest for closer unity is a progressive force in a world in which the ethnically-based nation-state has
presented us with a largely ugly model."

Even if one accepts this fashionable indictment of the modern nation-state, Fuller's enthusiasm for
pan-Arabism seems excessive. For if the "ethnically-based nation-state" does present us with "a
largely ugly model," then an ethnically-based super-state must surely be an even uglier
phenomenon. Contrary to Fuller's assertion, there is nothing inherently ugly or violent about the
desire of a specific group of people sharing such attributes as common descent, language, culture,
tradition, and history. National self-determination in a definite, well demarcated, and bounded
territory that a people considers to be their historical or ancestral homeland is acceptable.
Imperialism, rather, which has constituted the foremost generator of violence in modern world
history, is the problem. The desire to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or communities, and to
occupy territories well beyond the "ancestral homeland" contains the inevitable seeds of violence -
not the wish to be allowed to follow an independent path of development. The worst atrocities in
human historyfrom the exile of entire nations by the ancient Mesopotamian empires, to the
decimation of the native populations of north and south America, to the Armenian genocide of the
World War I, to the Holocausthave been carried out by imperial powers seeking regional or world
mastery. Even some of today's worst outbursts of violence, from Rwanda to Kosovo, are remnants of
the bitter legacy of longstanding imperial domination.

It is here that the sources of Middle Eastern volatility lie. As demonstrated in my article, the term
"Arab nationalism" is a misnomer. It represents not a genuine national movement or ideal but is a
euphemism for raw imperialism. There is not and has never existed an "Arab nation" and its
invocation has been nothing but a clever ploy to rally popular support behind one's quest for
regional mastery. Before the 1920s and 1930s, when Arabs began to be indoctrinated with the notion
that all of them constituted one nation, there had been no general sense of "Arabism" among the
Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East. There was only an intricate web of local loyalties to
one's clan, tribe, village, town, religious sect, or localized ethnic minorityoverarched by submission
to the Ottoman sultan-caliph in his capacity as the religious and temporal head of the worldwide
Muslim community.

This extreme orientation to the locality explains the near-total indifference among these populations
to the nationalist message of the secret Arab societies prior to World War I, as well as their
continued loyalty to their Ottoman sultan through the end of the war. Most important, it rebuts the
standard historiographical version of widespread yearning for a unified pan-Arab state, or rather an
empire, in the wake of World War I, and underscores the fundamental disposition of the Arabic-
speaking world to local patriotism rather than to a unified regional order.

Had this disposition been allowed to run its natural course, these disparate communities would have
developed into "normal" nation-states and been spared the artificial schizophrenia instilled into
them by imperialist-minded rulers and regimes. As things were, the systematic pan-Arab
indoctrination sufficed to create a deep dissonance between the reality of state nationalism and the
dream of an empire packaged as a unified "Arab nation." It failed, however, to make any headway
towards the creation of such a nation. For even "imagined communities" cannot be invented deus ex
machina but must rather be grounded, however tenuously, in the real world.

It is precisely this insubstantial nature of "Arab nationalism" that turned the Arab-Israeli conflict
into the main, indeed the only, common denominator of pan-Arab solidarity. For it is infinitely
easier to foment collective hatred of the other than to create a genuine national solidarity among
disparate populations with nothing in common apart from shared language and religion. Had the
Arab masses not been systematically indoctrinated over a period of decades, most of them would
have been totally oblivious to the existence of their Palestinian "brothers," let alone the "Zionist
movement" and its alleged usurpation of "Arab land." Thus, pan-Arab indoctrination has managed
to generate pervasive hatred of Jews and Israelis but not a real solidarity that could drive the Arab
masses to voluntarily sacrifice their well-being on the altar of the Palestinian cause.

The involvement of the Arab states in the Palestine problem, with which they have had no intrinsic
attachments apart from the hegemonic aspirations of some rulers and regimes, had an extremely
adverse impact on regional stability. It has resulted not only in thousands of deaths of non-
Palestinian Arabs, cynically ordered by their leaders to fight wars whose declared aims had nothing
to do with their real objectives, but it disrupted the Palestinians' national development and
condemned them to protracted dispersion and statelessness. Had Arab regimes foregone their
selfish intervention in the Palestine conflict in the mid-1930s, the zero-sum strategy of the
contemporary Palestinian leadership, headed by the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni of Jerusalem,
might have given way to a more realistic, mixed-motive approach, recognizing the necessity of
sharing their contested land between the two contending national groups. That such a realization
has not yet emerged, over sixty years later, is due in large part to the unrealistic visions, hopes, and
expectations inspired in successive Palestinian leaderships by the pan-Arab dream.

Given this historical record, Fuller's assertion that "the deep cultural roots of the Arab world" will
never bear positive fruit "without both a truly just settlement and a wholesale change in the
authoritarian leadership of Arab regimes across the boards" would seem to substitute cause for
effect. It will only be the banishment of imperialist thinking from the Middle Eastern political scene
that paves the way to regional peace and reconciliation, not the other way around.

As for the trendy advocacy by Western pundits of a wholesale democratization of the Arab world,
this fad is misconceived and dangerous. It ignores the realities of the Middle East and instead
imposes Western values in the place of Middle Eastern ideals, hopes, and beliefs. For another, this
approach grossly overstates the ability of the great powers, the United States in particular, to bring
about such an eventuality. There is no grassroots yearning for democracy in the Arab world, and any
American attempt to impose such a system is bound to encounter mass resistance and to be viewed
(quite correctly) by the local populations as neo-imperialism or a latter-day imposition of the "white
man's burden."

Noting the adverse impact of "pan-" ideas on modern Middle Eastern history, Martin Kramer
wonders whether Western pundits and politicians will draw the right conclusions from past
mistakes. Fuller's response offers little room for optimism.
Efraim Karsh, professor and director of Mediterranean studies at King's College, University of
London, is the author, most recently, with Inari Karsh, of Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for
Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Harvard University Press, 1999).

The Unbearable Lightness of My Critics

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2002, pp. 63-73

In the late 1990s, I took issue with a group of Israeli academics and journalists who called
themselves the "new historians," and who claimed to be offering a revisionist history of the origins of
the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and the 1948 war in particular.

To start with, I showed that there was nothing revisionist about their work. Far from unearthing new
facts or offering fresh interpretations that would transform the general understanding of events, the
new historians were effectively reiterating the standard Arab narrative of the conflict, in an attempt
to give it academic respectability. Moreover, while this group insists on tracing its origins, indeed its
raison d'tre, to the opening of Israeli state archives in the late 1980s, an examination of their works
easily reveals a highly eclectic and superficial use of these archives. Thus, for example, while
claiming to have overturned the "myth of the few [Jews] against the many [Arabs]" during the 1948
war, Avi Shlaim, at Oxford University, had not even attempted to tap the archives of the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) and its pre-state precursor, the Hagana, both of which contain millions of
declassified documents relating to the issue. Similarly, in his book on The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Benny Morris, at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, presents the
Hagana and the IDF as the main instigators of the Palestinian exodus, again without reference to
archival material held by these two military organizations.

Apparently in response to my repeated criticisms, Morris recently conceded that "when writingThe
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in the mid-1980s, I had no access to the
materials in the IDFA [Israel Defense Forces Archive] or Hagana archive and precious little to first-
hand military materials deposited elsewhere." "None the less," he hastened to reassure his readers,
"the new materials I have seen over the past few years tend to confirm and reinforce the major lines
of description and analysis, and the conclusions, in The Birth."1 In other words, the foremost new
historian admits both to having written the single most influential revisionist work without the use
of the most important archives and to having a preconceived view of what his archival findings
would be.

Any self-respecting academic discipline would not tolerate such an inversion of the research process.
However, such is the politicization of modern Middle Eastern studies, especially in relation to the
Arab-Israeli conflict, that partisan rewriting of history in line with contemporary political agendas
has not only become the norm, its practitioners are even applauded as courageous revisionists, who
present their discoveries at a considerable professional, if not personal, risk to themselves. "The
historian who reveals undesirable truths, who challenges or explodes myths," complained Ze'ev
Sternhell of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "is perceived [in Israel] as a troublemaker, an
enemy of the people."2 And Ilan Papp of Haifa University has gone a step further by calling for
"some kind of international protection" for Israel-based researchers of the nakba ("catastrophe," as
Palestinians call the 1948 war). 3

Nothing can be further from the truth. Not only have the new historians not faced the slightest risk
to their careers - the humanities and social sciences faculties in most Israeli (and Western)
universities are dominated by like-minded academics - but their writings have brought them
instantaneous celebrity status that would have otherwise been unattainable. For what could possibly
provide better "proof" of the validity of the Arab narrative than "inside" evidence by Israeli scholars
on the basis of (allegedly) declassified Israeli documents? Indeed, Palestinian and Arab
establishments have quickly embraced the new historians. Prominent Palestinian politicians, such as
Hanan Ashrawi and Abu Mazin, refer regularly to their findings in support of Palestinian territorial
and political claims from Israel. The partisan Journal of Palestine Studies(JPS) has not only thrown
its doors open to this group but has turned them into its favorite contributors. Since the late 1980s,
it has featured at least seven articles by both Shlaim and Morris, in addition to a string of review
essays - far more than any Palestinian or Arab scholar, with the sole exception of Edward Said.

The JPS has also used the new historians as its foremost demolition team, particularly against works
by Israeli historians deemed most damaging to the Palestinian narrative. In 1994, for example,
Morris wrote a lengthy and venomous review of The Road Not Taken, an account of early Arab-
Israeli peace talks by Itamar Rabinovich of Tel Aviv University. Yet this review pales in comparison
to his fifteen-page assault on the first edition of my book, Fabricating Israeli History: The "New
Historians" - the longest review essay ever published by the Journal of Palestine Studies.4

Last but not least, the JPS has turned the new historians into regular commentators on
contemporary Israeli-Palestinian affairs, where their adherence to the truth has been no stricter
than in their historical studies. Thus, for example, having traced the origins of Yitzhak Rabin's
assassination to a mixture of "national-religious tradition of ideological and actual lawlessness" and
"the older tradition of Revisionist' terrorism," Morris argues that "during the late 1960s and the
1970s, Gush Emunim continuously broke the law in its campaign to set up Jewish settlements in the
West Bank. The Labor-led governments of the day, under prime ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir,
and Yitzhak Rabin, continually bent to their will." 5 But Gush Emunim was established in March
1974, in the twilight of the Yom Kippur war, and as such could not have "continuously broke[n] the
law" during the late 1960s. Nor could prime ministers Meir and Eshkol have "continually bent to
their will," if only because the former had resigned her post before the start of the Gush's activities
while the latter had died five years before the establishment of Gush Emunim. But why be bothered
by facts?

The new historians' partisanship has also served as an entry ticket to the influential Arabist club
(comprising scholars of the Middle East and veterans of institutions dealing with the region, such as
foreign ministries, oil companies, economic and financial organizations, etc.) and its attendant
access to academic journals, respected publishing houses, and the mass media. Shlaim, for instance,
was the primary academic consultant to a six-part British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television
series about the Arab-Israeli conflict produced on the occasion of Israel's fiftieth anniversary, which
cast the Jewish state in the role of the regional villain. Morris was the moving spirit behind a
televised documentary on the Palestinians by an Israeli expatriate. "We perform at weddings
and bar mitzvas," a leading new historian, Tom Segev, joked about this group's popularity. 6 Indeed,
admiring reports on the new historians feature regularly in the Western press.

This state of affairs is not difficult to understand. Half a century after Israel's creation and its victory
over the concerted Arab attempt to strangle it at birth, these heroic events seem to have been all but
forgotten. Not only is there widespread ignorance in the West regarding the origins of the Arab-
Israeli conflict and the reasons for its persistence, but Middle Eastern studies have increasingly
fallen under the sway of the Arabists and/or scholars of Arab descent, as a glance at the membership
rolls of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its European
counterparts will easily reveal. Moreover, for quite some time the Arab oil-producing countries have
been penetrating the foremost Western universities and academic publishing houses by subsidizing
publications and extending generous grants for the establishment of endowed chairs and research
centers, over which they exercise a lasting control. Finally, since democracy is an extremely rare
commodity in the Middle East, and since students of the region's contemporary affairs are anxious
to maintain free access to its countries, they exercise a strict self-censorship, avoiding anything that
smacks of criticism of local societies and regimes, however brutal and repressive they might be.

Consider, for example, a doctoral student who wanted to research contemporary Syrian state-
sponsored terrorism. It did not take him long to realize that the topic would make him persona non
grata in Syria (and Lebanon) and would isolate him among fellow Arabists, and he changed his
research focus and its time frame. Or consider an international conference on Iraq, held at the Royal
Institute of International Affairs (or Chatham House as it is commonly known after the building in
which it resides), shortly before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. All participants,
British, Europeans, and Americans, went out of their way to heap praise on Saddam Husayn's
regime and to rub shoulders with the senior Iraqi officials in attendance (notably Nizar Hamdun,
then Iraq's deputy foreign minister). A respected American Arabist even applauded as decent
hamlets the desert concentration camps in which the Iraqi authorities had herded tens of thousands
of Kurds exiled from their homes during and after the Iran-Iraq war. When the handful of Iraqi
expatriates, who had somehow managed to obtain invitations to the conference, tried to voice
criticism of the repressive nature of the Iraqi regime, they were peremptorily silenced by the
moderators, with some of them being unceremoniously ushered out of the discussion hall.

This trend has not been confined to academia. In today's global village, where events in one part of
the world are instantaneously transmitted around the globe, reaching the public and policymakers at
the same moment, Arabists have gradually become key shapers of public opinion in their field of
specialty. It is they who interpret the Middle East to the general public whenever there is a fresh
conflagration in this volatile area; and it is they who regularly give the benefit of their opinion to
government and Congress. The Arabist presence has been particularly conspicuous on television,
where the proliferation of around-the-clock news channels has generated a cozy symbiosis between
broadcasters and pundits: the former constantly hunger for commentary while the latter are eager to
ply their merchandise, come what may. A good case in point is the recent whitewashing by Western
broadcasters and pundits of the extent of Palestinian rejoicing over the World Trade Center atrocity,
and their acquiescence in the Palestinian Authority's violent suppression of the freedom of
information by preventing the distribution of photos and videos of these celebrations.

In this disturbing atmosphere, where propaganda is often substituted for scholarship, Israel has
increasingly been cast in the role of the regional villain and implicated in every Middle Eastern crisis
over several decades, regardless of any actual connection. And whoever dares to challenge this
comfortable consensus is subjected to massive retaliation, or rather a defamation campaign, aimed
at shooting the messenger before he or she has been given the opportunity to speak.

Defame Game

Such has been the reaction of the new historians and their sympathizers to my book Fabricating
Israeli History: The "New Historians": a sustained campaign of personal smear and innuendo
aimed at discrediting my professional credentials. Boasting he had never read the book, Morris
dismissed it as "idiotic slander indicative of the man himself, who is probably seeking to promote his
own personal interests" (what particular interests could be promoted by going against the grain
Morris did not say),7 while Papp derided me as a "court historian." "Perhaps in the patriotic Israeli
colony in London there still exist the fighting spirit and the readiness to fight for Zionism to the last
drop of ink," he wrote,8 as if there is something fundamentally wrong when expatriate Israelis rebut
historical fabrications (though, of course, not when they fabricate in the first place).

Omer Bartov, an Israeli history professor at Brown University, expressed similar sentiments. In a
review of Fabricating in London's Times Literary Supplement, Bartov made no attempt to rebut any
of my factual assertions, which in itself is hardly surprising given that his field of research is modern
German history. Instead, he made a number of wholly irrelevant comments regarding my (alleged)
personal background, aimed at discrediting my academic integrity. In an attempt to portray me as
part of the Israeli defense establishment - the current version of the much-maligned orientalist -
Bartov claimed that I began my "specialization in Middle Eastern affairs as an officer in Israeli army
intelligence." In fact, I acquired my first academic degree in modern Middle Eastern history prior to
joining the army, and during my military service, dealt with superpower involvement in the Middle
East rather than with Arab affairs. But then, what is the relevance of my educational background to
the validity of my assertions? What counts is their factual basis. Similarly, Bartov finds a
fundamental incongruity between my criticism of the revisionist writings and my longstanding
support for Palestinian self-determination,9 as if one's contemporary political views should
necessarily influence one's historical propriety.
Indeed, a vivid illustration of the political agenda underlying the new historiography has been
afforded by Benny Morris's apparent about-face following the outbreak of Palestinian violence in the
autumn of 2000. So long as the Oslo peace process appeared to be edging towards a two-state
solution - Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza - Morris had no compunction
about charging Israel with the original sin of dispossessing the Palestinians and perpetuating the
conflict with the Arab world. Yet, when in the summer of 2000 the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat,
rebuffed Prime Minister Ehud Barak's generous territorial concessions and, rejecting Israel's very
right to exist, unleashed a tidal wave of violence, Morris changed tack. Departing from the line he
and his fellow new historians had been toeing for more than a decade, he blamed the persistence of
the Arab-Israeli conflict on the Palestinians' intransigence and their rejection of all compromise
solutions since the 1930s.10

But then, would a true historian discard his own archival research on a specific historical period,
without the discovery of new documentary evidence, merely on account of political developments
taking place some half-a-century after the original events? Hardly. For all of Yasir Arafat's
shortcomings, including his failure to accept Morris's definition of a "fair" solution to the Israeli-
Palestinian dispute, this does not change one iota in the historical record of the 1948 war and its
aftermath.

Even when criticism of Fabricating has ostensibly moved from the personal to the professional
sphere, it has never genuinely attempted to grapple with the book's central thesis, let alone refute its
factual assertions. Instead, the critics have misrepresented its substance altogether. Consider, for
example, the assertion by Joel Beinin of Stanford University (now president of MESA), that "by
returning the debate to the arena of intellectual history, Karsh avoids engaging [Benny] Morris's
archival discoveries."11 In fact, my book has nothing to do with intellectual history, its exclusive
concern being to engage the new historians' archival discoveries. Indeed, after bothThe
Economist and The Times Literary Supplement cited a number of Morris's factual falsifications
exposed by my book,12 he begrudgingly conceded the validity of my claims, while simultaneously
seeking to disguise their real nature. "Karsh has a point," Morris wrote to The Times Literary
Supplement. "My treatment of transfer thinking before 1948 was, indeed, superficial." He also
acknowledged my refutation of his misinterpretation of an important speech made by David Ben-
Gurion on December 3, 1947: "[Karsh] is probably right in rejecting the transfer interpretation' I
suggested in The Birth to a sentence in that speech."13 He also admitted elsewhere that "Karsh
appears to be correct in charging that I stretched' the evidence to make my point." 14 But then, the
issue is not the misinterpretation of a specific sentence in Ben-Gurion's speech, or even the
stretching of evidence. It is the deliberate and complex attempt to misrepresent the contents of the
speech so as to portray a false picture of the moral and political worldview of Israel's founding
father.

Shlaim resorts to cruder means to discredit my rebuttal of his conspiracy theory of an Anglo-
Transjordanian-Zionist collusion to disinherit the Palestinians. Rather than engage my archival
discoveries, he dismissed my criticism as based on a single "unimportant and insignificant
document," written by "a middle-level career civil servant" and deemed "not suitable for circulation
outside the Foreign Office."15 This is an incredible charge indeed, given that two full chapters
in Fabricating, containing hundreds of documents from official British archives, are dedicated to the
rebuttal of the conspiracy charge.

But the story does not end here, for Shlaim chose to misrepresent the nature of the above document
and its significance. First, this was not an obscure document by a middle-level career civil servant
but rather a summary of a crucial consultation, held by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin with his key
advisers immediately after his meeting with the Transjordanian prime minister, Tawfiq Abu'l-Huda.
The consultation addressed the critical issue of Transjordan's possible incursion into Palestine after
the termination of the British mandate, raised by Abu'l-Huda during the meeting, and its
implications. Secondly, contrary to Shlaim's claim, the memorandum was circulated well beyond the
bounds of the Foreign Office, as clearly evidenced by the comment on the foot of the page: "This was
briefly discussed with the S. of S. [i.e. Bevin] who did not object to the substance of the above minute
being confidentially discussed with the State Depat [sic]. I attach a draft tel."16
In short, Shlaim has totally misrepresented the above memorandum, turning black into white.
Again, this is not a matter of academic sophistry but rather a deliberate distortion of archival
evidence so as to defend an important but false aspect of his thesis. I challenged Shlaim to publish
the sources of his (mis)representation of the document.17 He never did.

The only sympathizer of the new historians willing to acknowledge the nature of my criticism and its
far-reaching implications has been William Quandt of the University of Virginia. "Karsh is not
talking about differences of interpretation, of nuanced readings of texts," he wrote in a review
of Fabricating, "he is making a different and more damaging accusation - namely, that these
academics are deliberately misleading readers. That is, they know what the record says and choose
to distort it." "Along with plagiarism," he continued, "fabrication is the worst accusation one
academic can make against another."

Do I succeed in making my case? Here, Quandt is reluctant to break rank: "I do not come away
convinced, although in some cases he does raise points that seem to warrant examination of the
originals."18 But then, why not press this point to its logical conclusion and conduct an examination
of the originals prior to writing the review, so as to inform the readers of your findings? Don't they
deserve an analysis that gets to the bottom of things, rather than an open-ended question?

That Quandt alone, among establishment Middle East scholars, has been prepared to admit
what Fabricating is all about is a sad testament to the prejudice and dogmatism plaguing this field
of studies over the past few decades. There is no real freedom of expression, no revisionism in the
true sense of the word: only founding myths and preconceived dogmas to which scholars must
conform, such as the presentation of Israel as "the bad guy," to use Edward Said's words, and the
Arabs as hapless victims of Zionist and Israeli aggression. 19 "Revisionism," in this Orwellian
environment, means simply the rewriting of history in line with these dogmas. If this requires the
substitution of fiction for fact, so be it.

Needless to say, it has been taken for granted that the Arab narrative of the conflict needs no
revisionist history. "It is important to stress that for all their flaws, the versions of history produced
by the traditional Arab historiography are fundamentally different from the Israeli myths of origin,"
Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago has recently argued.

This is true notably because it is not a myth that a determined enemy bent on taking control of their
homeland subjected the Palestinians to overwhelming force. It is not a myth, moreover, that as a
result of this process the Palestinian people were victims, regardless of what they might have done
differently in this situation of formidable difficulty, and of the sins of omission or commission of
their leaders. In this case, as in so much else in the conflict, there can be no facile equivalence
between the two sides, however much some may long for the appearance of Palestinian "new
historians" to shatter the "myths" on the Arab side. 20
This blind nationalist belief in one's absolute justice may have some merit at the level of political
polemics. As a historical statement it has none at all. During the past decade, Israeli and Western
archives have declassified millions of records, including invaluable contemporary Arab and
Palestinian documents, relating to the 1948 war and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.
These make it possible to establish that, contrary to Khalidi's assertion, the Palestinian tragedy was
by no means a foregone conclusion. It could have been averted altogether had the Palestinians and
the Arab states accepted the United Nations Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, and opted
for peaceful coexistence with their Jewish neighbors rather than attempt to ethnically cleanse this
community.

This mass of documentation also proves beyond any reasonable doubt that, far from being an act of
expulsion, the mass Arab flight was a direct result of the fragmentation and lack of cohesiveness of
Palestinian society, which led to its collapse under the weight of the war it had initiated and whose
enormity it had failed to predict. But then, why tap this indispensable mine of information if the
historical narrative has already been decided?

Heads in the Sand

Another founding myth of modern Middle Eastern history views Western imperialism as the
foremost source of regional instability. According to this conventional wisdom, the European powers
- Britain, France, Russia, and Italy - having long coveted the declining Ottoman Empire, exploited its
entry into World War I in order to carve it into artificial entities, in accordance with their imperial
interests and in total disregard of the yearning of the indigenous peoples for political unity. In order
to do so, they duped the naive and well-intentioned Arab nationalist movement into a revolt against
its Ottoman suzerain, only to cheat it of the fruits of its efforts. The European powers broke the
historical unity of this predominantly Arab area, thus sowing the seeds of the endemic malaise
plaguing the Middle East to this day.

As with the Arab-Israeli conflict there has been no real revisionism of this dogma. The only historian
to have attempted to do so was the eminent British historian, Elie Kedourie (1926-92), and he paid
dearly for his moral and scholarly integrity. His refusal to revise his dissertation so as to bring it into
line with the misconceptions of his examiner, H.A.R. Gibb (later Sir Hamilton Gibb), the Laudian
Professor of Arabic at Oxford University and the leading Orientalist of the day, cost Kedourie his
ultimate objective: his doctorate. When Kedourie later led the assault on the blame-the-West
thesis,21 the dogmatic denizens of Middle Eastern studies shunned him.

A similar treatment was meted out to me and my wife upon the publication of our co-
authoredEmpires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Harvard
University Press, 1999) - a comprehensive reinterpretation of the origins of the modern Middle East.
Denying primacy to Western imperialism and attributing equal responsibility to regional powers, it
refuted the orthodox belief in a longstanding European design on the Middle East culminating in the
destruction of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the notion that the European powers broke the
Middle East's political unity by carving artificial states out of the defunct entity. No less
important, Empires of the Sand laid to rest the popular myth of "Perfidious Albion," proving that it
was Britain's Arab war allies who duped the largest empire on earth into backing the "Great Arab
Revolt," rather than the other way round.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the book has incurred the ire of the Arabist establishment.
Scathing indictments have been made, on the basis of hearsay, without writers taking the trouble to
read the book. A leading academic has even urged fellow academics to place negative reviews on the
website of a major Internet bookstore, so as to warn potential readers of our book.

Following a lengthy pre-publication review of Empires in The Chronicle of Higher Education,

Kenneth Cuno of the University of Illinois quickly alerted fellow members of MESCHA (Middle East
Social and Cultural History Association), an informal network of scholars and graduate students, of
the new threat to their cherished dogmas and conceptual frameworks. 22 "I have just submitted a
comment to a colloquy' site created by The Chronicle of Higher Education with regard to a pre-
reviewed book by Efraim and Inari Karsh entitled Empires of the Sand (Harvard, due out in
December)," he wrote without the benefit of reading a single sentence of our book. "Never mind the
Karshes' book. What I am more concerned about is The Chronicle author's evident conviction that
what is new and cutting-edge in our field is old-fashioned political history cum polemic. Consider
the damage that will do. Maybe if they hear from enough of us that something else is going on, they
might take notice. Maybe even in the form of another article entitled something like Middle East
Historians Protest out of Date Image of their Field.'"

Cuno's letter elicited a string of enthusiastic responses from his colleagues. Though none of them
had read the book, and some had not even read The Chronicle review, these staunch Arabists
unquestioningly rallied to the call to discredit a scholarly work, the actual substance of which they
were totally ignorant. "I think Ken's idea is good, and the most efficient way to do it is to have him or
someone write a letter, and e-mail it to us for signatures," wrote Nikki Keddie of the University of
California, Los Angeles. "The letter should be consensual enough in its views so most of us will sign."
After reading The Chronicle review, her alarm seemed to have intensified, and she suggested a more
comprehensive struggle against the book: "I no longer think a group letter important," she decided.
It was better to have people "who both know the documents and can make general points give
specific answers; and best of all, doing so after reading the book. But others of course can contribute
answers that are useful."

Joel Beinin concurred. "I agree with the general thrust of Ken Cuno's comments and warning about
the Karshes' new book," he wrote. "I was not planning on writing anything about this book before
having a chance to read it (is that too old-fashioned now?) but I have reviewed a previous opus of
Ephraim Karsh on the Israeli new historians which may give those interested an idea of what kind of
person/scholar he is."

Beinin's reluctance to review a book without reading it first is to be commended; far less so his
readiness to warn readers away from a scholarly work he has never read, or to dismiss it out of hand
merely on the basis of an author's perceived personality. But this is precisely how this group has
sought to confront the presumed threat of our book: not a scholarly debate on facts and theses but a
character assassination couched in high pseudo-academic rhetoric. "This is not the first time that
Efraim Karsh has written a highly self-important rebuttal of revisionist history," wrote Yezid Sayigh
of Cambridge University. "He is simply not what he makes himself out to be, a trained historian (nor
political/social scientist)."

Leave aside the fact that both my training (undergraduate degree in modern Middle Eastern history
and Arabic language and literature, and a doctorate in political science and international relations)
and my research output refute Sayigh's assertion. His misleading misrepresentation of my scholarly
background is wholly irrelevant. Fabricating Israeli History has nothing to do withEmpires of the
Sand, which is a wholly different work in terms of scope, time frame, and historical methodology.
But Sayigh is not a person to be bothered by such niceties. Having told his colleagues how "Morris
and Shlaim et al swept the floor' with Karsh on methodological and documentary grounds"
(although, so far it is Morris, rather than myself, who has admitted mistakes and backtracked on his
earlier claims), Sayigh urges the writing of "robust responses [that] make sure that any self-
respecting scholar will be too embarrassed to even try to incorporate the Karsh books in his/her
teaching or research because they can't pretend they didn't know how flimsy their foundations are."

Mary Ann Fay from the American University of Sharjah seems to share his view. "Why this book?"
she protested. "It is appalling to think that the wider academic community believes that all we do is
old' history, but what is even worse is the notion that our work still has to be judged for legitimacy
(or illegitimacy) on where we stand in relation to Palestine."

Had Fay taken the trouble to read the book, she would have easily discovered that it has nothing to
do with the Palestine question. Only one of its twenty-one chapters (twelve pages out of 400) deals
with the origins of the Balfour Declaration, and even this, from a predominantly great-power
perspective. There is a discussion of Palestine in a couple of other chapters, but then again, not from
the perspective of an Arab-Jewish conflict but rather as an illustration of the perennial tension
between imperialism and nationalism. Empires of the Sand simply ends before this conflict began to
transcend its embryonic phase, and its scope is far wider than this localized feud.

Since we have seen the nature of Shlaim's and Morris's responses to Fabricating, it takes no great
imagination to guess the essence of the "robust responses" envisaged by Sayigh. Indeed, when such
robust responses were published, they made no greater an effort than Sayigh to grapple
with Empires' thesis or to rebut its factual assertions. Consider, for example, the criticism by
Richard Bulliet of Columbia University of our claim that "the price of Ottoman imperialism was
often paid for by its national minorities." Referring to our description of a large-scale massacre of
Armenians in Baku in September 1918, Bulliet argues that since Baku lies "some 500 miles beyond
the Ottoman frontier[,] to the degree Armenians in Baku were a national minority, surely they were
a national minority in the Russian, rather than in the Ottoman, empire. But to have said so would
not so well have served the Karshes' interest." 23

This is wrong not just by a mile, but by 500 miles. The Armenians of Baku were not massacred by
the Russians, as implied by Bulliet, but rather by Ottoman forces that had occupied the city, together
with vast Russian territories. Bulliet seems blissfully unaware of the history of the war in the Middle
East: Russian forces in Transcaucasia went into rapid disintegration following the revolutionary
upheavals of 1917, and Ottoman forces reached Baku the following year. To the degree Armenians in
Baku were a national minority in the autumn of 1918, they were a national minority in the
(temporarily) expanded Ottoman, rather than Russian empire. They were slaughtered precisely
because of this fact. Bulliet's error is an appalling example of ignorance in a professional historian.

Indeed, what credential did Bulliet possess, that a leading journal in the field should ask him to
review our book? He is a medievalist who has done no research or writing on the subject. But in his
spare time, he propagates the view of the Middle East and its nations as hapless victims of Western
imperialism. In Middle Eastern studies that in itself is a sufficient credential to pronounce on
anything. In his review, Bulliet rushes to absolve the Ottomans of responsibility for crimes they
committed in their effort to keep their own empire intact. The evidence be damned - for it would not
so well have served Bulliet's interest.

Truth and Untruth

This conventional view - absolving Middle Easterners and blaming the West - is academically
unsound and morally reprehensible. It is academically unsound because the facts tell an altogether
different story of modern Middle Eastern history, one that has consistently been suppressed because
of its incongruity with the politically correct dogmas of the Arabist establishment. And it is morally
reprehensible because denying the responsibility of individuals and societies for their actions is
patronizing and in the worst tradition of the "white man's burden" approach, which has dismissed
regional players as half-witted creatures, too dim to be accountable for their own fate. As Lawrence
of Arabia, perhaps the most influential early exponent of this approach, described the Arabs: "They
were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellect lay fallow in incurious resignation.
Their imaginations were vivid, but not creative They did not understand our metaphysical
difficulties, our introspective questioning. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief,
without our hesitating retinue of finer shades."24

Little wonder therefore that Empires of the Sand was more favorably received by Middle Eastern
intellectuals, fed up with being talked down to and open to real revisionism of their region's history
after suffering decades of condescension from their paternalistic champions in the West.

Efraim Karsh is professor of Mediterranean studies at King's College, University of London, and
editor of Israel Affairs.
1
Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim,
eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 37.
2
Interview with Ze'ev Sternhell, Rive - Review of Mediterranean Politics and Culture, Dec. 1996, p.
48.
3
Ilan Papp, "The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial," Journal of Palestine
Studies, Spring 2001, at http://www.ipsjps.org/jps/119/pappe.html.
4
Benny Morris, "A Second Look at the Missed Peace,' or Smoothing out History: A Review
Essay," Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1994, pp. 78-88; idem, "Refabricating 1948: Review
Essay," ibid., Winter 1998, pp. 81-96.
5
Benny Morris, "After Rabin," Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1996, pp. 84, 86.
6
Michael Kennedy, "Rewriting History," The Inquirer Magazine, Feb. 1, 1998.
7
Ha'aretz Musaf, May 2, 1997.
8
Ilan Papp, letter to Ha'aretz Musaf, May 9, 1997.
9
Omer Bartov, "Of Past Wrongs - and Their Redressing," The Times Literary Supplement(London),
Oct. 31, 1997.
10
Yediot Aharonot Musaf Shiva Yamim, Nov. 23, 2001.
11
Joel Beinin, review of Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians," in Middle East Journal,
Summer 1998, p. 448.
12
The Economist, July 19, 1997; The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 14, 1997.
13
The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 28, 1997. The term "transfer" refers to the alleged Zionist
design to remove the Palestinians from their patrimony.
14
Morris, "Refabricating 1948," p. 83.
15
Avi Shlaim, "A Totalitarian Concept of History," Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1996, p. 55;Ha'aretz
Musaf, May 2, 1997.
16
Memorandum by B.A.B. Burrows, Feb. 9 1948, FO 371/68368/E2696, Public Records Office,
London.
17
Efraim Karsh, "Historical Fictions," Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1996, p. 60.
18
William Quandt, review of Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians," in MESA Bulletin,
Summer 1998, p. 118.
19
The Sunday Times (London), June 20, 1993.
20
Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure," in Rogan and
Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine, pp. 16-17.
21
See Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914-
1921 (London: Cassell Academic, 1987); idem, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-
Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
22
MESCHA website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~mescha/.
23
Richard Bulliet, review of Empires of the Sand, in Middle East Journal, Autumn 2000, pp. 667-
68.
24
T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1935), p. 38.

Arafat's War
A briefing by Efraim Karsh
December 2, 2003

Professor Efraim Karsh is the Director of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of
London. He has held academic posts at the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, Columbia
University, Tel-Aviv University, and Harvard University. Professor Karsh is a regular
commentator on current events who often appears in the media in the United States and United
Kingdom. He has been published in many periodicals including the Middle East Quarterly. He
spoke to the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia on December 2, 2003.

In recent months, several well-publicized proposals designed to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
have gained enormous attention and praise. The Geneva Accords, in particular, made world
headlines. Yet all of these well-intentioned schemes fail to grasp a central reality: Yasser Arafat and
his PLO have no desire to end their war against Israel.

It is plain to many that the Oslo peace process was an abject failure. In the twenty years prior to the
accords, approximately 400 Israelis were killed by terrorists while in the post-Oslo years, four times
this number have been slaughtered by terror. This calamity was of Yasser Arafat's making.

If one simply reads what Arafat and his lieutenants have said over the past ten years, discovering the
roots of anti-Israeli terrorism becomes obvious. From the beginning, Arafat declared Oslo to be a
great deception; a political stepping-stone to achieve what the PLO has always struggled for the
end of Israel. This strategy of deception and terror was adopted decades before the principles and
architects of the peace process were assembled. Shortly before he assumed the leadership of the
PLO, Arafat gave an interview to a German magazine stating his clear objective: to move his
"resistance forces" (seasoned terrorists) to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to wage a devastating war
against Israel, to undermine Israel's security, economy, and confidence. However, in the late 1960s,
due to the efficiency of the Israeli security services and the reluctance of the Palestinians living in the
Territories, Arafat was forced to revise his course of action. This rethinking spawned the 1974
Phased Plan, which called for the PLO to use violence as well as political means (i.e., negotiations) to
extract concessions and ultimately destroy Israel. Therefore, Oslo emerged as the perfect means by
which the PLO could apply the Phased Plan.
On the very same day, when Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, he broadcast to the Palestinians
inflammatory anti-Israeli speeches, which invoked the Phased Plan. For the next decade, he
continued to go on record with talk of "liberating" the "territories of 1948" not 1967 and recapturing
the whole of Jerusalem. Before a Muslim audience in South Africa, he spoke of jihad for Jerusalem
and likening the peace process to the temporary agreement reached between the Prophet
Muhammad and the rulers of Mecca. It was this very agreement that allowed Muhammad to
increase his military strength, then terminate the pact and conquer Mecca.

Arafat cleverly used Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext to unleashing a campaign
of organized terror against Israel. He opened up the jails, armed the militias, and incited mobs to
engage in violence. Months after the outbreak of war, top Palestinian officials like Marwan
Barghouti admitted that intense preparations were made long before 2000 to launch a terrorist
offensive.

To this day, the poisonous incitement of terror remains a serious problem within the Territories. The
Palestinian Authority continues to promote the most venomous anti-Semitic broadcasts, writings,
and literature. Palestinian textbooks, newspapers, television programs, and religious sermons all
glorify the annihilation of Israel and the killing of Jews.

Where do we go from here? Israel will find no security and peace as long as Arafat and his thuggish
PLO remain in power. These veteran murderers are committed to the destruction of Israel. Israel
must end Arafat's reign of terror, remove the 20,000 to 30,000 PLO terrorists in its midst, and
disarm militant Islamist groups like Hamas. It will take time and it will be bloody, yet Israel must
persevere.

http://www.meforum.org/audio/12.mp3

This summary account was written by Zachary Constantino research assistant at the Middle East
Forum.

Arafat's Grand Strategy

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2004, pp. 3-11

For Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, the Oslo process has
always been a strategic means not to a two-state solutionIsrael and a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and Gazabut to the substitution of a Palestinian state for the state of Israel.

As early as August 1968, Arafat defined the PLO's strategic objective as "the transfer of all resistance
bases" into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel during the June 1967 war, "so that
the resistance may be gradually transformed into a popular armed revolution." This, he reasoned,
would allow the PLO to undermine Israel's way of life by "preventing immigration and encouraging
emigration destroying tourism weakening the Israeli economy and diverting the greater part of
it to security requirements [and] creating and maintaining an atmosphere of strain and anxiety
that will force the Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in Israel."[1]

The Oslo accords enabled the PLO to achieve in one fell swoop what it had failed to attain through
many years of violence and terrorism. Here was Israel, just over a decade after destroying the PLO's
military infrastructure in Lebanon, asking the Palestinian organization, at one of the lowest ebbs in
its history, to establish a real political and military presencenot in a neighboring Arab country but
right on its doorstep. Israel even was prepared to arm thousands of (hopefully reformed) terrorists
who would be incorporated into newly established police and security forces charged with asserting
the PLO's authority throughout the territories.
In September 2000, Arafat launched a war of terror against Israel with precisely the objectives he
had set for the Palestinian movement in 1968. Some analysts now argue that the Palestinians have
lost that war. But the very fact that Arafat could wage it and plunge Israel into one of its greatest
traumas constitutes a triumph of his strategy. Certainly the Palestinians have suffered reversals and
losses. But Arafat has achieved his goal: he brought the Palestinian war from Israel's borders into
Israel proper by the politics of stealth. He has every reason to hope that the work he began will be
continued by the next generation of Palestinian leaders. That work is nothing short of the
dismantlement of Israel.

How did Arafat bring it off? First, he articulated a long-term vision of Israel's elimination and
succeeded in imbuing all Palestinians with its precepts, even as he shook the hands of Israeli leaders
and a U.S. president. Second, he indoctrinated his people with an abiding hatred of Israel and its
people so as to fortify them for war. Last, he chose an opportune moment, after he had gained
maximum advantage from the "peace process," to resort to war and terror. This article examines
each of the three elements in Arafat's visionary plan to liberate Palestine and the meaning of Arafat's
legacy for the future.

A Strategic Plan

When Arafat began his "armed struggle" back in the mid-1960s, he took inspiration from the
example of Algeria: a war of national liberation that had succeeded in the space of a few years in
defeating a colonial power. When he failed to replicate this model, owing in part to the low level of
national consciousness among the Palestinians and Israel's effective counterinsurgency measures,
the PLO adopted the "phased strategy." This strategy, dating from June 1974, has served as the
PLO's guiding principle ever since. It stipulates that the Palestinians should seize whatever territory
Israel is prepared or compelled to cede to them and use it as a springboard for further territorial
gains until achieving the "complete liberation of Palestine."[2]

From the very outset of the Oslo process, Arafat and his lieutenants viewed the agreements as an
implementation of this strategy, not as its abandonment. Arafat said just that as early as September
13, 1993, when he addressed the Palestinians in a pre-recorded Arabic-language message broadcast
by Jordanian television, even as he shook Yitzhak Rabin's hand on the White House lawn. He
informed the Palestinians that the Israeli-Palestinian declaration of principles (DOP) was merely the
implementation of the PLO's "phased strategy." "O my beloved ones," he explained,

Do not forget that our Palestine National Council accepted the decision in 1974. It called for the
establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian land that is liberated or from which
the Israelis withdrew. This is the fruit of your struggle, your sacrifices, and your jihad This is the
moment of return, the moment of gaining a foothold on the first liberated Palestinian land Long
live Palestine, liberated and Arab.[3]

This vision of a "liberated and Arab Palestine"that is, a Palestine in which Israel does not exist
was not mentioned in any of Arafat's interviews with the Israeli and Western media at the time.
During the next seven years, until the launch of his terrorist war in late September 2000, Arafat
played an intricate game of Jekyll-and-Hyde politics. Whenever addressing Israeli or Western
audiences, he would habitually extol the "peace of the brave" he had signed with "my partner Yitzhak
Rabin." At the same time, he depicted the peace accords to his Palestinian constituents as transient
arrangements of the moment. He made constant allusions to the "phased strategy" and repeatedly
insisted on the "right of return," a standard Palestinian euphemism for Israel's destruction through
demographic subversion.[4] He leavened his speech with historical and religious metaphors, most
notably the Treaty of Hudaybiya, signed by the Prophet Muhammad with the people of Mecca in
628, only to be disavowed by Muhammad a couple of years later when the situation shifted in his
favor.[5]

The Palestinian leadership fully embraced this interpretation of the Oslo process as a grand strategic
deception, aimed at bringing about Israel's eventual destruction. As early as September 22, 1993,
nine days after the signing of the DOP, Yasir Abed Rabbo, a senior PLO official and future "minister
of information" in the Palestinian Authority (PA), categorically denied that "the mutual recognition
document between Israel and the PLO contains any Palestinian pledge to stop violence." Several
months later, in July 1994, Abed Rabbo went a step further and vowed that the Palestinians would
regain "all of Palestine."[6]

Other Palestinian leaders were equally explicit. In August 1994, Faruq Qaddumi, head of the PLO's
political department, openly called for Israel's destruction while Faisal Husseini echoed the same
sentiment in an interview with Syrian television in September 1996:

All Palestinians agree that the just boundaries of Palestine are the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Realistically, whatever can be obtained now should be accepted [in the hope that]
subsequent events, perhaps in the next fifteen or twenty years, would present us with an opportunity
to realize the just boundaries of Palestine.[7]

Husseini remained committed to this vision to his final days. In March 2001, a few weeks before his
death by heart attack, he said this:

One must draw a distinction between the strategic aspirations of the Palestinian people, who would
not surrender one grain of Palestinian soil, and their political striving, based on the balance of power
and the nature of the current international system Our eyes will continue to be focused on the
strategic goala Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Seaand nothing that we
take today can make us forget this supreme truth.[8]

By this time, Arafat had already launched his war of terror against Israel, and Husseini, if he wished,
could have reassured his Israeli peace partners that its goals were limited to the attainment of
Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. He did not, instead choosing to underscore
Israel's demise as the ultimate Palestinian objective.

Nabil Shaath, another supposed moderate and dedicated advocate of the Oslo process, also
threatened a return to the "armed struggle" whenever he found Israel to be insufficiently
accommodating of Palestinian demands. "If the negotiations reach a dead end, we shall go back to
the struggle and strife, as we did for forty years," he told a Nablus symposium in March 1996:

As long as Israel goes forward [with the process], there are no problems, which is why we observe
the agreements of peace and non-violence. But if and when Israel will say, "That's it, we won't talk
about Jerusalem, we won't return refugees, we won't dismantle settlements, and we won't retreat
from borders," then all the acts of violence will return. Except that this time, we'll have 30,000
Palestinian armed soldiers who will operate in areas in which we have unprecedented elements of
freedom.[9]

Even the supposed moderates in the Palestinian leadership, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and
Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala), expressed their hope (albeit implicitly) for Israel's eventual destruction. In
an interview with an Israeli newspaper in January 1996, Abu Mazen gently reiterated the PLO's old
formula of a democratic state comprising the whole of Palestine: he expressed the hope that in the
future Jews and Palestinians "will reach a state of complete mixture" in Palestine.[10] "We did not
sign a peace treaty with Israel, but interim agreements that had been imposed on us," said Abu Ala
in June 1996:

When we accepted the Oslo agreement, we obtained territory but not all the Palestinian territory.
We obtained rights, but not all of our rights. We did not and will not relinquish one inch of this
territory or the right of any Palestinian to live on it with dignity.[11]

Forever Enemies

Arafat and his PA reinforced their strategy by indoctrinating Palestinians, and especially the youth,
against the state of Israel, Jews, and Judaismall in flagrant violation of their obligations under
Oslo.
Palestinians have been told of the most outlandish Israeli plots to corrupt and ruin them, which are
wholly congruent with the medieval Christian (not Muslim) myth of Jews as secret destroyers and
poisoners of wells. Thus, Arafat has charged Israel with killing Palestinian children to get their
internal organs,[12] while the PA's minister of health, Riad Zaanun, has accused Israeli doctors of
using "Palestinian patients for experimental medicines."[13] The Palestinian representative to the
Human Rights Commission in Geneva charged Israel with injecting Palestinian children with the
AIDS virus.[14] The director of the PA's Committee for Consumer Protection accused Israel of
distributing chocolate infected with "mad cow disease" in the Palestinian territories.[15] The PA
minister of ecology, Yusuf Abu Safiyyah, indicted Israel for "dumping liquid waste ... in Palestinian
areas in the West Bank and Gaza."[16] Suha Arafat famously amplified one such charge when, in the
presence of Hillary Clinton, she told an audience in Gaza in November 1999 that "our people have
been subjected to the daily and extensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to
an increase in cancer cases among women and children."[17]

Perhaps the most successful anti-Semitic import in the Muslim-Arab world is the theory of an
organized Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination, as spelled out in the notoriousProtocols
of the Elders of Zion. The PA has repeatedly referred to the Protocols, and its tightly controlled
media have been rife with stories about Jewish "plots" and "conspiracies." Arafat himself borrowed
from the Protocols in his welcome speech in Jericho in July 1994.[18] In late 1997, when a dispute
ensued about the scope of Israel's military redeployment in the West Bank, the PA's largest daily, al-
Hayat al-Jadida, derided the maps presented by the Israeli government as the latest manifestation
of the alleged Zionist grand design, revealed in the Protocols, to expand from the Nile to the
Euphrates. Subsequent articles elaborated on the devious plots revealed in the Protocols for
manipulating world public opinion on behalf of Zionism.[19]

This pervasive denigration of Jews has been accompanied by a systematic denial of the Jewish
state's legitimacy by both the PA and the PLO. Israel is often referred to by the pejorative phrase,
"the Zionist entity." Israel is glaringly absent from Palestinian maps, which portray its territory as
part of a "Greater Palestine," from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. In 1998, when Prime
Minister Netanyahu made an issue of this, the PA's press responded contemptuously:

Which Israel is he talking about: that of 1948, 1967, 1982, or that extending from the Nile to the
Euphrates? Let him define for us what Israel is so that we can add it to the map of the dictatorships
that have had their day in history, only to vanish later without a trace.[20]

Since the Holocaust is viewed as the most powerful modern-day justification for the existence of a
Jewish state, the PA and its media have gone out of their way to minimize the genocide, if not deny it
altogether. At the same time, the Palestinians are portrayed as the Holocaust's real victims: they
have been made to pay for the West's presumed desire to atone for the Holocaust through the
establishment of a Jewish state. (The Palestinians offer no explanation why, if the Holocaust did not
happen, European nations should feel sufficiently remorseful about it to have foisted Israel upon the
Palestinians.) Even Abu Mazen, the Oslo architect and one of the foremost symbols of the supposed
Palestinian reconciliation, argued in a 1984 book that less than a million Jews had been killed in the
Holocaust and that the Zionist movement was a partner to their slaughter.[21]

The PA has also gone to great lengths to repudiate any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem or, by implication, to the Land of Israel itself. Even at the Camp David summit of July
2000the most ambitious single effort to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflictseveral Palestinian
negotiators denied the existence of King Solomon's Temple. Arafat himself told Clinton that the
temple had been located in Nablus rather than in Jerusalem.[22] Three days before the start of
Arafat's war of terror in September 2000, Abed Rabbo adamantly denied the temple's very
existence:

The Israelis say that beneath the noble sanctuary (the Esplanade of the Mosques) lies their temple.
Looking at the situation from an archaeological standpoint, I am sure there is no temple. They
have dug tunnel after tunnel with no result.[23]
Nor has Arafat refrained from utilizing the immense inflammatory potential of Islam, which has
constituted the linchpin of the Middle Eastern social and political order for more than a millennium,
as a primary tool to discredit his Israeli peace partners, if not peace itself. Week after week,
preachers have used their pulpits to discredit the peace process and to instill hatred for Israelis and
Jews. Worshippers have been taught that Jews are the "descendants of apes and pigs" and been
warned of Zionist machinations to divide the Palestinian people and spawn internecine strife. In
December 1994, when Palestinian police shot and killed fourteen Hamas militants during the first
bloody confrontation between the PA and its opponents, the PA-appointed mufti of Jerusalem,
Ikrama Sabri, blamed Israel for the massacre in a sermon.[24](In making this accusation, Sabri was
taking his cue from Arafat, who never tired of repeating the allegation that extremists within the
Israeli army and security services were flooding the territories with weapons in order to precipitate a
Palestinian civil war. Arafat even claimed that Israeli extremists were masterminding the suicide
bombings against Israeli civilians.[25])

There is correlation between the vicissitudes in the PA's policy and the tone and direction of Friday
sermons. In the summer of 2000, when Arafat chose to use the question of Jerusalem as the pretext
for bringing about the collapse of the Camp David summit, Sabri quickly mounted a spirited
propaganda campaign denying any Jewish attachment to the city. After Arafat launched his war of
terror in September 2000, the Friday preachers embarked on an orgy of unmitigated anti-Jewish
invective. "They think that they scare our people," Sabri said in his Friday sermon on May 25, 2001,
one week before a suicide bomber murdered twenty teenagers at a Tel Aviv disco:

We tell them: inasmuch as you love lifethe Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great
difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death
and [strives for] martyrdom. He does not fear the oppression of the arrogant or the weapons of the
bloodletters. The blessed and sacred soil of Palestine has vomited all the invaders and all the
colonialists throughout history and it will soon vomit, with God's help, the [present] occupiers.[26]

Choosing War

Arafat did not confine himself to disparaging the Oslo accords and his peace partner. From the
moment of his arrival in Gaza in July 1994, he set out to build an extensive terrorist infrastructure in
flagrant violation of the accords, and in total disregard of the overriding reason he had been brought
from Tunisia, namely, to lay the groundwork for Palestinian statehood.

Arafat refused to disarm the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad as required by the Oslo
accords and tacitly approved the murder of hundreds of Israelis by these groups. He created a far
larger Palestinian army (the so-called police force) than was permitted by the accords. He
reconstructed the PLO's old terrorist apparatus, mainly under the auspices of the Tanzim, which is
the military arm of Fatah (the PLO's largest constituent organization and Arafat's own alma mater).
He frantically acquired prohibited weapons with large sums of money donated to the PA by the
international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian population.[27]

What enabled Arafat to pursue his war preparations with impunity was a combination of
international sympathy for his cause and Israeli self-delusion. Israelis, fatigued by decades of
fighting and yearning for a normalcy that would allow them at last to enjoy their new affluence,
turned a blind eye to the danger on their doorstep. Even Binyamin Netanyahu, for all his scathing
criticism of Oslo, proved unable to win from Arafat the reciprocity he demanded and followed in the
footsteps of his two predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, in surrendering territory to the
PA without any tangible return.

These preparations gave Arafat the wherewithal to launch war. It is often claimed that the violence
that broke out on September 29, 2000, was the result of Ariel Sharon's "provocative" visit to the
Temple Mount the day before. In fact, the initial Palestinian reaction to Sharon's visit was
surprisingly mild. The actual turnout on the Temple Mount on the day of the visit was far lower than
expected, despite the violent incitement by the official Palestinian media and outright calls by
various Palestinian groups for mass demonstrations against the intended "desecration of al-Haram
ash-Sharif." During the visit, there were minor clashes between Israeli policemen and rock-throwing
Palestinian youths. These were limited in scope and intensity and resulted in thirty lightly wounded
Israeli policemen and four injured Palestinians. Not a single Palestinian was killed.[28] It was only
on the next day that serious violence eruptedin anything but a spontaneous manner. As a number
of prominent Palestinians have candidly admitted, the leadership quickly seized the initiative.[29]

Most ordinary Palestinians did not welcome war; they were enjoying a healthy economic recovery
after several years of deep recession. Nor was the population groaning under an onerous occupation.
In early 1996, Israel had withdrawn its forces from the West Bank's populated areas (withdrawal
from Gazan towns and camps had been completed by May 1994) and dissolved its civil
administration and military government. This was followed by the Israeli redeployment from
Hebron in January 1997. As a result, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip no longer lived under Israeli occupation. All of the Gaza Strip's residents and just
under 60 percent of West Bankers lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40 percent
of West Bank residents lived in towns, villages, refugee camps, and hamlets where the PA exercised
civil authority but where, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel maintained "overriding responsibility
for security."

In September 2000, only about two percent of the West Bank's population lived in areas where
Israel had complete control. By no conceivable stretching of words could the violence be described
as a popular uprising against foreign occupation. This "popular uprising" was launched and
choreographed by the leadershipand above all, by Yasir Arafat.

Conclusion

It is the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two leaders who determined their national development
during the twentieth centuryHaj Amin Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, who led them from the early
1920s to the late 1940s, and Yasir Arafat, who has dominated Palestinian politics since the mid-
1960swere megalomaniac extremists obsessed with violence and blinded by anti-Jewish hatred.
Had the mufti led his people to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he promised
the British officials who appointed him to his high rank, the Palestinians would have had their
independent state in a substantial part of Mandatory Palestine by 1948. They thus would have been
spared the traumatic experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat been genuinely interested in
peace, a Palestinian state could have been established in the early 1980s as a corollary to the
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, or by May 1999, as a part of the Oslo process.

But then, for all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat has never been as interested in
the attainment of statehood as in the violence attending its pursuit. As far back as 1978, he told his
close friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked
the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state, and that a Palestinian state would be a
failure from the first day.[30] The past decade has seen this bleak prognosis turn into a self-fulfilling
prophecy, driving Israelis and Palestinians in their bloodiest and most destructive confrontation in
half a century.

Efraim Karsh is director of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of
London, and editor of the quarterly journal Israel Affairs. He is the author of Arafat's War: The
Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (Grove Press).

[1] Al-Anwar (Beirut), Aug. 2, 1968.

[2] "Political Program for the Present Stage Drawn up by the 12th PNC, Cairo, June 9, 1974,"Journal
of Palestine Studies, Summer 1974, pp. 224-5.
[3] Jordan Television Network (Amman), in Arabic, Sept. 13, 1993.
[4] For evidence from the early 1990s, see Daniel Pipes and Alexander T. Stillman, "Two-Faced
Yasser," The Weekly Standard, Sept. 25, 1995.
[5] Daniel Pipes, "Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy," Middle East Quarterly,
Sept. 1999, pp. 65-72.
[6] Jordan Television Network, Sept. 24, 1993; The Jerusalem Post, July 17, 1994.
[7] The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 10, 1994; Focus, Syrian television, Sept. 9, 1996, in International
Media Review Analysis (IMRA), Sept. 9, 1996.
[8] As-Safir (Beirut), Mar. 21, 2001.
[9] The Jerusalem Post, Mar. 15, 1996.
[10] Ma'ariv (Tel Aviv), Jan. 19, 1996.
[11] Al-Ittihad (Baghdad, internet edition), June 24, 1996; Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), July 13, 1997.
[12] Al-Jazeera (Doha), Jan. 13, 2002; al-Hayat al-Jadida (Gaza) Dec. 24, 2001.
[13] Al-Hayat al-Jadida, Dec. 25, 1997.
[14] The Jerusalem Post, Mar. 17, 1997.
[15] Al-Hayat al-Jadida, Dec. 8, 1997.
[16] Ibid., Sept. 26, 2000.
[17] Reuters, Nov. 11, 1999.
[18] Radio Monte Carlo, in Arabic, July 1, 1994; Voice of Palestine, July 5, 1994.
[19] Al-Hayat al-Jadida, Nov. 30, Dec. 21, 1997; July 2, Nov. 7, 1998.
[20] Ibid., Dec. 17, 1998.
[21] Mahmud 'Abbas, al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-
Sihyuniya(Amman: Dar Ibn Rushd, 1984), introduction.
[22] "Camp David and After: An Exchange: An Interview with Ehud Barak," The New York Review
of Books, June 13, 2001.
[23] Le Monde, Sept. 26, 2000.
[24] Khaled Abu Toameh, "Sermons of Fire," The Jerusalem Report, Mar. 23, 1995, pp. 20-1.
[25] The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 28, 1994; Ma'ariv, May 2, 1995.
[26] Palestinian Authority television, May 25, 2001, in Middle East Media Research Institute
(MEMRI), Special Dispatch Series, no. 226, June 6, 2001, at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?
Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP22601.
[27] Die Zeit (Hamburg), June 7, Aug. 15, 2002.
[28] The Jerusalem Post, Sept. 29, 2000; Ma'ariv, Sept. 29, 2000; The Economist, Oct. 7, 2000.
[29] Imad Faluji in al-Ayyam (Ramallah), Dec. 6, 2002; Sakhr Habash, in al-Hayat al-Jadida, Nov.
7, Dec. 7, 2000; Mamduh Nawfal, in Majalat ad-Dirasat al-Filastiniya, Summer 2001, pp. 44-5;
Marwan Barghouti's interview with al-Hayat (London), Sept. 29, 2001.
[30] Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons. Inside the Romanian Secret ServiceThe Memoirs of Ceausescu's
Spy Chief (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 28.

Did Edward Said Really Speak Truth to Power?

by Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2008, pp. 13-21

Edward Said's influence on academe looms even larger in death than during his life. On September
25, 2003, the day that he died, students and staff of Columbia University gathered in the garden
outside Philosophy Hall, where the longtime professor of English and comparative literature had his
office, for a candlelight vigil. It was the first of several memorials held in his honor on campuses
across the United States, Asia, and Europe. Celebrity admirers, from novelist Salman Rushdie to
actors Danny Glover and Vanessa Redgrave, joined a "huge crowd" at a March 2004 service in New
York.[1] Almost four years later, Said's life is the subject of two documentariesCharles
Glass's Edward Said: The Last Interview and Sato Makoto's Out of Place. On May 25-26, 2007,
Boazii University in Istanbul held a major conference to provide revisionist luminaries including
Israeli historian Ilan Papp (now at the University of Exeter), British anti-Zionist academic
Jacqueline Rose, and Said's former Columbia colleagues Joseph Massad and Rashid Khalidi an
opportunity to "pay tribute, revisit, and engage with the richly variegated erudition and seminal
scholarship" and "reflect critically on the location and significance of Said's intellectual
legacy."[2] The conference not only examined Said's literary criticismhis professional fieldand
his writing on the Palestinians but also included a panel on "Said, the Public Intellectual Speaking
Truth to Power." Lionizing Said as an intellectual warrior casting aside falsehood in a quest for truth
regardless of consequence is a myth that may persist, but examination of his works suggests such
popularity also reflects the triumph of politics over scholarship in the academy.
Truth to Power?

That Said spoke truth to power is the legacy many of his followers seek to construct. It was the
theme of many of his obituaries. "He spoke truth to power" read his obituary in The Times Higher
Education Supplement. "Speaking truth to Power" was the title of another tribute in Al-Ahram
Weekly, Egypt's foremost English language paper, which long carried a Said column. "Truth to
Power" is also the name of one of the comprehensive online bibliographies of Said's work. Said's
nephew Saree Makdisi, a professor of English literature like his uncle, established a "Speaking Truth
to Power" website where he posts his own "archive of interventions" on the Palestinian issue.[3]

Many Said obituaries attached mythical qualities to what Said termed his refusal to "accept what
orthodoxy or dogma or received ideas tell you is the truth."[4] The poet Tom Paulin remembered
Said's "Promethean truth-telling."[5] For Mahmoud Darwish, a poet and former senior Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) official, Said in death was an "eagle soaring higher and higher /
bidding farewell to his height / for dwelling on Olympus / and over heights / is tiresome."[6]

Such accolades would delight Said who, when asked in 2001 about how he would like to be
remembered, said he would want people to eulogize that he "tried to tell the truth."[7] He often
argued that it was the "intellectual's role to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as
possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or
displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual's
constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth,
unadorned."[8] Such statements came easier to Said than truth. His accumulated works and
statements demonstrate truth to be a goal he eschewed rather than embraced.

Fabricating Facts to Fit

Said's collected works demonstrate antipathy for integrity and scholarship. Said often seeks to pass
off sweeping and groundless assertions as historical fact. For example, he claimed that "historically,
in nineteenth-century Europe anti-Semitism included both Jews and Arabs"[9]even though
nineteenth century polemicists, such as Wilhelm Marr (himself half-Jewish), credited with coining
the term, used it exclusively to describe animus toward Jews.[10] As egregious was his assertion that
"the town of Hebron is essentially an Arab town. There were no Jews in it before 1967,"[11] a
statement that ignores a long history dating from biblical days to the 1929 Arab massacre and
expulsion of the Jewish population of that city.

Likewise, Said claimed that "as far as the Jewish minority in Palestine was concerned, Zionism had
very little to do with them" in the post-Balfour Declaration era.[12] In fact, three quarters of the
Jewish inhabitants of Palestine at the time were avowed Zionists who arrived there as part of the
Zionist immigration waves in the preceding decades. In 1909, they founded Tel Aviv, the first
Hebrew-speaking city since antiquity, two years after Jewish residents of Jaffa had purchased the
land with funds borrowed from the Jewish National Fund. They established kibbutzim and
developed institutions such as the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut), which played a
central role in developing the construction, industrial, and agricultural sectors to support the Zionist
endeavor.

As false are Said's claims that "every kibbutz in Israel is on Arab property that was taken in 1948,"
and that "Zionists introduced terrorism into Palestine" in the 1920s.[13] Such statements are
outright errors, not just interpretations of history. Zionists established Deganyia in 1909, and an
additional 110 kibbutzim and 99 moshavim (cooperative villages) by 1944.[14] Nor was there any
Zionist terrorism in Palestine in the 1920s. Quite the contrary: the Arabs' primary instrument for
opposing Jewish national aspirations was violence, and the relative success or failure of that
instrument in any given period determined Arab politics and diplomacy. As early as April 1920, Arab
nationalists in Palestine sought to thwart Zionist activity and to rally support for incorporating the
country into the short-lived Syrian kingdom headed by King Faisal bin Hussein by carrying out a
pogrom in Jerusalem in which they killed five Jews and wounded 211. The following year, Arab riots
killed ninety and wounded hundreds more. In August 1929, Arab rioters across Palestine targeted
Jews, murdering 133 and wounding three times more.

Indeed, Said's description of his childhood years in Mandatory Palestine, on which he staked
personal, and by extension, national claim to victimhood and dispossession, was more imaginary
than real.[15] Said, a U.S. citizen by birth, grew up in Egypt and made only periodic visits to family
in Jerusalem (or for that matter in other Arab countries). Mona Anis, an Egyptian journalist and
admirer of Said, recalled her shock and surprise when, in her first personal encounter with Said at a
conference at Essex University in 1984, she heard him speak Arabic in "perfect Egyptian dialect."
She recalled, "I remember being so taken aback by his unexpected Egyptiannness that I hardly
spoke. When Said left I burst out with the question that had been perplexing me: 'How come he
sounds as Egyptian as you and me?'"[16]

Hypocrisy

His hypocrisy was flagrant. Not only did Said present legitimate questions about the narrative he
presented about his childhood in Palestine to be evidence of persecution, but he would also deny
that he had ever claimed to be a Palestinian refugee, albeit continuing to write about his "fifty years
of living the Palestinian exile"[17] and in reiterating his claim that he was "born in Jerusalem and
spent most of my formative years there,"[18] despite conclusive evidence to the contrary.

He castigated Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic and an outspoken supporter of Israel's
security, for exhibiting the "hypocrisy of the rank coward" for "sitting in the comfort of his millions
in Washington and Boston"[19] while, at the same time, Said remained in plush quarters in New
York. In his 1994 book The Politics of Dispossession, he wrote that "I was pretty far away from the
contested land, forced to do my bit at a great distance."[20] On another occasion, he stated that "I
speak at a great distance from the field of struggle."[21] When criticized by PLO chairman Yasir
Arafat as a long-distance Palestinian "jumping on the bandwagon of patriotism" while failing to "feel
the suffering of his people," Said responded, "I don't understand what the accusation of living in
America is supposed to mean."[22]

Nor did Said see any irony in condemning the Mubarak regime's show-trial imprisonment of
Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim while continuing his relationship with the regime's
newspaper, Al-Ahram, and accepting that regime's felicitations. He became such an important
presence on the Egyptian cultural scene that following his death, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture
dedicated a conference to his memory. There, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim refused to accept a
10,000 Egyptian (US $1,750) prize because it was "awarded by a government that in my view lacks
[the] credibility that would make this award worth receiving."[23] Other novelists and literary
figures refused to make the moral comprises which Said, in his desire to revel in the powerful's
plaudits, would make.

Plagiarist?

Said claimed to value original thought,[24] but he borrowed liberally from others, especially when it
came to writings about the Middle East. His repudiation of Jewish nationalism repeated and
repackaged Arab propaganda dating back to the early 1920s and the 1930s.[25]

Shortly after its creation in 1964, the PLO produced a short pamphlet entitled Zionist Colonialism in
Palestine. It declared:

The frenzied "scramble for Africa" of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in
Palestine. As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire-builders raced for Africa,
Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine.[26]

Contrast this with a passage from Said's The Question of Palestine:

Zionism ... coincided with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and
Asia, and it was as part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was
launched initially by Theodor Herzl.[27]

Or consider the pamphlet's explanation of the main difference between Zionism and nineteenth-
century European colonialism:

Unlike European colonization elsewhere ... Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially
incompatible with the continued existence of the "native population" in the coveted country.[28]

With Said:

Zionism was a colonial vision unlike that of most other nineteenth-century European powers, for
whom the natives of outlying territories were included in the redemptive mission civilisatrice.[29]

Such paraphrasing of previously published material, if conscious, borders on plagiarism. Other Said
themes parallel those espoused by the 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring
Zionism to be "a form of racism and racial discrimination,"[30] and by earlier polemicists' attempts
to equate Zionism and Nazism.[31] James Parkes, a Christian theologian and historian of Judaism,
commented in 1945 that he had already heard "too often" attempts to link the two.[32]

Also problematic is Said's tendency to misrepresent secondhand sources as original documents.

Consider his extensive quotation from the diary of Zionist official Yosef Weitz in an attempt to prove
a grand Zionist design to dispossess Palestinian Arabs. While Said would like his readers to believe
that he consulted the original document, it appears that he borrowed the quotations from Israeli
academic Israel Shahak, an outspoken opponent of Zionism. This is evidenced not only by Said's
inability to read Hebrew, the language in which Weitz's diary was published,[33] but also by the fact
that Said recycles Shahak's errors of quotation. Thus, for example, both Said and Shahak locate a
June 15, 1948 Weitz quotation on page 302 in the diary when it appears on page 303, and both
misspell in the exact same manner the village of Mghar.[34]

Intolerance to Dissent?

While Said sought to cast himself as a courageous defender of free discourse and thought, his record
was opposite. He cast aspersions on anyone who disagreed with him, conflating academic challenge
with victimization. "Anyone who defies or dares to challenge [American Zionists]," he wrote, "is
subject to the most awful abuse and vituperation, all of it personal, racist and ideological. They are
relentless, totally without generosity or genuine human understanding. To say that their diatribes
and analyses are Old Testament-like in manner is to insult the Old Testament."[35]

Said launched ad hominem attacks on major intellectual figures with whose views about the Middle
East he disagreed. To Said, Paul Johnson, the renowned British writer, was a "retrograde social and
political polemist" while Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum and publisher of
the Middle East Quarterly, was a "Neanderthal." Bernard Lewis, the eminent Princeton historian
who challenged Said's Orientalism[36] in the New York Review of Books,[37] was guilty of
"distorting truth" and had an "extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong."[38] Said
concluded that the polyglot historian "knows nothing" about the Arab world. Harvard political
scientist Samuel Huntington, author of the influential Clash of Civilizations,[39] Said wrote, "knows
nothing about civilization, he knows nothing about history."[40] Said wrote with similar vitriol
toward social anthropologist Ernest Gellner and Middle East historian Elie Kedourie.

He reserved special venom for Arab academics in the United States who did not agree with him.
[41] He attacked dissident Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who brought Saddam's brutality to
international attention in his books Cruelty and Silence[42] and Republic of Fear,[43] as an
"intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He
is a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no
stable principles or values."[44]
The irony of Said's judgment and dismissal[45] of such intellectuals is that he conducted no
independent research whatever on the Middle East or Islamic history, politics, and society. In a 1998
interview, he admitted that "for the forty years that I have been teaching I have never taught
anything other than the Western canon, and certainly nothing about the Middle East."[46] While
famous for writing and lecturing about Israel and Zionism, he did not speak or read Hebrew. Still, he
positioned himself on the Arab-Israeli question as an authority who "revealed for a Western
audience things that had so far either been hidden or not discussed at all."[47]

For decades, he characterized scholarly and public criticism over his stance on Zionism and Israel as
"the worst sort of Stalinist bullying" and, even as his books became bestsellers and were assigned in
classrooms across the country, he argued that the "severest opprobrium" made his views "no longer
acceptable" in the United States. He recalled that the more the "establishment [tries] to bring me
back to the fold [the more] I become enraged, and I become even more inflammatory, and I reveal
even more of their horrible secrets."[48] He told some people he received death threats but would
remain undeterred.[49] Later, he said he had actually suffered assassination attempts. "There have
been attempts made by the extremists, who have tried to do away with me," he said in one interview
toward the end of his life.[50]

Such claims were unsubstantiated. While Said said he installed a panic button in his apartment in
the 1980s, he also said, "[W]e never had to use it. It was only used once, as it turned out, by a house
guest, who thought it was, you know, a light switch."[51] While Rushdie, Bangladeshi writer Taslima
Nasrin, and the late Egyptian novelist Neguib Mafouz weathered threats, bounties and, in Mafouz's
case, a near-fatal attempt on his life, Said sought to claim the same mantle. In helping him weave his
myth, admirers wrote he risked "scorn and death threats from extremists to speak out for the people
he calls 'the victims of the victims'";[52] how he "has enemies the stakes in being Edward Said are
high";[53] how "he is not afraid to challenge any authority he has paid a high price for this
position."[54]

Using Polemics to Climb the Career Ladder

Said substituted status as a Palestinian activist and polemicist for scholarship to achieve
unprecedented celebrity for an English professor. He became enmeshed in Palestinian activism after
the 1967 Six-Day war. In 1971, he wrote his first piece for Le Monde Diplomatique[55] and, two
years later, he made his debut in The New York Times;[56] both articles were on the Arab-Israeli
conflict. By 1977 he was a member of the Palestine National Council, the PLO's rubberstamp
parliament. The young English professor who had labored in obscurity prior to embracing the
Palestinian cause had come a long way. While his early studies of Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad
made contributions to his scholarly field, it was his 1978 publication ofOrientalism, a flawed and
highly-selective examination of the way the West perceived Islam,[57] which cemented his celebrity.

Hamid Dabashi, his friend and colleague at Columbia University, noted in a long tribute published
after Said's death, "I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior toOrientalism,
and for years after my graduation, I remained entirely oblivious to it I discovered Edward Said
first from Orientalism, then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the
Iranian Revolution."[58] Said's protestation that involvement in the issue of "Palestine brings no
rewards,"[59] was risible. In 1979, he published The Question of Palestineand was invited to Paris to
attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the
apartment of Michel Foucault.[60]

His subsequent work eschewed the rigors of scholarship and instead favored political activism. On
February 22, 1980, The New York Times titled a profile article, "Edward Said: Bright Star of English
Lit and the PLO." Pal Ahluwalia, a professor at the University of South Australia and the author of a
complimentary book on Said's "intellectual project," explained:

Palestine itself becomes an almost overwhelming repetitive theme in Said's work. Indeed, the major
corpus of his writing deals with Palestine, and much of it is topical and direct political commentary,
very much in line with his stance on the role of the public intellectual. Hence we have to see
Palestine as firmly connected to the rest of Said's cultural theory.[61]

His contrarianism and rejectionism ironically augmented his authenticity among policymakers. In
1993, U.S. Central Command invited Said, one of the most outspoken critics of the U.S. military and
its role in the 1991 Kuwait war, to address 500 officers. Following his appearance, CENTCOM asked
him to act as a consultant on the region, an invitation he declined. In the same year, despite his
virulent opposition to the nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Clinton administration
invited him to the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo accords, an invitation he also declined.
[62]

Plaudits and rewards increased alongside his rejectionism. In 1993, the British Broadcasting
Corporation invited Said to give the Reith Lecture, its prestigious annual address. The following
year, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded him its Picasso
Medal. In 1997, he gave the inaugural set of William Empson Lectures at Cambridge University, as
well as the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Lecture in Delhi and the Netaji Centenary Oration at the Netaji
Institute in Calcutta. The following year, he served as distinguished lecturer at the Collge de France,
the premier institute of learning in that country. Again in 1998, the BBC commissioned him to write
and present a documentary film, In Search of Palestine. While very few professors get such
opportunities, Said chose to use it as evidence of his persecution, noting that after being shown on
the BBC it "more or less disappeared."[63] In 1999, the prestigious Modern Language Association
elected Said its president, and the Middle East Studies Association appointed him an honorary
fellow, a plaudit it has not even bestowed upon a professor like Bernard Lewis whose scholarship,
unlike Said's, is in Middle Eastern studies. Several awards and honors in Europe followed.

Said's Legacy

Said's substitution of politics for scholarship in the name of "speaking truth to power" has spawned
scores of students, professors, and journalists who seek to emulate his path to fame. Justifying any
polemic under the rubric of speaking truth to power now brings reward in most Western
universities. Said once described himself "as a teacher of how language is used and abused";
[64] indeed, he provided a global audience with a master class on the subject.

It is ironic that while Said and his intellectual successorsDabashi, Columbia University associate
professor Joseph Massad, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, and Chicago political
scientist John Mearsheimer and his Harvard University coauthor Stephen Waltseek to profit from
false claims of persecution and censorship, across the Arab world, a plethora of reformers and
opponents of authoritarian regimes suffer for attempting to speak truth to power. By substituting
polemics for research and conflating academic freedom with freedom from academic standards,
Said's legacy may ultimately be to harm fact-based and lasting Middle East studies scholarship and
instruction in American and European universities.

Efraim Karsh is professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London
where Rory Miller is a senior lecturer.

[1] "The Edward Said Memorial," Columbia News, Columbia University, New York, Mar. 25, 2004;
Esther Iverem, "Q & A: Danny Glover," SeeingBlack.com, Mar. 15, 2004.
[2] "Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said," May 25-26, 2007, Boazici
University, Istanbul, Turkey.
[3] Saree Makdisi's weblog can be found at http://sareemakdisi.blogspot.com/; The Times Higher
Education Supplement (London), Oct. 10, 2003; Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), Oct. 30- Nov. 5,
2003; Truth to Power: The Online Bibliography of Edward Said, accessed Aug. 28, 2007.
[4] Edward Said, "Bridge across the Abyss," Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 10-16, 1998.
[5] Tom Paulin, "Writing to the Moment," The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2004.
[6] Mahmoud Darwish, "Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading," Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6,
2004.
[7] "Interview with Edward Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays," Booknotes, June 17,
2001.
[8] Edward Said, "A Desolation, and They Called it Peace," Al-Ahram Weekly, June 25-July 1, 1998.
[9] David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W.
Said (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), p. 177.
[10] See, for example, Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History (New York: New American Library,
1962), p. 312; Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical
Anti-Semitism (New York: Fromm, 1993), pp. 123-30.
[11] Barsamian and Said, Culture and Resistance, p. 54.
[12] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 19.
[13] David Barsamian, "Interviews: Edward W. Said," Arts & Opinion, Nov. 2003.
[14] A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of
the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, vol. I (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1946),
p. 373, reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C., 1991.
[15] Justus Weiner, "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward
Said,"Commentary, Sept. 1999.
[16] Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 24-Oct. 1, 2003.
[17] Edward Said, "Fifty Years of Dispossession," Al-Ahram Weekly, May 7-13, 1998.
[18] Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998.
[19] Edward Said, "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness," Al-Ahram Weekly, Aug. 24-30, 2000. He
expressed a similar theme toward other Diaspora Jews in Edward Said, "Thinking about Israel,"Al-
Ahram Weekly, May 3-9, 2001.
[20] Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. xvi.
[21] Edward Said, "Arafat Is Only Interested in Saving Himself," The lndependent (London), June
20, 2002.
[22] Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 165-6.
[23] Mona Anis, "Speaking Truth to Power," Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 30-Nov. 5, 2003.
[24] Moustafa Bayoumi, "Edward W. Said (1935-2003)," The Village Voice, Oct. 1-7, 2003.
[25] See, for example, Bayan Nuwaihid al-Hut, Watha'iq al-Haraka al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya
1918-1939: Min Awraq Akram Zu'aytir, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Palestinian Research Center, 1984), pp. 4-
34; "Report on Political and Economic Conditions in Palestine: Submitted to His Excellency the
High Commissioner for Palestine by the Executive of the Seventh Palestine Arab Congress, 1925,"
Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/665/2; Arthur Rupin, report on a meeting with George
Antonius, July 28, 1930, CZA, AM 1012/868.
[26] Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Research Center, Palestine
Liberation Organization, Sept. 1965), p. 1.
[27] Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 69.
[28] Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, p. 5.
[29] Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 68 (emphasis in original).
[30] United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, Nov. 10, 1975.
[31] Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, pp. 21-7.
[32] Rory Miller, Divided against Zion: Anti-Zionist Opposition to a Jewish State in Palestine,
1945-1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 148.
[33] Yosef Weitz, Yomani Ve-igrotai La-banim (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1965).
[34] Said, The Question of Palestine, pp. 102, 248, fn. 47; Israel Shahak, Min al-Arshif as-Sihyuni:
Watha'iq wa-Nusus (Beirut: Munazzamat at-Tahrir al-Filastiniya, Markaz al-Abhath, 1975), p. 31.
[35] Edward Said, "More on American Zionism (2)," Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 5-11, 2000.
[36] Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
[37] Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," The New York Review of Books, June 24, 1982.
[38] Oleg Grabar and Edward W. Said, "Orientalism: An Exchange, Reply by Bernard Lewis,"The
New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1982.
[39] New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
[40] Edward Said, "East Isn't East," The Times Literary Supplement (London), Feb. 3, 1995; "I Find
Myself Instinctively on the Other Side of Power," interview with Edward Said, The Guardian, Dec.
10, 2001; Edward Said, "Dignity and Solidarity," Al-Ahram Weekly, June 26-July 2, 2003.
[41] Edward Said, "Suicidal Ignorance," Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 15-21, 2001.
[42] New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
[43] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
[44] Edward Said, "Misinformation about Iraq," Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 28-Dec. 4, 2002.
[45] David Barsamian, "Edward Said Interview," The Progressive, Nov. 2001.
[46] Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Jennifer Wallace interview with Edward Said, "Exiled by Foes, Silenced by Friends," The Times
Higher Education Supplement, Jan. 17, 1997.
[49] Matthew Rothschild, "Edward W. Said, 1935-2003," The Progressive, Sept. 28, 2003.
[50] "Interview with Edward Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays," Booknotes, June 17,
2001.
[51] Ibid.
[52] "Lion of Judea," interview with Edward Said, The Guardian, May 13, 1997.
[53] Zoe Heller, "Radical Chic," The Independent on Sunday (London), Feb. 7, 1993.
[54] Nouri Jara, interview with Edward Said on "'Orientalism,' Arab Intellectuals, Marxism, and Use
of Myth in Palestinian History," Al-Jadid Magazine, Summer 1999.
[55] See Edward Said, "Les Palestiniens face aux responsabilites de la defaite; la prolongation du
conflit entre Israel et les pays Arabes," Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris), Oct. 1, 1971.
[56] Edward Said, "Arabs and Jews," The New York Times, Oct. 14, 1973.
[57] Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism."
[58] Hamid Dabashi, "The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)," Counterpunch, Oct. 2,
2003.
[59] "A Highbrow Hero Who Storms the Ivory Tower," interview with Edward Said, The Sunday
Times, June 20, 1993.
[60] Edward Said, "My Encounter with Sartre," The London Review of Books, June 1, 2000.
[61] See introduction to Edward Said Memorial Lecture, University of Adelaide, Oct. 1, 2005, p. 5.
[62] Said, Peace and Its Discontents, p. xxix.
[63] Edward Said, "West Bank Diary," Al-Ahram Weekly, Dec. 10-16, 1998. In July 1999, New York's
WNET, a major Public Broadcast Service (PBS) affiliate, aired the documentary in New York.
[64] Edward Said, "Trying Again and Again," Al-Ahram Weekly, Jan. 11-17, 2001.

Who's Against a Two-State Solution?

by Efraim Karsh
Jewish Ideas Daily
July 20, 2010

"Two states, living side by side in peace and security." This, in the words of President Barack Obama,
is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East.
Washington is fully and determinedly on board. So are the Europeans. The UN and the
"international community" vociferously agree. Successive governments of the state of Israel have
shown their support for the idea. So far, there isjust as there has always beenonly one holdout.

The story begins a long time ago. In April 1920, the newly formed League of Nations appointed
Britain as the mandatory power in Palestine. The British were committed, via the Balfour
Declaration, to facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. But they were
repeatedly confronted with violent Arab opposition, which they just as repeatedly tried to appease.
As early as March 1921, they severed the vast and sparsely populated territory east of the Jordan
River ("Transjordan") from the prospective Jewish national home and made Abdullah, the emir of
Mecca, its effective ruler. In 1922 and 1930, two British White Papers limited Jewish immigration to
Palestine and imposed harsh restrictions on land sales to Jews.

But the violence mounted, and in July 1937 it reaped its greatest reward when a British commission
of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, recommended repudiating the terms of the mandate altogether. In
its stead, the commission now proposed a two-state solution: the partitioning of Palestine into an
Arab state, united with Transjordan, that would occupy some 85 percent of the mandate territory
west of the Jordan river, and a Jewish state in the remainder. "Half a loaf is better than no bread,"
the commission wrote in its report, hoping that "on reflection both parties will come to realize that
the drawbacks of partition are outweighed by its advantages."

But partition did not happen. While the Zionist leadership gave the plan its halfhearted support,
Arab governments and the Palestinian Arab leadership (with the sole exception of Abdullah, who
viewed partition as a steppingstone to the vast Arab empire he was striving to create) dismissed it
out of hand.

The same thing happened in November 1947 when, in the face of the imminent expiration of the
British mandate, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine. Rejecting the plan
altogether, the Arab nations attempted to gain the whole by destroying the state of Israel at birth.
This time, however, Arab violence backfired. In the ensuing war, not only did Israel confirm its
sovereign independence and assert control over somewhat wider territories than those assigned to it
by the UN, but the Palestinian Arab community was profoundly shattered, with about half of its
members fleeing to other parts of Palestine and to neighboring Arab states.

But the results hardly won the Arabs over to the merits of the two-state solution. Rather, the Arab
states continued to manipulate the Palestinian cause to their own several ends. Neither Egypt nor
Jordan permitted Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine they had occupied during
the 1948 war. Jordan annexed the West Bank in April 1950, while Egypt kept the Gaza Strip under
oppressive military rule. No new Palestinian leadership was allowed to emerge. Only after the
conquest of these territories by Israel during the June 1967 Six-Day war, and the passage five
months later of UN Security Council Resolution 242, would their political future become a question
of the first order.

At the time, though, nobody envisaged a return to the two-state solution. To the contrary:
Palestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community, including the western
democracies, the Soviet Union (then the foremost supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world
itself (as late as 1974, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad openly referred to Palestine as "a basic part of
southern Syria"). Instead, under Resolutions 242's "land for peace" terms, it was assumed that any
territories evacuated by Israel would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiers: Gaza to Egypt,
and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention the Palestinians by name,
affirming instead the necessity "for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem"a clause
that applied not just to Arabs but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab states
following the 1948 war.

What, then, about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964 at the initiative
of Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser? Through a sustained terror campaign in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, most notably including the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the September
1972 Munich Olympics, the PLO would gradually establish itself as a key international player. In
October 1974 it was designated by the Arab League as the "sole legitimate representative" of the
Palestinian people, and in the following month PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat became the first non-
state leader ever to address the UN General Assembly. Soon afterward, the UN granted observer
status to the PLO despite that organization's open commitment to the destruction of Israel, a UN
member state; within a few years, it was allowed to open offices in most west European capitals.

The PLO's ascendance, coupled with Jordan's renunciation of its claim to the West Bank, led to a
reinterpretation of Resolution 242 as in fact implying a two-state solution: namely, Israel and a
Palestinian state governed by the PLO in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Conveniently ignored
was one glaring fact: the PLO rejected any such solution. In June 1974, the organization adopted a
"phased strategy," according to whose terms it would seize whatever territory Israel was prepared or
compelled to cede and use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving, in its
phrase, the "complete liberation of Palestine."

It is true that, in November 1988, more than two decades after the passage of 242, the PLO made a
pretense of accepting the resolution; but this was little more than a ploy to open a dialogue with
Washington. Shortly after that move, Salah Khalaf, Arafat's second-in-command (better known by
his nom de guerre of Abu Iyad), declared: "The establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of
Palestine is but a step toward the whole of Palestine." Two years later, following the Iraqi occupation
of Kuwait (which the PLO endorsed), he reiterated the point at a public rally in Amman, pledging "to
liberate Palestine inch by inch from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river."

Despite all this, Israel's Labor government, which had backed the "land for peace" formula in the
immediate wake of the 1967 war, decided to enter into its own peace negotiations with the PLO. In
1993 it signed the "Oslo Accords" providing for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank and
Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which time Israel and the
Palestinians would negotiate a permanent settlement. Although the Oslo accords were not based
explicitly on a two-state solution, they signaled an implicit Israeli readiness to acquiesce in the
establishment of a Palestinian state.

But once again the PLO had other plans. In its judgment, the Oslo "peace process" offered a path not
to a two-state but to a one-state solution. Arafat admitted as much five days before signing the
accords in Washington when he told an Israeli journalist that "In the future, Israel and Palestine will
be one united state in which Israelis and Palestinians will live together"that is, Israel would cease
to exist. And even as he shook Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's hand on the White House lawn, Arafat
was assuring the Palestinians in a pre-recorded Arabic-language message that the agreement was
merely an implementation of the PLO's phased strategy.

The next ten years offered a recapitulation, over and over again, of the same story. In addressing
Israeli or Western audiences, Arafat would laud the "peace" he had signed with "my partner Yitzhak
Rabin." To his Palestinian constituents, he depicted the accords as transient arrangements required
by the needs of the moment, made constant allusion to the "phased strategy," and repeatedly
insisted on the "right of return," a euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic
subversion.

And that was the least of it. Further discrediting the idea of "two states living side by side in peace
and security," Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) launched a sustained campaign of racial hatred
and political incitement. Israelis, and Jews more generally, were portrayed as the source of all evil
and responsible for every problem, real or imagined, in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians were
indoctrinated in the illegitimacy of the state of Israel and the lack of any Jewish connection to the
land, supplemented with tales of Israeli plots to corrupt and ruin them.

Nor did it stop there. Embracing violence as the defining characteristic of his rule, Arafat set out to
build an extensive terrorist infrastructure in the territoriesin flagrant violation of the accords and
in total defiance of the overriding official reason for his presence there: namely, to lay the
groundwork for Palestinian independence. Israeli concessions had no effect, or worse. In 1997,
Jerusalem gave the PA full control over virtually the entire Arab population of the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip, as well as some 40 percent of the land, as a prelude to final-status negotiations. But
Israel's civilian casualties only mounted. At the American-convened peace summit in Camp David
(July 2000), Ehud Barak offered Arafat a complete end to the Israeli presence, ceding virtually the
entire territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state and making
breathtaking concessions with respect to Jerusalem. Arafat's response was war, at a level of local
violence unmatched in scope and intensity since the attempt to abort the creation of a Jewish state
in 1948.

Although it had become abundantly evident by then that the PLO had no interest whatsoever in
statehood, the international community responded by condemning Israel's defensive measures
against the Palestinian intifada and urging it to accelerate the "peace process." It also maintained the
massive influx of international aid to the Palestinian Authority, making the Palestinians the largest
recipients of foreign aid per-capita in the worldthough most of the funds were promptly siphoned
off to the personal bank accounts of Arafat and his cronies and/or channeled to terror operations.
Even after Arafat's death in late 2004 and the landslide victory of the militant Islamist group Hamas
in Palestinian parliamentary elections twelve months later, Western governments insistently
maintained the faade of a "peace process," now embracing Mahmoud Abbas and his defeated Fatah
as the epitome of moderation.

But is there in fact a fundamental distinction between Hamas and Fatah when it comes to a two-
state solution? Neither faction formally accepts Israel's right to exist; both are formally committed to
its eventual destruction. Moreover, for all the admittedly sharp differences between Arafat and his
successor Abbas both in personality and in political style, the two are warp and woof of the same
dogmatic PLO fabric.

In a televised speech on May 15, 2005, Abbas described the establishment of Israel as an
unprecedented historic injustice and vowed his unwavering resolve never to accept it. Two-and-a-
half years later, at a U.S.-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, he rejected Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert's proposal of a Palestinian Arab state in 97 percent of the West Bank and the entire Gaza
Strip, and categorically dismissed the request to recognize Israel as a Jewish state alongside the
would-be Palestinian state, insisting instead on full implementation of the "right of return."

In June 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke with longstanding Likud precept by
publicly accepting a two-state solution and agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state,
provided the Palestinian leadership responded in kind and recognized Israel's Jewish nature. The
Arab world exploded in rage. Egyptian President Husni Mubarak, whose country had been at peace
with the Jewish state for 30 years, deplored Netanyahu's statement as "scuppering the possibilities
for peace." Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat warned that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000
years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."

At Fatah's sixth general congress, convened in Bethlehem in August last year, the delegates
reaffirmed their longstanding commitment to "armed struggle" as "a strategy, not a tactic . . . . This
struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated." More recently,
even as Abbas has publicly mouthed the Obama formula for "two states living side by side in peace
and security," he pointedly insists on preconditions impossible for Israel to accept.

The Peel Commission had the principle right. While a two-state solution "offers neither party all it
wants, it offers each what it wants most, namely, freedom and security." It is a great historical irony
that this "half-a-loaf" solution should have been repeatedly advanced as a response by others
Europeans, Americans, Israelisto the actions of its most implacable opponents, who have then
repeatedly proceeded to repudiate it in word and deed. On the Palestinian side, not a single leader
has ever evinced any true liking for the idea or acted in a way signifying an unqualified embrace of it.
The same is true, with the partial exceptions of Egypt and Jordan, for the larger Arab world.

Nearly two decades and thousands of deaths after the launch of the "peace process," one might hope
that Western policy makers would at last begin to take the measure of what the Palestinian
leadership tells its own people and wider Arab audiences. For the lesson of history remains: so long
as things on the Arab side are permitted, or encouraged, to remain as they are, there will be no two-
state solution, and therefore no solution at all.

Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author most recently ofPalestine
Betrayed (Yale), is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College,
University of London.

Shimon Peres versus the Brits

by Efraim Karsh
Jerusalem Post
August 2, 2010
Shimon Peres, Israel's 87-year-old president doesn't usually arouse antagonism among Europeans.

A tireless peace advocate for decades, and architect of the Oslo Process for which he received the
Nobel Peace Prize, he has long presented Israel's moderate face to the outside world.

Yet last week he provoked anger among British politicians and Anglo-Jewish leaders when he told a
Jewish website that the British establishment had always been "deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israel,"
and that this was partly due to endemic anti-Semitic dispositions. "I can understand Mr. Peres'
concerns, but I don't recognize what he is saying about England," said James Clappison, vice-
chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel. "Things are certainly no worse, as far as Israel is
concerned, in this country than other European countries. He got it wrong."

But did he? While few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of
observers, than the claim that Britain has been the midwife of the Jewish state, the truth is that no
sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of
facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the
Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.

AS EARLY as March 1921, the British government severed the vast and sparsely populated territory
east of the Jordan River ("Transjordan") from the prospective Jewish national home and made
Abdullah, the emir of Mecca, its effective ruler. In 1922 and 1930, two British White Papers limited
Jewish immigration to Palestine the elixir of life of the prospective Jewish state and imposed
harsh restrictions on land sales to Jews.

Britain's betrayal of its international obligations to the Jewish national cause reached its peak on
May 17, 1939, when a new White Paper imposed draconian restrictions on land sales to Jews and
limited immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, after which Palestine would become an
independent state in which the Jews would comprise no more than one-third of the total population.

Such were the anti-Zionist sentiments within the British establishment at the time that even a life-
long admirer of Zionism like prime minister Winston Churchill rarely used his wartime dominance
of British politics to help the Zionists (or indeed European Jewry). However appalled by the White
Paper he failed to abolish this "low grade gasp of a defeatist hour" (to use his own words), refrained
from confronting his generals and bureaucrats over the creation of a Jewish fighting force in
Palestine, which he wholeheartedly supported, and gave British officialdom a free rein in the
running of Middle Eastern affairs, which they readily exploited to promote the Arab case. In 1943,
for instance, Freya Stark, the acclaimed author, orientalist, and Arabian adventurer, was sent to the
US on a seven-month propaganda campaign aimed at undercutting the Zionist cause and defending
Britain's White Paper policy.

That this could happen at the height of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry of which
Whitehall was keenly aware offered a stark demonstration of the mindset of British officialdom,
which was less interested in stopping genocide than in preventing its potential survivors from
reaching Palestine after the war.

So much so that senior Foreign Office members portrayed Britain, not Europe's Jews, as the main
victim of the Nazi atrocities.

THIS ANTI-ZIONISM was sustained into the postwar years as the Labor Party, which in July 1945
swept to power in a landslide electoral victory, swiftly abandoned its pre-election pro-Zionist
platform to become a bitter enemy of the Jewish national cause. The White Paper restrictions were
kept in place, and the Jews were advised by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin not "to get too much at
the head of the queue" in seeking recourse to their problems.

Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who chose to ignore the warning and to run the British
naval blockade were herded into congested camps in Cyprus, where they were incarcerated for years.
"Should we accept the view that all the Jews or the bulk of them must leave Germany?" Bevin
rhetorically asked the British ambassador to Washington.

"I do not accept that view. They have gone through, it is true, the most terrible massacre and
persecution, but on the other hand they have got through it and a number have survived."

Prime Minister Clement Attlee went a step further by comparing Holocaust survivors wishing to
leave Europe and to return to their ancestral homeland to Nazi troops invading the continent.

While these utterances resonated with the pervasive anti-Semitism within British officialdom (the
last high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, for instance, said of Zionism,
"The forces of nationalism are accompanied by the psychology of the Jew, which it is important to
recognize as something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment"), Britain's Middle
Eastern policy also reflected the basic fact that as occupiers of vast territories endowed with natural
resources (first and foremost oil) and sitting astride strategic waterways (e.g., the Suez Canal), the
Arabs had always been far more meaningful for British interests than the Jews.

As the chief of the air staff told the British cabinet in 1947, "If one of the two communities had to be
antagonized, it was preferable, from the purely military angle, that a solution should be found which
did not involve the continuing hostility of the Arabs."

One needs look no further than David Cameron's statements on the Middle East to see this anti-
Israel mindset is alive and kicking. In the summer of 2006, when thousands of Hizbullah missiles
were battering Israel's cities and villages, he took the trouble of issuing a statement from the tropical
island on which he was vacationing at the time condemning Israel's "disproportionate use of force."

Four years later, while on an official visit to Turkey, he went out of his way to placate his Islamist
host, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by criticizing Israel's efforts to prevent the arming of
the Hamas Islamist group, which, like its Lebanese counterpart, had been lobbing thousands of
missiles on Israel's civilian population for years.

Plus a change, plus c'est la mme chose.

Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London,
editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author, most recently, ofPalestine Betrayed.

The Palestinians, Alone

by Efraim Karsh
The New York Times
August 2, 2010

It has long been conventional wisdom that the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a
prerequisite to peace and stability in the Middle East. Since Arabs and Muslims are so passionate
about the Palestine problem, this argument runs, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate feeds regional
anger and despair, gives a larger rationale to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and to the insurgency in
Iraq and obstructs the formation of a regional coalition that will help block Iran's quest for nuclear
weapons.

What, then, are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding thata
staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace
talks? "This is an alarming indicator," lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab
newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. "The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested
in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian
cause itself."

But the truth is that Arab policies since the mid-1930s suggest otherwise. While the "Palestine
question" has long been central to inter-Arab politics, Arab states have shown far less concern for
the well-being of the Palestinians than for their own interests.

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of
Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As
the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British
reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan "was to swallow up the central hill regions of
Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee
would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon."

From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed
little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of life which is
part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River
and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. "We couldn't care less if all the refugees die," an
Egyptian diplomat once remarked. "There are enough Arabs around."

Not surprisingly, the Arab states have never hesitated to sacrifice Palestinians on a grand scale
whenever it suited their needs. In 1970, when his throne came under threat from the Palestine
Liberation Organization, the affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan ordered
the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, an event known as "Black September."

Six years later, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian Army, massacred some 3,500
Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar. These militias again
slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this time
under Israel's watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians' rescue.

Worse, in the mid-'80s, when the P.L.O. officially designated by the Arab League as the "sole
representative of the Palestinian people" tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon, it
was unceremoniously expelled by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria.

This history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring
the fate of the Palestinians goes on and on. Saddam Hussein, in an effort to ennoble his predatory
designs, claimed that he wouldn't consider ending his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait without "the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in Palestine."

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaitis then set about punishing the P.L.O. for its support of
Hussein cutting off financial sponsorship, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers
and slaughtering thousands. Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge
that "what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to
Palestinians in the occupied territories."

Against this backdrop, it is a positive sign that so many Arabs have apparently grown so apathetic
about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For if the Arab regimes' self-serving interventionism has
denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate, then the best, indeed only, hope of peace
between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other
regional and global problems.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to
make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated
settlement.
Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean studies at King's College London and author, most recently, of "Palestine
Betrayed."

Justice for Palestine

by Efraim Karsh Aug 16, 2010 at 1:45 pm
"To a man with a hammer," Mark Twain famously quipped, "everything looks like a nail." To a
propagandist, everything looks like a poll.

No sooner had my latest New York Times op-ed piece, The Palestinians, Alone, been published than
my mailbox was swamped with polls of all hues aimed at proving the depth of Arab compassion for
the Palestinians.

One such poll claimed that 86% percent of Arabs were "prepared for peace" with Israel within the
pre-June 1967 borders (these Arabs obviously forgot to consult the Palestinians, as only 21 percent
of them named the "right of return" - a red line for all Palestinian factions without exception - as a
most important concern). Another poll, held by the Brookings Institution in conjunction with Zogby
International, reported a precipitous drop in Arab confidence in Barack Obama's Middle East policy
(as if Obama had not distinguished himself, in his short term in office, as the most anti-Israeli U.S.
president in living memory).

James Zogby himself, among others, felt compelled to attempt to rebut my article. "There are bad
polls, and then there are bad interpretations of polls," he wrote in the Huffington Post. "Putting
them together (i.e. a bad interpretation of a bad poll) can create a mess of misinformation."

The "bad poll" in question is a recent survey for the al-Arabiya television network, noted in my
article, which found a staggering 71 percent of Arab respondents had no interest in the Palestinian-
Israeli peace talks. And the "bad interpretation" is my presumed failure to recognize that this was
not a fully scientific poll but rather an "online vote," which didn't refer to the Palestinian-Israeli
peace talks but rather to the "Middle East peace process."

It is arguable of course that an "online-vote" by 8844 respondents (more than twice the size of the
Brookings/Zogby poll), answering one straightforward question, might be more accurate and less
susceptible to manipulation than "scientifically" crafted surveys purposively choosing their target
audiences; or that ordinary Arabs, living as they do in one of the least democratic parts of the world,
will be more candid in the relative obscurity of the web than in the presence of a pollster knocking
on their front door or contacting them by phone.

Nor is there any risk of Arabs, and for that matter any other polled audience, construing the "Middle
East peace process" for anything but the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks; not only because there has
been no other regional "peace process" for quite some time, but because the two terms have long
become synonymous.

But whatever the scientific merits and flaws of certain polling techniques, this issue has no bearing
whatsoever on "The Palestinians, Alone." For, contrary to Zogby's claim, my contention that the
Arab world has never had any real stake in the "liberation of Palestine" is not based on my reading of
the al-Arabiya survey but on the long history of systematic Arab abuse of both the "Palestine
Question" and the Palestinians themselves. A poll, even in the best of circumstances, can only give a
fleeting glimpse into reality, which is what the al-Arabiya poll did; a historical survey, by contrast,
can put current circumstances within their far wider and deeper context, which is precisely what my
article did.
Since this point seems to have eluded Zogby and like minded critics, as has my plea that the
Palestinians should be allowed to determine their own fate rather than be bossed around by their
Arab "brothers," let me expand the argument and diversify the historical examples in the
(admittedly slight) hope of convincing the unconvinced.

To begin with, it should be borne in mind that although the doctrine of pan-Arabism, which
dominated Arab politics for most of the twentieth century, constantly flaunted the "Palestine
Question" as its most celebrated cause, this had nothing to do with concern for the wellbeing of the
Palestinian Arabs, let alone the protection of their national rights.

Pan-Arabism views the Palestinians not as a distinct people deserving statehood but as an integral
part of a wider Arab framework stretching over substantial parts of the Middle East (e.g., "Greater
Syria") or the entire region. As the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti stated in 1946:
"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not." As late as September 1974, Syria's
President Hafez al-Assad described Palestine as "a basic part of southern Syria."

Though anti-Zionism formed a core principle of pan-Arab solidarity since the 1920s - it is easier,
after all, to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty - its invocation has
almost always served as an instrument for achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaim
it.

Take Emir Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca, the celebrated hero of the "Great Arab Revolt" against the
Ottoman Empire and the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. In January 1919 he
signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, the upcoming head of the Zionist movement, which
endorsed the Balfour Declaration. Yet when the opportunity arose, he had himself crowned (on
March 8, 1920) King of Syria, "within its natural boundaries, including Palestine." Had Faisal had
his way, Palestine would have disappeared from the international scene already then.

Faisal's ambitions were opposed by his elder brother, Abdullah, who strove to transform the emirate
of Transjordan (latterly Jordan), which he ruled since 1921, into a springboard for the creation of a
vast empire comprising Syria, Palestine, and possibly Iraq and Saudi Arabia; and it was this
ambition, rather than the desire to win independence for the Palestinian Arabs, that was the main
catalyst of the pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel in mid-May 1948.

Abdullah, who led the invasion, sought to incorporate mandatory Palestine, or substantial
parts of it, into his coveted empire.
Egypt wanted to prevent that eventuality by laying its hands on southern Palestine.
Syria and Lebanon sought to annex the Galilee.
Iraq viewed the invasion as a stepping stone to bringing the entire Fertile Crescent under its
rule.

Had Israel lost the 1948 war, its territory would have been divided among the invading Arab forces.
The name Palestine would have vanished into the dustbin of history. By surviving the pan-Arab
assault, Israel has paradoxically saved the Palestinian national movement from complete oblivion.

During the decades following the war, the Arab states manipulated the Palestinian national cause to
their own ends:

Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine
they had occupied during the 1948 war (respectively, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
The Palestinian refugees were kept for decades in squalid, harshly supervised camps
throughout the Middle East, where they could serve as a rallying point for anti-Israel
sentiment.

Lebanon may offer the starkest example of this abuse, having deprived its 400,000-strong
Palestinian population of the most basic human rights - property ownership, employment in
 numerous professions, free movement, etc. - but nowhere in the Arab world, with the partial
exception of Jordan, have the Palestinians been treated like decent human beings, let alone
"brothers."

In 2004 Saudi Arabia revised its naturalization law, allowing foreigners who had resided in
the kingdom for 10 years to apply for citizenship. Only one group was excluded: the estimated
500,000 Palestinians living and working in Saudi Arabia.

Such attitudes have by no means been confined to the official level. From the moment of their arrival
in the neighboring Arab states in 1948, the Palestinians were seen by ordinary Arabs as an
unpatriotic and cowardly lot who had shamefully abdicated their national duty while expecting
others to fight on their behalf. These sentiments were also manifest within Palestine itself, where the
pan-Arab volunteer force that entered the country to "protect the Palestinians" found itself at
loggerheads with the community it was supposed to defend. When an Iraqi officer in Jerusalem was
asked to explain his persistent refusal to greet the local populace, he angrily retorted that "one
doesn't greet these dodging dogs, whose cowardice causes poor Iraqis to die."

For their part, Arab leaders repeatedly exploited the Palestinian cause to promote their personal
goals:

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser cloaked his hegemonic aspirations by invoking the
restoration of "the full rights of the Palestinian people." Yet this didn't prevent him from
telling a Western reporter that "The Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are. We
will always see that they do not become too powerful."
Saddam Hussein disguised his predatory designs on Kuwait by conditioning his evacuation of
the emirate on "the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied
Arab territories in Palestine," only to drop this demand once his position became untenable.

Syria's President Assad was a persistent obstacle to Palestinian self-determination. He

pledged allegiance to any solution amenable to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) -
appointed by the Arab League (in October 1974) as the "sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people" - so long as it did not deviate from the Syrian line advocating the
destruction of the state of Israel. Yet when in November 1988 the PLO pretended to accept
the 1947 partition resolution (and by implication to recognize Israel's existence) so as to end
its boycotting by the U.S., Syria immediately opposed the move. When the PLO took this
pretence a step further by signing the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel, it was strongly
condemned by the Syrian regime, while the Damascus-based Palestinian terrorist, Ahmad
Jibril, threatened Arafat with death.

Nor have the Arab states shrunk from massacring Palestinians on a grand scale whenever this suited
their needs.

In 1970, when his throne came under threat from Palestinian guerilla organizations, the
affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein slaughtered thousands of Palestinians
during a single month, now known as "Black September." Fearing certain death, scores of
Palestinian fighters fled their Jordanian "brothers," surrendering themselves to the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF).
In the summer of 1976, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian army, massacred
some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar.

In September 1982, these very militias slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee
camps of Sabra and Shatila.

When the PLO tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon in 1983, it was
unceremoniously expelled by Assad, who then instigated an internecine war among the
Palestinian factions in Lebanon, which went on for years and cost an untold number of lives.
 In 1991, shortly after the Gulf War, thousands of innocent Palestinian workers living in
Kuwait were slaughtered by their hosts in retaliation for the PLO's support for the Iraqi
invasion of the emirate.

In the summer of 2007, the Lebanese army killed hundreds of Palestinians, including many
civilians, in the north Lebanese refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared.

For their part, the Palestinians turned on their Arab hosts whenever given the opportunity.

It was the PLO's subversive activities against the Jordanian regime, which had allowed the use of its
territory for anti-Israel attacks, that set in train the chain of events culminating in the Black
September massacres.

The PLO's abuse of its growing power base in Lebanon, and its meddling in the country's domestic
affairs, helped trigger the Lebanese civil war that raged for nearly two decades and cost hundreds of
thousands of lives. In the process, the Palestinians perpetrated numerous atrocitiesin their adopted
country. For example,

In May 1975, tens of Lebanese civilians were massacred in the Dekkwaneh-Jisr al-Basha
neighborhood in East Beirut.
In October 1975, dozens of civilians were slaughtered in the convent of Naameh, which had
received and sheltered Palestinian refugees in 1948.
In January 1976, the Palestinians massacred hundreds of civilians in the Christian town of
Damour, south of Beirut, desecrating the local religious shrines and expelling the rest of the
population.
During the Tel Zaatar siege, the Palestinians massacred hundreds of civilians in adjacent
neighborhoods.
In October 1976, dozens of women, children, and elderly persons were massacred in the
village of Aishiyah.

Much has been made of the Palestinian exodus of 1948. Yet during their decades of dispersal, the
Palestinians have experienced no less traumatic ordeals at the hands of their Arab brothers. For
example,

Following the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, most of the 400,000 Palestinians who had been
living and working in the emirate were expelled, creating an epic scale humanitarian
problem.
In September 1995 Libya's dictator Muammar Qaddafi ordered the expulsion of the 30,000-
strong Palestinian community in his country. "Since the Palestinian leaders claim they have
now got a homeland and a passport," he ridiculed the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. "Let
the 30,000 Palestinians in Libya go back to their homeland." No Arab state opened its doors
to the deportees, with thousands of hapless refugees stranded in the Egyptian desert for
weeks before being allowed into Gaza.

After the 2003 Iraq war, some 21,000 Palestinians have fled the country, in response to a
systematic terror and persecution campaign, leaving about 13,000 Palestinians.

Indeed, even during the 1948 war, far more Palestinians were driven from their homes by their own
leaders and/or by Arab armed forces than by Jewish/Israeli forces. Nowhere at the time was the
collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by
Jews. To the contrary, as a senior British official discovered to his surprise during a fact-finding
mission to Gaza in June 1949, "while [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for
that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the
Egyptians and other Arab states. 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are
referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their
homes.... I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they
were to come in and take the district over."

The prevailing conviction among Palestinians that they have predominantly been the victims of their
fellow Arabs has remained unabated to date. For example,

Salah Khalaf (a.k.a. Abu Iyad), the number two man in the PLO, publicly stated (in 1983) that
the crimes of the Syrian government against the Palestinian people "surpassed those of the
Israeli enemy."
Addressing mourners at the funeral of a PLO figure murdered at Syrian instigation, Arafat
stated: "The Zionists in the occupied territories tried to kill you, and when they failed, they
deported you. However, the Arab Zionists represented by the rulers of Damascus thought this
was insufficient, so you fell as a martyr."

Following the 1991 Kuwait massacres Arafat acknowledged: "What Kuwait did to the
Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied
territories." A Palestinian survivor of the massacres echoed this prognosis: "Now I feel Israel
is paradise. I love the Israelis now. I know they treat us like humans."

I could go on and on, but I doubt whether the historical record will induce the Zogbys to publicly
acknowledge the unhappy state of Arab-Palestinian relations. Some people would simply not be
bothered with the facts. Yet to judge by their hysterical response to "The Palestinians, Alone," it is
clear that the article has touched a raw nerve, or to paraphrase Mark Twain, has hit the nail right on
the head.

Obama's Failed Middle East Policy

A briefing by Efraim Karsh
August 24, 2010

Efraim Karsh is editor of the Middle East Quarterly and Professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. The author of fifteen books, he has held various
academic posts at Harvard and Columbia universities, the Sorbonne, the London School of
Economics, 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. On August 24, he addressed the Middle East Forum via conference call on the
subject of President Obama's Middle East policy.

http://www.meforum.org/audio/77.mp3

Mr. Karsh began his talk on the Obama administration's

policy in the Middle East by examining the President's
famous remarks about reconstructing America's
relationship with the Muslim world. Mr. Karsh argued that,
despite Obama's personal connections to Islam, by
speaking ambiguously about the threat Islamists pose to
America's national security, he misunderstands the religion
and its intrinsic imperialistic tendencies. For example,
while the administration rightly argues that America is not
at war with terrorism because terrorism is simply a tactic, it
also refuses to look at the ideology that drives that tactic:
the administration winces at the use of the word "jihadist"
because jihad is a fundamental tenet of Islam. Mr. Karsh
pointed out, however, that calls for jihad throughout
history have been an act of war rather than a call to purify
oneself or one's community.
In essence, the Obama administration's courting of the Muslim world has failed on all key counts.
Tehran, with its fist still unclenched, continues to pursue its nuclear program and to crack down on
those who speak out against it. Mr. Karsh argued that a more constructive policy would recognize
that Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology is not defensive in nature and therefore cannot be settled
diplomaticallyperhaps not even with sanctions. Secondly, Obama's remarks about democracy and
EU membership for Turkey come at a time when neo-Ottoman policies are on the rise in Turkey,
which should only make Turkey's true intentions all the more questionable. Finally, the
administration's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict has been to seek Israeli concessions, even as
the Palestinians demonstrate that they are not interested in peace. The administration needs to
realize that there will be no peace until the Palestinians, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, recognize
Israel's right to exist and cease calling for its destruction.

Mr. Karsh concluded his remarks by observing that the Obama administration has its head in the
sand with respect to engagement with the Muslim world. At the same time, however, the Republican
Party is currently not in a position to pose a serious challenge to the President in 2012, leaving
America with a failed policy in the Middle East.

Summary written by Sean Alexander

Not taking yes for an answer

by Efraim Karsh
Jerusalem Post
August 24, 2010

No sooner had Hillary Clinton announced the imminent resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian
peace negotiations without preconditions, than the Palestinian leadership cold shouldered the US
secretary of state. An emergency meeting of the PLO executive committee (which controls the
Palestinian Authority), chaired by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to return to the negotiating
table but threatened to pull out of the talks if Israel didn't extend the freeze on all settlement
activities. "Should the Israeli government issue new tenders on September 26, we will not be able to
continue with talks," chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat told reporters.

But the story doesn't end here. While the English-language announcement of the PLO's decision sets
"the emergence of an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side in
peace and security with Israel" as the outcome of the negotiations, the Arabic-language version
makes no mention of the two-state solution. Instead it notes the Palestinian readiness to resume the
final-status talks, adding a few new preconditions, notably the rejection of Israel's annexation of east
Jerusalem.

And just there, no doubt, lies the heart of the problem.

For while the PLO leadership, since the launch of the Oslo "peace" process in 1993, has been singing
the praises of the two-state solution whenever addressing Israeli or Western audiences, it has
consistently denigrated the idea to its own constituents, depicting the process as a transient
arrangement required by the needs of the moment that would inexorably lead to the long-cherished
goal of Israel's demise.

In this respect there has been no fundamental distinction between Yasser Arafat and Abbas (and, for
that matter, between Hamas and the PLO). For all their admittedly sharp differences in personality
and political style, the two are warp and woof of the same dogmatic PLO fabric: Neither of them
accepts Israel's right to exist; both are committed to its eventual destruction.
IN ONE way, indeed, Abbas is more extreme than many of his peers. While they revert to standard
talk of Israel's illegitimacy, he devoted years of his life to giving ideological firepower to the anti-
Israel and anti-Jewish indictment. In a doctoral dissertation written at a Soviet university, an
expanded version of which was subsequently published in book form, Abbas endeavored to prove
the existence of a close ideological and political association between Zionism and Nazism. Among
other things, he argued that fewer than a million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust, and that the
Zionist movement was a partner to their slaughter.

In the wake of the failed Camp David summit of July 2000 and the launch of Arafat's war of terror
two months later, Abbas went to great lengths to explain why the "right of return" the standard
Arab euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic subversion was a nonnegotiable
prerequisite for any settlement. Two years later, he described the Oslo process as "the biggest
mistake Israel has ever made," enabling the PLO to get worldwide acceptance and respectability
while clinging to its own aims.

Shortly after Arafat's death in November 2004, Abbas publicly swore to "follow in the path of the
late leader Yasser Arafat and... work toward fulfilling his dream... We promise you that our hearts
will not rest until the right of return for our people is achieved and the tragedy of the refugees is
ended."

Abbas made good his pledge. In a televised speech on May 15, 2005, he described the establishment
of Israel as an unprecedented historic injustice and vowed never to accept it.

Two-and-a-half years later, at a US-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, he rejected prime

minister Ehud Olmert's proposal of a Palestinian state in 97 percent of the West Bank and the entire
Gaza Strip, and categorically dismissed the request to recognize Israel as a Jewish state alongside
the would-be Palestinian state, insisting instead on full implementation of the "right of return."

He was equally recalcitrant when the demand was raised (in April 2009) by newly-elected Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. "A Jewish state, what is that supposed to mean?" Abbas asked in a
speech in Ramallah. "You can call yourselves as you like, but I don't accept it and I say so publicly."

When in June 2009 Netanyahu broke with longstanding Likud precept by publicly accepting a
twostate solution and agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state, provided the PA
leadership responded in kind and recognized Israel's Jewish nature, Erekat warned that the prime
minister "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."

Fatah, the PLO's largest constituent organization and Abbas's alma mater, went a step further. At its
sixth general congress, convened in Bethlehem last August, the delegates reaffirmed their long-
standing commitment to "armed struggle" as "a strategy, not a tactic... This struggle will not stop
until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated."

And so it goes. Precisely 10 years after Arafat was dragged kicking and screaming to the American-
convened peace summit in Camp David, only to reject Ehud Barak's virtual cession of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state and to launch an unprecedented war of terror, his
erstwhile successor is being dragged to the negotiating table, which he would rather continue to
shun after a year-and- a-half absence.

Not because of the unconstitutionality of any agreement he might sign (owing to the expiry of his
presidency in January 2009), or his inability to deliver anything that is not to Hamas's liking, but
because, like Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership, as far as Israel's existence is concerned,
Abbas would not take a yes for an answer.

The writer is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London, editor
of Middle East Quarterly and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.
How the "Sons of Iraq" Stabilized Iraq
by Mark Wilbanks and Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2010, pp. 57-70 (view PDF)

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 8, 2008, Gen. David H. Petraeus,
the top U.S. and coalition forces commander in Iraq, reported a dramatic reduction in violence levels
and civilian deaths from fifteen months before when Iraq seemed on the brink of civil war.
[1] Petraeus attributed this turning point to the increased numbers of coalition and Iraqi forces, part
of the surge declared by President George W. Bush in January 2007, but he gave equal credit to the
predominantly Sunni popular movement known as the Sons of Iraq (SOI). "These volunteers have
contributed significantly in various areas," he said. "With their assistance and with relentless pursuit
of al-Qaeda-Iraq, the threat posed by AQI, while still lethal and substantial, has been reduced
significantly."[2]

Lt. Col. Mark Wilbanks (left), Maj. Gen.

Muther al-Mawla (center), and Abu
Haidar meet at the offices of the
Implementation and Follow-up
Committee for National Reconciliation,
the International Zone, Baghdad,
September 15, 2009. Mawla was
appointed to oversee efforts to
incorporate Sahwa members into the
Iraqi state apparatus.Photo credit: Lt.
Col. Mark Wilbanks

Initially known as al-Anbar Awakening

(Sahwat al-Anbar), the movement
made its appearance in the summer of
2006 when local sheikhs, disillusioned
with the insurgency that had ravaged the province during the past two-and-a-half years, offered
their support to the coalition forces. While pundits and commentators have varyingly acknowledged
the significance of the movement, less is known about the motives and the thoughts of its key
participants, including those members of the coalition forces with whom the Awakening worked.

What motivated these Sunni tribesmen to sign loyalty oaths to fight for an Iraqi government with
whom they had only recently battled viciously? What were U.S. officers thinking when they provided
military training and money for arms and equipment to men who, more often than not, had been
their enemies just a short time before?

While the program was successful in reducing violence and quickly spread throughout Iraq, it did
not prevent the ruling Shiite elites from viewing the Sons of Iraq with suspicion. Nor have the
achievements of the recent past guaranteed that a true reconciliation between feuding sides has been
reached. Through a fascinating series of interviews held in late 2008 and 2009as the program was
being unwoundthe outlines of this unlikely social and military development can be glimpsed.

The Sunni Insurgency

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the collapse of Saddam Hussein's repressive regime unleashed
sectarian and religious enmities that had been kept in check by the tyrant. As early as April 2003,
while coalition forces were still mopping up the last traces of Baath resistance, a prominent Shiite
leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who had just returned from exile, was murdered in the holy town of
Najaf.[3] Four months later, on August 29, 2003, a car bomb exploded outside that very mosque,
killing more than 100 people, including Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the
Iranian-sponsored Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).[4] On February 1,
2004, another 100 people were killed in two suicide bombings in the Kurdish town of Erbil.[5]

While some of this sectarian violence was perpetrated by Islamist Shiite militias that sprang up in
southern Iraq in the immediate wake of the invasion, the main instigator was the minority Arab
Sunni community, about 20 percent of the total population, which had dominated Iraqi politics for
centuries and which resented its exclusion from the new state structures established by the
victorious powers.[6] In no time, the "Sunni Triangle"the vast area between Baghdad in the south,
Mosul in the north, and Rutba in the east where most of Iraq's Sunni population resides and
consisting of the four governorates of Baghdad, al-Anbar, Salah ad-Din and Ninawawas in flames.

For some insurgents, notably members of Saddam's regime and tribe, the overriding motivation was
loyalty to the fallen tyrant. For others, such as the tens of thousands of soldiers and officers who had
lost their jobs when the predominantly Sunni army was dissolved in May 2003, it was a desire for
revenge. There was also a deep sense of humiliation felt by those who had long considered
themselves the only people capable of running the affairs of the Iraqi state. All feared and resented
their possible domination by the despised Shiites and their perceived paymasterIran's militant
Islamist regimeand all wished to regain lost power and influence.

These grievances were further reinforced by tribal interests, values, and norms. The Sunni Triangle
is a diverse mosaic of hundreds of small and medium-sized tribes, as well as a dozen large tribal
federations, notably the Dulyam and the Shammar Jarba, each comprising more than a million
members. Under Saddam, many of these tribes, especially the Dulyam, had been incorporated into
the regime's patronage system. With such material benefits and political prestige curtailed after the
U.S.-led invasion, many tribesmen joined the insurrection.

Such was the tenacity of the insurrection that in September 2006, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli,
commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, questioned the U.S. ability to defeat it. "It is our job
to win," he said. "But it is not the kind of fight that is going to be won by military kinetic action alone
I think the real heart of [the matter] is that there are economic and political conditions that have
to improve out at al-Anbar, as they do everywhere in Iraq, for us to be successful."[7]

The Anbar Awakening

To make matters worse, the Sunni Triangle's location near the Jordanian, Syrian, and Saudi borders
made it the first port of call for al-Qaeda terrorists and other foreign elements. The overall number
of these infiltrators was insignificant compared to the many thousands of Iraqi insurgentssome
estimates put the number of al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq at less than 1,300[8] but they exerted a
disproportionate impact on the course of the fighting by recruiting significant numbers of Iraqi
jihadists, providing invaluable military and logistical expertise, and mounting most of the mass-
casualty suicide bombings.[9] At the same time, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) expected compensation for
the security they helped provide to their local allies, often crossing the line from payment to
extortion. Muscling in on time-honored smuggling routes and trying to forcibly wed women in order
to build tribal ties exacerbated tensions. But AQI began to overreach in their efforts to control the
area. A U.S. Marine colonel cited this example:

Fallujah I remember the day [March 2007] that I got there. I think it was the secretary of the city
council, his nephew a 12-year old boy [who] was hit by AQI right on the main street in Fallujah.
Ran him over with a vehicle several times. Broke several, maybe all his bones. Then threw him on
the door step of the secretary of the council's house and shot him in front of everybody. We
couldn't get there. Everybody got there too late. The populace knew who did it. They knew why they
did it. They had had it. That was it. They stopped. They stopped listening to AQI. They turned.[10]

Al-Qaeda's overreaching was coupled with a growing awareness that the Americans, who did not
interfere with traditional sources of revenue or seek to change tribal custom, would eventually leave.
AQI, on the other hand, was determined to impose its version of Shari'a (Islamic law) on the entire
population as a stepping stone to the creation of the worldwide Muslim community (umma).
It was this realization that led to the advent of the Sahwa or Awakening movement. With the
coalition anxious for local allies who would help defeat the insurgency and prevent its retrenchment,
and a growing number of ordinary Sunnis and tribal leaders increasingly disillusioned with the
mayhem and dislocation occasioned by the fighting, a meeting of minds was only a question of time.
The acting national security advisor to the Iraqi government Safa Hussein al-Sheikh explained:

Most people don't know that the first time we thought about the Sons of Iraq was ... in 2005
Things were getting worse from a security point of view ... This was opposed directly and strictly by
the leadership of the MNF [Multinational Forces] at that time because they thought this was the
creation of militias ... Then at the end of 2005at that time al-Qaeda had almost full control of
Anbar province and other areassomething happened on the border with Syria. It was the Albu
Mahan tribe and another tribe, al-Karabla, big tribes on the border. They live mostly on smuggling ...
And one of these tribes made some kind of an agreement of understanding with al-Qaeda ... So both
tribes there were fighting between themselves ... My colleagues and I advised that we should support
the tribes against the tribe [that was allied] with al-Qaeda.[11]

On most occasions, however, the tribes made the first offers to cooperate. A U.S. Army captain
related his experience with a first contact:

We had gotten a call in the TOC [Tactical Operations Center], and we were located in Camp Blue
Diamond. North of the river was our task force headquarters. And there was a report that one of our
task force level HVTs, high value targets enemy personnel, was at the gate and asking to come in and
talk with our task force commander ... Hindsight being twenty-twenty and seeing how it played out,
it doesn't seem as alarming, but at this time, he was a high value target, was known or had
allegedly ... been involved with attacks against coalition forces, had been successful, had been a
leader ... How do you react? There had not been a precedent set for something like this. We had
never seen anything like this. So it was really an exercise in good faith and you know those were
some tense times.[12]

A former insurgent-turned-Sahwa fighter gave his side of the story:

No one supported me in my work but the American forces. They did that because I brought a
backhoe, and I bermed all the roads in my area. I left only one road [open] with a checkpoint on it,
so I can control my neighborhood since I have only thirteen people working for me. My house is
high, so I can monitor the entire area. Even the Americans, they couldn't drive through these
[berms] with their tanks and Humvees, but I told them: "There's no need, this is a safe area." The
area is about ten kilometers by ten, maybe less. It was closed for all but me. No one can come
through this area without being noticed. I was in constant contact with the American soldiers in the
area, and we agreed that they will come to my area dismounted. My area is very close to Blue
Diamond, which was an American base. The distance between us was three kilometers, so the
Americans would stop with their tanks at a distance and would then come to us on foot.[13]

By mid-August 2006, such low level contacts had led to a formal meeting between Col. Sean
MacFarland, the newly appointed commander of U.S. forces in Ramadi, and Sheikh Abd as-Sattar
Abu Risha, a prominent tribal leader, who had just issued a manifesto denouncing al-Qaeda in Iraq
(AQI) and pledging support to U.S. forces. MacFarland described the scene at Abd as-Sattar's home:
"The walls were just lined with guys in sheikh robes. I go down and see the governor about once a
week, and it's just me and the governor. I go into Sheikh Sattar's house, and the place is packed."

Soon an agreement was struck, and by November, an estimated 1,500 recruits sent by the sheikh had
joined the revamped police training program for Ramadi. In comparison, a mere forty men had
previously signed on to the Ramadi police force, then numbering only 150 officers in total.[14]

This collaborative pattern spread rapidly throughout the province, and before long coalition forces
were providing training opportunities, first in Jordan then in Anbar, to the growing number of
volunteers, who often had previous army or police experience although not to Western standards. A
senior marine officer described the recruitment and training process:
You had to kind of read and write. You had to have, I think, twenty-two teeth. They had mixed
standards, and we would vet them and, of course, BAT [Biometrics Automated Toolset System] them
... And so this is all good stuff. But we would build the police and the army by recruiting. And they
would recruit and basically use the sheikhs. The next day six hundred or seven hundred guys would
show up, and we would put them through the process. Who was eligible, who met the criteria to join
the army or the police. So we built the first and seventh Iraqi army divisions, and we increased the
police from about 5,000 to almost 28,000 in that year. And that was the Sons of Anbar.[15]

After a probationary period, the volunteers were allowed to carry their own weapons, which many of
them bought with money provided by the coalition. There was also an effort to train Iraqi women
the "Daughters of Iraq"to replace female Marines responsible for female body searches at
checkpoints.

Being "concerned local citizens" (CLC, as they were initially called by the coalition), rather than
professional soldiers, the Sahwa volunteers were not allowed to carry out offensive operations.
Instead, they were tasked to perform defensive missions such as manning checkpoints and providing
intelligence on insurgent activities and locations. The dividing line between these activities and
actual participation in fighting was, however, more often than not, blurred. A junior U.S. officer
recalled:

Although the CLCs were not supposed to be used offensively, there was no stopping them this day
because they were pretty amped up about losing some of their friends.

I was on a roof, and I'm talking to F-16s that are flying around, and we've got air weapons teams, and
there is a lot of activity ... we're getting ready to move out. Maybe four or five CLCs, a couple of IPs
[Iraqi police], a couple of SWATs [Special Weapons and Tactics], ISF [Iraqi Security Forces]. It is
just this big mix of dudes.

I talked to the [Sahwa leader] ... who spoke English: "I'm going to be bounding up this way, and
we're going to get there. You'll provide over watch, we'll go in and take it. When we say it's clear,
then we'll pull you guys in, and then we'll leave you guys up there to control the area."

And he maneuvered his guys up there. And it was just an amazing day.[16]

The new recruits proved particularly efficient in the fight against the al-Qaeda jihadists and their
local allies. The Sunnis knew where al-Qaeda fighters lived and worked because they had harbored
them initially, and they had no qualms about using the same brutal methods in fighting back. This
resulted in a swift routing of al-Qaeda in a revenge-based frenzy: "They hunted al-Qaeda down with
a vengeance. They dragged al-Qaeda guys through streets behind cars ... they had videos of feet on
the altars in mosques ... It was pretty much just a ruthless slaughter."[17] An Iraqi official recalled
how a tribal sheikh gleefully told him how he had a certain al-Qaeda operative beheaded: "And then
he smiled and said, 'I want to show you something you will like.' One of the [al-Qaeda] people who
tried to assassinate him, and he showed me on the telephone a picture of a head."[18]

At times the savage war against al-Qaeda pitted members of the same tribe against each other. A
U.S. colonel recounted this example:

The Zobai tribe came under a lot of friction. They literally told us to stay out of the Habanniya Zoba
village-Khandari area for seventy-two hours because Zobai against Zobai were going to fight. Al-
Qaeda against the tribe ... al-Qaeda would come into the village, and they would sit down and have a
meeting. It is tribal, and they would negotiate, and if they couldn't solve the negotiations, then there
was going to be a fight. After twenty-four hours of fighting, they couldn't handle it, and they asked us
to come in and support them. So for about the last week of March, we had a fairly significant fight,
and for the Zobais, that was the first example and demonstration from the U.S. side that, yes, we will
fight against al-Qaeda, and we won't arrest you.[19]
Helping the Surge

Within a year of its advent, the Awakening movement had dramatically changed the security
situation in Anbar with monthly attacks dropping from some 1,350 in October 2006 to just over 200
in August 2007.[20] By now, the movement had been established on a national basis as the coalition
sought to replicate its success in other parts of Iraq. It played a particularly prominent role in
improving the security situation in Baghdad as part of the troop surge, helping to slash murders by
90 percent and attacks on civilians by 80 percent, as well as destroying numerous insurgent
networks. Its contribution in other provinces was no less substantial: By the end of the year, al-
Qaeda leaders admitted that their forces throughout Iraq had been decimated by over 70 percent,
from 12,000 to 3,500.[21]

No less importantly, the Sahwa eventually became a tool for promoting sectarian reconciliation and
weaning fighters away from sectarian militias. This process began in fall 2007 in the Baghdad
suburb of al-Jihad, a Shiite neighborhood aligned with the radical militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr,
where the government sought to elicit mass participation in the Awakening program. Working with
these Shiites was difficult because Sadr forbade anyone from dealing with the Americans. Yet, he
would broker a cease-fire and enforce it by passing the names of Mahdi Army leaders whom he
could not control to the Iraqi government for arrest or elimination with the knowledge that this
information would be shared with coalition forces. An Iraqi official recalled:

It was a really ambitious project. There were some successes in al-Jihad in which we brought people
from the Sadrists and included them in the Sahwas with close cooperation from Colonel Franks who
was the local commander there, and he is an excellent man. His mind is very well-oriented to these
kinds of activities. And we first had to talk to the Sadrists in the areas. The environment there is
better than any place else to include the Sadrists into the Sahwas because these Sadrists were
surrounded by areas of Sunnis.

There was a funny discussion with the leaders there of the Sadrists when I told them. [Usually with]
Shiite people, I try to appease their fears and their concerns. [But] I did the opposite there.
Increased their fears.

They are not the majority, and they do not have the upper hand. So this is one point. The other point
is that the Sadrists, in general, do not have good financial support. And the payment in the Sahwas is
pretty good for them. But they have a problem [in] that their leadership will denounce any person
who talks to the Americans.

The general concern was that the balance of Sunni-Shiites would change. So I said to them: "It is in
your hands. If you don't get your people to join, it will change, and you can do nothing about it." And
it was a very hard time for them because they couldn't say, yes, because of Muqtada al-Sadr. So they
tried to give me a message that "If we don't know and something is arranged, it is okay." [Laughter]

Once the Jihad area went, the rest of the Sadr areas wanted the money, and they followed suit. But
other things happened, and this project wouldn't continue as we wished. When al-Basra operation
came, in their minds, the process [ended. Still] al-Jihad was maintained as a quiet area.[22]

This example was, however, more of an exception to the rule as the Iraqi government was slow to
acknowledge the merits of the Awakening movement. In fact, as the coalition accelerated
recruitment and institutionalized regular salaries to its members, the government remained wary of
this large and predominantly Sunni forcewhich had grown to some 80,000 members by early
2008and its future political intentions. A senior Iraqi advisor to the coalition forces recalled the
situation:

The Shiites thought, it is a conspiracy. That is: al-Qaeda cannot be tolerated, so now they came in
other clothes [sic], and they are trying to surround Baghdad. And maybe the Americans, because of
the violence, are desperate, and they want to bring the Sunnis back and that is why they support
them. So this theory of conspiracy controlled the minds of the Shiites inside the government and
popularly.[23]

After much haggling, the Americans managed to persuade Nuri al-Maliki's government to take over
the Awakening program and to incorporate it into the newly established security and state
structures. In the words of a political advisor to Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, second ranking officer in
Iraq at the time and source of much of this behind-the-scenes wrangling:

[What was] very interesting was the cultural difference. The Americans would come every day and
say: "Look at how fantastic the Sahwa are and what they are doing," and the Iraqi government just
didn't believe it. So the Americans brought more power pointsand bigger onesand paraded them
about pointing to all the great things the Sahwa have done. And then with Safa [Hussein al-Sheikh's]
advice, we started talking about the bad things that some Sahwa had done. And once we started to
admit that some of them were involved in violence and involved in bad things ... then the
government felt at last that we were more trustworthy. So that was the famous meeting in December
[2007] where General Odierno stood up and said, "Here are the bad things; these are the good
things. We want the government really to take control of this program, and this is what we suggest."
And the prime minister said, "I agree with everything that General Odierno suggests."[24]

Forging Relationships

On the ground, young officers and soldiers knew little of the higher level maneuvering that went on
between the coalition and the Iraqi government. For them, the Sahwas were not abstract programs
but human beings who formed close relationships with their coalition colleagues. They suffered
casualties alongside the coalition forces; their wounded shared rides in medical helicopters, and they
formed the kinds of bonds of mutual trust and respect that can only happen in combat. A U.S. Army
platoon leader explains:

We showed up to the JCC [Joint Command Center] to pick up the first round of CLCs we were going
to institute across the city. It was just very comical because I've got about half of my platoon with
me, and my other half is holding a patrol base where I am getting ready to take some of these guys.
We're sitting around the JCC outside the mayor's office and all of the sudden, they come walking in.
And they're proud, they're happy, they're like, "I'm part of this thing, and we are going to go do this,
and it's going to be great."

There ... were three groups. One we called the classic camouflage because they were all in the same
uniform. They all had T-shirts with a regular woodland camouflage print on it, and it also had the
text that read "Classic Camouflage."

The next group that comes in we called them the Headlamp Platoon because, for some reason, every
single one of those guys had a headlamp. So they had no uniform, but they had headlamps. And the
last group we called the AQI group because they came in, and they looked just like jihadists. There
was one guy Hassam ... He was a natural leader. he looked American ... He spoke English pretty
well, and he was [a] teacher.

I don't know what [their agenda] was ... But for a period of time, their agenda and our agenda were
perfectly aligned, and we all worked together pretty well to secure that place. And we formed pretty
tight relationships and we earned their trust ... they earned our trust.[25]

Respect was mutual. Officers who attempted to speak Arabic and who attended Iraqi events and
participated in tribal customs were respected. As an Iraqi general and former Sons of Iraq member
recalled:

Lt. Col. Silverman is an extraordinary officer. He is special. He worked in the al-Jazeera area ... So he
has been able to establish an excellent relationship with these tribes. The relationship that they had
between the U.S. Army and the tribes was abnormal extraordinary awesome. If they have a
funeral, he will go to the funeral reception.
This is our tradition. This is our culture, and he was doing the same thing. He would go into the
funeral, and he would say salam aleikum. And he would recite al-Fatiha. I'm sure he doesn't know
what it means, al-Fatiha, or he cannot read, but after he finishes, he would do this [wipes his hand
over his face]. Exactly how the normal Iraqi people do it. And he would also pay and contribute [to]
the funeral reception. The people, the sheikhs, the tribes, they liked him. They were impressed. He
was Lawrence of Arabia, Silverman. If we had tribal conflicts, he would sit, and he would judge.
The tribes liked the hookah [water pipe]. He would sit with them, and he would have his hookah
with them. You would say this guy, he is an Eastern man. He is Iraqi, but in an American uniform.
[26]

The Iraqi general continued:

I would like to tell you the story of an American officer. His name was Patrick [Capt. Travis
Patriquin, 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division]. He was a friend of Sheikh Sattar. Sheikh Sattar used to
call him Hisham, not Patrick, because he had a mustache. He would always sit with Sheikh Sattar's
kids. He was very close to the police. He was an extraordinary person He got hit with an IED
[Improvised Explosive Device]got killed.

We named one of our police stations after him. We called it Hisham Police Station because all the
policemen knew him by the name Hisham, not Patrick. Until nowadays Sheikh Sattar insists that we
call the police station Hisham, so until now we call it "Martyr Hisham's Police Station." Hisham,
who is Patrick.[27]

Col. Richard Welch, an Army reserve officer with counterinsurgency training and a Special Forces
background, did not stand out in a crowd, but that belied his intensity and tenacity. He took a pay
cut from his job as a prosecutor in Ohio and missed his grandchildren's birthdays and had been in
Baghdad for four of the five years from 2004 to 2009. This put him in a unique position to develop
relationships that kept people alive. One such relationship was with Sheikh Ali Hatem of the Dulaym
tribe, whose grandfather had allegedly ridden with T.E. Lawrence against the Turks. Welch
recounted his experience:

Working with the tribes and working with a lot of these religious leaders actually facilitated me
getting connected with insurgent leaders on the Sunni side and militia leaders on the Shiite side.
So I began talking with them about what we now call reconciliation talking to them about how to
stop fighting, to try and join the political process

Most of the other groups out of Baghdad came out of these meetings with the tribal leaders and the
community leaders getting them connected with the brigade commanders and battalion
commanders. And they began to work with them ... [Those sheikhs interested in reconciliation]
would call and say: "Colonel Welch, al-Qaeda is attacking us and we need help. We need supplies."
[During] many of those phone calls you could hear gun shots in the background. You could hear the
fighting going on.

I was out at Camp Liberty [near Baghdad airport] walking to the dining facility with my deputy and
my cell phone rang. I noticed that it was Sheikh Ali Hatem so I answered it immediately. He said,
"Colonel Welch, I need your help Al-Qaeda overran Sheikh Hamed Village up in the Taji area,
north Taji. And our tribe is getting ready to counterattack and take back the village. But we need you
to contact the unit up there because we've seen helicopters flying around, and we don't want them to
engage [attack] us ... So we need to let you know which ones." So I said, "Okay, we will take care of
it." So I kept Ali Hatem on the line and sent [my deputy] back. I said, "You've got to get the G3
[operational commander on duty] you know." ... Because I couldn't move. I had to get the coverage
for my cell phone where it was out at Liberty. So we finally were able to contact the unit, and
literally, the helicopter pilot was ready to pull the trigger on them ... The commander told us that
later. They were ready to engage these guys. But then instead they flew over watch and supported
them taking that village back.[28]
Show Me the Money

Though there was initially no money involved for the Awakening movement, this issue quickly came
to the fore. Just as tribal support for the "Great Arab Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire had been
motivated by the glitter of British gold and the promise of booty (nearly half-a-century later
Lawrence of Arabia would still be remembered by Bedouins as "the man with the gold"),[29] so the
Anbar sheikhs were not immune to the allure of American money. Brigade level commanders doled
out millions of Iraqi dinars and, in some places, U.S. dollars every month, and by the summer of
2007 the movement was fully subsidized by the coalition. This was one of the reasons the coalition,
rather than the Iraqi government, took the lead in the Sahwa program. As a senior Iraqi official
explained:

Some people in some areas came to us and wanted to work with the government because they
thought for some reason that it was not good for their reputation to work with the Americans to fight
al-Qaeda. And our main problem at that time was that the government didn't have the means to
completely help them. So at times we felt really embarrassed.[30]

In addition to monthly salaries, the coalition also paid for results. One Sons of Iraq member
reported:

Yes, we did that with the support of the coalition forces when we captured some gangsters. After
missions, the coalition forces used to issue letters of appreciation for us and gave us a reward. And
that was good. I got $700 from the coalition forces: $300 for salary and a $400 reward for a total of
$700 in one monthU.S. dollars.

I saw gangsters trying to kidnap a girl. She was driving her vehicle, and I was watching them. I
started to shoot and shot one of them. I released her and that is why I got the reward and letter of
appreciation.[31]

Such letters of appreciation, on tattered pieces of paper and blurry from being copies of copies with
the previous recipients names blanked out, were more valuable than money. A signed letter by the
coalition, regardless of whether the words were level on the page, was a sought after status symbol.

In other places, where the security situation was relatively good, coalition funding of Sahwa
activities was effectively little more than a jobs program. In the words of a local sheikh:

Let's be honest. They established the Sahwa in our city after all the doors had been shut in our face
because there was no chance to hold jobs. The first reason for establishing the Sahwa was because
there were no jobs; the second reasonto provide money for the families; and the third reasonto
protect the civilian people.

When we joined the Sahwa, we had to remind each other why most of us were insurgents ... Either
get us a job or Iraq will go back to the way it used to be.[32]

By January 2009, the U.S. government had invested more than $400 million in the Awakening
program with a median monthly cost of more than $21 million, peaking at nearly $39 million in
March 2008.[33] For Petraeus, this was a worthwhile investment that not only saved lives in Iraq
but also U.S. taxpayers' money. As he told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

These volunteers have contributed significantly in various areas, and the savings in vehicles not lost
because of reduced violence, not to mention the priceless lives saved have far outweighed the cost of
their monthly contracts.[34]

As with other fields of U.S. activity in Iraq, the overriding preoccupation with security and stability
often resulted in mismanagement and waste. Being totally result-oriented, the coalition forces were
primarily interested in having all checkpoints manned, arms caches uncovered, and the violence
decreased, leaving the methods for achieving these goals at the sheikhs' discretion. This in turn
resulted in serious accountability problems, such as ghost employees and poor control over the
distribution of cash payments as the sheikhs habitually rotated people around and took a cut for
managing the program. The program was also vulnerable to corruption and embezzlement on the
American side, as demonstrated in December 2009 when a U.S. officer was convicted of stealing
approximately $690,000 from funds allocated to the Sahwa program and local relief and
reconstruction.[35] The Implementation and Follow up Committee for National Reconciliation
(IFCNR) cleaned up the program when they took over payments in late 2009 by paying the Sahwa
directly. However, this did not prevent the sheikhs from taking their share ten feet from the payment
point.

Patriots at Last

On September 4, 2008, the Awakening movement's massive contribution to Iraq's national security
received a long overdue official recognition when an executive order issued by Prime Minister Maliki
officially named its members Sons of Iraq and called for the incorporation of its members into the
Iraqi state structures.

The practical implications of this change, however, were far more elusive. Although the Iraqi
government undertook to integrate approximately 94,000 SOI personnel (from the 100,000-plus
membership list provided by the Americans) into the Iraqi security forces (ISF) or other Iraqi
ministries by the end of 2009, by April 2010, only 9,000 had been absorbed by the ISF, and another
30,000 had been hired by non-security ministries.[36] These delays were partly due to the fact that
many SOI possessed rudimentary educational credentials (in Baghdad, 81 percent of SOI members
had only elementary or middle-school educations) and were, therefore, unfit for many government
positions. But this also reflected the government's residual suspicion of the groupas well as other
former militiasalongside lingering disagreements with Washington regarding the movement's size
and the attendant funds required for its absorption.

While ordinary Sahwa members were slowly incorporated into the state apparatus, the movement's
leaders, whose sense of honor prevented them from taking menial government jobs, were looking
forward to political careers as part of the national reconciliation process. Their hopes were bolstered
by the fact that the Maliki government, knowing that its treatment of the SOI would be viewed by
many Sunnis as a litmus test for their future integration into the country's sociopolitical system,
assigned the process to the IFCNR.

In what turned out to be a stroke of genius, the head of the committee quickly appointed one of its
members, Maj. Gen. Muther al-Mawla, to oversee the transition. An open and affable person, who
wore tailored Western suits and readily shared pictures of his grandchildren, Mawla brought a
paternal sense of security and calm to the process that put everyone at ease. He would bring in
pastries that his wife had baked or share a feast with his coalition colleagues late into the night. At
the same time, as former commander of the National Guard and the Iraqi Special Forces for the new
government, he was more than capable of holding his own in the bare-knuckle world of Iraqi politics
and conducting negotiations with those who, on many occasions, had been on his Special Forces'
most wanted list.[37]

The statements of Abu Azzam al-Tamimi, a former Sahwa leader in the Abu-Ghraib area, are most
instructive on the issues surrounding ongoing efforts at reconciliation. Sounding hopeful and
relaxed at the al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad's International Zone, he expounded on the integration of
the neighborhood's SOI in government jobs, his personal safety, and the forthcoming March 2010
elections:

Some of them are still Sahwas till this moment. I got a chance to join them to the Iraqi Security
Forces back in 2007. In the middle of 2007, I had coordination with them but not control.

I have no relationship with [Brig. Gen.] Nasser [al-Hitti, commander of the Muthanna 3rd Brigade,
Abu Ghraib]. He knew that he had no capability to arrest me, but he was trying to do that.
We are trying to create or establish our own political entity. And that is why we are going to set up a
meeting tomorrow here in this hotel to discuss this issue with all the Sahwa leaders.

We have a joint committee now and are negotiating with [Prime Minister] Maliki. Yesterday [Sept.
4, 2009], we met with the main people from the Da'wa party ... Maybe we are going to establish the
one front together, or we will have other options.[38]

Some former Sahwa leaders, such as Sa'ad Uraibi Ghafuri (aka Abu Abed), a major and intelligence
officer in Saddam's armed forces, are not able to run for office or form political alliances for fear of
being arrested. He is in Jordan waiting to get a visa, based on glowing recommendations from
American officers who knew him, and seeks a new life in the United States. Some in the Iraqi
government, however, see him differently as he wanted to control an area that the government also
sought to control. Abu Abed, while in Jordan, discussed his past as sheikh of the Adamiya area in
Baghdad:

After a while we defeated al-Qaeda from al-Fadil to Muadam, Palestine Street to Adhamiya [a
Baghdad neighborhood]. It was just like one line, one road, we cleared all the area. And I used to
set up meetings with all the leaders from al-Fadil and this Rusafa side weekly. People got to listen to
them and to report about that. So all the Iraqi government was watching, and they were surprised
how we defeated al-Qaeda in those areas, freed the people, and maintained stability and security in
this area.

After that ... the Iranian ambassador in Iraq gave an announcement. And he said [that] all those
Sahwas were like gangsters. They are bad people, and we need to get rid of them. I told him, "If
the ambassador has an issue in Iran, let him go and solve his issues in Iran. He is not supposed to be
involved in Iraqi matters. He has no right to do that." And after that I got the result. I paid for that
because I got a phone call from the colonel [Welch], and he told me, "You need to leave your home
because there is an arrest warrant against you for your disagreements with the Iraqi government."
So I asked him why? I have been fighting al-Qaeda, and we defeated al-Qaeda, and the Iraqi
government they just gained everything, the benefits of that.

[Gen. Eric E.] Fiel, [Brig.] Gen. [Donald M.] Campbell, and even Gen. David Petraeus, and Gen.
Odierno, he visited me in my office too.

During a reconciliation meeting, however, someone tried to kill Abu Abed.

I left my office with eight vehicles, and I used to use my own vehicle. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser
armored vehicle, very, very strong. And when I went to Amel al-Shabby Street, I saw those seven
hummers there, and the Iraqi soldiers they [had] been walking in the street.

[My security chief] said maybe the guard ... went to drink some chai. I told him no, this is unusual ...
They [detonated] a big IED, and the sound of the explosion covered all [of] Baghdad ... I was flying,
and I hit one of the vehicles, and I can still remember when I was covered by the rocks and the dust.
[39]

Conclusion

Just as the peremptory dissolution of Saddam's army in May 2003 without the existence of an
adequate substitute opened the door to insurgencies of all hues, so the disbanding of the social
movement that had been instrumental in turning the tide against al-Qaeda in Iraq during 2007-08,
and the decision to incorporate its members into ministries rather than the Iraqi security forces has
left a dangerous security vacuum. Most SOI in Anbar were incorporated into the Iraqi police and
army, but not so in Baghdad.

The 100-plus violent attacks during the March 7, 2010 elections serve as a stark reminder that
extremist elementsmost notably AQIcontinue to pose a clear and real danger to the nascent Iraqi
democracy. Across the country, up to 367 people, including 216 civilians, were killed during March,
and the pace of killing accelerated in April when more than a hundred people were killed during the
first week of the month.[40]

Some senior Iraqi officials are still unable to see the writing on the wall. Gen. Abud Kanbar Hashem
Khayun al-Maliki, the Baghdad Operations Center commander, refused to allow the tidal wave of
kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings that rocked the capital in the last quarter of 2009 deflect
his determination to dissolve the SOI. On November 27, 2009, he stated:

By the time the year is up, we will fulfill the obligation of the order and employ all of them. Those
people have sacrificed a lot, and there were a lot of lost lives and a lot of martyrs. Some of them were
martyred for their country, and some were injured, and some were damaged in some way. This is a
central plan for the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government was serious about this plan. And they
wanted to make sure that this plan is successful and is implemented ... In short, the Sons of Iraq was
an experimental plan to implement laws and enforce the rule of law [whose time has come and
passed].[41]

Whether General Abud's forecast is accurate, and more importantly, whether the results of the Sons
of Iraq's dissolution bode well for Iraq's future remains to be seen. It behooves Washington, which,
after all, has sacrificed much blood and riches to secure and stabilize this nascent experiment in
democracy within the Arab Middle East to reflect on these developments as it seeks to remove its
military presence from the Land between the Rivers.

Mark Wilbanks is an Air Force lieutenant colonel. He served as a staff officer with the
Multinational Forces Iraq headquarters in Baghdad from May through December 2009. Efraim
Karsh is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

[1] Associated Press, Apr. 8, 2008.

[2] Ibid.
[3] Time, Apr. 10, 2003.
[4] CNN, Aug. 30, 2003.
[5] "TIMELINE: Major Bombings in Iraq since 2003," Reuters, Aug. 22, 2007.
[6] Although the Kurds of northern Iraq are also predominantly Sunni, they had never been part of
the country's ruling classes and have consistently been oppressed by their Arab co-religionists.
[7] Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, teleconference news briefing, Iraq, U.S. Department of Defense,
Washington, D.C., Sept. 15, 2006.
[8] See, for example, James A. Baker, et. al., The Iraq Study Group Report (New York: Vintage,
2006), p. 4.
[9] Mahan Abedin, "Anbar Province and Emerging Trends in the Iraqi Insurgency," Terrorism
Monitor (Washington, D.C.: Jamestown Foundation), July 15, 2005.
[10] Wilbanks interview with U.S. Marine Col. Jeff Satterfield, Multinational Force West, Camp
Ramadi, Fallujah, Nov. 12, 2009.
[11] Wilbanks interview with Safa Hussein al-Sheikh, former Iraqi deputy national security advisor,
International Zone, Baghdad, Oct. 28, 2008.
[12] Wilbanks interview with Capt. Christopher P. Dean, Task Force 237, 1st Armored Div., Camp
Echo, Diwaniyah, Sept. 28, 2009.
[13] Wilbanks interview with Gen. Tariq al-Asal, police chief of Anbar province, Ramadi government
official and former Sons of Iraq leader, Nov. 12, 2009.
[14] Time, Dec. 26, 2006.
[15] Wilbanks interview with Satterfield, Nov. 12, 2009.
[16] Wilbanks interview with U.S. captain, former platoon leader, 2-23 Infantry from 4th Brigade,
2nd Infantry Div., Muqdadiya, at Camp Victory near Baghdad Airport, Aug. 14, 2009.
[17] Wilbanks interview with anthropologist David Matsuda, Baghdad, Sept. 14, 2009.
[18] Wilbanks interview with S. H. al-Sheikh, Oct. 28, 2008.
[19] Wilbanks interview with Col. Kurt Pinkerton, former lt. col. and commander, 2-5 Cavalry
Aviation Brigade, Abu Ghraib, Nov. 9, 2009.
[20] Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander, Multinational Force-Iraq, "Report to Congress on the
Situation in Iraq," Sept. 10-11, 2007.
[21] Farooq Ahmed, "Backgrounder #23: Sons of Iraq and Awakening Forces," Institute for the
Study of War, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2008, pp. 2-5.
[22] Wilbanks interview with anonymous Iraqi ministry secretary, International Zone, Baghdad, late
2009.
[23] Wilbanks interview with S. H. al-Sheikh, Oct. 28, 2008.
[24] Wilbanks interview with Emma Sky, political advisor to Gen. Raymond T. Odierno,
International Zone, Baghdad, Oct. 28, 2009.
[25] Wilbanks interview with former U.S. platoon leader, Camp Victory, Aug. 14, 2009.
[26] Wilbanks interview with Gen. Tariq Yusuf Muhammad Hussein al-Thiyabi, chief of police,
Anbar province, former Sahwa leader, Provincial Government Center, Ramadi, Nov. 12, 2009.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Wilbanks interview with Col. Richard Welch, Forward Operating Base Prosperity, International
Zone, Baghdad, Oct. 1, 2009.
[29] Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, "Myth in the Desert, or Not the Great Arab Revolt," Middle
Eastern Studies, Apr. 1997, p. 296.
[30] Wilbanks interview with S. H. al-Sheikh, Oct. 28, 2008.
[31] Wilbanks interview with Sons of Iraq member from Rusafa district, Baghdad, Forward
Operating Base Prosperity, International Zone, Baghdad, Sept. 3, 2009.
[32] Wilbanks interview with Sheikh Wathak Ozet Latif of al-Daqr area, Salah ad-Din province,
Camp Dagger, Tikrit, Oct. 6, 2009.
[33] "Information on Government of Iraq Contributions to Reconstruction Costs," SIGIR 09-018,
Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Apr. 29, 2009, p. 6.
[34] Associated Press, Apr. 8, 2008.
[35] Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction,
"Subcontracting in Combat Zones: Who Are Our Subcontractors?" testimony before the
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2010, p. 6.
[36] "Quarterly Report to the United States Congress," Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction, Apr. 30, 2010, p. 11.
[37] Wilbanks interview with Maj. Gen. Muther al-Mawla, International Zone, Baghdad, Oct. 15,
2009.
[38] Wilbanks interview with Abu Azzam al-Tamimi, International Zone, Baghdad, Sept. 5, 2009.
[39] Wilbanks interview with Sa'ad Uraibi Ghafuri, via Skype to Jordan, International Zone,
Baghdad, Oct. 2, 2009.
[40] "Quarterly Report to the United States Congress," Apr. 30, 2010, pp. 47-8.
[41] Wilbanks interview with Gen. Abud Kanbar Hashim Khayun al-Maliki, Baghdad Operations
Center, Nov. 27, 2009.

Adrift in Arabia
by Efraim Karsh
The Journal of International Security Affairs
Fall 2010

Transforming America's relations with the Islamic world has been perhaps the foremost foreign
policy issue through which President Obama has sought to set himself apart from his immediate
predecessor. Having long downplayed his Muslim rootsgoing so far as to disguise not only his
middle name, Hussein, but also to substitute Barack with the less conspicuous Barry early on in his
career[1]Obama has embraced them since taking office. As he explained in his much-ballyhooed
June 2009 address to the Muslim World in Cairo:

I'm a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a
boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the
fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace
in their Muslim faith... So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region
where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America
and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't.[2]
Reverting to standard "post colonial" rhetoric, the president squarely blamed the West for "the great
tension between the United States and Muslims around the world." "The relationship between Islam
and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars,"
he claimed,

More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many
Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies
without regard to their own aspirations... Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small
but potent minority of Muslims [culminating in] the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the
continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians."[3]

While there is no denying the widespread appeal of this argument, there is also no way around the
fact that, in almost every particular, it is demonstratively, even invidiously, wrong. The depiction of
Muslims as hapless victims of the aggressive encroachments of others is patronizing in the worst
tradition of the "white man's burden," which has dismissed regional players as half-witted creatures,
too dim to be accountable for their own fate. Moreover, Islamic history has been anything but
reactive. From the Prophet Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the
rise and fall of an often-astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never
quiescent imperial dreams and repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration. These fantasies gained
rapid momentum during the last phases of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in its disastrous
decision to enter World War I on the losing side, as well as in the creation of an imperialist dream
that would survive the Ottoman era to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics into the
21st century.

To this very day, for example, many Muslims unabashedly pine for the restoration of Spain, and look
upon the expulsion of the Moors from that country in 1492 as a grave historical injustice. Osama bin
Laden highlighted "the tragedy of Andalusia" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks[4], while the
perpetrators of the subsequent March 2004 Madrid bombings, in which hundreds of people were
murdered, mentioned revenge for the loss of Spain as one of the atrocity's "root causes."[5]

Indeed, even countries that have never been under Islamic imperial rule have become legitimate
targets of radical Islamic fervor. Since the late 1980s, various Islamist movements have looked upon
the growing number of French Muslims as a sign that France, too, has become a potential part of the
House of Islam.[6] In Germany, which extended a warm welcome to the scores of Islamists fleeing
persecution in their home countries, the radical Muslim Brotherhood has successfully established
itself, with ample Saudi financing, as the effective voice of the three million-strong Muslim
community.[7] Their British counterparts have followed suit; "We will remodel this country in an
Islamic image," London-based preacher Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad told an attentive audience
less than two months after 9/11. "We will replace the Bible with the Qur'an."[8]

This goal need not necessarily be pursued by the sword; it can be achieved through demographic
growth and steady conversion to Islam. But should peaceful means prove insufficient, physical force
can readily be brought to bear.

Nor is this vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe, as President Obama apparently believes. That
much is clear from the overwhelming support the 9/11 attacks garnered throughout the Arab and
Islamic worlds, the admiring evocations of bin Laden's murderous acts during the 2006 crisis over
the Danish cartoons, and polls indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in
Britain for the "feelings and motives" of the suicide bombers who attacked London in July 2005.[9]

In the historical imagination of many Muslims, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new
incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the
House of Islam's war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.
If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because,
as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of a
universal Islamic community, or umma.
It is the failure to recognize this state of affairs that accounts for the resounding failure of Obama's
policies toward the Middle East and the Muslim World. For all his hyped outreach to Arabs and
Muslimsfrom the pledged "new way forward" in his inaugural speech to his first major presidential
interview, given to the al-Arabiya television network, to his submissive bow to Saudi Arabia's King
Abdullah, to his instruction to NASA to reach out to the Muslim worldObama has failed to win the
quiescence, let alone the respect and admiration of these societies. On the contrary, in line with
Osama bin Laden's handy quip in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks that "when people see a
strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse,"[10] his prestige has been
on a downward spiral since the first days of his presidency. In the recent words of a Saudi academic,
who had been formerly smitten with the first black U.S. president: "He talks too much."[11]

Misreading Iran

Take Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, the foremost threat to Middle Eastern stability, if not to
world peace, in the foreseeable future. In a sharp break from the previous administration's attempts
to coerce Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, Obama initially chose the road of "engagement
that is honest and grounded in mutual respect."[12]

In his al-Arabiya interview, a mere week after his inauguration, Obama already promised that if
Iran agreed "to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us." Two months later, in a
videotaped greeting on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, he reassured the clerics in Tehran of
his absolute commitment "to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us," claiming
that this "new beginning" would win Iran substantial economic and political gains, most notably
worldwide acceptance of the legitimacy of the Islamic regime derided by the Bush administration as
a central part of the "Axis of Evil." This, however, could only be achieved "through peaceful actions
that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that
greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create."[13]

In his Cairo address, Obama amplified this suggestion. While warning Iran that its nuclear
ambitions might lead to "a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the
world down a hugely dangerous path," he made no allusion to the possibility of coercion, going out
of his way to show empathize with Iran's supposed sensitivities. "I understand those who protest
that some countries have weapons that others do not," he said.

No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons. And that's why I
strongly reaffirmed America's commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear
weapons. And any nationincluding Iranshould have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if
it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is
at the core of the treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it. And I'm hopeful that all
countries in the region can share in this goal.[14]

However appealing as an intellectual sophistry (though China and Russia, among others, have
remained conspicuously unimpressed), the framing of Iran's nuclear buildup within the context of
the NPT is totally misconceived, for the simple reason that the matter at hand is one of international
security rather than international legality. Even if Iran were not a signatory to the NPT, and hence
legally free to develop nuclear weapons, it would still be imperative for the international community
to prevent this eventuality, since the existence of the deadliest weapons at the hands of a militant
regime driven by messianic zeal and committed to the worldwide export of its radical brand of Islam
would be a recipe for disaster.

Nor is Obama's professed commitment to a nuclear-free world likely to impress the clerics in
Tehran. Quite the opposite, in fact. Since their nuclear ambitions emanate from imperialist rather
than defensive considerations, the disarmament of other nuclear powers (notably Israel) could only
whet their appetite by increasing the relative edge of these weapons for the Islamic Republic's quest
for regional hegemony, if not the world mastery envisaged by its founding father, the late Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini. As Khomeini put it in his day: "The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of
Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people We will export our revolution
throughout the world because it is an Islamic revolution. The struggle will continue until the calls
'there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed all over the
world."[15]

Moreover, Obama's eagerness to demonstrate his even handedness and goodwill to a regime that
views the world in zero sum terms has only served to cast him as weak and indecisive, an image that
was further reinforced by the administration's knee jerk response to the Islamic regime's brutal
suppression of popular protest over the rigging of the June 2009 presidential elections. That the
U.S. president, who had made a point in his inaugural address to warn "those who cling to power
through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent" that they were "on the wrong side of
history," and who lectured Muslim regimes throughout the world that "you must maintain your
power through consent, not coercion,"[16] remained conspicuously silent in the face of the flagrant
violation of these very principles did not pass unnoticed by the Iranian regime. Iran's leaders
responded accordingly; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not only demanded that the United
States apologize to the Iranian people, but also that it withdraw its troops from conflict zones around
the world and "stop supporting the Zionists, outlaws, and criminals."[17]

He reiterated the demand for an American apology five months later, this time for its supposed
meddling in the June 2009 Iranian elections, while the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, ridiculed Obama for privately courting Iran while censuring it in public. "The U.S.
President said that we were waiting for the day when people would take to the streets," he stated in a
Friday sermon. "At the same time they write letters saying that they want to have ties and that they
respect the Islamic Republic. Which are we to believe?"[18]

Iran's leaders backed their defiant rhetoric with actions. In a February 2010 visit to Damascus, for
example, Ahmadinejad signed a string of agreements with his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad, and
the two held warm meetings with the leaders of the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas
Islamist terror groups aimed at underscoring the indivisibility of their alliance. Coming a day after
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Syria "to begin to move away from the relationship with
Iran" and to stop supporting Hezbollah, the summit was a clear slap in the face of the administration
and proof of the abject collapse of Obama's "engagement" policy.

Losing Turkey

So was the Turkish Republic's sudden and dramatic disengagement from the founding principles
underpinning its creation in the wake of World War I. This latter setback was particularly galling to
the White House, in part because the president had made that country a major cornerstone of his
engagement strategy. "This is my first trip overseas as President of the United States," he told the
Turkish parliament on April 6, 2009:

I've been to the G20 summit in London, and the NATO summit in Strasbourg, and the European
Union summit in Prague. Some people have asked me if I chose to continue my travels to Ankara
and Istanbul to send a message to the world. And my answer is simple: Evet - yes. Turkey is a critical
ally... And Turkey and the United States must stand together - and work together - to overcome the
challenges of our time.[19]

Having praised Turkey's "strong, vibrant, secular democracy," Obama voiced unequivocal support
for the country's incorporation into the European Uniona highly contentious issue among the
organization's members. In his opinion, Turkey was "an important part of Europe," which had to be
"truly united, peaceful and free" in order to be able to meet the challenges of the 21st century. "Let
me be clear," he said:

The United States strongly supports Turkey's bid to become a member of the European Union. We
speak not as members of the EU, but as close friends of both Turkey and Europe. Turkey has been a
resolute ally and a responsible partner in transatlantic and European institutions. Turkey is bound
to Europe by more than the bridges over the Bosphorous. Centuries of shared history, culture, and
commerce bring you together. Europe gains by the diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith - it is not
diminished by it. And Turkish membership would broaden and strengthen Europe's foundation once
more.[20]

"I know there are those who like to debate Turkey's future," he continued.

They see your country at the crossroads of continents, and touched by the currents of history.... They
wonder whether you will be pulled in one direction or another.

But I believe here is what they don't understand: Turkey's greatness lies in your ability to be at the
center of things. This is not where East and West divide - this is where they come together.[21]

As with his Cairo speech, Obama's reading of the historic Turkish-Western interaction (and its
attendant implications) was disastrously flawed. Far from being a bridge between East and West, the
Ottoman Empire was an implacable foe that had steadily encroached on Europe and its way of life. It
is true that the 19th century saw numerous instances of Ottoman-European collaboration; but this
was merely pragmatic maneuvering aimed at arresting imperial decline and holding on to colonial
possessions.

This failed, and from the end of the Napoleonic wars (1815) to the outbreak of World War I, Turkey
was the most violent part of the European continent, as the Ottoman Empire's attempt to keep its
reluctant European subjects under its domination unleashed a prolonged orgy of bloodletting and
mayhem, from the Greek civil war of the 1820s to the Crimean War to the Balkan crisis of the 1870s
to the Balkan wars of 1912-13.

Obama's exercise in appeasement was wholly unnecessary. By the time he was addressing the
Turkish parliament, the country's "strong and secular democracy," lauded by Obama as Atatrk's
foremost and most enduring legacy, was well and truly under siege. In the eight eventful years since
it won the November 2002 general elections, the Islamist Justice and Reconciliation Party (AKP)
has transformed Turkey's legal system, suppressed the independent media, and sterilized the
political and military systems, even as hundreds of opponents and critics have found themselves
inducted on dubious charges of a grand conspiracy to overthrow the Turkish government.[22]

This process was not confined to the domestic scene. Turkey's growing Islamization has been
accompanied by a mixture of anti-Western sentiments and reasserted aspirations for regional
hegemony, aptly described by a growing number of Turkish and foreign commentators as "Neo-
Ottomanism."[23] Hence Turkey's growing alignment with Iran, exemplified most notably in the
attempt to avert the imposition of international sanctions on Tehran by signing (with Brazil) a
nuclear fuel swap deal in May 2010, which would have provided for the dispatch of low-enriched
Iranian uranium to Turkey in return for fuel for one Iranian nuclear reactor. Similarly evocative has
been Turkey's eagerness to wrest the mediator's role between Syria and Israel from the West, despite
the AKP's overt hostility to Israel and to Jews more generally. Then there is Turkey's embrace of the
Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers, better known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas, which
reached its peak in May 2010 with the sponsorship of a flotilla aimed at breaking the Israeli
blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Exacerbating the Arab-Israeli conflict

Instead of backing the Israeli effort to contain a murderous Islamist group, implacably opposed to
Western values and ideals and committed to the establishment of "a great Islamic state, be it pan-
Arabic or pan-Islamic," on Israel's ruins,[24] the Obama administration viewed the international
outcry attending the flotilla incident as a golden opportunity to tighten the noose around Israelthe
main, indeed only, defined component of its policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.

To be sure, in his Cairo address Obama made a point of emphasizing the permanence of "America's
strong bonds with Israel." But then, by predicating Israel's right to exist on the Holocaust (which he
diluted by putting on a par with Palestinian suffering), he effectively adopted the Palestinian
narrative. Under that telling, the Palestinians are the real victims of the Holocaust, forced to foot the
bill for the West's presumed desire to atone for its genocidal tendencies and indifference through the
establishment of a Jewish state. Never mind that there was no collective sense of guilt among
Europeans, many of whom viewed themselves as fellow victims of Nazi aggression. Anti-Semitic
sentiments remained as pronounced as ever, especially in Eastern Europe, which witnessed a few
vicious pogroms shortly after the end of WWII.

Nor did Obama's succeed in advancing his avowed commitment to the two-state solution of Israel
and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, by putting excessive
pressure on Israel and none whatsoever on the Arabs, and by casting the issue of West Bank
settlements as the foremost obstacle to peace while turning a blind eye to continued Palestinian and
Arab rejection of Israel's right to exist, he managed to alienate the Israeli public and to harden the
position of the Palestinian leadership, which watched the recurrent crises in U.S.-Israeli relations
with undisguised satisfaction in anticipation of substantial (and unreciprocated) Israeli concessions.
Thus, for example, when on June 14, 2009, in an abrupt departure from Likud's foremost ideological
precept, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state
provided the Palestinian leadership responded in kind and recognized Israel's Jewish nature, the
Obama administration did nothing to disabuse Arab regimes of their adamant rejection of Jewish
statehood and instead pressured the Israeli government for a complete freeze of building activities in
the settlements and East Jerusalem.

This behavior is not difficult to understand. Appeasement of one's enemies at the expense of friends,
whose loyalty can be taken for granted, is a commonif unsavoryhuman trait. Rather than reward
America's longest and most loyal ally in the Middle East, the Obama administration ruthlessly
exploited the Jewish state's growing international isolation for the sake of winning over enemies and
critics. It was also a telling affirmation that the Obama administration subscribes to the common
fallacy that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict constitutes the root of all evil, and that its resolution will
lead to regional peace.

Such a view is wildly inaccurate. For one thing, violence was an integral part of Middle Eastern
political culture long before the advent of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and physical force remains today
the main if not the sole instrument of regional political discourse. For another, the Arab states have
never had any real stake in the "liberation of Palestine." Though anti-Zionism has been the core
principle of pan-Arab solidarity since the 1930s, it has almost always served as an instrument for
achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaim it.

Consider, for example, the pan-Arab invasion of the newly proclaimed state of Israel in May 1948.
On its face, it was a shining demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs. But the invasion
had far less to do with winning independence for the indigenous population than with the desire of
the Arab regimes for territorial aggrandizement. Transjordan's King Abdullah wanted to incorporate
substantial parts of mandatory Palestine, if not the entire country, into the greater Syrian empire he
coveted; Egypt wanted to prevent that eventuality by laying its hands on southern Palestine; Syria
and Lebanon sought to annex the Galilee; Iraq viewed the 1948 war as a stepping stone in its long-
standing ambition to bring the entire Fertile Crescent under its rule. Had the Jewish state lost the
war, its territory would not have fallen to the Palestinians but would have been divided among the
invading Arab forces.

During the decades that followed, the Arab states manipulated the Palestinian national cause for
their own ends. Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of
Palestine they had occupied during the 1948 war (respectively, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
Palestinian refugees were kept in squalid camps for decades as a means of derogating Israel and
stirring pan-Arab sentiments. "The Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are," Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser candidly responded to an inquiring Western reporter in 1956. "We
will always see that they do not become too powerful."[25] As late as 1974, Syria's Hafez al-Assad
referred to Palestine as being "not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern
Syria."[26]
If the Arab states have shown little empathy for the plight of ordinary Palestinians, the Islamic
connection to the Palestinian problem is even more tenuous. It is not out of concern for a Palestinian
right to national self-determination but as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the
"House of Islam" that Islamists inveigh against the Jewish state of Israel. In the words of the Hamas
covenant: "The land of Palestine has been an Islamic trust (waqf) throughout the generations and
until the day of resurrection... When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty
binding on all Muslims."[27] That current American policy ignores this reality not only serves to
weaken Israel and embolden its enemies, but also to make the prospects of Arab-Israeli peace ever
more remote.

A new beginning?

A year after announcing "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the
world," Obama's grandiose outreach lies in tatters. The clerics in Tehran continue their dogged quest
for the "bomb" and have intensified arms supplies to their Lebanese terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, with
Syria's connivance and support. Turkey persists in its Islamist odyssey, and Hamas continues its
military buildup and occasional terror attacks, while at the same time promoting its removal from
the EU's list of terror organizations. Nor for that matter has the cold shouldering of Israel enhanced
Obama's popularity in the Arab world, as evidenced, inter alia, by recent surveys showing a steady
decline in his standing and making him only marginally more popular in comparison with his much
maligned predecessor, George W. Bush.[28]

Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has failed to chart a course that is different in any meaningful
way from that of the previous administration. On the contrary, while credit for the relative calm in
Iraq is undoubtedly due to the Bush-era "surge," which Senator Obama had bitterly opposed at the
time[29], the military situation in Afghanistanwhich he has made the edifice of his struggle against
violent extremismhas seriously deteriorated, owing to his indecisive and poorly conceived strategy.
Particularly damaging was the pronounced intention to withdraw from the country in the summer of
2011, which has left the Taliban in the enviable position of lying low and biding their time until the
departure of American forces, or wearing them down in a sustained guerrilla and terror campaign,
so as to portray the withdrawal as an ignominious retreat.

The truth of the matter is that in order to have even the slightest chance of success, Obama's "new
beginning" must be promptly ended, with appeasement replaced by containment and counterattack.
As a first step, the president and his advisers must recognize the Manichean and irreconcilable
nature of the challenge posed by their adversaries. There is no peaceful way to curb Iran's nuclear
ambitions, stemming as they do from its imperialist brand of Islamism; a military strike must
remain a serious option. Turkey's Islamist drift is bound to make it an enemy of the West, rather
than the ally it was over the past half-a-century. Hamas and Hezbollah will never reconcile
themselves to the existence of a Jewish state on any part of the perceived House of Islam, however
tiny. And there is no way for the U.S. to resolve the century-old war between Arabs and Jews unless
the Palestinian and Arab leaders eschew their genocidal hopes for Israel's destruction and accept the
Jewish right to statehood. Failure to grasp these realities is an assured recipe for disaster.

Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean
Studies at King's College London and author, most recently ofPalestine Betrayed (Yale University
Press, 2010).

[1] "When Barry Became Barack," Newsweek, March 22, 2008.

[2] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "Remarks by the President on a New Beginning,"
Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009.
[3] Ibid.
[4] "Statement of Osama Bin Laden," Al-Jazeera (Doha), October 7, 2001.
[5] "Beyond Madrid," Times of London, November 1, 2007.
[6] Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
306.
[7] Michel Gurfinkiel, "Islam in France: The French Way of Life Is in Danger," Middle East
Quarterly 4, no. 1 (March 1997).
[8] Lorenzo Vidino, "The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe," Middle East Quarterly 12, no.
1 (Winter 2005).
[9] "Poll Shows Muslims in Britain are the Most Anti-Western in Europe," Guardian (London), June
23, 2006; "British Muslims: London Bombing Justified," The Trumpet, October 26, 2006.
[10] As cited in James Poniewozik, "The Banality Of Bin Laden," Time, December 13, 2001.
[11] As cited in Fouad Ajami, "The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama," Wall Street Journal,
November 29, 2009.
[12] "Obama's Tone in Iran Message Differs Sharply from Bush's," Washington Post, March 21,
2009.
[13] "Obama to Iran - 'A New Day, a New Beginning,'" Times of London, March 21, 2009.
[14] "Remarks by the President on a New Beginning."
[15] Farhad Rajaee, Islamic Values and World View: Khomeini on Man, the State and
International Politics (Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 1983), 82 - 83.
[16] "Text of Barack Obama's Inaugural Address," New York Times, January 20, 2009; "Remarks by
the President on a New Beginning."
[17] "Ahmadinejad Says Obama Must Apologize to the Iranian People for Bush," Times of
London, January 28, 2009; "Iran Rebuffs Obama's Surprise Offer of a 'New Beginning,'" Times of
London, March 20, 2009; "Obama Dismisses Ahmadinejad Apology Request," Washington Times,
June 26, 2009; "Ahmadinejad: Obama is a Cowboy Who Follows Will of Israel," Ha'aretz(Tel Aviv),
April 4, 2010; "Iran: Ahmadinejad Threatens Obama with 'Tooth Breaking Response to U.S. Nuclear
strategy," Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2010; "Ahmadinejad: Iran is Obama's Only Way to Stay in
Power," CNN, April 10, 2010.
[18] "Ayatollah mocks U.S. Pre-election Overture," CBS, June 24, 2009.
[19] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "Remarks by President Obama to the Turkish
Parliament," Ankara, Turkey, April 6, 2009.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibidem.
[22] Michael Rubin, "Turkey, from Ally to Enemy, Commentary, July/August 2010; Dani Rodrik,
"The Death of Turkey's Democracy," Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2010.
[23] See, for example, Suat Kiniklioglu, "The Return of Ottomanism," Zaman (Istanbul), March 20,
2007; Omer Taspinar, "Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalist Foreign
Policy," Zaman (Istanbul),September 22, 2008; Tariq Alhomayed, "Turkey: Searching for a
Role," Al-Sharq al-Awsat(London), May 19, 2010.
[24] This according to senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar. He added that "Islamic and
traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state... In the past,
there was no independent Palestinian state." "Exclusive Interview with Hamas Leader," The Media
Line, September 22, 2005.
[25] John Laffin, The PLO Connections (London, Corgi Books, 1983), 127.
[26] Damascus Radio, March 8, 1974.
[27] Articles 11, 13, 15, 27, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, August 18, 1988.
[28] See, for example, Daniel Pipes, "Obama Makes Little Headway among Arabic-Speaking
Muslims," The Lion's Den: Daniel Pipes Blog, May 29, 2010; Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes
Project, "Muslim Disappointment," June 17, 2010.
[29] See, for example, "Obama: Iraq Surge has Hurt American Interests," New York Sun, July 15,
2008.

Does the Arab World Truly Want a

"Palestine"?
A briefing by Efraim Karsh
January 25, 2011

Efraim Karsh is editor of the Middle East Quarterly and

Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's
College London. He served as an intelligence officer in the Israel
Defense Forces for seven years before obtaining graduate and doctoral degrees in international
relations from Tel Aviv University. He is the author of fifteen books, including Arafat's War, Islamic
Imperialism, and most recently Palestine Betrayed. On January 25th, he addressed the Middle East
Forum on what the leaked Palestine Papers reveal about Arab and Palestinian aspirations for a
Palestinian state.

http://www.meforum.org/audio/83.mp3

According to Mr. Karsh, the documents recently released from Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations
shed some light on the position of the Palestinian leadership and neighboring Arab states toward the
creation of a Palestinian state. By tracing the history of both parties, Mr. Karsh stated that neither
party has ever been, nor is, truly interested in forming a Palestinian state.

He began by discussing the Arab states, arguing that they have never wanted a Palestinian state and
have done the utmost to sabotage its formation. He noted that in the 1920s, both Jordan and Syria
attempted to annex the territory of Palestine for themselves. He further observed that while this is
not entirely surprising, it is surprising that Palestinian leaders themselves appear to not want an
independent state either.

In support of this point, he outlined the history of Palestinian leadership from the founding of the
PLO. For example, Arafat had opportunities to establish a state in both 1993, with the Oslo Accords,
and 2000, with the Camp David meeting. In 1993, he "made sure it would be a failure," and in 2000
he rejected Barak's offer, opting for war.

Lastly, Mr. Karsh addressed the leaked documents. He emphasized the fact that their authenticity
have yet to be verified, and that the Palestinian leadership has denied their validity. He underscored
that if they are authentic, they may indicate that Palestinian leadership has started thinking in terms
of statehood. Yet the most interesting part of the documents has been the reaction to them: the Arab
world has dished out criticism and accused the leadership of betraying the Palestinian cause, even
though the concessions they agreed to were minimal in comparison to those agreed to in exchange
by Israel. For those who do want a two-state solution, Mr. Karsh concluded, the documents could
serve as a glimmer of hope.

Written by MEF intern Alessandra Grace.

A legacy of violence
by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
March 1, 2011

Turbulent times often breed nostalgia for a supposedly idyllic past. Viewing the upheavals sweeping
the Middle East as a mass expression of outrage against oppression, eminent historian Bernard
Lewis fondly recalled past regional order.

"The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes that rule most of the countries in the modern
Islamic Middle East are a modern creation. They are a result of modernization," he told The
Jerusalem Post. "The pre-modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see
this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the memory of that is still living."

I doubt past generations of Muslims would share this view. In the long history of the Islamic empire,
the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the forces of localism would be bridged time and
again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture. No sooner had the
prophet Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among
the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma, Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was
murdered by disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign
with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria, Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went
on to establish the Umayyad dynasty after Ali's assassination.

Mu'awiya's successors managed to hang onto power mainly by relying on physical force to prevent or
quell revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the
long centuries of their sovereignty.

WESTERN SCHOLARS often hold up the Ottoman Empire as an exception to this earlier pattern. In
fact, the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its vast non- Muslim subject populations provided
they acknowledged their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these
groups dared to question their subordinate status let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke
they were viciously put down.

In the century or so between Napoleon's conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the
Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their
European subjects.

The Greek war of independence of the 1820s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848, the Balkan explosion
of the 1870s all were painful reminders of the cost of resisting Islamic rule. The 1990s wars in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are but natural extensions of this "much more open, much more
tolerant" legacy.

Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey's Afro-Asiatic provinces were also
scenes of mayhem.

The Ottoman army or its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in
Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 1840s
and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians
in the 1890s, Istanbul killed tens of thousands a taste of the horrors that awaited the Armenians
during World War I.

Violence and oppression, then, have not been imported to the Middle East as a byproduct of
European imperialism; they were a part of the political culture long before. If anything, it is the
Middle East's tortuous relationship with modernity that has left physical force as the main
instrument of political discourse.

Unlike Christianity, Islam was inextricably linked with empire. It did not distinguish between
temporal and religious powers (which were combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his
authority directly from Allah). This allowed the prophet and his erstwhile successors to cloak their
political ambitions with a religious aura.

Neither did the subject populations of the Ottoman Empire undergo the secularization and
modernization that preceded the development of nationalism in Western Europe in the late 1700s.

So when the old European empires collapsed 150 years later, individual nationstates were able to
step into the breach. By contrast, when the Ottoman Empire fell, its components still thought only in
the old terms on the one hand, the intricate web of loyalties to clan, tribe, village, town, religious
sect or local ethnic minority, and on the other, submission to the distant Ottoman sultan/caliph as
the temporal and religious head of the world Muslim community a post that now stood vacant.

INTO THIS vacuum stepped ambitious political leaders speaking the rhetoric of "Arab nationalism."

The problem with this state of affairs was that the diversity and fragmentation of the Arabic-
speaking world had made its disparate societies better disposed to local patriotism than to a unified
secular order.
But then, rather than allow this disposition to develop into modern-day nationalism, Arab rulers
systematically convinced their peoples to think that the independent existence of their respective
states was a temporary aberration.

The result was a legacy of oppressive violence that has haunted the Middle East into the 21st
century, as rulers sought to bridge the reality of state nationalism and the mirage of a unified "Arab
nation," and to shore up their regimes against grassroots Islamist movements (notably the Muslim
Brotherhood) articulating the far more appealing message of a return to religious law (Shari'a) as a
stepping stone to the establishment of a worldwide community of believers (umma).

One need only mention, among many instances, Syria's massacre of 20,000 Muslim activists in the
early 1980s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq's Shi'ite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or
the genocidal campaign in Darfur by the government of Sudan.

This violence has by no means been the sole property of the likes of Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam
Hussein, Hafez Assad, and Ayatollah Khomeini. The affable and thoroughly Westernized King
Hussein of Jordan didn't shrink from slaughtering thousands of Palestinians during September 1970
(known as Black September) when his throne came under threat from Palestinian guerrillas.

Now that the barrier of fear has been breached, it remains to be seen which regimes will be swept
from power. But it is doubtful whether Middle East societies will be able, or willing, to transcend
their imperial legacy and embrace the Western-type liberal democracy that has taken European
nations centuries to achieve.

Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London,
editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History.

The pinnacle of incompetence

by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
March 23, 2011

It is commonplace for the views of people in power to receive widespread exposure. Having
presumably won their stripes in an arduous climb to the top, they are believed to know best what's
going on.

This presumption, however, is not only wrong, but is often the inverse of the truth. Given
bureaucracy's predilection for conformity, it is rarely the best and brightest who reach the top, but
rather the yes-men sycophants whether by rising to their level of incompetence, as the Peter
Principle famously asserts, or by stumbling upward through successive failures, or by simply "being
there" long enough.

Thus we have England's national soccer team manager, Sven Goran Eriksson, putting Wayne
Rooney on a par with soccer's best-ever player, the legendary Pele. Yet rather than have his
professional judgment questioned, the overpaid manager was allowed to lead his under performing
team for three more trophy-less years.

Or take US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's astounding description of the Muslim
Brotherhood as a "largely secular" organization.

Shouldn't he know what countless newspaper readers know full well the Brotherhood is probably
the world's foremost Islamist organization, committed to the establishment of a worldwide
caliphate. How else is one to interpret its motto "Allah is our objective. The prophet is our leader.
The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope"? Now
Baroness Eliza Manningham- Buller, former director of MI5 (Britain's FBI equivalent), has joined
the march of folly. In her first television interview since leaving her job four years ago, she argued
that the "war on terror" is unwinnable, and urged the British government to "reach out" to al-Qaida.
"It's always better to talk to the people who are attacking you than attacking them, if you can," she
explained.

This gives the idea of appeasement a whole new meaning. Even the most notorious incident the
Anglo- French surrender of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the 1938 Munich agreement took place
prior to any German military aggression. Once the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939,
London and Paris attempted no further talks, but declared war on Germany.

In contrast, by the time Manningham-Buller made her startling suggestion, al-Qaida had massacred
tens of thousands in the name of Islam from the 9/11 attacks, to the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, to
bombings in Yemen, Bali, Sharm e-Sheikh and Madrid. Yet neither these atrocities, nor the July
2005 London bombing, which took place under her watch, seem to have shaken the former
director's belief that outreach to the Islamist group would curb its murderous zeal: "If we can get to
a state where there are fewer attacks, less lethal attacks..., fewer young people being drawn into this,
less causes resolution of the Palestinian question, less impetus for this activity, I think we can get
to a stage where the threat is thus reduced."

THIS JUDGMENT of al-Qaida's worldview is as delusional as Clapper's take on the Muslim

Brotherhood. It is true that during the 1970s Western Europeans bought partial immunity from
Palestinian terrorism by indulging the PLO. But then, the PLO's goal has always been limited to the
"liberation of Palestine" (that is the destruction of Israel), while al-Qaida seeks nothing short of
worldwide triumph. As such, the idea that Israeli-Palestinian peace will take away one of Islam's
primary gripes against the West totally misreads history and present-day politics.

It is not out of concern for a Palestinian right to self determination, but as part of a holy war to
prevent the loss of part of the "House of Islam" that Islamists inveigh against Israel. In the words of
the covenant of Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood: "The land of Palestine
has been an Islamic trust [wakf] throughout the generations, and until the day of resurrection...
When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims."

In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other parts of the world conquered by
Islam throughout history. To this day, for example, many Muslims unabashedly pine for the
restoration of Spain, and look upon their expulsion in 1492 as a grave historical injustice, as if they
were Spain's rightful owners. Small wonder that Osama bin Laden evoked "the tragedy of Andalusia"
after the 9/11 attacks, and the perpetrators of the March 2004 Madrid bombings, in which hundreds
of people were murdered, mentioned revenge for the loss of Spain as one of the atrocity's "root
causes."

Indeed, even countries that have never been under Islamic rule have become legitimate targets of
Islamist fervor. Since the late 1980s, various Islamist movements have looked on the growing
number of French Muslims as a sign that France, too, has become a potential part of dar Islam, the
house of Islam.

In Britain, even the more moderate elements of the Muslim community are candid about their aims.
As the late Zaki Badawi, a doyen of interfaith dialogue, put it, "Islam is a universal religion. It aims
to bring its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be
one Muslim community."

This goal need not necessarily be pursued by the sword; it can be achieved through demographic
growth and steady conversion to Islam. But should peaceful means prove insufficient, physical force
can be brought to bear.
Nor is this vision confined to an extremist fringe. This has been starkly demonstrated by the
overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Islamic world, in the admiring evocations
of bin Laden's murderous acts during the 2006 crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in the poll
indicating significant sympathy among British Muslims for the "feelings and motives" of the London
suicide bombers.

To deny this reality is the height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to
play into the Islamists' hands.

Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London,
editor of Middle East Quarterly and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History.

How Many Palestinian Arab Refugees Were There?

by Efraim Karsh
Israel Affairs
April 2011

The number of Palestinian Arabs fleeing their homes during the 1948 war has constituted one of the
most intractable bones of contentions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not least since the Palestinians
have insisted on the "right of return" of these individuals and their descendants to territory that has
long been part of the state of Israel.

More than a half-century later, these exaggerated initial numbers have swollen still further: as of
June 2000, according to UNRWA, the total had climbed close to three and three-quarters million,
though it readily admits that the statistics are largely inflated. For its part the PLO set a still higher
figure of 5 million refugees, while Israel has unofficially estimated the current number of refugees
and their families at closer to 2 million.

Using a wealth of declassified Arab, Israeli, and British documents, this article seeks to provide as
comprehensive and accurate an estimate as possible of the actual number of refugees in the wake of
the 1948 war.

At the end of the war, the Israeli government set the number of Palestinian refugees at 550,000-
600,000; the British Foreign Office leaned toward the higher end of this estimate. But within a year,
as large masses of people sought to benefit from the unprecedented influx of international funds to
the area, some 962,000 alleged refugees had been registered with the newly-established UN Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The extraordinary coverage of the 1948 war notwithstanding, the birth of the Palestinian refugee
problem during the five-and-a-half months of fighting, from the partition resolution of November
29, 1947, to the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, passed virtually unnoticed by
the international community. Nor for that matter did the Arab states, burdened as they were with a
relentless flow of refugees, or even the Palestinian leadership itself, have a clear idea of the
dispersal's full magnitude, as demonstrated by the mid-June 1948 estimate of the prominent
Palestinian leader, Emile Ghouri, of the number of refugees at 200,000: less than two thirds the
actual figure. A few weeks later, after thousands more Arabs had become refugees, a Baghdad radio
commentator was still speaking of 300,000 evacuees "who are forced to flee from the Jews as the
French were forced to flee from the Nazis." Taking their cue from these claims, W. De St. Aubin,
delegate of the League of Red Cross Societies to the Middle East, estimated the number of Arab
refugees (in late July) at about 300,000, while Sir Raphael Cilento, director of the UN Disaster
Relief Project (DRP) in Palestine, set the number at 300,000-350,000 (in early August).[1]
Paradoxically it was the Israelis who initially came with the highest, and most accurate, estimates. In
early June Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was told by Yossef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund
(JNF) that "some 123,000 Arabs left 155 villages in the Jewish state's territory; another 22,000 left
35 villages outside the Jewish state: a total of 145,000 evacuees and 190 villages. Seventy-seven
thousand Arabs left five cities in the Jewish state's territory (Haifa, Beisan, Tiberias, Safad,
Samakh). Another 73,000 left two cities [designed to remain] outside the state (Jaffa and Acre).
Forty thousand Arabs left Jerusalem: a total of 190,000 from eight cities. All in all, 335,000 Arabs
fled (including 200,000 from the UN ascribed Jewish territory)."[2]

A comprehensive report by the Hagana's intelligence service, comprising a detailed village-by-village

breakdown of the exodus, set the number of Palestinian Arab evacuees in the six-month period
between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948, at 391,000: 239,000 from the UN-ascribed Jewish
state, 122,000 from the territory of the prospective Arab state, and 30,000 from Jerusalem. Another
exhaustive Israeli study set the number of refugees (in late October) at 460,000, almost evenly
divided between the rural and urban sectors.[3]

This estimate was substantially higher than the 360,000 figure in the report of the UN mediator,
Count Folke Bernadotte, submitted to the General Assembly on September 16, or Cilento's revised
estimate of 400,300 a couple of weeks later, and was virtually identical to the supplementary report
submitted on October 18 by Bernadotte's successor, Ralph Bunche, which set the number of refugees
at 472,000 and anticipated the figure to reach a maximum of slightly over 500,000 in the near
future.[4]

By now, however, the Arabs had dramatically upped the ante. In a memorandum dispatched to the
heads of the Arab states and Arab League Secretary-General Abdel Rahman Azzam in mid-August,
the Palestine Office in Amman, an organization operating under the auspices of the Transjordan
government, estimated the total number of refugees at 700,000, of whom 500,000 were in Palestine
and the rest in the neighboring Arab states. The memo struck a responsive chord, for in October the
Arab League set the number of refugees at 631,967, and by the end of the month official Arab
estimates ranged between 740,000 and 780,000. When the newly-established United Nations Relief
for Palestine refugees (UNRPR) began operating in December 1948, it found 962,643 refugees on its
relief rolls.[5]

In conversations with British diplomats (in early October) Cilento described the figures supplied by
the Arab authorities as unreliable, claiming that they increased from week to week in all areas
irrespective of known movements of refugees from place to place. A large number of refugees had,
for example, moved from the Nablus area to the Hauran in Syria while others from Jericho,
Jerusalem and Transjordan had moved to Gaza. Similarly, at least 2,000 refugees had recently
moved from the Egyptian port town of Kantara, on the Suez Canal, to Gaza. Yet the number of
refugees in the areas from which these movements had taken place was in all cases reported as
increasing instead of decreasing. Similar exaggerations were made in Syria where, according to
Bunche's October report, the authorities claimed the existence of 30,000 refugees whereas the
actual figure was no more than half that size.

Cilento expected as many as 400,000 Arabs to apply for UN relief in the coming winter on top of the
360,000-390,000 registered refugees, though these were not genuine refugees in the sense that they
were living in their own homes and had not been "displaced." This, however, didn't prevent him,
when the prediction was vindicated before the end of the year, from raising the number of refugees
to 750,000. St. Aubin, who in September 1948 became the DRP's director of field operations, went a
step further by placing the figure (in July 1949) at "approximately one million."

Admitting to having "some difficulty in separating out the real refugees from the rest, and in
explaining the reasons for doing so to the Arab authorities," Cilento attributed this chaotic situation
to a number of reasons:

Refugees were registered on arrival and fed but their names were not struck off the list if they
moved or died;
 Refugees moving from one area to another would check in and be fed at several points en
route and at each would be added to the list of refugees in the area, in this way numbers
increased on paper in areas vacated as well as at final destination;
Local destitute persons were included in numbers although they were not properly refugees;
Fraud and misrepresentation by officials and others to utilize supplies etc.;
There were people who left their homes owing to disturbed conditions but returned to them
shortly afterward, yet were briefly registered as refugees and the records remained.[6]

Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo, got a first-hand impression of
this pervasive inflation of refugee numbers during a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949. "The
Quakers have nearly 250,000 refugees on their books," he reported to London.

They admit however that the figures are unreliable, as it is impossible to stop all fraud in the making
of returns. Deaths for example are never registered nor are the names struck off the books of those
who leave the district clandestinely. Some names too are probably registered more than once for the
extra rations. But the Quakers assured me that they have made serious attempts to carry out a
census and believe they have more information in that respect than the Red Cross organizations
which are working in other areas. Their figures include Bedouin whom they feed and care for just
like other refugees. They seemed a little doubtful whether this was a right decision, but once it had
been taken it could not be reversed, and in any case the Bedouin, though less destitute than most of
the refugees proper, are thought to have lost a great part of their possessions. They and the other
refugees live in separate camps and in a state of mutual antipathy.[7]

This was hardly a novel phenomenon. Population figures of Palestinian Arab society, especially of
rural Muslim communities, were notoriously unreliable, based as they were on exaggerated
information provided by village headmen in order to obtain greater government support. As
explained in the preface to the mandatory government's Village Statistics 1945, for all the "very
detailed work" invested in this comprehensive compendium of rural Palestine, its estimates
"cannot be considered as other than rough estimates which in some instances may ultimately be
found to differ even considerably, from the actual figures."[8]

The supplementary volume to the government's Survey of Palestine (1946), compiled in June 1947
for the information of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), elaborated on the
problematic nature of official demographic statistics:

For the years 1943-46 an investigation recently carried out by the Department of Statistics revealed
that many cases of death, especially in rural areas, have not been reported. These omissions (which
are mainly due to the attempt to obtain food rations of deceased persons) seriously impair the
reliability of the death rates (particularly infant mortality rates) and that of the rate of natural
increase. On the other hand, they are not of such magnitude as to effect seriously the estimates of
total population.[9]

This may well have been the case. But then, if accepting the Supplement's estimate of 1.3 million
Palestinian Arabs at the end of 1946 (the actual figure was most probably 5%-6% lower) the number
of refugees could by no stretch of the imagination approximate the million mark for the simple
reason that some 550,000-600,00 Arabs who lived in the mandatory districts of Samaria,
Jerusalem, and Gaza (which subsequently became the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after their
respective occupation by Transjordan and Egypt) remained in situ, while another 160,000 Arabs
remained in, or returned to, Israel. This, in turn, puts the number of refugees at 540,000-590,000.
Likewise, according to an extrapolation of the Village Statistics 1945, the non-Jewish population of
the area that was to become Israeli territory at the end the war amounted, in April 1948, to some
696,000-726,800. Deducting Israel's 160,000-strong postwar Arab population from this figure
would leave 536,000-566,800 refugees beyond Israel's frontiers.[10]
As can be seen below, my own calculations, based on British, Jewish, and to a lesser extent Arab,
population figures of all identified rural and urban localities abandoned during the war, amounts to
583,000-609,000 refugees.

The Palestinian Arab Exodus 1947-48

CITIES[11]

Acre 13,510 (3,885 remained).[12]

Beersheba 6,490.

Beisan 5,540.

Haifa 70,910 (5,000 remained).[13]

Jaffa 70,730 (4,000-5,000 remained).[14]

Jerusalem 65,010 (some 30,000 fled).[15]

Lydda & Ramle 35,078 (2,500 remained).[16]

Majdal 10,900.

Safad 10,210.

Tiberias 5,770.

Total: 247,403-248,403

VILLAGES[17]

GALILEE DISTRICT

Acre Sub-District

Amqa 1,240, Jul. 9, 1948.[18]

Arab Samniya 200,

Bassa 2,950-3,140 (includes Ma'sub), May 14, 1948.[19]

Birwa 1,460, Jun. 11, 1948.[20]

Damun 1,310, Jul. 14-18, 1948.[21]

Deir Qasi 1,190 (including Mansura), Oct. 30, 1948.[22]

Ghabisiya 690-740, May 22, 1948.[23]

Iqrit 490-520, Apr. 26-Oct. 30, 1948.[24]

Kabri 1,530-1,640, May 5-22, 1948.[25]

Kafr Inan 360, Oct. 30, 1948.[26]

Khirbat Iribbin 360 (including Jurdeih & Khirbat Idmith),

Khirbat Jiddin no people according to the Village Statistics

Kuweikat 1,050, Jul. 9, 1948.[27]

Manshiya 810-1,140, May 17, 1948.[28]

Mansura see Deir Qasi.

Mi'ar 770, Oct. 30, 1948.[29]

Nabi Rubin see Tarbikha.

Nahr 610, May 22, 1948.[30]

Ruweis 330, Jul. 18, 1948.[31]

Suhmata 1,130, Oct. 29/30, 1948.[32]

Sumeiriya 760-820, May 14, 1948.[33]

Suruh see Tarbikha.

Tell May 14, 1948.[34]

Tarbikha 1,000 (including Nabi Rubin & Suruh), Oct. 30, 1948.[35]

Umm Faraj 800, May 22, 1948.[36]

Zib (includes Manawat) 1,910-2,050, May 14, 1948.[37]

Beisan Sub-District

Arida 150, May 20, 1948.

Ashrafiya 230, May 12, 1948.

Bawati - 520-700, Mar. 30, 1948.

Bira 220-500, May 16, 1948.[38]

Danna 160-400, May 16-28, 1948.

Farawna 330-350, May 11, 1948.

Ghazawiya 1,020, late May 1948.

Hamidiya 220-300, Apr. 6-May 12, 1948.[39]

Hamra, 730, May 1, 1948.

Jabbul 250-370, May 1-18, 1948.[40]

Kafra 400-700, May 16, 1948.[41]

Kaukab Hawa 30-600, May 14, 1948.[42]

Khuneizir 260-400, May 20, 1948.

Masil Jizl 100, mid-May 1948.

Murassas 460-600, May 16, 1948.

Qumiya 320-440, Mar. 30, 1948.[43]

Safa 650, May 20, 1948.

Sakhina 200-530, May 16, 1948.

Samiriya 250-500, May 27, 1948.

Sirin 600-820, Apr. 24, 1948.[44]

Tell Shauk 120, probably in mid-May 1948.

Tira 120-150, Apr. 15, 1948.[45]

Zab'a 170, May 12, 1948.[46]

Yubla 150-250, May 16, 1948.[47]

Zir'in 1,300, May 1, 1948.[48]

Nazareth Sub-District

Indur 620, May 24, 1948.

Ma'lul 690, Jul. 15-18, 1948.[49]

Mujeidil 1,600-1,900, Jul. 15-18, 1948.[50]

Saffuriyya 4,320-4,330, Jul. 15-16, 1948.[51]

Safad Sub-District

Abil Qamh 230-330, May 10, 1948.[52]

Abisiya 830-1,220, May 25, 1948.[53]

Akbara 390-410, May 10, 1948.

Alma 950, Oct. 30, 1948.[54]

Ammuqa Tahta & Fawqa 140, May 24, 1948.

Arab Shamalina see Buteiha.

Arab Zubeid Apr. 20, 1948.

Azaziyat 390, Apr. 30-May 1, 1948.

Beisamun 20, May 25, 1948.

Biriya 240, May 2, 1948.

Buteiha - 650 (including Arab Shamalina), May 4, 1948.[55]

Buweiziya 510-540, May 11, 1948.[56]

Dahariya 350, May 10, 1948.

Dallata 360, Oct. 30, 1948.[57]

Darbashiya 310, early May 1948.

Dawwara 700, May 25, 1948.

Deishum 590, May 9, 1948-Oct. 30, 1948.[58]

Dirdara Jul. 9-10, 1948.[59]

Ein Zeitun 620-820, May 2, 1948.

Fara 820, Oct, 30, 1948.[60]

Farradiya 670, Oct. 30-Nov. 6, 1948.[61]

Fir'im 740, May 2-26, 1948.[62]

Ghabbatiya 60, probably in late October 1948.

Ghuraba 220, May 1-28, 1948.

Hamra May 1, 1948.

Harrawi May 25, 1948.

Hunin 1,620, May 3-5, 1948.[63]

Husseiniya 340 (including Tuleil), Apr. 21, 1948.

Jahula 420, not known.

Jauna 1,150, May 9, 1948.

Jubb Yusuf 170, early May 1948.

Kafr Bir'im 710, Oct. 30, 1948.[64]

Khalisa 1,840, May 11, 1948.

Khirbat Muntar n.a., May 7, 1948.[65]

Khisas 470-530, Mar. 26-May 24, 1948.[66]

Khiyam Walid 210-280, Mar. 29-May 1, 1948.

Kirad Baqqara 360, Apr. 22, 1948.

Kirad Ghanama - 350, Apr. 22, 1948.

Lazzaza 230, May 21, 1948.

Madahil 410, Apr. 7-30, 1948.[67]

Malikiya 360, May 15-Oct. 30, 1948.[68]

Mallaha 890, May 25, 1948.

Mansura 360, May 25, 1948.

Mansurat Kheit 200-900, Jan. 18, 1948.

Marus 80, May 26, 1948.

Meirun 290, May 29-Oct. 29, 1948.[69]

Mughr Kheit 490, Jan. 18, 1948.

Muftakhira 350 May 1-16, 1948.

Nabi Yusha 70, May 16-17, 1948.

Naima 1,240-1,310, May 14, 1948.

Qabba'a - 460, May 2, 1948.[70]

Qadas 320-390, May 28, 1948.

Qaddita 240, May 11, 1948.

Qeitiya 940, May 2-19, 1948.

Qudeiriya 390, May 4, 1948.

Ras Ahmar 620, Oct. 30, 1948.[71]

Sabalan 70, apparently in late October 1948.

Safsaf 910, Oct. 29, 1948.[72]

Saliha 1,070, Oct. 30, 1948.[73]

Salihiya 1,520, May 25, 1948.

Sammui 310, May 12-Oct. 30, 1948.[74]

Sanbariya 130, not known.

Sa'sa 1,130, Oct. 29-30, 1948.[75]

Shauka Tahta 200, Feb. 2-May 14, 1948.

Shuna 170, not known.

Teitaba 530, Oct. 30, 1948.[76]

Tuleil see Husseiniya.

Ulmaniya 260, Feb. 25-Apr. 20, 1948.

Weiziya not known.

Yarda Jul. 10, 1948.[77]

Zanghariya 840, May 4, 1948.

Zawiya 760, May 24, 1948.

Zuk Fauqani & Zuk Tahtani 1,050, May 11-21, 1948.

Tiberias Sub-District

Dalhamiya 410, probably late April.

Ghuweir Abu Shusha 1,240, Apr. 21-28, 1948.

Hadatha 520-550, Mar. 30-May 12, 1948.[78]

Hittin 1,190, Jul. 17, 1948.[79]

Kafr Sabt 480, Apr. 22, 1948.

Khirbat Qadish 410, Apr. 19-20, 1948.[80]

Khirbat Wa'ra Sauda 1,870 (Mawasi & Wuheib), not known.

Lubiya 2,350, Jul. 17, 1948.[81]

Ma'dhar 480-510, Apr.16-May 12, 1948.[82]

Majdal 240-360, Apr. 22, 1948.

Manara 490, Apr. 10, 1948.[83]

Mansura 360, May 25, 1948

Nasr al-Din 90 - Apr. 12, 1948.[84]

Nimrin 320, Jul. 17-18.[85]

Nuqeib (includes Samra) - 290-320, Apr. 23-24, 1948.[86]

Samakh 3,460-3,660, Apr. 29, 1948.[87]

Samakiya 380, May 4, 1948.

Samra see Nuqeib.

Shajara, 720-770, Apr. 21-May 6, 1948.

Tabigha 330, May 1, 1948.

Ubeidiya 870-920, Mar. 5-Apr. 21, 1948.[88]

Ulam - 720- Mar. 30-May 12, 1948.[89]

Yaquq 210, Jul. 18, 1948.[90]

HAIFA DISTRICT

Haifa Sub-District

Abu Shusha 720, Apr. 9-12.[91]

Abu Zueriq 550, Apr. 12, 1948.[92]

Arab Fuqara 310-340, Apr. 10, 1948.[93]

Arab Nufeiat 820-910, Mar. 30-Apr. 10, 1948.

Atlit 150, not known.

Balad Sheikh 4,120-4,500, Jan. 7-Apr. 25, 1948.

Bureika 290, Mar. 6-Apr. 26, 1948.[94]

Buteimat 110, Apr. 12-May 13, 1948.[95]

Daliyat Ruha 280-310, Apr. 12, 1948.[96]

Dumeira 620, not known.

Ein Ghazal 2,170-2,410, Apr. 25-July 26, 1948.[97]

Ein Haud 650, Jul. 17, 1948.[98]

Ghubaiyat, 1,130-1,260 (includes Naghnagiya), Apr. 9-13, 1948.[99]

Hawsha n.a., Apr. 4-19, 1948.[100]

Ijzim 2,970, Apr. 25-July 26, 1948.

Jaba 1,140, Jul. 25, 1948.[101]

Jalama n.a, Jun. 1, 1948.[102]

Kabara -120, apparently late April-early May 1948.

Kafr Lam 340-380, May 13-15-Jul. 16, 1948.[103]

Kafrin 920; April 12, 1948.[104]

Khirbat Damum 340; late April 1948.

Khirbat Kasayir Apr. 27, 1948.

Khirbat Lid 640, mid-April-mid-May, 1948.[105]

Khubbeiza 290, apparently in mid May 1948.

Mansi 1,200, Apr. 12-15, 1948.[106]

Mazar 210, May 17, 1948.[107]

Mazra'a 460, Feb. 6, 1948.

Naghnagiya see Ghubaiyat.

Qannir 750, Apr. 5-25, 1948.[108]

Qisariya 930-1,240, Jan. 12-Feb. 15, 1948.[109]

Rihaniya 240-340, Apr. 12, 1948.[110]

Sabbarin 1,700-1,880, May 14, 1948.

Sarafand 290, early May 1948-Jul. 17, 1948.[111]

Sarkas Apr. 15-26, 1948.

Sindiyana 1,250-1,390, May 2-14, 1948.

Tantura 1,490-1,650, May 6-21, 1948.

Tira 5,270, Apr. 22-Jul. 16, 1948.[112]

Umm Shauf 480, May 14, 1948.

Umm Zinat 1,470, Apr. 26-May 15, 1948.[113]

Wadi Ara 260, Feb. 27, 1948

Yajur 610 Feb. 18-Apr. 25, 1948.

SAMARIA DISTRICT

Jenin Sub-District

Ein Mansi 90, not known.

Kufeir 140, Apr. 27, 1948.

Lajjun 600, Apr. 16-May 30, 1948.[114]

Mazar 270-350, May 30, 1948.[115]

Nuris 570-700, May 30, 1948.[116]

Zir'in 1,300-1,420, May 28, 1948.

Tulkarm Sub-District

Arab Balawina, Dec. 31, 1947.

Arab Huweitat Mar. 15, 1948.

Arab Zubeidat (Kafr Zibad) 1,590, Apr. 16, 1948.

Kafr Saba 1,270-1,370, May 15, 1948.

Khirbat Azzun (Tabsur) 50, Dec. 21, 1947-Apr. 3, 1948.

Khirbat Beit Lid 460-500, Mar. 20-Apr. 5, 1948.

Khirbat Jalama 70, early February 1948.[117]

Khirbat Manshiya 260-280, Apr. 15, 1948.

Khirbat Zalafa 210-370, Apr. 15, 1948.

Miska 650-880 Apr. 15, 1948.

Qaqun 1,970, May 4 & Jun. 4, 1948.[118]

Umm Khalid 970-1050, Mar. 20, 1948.

Wadi Hawarith 1,330-1,440, Mar. 15, 1948.

JERUSALEM DISTRICT

Hebron Sub-District

Ajjur 3,720 (including Khirbat Ammuriya), Oct. 22-24, 1948.[119]

Barqusiya 330, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[120]

Beit Jibrin 2,430, Jul. 13-14-Oct. 27, 1948.[121]

Beit Nattif 2,150, Oct. 22, 1948.[122]

Dawayima 3,710, Oct. 29, 1948.[123]

Deir Dubban 730, Oct. 22-23, 1948.[124]

Deir Nakh-Khas 600, Oct. 29, 1948.[125]

Kidna 450, Oct. 22-24, 1948.[126]

Mughallis 540, Jul. 16, 1948.[127]

Qubeiba 1,060, Oct. 28, 1948.[128]

Ra'na 190, Oct. 22-23, 1948.[129]

Tell Safi 1,290, Jul. 9, 1948.[130]

Zakariya 1,180, Jul. 22-23-Oct. 22-24, 1948.[131]

Zeita 330, Jul. 9-18, 1948.[132]

Zikrin 330-960, Oct. 22-24, 1948.[133]

Jerusalem Sub-District

Allar 440, Oct. 22, 1948.[134]

Aqqur 40, Jul. 13, 1948.[135]

Artuf 350, Jul. 17-18, 1948.[136]

Beit Itab 540, Oct. 21, 1948.[137]

Beit Mahsir 2,400, May 10, 1948.[138]

Beit Naqquba 240, Jul. 8, 1948.[139]

Beit Thul 260, not known.

Beit Umm Meis 70, Jul. 15, 1948.[140]

Buerij 720, Jul. 15-16, 1948.[141]

Deir Aban - Oct. 19, 1948.[142]

Deir Amr 10, Jul. 14, 1948.[143]

Deir Hawa 60, Oct. 19, 1948.[144]

Deir Rafat 430, Jul. 17-18, 1948.[145]

Deir Sheikh 220, Oct. 21, 1948.[146]

Deir Yasin 610-650, Apr. 9-10, 1948.

Ein Karim 3,180-3,390, Apr. 10-21 & Jul. 10-17, 1948. [147]

Ishwa 620, Jul. 10-18, 1948.[148]

Islin 260, Jul. 10, 1948.[149]

Jarash 190, Oct. 21, 1948.[150]

Jura 420, late Jul. 1948.[151]

Kasla 280, Jul. 14, 1948.[152]

Khirbat Ismallah 20, not known.

Khirbat Lauz 450, Jul. 13-14, 1948.[153]

Khirbat Umur 270, Oct. 21, 1948.[154]

Lifta 2,550-2,730, Dec. 31, 1947-early January 1948.

Maliha 1,940-2,070, Apr. 21-May 6, 1948 & Jul. 14, 1948.[155]

Nataf 40, Apr. 15, 1948.[156]

Qabu 260, Oct. 21, 1948.[157]

Qaluniya 910-970, Apr. 10-May 3, 1948.

Qastel - 90-100- late March 1948-May 3, 1948.[158]

Ras Abu Ammar 620, Oct. 21, 1948.[159]

Sar'a 340, Jul. 10-14, 1948.[160]

Saris 560-600, Apr. 16-May 3, 1948.[161]

Sataf 540, Jul. 13-14, 1948.[162]

Suba 620, Jul. 12/13, 1948.[163]

Sufla 60, Oct. 21, 1948.[164]

Walaja 1,650, Oct. 21, 1948.[165]

LYDDA DISTRICT

Jaffa Sub-District

Abbasiya see Yahudiya.

Abu Kishk 1,900 Mar. 30, 1948.

Beit Dajan 3,840, Apr. 25-May 1, 1948.[166]

Biyar Adas 300, Apr. 12, 1948.

Fajja 1200-1,570, Mar. 17-May 15, 1948.[167]

Haram - see Saiduna Ali.

Jalil 600-1,020, Mar. 23-Apr. 3, 1948.[168]

Jammasin 1,810-2,050, Jan. 7-Mar. 17, 1948.

Jarisha 190, apparently in mid-May 1948.

Kafr Ana 2,000-3,020, Apr. 17-25, 1948.

Kheiriya 1,420-1,600, Apr. 25, 1948.

Mas'udiya 850, Dec. 25, 1947.

Mirr 170-190, Feb. 3-15, 1948.

Muweilih 360, Jul. 9, 1948.[169]

Rantiya 590, Apr. 28-May 13, 1948.[170]

Safiriya 3,070, apparently in late April 1948.

Saiduna Ali- 520-880, Feb. 3, 1948.[171]

Salama 6,730-7,610, Apr. 25, 1948.

Saqiya 1,100-1,240, Apr. 25, 1948.

Sawalima 800, Apr. 20, 1948.

Sheik Muwannis 1,930-2,000, Dec. 1, 1947-Mar. 30, 1948.

Sumeil see Mas'udiya.

Yahudiya 5,650-6,560, May 4-Jul. 10, 1948.[172]

Yazur 4,030, May 1, 1948.

Ramle Sub-District

Abu Fadl (Sautariya) 510, Apr. 7-May 9, 1948.

Abu Shusha 870-950, May 14-20, 1948.

Aqir 2,480-2,710, May 4-6, 1948.[173]

Barfiliya 730, Jul. 15-17, 1948.[174]

Barriya 510, May 1-Jul. 10-11, 1948.[175]

Bashshit 510-1,770, May 12-13, 1948.[176]

Beit Jiz 550-600, Apr. 20, 1948.

Beit Nabala 630-2,310, May 13, 1948.

Beit Shanna 210, not known.

Beit Susin 210, Apr. 20, 1948.

Bir Ma'in 510, Jul. 15-16, 1948.[177]

Bir Salim 410-950, May 9, 1948.

Burj 480, Jul. 15-16, 1948.[178]

Daniyal 410, Jul. 9-10, 1948.

Deir Abu Salama 60, Jul. 13, 1948.[179]

Deir Aiyub 320, May 16, 1948.[180]

Deir Muheisin 460-500, Apr. 7-20, 1948.[181]

Deir Tarif 1,750, Jul. 9-11, 1948.[182]

Haditha 760, Jul. 10-12, 1948.[183]

Idnibba 490, Jul. 9-16, 1948.[184]

Innaba 1,420, Jul. 10-16, 1948.[185]

Jilya 330, Jul. 16, 1948.[186]

Jimzu 1,510, Jul. 10, 1948.[187]

Kharruba 170, Jul. 11, 1948.[188]

Kheima 190, Jul. 16, 1948.[189]

Khirbat Beit Far 300, not known.

Khirbat Buweira 190, not known.

Khirbat Dhuheiriya 100, Jul. 10-11, 1948.[190]

Khirbat Zakariya not known.

Khulda 260-300, Apr. 7-21, 1948.[191]

Latrun 190, May 16, 1948.[192]

Majdal Yaba 1,520, Jul. 12, 1948.[193]

Mansura 90-100, Dec. 22-29, 1947-Apr. 20, 1948.[194]

Mughar 1,740-1,900, May 15-18, 1948.[195]

Mukheizin 200-310, Dec. 29, 1947.[196]

Muzeiri'a 1,160, Jul. 16-18, 1948.[197]

Na'ana 1,470-2,270, May 14-Jun. 12, 1948.[198]

Nabi Rubin 1,420, Jun. 1, 1948.[199]

Qatra 1,210-1,320, May 17, 1948.

Qazaza 940, Apr. 17-Jul. 16, 1948.[200]

Qubab 1,980-2,160, Apr. 20-Jun. 4, 1948.[201]

Qubeiba 1,720-1,870, May 27-Jul. 9-10, 1948.[202]

Qula 1,010, Jul. 11-18, 1948.[203]

Sajad 370, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[204]

Salbit 510, Jul. 16-17, 1948.[205]

Sarafand Amar 1,950, probably in mid-May 1948.

Sarafand Kharab 1,040-1,130, Apr. 20, 1948.[206]

Seidun 210-230, Jan. 1, 1948.[207]

Shahma 280-310, May 14, 1948.

Shilta 100, Jul. 17-18, 1948.[208]

Tina 750, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[209]

Tira 1,290, Jul. 10, 1948.[210]

Umm Kalkha 60, not known.

Wadi Hunein 1,620-1,770, Jan. 5-Apr. 17, 1948.[211]

Yibna 5,400-5,920, Jun. 4-5, 1948.[212]

Zarnuqa 2,380-2,600, May 27, 1948.[213]

GAZA DISTRICT

Gaza Sub-District

Arab Sukreir 390-430, Jan. 25, 1948.

Barbara 2,410, Nov. 30, 1948.[214]

Barqa 890-980, May 13, 1948.

Batani Sharqi 650-710, May 11-13, 1948.[215]

Batani Gharbi 980, Jun. 10-11, 1948.[216]

Beit Affa 700, May 23-Nov. 10, 1948.[217]

Beit Daras 2,750-3,010, May 11-12, 1948.

Beit Jirja 940, Nov. 5, 1948.[218]

Beit Tima 1,060, May 29-31, 1948.[219]

Bi'lin 180, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[220]

Bureir 2,740-4,000, May 12, 1948.

Deir Suneid 730, late October-early November 1948.

Dimra 520, late October-early November 1948.

Faluja 4,670, Oct. 16, 1948.[221]

Hamama 5,000, Jun. 9-Nov. 30, 1948.[222]

Hatta 970, Jul. 17-18, 1948.[223]

Hirbiya 2,240, Nov. 5-30, 1948.[224]

Huj 800-810, May 28, 1948.

Huleiqat 420, May 12-Oct. 29, 1948.[225]

Ibdis 540, May 23, 1948.[226]

Iraq Manshiya 2,010, Oct. 16-17, 1948.[227]

Iraq Suweidan 660, Jul. 9-Nov. 10, 1948.[228]

Isdud 4,620, Nov. 30, 1948.[229]

Jaladiya 360, May 23-Jul. 9-10, 1948.[230]

Jiya 1,230, Nov. 5-30, 1948.[231]

Julis 1,030-1,130, May 23-Jun. 10-11, 1948.[232]

Jura 2,420, Nov. 5, 1948.[233]

Juseir 1,180, late May or early June 1948.[234]

Karatiya, 1,370, May 23, 1948.[235]

Kaufakha 500, Aug. 16-Sept. 24, 1948.[236]

Kaukaba 680, May 12-Oct. 18, 1948.[237]

Khirbat Khisas 150, Nov. 30, 1948.[238]

Masmiya Kabira 2,520, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[239]

Masmiya Saghira 530, Jul. 9-10, 1948.

Muharraqa 580-1,100, May 25-28, 1948.[240]

Najd 600-620, May 12, 1948.

Ni'ilya 1,310, Nov. 5-30, 1948.[241]

Qastina 890, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[242]

Sawafir Gharbiya 1,000-1,030, May 15-18, 1948.[243]

Sawafir Shamaliya, 680, May 11-18, 1948.[244]

Sawafir Sharqiyya 970, May 15-18, 1948.

Sumsum 1,200-1,360, May 12, 1948.

Summeil 950, Jul. 9-10, 1948.[245]

Tell Turmus 760, Jul. 9, 1948.[246]

Yasur 1,070, Jun. 10-11, 1948.[247]

Beersheba Sub-District

Bir Asluj Jun. 11, 1948.[248]

Jammama 150, May 22, 1948.[249]

GALILEE DISTRICT

Acre Sub-District 20,950-21,860

Beisan Sub-District 9,960-13,640

Nazareth Sub-District 7,230-7,540

Safad Sub-District 34,320-36,030

Tiberias Sub-District 17,430-17,940

HAIFA DISTRICT

Haifa Sub-District 35,290-37,120

SAMARIA DISTRICT

Jenin Sub-District 2,970-3,300

Tulkarm Sub-District 8,830-9,570

JERUSALEM DISTRICT

Hebron Sub-District 19,040-19,670

Jerusalem-Sub-District 22,260-22,930

LYDDA DISTRICT

Jaffa Sub-District 39,060-43,670

Ramle Sub-District 47,940-54,410

GAZA DISTRICT

Gaza Sub-District 58,850-61,400

Beersheba Sub-District 150

Villages Total 324,280-349,230

Cities Total 247,403-248,403

Negev Bedouins 30,510[250]

Refugees Settled in Israeli Localities other than their Original Sites 19,072[251]

Palestine Grand Total 583,121-609,071

Notes

[1] Asher Goren (Israel's Foreign Ministry's Middle East Department), 'The Palestinian Arab
Refugee Problem', Sept. 27, 1948, p. 2, CZA A457/113; "Refugees Strain Arab Towns," New York
Times, Jul. 26, 1948; "Official Puts Arab Refugees at 300,000," ibid., Jul. 24, 1948; "Disease
threatens Refugees," ibid., Aug. 3, 1948,.

[2] David Ben-Gurion, Yoman Hamilhama Tashah-Tashat (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publishing
House, 1983), Vol. 2, p. 487 (diary entry for Jun. 5, 1948).

[3] Tene, "Migration of the Palestinian Arabs in the Period 1.12.47-1.6.48," Jun. 30, 1948, pp. 1-2,
IDFA, 1957/100001/781; Y. Weitz, E. Danin & Z. Lifshitz, "Memorandum on the Settlement of the
Arab Refugees. Submitted to the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government," Oct. 31, 1948, p. 4,
HA 80/58/13.

[4] UN General Assembly, "Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted
to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations in Pursuance of
Paragraph 2, Part II, of Resolution 186 (S-2) of the General Assembly of 14 May 1948" (General
Assembly Official Records: Third Session Supplement No. 11; A/648, Sept. 16, 1948)," p. 78; Beirut
to Foreign Office, Oct. 1, 1948, FO 371/68679; "Plight of 472,000 Arab Refugees," Times, Oct. 21,
1948.

[5] "Refugees Put at 700,000," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1948; Rony E. Gabbay, A Political Study of
the Arab-Jewish Conflict. The Arab Refugee Problem (A Case Study) (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz,
1959), pp. 167-68.

[6] Beirut to Foreign Office, Oct. 1, 3, 1948, FO 371/68679; "The Number of Arab Refugees (Revised
Version)," Israel State Archives (ISA), FM 347/2 (apparently written in august/September 1949); W.
de St. Aubin, "Peace and Refugees in the Middle East," Middle East Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul.
1949), p. 249.

[7] Sir J. Troutbeck, "Summary of general impressions gathered during week-end visit to the Gaza
District," Jun. 16, 1949, FO 371/75342/E7816.

[8] Palestine Office of Statistics, Village Statistics 1945 (Jerusalem, 1945), "Explanatory Note," p. 2
(A5).

[9] Government for Palestine, Supplement to Survey of Palestine: Notes compiled for the
information of the United Nations Special Committee of Palestine, (London: HMSO, June 1947;
reprinted in full permission by the Institute for Palestine studies, Washington D.C.), p. 14.

[10] Supplement to Survey on Palestine, pp. 10-11; Israeli Foreign Ministry, Middle East
Department, "The Palestinian Refugee Problem (Report No. 3)," Feb. 2, 1949, ISA FM 347/23; idem,
"Notes on Arab Refugees, the Boundaries of Israel, and Jerusalem," Aug. 22, 1949, ibid.; "The
Number of Arab Refugees (Revised Version)"; Military Government HQ, "Tables of the Arab
Population Categorized by Settlements and Religions, Feb. 15, 1950," IDFA 1960/28/29, May 9,
1959; Walter Pinner, How Many Arab Refugees? A Critical Study of UNRWA's Statistics and
Reports (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959), Part III.
In its report, submitted to the General Assembly on Dec. 28, 1949, the United Nations Conciliation
Commission for Palestine estimated the number of arab refugees outside Israel's territory at
726,000, of whom 627,000 were eligible for relief from the United Nations. See: "Final Report of the
United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East: An Approach for economic
development in the Middle East" (Lake Success: United Nations, Dec. 28, 1949), A/AC.25/6, pp. 18,
22-24.

[11] Urban population figures are taken from Supplement to Survey of Palestine, pp.12-13.

[12] Ministry of Minorities Affairs & Central Bureau of Statistics, "List of City Residents," Sept. 26,
1948, FM 2564/22.

[13] "Survey of the Arab Situation in Haifa," Sept. 22, 1948, IDFA 1954/219/240.

[14] "Protocol of a Meeting to Discuss the Problems in the Occupied Cities of Jaffa, Lydda, and
Ramle," Aug. 16, 1948, IDFA 1949/1331/54; Ministry of Minorities Affairs & Central Bureau of
Statistics, "List of City Residents," Sept. 26, 1948, FM 2564/22.

[15] Tene, "Migration of the Palestinian Arabs in the Period 1.12.47-1.6.48. Annex 1: Vacated Arab
Villages," June 30, 1948, IDFA, 1957/100001/781, p. 2.

[16] "Protocol of a Meeting to Discuss the Problems in the Occupied Cities of Jaffa, Lydda, and
Ramle."

[17] Unless otherwise indicated, rural population figures are based on the Village Statistics 1945&
Tene, "Migration of the Palestinian Arabs," Annex 1: Vacated Arab Villages. Departure dates are
based on the latter study, unless indicated otherwise.

[18] Tzadok Eshel, Hativat Carmeli Bemilhemet Haqomemiut (Tel Aviv: Maarachot, 1973), p. 291.

[19] Hagana Operational Directorate, "Logbook of the War of Independence, 3.1.48-14.5.48," IDFA,
1954/464/2, p. 291.

[20] Intercepted communications from the ALA forces in north Palestine & the residents of Birwa,
Jun. 14, 1948, HA 105/92b, p. 91; Hiram to Tene, "The Battle for Birwa According to Acre
Residents," Jul. 4, 1948, ibid., p. 159.

[21] Seventh Brigade/Intelligence, "News Logbook 8," Jul. 14, 1948 & 7 th Brigade/Operational HQ,
"Dekel Operational Order ," Jul. 18, 1948, IDFA 1952/273/5.

[22] Front A, "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4: 300800-302000," IDFA 1992/164/1.

[23] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 290.

[24] "Operation Hiram - Intelligence Report, Oct. 28-31, 1948," IDFA 1992/164/1.

[25] Agam/Matkal, "Hanes Hagadol (General Staff's operational logbook), May 22, IDFA
1975/922/1175, p. 48.

[26] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[27] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 291.

[28] Ibid., p. 290.

[29] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[30] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 290.

[31] Ibid., p. 292.

[32] Front A, "Hiram Operational Report, No. 3: 292000-300600," IDFA 1992/164/1.

[33] "Logbook of the War of Independence, 3.1.48-14.5.48," p. 291.

[34] Ibid.

[35] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[36] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 290.

[37] "Logbook of the War of Independence, 3.1.48-14.5.48," p. 291.

[38] Beisan National Committee (mid-March 1948), IDFA 1975/922/648.

[39] Tzefa to Tene, "Evacuation of Arab Villages," Apr. 6, 1948, HA 105/257, p. 24.

[40] Beisan National Committee; Tene, "Migration."

[41] Beisan National Committee.

[42] "Carmeli Brigade: News Summary No. 6 for May 25, 1948," IDFA 1949/6127/117.

[43] Beisan National Committee.

[44] Ibid.; Golani/Intellgence, "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands. Captured by the
12thBattalion," Jun. 25, 1948, IDFA 1951/84/128.

[45] Beisan National Committee.

[46] Golani/Intellgence, "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands. Captured by the 12 thBattalion,"
June 25, 1948, IDFA 1951/84/128.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Tene, "Migration."

[49] Galilee Front, "List of Villages (and Cities) that Fell to Our Hands on Jul. 15-18, 1948," IDFA
1949/7249/119.

[50] Ibid.

[51] "First Brigade: Operational Logbook," May 16, 1948, IDFA 1951/665/1; Eshel, Hativat Carmeli,
p. 291.

[52] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[53] Ibid.; "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 265.

[54] "Operation Hiram - Intelligence Report, Oct. 28-31, 1948.

[55] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 283.

[56] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[57] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[58] Front A, "Hiram Operational Report, No. 5: 302000-310000," IDFA 1992/164/1.

[59] IDF History Branch, Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut (Tel Aviv: Maarachot, 1975; first published
1959), pp. 243-44.

[60] "Operation Hiram - Intelligence Report, Oct. 28-31, 1948.

[61]Golani-Intelligence, "Daily Summary," Nov. 6, 1948, IDFA 1951/128/84; "Hiram Operational

Report, No. 4."

[62] Bulgarim to Matkal, "Daily Report," May 2, 1948, 1975/922/1044, p. 313; Tene, "Migration."

[63] "Logbook of the War of Independence."

[64] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[65] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 285.

[66] "Tene News," Apr. 24 & 28, 1948, HA 105/98, pp. 89, 93; Tene, "Migration." Weitz, Danin, and
Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[67] Tene, "Migration."

[68] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 5."

[69] Bulgarim to Matkal, "Daily Report," May 29, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1214; "Operation Hiram -
Intelligence Report, Oct. 28-31, 1948.

[70] Bulgarim to Matkal, "Daily Report," May 2, 1948, IDFA, 1975/922/1044, p. 313; Tene,
"Migration."

[71] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[72] "Operation Hiram - Intelligence Report, Oct. 28-31, 1948."

[73] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[74] Ibid.

[75] Front A, "Hiram Operational Report, No. 3: 292000-300600," IDFA 1992/164/1.

[76] "Hiram Operational Report, No. 4."

[77] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 291.

[78] Tzefa to Tene, "Evacuation of Arab Villages," Apr. 6, 1948, HA 105/257, p. 24;
Golani/Intellgence, "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands. Captured by the 12 th Battalion," June 25,
1948, IDFA 1951/84/128; "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 280.

[79] Golani/Intelligence, "Daily Summary," Jul. 17, 1948, IDFA 1951/128/84.

[80] "Tene News," Apr. 24, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 89; "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands.
Captured by the 12th Battalion."

[81] Golani/Intelligence, "Daily Summary," Jul. 17, 1948, IDFA 1951/128/84.

[82] Tzefa to Tene, "Evacuation of Arab Villages." "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands";
"Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 280.

[83] "List of Arab Villages in Our Hands. Captured by the 12 th Battalion."

[84] Ibid.

[85] Golani/Intelligence, "Daily Summary," Jul. 18, 1948, IDFA 1951/128/84.

[86] "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands."

[87] Ibid.

[88] Tzuri to Tene, Ubeidiya Arabs Vacated their Village and Moved to Transjordan," Apr. 21, 1948,
HA 105/257, p. 3.

[89] Tzefa to Tene, "Evacuation of Arab Villages"; "List of the Arab Villages in Our Hands";
"Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 291.

[90] Galilee Front, "List of Villages (and Cities) that Fell to Our Hands on Jul. 15-18, 1948," IDFA
1949/7249/119.

[91] Golani/Intelligence, "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 14 th Battalion," Jun. 25, 1948, IDFA,
1951/128/84; "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 251.

[92] "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 14 th Battalion."

[93] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[94] Tiroshi to Tene, "Evacuation of Bureika," Apr. 26, 1948, HA 105/257, p. 11; "Tene News," Apr.
24, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 89.

[95] "Hanes Hagadol,", p. 9; "Tene News," Apr. 24, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 89; "List of the Arab
Villages Captured by the 14th Battalion."

[96] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 255.

[97] Alexandroni Report, Jul. 25, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176.

[98] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 291.

[99] "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 14 th Battalion"; "Logbook of the War of Independence,"
pp. 248, 255, 257.

[100] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 296.

[101] Alexandroni Report, Jul. 25, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176.

[102] Golani/Intelligence, "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 13 th Battalion," Jun. 25, 1948,
IDFA, 1951/128/84.
[103] "Tene News," May 13, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 107; "Hanes Hagadol," May 17, 1948, p. 26;
IDF, Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 252.

[104] "Logbook of the War of Independence," pp. 253-54.

[105] Golani to Matkal, May 15, 1948, IDFA 1954/464/1.

[106] "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 14 th Battalion"; "Logbook of the War of Independence,"
p. 257.

[107] "Hanes Hagadol," May 17, 1948, p. 26.

[108] Tiroshi to Tene, "Qannir," Apr. 26, 1948, HA 105/257, p. 16; "Tene News," Apr. 29, 1948, HA
105/98, p. 95.

[109] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[110] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 255.

[111] "Tene News," May 13, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 107; Eshel, Hativat Carmeli, p. 291.

[112] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 68," Jul. 17, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9.

[113] Tirsohi to Tene, "Evacuation of Umm Zinat," Apr. 26, 1948, HA 105/257, p. 16; "List of Arab
Villages Captured by the 14th Battalion."

[114] Tene, "Migration"; "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 14 th Battalion"; Bulgarim to Matkal,
"Daily Report," Apr. 16, 1948, 1975/922/1044, p. 317.

[115] "List of Arab Villages Captured by the 13th Battalion."

[116] "Hanes Hagadol," p. 93.

[117] 01132 to Tene, "The Evacuation of Jalama," Feb. 8, 1948, HA 105/215, p. 44.

[118] "Qaqun in the Triangle and Arab Yibna in the South Captured by Our Armies," Haaretz, Jun. 6,
1948.

[119] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations," Oct. 24, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/900;
Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 15-Dec. 9," ibid.

[120] Avraham Ayalon, Hativat Givati Mul Hapolesh Hamitsri (Tel Aviv: Maarachot, 1963), p. 254.

[121] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 65," Jul. 13, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9; Ayalon, Hativat Givati, pp.
557-58; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Hamilhama, Vol. 3, p. 779 (diary entry for Oct. 27, 1948).

[122] Netanel Lorch, The Edge of the Sword. Israel's War of Independence 1947-1949(Jerusalem:
Massada, 1961), p. 431.

[123] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 558.

[124] Ibid., p. 550.

[125] Ibid., p. 558.

[126] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 22/23, 1948," IDFA 1975/922/900;
Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 15-Dec. 9," ibid.

[127] Agam to Givati, Jul. 16, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1226.

[128] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 558.

[129] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 22/23, 1948" & "Summary of
Operations, Oct. 15-Dec. 9."

[130] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[131] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 22/23, 1948."

[132] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254; "Hanes Hagadol," p. 48.

[133] Weitz, Danin, & Lifshitz, "Memorandum"; Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of

Operations, Oct. 22/23, 1948," IDFA 1975/922/900; Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of
Operations, Oct. 15-Dec. 9," ibid.

[134] Salim Tamari (ed.), Jerusalem 1948. The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the
War(Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 1999), p. 86.

[135] Ibid.

[136] "Arab News Bulletin," Jul. 18, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/75.

[137] Tamari, Jerusalem 1948, p. 86.

[138] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 289.

[139] "Arab News Bulletin," Jul. 8, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/75.

[140] Elhannan Orren, Baderekh el Hair: Mivtsa Danny (Tel Aviv: IDF Publishing House, 1976), p.
133.

[141] Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 260.

[142] Ben-Gurion, Yoman Hamilhama, Vol. 3, p. 753 (diary entry for oct. 19, 1948).

[143] Yeruham, "Weekly Report of Jerusalem District Departments," Jul. 14-20, 1948, IDFA
1949/2504/7.

[144] Ben-Gurion, Yoman Hamilhama, Vol. 3, p. 753 (diary entry for oct. 19, 1948).

[145] IDF History Branch, Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 263.

[146] Tamari, Jerusalem 1948, p. 86.

[147] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 65," Jul. 13, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9; Ben-Gurion, Yoman
Hamilhama, Vol. 2, p. 589 (entry for Jul. 15, 1948); Yeruham, "Weekly Report of Jerusalem District
Departments," Jul. 14-20, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/7.

[148] Harel to General Staff, Jul. 10, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1237; IToldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p.
263.
[149] Harel to General Staff, Jul. 10, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1237.

[150] Tamari, Jerusalem 1948, p. 86.

[151] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 76," Jul. 26, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/49.

[152] "Arab News Bulletin," Jul. 14, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/75.

[153] Orren, Baderekh, p. 133.

[154] Tamari, Jerusalem 1948, p. 86.

[155] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 65," Jul. 13, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9; Ben-Gurion, Yoman
Hamilhama, Vol. 2, p. 589 (entry for Jul. 15, 1948); Yeruham, "Weekly Report of Jerusalem District
Departments," Jul. 14-20, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/7.

[156] Tamari, Jerusalem 1948, p. 86.

[157] Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 311.

[158] "Evacuation of the Qastel," Mar. 25, 1948, IDFA 1948/500/28; Tene, "Migration."

[159] Tamari, Jerusalem 1948, p. 86.

[160] Harel to General Staff, Jul. 10, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1237; "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 65," Jul.
13, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9.

[161] "Logbook of the War of Independence," p. 258; Tene, "Migration."

[162] Orren, Baderekh, p. 133.

[163] Intercepted Arab military communications, Jul. 13, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 58; "Hashmonai
Bulletin No. 63," Jul. 13, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/75.

[164] Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 311.

[165] Lorch, The Edge, p. 432.

[166] "Tene News," May 9, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 102.

[167] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[168] Ibid.; Tiroshi to Tene, "Vacation of Jalil," Mar. 23, 1948, HA 105/257.

[169] Gershon Rivlin & Zvi Sinai (eds.), Hativat Alexandroni Bemilhemet Haqomemiut (Tel Aviv:
Maarachot, 1964), p. 285.

[170] Tiroshi to Tene, "The Rantiya Villagers on the Move," Apr. 28, 1948, HA 105/257, p. 64; "Tene
News," May 14, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 110.

[171]Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum."

[172] Ibid.; "Arab News Bulletin," Jul. 10, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/75.

[173] "Flight from Aqir," May 5, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 244.

[174] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 68," Jul. 17, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9; Agam report, Jul. 15, 1948,
IDFA 1975/922/1226.

[175] Yiftach to General Staff, May 1, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1226; Yiftach HQ, "Daily Report," Jul.
11, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1237.

[176] Tene, May 12, 1948 HA 105/92a, p. 252.

[177] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 68," Jul. 17, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9; Danny HQ to General Staff,
Jul. 16, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176, p. 42.

[178] Ibid.; Danny HQ to General Staff, Jul. 16, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176, p. 42.

[179] Yiftach/Intelligence, "Daily Report," Jul. 13, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1237.

[180] Harel to Matkal, May 16, 1948, IDFA 1954/464/1.

[181] Naim to Tene, "Operation Nahshon," Apr. 7, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 181; "Tene News," Apr. 22,
1948, HA 105/98, p. 87.

[182] "Arab News," Jul. 11, 1948, HA 105/92b, p. 141.

[183] Rivlin & Sinai, Hativat Alexandroni, p. 280; Allon to General Staff, Jul. 13, 1948,
1975/922/1176; "More Villages Captured," Palestine Post, Jul. 14, 1948.

[184] Givati to General Staff, Jul. 16, 1948, 1975/922/1176, p. 43; Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[185] "Arab News Bulletin," Jul. 10, 1948, IDFA 1949/5254/75; Givati Operational Logbook, Jul. 16,
1948, IDFA 1975/922/1226.

[186] Givati Operational Logbook, Jul. 16, 1948.

[187] Debriefing of a Jimzu resident, Jul. 13, 1948, HA 105/92b, p. 77.

[188] Yiftach/Intelligence, "Daily Report," Jul. 11, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1237.

[189] Givati Operational Logbook, Jul. 16, 1948.

[190] Orren, Baderekh, p. 147.

[191] Naim to Tene, "Operation Nahshon," Apr. 7, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 181; "Summary of
Conquests in the Southern Sector up to Jun. 11, 1948," HA 105/92b, p. 149.

[192] "Hanes Hagadol," p. 18.

[193] Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 258.

[194] Tene, "Migration from December to the End of February," HA 105/102, p. 14; Village Files, HA
105/134, p. 76; "Summary of Conquests in the Southern Sector up to Jun. 11, 1948," HA 105/92b, p.
149.

[195] Ibid.; Givati to Matkal, May 15, 1948, IDFA 1954/464/1.

[196] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum"; Tene, "Migration from December to the End of
February," p. 14.
[197] Orren, Baderekh, pp. 178-83.

[198] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum"; Agam/Hashmonai, "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 17,"
Jun. 14, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/6.

[199] "Summary of Conquests in the Southern Sector," p. 149.

[200] Doron to Tene, "Qazaza Evacuation," HA 105/257, p. 10; Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[201] Village Files, HA 105/134, p. 208; "The Qubab Village is Captured," Haaretz, Jun. 4, 1948.

[202] Doron to Tene, "Report on the Qubeiba Operation," May 30, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 55;
Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[203] Rivlin & Sinai, Hativat Alexandroni, pp. 288, 291-99.

[204] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[205] "Hashmonai Bulletin No. 68," Jul. 17, 1948, IDFA 1949/2504/9.

[206] "Summary of Conquests in the Southern Sector," p. 149.

[207] Ibid.

[208] Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiut, p. 262.

[209] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 263.

[210] Rivlin & Sinai, Hativat Alexandroni, p. 288.

[211] 02117 to Tene, "In Wadi Hunein," Jan. 5, 1948, HA 105/148, p. 195; "Summary of Conquests in
the Southern Sector," p. 149.

[212] "Qaqun in the 'Triangle' and Arab Yibna in the South Captured by Our Armies," Haaretz, Jun.
6, 1948.

[213] Doron to Tene, "The Zarnuqa Village," May 30, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 225.

[214] Operational Headquarters to General Staff/operations, "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain," Dec.
2, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1025.

[215] Doron to Tene, "Batani Sharqi," May 13, 1948 HA 105/92a, p. 47; "Tene News," May 12, 1948,
HA 105/98, p. 106.

[216] "Capture of Villages," Jun. 14, 1948, HA 105/92b, p. 91.

[217] "Tene News," May 23, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 121; Arif al-Arif, al-Nakba: Nakbat Bait al-Maqdis
wa-l-Firdaws al-Mafqud (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Asriya, 1956), Vol. 3, p. 720.

[218] "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain"; Front D to General Staff, Nov. 5, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176,
p. 136; Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 571.

[219] "Hanes Hagadol," p. 95.

[220] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[221] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations," Oct. 18, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/900.

[222] Doron to Tene, "An Attack on Hamama," Jun. 9, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 193; "Evacuation of the
Coastal Plain."

[223] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 324.

[224] Ibid., p. 571; "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain."

[225] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 15-Dec. 9," IDFA 1975/922/900;
Benjamin Magen to General Staff, Oct. 20, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176, p. 118.

[226] "Tene News," May 23, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 121.

[227] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations," Oct. 16-17, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/900.

[228] Ibid., Nov. 10, 1948; Arif Arif, al-Nakba, Vol. 3, p. 718.

[229] "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain."

[230] "Tene News," May 23, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 121; Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 263.

[231] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 571; "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain."

[232] Weitz, Danin, and Lifshitz, "Memorandum"; "Capture of Villages," Jun. 14, 1948, HA 105/92b,
p. 91; "Tene News," May 23, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 121.

[233] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 571.

[234] "Interrogation of Khalil Hajj Ahmad Muslih," Jun. 21, 1948, HA 105/92b, p. 102.

[235] "Tene News," May 23, 1948, HA 105/98, p. 121.

[236] Sergei to General Staff, Aug. 16, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1176; Yiftah/Intelligence to General
Staff, Sept. 24, 1948, IDFA 1975/922/1214.

[237] Fifth Brigade/Intelligence, "Summary of Operations, Oct. 15-Dec. 9," IDFA 1975/922/900.

[238] "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain."

[239] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 263.

[240] Sergei to Matkal, May 28, 1948, IDFA 1954/464/1.

[241] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 571; "Evacuation of the Coastal Plain."

[242] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 262.

[243] "Summary of Conquests in the Southern Sector," p. 149; Doron to Tene, "Capture of the
Sawafirs," May 19, 1948, HA 105/92a, p. 14.

[244] Doron to Tene, "Capture of the Sawafirs"; Doron to Tene, "The Capture of Beit Daras," May 13,
1948, ibid., p. 46; Village Files, HA 105/143, pp. 39, 46; "Summary of Conquests in the Southern
Sector," p. 149.

[245] Ayalon, Hativat Givati, p. 254.

[246] Ibid., p. 263.

[247] "Capture of Villages," Jun. 14, 1948, HA 105/92b, p. 91.

[248] Bulgarim to Matkal, "Daily Report," Jun. 12, 1948, IDFA, 1975/922/1214.

[249] Tene, "Migration."

[250] The Village Statistics set the number of the Negev Bedouins on 47,980; 17,470 of these,
according to Israeli figures, remained in situ. See: Military Administration HQ, "Table of the Arab
Population by Settlements and Religions, Feb. 15, 1950," IDFA 1960/28/29.

[251] Ibid.

Abbas's Fable
by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
May 20, 2011
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 "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 Gen. 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 so-called 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.

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?
Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College
London, incoming director of the Middle East Forum and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

Reclaiming a historical truth

by Efraim Karsh
Haaretz
June 10, 2011

I agree with Shlomo Avineri, in his op-ed "Zionism does not need propaganda" (Haaretz English
Edition, May 23), that the tragedy befalling the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 was exclusively of their
own making, and that there is therefore "a grave moral defect in the Nakba discourse."

I am surprised, however, by his assertion that "despite decades of research, to this day no document
or broadcast has been found confirming ... [any order] by the Arab leadership for the population to
leave." This claim couldn't be further from the truth. While most Palestinian Arabs needed little
encouragement to take to the road, large numbers of them were driven from their homes by their
own leaders and/or the "Arab Liberation Army" that had entered Palestine prior to the end of the
Mandate, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens
of the prospective Jewish state. Of this there is an overwhelming and incontrovertible body of
contemporary evidence - intelligence briefs, captured Arab documents, press reports, personal
testimonies and memoirs, and so on and so forth.

In the largest and best-known example of Arab-instigated exodus, 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. Only days earlier, Tiberias'
6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish
wishes (a fortnight after the exodus, Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British high commissioner of
Palestine, reported that the Tiberias Jews "would welcome [the] Arabs back" ). In Jaffa, Palestine's
largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea;
in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed
out residents of several neighborhoods, while in Beisan the women and children were ordered out as
Transjordan's Arab Legion dug in.

Avineri mentions the strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade the Haifa Arabs to stay but not the AHC's
order to leave - which was passed on to the local leadership by phone and secretly recorded by the
Haganah. Nor does he note the well-documented efforts of Haifa's Arab leadership to scaremonger
their hapless constituents, reluctant in the extreme to leave, into fleeing. Some Arab residents
received written threats that, unless they left town, they would be branded as traitors deserving of
death. Others were told they could expect no mercy from the Jews.

In the words of a British intelligence report: "After the Jews had gained control of the town, and in
spite of a subsequent food shortage, many would not have responded to the call for a complete
evacuation but for the rumors and propaganda spread by the National Committee members
remaining in the town. Most widespread was a rumor that Arabs remaining in Haifa would be taken
as hostages by [the] Jews in the event of future attacks on other Jewish areas: and an effective piece
of propaganda with its implied threat of retribution when the Arabs recapture the town, is that
[those] people remaining in Haifa acknowledged tacitly that they believe in the principle of a Jewish
State."

Nor was this phenomenon confined to Palestinian cities. The deliberate depopulation of Arab
villages too, and their transformation into military strongholds was a hallmark of the Arab campaign
from the onset of hostilities. As early as December 1947, villagers in the Tul Karm sub-district were
ordered out by their local leaders, and in mid-January Haganah intelligence briefs reported the
evacuation of villages in the Hula Valley to accommodate local gangs and newly arrived ALA forces.

By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of the country, gaining considerable
momentum in April and May as Arab forces throughout Palestine were being comprehensively
routed. On April 18, the Haganah's intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general order
to remove the women and children from all villages bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later,
its Haifa counterpart reported an ALA directive to evacuate all Arab villages between Tel Aviv and
Haifa in anticipation of a new general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in the eastern
Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while
in the Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan's Arab Legion ordered the emptying of scores of villages.

To sum up, Zionism needs no propaganda to buttress its case, yet the historical truth needs to be
reclaimed after decades of relentless distortion.

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of "Palestine
Betrayed."

Israel's Human Chameleon Strikes Again

by Efraim Karsh
American Thinker
July 10, 2011

In the opening scene of Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, F. Scott Fitzgerald is seen to observe a
curious little man as he chats with socialites at a sumptuous bash, speaking adoringly of President
Coolidge and the Republican Party -- all in an upper class Boston accent. Then, an hour later, the
renowned novelist is stunned to see the same man speaking to the kitchen help. Only now he claims
to be a Democrat, and his accent has become coarse as if he were one of the crowd.

This scene comes to mind when observing the incessant, ideological acrobatics of the Israeli
academic Benny Morris. For years, he basked in the dubious glory of being one of Israel's foremost,
homegrown bashers, deriding Zionism as "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement ...
intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs" and going out of
his way to fabricate Israel's history so as to prove the sinful circumstances of its birth. He paraded
the Arab canard of an age-old Zionist design to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs from their homes;
he ignored the sustained Arab efforts to destroy the Jewish national cause and the no less sustained
efforts of the Jews at peaceful coexistence, both prior to and after Israel's establishment; he
dismissed the Zionist acceptance of the November 1947 partition resolution as a ruse, claiming that
"large sections of Israeli society" were looking forward to war as an opportunity for territorial
expansion and ethnic cleansing; he even went so far as to present the Palestinians as the real victims
of the pan-Arab assault on Israel in May 1948, with the Jewish state supposedly colluding with the
invading Arab states to prevent the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.

But then, all of a sudden, Morris was reborn. He acknowledged truths about the Arab-Israeli conflict
that he had previously taken great pains to deny and distort, notably that "the Palestinian national
movement, from its inception, has denied the Zionist movement any legitimacy and stuck fast to the
vision of a 'Greater Palestine'." He even went so far as to arguethat there was nothing
fundamentally wrong in the notion of mass displacement of Arabs so long as it was born of dire
necessity and that, over the long term, such a displacement might even have been conducive to
peace. Had David Ben-Gurion "gone the whole hog" and "engineered a comprehensive rather than a
partial transfer," he claimed, "today's Middle East would be a healthier, non-violent place."
This turnover astounded many Israel-bashers, who failed to grasp how the person who for over a
decade had provided them with endless ammunition against the Jewish state's legitimacy could so
whimsically change his colors. And as if to add insult to injury, Morris has never produced any
evidence substantiating his newly-adopted, anti-Palestinian stance: Surely the launch of the
September 2000 "al-Aqsa Intifada," which triggered Morris's u-turn, does not change one iota of
what happened some fifty-plus years earlier. Nor for that matter, has he ever disowned his early
writings, which continue to adorn countless anti-Israel sites and publications, thus placing him in
the unique position of simultaneously entertaining, and expressing, wildly discrepant views to
different audiences.

It was hardly surprising, therefore, that when he arrived last month at the London School of
Economics (LSE), perhaps the foremost leftist bastion of British academia, Morris was accosted by
agitated activists protesting his public utterances. "Earlier that evening, Palestinian rights
campaigners sitting in a coffee shop near the LSE, spotted Benny Morris walking down Kingsway, a
busy street near Holborn Tube Station," reported a London-based pro-Palestinian website.

This was too good an opportunity to miss; in a flash, campaigners gathered around him and took
turns to put questions directly to Morris about his writings and statements on the necessity of ethnic
cleansing, his call for the caging of Palestinians, and the racist overtones of his descriptions of Arabs.
Morris ignored the questions and instead marched on ... his demeanor throughout had been more
like a criminal trying to hide from the spotlight rather than an academic confident of his ground and
willing to take up the invite of open debate.

For Morris, however, this less than extraordinary encounter -- controversial speakers on British, and
Israeli campuses for that matter, are often given heated reception -- was not only evocative of the
Nazi persecution of the Jews but also a dark omen as to "where Britain, and possibly Western
Europe as a whole, are heading." "Violence was thick in the air though none was actually used," he
wrote. "Passersby looked on in astonishment, and perhaps shame, but it seemed the sight of angry
bearded, caftaned Muslims was sufficient to deter any intervention. To me, it felt like Brownshirts in
a street scene in 1920s Berlin -- though on Kingsway no one, to the best of my recall, screamed the
word 'Jew'."

This metaphor couldn't be further from the truth. Had Morris actually run into a group of Nazi thugs
on a Berlin street, he would have been fortunate to escape with his life rather than enjoy a nice cup
of tea at the university's lecture hall a few minutes later, before delivering an address that by his own
account "passed remarkably smoothly."

But then, humility was never one of Morris's trademarks. In a manner that would put Woody Allen's
human chameleon to shame, Morris made an art of portraying his ideological acrobatics as moral
decisions exacting a heavy personal and professional price. For years, he cast himself as a victim of
Israel's political and academic establishments, which allegedly denied him a tenured position at a
local university. This patent fabrication -- the respective faculties in Israel's universities have long
been dominated by Morris's ideological fellow travelers -- won him international sympathy (and
besmirched Israel's reputation for its supposed encroachment on academic freedoms), so much so
that then-president Ezer Weizmann personally intervened to arrange Morris a tenured post. Now
that he has changed his colors, Morris is supposedly victimized by Islamists and anti-Semites of all
hues for his heroic defense of Israel.

As before, this false pretence has had its fair share of takers. Only now it is Israel's supporters who
are willfully turning a blind eye to Morris's past antics, and their lingering damage to the Jewish
state's international reputation, in the desperate hope of scoring a point in the rearguard action
against the country's growing de-legitimization. Yet they shouldn't be holding their breath, for there
are clear indications that Israel's human chameleon is laying the groundwork for another dramatic
flip flop.

Thus, for example, he has recently pulled out of a high profile conference in Washington, D.C.,
organized by a pro-Israel advocacy group, having negotiated a sumptuous lecturer fee and travel
arrangements. More publicly, he chose to conclude a recent article indicting the Palestinians of
misleading the West by pretending to speak peace while holding fast to their historic goal of
destroying Israel with a withering attack on the Netanyahu government "that has offered the
Palestinians nothing that any Arab or the international community, including the US, could accept
as a reasonable minimum the Palestinians should agree to."

Even if true, the government's behavior would be fully commensurate with Morris's prognosis in the
article: For it makes no sense whatsoever to promote a Palestinian state that will become a
springboard for attacks against Israel (a prognosis that was actually made by Netanyahu two
decades before Morris).

Yet as we all know, far from offering the Palestinians nothing, the Netanyahu government took the
unprecedented step of freezing all building activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order
to bring them back to the negotiating table, from which they walked away in the hope that the
Obama administration would deliver unreciprocated Israeli concessions. Besides, isn't Netanyahu
the first prime minister to have made the two-state solution the cornerstone of a Likud-led
government: first in his June 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech, a mere three months after assuming
the premiership, then in his May 2011 congressional address, where he expressed the readiness "to
make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace" that would allow the Palestinians to "enjoy
a national life of dignity as a free, viable, and independent people in their own state [as well as] a
prosperous economy, where their creativity and initiative can flourish"?

That Morris has been able to engage in this intricate game of doublespeak for so long, without
paying any professional or personal price, is a sad testament to the shortness of public memory and
the utter ruthlessness of the Arab-Israeli propaganda war. And while one can only speculate about
Morris's next somersault, it is clear that this human chameleon will have no problem in finding the
"facts" to back up whatever his political convictions demand at that time-and the useful idiots to
applaud them.

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia), and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

A Chameleon, Nevertheless
by Efraim Karsh
American Thinker
July 24, 2011

While I am relieved to hear that Benny Morris is not entertaining any flip flops in the near future,
hisrebuttal to my American Thinker article fails to answer the central question I posed: How can he
in good conscience (not to mention the minimum academic or intellectual integrity) espouse the
views he presently claims to uphold without retracting his previous writings on the Arab-Israeli
conflict?

Since the outbreak of the Palestinian war of terror in September 2000, Morris has been playing an
intricate game of Jekyll-and-Hyde. In press articles and media appearances, he blames the
Palestinians for initiating and perpetuating the conflict since the 1920s and 1930s. In his books, he
casts Israel in the role of the regional villain, as he has done for decades.

The 2001 paperback edition of his history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Righteous Victims, opens with
a famous quote by the poet W.H. Auden - "Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return" - that leaves
no doubt as to which side is the aggressor and which is the victim. Zionism, he explains therein, is a
"colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement... intent on politically, or even physically,
dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs."

Three years later, in the revised edition of his influential book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, he added a special chapter peddling the longstanding Arab canard that "the displacement
of Arabs from Palestine... was inherent in Zionist ideology" and can be traced back to the father of
political Zionism, Theodor Herzl.

How can this possibly square with his present day public statements squarely putting blame for the
conflict on "the instinctive rejectionism that runs like a dark thread through Palestinian history"?

Morris would have us believe that this decade-long doublespeak has never existed; that his
simultaneous articulation of pro-Israel rhetoric and anti-Israel propaganda, masqueraded as
meticulously researched historiography, is but a figment of imagination of "a febrile and obsessive
mind." To which one can only respond with one of his favorite words: balderdash.

Consider, for example, Morris's emphatic oath of allegiance to the Zionist ideal - "the establishment
and perpetuation of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, the historic patrimony of the Jewish people"
(a definition readers will be hard pressed to find in his books) - and its simultaneous derision as a
"colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement."

Keenly aware that the latter libel - the standard Arab depiction of the Jewish national cause since the
early 1920s - might not wash well with his present cohort of Israel sympathizers, yet reluctant to
disown anything he ever wrote, Morris performs his trademark textual acrobatics in an attempt to
square this impossible circle. "Zionism was never, as the Arabs charged, a 'colonialist' or 'imperialist'
movement," he argues, "but it did proceed by establishing colonies (moshavot) in Palestine and
expanding from them outward, to encompass as much of Palestine as possible."

So it has all been a matter of misunderstood semantics. Zionism is not a colonialist movement la
the Arabs, only a movement establishing and expanding colonies. But if the Land of Israel is the
historic patrimony of the Jewish people, as Morris now admits, there is surely nothing wrong in the
existence of Jewish localities there. Why then should communal villages, agricultural settlements,
and rural communities (as moshavot would be translated in non-archaic Hebrew) be described as
colonies? By this reckoning, the 1909 establishment of Tel Aviv would also qualify as such.

The truth, of course, is that in describing Zionism as "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and
movement" Morris meant precisely that: an offshoot of European imperialism at its most rapacious,
which, as he put it a couple of pages later, "managed to avoid 'seeing' the Arabs, of whom there were
about half a million in the country around 1880, about seven hundred thousand in 1914, and 1.25
million in 1947," in line with "the routine European colonist's mental obliteration of the 'natives'."

But Morris doesn't stop here. Having stigmatized the Zionist founding fathers as quintessential
European-type colonialists, he would not discard the other part of this Arab canard, which he has
been peddling for decades, namely, that they were also unreconstructed ethnic cleansers "intent on
politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs."

I have been battling this defamation of Zionism's very essence for quite some time, showing time
and again the extraordinary lengths to which Morris would go by way of fabricating Israeli
history (seehere, here, here, here, and here). I will therefore confine myself to one telling example of
his professional misconduct.

In an October 1937 letter to his son David Ben-Gurion said: "We do not wish and do not need to
expel Arabs and take their place. All our aspiration is built on the assumption - proven throughout
all our activity - that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." In The
Birth Morris represents Ben-Gurion as saying precisely the opposite: "We must expel Arabs and take
their places."
(Tellingly, in his Hebrew language writings, Morris rendered Ben-Gurion's words accurately,
perhaps because he knew his readers could check the original for themselves.)

Over the years Morris was forced to concede that his "treatment of transfer thinking before 1948
was, indeed, superficial," and that he had "stretched" evidence to make his point. He even removed
this quote for the revised addition of The Birth in an implicit acknowledgment of its inaccuracy, and
rendered it correctly in Righteous Victims. Yet this doesn't prevent him from reiterating the ethnic
cleansing canard in his American Thinker article. Only now he is not only sympathetic to this
(supposed) Zionist grand design but he also argues that "had all of Palestine's Arabs crossed the
Jordan River eastward in 1948 and established their own state in Transjordan, alongside a Jewish
state west of the Jordan, the history of Israeli-Arab relations would have been more tranquil."

This, of course, is a euphemism for the comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arabs,
who obviously had no reason whatsoever to leave their homes and "cross the Jordan river eastward,"
where they had no chance of establishing their own state given that this territory was already an
existing state: the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (latterly Jordan).

Yet this is emblematic of Morris's chameleon-like doublespeak of the past decade. Acknowledging
(in his public statements) Zionism's longstanding acceptance of coexistence with the Arabs in a
partitioned Palestine, yet reluctant to disown his defamation of this movement as intrinsically
disposed to ethnic-cleansing, he squared these contradictory ideas in a novel manner: by condoning
the practice so long as it is born of dire necessity. "[W]hen the choice is between ethnic cleansing
and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing," he explained in an
infamous interview a few years ago.

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands... Even the great
American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are
cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course
of history.

Morris is, of course, perfectly entitled to express such Darwinist views, but to project this outlook
onto Zionism's founding fathers, whose value system and worldview were the complete opposite, is
absurd and thoroughly dishonest.

Alongside his distortion of Jewish actions during the 1948 war, Morris now whitewashes the
Palestinian/Arab assault on the nascent state of Israel. He no longer speaks about "genocide" and
"annihilation" as the attack's goal, but rather about a war "which the Jews believed aimed at their
annihilation" and for which the Palestinians "suffered the consequences." Never mind that the entire
Arab world - from Hajj Amin Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs, and his top henchmen
(Jamal and Abdel Qader Husseini), to Saudi King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, to the Syrian, Lebanese, and
Iraqi heads of state - were openly frank about their intention to obliterate the Jewish national cause;
not to mention the infamous threat by Arab League Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Azzam (on
October 11, 1947) that the establishment of a Jewish state would unleash "a war of extermination
and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."

How is one to interpret this whitewashing? As an indication of an imminent flip flop, or as yet
another customary piece of doublespeak? Be that as it may, this euphemism is far less ostentatious
than the extraordinary claim that Israel colluded with the invading Arab states to prevent the birth
of a Palestinian Arab state.

In his American Thinker article Morris emphatically denies that he has ever written any such thing,
or that he has ever dismissed the Zionist acceptance of the November 1947 partition resolution as a
ruse. Let his text speak for itself:

The acceptance of partition, in the mid-1930s as in 1947, was tactical, not a change in the Zionist
dream [of "Greater Israel"] (1948 and After, p. 9)
What ensued, once Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 and the Arab states invaded on
15 May, was "a general land grab," with everyone - Israel, Transjordan, Syria, Egypt, and even
Lebanon - bent on preventing the birth of a Palestinian Arab state and carving out chunks of
Palestine for themselves. (1948 and After, p.11)

Morris is equally untruthful with his readers regarding the untold damage done by his books to the
Jewish state. "Both Arabs and Jews were able, by cherry picking, to buttress their positions by
selectively quoting this or that passage," he writes in his rebuttal, but his aim as a historian is
ostensibly "to illuminate what happened, and let the chips fall where they may."

This self-righteous pretence couldn't be further from the truth. One would be hard pressed to find
Jews cherry picking from The Birth to buttress their position, save for those who are eager to defame
their own country and/or people. For why should any Jew in the right state of mind wish to cherry
pick Morris's systematic defamation of the Jewish national movement and the creation of the Jewish
state? As for the Arabs and their worldwide supporters - they need not cherry pick but can easily
truckload scores if not hundreds of Morris (mis)quotes buttressing their cause.

In one point, however, Morris is right on spot: his historiographical fabrications continue to be
massively used by Israel's enemies, and none more so than his fabricated Ben-Gurion quote "We
must expel Arabs" - splashed over countless websites and twits (see, for
example, here, here, here,here, here, here, and here). To Morris, apparently, this means getting the
story right.

Morris has temerity to bemoan his supposed longstanding persecution by Israel's academic and
political establishments, apparently oblivious to the irony of landing a professorship at the
university named after the person whose reputation he has most systematically maligned - the Ben-
Gurion family, not surprisingly, protested the appointment. Nor does he seem to be perturbed by the
scandalous irregularity attending his instatement - with the country's head of state riding roughshod
over proper academic procedures. Most academics would welcome such "persecution."

Indeed, so deeply is Morris's self-righteous victimization complex ingrained that any doubt of his
theatrical embellishments is taken as an act of war. "To me, the most offensive part of Karsh's article
pertains to what happened on the main thoroughfare of Kingsway, London, on my way to a lecture
last month at the LSE," he laments. "Karsh wrote that instead of 'debating' with the thugs in the
street, I made my way 'like a criminal,' unresponsively, to the LSE lecture."

I wrote no such thing. Rather, I quoted the account of one of the activists who confronted Morris on
the street before attending his lecture, published on a London-based pro-Palestinian website, to
which I provided the relevant link. This, however, is an integral, indeed elementary part of accurate
reporting. Since the incident was not relayed by an independent source of information but only by
Morris himself, I had to weigh his account against that of his (admittedly politicized) critics. My
familiarity with campus life in the UK and Morris's tenuous relationship with facts leads me to doubt
his version of events, not least since his lecture, by his own account (it was videotaped, hence its
description had to conform to reality to a greater extent) passed smoothly - despite the presence in
the audience of some of the "Muslim thugs" accosting him in the street who took part in the "lengthy
Q and A" that followed the lecture. As one of them described:

Morris took questions in blocks of three for about an hour. This enabled him to evade many
questions altogether, or give only part replies... As time went on Morris seemed to become more
flippant with his responses - wrongly playing to what he thought the audience wanted. This clearly
angered many in the audience; and shouts of "Answer the Question" became frequent and loud. At
one point Morris referred to the Palestine Papers and dismissed these as US diplomatic cables; he
repeated again they were US diplomatic cables which caused huge laughter and anger in equal
proportions from the audience. Audience members pointed out loudly that the Palestine Papers were
internal documents of the Palestinian Authority and [had] nothing to do with US diplomatic cables.
Not for the first time during the evening Morris's factual foundations were found to be rotten.
It is true that Morris was called racist (a fact readily admitted by his critics, who handed out flyers
containing a string of his more damning quotes), perhaps even a fascist. But these have been
standard pejoratives on western campuses for decades. Israeli students use the F word in their
political exchanges as a matter of course; Israeli academics routinely badmouth right-of-center
politicians and peers as fascists; leftist students at Ben-Gurion University, Morris's home institution,
were photographed giving Heil Hitler Nazi salutes to pro-Zionist students at a campus rally. Morris
himself has repeatedly defamed Ben-Gurion (among other Zionist leaders) as an unreconstructed
ethnic cleanser - a far harsher indictment than fascist. Surely he can take a few drops of his own
medicine without evoking Nazi metaphors or prophesying the looming end of British and West
European way of life.

The Book of Proverbs famously quips that "He that hideth his sins, shall not prosper: but he that
shall confess, and forsake them, shall obtain mercy." Morris has neither confessed nor forsaken his
anti-Israel writings and has, moreover, hidden them behind a smoke screen of simultaneous pro-
Israel rhetoric. Yet he has prospered, big time. As another biblical verse puts it: "Eyes have they, but
they see not."

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia), and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

Land for War

by Efraim Karsh and Asaf Romirowsky
The Wall Street Journal
August 5, 2011

As September approaches, many are waiting with bated breath to learn if Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver on his threat to unilaterally declare an independent
Palestinian state and seek recognition of it through the U.N. But in putting the Palestinian demand
for statehood to a vote, Abbas will end up subverting the international organization's longstanding
solution to the Arab Israeli-conflictU.N. Security Council Resolution 242with unpredictable
results.

Passed in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, resolution 242 established the principle of "land for
peace" as the cornerstone of future peace agreements between Israel and the Arabs, to be reached in
negotiations between the two sides. Israel was asked to withdraw "from territories occupied in the
recent conflict"the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

The absence of the definite article "the" before "territories" was no accident: Issued a mere six
months after Israel's astounding triumph over the concerted Arab attempt to obliterate the Jewish
state, the resolution reflected acceptance by the Security Council of the existential threat posed by
the 1949 armistice line, memorably described by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban as "Auschwitz
borders." The Security Council expected negotiations between Israel and the Arabs to produce a
more defensible frontier for Israel, one consistent with, in the words of the resolution's other key
formulation, the right of every state in the region "to live in peace with secure and recognized
boundaries."

In the 44 years that have followed, Israel has persistently striven to make peace with its Arab
neighbors. It withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, constituting more than 90% of the territories
occupied in 1967, as part of its 1979 peace agreement with Egypt. Repeated efforts to persuade
Syrian President Hafez Assad to follow in Egypt's footsteps came to naught, however.
As for the Palestinians, their rejection of resolution 242 was absolute. In 1967, the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) rejected the U.N. proposal as a plot "concocted in the corridors of the
United Nations to accord [with] the Zionist racist colonial illegal occupation in Palestine,"
acceptance of which constituted "a treasonable act not only against the Palestinian people but
against the whole Arab nation." When the Carter administration informed Arafat of its readiness to
inaugurate Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, should he accept resolution 242, the PLO
chairman categorically turned the offer down. "This is a lousy deal," he told an intermediary. "We
want Palestine. We don't want bits of Palestine."

It was not until 1988, more than two decades after the resolution's passage, that the Palestine
National Congress grudgingly accepted resolution 242. While this marked a major shift in PLO
public diplomacy, Arafat remained committed to the PLO's phased strategy of June 1974, which
stipulated that any territory gained through diplomacy would merely be a springboard for the
"complete liberation of Palestine." Shortly after the PLO accepted 242, Arafat's second in command,
Salah Khalaf (better known by his nom de guerre of Abu Iyad), declared that "the establishment of a
Palestinian state on any part of Palestine is but a step toward the whole of Palestine." Two years
later, he reiterated this view at a public rally in Amman, pledging to liberate Palestine "inch by inch
from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river."

Arafat remained committed to the PLO's phased strategy even after signing the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Five days before the signing, he told an Israeli journalist that one day there would be a "united state
in which Israelis and Palestinians will live together"that is, Israel would cease to exist. Even as he
shook Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's hand on the White House lawn, Arafat was assuring the
Palestinians in a pre-recorded Arabic-language message that the agreement was merely an
implementation of the PLO's phased strategy.

The public diplomacy of Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, also ran contrary to the letter
and spirit of 242. The Palestinians have consistently misrepresented the resolution as calling for
Israel's complete withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines, while claiming that its stipulation for "a just
settlement of the refugee problem" meant endorsement of the Palestinian "right of return"the
standard Arab euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic subversion. They also
sought to undermine the resolution's insistence on the need for a negotiated settlement, seeking
time and again to engineer an internationally imposed dictate despite their commitment to a
negotiated settlement through the Oslo process.

When Israel offered at the American-convened July 2000 peace summit in Camp David to cede
virtually the entire territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state and
made concessions with respect to Jerusalem, Arafat responded with a campaign of terror unmatched
in the history of the Jewish state. Seven-and-a-half years later, at yet another U.S.-sponsored
summit, Mr. Abbas rejected Israel's offer of a Palestinian Arab state in 97% of the West Bank and all
of Gaza, and categorically dismissed the request to recognize Israel as a Jewish state alongside the
would-be Palestinian state, insisting instead on full implementation of the "right of return."

Since the inauguration of the Obama administration, Mr. Abbas has dropped all remaining
pretenses of seeking a negotiated settlement, striving instead to engineer international enforcement
of a complete Israeli withdrawal without a peace agreement, or, indeed, any quid pro quo. Were the
U.N. General Assembly to fall for the Palestinian ploy, it will not only reward decades of duplicity,
intransigence, and violence and betray its own formula of "land for peace," but will be introducing a
new and dangerous stage in the century-long feud between Arabs and Jews: that of "land for war."

Mr. Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Mr. Romirowsky is adjunct scholar at the Middle
East Forum and a doctoral student at King's College London.
Texts, Lies and Videotape
Letter to the Editor

by Efraim Karsh
The National Interest
August 10, 2011

Benny Morris appears genuinely oblivious to the stark discrepancy between depicting Israel as an
ethnic cleanser in his early work and blaming the Palestinians for genocidal ambitions in his later
years. In his recent National Interest article, he denounces criticism of this glaring contradiction as
"defamation and incitement by both extremists Jews [sic] and extremist Muslims."

While I resent being lumped into either group, I can readily understand the difficulty of figuring out
which line of thinking Morris really believes.

The post-conversion Morris objects to a "Muslim video" claiming that Jews massacred 250-300
men, women, and children at Deir Yassin in April 1948, noting that "Arab researchers already in the
1980s concluded that only about 100 Arabs combatants and noncombatants died in the village that
day."

But Morris himself wrote in his influential 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,
that "some 250 Arabs, mostly non-combatants, were murdered" at Deir Yassin (p. 113). If it was
common knowledge in the 1980s that only around 100 Arabs were killed, then his figures in The
Birth make him either incompetent or untruthful. In any case, it's absurd for him to find fault with
those who rely on this and other dubious claims from The Birth to demonize Israelafter all, he
hasn't disavowed the book.

Indeed, in his TNI piece, Morris repeats his claims about an age-old Zionist design to dispossess the
Palestinian Arabs from their homes. I have been debunking this canard for years
(see here,here, here, here, and here), yet many of the book's most controversial passagesnotably
the alleged Ben-Gurion quote "We must expel Arabs and take their places"continue to provide
fodder for the very "Muslim extremists" he condemns (see, for
example, here, here, here, here,here, here, and here for an English translation).

If Morris finds this objectionable, he can easily rectify the matter by disowning his past defamation
of Zionism. His reluctance to do so has led him into some strange terrain. The only way his pre-
conversion and post-conversion views can both be valid is if the Israelis were ethnic
cleansers and were justifiably so. This led to his infamous assertions that "when the choice is
between ethnic cleansing and genocidethe annihilation of your peopleI prefer ethnic cleansing"
and "even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the
Indians" in an infamous 2004 Haaretz interview with Ari Shavit (see here for an English
translation).

Morris now claims to have been misrepresented. "I never, ever said what I am alleged to have said. . .
. Shavit had simply misquoted me." Few at the time accepted the accusationmade in the face of
unprecedented public condemnationthat Shavit, one of Israel's most distinguished journalists,
whose trademark in-depth interviews are widely considered beyond reproach, misrepresented
Morris's assertions. "It cannot be claimed that Ari Shavit sweet-talked Morris [into making racist
statements]," wrote Professor Aviad Kleinberg of Tel Aviv University inHaaretz on January 24,
2004.

Morris will no doubt continue to cry foul, but the discrepancies between his pre-conversion work
and post-conversion statements will continue to haunt him.
Azzam's Genocidal Threat
by David Barnett and Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2011, pp. 85-88 (view PDF)

Of the countless threats of violence, made by

Arab and Palestinian leaders in the run up to
and in the wake of the November 29, 1947
partition resolution, none has resonated more
widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman
Azzam, the Arab League's first secretary-
general, that the establishment of a Jewish
state would lead to "a war of extermination
and momentous massacre which will be
spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and
the Crusades."

Akhbar al-Yom, October 11, 1947.

This threat is generally believed to have been made during a briefing to the Egyptian press on May
15, 1948, shortly after the pan-Arab invasion of the newly-proclaimed state of Israel. Some scholars
trace it to a May 16 New York Times report, citing the Egyptian dailyal-Ahram.[1] Yet this New
York Timesedition contains no such item, whereas the original al-Ahram report has yet to surface.
Others cite a BBC broadcast as their source,[2] yet a comprehensive examination, completed by
Efraim Karsh, of the corporation's archives in Reading, England, has found no evidence of this
broadcast. Others, like the renowned American journalist, I. F. Stone, who covered the saga of
Israel's birth as it unfolded, simply noted the threat without proper attribution.[3]

Indeed, failure to trace the original document[4] has given rise to doubts as to whether Azzam
actually made this threat. Criticizing Karsh for noting the threat in Palestine Betrayed,[5] Israeli
academic Benny Morris wrote:

But was "extermination" their war aim, as Karsh would have it? There is no knowing. Indeed, the
Arab leaders going to war in 1948 were very sparing in publicly describing their goals and
"exterminating" the Jews never figured in their public bombast. I myself in the past have used the
one divergent quote, by Arab League Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Azzam from May 15, 1948, in
which he allegedly spoke of a "war of extermination" and a "momentous massacre" la the Mongols.
But in my recent history of the war, 1948 (Yale University Press, 2008), I refrained from reusing it
after discovering that its pedigree is dubious.[6]

Yet, the original document does in fact exist. It has eluded scholars for so long because they have
been looking in the wrong place.

In his account of Israel's birth, Stone alluded to the possibility that the threat was made on the eve of
the U.N. vote on partition, with the aim of averting this momentous decision, rather than before the
pan-Arab invasion of Israel six months later.[7] Following this lead, David Barnett found a Jewish
Agency memorandum, submitted on February 2, 1948, to the U.N. Palestine Commission, tasked
with the implementation of the partition resolution, and yet again to the U.N. secretary-general on
March 29, 1948.

Describing the panoply of Arab threats of war and actual acts of violence aimed at aborting the
partition resolution, the memorandum read:

(6) The "practical and effective means" contrived and advocated by the Arab States were never
envisaged as being limited by the provisions of the Charter; indeed, the Secretary-General of the
Arab League was thinking in terms which are quite remote from the lofty sentiments of San
Francisco. "This war," he said, "will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will
be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades."[8]

The Jewish Agency memorandum cites an October 11, 1947 article in the Egyptian newspaper
Akhbar al-Yom as the quote's source. An examination of the original article readily confirms the
quote's authenticity, laying to rest one of the longest running historiographical debates attending the
1948 war.

War of Extermination

An October 11, 1947 report on the pan-Arab summit in the Lebanese town of Aley,[9] by Akhbar al-
Yom's editor Mustafa Amin, contained an interview he held with Arab League secretary-general
Azzam. Titled, "A War of Extermination," the interview read as follows (translated by Efraim Karsh;
all ellipses are in the original text):

Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha spoke to me about the horrific war that was in the offing saying:

"I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and
momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre[10] or the Crusader wars. I
believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine's Arab
population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and
China to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine You might be surprised to learn
that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews.

"This war will be distinguished by three serious matters. Firstfaith: as each fighter deems his death
on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise; second, [the war] will be an opportunity for
vast plunder. Third, it will be impossible to contain the zealous volunteers arriving from all corners
of the world to avenge the martyrdom of the Palestine Arabs, and viewing the war as dignifying every
Arab and every Muslim throughout the world

"The Arab is superior to the Jew in that he accepts defeat with a smile: Should the Jews defeat us in
the first battle, we will defeat them in the second or the third battle or the final one whereas one
defeat will shatter the Jew's morale! Most desert Arabians take pleasure in fighting. I recall being
tasked with mediating a truce in a desert war (in which I participated) that lasted for nine months
While en route to sign the truce, I was approached by some of my comrades in arms who told me:
'Shame on you! You are a man of the people, so how could you wish to end the war How can we
live without war?' This is because war gives the Bedouin a sense of happiness, bliss, and security that
peace does not provide!

"I warned the Jewish leaders I met in London to desist from their policy,[11] telling them that the
Arab was the mightiest of soldiers and the day he draws his weapon, he will not lay it down until
firing the last bullet in the battle, and we will fire the last shot "

He [Azzam] ended his conversation with me by saying: "I foresee the consequences of this bloody
war. I see before me its horrible battles. I can picture its dead, injured, and victims But my
conscience is clear For we are not attacking but defending ourselves, and we are not aggressors
but defenders against an aggression! "

David Barnett, an international studies major, is a junior at Johns Hopkins University. He has
been an intern at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as well as a researcher and Emerson
Fellow for StandWithUs. Efraim Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum and editor of
the Middle East Quarterly.

[1] See, for example, Rony E. Gabbay, A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: The Arab
Refugee Problem (A Case Study) (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1959), p. 88; Joan Peters, From Time
Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row,
1984), p. 444, n. 14.
[2] See, for example, John Roy Carlson, Cairo to Damascus (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 266; Mizra
Khan, "The Arab RefugeesA Study in Frustration," in Walter Z. Laqueur, ed., The Middle East in
Transition: Studies in Contemporary History (New York: Praeger, 1958), p. 237; Larry Collins and
Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 408, 588; Esther
Rosalind Cohen, Human Rights in the Israeli-Occupied Territories, 1967-1982(Manchester, U.K.:
Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 60, n. 72; Mitchell Bard, Myths and Facts: A Guide to the
Arab-Israeli Conflict (Chevy Chase, Md.: American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2006), p. 121.
[3] Isidor Feinstein Stone, This Is Israel (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1948), p. 21.
[4] Alexander H. Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky, "A Tale of Two Galloways: Notes on the Early History
of UNRWA and Zionist Historiography," Middle Eastern Studies, Sept. 2010, p. 671.
[5] New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
[6] Benny Morris, "Revisionism on the West Bank," The National Interest, July-Aug. 2010, pp. 76-7.
[7] Stone, This Is Israel, p. 21.
[8] "Acts of Aggression Provoked, Committed, and Prepared by Arab States in Concert with the
Palestine Arab Higher Committee against the Jewish Population of Palestine in an Attempt to Alter
by Force the Settlement Envisaged by the General Assembly's Resolution on the Future Government
of Palestine," memorandum submitted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine to the United Nations
Palestine Commission, Feb. 2, 1948; Moshe Shertok, "Letter from the Jewish Agency for Palestine
Dated 29 March 1948, Addressed to the Secretary-General Transmitting a Memorandum on Acts of
Arab Aggression," UNSC, S/710, Apr. 5, 1948.
[9] For the Aley summit, see Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, pp. 87-9.
[10] Tatar is used loosely in Arabic to mean Mongol, a reference to the thirteenth-century invasions.
Eds.
[11] Azzam met with Eliahu Epstein, head of the Jewish Agency's Washington office, on June 18,
1947, and with David Horowitz and Aubrey (Abba) Eban, the Jewish Agency's liaison officers to the
U.N. Special Committee on Palestine, on Sept. 15, 1947. In both meetings he sought to dissuade his
interlocutors from pursuing their quest for statehood by using the Crusaders metaphor. See
Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, pp. 92-5.Eds.

Where is the Palestinian Ben-Gurion?

by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
September 15, 2011

Sixty-four years after partitioning Palestine into two independent states one Jewish, the other
Arab the UN General Assembly is set again to vote on the same issue. While this time around
Palestinian leaders appear to be preaching compromise, closer scrutiny reveals this to be a tactical
rather than a strategic change of heart, stemming from the different circumstances of the two votes
and aimed at disguising their lingering unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to live with a two-state
solution.

In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish
self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early
1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that "there is no place in Palestine for two races." All areas
conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews.

These days the Palestinians can hardly ask the UN to dismantle one of its longest standing member
states and to expel its citizens.

Yet by seeking international recognition of their statehood and pressure for a complete Israeli
withdrawal without a peace agreement, or, indeed, any quid pro quo, they are continuing their
predecessors' rejection of a negotiated settlement and laying the diplomatic groundwork for the
renewal of the assault on the Jewish state.

The PLO's hallowed National Covenant envisages the permanent departure of most Jews from
Israel. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat's phased strategy of June 1974, which was never disowned,
stipulates that any territory gained through diplomacy would merely be a springboard for the
"complete liberation of Palestine." At the negotiating table during the Oslo years, the PLO's most
adamant demand was for the subversion of Israel's demographic composition by forcing it to accept
the so-called "right of return" and allow refugees of the 1948 war, and their descendants, to return to
territory that is now part of the state of Israel. At the moment Jews presently constitute about 80
percent of Israel's seven million strong population; by 2020, nearly one in four Israelis will be Arab,
owing to this sector's far higher birth rate. Were millions of Palestinians to be resettled within Israel,
it would soon cease to be a majority Jewish state and everybody knows it.

TO PRESENT the "right of return" as a nonnegotiable demand is not to negotiate at all, particularly
when Palestinian leaders themselves refuse to accept alien minorities as part of a peace settlement:
In June, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas told the Arab League that the future
Palestinian state should be free of Israelis (that is Jews, since virtually no other Israelis live in the
West Bank). He reiterated this vision of a Judenrein Palestine last month, telling a delegation of
visiting members of Congress that "I am seeking a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
with Jerusalem as its capital, empty of settlements."

Like Husseini, Arafat was far more interested in destroying the Jewish national cause than in
leading his own people to statehood. As far back as 1978, he told his close friend and collaborator,
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked the traditions, unity and
discipline to have a successful state. He was right. It was the Palestinians' lack of communal
solidarity the willingness to subordinate personal interest to the collective good that accounted
for their collapse and dispersion during the 1948 war. The subsequent physical separation of the
various parts of the Palestinian Diaspora and longstanding cleavages between West Bankers and
Gazans prevented the crystallization of a cohesive national identity.

Sadly, Arafat had no intention of redressing this predicament. Given control of the Palestinian
population in the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, he made his bleak prognosis a
self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing an oppressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of Arab
dictatorships, while launching the most destructive confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians
since the 1948 war.

In the process, he destroyed the fragile civil society and relatively productive economy that had
developed in the interim.

Two years ago, in a bold departure from this destructive path, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad
embarked on the first state-building effort in Palestinian history, one that has had some successes.
However, while he recently pronounced his initiative a mission accomplished amid the diplomatic
buildup to the UN vote, he knows better. Abbas's presidency, and by extension Fayyad's own
premiership, remain unconstitutional. Not only because Abbas defied Hamas's landslide victory in
the January 2006 parliamentary elections by establishing an alternative government headed by
Fayyad, but also because his own presidency expired in January 2009.

Fayyad barely challenged the corrupt and dysfunctional system established by Arafat.

The two groups dominating Palestinian life, the PLO and Hamas, remain armed groups (and active
practitioners of terrorism) rather than political parties an assured recipe for a failed state. (The
Oslo Accords charged the PA with dismantling all armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza, but
Arafat never bothered to comply.) Even if Abbas were to genuinely commit himself to reform after
the attainment of statehood, his tenuous authority would continue to be defied by Hamas, which has
not only transformed the Gaza Strip into a an Islamist micro-state but also wields considerable
power and influence in the West Bank.
WHATEVER THE UN vote may achieve, it will not be a step toward Palestinian statehood.

Contrary to the received wisdom, Israel was established not by a UN General Assembly resolution
but through the unwavering determination of the Zionist leadership, or rather David Ben-Gurion,
shortly to become Israel's first prime minister, in the face of mounting international skepticism
regarding partition (in March 1948 the US administration effectively backed down from the idea)
and doubts about the new state's ability to fend off both Palestinian violence and a pan-Arab attempt
to abort it at birth.

In doing so, Ben-Gurion could rely on an extraordinarily resilient and vibrant national community,
armed with an unwavering sense of purpose and an extensive network of political, social and
economic institutions built over decades of pre-state national development.

In this respect, eighteen years after being given the chance to establish their own state free of Israel's
occupation, and despite the billions of dollars in international aid poured into this effort, the
Palestinians have barely made it out of the gate. One can only hope that the international
community will at long last pressure Palestinian leaders to own up to their obligations and opt for a
true build-up of civil society that will ensure their constituents a decent and peaceful existence,
rather than seek illusionary shortcuts and intensified conflict with Israel.

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia ) and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

There Is No Palestinian State

by Efraim Karsh
The Daily Beast
September 16, 2011

As the United Nations prepares to vote next week on the issue of Palestinian statehood, it might be
worth bearing in mind that whatever the outcome, the result will certainly not be the creation of an
actual Palestinian state, any more than the November 1947 partition resolution spelled the
inevitable creation of a Jewish one.

In 1948, Israel came into being due to the extraordinary cohesion of Palestine's Jewish community
(the Yishuv). Armed with an unwavering sense of purpose and an extensive network of institutions,
the Yishuv managed to surmount a bevy of international obstacles and fend off a pan-Arab attempt
to destroy it. Likewise, it was the total lack of communal solidaritythe willingness to subordinate
personal interest to the collective goodthat accounted for the collapse and dispersion of
Palestinian Arab society as its leaders tried to subvert partition.
Sixty-four years later, Palestinian society seems no better prepared for statehood. And the U.N.
would be doing the Palestinians a great disservice by accepting the corrupt and dysfunctional
Palestinian Authority as its newest member. While this would hardly be the first failed state to be
delivered by the world organization, the unique circumstances of its possible birth make failure a
foregone conclusion, and the consequences are too dire to contemplate.

The building of the Jewish state began in the Swiss town of Basel in 1889 at the First Zionist
Congress, which defined Zionism's goal as "the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine
to be secured by public law," and established institutions to promote it. By the time the League of
Nations appointed Britain as the mandatory for Palestine 23 years later, the Yishuv had been
transformed into a cohesive and organized national community that provided most of Palestine's
Jewry with work, trade union protection as well as with education, health care, and defense.
By contrast, it was the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two leaders who determined their national
development during the 20th centuryHajj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafatwere far more
interested in destroying the Jewish national cause than leading their own people. As far back as
1978, Arafat told his close friend and collaborator, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the
Palestinians lacked the traditions, unity, and discipline to have a successful state. Once given control
of parts of the West Bank and Gaza, this prognosis became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as his regime
quickly became oppressive and corrupt. Later it helped launch the second intifada, the bloodiest and
most destructive confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians since the 1948 war. In the process,
he destroyed the fragile civil society and relatively productive economy that had developed during
the previous decade.

Paradoxically, it was Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the June 1967
war that laid the groundwork for Palestinian civil society. Not only did it bring the issue of
Palestinian independence to the forefront of the international agenda, but it also produced dramatic
improvements in the Palestinians' quality of life. During the occupation, the territories became the
fourth fastest-growing economy in the worldahead of Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, and
substantially ahead of Israel itself. From 1967 to 2000, life expectancy rose from 48 to 72, while
infant mortality fell from 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 births in 2000. And while
there was not a single university that existed in the West Bank or Gaza before Israeli rule, by the
mid-1990s, there were seven such institutions, boasting more than 16,000 students.

All of these achievements were steadily undone after Oslo, as Arafat's regime took control over parts
of the territories. In September of 1993, conditions in the West Bank and Gaza were still better than
those in most neighboring Arab statesand this despite the economic decline caused by the first
intifada. Within six months of Arafat's arrival in Gaza, the standard of living in the strip fell by 25
percent, and more than half of the area's residents claimed to have been happier under Israeli rule.
The launch of the second intifada six years later dealt the death blow to the economic and
institutional gains that Israel bequeathed.

In an apparent departure from this destructive path, in the summer of 2007, PA Prime Minister
Salam Fayyad embarked on the first true state-building effort in Palestinian history. And he has had
some modest successes, most notably a sustained economic recovery that has nearly restored the
West Bank's pre-intifada levels of performance. Yet Fayyad has created no new institutions, and the
PA remains a corrupt and wholly dysfunctional organization. The Palestinian prime minister may
claim to have laid the groundwork for a democratic Palestine, but the presidency of Mahmoud
Abbas, and by extension his own position, are totally unconstitutional. Not only did Abbas defy
Hamas's landslide victory in the January 2006 parliamentary election, but Abbas's presidency
expired more than two years ago.

No less important, the two factions dominating Palestinian life, the Hamas and Fatah, remain armed
groups, and active practitioners of terrorisman assured recipe for a failed state. The Oslo Accords
charged the PA to dismantle all armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza, but Arafat never
complied; David Ben-Gurion, by contrast, dissolved all Jewish underground movements within a
fortnight from Israel's independence, incorporating them into the newly established Israeli Defense
Forces. Following statehood, even if Abbas were to make a genuine commitment to reform, Hamas
would continue to defy his tenuous authority; not only does the group rule the Gaza Strip, which it
has transformed into an Islamist micro-state, but it also wields considerable power in the West
Bank.

Small wonder that recent surveys show that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem, who are entitled to
Israeli social benefits and are free to travel across Israel's pre-1967 borders, would rather become
citizens of the Jewish state than citizens of a new Palestinian one. Two thirds of them believe that a
unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence backed by the U.N. would have no positive effect.
And they're right. Unfortunately the ramificationsincreased conflict with Israel and a deepening
rift in an already divided Palestinian societyare manifold. Once again, the Palestinian leadership is
leading its people astray.
Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

The revisionist history of Sari Nusseibeh

by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
October 11, 2011

Sari Nusseibeh has done it again. In an article titled "Why Israel Can't be a 'Jewish State,'" published
on the Jewish New Year of all dates, the supposedly moderate president of al-Quds University goes
to great lengths to explain why Jews, unlike any other nation on earth, are undeserving of statehood.

"[T]he idea of a 'Jewish State' is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious,
historical and social implications," he wrote. "The implications of this term therefore need to be
spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people and most Israeli citizens, we trust
will not accept these implications."

Not that this should have come as a surprise. For decades, Nusseibeh has tirelessly advanced the
"one-state solution" a euphemistic formula that proposes the replacement of Israel by a country,
theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status
of a permanent minority.

This advocacy of the destruction of a long-existing state, established by an internationally recognized

act of national self-determination, has hardly dented Nusseibeh's "moderate" credentials. That can
be partly explained by the desperate yearning among Jews and their supporters worldwide for
Palestinian and Arab peace partners. That desire dates back to the 1920s and the 1930s, despite
countless setbacks and disillusionments. It is also a corollary of the narcissist and patronizing
mesmerization among educated westerners with the "noble savage" in general, and the Westernized
native in particular. With his posh Jerusalem high school education, his Oxford and Harvard
degrees and impeccable western demeanor, Nusseibeh, like cultured Arabs and Muslims before him,
represents the ultimate product of the "white man's civilizing mission," a contemporary replica of
George Antonius, the Cambridge-educated Syrian political activist who was the toast of the British
chattering classes in Palestine and beyond during the 1930s.

I was personally privy to this feting during a London meeting in the spring of 1989. I was then a
senior fellow at Tel Aviv University's Jafee Center for Strategic Studies, and like many well
intentioned Israelis at the time and since, we aspired to lay the ground for Israeli-Palestinian
reconciliation through secret talks with Palestinian interlocutors, including members of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization, then an outlawed organization in Israel. The group we met was
headed by Faisal Husseini, then the PLO's most senior official in the disputed territories, flanked by
Nusseibeh and a few prominent London-based Palestinian academics.

The meeting was pleasant and informative enough, with the courteous British hosts going out of
their way to keep their Palestinian guests sweet. Yet I was taken aback when Nusseibeh, the
celebrated epitome of Palestinian moderation, turned out to be the most extreme member of the
group. Dismissing out of hand the two-state solution Israel and a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip he sang the praise of the "one-state paradigm," demanding the
incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza population into the Jewish state as full-fledged citizens, to
be followed by Palestinian "refugees" from the neighboring Arab states and beyond.

In subsequent years, Nusseibeh would pay customary lip service to the two-state solution while
consistently questioning the very legitimacy of the state with which he ostensibly wished to make
peace. On a few occasions he even let the mask drop, unveiling his true agenda. In the late 1990s, for
example, he told an old Oxford friend that "one day, in the near or further future, all this [Israel and
Palestine] will be one binational state. It's just a question of how we get there."

In an April 2005 debate at Dartmouth College, Nusseibeh advocated the creation of a bi-national
state as the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

"We will have spent 100 years killing and fighting each other, doing our best to avoid a one-state
solution, and we will find ourselves in that exact situation in 40 or 50 years," he argued.

IN A 2007 political memoir Nusseibeh missed no opportunity to denigrate and delegitimize the
Jewish state through sharp, short, often subtle yet always false readings of history.

He does this in spades in his latest article. A Jewish state cannot exist, he argues, because "no state
in the world is or can be in practice ethnically or religiously homogenous." But the Jewish state
that has existed for over 63 years has never been, nor aspired to be, totally homogenous: unlike the
Palestinian Arab leadership which, since the early 1920s to date, has insisted on a Judenrein
Palestine. Rather, Israel has been home to diverse religious and ethnic minorities accounting for
nearly 20 percent of its total population.

As David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of his own (Mapai) party in 1947, the non-Jews in the
Jewish state "will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is, the state will
be their state as well."

Nusseibeh claims that a Jewish state must by definition be either a theocracy or an apartheid state,
and that its Jewish nature opens the door to legally reducing its substantial non-Jewish minority
(whose very existence he previously denied) "to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping
them of their citizenship and other rights)." This, too, flies in the face of Israel's 63-year history,
where Arabs have enjoyed full equality before the law, and have been endowed with the full
spectrum of democratic rights including the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.

In fact, from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish
religious holidays as legal resting days for their respective communities, to the granting of
educational, cultural, judicial, and religious autonomy, Arabs in Israel enjoy more formal
prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world.

Small wonder that whenever an Israeli politician proposes the inclusion of some frontier Israeli-
Arab settlements in the future Palestinian state, as part of a land exchange within the framework of a
peace agreement, the residents of these localities immediately voice their indignation. Moreover,
recent surveys show that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem, who are entitled to Israeli social
benefits and are free to travel across Israel's pre-1967 borders, would rather become citizens of the
Jewish state than citizens of a new Palestinian one.

But Nusseibeh is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the misconception, prevalent
among Arabs and Muslims, that Jews are a religious community and not a nation deserving of
statehood.

Hence, instead of insisting on being accepted for what it has been for 63 years, or what the UN
partition resolution envisaged it to be, Israel should shed its Jewish identity and become "a civil,
democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism" like many of its Arab neighbors
which have Islam as their official religion "but grant equal civil rights to all citizens."

This of course is the complete inverse of the truth.

The Jewish state is a civil, democratic and pluralistic society, something that none of its Arab
neighbors can stake a claim to. On the contrary, precisely because Islam is enshrined as state
religion throughout the Middle East, the non-Muslim minorities have been denied "equal civil
rights" and have instead been reduced to the historic dhimmi status whereby they can at best enjoy
certain religious freedoms in return for a distinctly inferior existence, and at worst suffer from
systematic persecution and oppression.

And this is the "one-state paradigm" offered by Nusseibeh to Israel's Jewish citizens.

The writer is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

Finnish delusions
by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
November 7, 2011

Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja has done it again. No sooner did this 1960s radical ease
himself back into the foreign minister's seat after four years in the opposition than he unveiled again
his anti- Israel prejudice.

"No apartheid state is justified or sustainable," he told a panel discussion in Helsinki last week. "If
you are occupying areas inhabited by... Palestinians who do not have the same rights as the Israelis
in Israel, that is apartheid.... I think that the majority in Israel has also realized this, but they have
been unable to provide a leadership that [can] move forward on the two-state solution, on the
Palestinian problem."

As the longest-serving foreign minister in Finland's history (2000-2007, 2011-present) one would
have expected Tuomioja to show greater familiarity with the facts. For one thing, all Israeli prime
ministers over the past two decades from Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres to Ariel Sharon and
Binyamin Netanyahu have unequivocally endorsed the two-state solution, whereas all Palestinian
leaders have rejected this solution, refusing to allow a single Jew to live in a prospective Palestinian
state. For another, Israel's "occupation" of the populated areas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
ended in the mid-1990s.

The declaration of principles signed on the White House lawn in 1993 by the PLO and the Israeli
government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional
period, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. By
May 1994, Israel had completed its withdrawal from Gaza (apart from a small stretch of territory
containing settlements in the south of the Strip, which was vacated in 2005) and the Jericho area of
the West Bank. On July 1, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza.

On September 28, 1995, despite Arafat's abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the
territories now under his control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the
year Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank's populated areas, with the exception of
Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On January 20, 1996, elections to the
Palestinian Legislative Council were held, and shortly afterward, both the Israeli civil administration
and the military government were dissolved.

The geographical scope of these withdrawals was relatively limited; the surrendered land amounted
to some 30 percent of the West Bank's overall territory. But its impact on the Palestinian population
was nothing short of revolutionary. In one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over virtually all of
the West Bank's 1.4 million residents. Since that time, nearly 60% of them in the Jericho area and
in the seven main cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron
have lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40% live in towns, villages, refugee camps
and hamlets where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil authority but where, in line with the Oslo
accords, Israel has maintained "overriding responsibility for security."

In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the Hebron
redeployment in January 1997, 99% of the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
have not lived under Israeli occupation; rather, they have been under the jurisdiction of the Arafat-
led PA.

But a person like Tuomioja wouldn't be bothered with such facts as far as the Jewish state is
concerned. Time and again, he has allowed his anti-Israel animosity to get the better of him. In an
infamous 2001 interview, he compared Israel's attempts to protect its citizens from the savage terror
war launched by Arafat's PA in September 2000 to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry: "It is
quite shocking that some implement the same kind of policy toward the Palestinians which they
themselves were victims of in the 1930s."

Ignoring criticism of this comparison, which subsequently became an integral component of the
EU's working definition of anti-Semitism, he told the same Finnish magazine four years later that he
"could have avoided many unnecessary reactions with a different wording, but the matter itself has
not changed in any way."

Nor, for that matter, does Tuomioja seem to believe that the Jewish state has any right to self-
defense. In 2003, he used the apartheid metaphor to denounce the erection of the security fence,
which has done more than any other single factor to slash the tidal wave of Palestinian terrorism,
though Finland has long had a similar fence along its border with the Soviet Union/Russia. When
Israel responded to years of Gaza rocket attacks on its towns and villages by unleashing Operation
Cast Lead in December 2008, Tuomioja, now chairman of the Parliament Grand Committee,
condemned this supposed disproportionate use of force. When IDF commandos killed eight Islamist
militants in violent clashes on board a Turkish ship trying to break the naval blockade of Hamas-
controlled Gaza in June 2009, he demanded that "trade and other ties with Israel should be linked
to Israel's regard for international law and commitment to the peace process."

One could have dismissed Tuomioja's musings as a desperate ploy by an aging politician to regain
his luster after the highly successful term of his predecessor the charismatic Alexander Stubb, 22
years his junior had Finland not been aggressively campaigning for the rotating Security Council
seat for the 2013-2014 term. Next time Abbas touts his Jew-free revanchist state to the council, he is
likely to find an eager collaborator.

The writer is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

Haaretz: The Paper for Thinking People?

by Efraim Karsh
Hudson New York
December 16, 2011

Of the countless threats of Arab violence in the run-up to the November 29, 1947 Partition
Resolution and in its wake, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman
Azzam, the Arab League's first secretary-general, that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead
to "a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian
massacre and the Crusades."
Unfortunately, the longstanding failure to trace the original document in which the threat was made
has given rise to doubts regarding its veracity, and by implication - the murderous Arab intentions:
not least since the historical truth has been erased from public memory by decades of relentless pro-
Arab propaganda.

Small wonder, therefore, that when the missing document was recently found, with an annotated
full translation published in the Middle East Quarterly, which I edit, Haaretzcolumnist and self-
styled "new historian" Tom Segev, who had spent a good part of the past two decades turning the
saga of Israel's birth upside down, went out of his way to whitewash Azzam's threat and downplay its
significance. "There is something pathetic about this hunt for historical quotes drawn from
newspapers," he wrote, without disputing the threat's contents or authenticity. "Azzam used to talk a
lot. On May 21, 1948, the Palestine Post offered this statement by him: 'Whatever the outcome, the
Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as
Jewish as they like.'" He then quotes Ben-Gurion's alleged description of the League's Secretary-
General as "the most honest and humane among Arab leaders."

Azzam might have talked a lot, but there was no contradiction whatsoever between his public threats
and private assertions. He privately told his Jewish interlocutors that their hopes of statehood would
meet the same calamitous fate as the crusading state, and he reiterated this prognosis in the newly-
discovered document. A week before the pan-Arab invasion of Israel on May 15, Azzam told Sir Alec
Kirkbride, the powerful British ambassador to Amman: "It does not matter how many [Jews] there
are. We will sweep them into the sea." Even the actual Palestine Post report, from which Segev chose
to bring a misleadingly truncated quote, had Azzam describe the Arab-invaded State of Israel as "a
bridgehead into Arab territory" (that is, a crusader-like alien implant) that must be fought and
destroyed for "otherwise they will be fighting us here, in Transjordan, and elsewhere in the Arab
State."

It is true that Azzam was prepared to allow survivors of the destroyed Jewish state to live as
Dhimmis, or second-class citizens, in the "Arab Palestine" that would arise on its ruins (after all, his
statement was made in a memo to the UN seeking to justify "the first armed aggression which the
world had seen since the end of the [Second World] War," to use the words of first UN Secretary-
General Trygve Lie). But this can hardly be considered an indication of moderation. If anything, it
affords further proof, if such is at all needed, that the gap between "the most honest and humane
among Arab leaders" and the basic Jewish aspiration for national-self determination was as
unbridgeable in 1948 as it is now.

But the story doesn't end here. For Mr. Segev didn't content himself with distorting the contents and
significance of a key historical document but also sought to besmirch those who brought it to public
attention by claiming that they lifted it from Wikipedia, to which it had supposedly been uploaded
by one Brendan McKay - a professor of computer science at the Australian National University in
Canberra.

This claim is not only false but the complete inversion of the truth. There was no trace of the newly-
found document in Azzam's Wikipedia entry at the time of the document's publication in the Middle
East Quarterly. On the contrary, noting the long-misconceived May 14, 1948, as the threat's date - it
was actually made on October 11, 1947, in the run-up to the partition resolution - the Wikipedia
entry (accessed October 3) questioned its very existence:

One day after the State of Israel declared itself as an independent nation (May 14, 1948), Lebanese,
Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and Transjordanian troops, supported by Saudi and Yemenite troops,
attacked the nascent Jewish state, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. On that day, Azzam is said
to have declared: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be
spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades". However, Joffe and Romirowsky report
that this "cannot be confirmed from cited sources". Benny Morris, who had previously quoted it in
his books, refrained from using it in his book 1948 "after discovering that its pedigree is dubious".
In other words, rather than upload Azzam's original threat to Wikipedia (or to any other publication
for that matter) as falsely claimed by Segev, Mr. McKay, who on September 22, 2010informed fellow
Wikipedia discussants of having obtained a copy of the original interview in which the threat was
made, failed to share his important discovery with the general public so as to keep Arab genocidal
designs on the nascent Jewish state under wraps.

Why Mr. McKay agreed to pass a copy of the document to the evidently pro-Israel David Barnett, an
American international politics student who had been chasing the document on his own, thus
enabling it to see the light of day at long last - including, eventually, in Wikipedia - is not entirely
clear: in a private communication, he declined my offer that his name be added as co-author as he
didn't "have a good opinion of MEQ".

It is clear, however, that instead of minimizing Azzam's threat and patronizing him in the worst
tradition of the "white man's burden" approach, Mr. Segev should have marveled at an important
discovery that lays to rest one of the longest running debates on the 1948 war and helps his country
reclaim the historical truth after decades of relentless distortion. But then, some journalists simply
cannot handle the truth.

Nor, so it seems, can their editorial colleagues.

On October 24, three days after the publication of Segev's article, I emailed my response to Aluf
Ben, Haaretz's editor-in-chief, and was informed that the paper's op-ed editor would be in touch.
Yet it was only six weeks later (on December 5), after much haggling during which I agreed to cut the
article's length by half, that a Hebrew translation was (almost invisibly) published in the inside
pages of the op-ed section. When I kept insisting that the original English-language article be also
published I received the following response on December 12:

I'm afraid that we will not be able to publish this piece due to space limitations in the English edition
of the newspaper. Our paper is considerably smaller than the Hebrew edition and we give priority to
pieces published on the main editorial page of the Hebrew paper, which is why you were passed over
last week. I had hoped to find a spare slot this week, but this has not been possible.

I would be pleased to be in touch with you directly next time one of your pieces is published on our
opinion pages, so that I can receive the original English version in time to consider it for the same
day's newspaper.

It is doubtful whether the editors believe their own words. Not only are space limitations wholly
irrelevant in the case of an online publication, which is what Haaretz.com essentially is, but the
editors have had my article for seven weeks, which should have given them more than ample
opportunities for a timely publication.

Worse: the fact that Haaretz took the trouble to have Mr. Segev's Hebrew-written piece translated to
English, and to have my response translated to Hebrew, while refusing to post an English-written
article on its English-language website - where the main defamatory damage to my professional
reputation was intended to be done - cannot but be seen as a blatant cover up of a professional
misconduct by one of its most senior columnists.

While there is nothing new or surprising in a paper's refusal to own up to its misreporting or publish
facts and analysis contradicting its political line, it is ironic that "the paper for thinking people,"
as Haaretz habitually flaunts itself, would engage in the shoddy business of truth suppression and
mouth shutting at a time when it self-righteously fights an alleged attempt by the Israeli government
to do precisely that.

Efraim Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum, research professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean Studies at King's College, and author, most recently, ofPalestine Betrayed.
Betraying Ben-Gurion
by Efraim Karsh
Hudson New York
December 22, 2011

It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel's only university bearing the name
of the Jewish state's founding father, and established in the ancient desert he dreamt of reviving, has
become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper scholarly endeavor.

So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel's Council for Higher
Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities,
recently recommended that BGU "consider closing the Department of Politics and Government"
unless it abandoned its "strong emphasis on political activism," improved its research performance,
and redressed the endemic weakness "in its core discipline of political science." In other words, they
asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with
libel.

The same day the committee's recommendation was revealed, Professor David Newman -- who
founded that department and bequeathed it such a problematic ethos, for which "achievement" he
was presumably rewarded with a promotion to Deanship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, from where he can shape other departments in a similar way -- penned an op-edin
the Jerusalem Post in which he compared Israel's present political culture to that of Nazi Germany.
"I will no doubt be strongly criticized for compared making such a comparison," he wrote,

but we would do well to paraphrase the famous words of Pastor Niemoller, writing in 1946 about
Germany of the 1930s and 1940s: "When the government denied the sovereign rights of the
Palestinians, I remained silent; I was not a Palestinian.
When they discriminated against the Arab citizens of the country, I remained silent; I was not an
Arab. When they expelled the hapless refugees, I remained at home; I was no longer a refugee. When
they came for the human rights activists, I did not speak out; I was not an activist. When they came
for me, there was no one left to speak out."

Even if every single charge in this paraphrase were true, Israel would still be light years apart from
Nazi Germany. But one need not be a politics professor or faculty dean to see the delusion in these
assertions.

To begin with, which Israeli government has denied "the sovereign rights of the Palestinians"? That
of David Ben-Gurion which accepted the 1947 partition resolution with alacrity? Or those headed by
Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu, which explicitly
endorsed the two-state solution? Has Newman perhaps mistaken Israel's founding father for Hajj
Amin Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the 1940s, who tirelessly
toiled to ethnically cleanse Palestine's Jewish community and destroy the nascent state of Israel? Or
possibly for Husseini's successors, from Yasser Arafat, to Ahmad Yassin, to Mahmoud Abbas, whose
commitment to Israel's destruction has been equally unwavering?

There is no moral equivalence whatever between the Nazi persecution, exclusion, segregation, and
eventually industrial slaughter of European Jewry, and Israel's treatment of its Arab population. Not
only do the Arabs in Israel enjoy full equality before the law, but from the designation of Arabic as
an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their
respective communities, Arabs in Israel have enjoyed more prerogatives than ethnic minorities
anywhere in the democratic world.
To put it more bluntly, while six million Jews, three quarters of European Jewry, died at the hands
of the Nazis in the six years that Hitler dominated Europe, Israel's Arab population has not only
leapt tenfold during the Jewish state's 63 years of existence - from 156,000 in 1948 to 1.57 million in
2010 - but its rate of social and economic progress has often surpassed that of the Jewish sector,
with the result that the gap between the two communities has steadily narrowed.

It is precisely this exemplary, if by no means flawless, treatment of its Arab citizens that underlies
their clear preference of Israeli citizenship to that of one in a prospective Palestinian state (a
sentiment shared by most East Jerusalem Palestinians). This preference has also recently driven
tens of thousands of African Muslims illegally to breach the Jewish state's border in search of
employment, rather than to stay in Egypt, whose territory they have to cross on the way. The
treatment of mass illegal immigration (hardly the hapless refugees presented by Newman) is a major
problem confronting most democracies in the West these days, where there is an ongoing debate
about what are the basic responsibilities of governments for their citizens' wellbeing and the right of
nations to determine the identity of those entering their territory.

Even more mind-boggling is Newman's equating Israel's attempt to prevent foreign funding of
Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the international Israel de-legitimization
campaign -- along the lines of the US Foreign Agents Legislation Act -- with repressing political
opponents by the Nazi regime. What "human rights activists" have been unlawfully detained by the
Israeli government, let alone rounded up and thrown into concentration camps? On what planet
does the Ben-Gurion University faculty dean live?

But Newman is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the standard "colonialist paradigm"
prevalent among Israeli and Western academics, which views Zionism, and by extension the state of
Israel, not as a legitimate expression of national self-determination but as "a colonizing and
expansionist ideology and movement" (in the words of another BGU professor) - an offshoot of
European imperialism at its most rapacious.

And therein, no doubt, lies the problem with BGU's Politics and Government Department: the only
Israeli department singled out by the international committee for the unprecedented
recommendation of closure. For if its founder and long-time member, who continues to wield
decisive influence over its direction, views Israel as a present-day reincarnation of Nazi Germany in
several key respects, how conceivably can the department ensure the "sustained commitment to
providing balance and an essential range of viewpoints and perspectives on the great issues of
politics" required for its continued existence?

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

The Middle East's real apartheid

by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
March 5, 2012

In light of Israel Apartheid Week, which hit cities and campuses throughout the world recently,
supporters of the Jewish state find it difficult to agree on the best response to this hate fest. Some
suggest emphasizing Israel's peacemaking efforts, others propose rebranding the country by
highlighting its numerous achievements and success stories. Still others advocate reminding the
world of "what Zionism is a movement of Jewish national liberation and what it isn't racist."
Each of these approaches has its merits yet none will do the trick.
Peace seeking and/or prosperity are no proof of domestic benevolence and equality. The most brutal
regimes have peacefully coexisted with their neighbors while repressing their own populations; the
most prosperous societies have discriminated against vulnerable minorities. South Africa was hardly
impoverished and technologically backward; the United States, probably the most successful and
affluent nation in recent times was largely segregated not that long ago.

Nor for that matter is the apartheid libel driven by forgetfulness of Zionism's true nature. It is driven
by rejection of Israel's very existence. No sooner had the dust settled on the Nazi extermination
camps than the Arabs and their western champions equated the Jewish victims with their
tormentors.

"To the Arabs, indeed Zionism seems as hideous as anything the Nazis conceived in the way of racial
expansion at the expense of others," read a 1945 pamphlet by the Arab League, the representative
body of all Arab states. A pamphlet published by the PLO shortly after its creation in 1964 stated:
"The Zionist concept of the 'final solution' to the 'Arab problem' in Palestine, and the Nazi concept of
the 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem' in Germany, consisted essentially of the same basic
ingredient: the elimination of the unwanted human element in question."

Indeed, it was the Palestinian terror organization that invented the apartheid canard in the mid-
1960s, years before Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

This charge, of course, is not only completely false but the inverse of the truth. If apartheid is indeed
a crime against humanity, Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East a state
whose Arab population enjoys full equality before the law and more prerogatives than most ethnic
minorities in the free world, from the designation of Arabic as an official language to the recognition
of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal days of rest.

By contrast, apartheid has been an integral part of the Middle East for over a millennium, and its
Arab and Muslim nations continue to legally, politically and socially enforce this discriminatory
practice against their hapless minorities.

Why then should an innocent party be under constant pressure to "come clean" while the real
culprits are not only left unscathed but also given a worldwide platform to blame others for their
own crimes? Rather than engage in incessant apologetics and protestations of innocence, something
Jews have been doing for far too long, Israel should adopt a proactive strategy, call a spade a spade
and target the real perpetrators of Middle East apartheid: the region's Arab and Muslim nations.

Arab/Muslim apartheid comes in many forms, and some victims have been subjected to more than
one.

Religious intolerance: Muslims historically viewed themselves as distinct from, and

superior to, all others living under Muslim rule, known as "dhimmis." They have been loath
to give up this privileged status in modern times. Christians, Jews and Baha'is remain
second-class citizens throughout the Arab/Muslim world, and even non-ruling Muslim
factions have been oppressed by their dominant co-religionists (e.g. Shi'ites in Saudi Arabia,
Sunnis in Syria).
Ethnic inequality: This historic legacy of intolerance extends well beyond the religious
sphere. As longtime imperial masters, Arabs, Turks and Iranians continue to treat long-
converted populations, notably Kurds and Berbers, that retained their language, culture and
social customs, as inferior.

Racism: The Middle East has become the foremost purveyor of anti-Semitic incitement in
the world with the medieval blood libel widely circulated alongside a string of modern
canards (notably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) depicting Jews as the source of all evil.
 Likewise, Africans of sub-Saharan descent are held in deep contempt, a vestige of the region's
historic role as epicenter of the international slave trade.

Gender discrimination: Legal and social discrimination against women is pervasive

throughout the Arab-Islamic world, accounting for rampant violence (for example domestic
violence or spousal rape are not criminalized) and scores of executions every year, both legal
and extra-judicial (i.e. honor killings). Discrimination against homosexuals is even worse.
Denial of citizenship: The withholding of citizenship and attendant rights from a large
segment of the native-born population is common. Palestinian communities in the Arab
states offer the starkest example of this discrimination (in Lebanon, for example, they cannot
own property, be employed in many professions, move freely, etc.). The Beduin (stateless
peoples) in the Gulf states, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds in Syria have been subjected
to similar discrimination.

Labor inequality: Mistreatment of foreign workers (especially household servants),

ranging from sexual abuse to virtual imprisonment and outright murder, is widely tolerated
throughout the Middle East, especially in oil-exporting countries that host large expatriate
labor forces.

Slavery: The Arabic-speaking countries remain the world's foremost refuge of slavery, from
child and sex trafficking in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to actual chattel slavery in Sudan
and Mauritania. Indeed, Islamists throughout the Middle East have had no qualms
advocating the legalization of slavery.

Political Oppression: Many Middle Eastern regimes are little more than elaborate
repressive systems aimed at perpetuating apartheid-style domination by a small minority:
Alawites in Syria; Tikritis in Saddam's Iraq; the Saudi royal family; the Hashemite dynasty in
Jordan.

Possibly the world's most arresting anachronism, these endemic abuses have until now escaped
scrutiny and condemnation. Western governments have been loath to antagonize their local
authoritarian allies, while the educated classes have absolved Middle Easterners of responsibility for
their actions in the patronizing tradition of the "white man's burden," dismissing regional players as
half-witted creatures, too dim to be accountable for their own fate.

It is time to denounce these discriminatory practices and force Arab/Muslim regimes to abide by
universally accepted principles of decency and accountability. This will not only expose the
hollowness of the Israel delegitimization campaign but will also help promote regional peace and
stability.

History has shown that gross and systemic discrimination is a threat not just to the oppressed
minorities, but also to the political health of the societies that oppress them. Only when Arab and
Muslim societies treat the "other" as equal will the Middle East, and the rest of the Islamic world, be
able to transcend its malaise and look forward to a real political and social spring.

The writer is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College
London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine
Betrayed.

The war against the Jews

by Efraim Karsh
Israel Affairs
July 2012, pp. 319-343
The sustained anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign is a corollary of the millenarian obsession with
the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Since Israel is the world's only Jewish state, and
since Zionism is the Jewish people's national liberation movement, anti-Zionismas opposed to
criticism of specific Israeli policies or actionsmeans denial of the Jewish right to national self-
determination. Such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation(and one of the few
that can trace their corporate identity and territorial attachment to antiquity) while allowing it to all
other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and
unadulterated anti-Jewish racism, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known.

By any conceivable standard, Israel has been an extraordinary success story: national rebirth in the
ancestral homeland after millennia of exile and dispersion; resuscitation of a dormant biblical
language; the creation of a modern, highly educated, technologically advanced, and culturally and
economically thriving society, as well as a vibrant liberal democracy in one of the world's least

democratic areas. It is a world leader in agricultural, medical, military, and solar energy
technologies, among others; a high-tech superpower attracting more venture capital investment per
capita than the United States and Europe; home to one of the world's best health systems and
philharmonic orchestras, as well as to ten Nobel Prize laureates. And so on and so forth.

Why then is Israel the only state in the world whose right to exist is constantly debated and
challenged while far less successful countries, including numerous "failed states," are considered
legitimate and incontestable members of the international community? The answer offered by this
article is that this pervasive prejudice against Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical
times, is a corollary of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim
worlds.

On occasion, notably among devout and/or born again Evangelical Christians, this obsession has
manifested itself in admiration and support for the national Jewish resurrection in the Holy Land.
In most instances, however, anti-Jewish prejudice and animosity, or anti-Semitism as it is
commonly known, has served to exacerbate distrust and hatred of Israel. Indeed, the fact that the
international coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the libels against Zionism and Israel, such as
the despicable comparisons to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, have invariably reflected a
degree of intensity and emotional involvement well beyond the normal level to be expected of
impartial observers would seem to suggest that, rather than being a response to concrete Israeli
activities, it is a manifestation of long-standing prejudice that has been brought out into the open by
the vicissitudes of the conflict.

Anti-Zionism or Anti-Semitism?

Of course, it has long been a staple of Israel bashers to argue that they have never had anything
against Judaism or Jews but only against Zionism and Zionists, and that their criticisms are to be
understood as an expression of frustration with Zionism, not with Jews or Judaism. Yet, for all their
protestations to the contrary, opponents of Zionism and Israel have never really distinguished
among Zionists, Israelis, and Jews, and often use these terms interchangeably.

"I really can't see that there is any kind of way of dealing with the Zionist question except by a
massacre now and then," wrote the Freya Stark, the noted British Arabist and anti-Zionist during a
1943 mission to the United States to promote Britain's Palestine policy. "What can we do? It is the
ruthless last penny that they squeeze out of you that does it... the world has chosen to massacre them
at intervals, and whose fault is it?"[1]

When in June 1967 the Israeli government ignored a French warning against preempting the
imminent pan-Arab attack, President Charles de Gaulle lambasted the Jewsnot the Israelisas "an
elite people, self-assured and domineering." Seven years later, the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Gen. George S. Brown, vented his ire at Israel's supposed stranglehold of US foreign policy
in no less indiscriminate terms. Making no distinction between Israelis and American Jews, he
bluntly claimed that "they own, you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers, you just look at
where the Jewish money is in this country."[2] And Anis Mansur, one of Egypt's foremost journalists
and a one-time confidant of President Anwar Sadat, put the same idea in even blunter terms: "There
is no such thing in the world as Jew and Israeli. Every Jew is an Israeli. No doubt about that."[3]

The truth of the matter is that since Israel is the world's only Jewish state and since Zionism is the
Jewish people's national liberation movement, anti-Zionism - as opposed to criticism of specific
Israeli policies or actions - means denial of the Jewish right to national self-determination. Needless
to say, such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation(and one of the few that can
trace their corporate identity and territorial attachment to antiquity) while allowing it to all other
groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and
unadulterated racism. Yet it is precisely because it has been tacitly construed as epitomizing the
worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews that Israel could be portrayed in so lurid a
light, and its destructionas a redress of a historical anomaly rather than the genocidal act it
actually is.

Take the repeated calls by Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be "wiped off the
map." On one level, it is refreshing to see a politician who, unlike many of his Western counterparts,
does not consider high political office and plain speaking as mutually exclusive. On the other, the
sight of a head of state openly advocating the extermination of an existing state, which has done his
country, from which it is separated by nearly a thousand miles, no wrong whatsoever, cannot but be
absolutely terrifying.

Or can it? No sooner had the Nazi extermination of European Jewry become public knowledge than
the nascent Arab League proclaimed (on December 2, 1945) an official boycott of "Jewish products
and manufactured goods." Two years later, on October 11, 1947, as the UN General Assembly
deliberated the creation of a Jewish state in part of Mandatory Palestine, the league's secretary-
general Abdel Rahman Azzam threatened that such a move would unleash "a war of extermination
and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars."[4]

Such rhetoric has been used by a long line of Arab and Muslim leaders. During the 1950s and 1960s,
it was Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser who led the call for Israel's destruction. After this
goal was frustrated by the Jewish state's astounding victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the baton
passed to a new generation of aspiring pan-Arab champions, notably Syrian president Hafez Assad,
Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. For his part, Iran's Ayatollah
Khomeini, Ahmadinejad's revered spiritual mentor, had emphasized the need to obliterate the
Jewish state well before coming to power in 1979; and during his reign, the destruction of Israel
evolved into a foremost tenet of the Islamic Republic and has long outlived his death in June 1989.

And let us not forget the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose publicly stated goal since
its creation in 1964 has been the destruction of the state of Israel. In June 1974, it introduced a new
phased strategy enabling it to use whatever land Israel surrendered as a springboard for further
territorial gains until the "complete liberation of Palestine"that is, Israel's destruction"could be
achieved."[5] Yet in November 1974, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat became the first non-head-of-state
to address the UN General Assembly; and in 1975, the year Israel suffered the ultimate indignity of
the Zionism-is-racism resolution, the PLO established another precedent when it was invited to
sessions of the UN Security Council on the same basis as member states. In 1980, just weeks after
Fatah, the PLO's dominant constituent group, had reiterated its objective of liquidating Israel, the
European Community issued the Venice Declaration that called for the PLO's "association" with the
political process.

Small wonder, therefore, that despite their official commitment to peace with Israel within the
framework of the Oslo process, Arafat and his PLO successors have never abandoned their
commitment to Israel's destruction. Instead they have embarked on an intricate game of Jekyll-and-
Hyde politics, constantly reassuring Israeli and Western audiences of their peaceful intentions while
at the same time denigrating the peace accords to their Palestinian constituents as a temporary
measure to be abandoned at the first available opportunity. Neither this duplicity nor the war of
terror launched by Arafat in September 2000 seems to have discredited the PLO as a peace partner
in the eyes of the international community.[6]

Against this backdrop of six decades of international acquiescence in constant calls for Israel's
destruction, Ahmadinejad must have felt that he had been singled out a bit unfairly when his
genocidal incitement was roundly condemned by world leaders and organizations. Yet while this
uncharacteristically harsh response is certainly welcome, one wonders whether it was motivated by
real concern for Israel's safety or by the West's growing frustration with Iran's dogged drive toward
nuclear weapons.

That this may well be the case is evidenced by the continued tolerance of more subtle forms of
malignant incitement such as the Palestinian insistence on the "right of return"the standard Arab
euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic subversion.[7] Worse, during the past
decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause clbre among many
educated Westerners. The "one-state solution" (or a "bi-national state") as it is called is a
euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the
whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority at
the sufferance of the Arab-Muslim majority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the "original sin" of
Israel's founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) "on the ruins of Arab Palestine" and
achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.[8]

"I don't find the idea of a Jewish state terribly interesting," American Arab academic Edward Said
told the Israeli daily Haaretz in August 2000. "I wouldn't want it for myself. Even if I were a Jew, I'd
fight against it. And it won't last.... Take my word for it.... It won't even be remembered." Making his
own vision of the future explicit, he added: "[T]he Jews are a minority everywhere. A Jewish
minority can survive [in Arab Palestine] the way other minorities in the Arab world survived."

"Knowing the region and given the history of the conflict, do you think such a Jewish minority would
be treated fairly?"

"I worry about that. The history of minorities in the Middle East has not been as bad as in Europe,
but I wonder what would happen. It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the
fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don't know. It worries me."[9]

Said at least took the trouble to feign concern for the fate of yet another six million Jews who were to
be ethnically cleansed and their thriving state destroyed to make room for his envisaged "bi-national
state"though this did not lead him to reconsider this genocidal idea. New York University
professor Tony Judt (himself a Jew) made no such effort. As far as he was concerned, there was "no
place in the world today for a 'Jewish state,'" and the idea of Jewish statehood was "not just an
anachronism but a dysfunctional one." "Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed
to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do," he wrote in 2003. "The increased
incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts,
often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel."[10]

Anti-Semites, of course, have never been short of excuses for assaulting and killing Jews, and
infinitely larger numbers of Jews were exterminated shortly before the founding of the state of Israel
than in the sixty-four years of its existence, not to mention the millions massacred in Europe and the
Middle East since antiquity. Neither did European Jew haters await Israel's establishment to
unleash on the remnants of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitic sentiments remained as pronounced as
ever, especially in Eastern Europe, which witnessed a few vicious pogroms shortly after the end of
World War II.[11] Even in Germany, Jews found themselves attacked and abused in public with sixty
percent of Germans condoning overt acts of violence against Jews. Yet this bleak record did not
prevent Judt, a student of European history, from falling for the canard that Israeli actions are the
cause, rather than the pretext, for the worst wave of attacks on Jews and Jewish targets in Europe
since the 1930s.
If it were not so appalling, one could even marvel in the irony that seventy years after being forced to
wear yellow stars so they could be targeted for persecution, German Jews are being instructed to
hide any signs of their Jewish identity for their protection!

Palestine Is Not the Problem

But let us assume for the sake of argument that Israel and the PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority
(PA) were to sign a formal peace treaty. Would this stop the effort to delegitimize the Jewish state
campaign or eliminate anti-Semitism from the European scene? Hardlyfor the simple reason that
the Palestinian question has next to nothing to do with either of these. Though anti-Zionism has
been the core principle of pan-Arab solidarity since the 1930sit is easier, after all, to unite people
through a common hatred than through a shared loyaltythe Arab states (and the Palestinians'
international champions) have shown far less concern for the well-being of the Palestinians than for
their own interests.

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of
Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As
the Arab league's secretary-general Azzam once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King
Abdullah of Transjordan "was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the
Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that
the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon."[12]

From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed
little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of lifewhich is
part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River
and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. "We couldn't care less if all of the refugees die," an
Egyptian diplomat once remarked. "There are enough Arabs around."[13]

Not surprisingly, the Arab states have never hesitated to sacrifice Palestinians on a grand scale
whenever it suited their needs. In 1970, when his throne came under threat from the PLO, the
affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan had no qualms about slaughtering
thousands of Palestinians, an event known as "Black September." Six years later, Lebanese Christian
militias, backed by the Syrian army, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the
Beirut refugee camp of Tel Zaatar. These militias again slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in 1982
in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this time under Israel's watchful eye. In the summer of
2007, the Lebanese army killed hundreds of Palestinians, including many civilians, in the northern
refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians' rescue. Worse, in
the mid-1980s, when the PLOofficially designated by the Arab League as the "sole representative
of the Palestinian people"tried to reestablish its military presence in Lebanon, it was
unceremoniously expelled by President Assad of Syria.

This history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring
the fate of the Palestinians goes on and on. Saddam Hussein, in an effort to ennoble his predatory
designs, claimed that he would not consider ending his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait without "the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in Palestine."
Shortly after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Kuwaitis set about punishing the PLO for its support of
Husseincutting off financial sponsorship, expelling some 440,000 Palestinian workers, and
slaughtering thousands. Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that
"what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to
Palestinians in the occupied territories."[14]

If the Arab states have shown little empathy for the plight of ordinary Palestinians, the Islamic
connection to the Palestinian problem is even more tenuous. It is not out of concern for a Palestinian
right to national self-determination but as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the
"House of Islam" that Islamists inveigh against the Jewish state of Israel. In the words of Hamas's
covenant: "The land of Palestine has been an Islamic trust (waqf ) throughout the generations and
until the day of resurrection.... When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty
binding on all Muslims."[15]

In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other parts of the world conquered by
the forces of Islam throughout history. To this very day, for example, Arabs and many Muslims
unabashedly pine for the restoration of Spain and look upon their expulsion from that country in
1492 as a grave historical injustice. Indeed, even countries that have never been under Islamic
imperial rule have become legitimate targets of radical Islamic fervor. This goal need not necessarily
be pursued by the sword; it can be achieved through demographic growth and steady conversion to
Islam. But should peaceful means prove insufficient, physical force can readily be brought to bear.
As illustrated by the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic
worlds, this vision is by no means confined to a disillusioned and obscurantist fringe of Islam; and
within this grand scheme, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is but a single element
and one whose supposed centrality looms far greater in Western than in Islamic eyes.

The Public War against the Jews

If there is so little genuine concern for Palestinian wellbeing, why have they been universally cast in
the role of the ultimate victim to the total neglect of far worse human tragedies and atrocities?
Because they have served as the latest lightning rod against the Jews, their supposed victimization
reaffirming the latter's millenarian demonization. Had the Palestinians' dispute been with an Arab,
Muslim, or any other adversary, it would have attracted a fraction of the interest that it presently
does.

Few if any in the international community pay any attention to the ongoing abuse of Palestinians
across the Arab world from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, which deprives its 400,000-strong Palestinian
population of the most basic human rights from property ownership, to employment in numerous
professions, to free movement. Nor has there been any international outcry when Arab countries
have killed Palestinians on a grand scale. The fact that King Hussein of Jordan killed more
Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel managed to do in decades was never held
against him or dented the widely-held perception of him as a man of peace. As the supposedly pro-
Palestinian journalist Robert Fisk put it in his memoirs, King Hussein was "often difficult to
fault."[16] Kuwait's 1991 slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinian workers passed virtually
unnoticed by the international media. By contrast, any Palestinian or Arab casualty inflicted by
Israel comes under immediate international criticism.

Take the blanket media coverage of Israel's military response in Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008-
09), but not of the original Hezbollah and Hamas attacks triggering it, in stark contrast to the utter
indifference to bloodier conflicts going on around the world at the same time. On July 19, 2006, for
example, 5,000 Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia in what Addis Ababa claimed was an action to
"crush" an Islamist threat to its neighbor's government. A month later, Sri Lankan artillery pounded
territory held by the rebel Tamil Tigers resulting in mass displacement and over 500 deaths,
including an estimated fifty dead children following the Sri Lankan air force's bombing of an
orphanage. But neither of these events gained any media coverage, let alone emergency sessions of
the UN Security Council, just as the ongoing bloodbath in Iraq at the time, with its estimated 3,000
deaths a month by Hezbollah-like militants, sank into oblivion while the world focused on Lebanon.

And what about the-then long-running genocide in Darfur, with its estimated 300,000 dead and at
least 2.5 million refugees? Or the war in the Congo, with over 4 million dead or driven from their
homes, or in Chechnya where an estimated 150,000-160,000 have died and up to a third of the
population has been displaced at the hands of the Russian military? None of these tragedies saw
protesters flock onto the streets of Moscow, Montreal, Sydney, London, Dublin, Copenhagen, Berlin,
Bern, Paris, Stockholm, and the US cities of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and
Boston (to give a brief list) as was the case during the Lebanon and Gaza crises.

How can this be? Why do citizens in democracies enthusiastically embrace two of the world's most
dangerous and effective Islamist terror organizations, overtly committed not only to the destruction
of a sovereign democracy but also to the subordination of Western values and ways of life to a
worldwide Islamic caliphate (or umma)?

Nor should we forget that Hezbollah has been implicated in dozens of international terror attacks
from Brussels to Buenos Aires. Indeed, the response to its July 18, 1994 terror attack on the Israeli-
Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), a social center catering to Buenos Aires' large Jewish
population, provides an illuminating contrast to the relentless coverage of the 2006 events in
Lebanon. It was the worst terror attack in Argentina's history, killing 100 people and wounding
more than 200. More died in this bombing than in any single action in the 2006 Lebanese war. Yet
the BBC, which prides itself on its worldwide coverage, did not find the atrocity worth mentioning in
its evening news bulletin. When confronted with a complaint by the normally timid Board of
Deputies, British Jewry's umbrella organization, the corporation offered an apology of sorts,
blaming the omission on a particularly busy day.

What were those daily events that could have possibly diverted the BBC's attention from the
Argentina massacre? A perusal of the papers reveals the British premiership of Steven Spielberg's
new film, The Flintstones, attended by the Prince of Wales. This was also the day when Gavin
Sheerard-Smith, caned and imprisoned for six months in Qatar after being convicted of buying and
selling alcohol, returned to Britain professing his innocence, and when David MacGregor, an
agoraphobia sufferer jailed for a fortnight for failing to pay poll tax arrears, had his sentenced
quashed. In the first Commons debate on the economy since Christmas, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Kenneth Clarke claimed that the government had created the most favorable economic
circumstances for a generation while an all-party report said that Britain would have to divert over
160 million of its aid budget from the poorest nations in Africa to Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union as part of a deal signed by Prime Minister John Major at the latest EU summit. An
eventful day, indeed.

Given the BBC's indifference to the mass murder of Argentinean Jews by Hezbollah, it is hardly
surprising that the corporation, along with much of the world's media, ignored the almost daily
rocket attacks by the same group on Israel's northern border, never mind the constant attacks from
Gaza, following the Israeli withdrawal from both territories in 2000 and 2005 respectively.

And why shouldn't they? The killing of Jews and the destruction or seizure of their worldly
properties is hardly news. For millennia, Jewish blood has been cheap, if not costless, throughout
the Christian and Muslim worlds where the Jew became the epitome of powerlessness, a perpetual
punch bag, and a scapegoat for whatever ills befell society. There is no reason, therefore, why Israel
should not follow in the footsteps of these past generations, avoid antagonizing its Arab neighbors,
and exercise restraint whenever attacked. But no, instead of knowing its place, the insolent Jewish
state has forfeited this historic role by exacting a price for Jewish blood and beating the bullies who
have hitherto been able to torment the Jews with impunity. This dramatic reversal of history cannot
but be immoral and unacceptable. Hence the global community outrage and hence the world's
media provision of unlimited resources to cover every minute of Israel's "disproportionate"
response, but none of the devastation and dislocation caused to Israeli cities and their residents,
hundreds of thousands of whom became refugees.

UN-ited in Hate

Even the United Nations seemed to be backtracking from its November 1947 decision to establish a
Jewish state as it increasingly came under the sway of the Arab and Muslim states, together with
their Soviet and Third World allies. This process reached its peak in the notorious 1975 General
Assembly resolution equating the idea of Jewish statehood with "racism and racist discrimination";
and while the resolution was rescinded sixteen years later, the UN has remained a foremost
purveyor of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement.

Time and again, year after year, its Commission on Human Rights discussed Israel's supposed
human rights abuses while turning a blind eye to scores of actual atrocities around the world. Of the
ten emergency sessions in the General Assembly's history, six focused on Israel while that body's
annual meetings regularly feature numerous anti-Israel resolutions. The 59th Session (2004-05), for
example, enacted nineteen anti-Israel resolutions, but not a single one on Sudan's ongoing genocide
in Darfur where hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians perished. In a UN-sponsored
"International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People," held on November 29, 2005the fifty-
seventh anniversary of the Partition ResolutionSecretary-General Kofi Annan, flanked by UN
senior officials, sat on the podium beside an Arabic-language "Map of Palestine" that showed a
Palestine replacing Israel.[17]

The world organization has 192 member nations, but the Security Council of that august body has
devoted about a third of its activity and criticism to only one of those statesIsrael. Similarly, about
a third of all the resolutions adopted by the UN Commission on Human Rights have criticized Israel,
which is the only country regularly dealt with at meetings as a separate and exclusive agenda item.
In 2001 alone, the commission issued six condemnations of Israel, only to surpass this figure the
following year when it passed eight anti-Israel condemnations. In contrast, no other state has ever
received more than one condemnation in the same year from this body, and over three-quarters of
UN members have never had a resolution passed condemning them, including such paragons of
human rights as Saudi Arabia, China, Zimbabwe, and Syria, who under President Hafez Assad, lest
we forget, razed the city of Hama in February 1982, killing between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians in
the course of one hellish week.

The UN rarely calls for emergency special sessions and did not see any reason to hold such a meeting
to discuss genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, genocide in Darfur or the horrific
massacres in East Timor. But in 2003 alone, it felt the need to call an unprecedented three
emergency sessionstwo to condemn Israel's security barrier and one to criticize Israel for
considering (considering, not even carrying out!!) the expulsion of Arafat. And yet Israel's use of
military force combined over the sixty-four years of its existence has caused far fewer casualties and
damage than each of these horrific events, not to mention those in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola,
Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Chad, Chechnya, Colombia, Congo, El Salvador, Eritrea,
and Ethiopia (and that is only the first five letters of the alphabet; if we go to countries beginning
with 'I' there is India; Indonesia; Iran; Iraq).

Nowhere has this hypocrisy been more starkly demonstrated than in the World Conference against
Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in September 2001 in the
South African town of Durban. For eight full days, delegates from numerous countries and
thousands of NGOs indulged in a xenophobic orgy of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement that
made mockery of the conference's original purpose. Posters equating Zionism with Nazism were
widely distributed while tens of thousands of hate-spouting demonstrators marched in the streets
carrying banners proclaiming inter alia that "Hitler should have finished the job." Representatives
of Jewish groups were subjected to taunts, physical intimidation, and organized jeering while the
hate literature distributed during the conference included The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a
virulent anti-Semitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the 20th century and
alleging an organized Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination, as well as caricatures of Jews
with hooked noses, Palestinian blood on their hands, surrounded by money, and Israelis wearing
Nazi emblems. Pamphlets reading "Nazi-Israeli apartheid" were distributed daily at conference halls
alongside flyers that asked (approvingly) "what if Hitler had won?" while representatives of such
repressive states as Syria and Iran objected to the inclusion of anti-Semitism or the Holocaust on the
grounds that anti-Semitism was a "complicated," "curious," and "bizarre" concept, and reference to
the Holocaust would be imbalanced or "favoritism." Little wonder that resolutions charging Israel
with "genocide and ethnic cleansing" and effectively calling for its dismantling were voted upon by
regional caucuses and adopted by the NGOs' forum at the conference.

In protest at this breathtaking bigotry, the American and Israeli delegations walked out of the
conference, together with representatives of the eleven Jewish NGOs, whose proposed resolution
against anti-Semitism was not included in the final document. "This forum is now Judenrein,"
declared a prominent Jewish delegate, while US secretary of state Colin Powell denounced the
"hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of 'Zionism equals racism;' or supports
the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or
that singles out only one country in the worldIsraelfor censure and abuse."[18]

The Auschwitz Complex: Zionism, the New Nazism

If this double standard and dehumanization is not bad enough (how else can one describe the denial
of a country's basic right to self-defense?), there is also the fact that this is the only case where one
party to a territorial disputeIsraelis and their supporters across the worldis collectively
stigmatized for government actions and targeted for political, economic, and academic boycotts as
well as defamed as the heirs to the Nazis in the modern world.

The British government, and especially Prime Minister Tony Blair, has been widely criticized for
sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, but nobody has held the British people collectively
responsible for this decision or looked to boycott them for the fact that, on two occasions since 2001,
their government sent troops into countries that had not directly attacked them and had posed no
immediate threat to British security. In the years since Serbia and the Serb minority in Bosnia
initiated the war in the Balkans and embarked on a program of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian
Muslims, neither Serbian citizens, nor Christian orthodox communities from Russia to Greece who
supported this aggression, were held collectively responsible for the war. The world community is in
no doubt that the blame rested squarely on Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and the military
and political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs.

Israeli policies and actions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and more recently in Lebanon, have
never remotely resembled those adopted by the Serbs during the 1990s. Yet not only are Israeli
politicians and officers condemned unreasonably for their actions and threatened with arrest in
several European countries, but Israeli citizens, and Jews around the world, are also singled out for
collective excoriation: from polls in Germany in which 51% of respondents expressed the view that
Israel's current treatment of Palestinians is similar to that meted out to the Jews by the Nazis, to
posters in Paris reading "Hitler has a sonSharon"; from information signs, paid for by local
government, in the Spanish town of Oleiros, flashing "Stop the neo-Nazis," to banners in a Dublin
march demanding an end to the Palestinian holocaust and equating the Star of David with the Nazi
swastika. Wherever one looks, we are bombarded with images of Israeli "storm troopers" pursuing
"SS tactics" and engaged in "Blitzkrieg" operations.

Of course, there is absolutely no moral equivalence between Hitler's industrial slaughter of the Jews
and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. If you doubt this, ask yourself the following questions:
Would it have been possible for Jewish schools in German-occupied Holland, Poland, Hungary, and
numerous other countries to indoctrinate their students with the most outlandish anti-German
propaganda and incitement? Would these same school children fresh from their brainwashing
classes have been free to enroll, in the glare of the world's media, in summer camps dedicated to
training a new generation of anti-German guerillas? Would their religious and secular leaders have
been able to go on their own TV channels and call their occupiers the "sons of monkeys" with
impunity? Of course not: The Jews under Nazi rule were too busy trying (in most cases
unsuccessfully) to escape being bundled on trains and shipped to the gas chambers. To put it
bluntly, while six million Jews, three quarters of European Jewry, died at the hands of the Nazis in
the six years that Hitler dominated Europe, the Palestinian population under Israel's control of Gaza
and the West Bankfrom 1967 to the mid-1990s when these territories were transferred to Arafat's
PAhas doubled, as life expectancy has risen from 48 to 73. Hardly a Nazi-like extermination
program.

Indeed, the equation of Zionism with Nazism among Westerners seems to be far less related to the
actual state of Israeli-Palestinian relations than to the desire to upload the burden of Christianity's
millenarian persecution of the Jews in general and the Holocaust in particular. This is evidenced by
the fact that this despicable analogy emerged not in response to the 1967 occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, or even to Israel's establishment in 1948, but at the height of the Nazi extermination
of the Jews in World War II, gathering momentum in the years immediately attending the war. Thus
we have a senior official at the British embassy in Baghdad shamelessly claiming (in 1943) that there
is a "powerful Jewish organization in Palestine that is run on Fascist lines and Nazi principles" and
that "Jewish refugees from the Nazi's Fascist tyranny in Europe have introduced into Palestine a
good few of the methods employed to regiment the German masses by Himmler's hoodlums." In
1945, Sir Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), British minister resident in the Middle East, warned a
Cairo press conference of the "establishment of a kind of Nazi gangsterism in the Holy Land." While
Sir Edward Spears, who had been British ambassador in Syria and Lebanon during the war,
expanded on Grigg's view: "Political Zionism as it is manifested in Palestine today preaches very
much the same doctrines as Hitler." Even Prime Minister Clement Attlee was not immune to the
Zionism equals Nazism equation. "That was just Hitler's method," he responded on April 28, 1948,
to an American request to allow Holocaust survivors to enter Palestine. "He put people in as tourists,
but they were soon armed once they got in. The Jews would put them in as immigrants, but they
would soon become soldiers, and it was known that they were already being drilled and trained."[19]

The truth of the matter is that if there is indeed something reminiscent of Nazism in the
contemporary Middle Eastin terms of style and political intent (albeit not the ability to implement
them)it is the Arab world's vile anti-Semitic propaganda and the persistent commitment of many
of its parts to Israel's destruction. Even Egypt, at peace with Israel for over thirty years, may be,
today, the world's most prolific producer of anti-Semitic ideas and attitudes. These are voiced openly
by the extreme Islamist press, by the establishment media, and even by supporters of peace with
Israel. In numberless articles, scholarly writings, books, cartoons, and public statements, Jews are
painted in the blackest terms imaginable.

This state of affairs is hardly surprising given the Arab world's real time veneration for Hitler and
Nazism. Hassan al-Banna, one time watch repairer and teacher who in 1927 founded the militant
Islamist group the Muslim Brothers, was not only an unabashed admirer of the German tyrant but
also organized the society's "shock battalions," responsible for most of its terrorist attacks during the
1940s, along the lines of the notorious Nazi SS.[20] So did Ahmad Hussein, spiritual father of the
Young Egypt Society, a nationalist-fascist organization that mimicked its German and Italian
counterparts, in which future president Nasser was schooled in the early 1930s. Nasser's fellow
officer and successor to the presidency, Anwar Sadat, was an equally staunch Nazi sympathizer who
was imprisoned in World War II, together with scores of fellow officers, for an attempted
collaboration with the Nazi forces in North Africa.

Such sentiments were echoed in Iraq where pro-Nazi officers seized power in the spring of 1941 only
to be deposed by the British army. In Palestine, then under British rule, a Nazi official reported to
Berlin as early as 1937 that "the Palestinian Arabs show on all levels a great sympathy for the new
Germany and its Fuhrer, a sympathy whose value is particularly high as it is based on a purely
ideological foundation." He added: "Most important for the sympathies which Arabs now feel
towards Germany is their admiration for our Fuhrer." Years after the war, Hajj Amin Husseini,
former mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to late 1940s,
who spent the war years in Berlin helping the Nazi propaganda as well as its war and killing
machines, boasted of his close friendship with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's murderous henchman,
and evoked Hitler's admiration for the Palestinians as proof of their true patriotism.[21]

The Apartheid Canard

Another malignant anti-Israel slander that has become a commonplace over the past few decades
compares the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa. Invented by the PLO in the early 1960s,
[22] this canard quickly struck roots not only among Arabs and their Third World allies but also
among many educated Westerners, such as Nobel Prize laureates Desmond Tutu,[23]Jimmy Carter,
[24] and Mairead Corrigan-Maguire.[25] And the message could not be clearer: Just as the South
African regime was emasculated, so its Zionist counterpart has to be destroyed.

As with the Nazi slander, the apartheid charge is not only false but the complete inverse of the truth.
Whether in its South African form or elsewhere, such as the US south until the late 1960s, apartheid
was a comprehensive and discriminatory system of racial segregation, on the basis of ethnicity,
comprising all walks of lifefrom schooling, to public transportation, to social activities and
services, to medical care. None of this has ever been applied to Israel. Not only have its religious and
ethnic minorities been free and equal citizens of the Jewish state, but from the beginning of the
Zionist enterprise in the early twentieth century, well before the establishment of Israel, Arabs had
been leaving their places of residence en masse and flocking to Jewish towns and cities in search of a
better life. In the words of a 1937 report by a British commission of enquiry headed by Lord Peel:

The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the
increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A
comparison of the Census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase percent in
Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it
was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.[26]

Indeed, from the very beginning, the Zionist movement had always assumed that there would be a
substantial Arab minority in the future Jewish state, and the general conviction was that they would
participate on an equal footing "throughout all sectors of the country's public life," in the words of
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today's Likud
party.[27]

In 1934, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its
provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, notably
including military and civil service; Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing; and
"in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab
and vice versa."[28] Echoing this vision, David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of his own (Mapai)
party in 1947 that the non-Jews in the Jewish state "will be equal citizens; equal in everything
without any exception; that is, the state will be their state as well."[29]

Committees laying the groundwork for the nascent state discussed in detail the establishment of an
Arabic-language press, the improvement of health, the incorporation of Arab officials into the
government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-
Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction. Even military plans for rebuffing an anticipated pan-
Arab invasion in the late 1940s were predicated, in the explicit instructions of the commander-in-
chief of the Hagana, on the "acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in
the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual
freedom and dignity."[30]

The same principle was enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence, issued on May 14, 1948.
The new state undertook to "uphold absolute social and political equality of rights for all its citizens,
without distinction of religion, race, or sex." In particular, Arab citizens were urged "to take part in
the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and on the basis of appropriate
representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent." While the declaration lacked
constitutional status, its principles were taken as guidelines for governmental behavior; over the
years, they would gain legal authority through supreme-court decisions and acts of the Knesset
(parliament).

As a result, Israeli Arabs have enjoyed full equality before the law and have been endowed with the
full spectrum of democratic rightsincluding the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.
(From the first, Arabs have been members of the Knesset.) From the designation of Arabic as an
official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their
respective communities, to the granting of educational, cultural, judicial, and religious autonomy,
Arabs in Israel may well enjoy more formal prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the
democratic world.

Over the years, the Israeli Arabs have made astounding social and economic progress. Far from
lagging behind, their rate of development has often surpassed that of the Jewish sector with the
result that the gap between the two communities has steadily narrowed. Mortality rates, for
example, have fallen by nearly two-thirds over the last decades while life expectancy of Israeli Arab
males has risen from age seventy (in 1970) to 76.3 today. Not only does the latter figure compare
favorably with the Middle East's average of sixty-eight, but the average Israeli Arab male can expect
to live substantially longer than many of his white European counterparts.[31]

No less remarkable have been the advances in education. Since Israel's founding, while the Arab
population has grown eightfold, the number of Arab schoolchildren has multiplied by a factor of 35.
If, in 1960, the average Israeli Arab spent one year in school, today the figure is over eleven years;
over the same period, adult illiteracy rates have dropped from 52 to 6.2% (3.5% among women
younger than forty-five). This not only places Israeli Arabs miles ahead of their brothers in the Arab
worldin Morocco illiteracy is at 69%, in Egypt at 61%, in Syria at 44%but reflects a pace of
improvement nearly double that of the Jewish sector.

Still more dramatic has been the story in higher education where the numbers of Arab graduates
multiplied fifteen times between 1961 and 2001. Thirty years ago, a mere 4% of Arab teachers held
academic degrees; by 2000, the figure had vaulted to 47%.

Standard of living? In the late 1940s, following the flight of its more affluent classes and the
breakdown of economic relations with neighboring Arab states, the Arab minority in Israel was left
largely impoverished. As they became increasingly incorporated into local economic life, Arabs
experienced a steep rise in earnings and a visible improvement in their material circumstances. By
2002, 86% of Arab householdsmore Arab households than Jewish onesoccupied dwellings of
three or more rooms. Contrary to the standard image of cramped neighborhoods and acute land
shortages, population density in Arab localities is substantiallylower on average than in equivalent
Jewish locales.

As for income statistics, it is undeniable that, on average, Israeli Arabs still earn less than Jews. But
to what is this attributable? For one thing, the average Muslim in Israel is ten years younger than his
Jewish counterpart; all over the world, younger people earn less. Then, too, fewer Arab women enter
the labor market than do Jewish women. The salience of these and other factorsfamily size, level of
schooling, cultural tradition, and so forthmay be judged by looking at segments of Israeli Jewish
society like the ultra-Orthodox or residents of development towns (localities established during the
1950s and 1960s to absorb the fresh waves of Jewish immigration, especially from Arab countries),
whose income levels more closely resemble those in the Arab sector. In 1997, for instance, when the
average monthly salary in Arab Nazareth was 4,450 shekels, the equivalent figure for mostly Jewish
Upper Nazareth was 4,780 shekels. During the late 1990s, the unemployment rate in Israel's Arab
sector was consistently lower than in Jewish development towns.

Government allocations to Arab municipalities have grown steadily over the past forty years and are
now on a par with, if not higher than, subsidies to the Jewish sector. By the mid-1990s, Arab
municipalities were receiving about a quarter of all such allocations, well above the "share" of Arabs
in Israel's overall population. In numerous cases, contributions to Arab municipal budgets
substantially exceed contributions to equivalently situated Jewish locales: in 1996, for instance,
relative disbursements to the Arab town of Tamra were three times higher than to the Jewish town
of Yahud; nearly three times higher to (Arab) Abu Snan than to (Jewish) Even Yehuda; twice as high
to (Arab) Iksal as to (Jewish) Azur.

The city of Haifa, to give a prominent example, was a model of Arab-Jewish coexistence with the two
communities living side by side in peace and harmony. And while this idyllic coexistence was cruelly
shattered by the 1948 war, when most of the city's Arab residents were driven to exile by their
national leadership despite pleas by their Jewish neighbors not to do so, those who stayed behind
were incorporated into the fabric of the nascent Jewish state as equal citizens.

With the subsequent growth of their numbers, owing to a higher natural increase and migration
from rural and peripheral areas, the Haifa Arabs have regained their focal role, and the pre-1948
coexistence has been restored. Jews and Arabs live together, study together, belong to the same
clubs, ride the same buses, shop in the same malls, and eat in the same restaurants. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that when on October 4, 2003, Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old lawyer from
Jenin, blew herself up in a bustling Haifa restaurant on a peaceful Saturday afternoon, murdering
twenty-one people and wounding another sixty, the establishment chosen for the heinous crime was
of joint Arab-Jewish ownership, and the victimsboth Jews and Arabs.

Indeed, the occasional suggestions to redraw Israel's borders, in the framework of a comprehensive
peace settlement, so as to allow predominantly Arab frontier areas to be included in the prospective
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, have invariably been rejected by the Israeli Arabs, who
would rather remain citizens of the Jewish state than join their bothers in a newly created state.
Even the residents of the territories, for all their criticism and grievances, have consistently ranked
Israel among the most admired democracies in the world, in stark contrast to their scathing opinion
of Arab regimes, including their own Palestinian Authority. As late as 2011, most of surveyed
Palestinians in east Jerusalem, who are entitled to Israeli social benefits and are free to travel across
Israel's pre-1967 borders, said that they would rather become citizens of the Jewish state than
citizens of a new Palestinian one.[32]

So much for Israel's supposed apartheid.

The Blame Game: From Blood Libels to 9/11

And what about the constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels
to which Israel, and Israel alone, has been subjected from the first days of its existence? Again, this
phenomenon is not confined to the Arab and Muslim worlds where medieval myths of Jews as secret
destroyers and poisoners of wells are in wide circulation (as late as October 2000, the largest
Egyptian government daily, al-Ahram, which is probably the world's foremost Arabic-language
newspaper, published an almost full-page article titled "Jewish Matzah Is Made of Arab Blood"), and
where Jews are accused of every conceivable vice from the spread of aids, mad cow disease, and bird
flu, to the murder of Palestinian children to take their internal organs, to the 9/11 attacks. It has
been echoed by the tendency of Western political and intellectual elites to demonize Israel by
endorsing the basest anti-Semitic conspiracy theories regarding Jewish and Israeli clannish
domination of world affairs.

Of course, Jews have traditionally been accused of lacking true patriotism to their countries of
citizenship, and instead seeking to embroil their non-Jewish compatriots in endless conflicts and
wars on behalf of such cosmopolitan movements and ideals as "world imperialism," "international
bolshevism," or "world Zionism." The Protocols of the Elders of Zion made this claim. So did Adolf
Hitler, an avid admirer of the anti-Semitic tract, who used his Nazi propaganda machine to
misrepresent the horrendous violence he unleashed as a "Jewish war." As the United States
eventually joined World War II following the Pearl Harbor attack, more than two years after the
outbreak of hostilities, the Nazis and their Arab lackeys portrayed this move as proof of the
supposed Jewish influence over the Roosevelt administration.[33]

This travesty struck a responsive chord over the ocean. Prior to World War II, it was a staple of the
US officer corps that Jewish attempts to counter the virulent Nazi anti-Semitism disrupted US-
German relations and might ultimately drive the country to war contrary to its real interests. The
fact that these desperate pleas had no effect whatever on the administration, or that US-Nazi
relations were doomed from the start given Hitler's maniacal desire for world mastery, did not seem
to have bothered these detractors. As late as April 1948, General Albert C. Wedemeyer, plans and
operations chief and a rabid anti-Semite who saw international Jewish conspirators around every
corner, blamed the Zionist movement and Roosevelt's Jewish advisors for getting the United States
into World War II.[34]

More than sixty years later, the obsession with the supposed influence of "world Jewry" is alive and
kicking. Only now it is the 2003 Iraq war, rather than World War II, which was allegedly triggered
by Jewish and Israeli machinations, and it is George W. Bush, rather than F.D.R., who is criticized
for allowing himself to be conned by a Jewish cabal. (In fact, Israel had never viewed Saddam
Hussein as an existential threat and was skeptical of the impending war against Iraq for fear that it
would diminish the US ability to contain Iran's dogged quest for nuclear weaponsas indeed
happened.)
According to Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim advisor to Tony Blair, the former British prime minister
was the latest in a long line of politicians to have fallen under the spell of a "sinister" group of Jews
and Freemasons, which saw the attack on Iraq as a means to control the Middle East.[35] This claim
(albeit without the Freemasons) was reiterated inter alia in a "working paper" by Harvard professor
Stephen Walt and his University of Chicago colleague John Mearsheimer, published in March 2006
under the auspices of Harvard University's prestigious Kennedy School of Government, which not
only presented the Iraq war as the brainchild of a devious Jewish cabal but bemoaned the supposed
hijacking of US foreign policy over the past several decades by the "Israel lobby," which has
manipulated the largest power on earth "to set aside its own security in order to advance the
interests of another state."[36]

Lobbying is, of course, the bread and butter of American social and political life, and "ethnic" or
"national" lobbies, among many others, have exerted great influence on US foreign policy on
numerous occasions. During WWII, to give a prominent example, the Irish lobby cowered F.D.R.
into tolerating the denial of Ireland's ports to the allied anti-Nazi war effortat an enormous human
and material cost.[37] Likewise, for decades the China lobby helped prevent the recognition of and
normalized relations with communist China, something that could have probably spared the United
States the Korea and Vietnam wars among other detrimental developments. Yet none of these
lobbies, not to mention the ruthless manipulation of US foreign policy by the Arab oil lobby, have
attracted a fraction of the criticism vented on the "Jewish lobby." "Why it is supposed that principle
requires that Jews, and Jews alone, refrain from consulting their ethnic loyalties, I don't know,"
wrote the eminent American Jewish intellectual Irving Howe, "but it is surely outrageous to suggest
that the possession of such loyalties, which does not in itself distinguish Jews from anyone else, is a
ground for dismissing the arguments made by democratic radicals and intellectuals in behalf of
supporting Israel."[38]

No Business like the Bash Israel Business

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that those who make a career of bashing Israel, in the media,
academia, and politics, become major stars with access to the most valuable real estate in the press
and with more invitations to travel the world disparaging Israel than they can take up.

Take the hullabaloo attending the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the supposed stranglehold of the
"Israel lobby" over US foreign policy. While the two have gone out of their way to cast themselves as
courageous intellectuals who have taken great personal risk by "speaking truth to power" (Walt even
bemoaned to a radical Muslim audience that standing up to Israel entailed adverse financial
implications), the truth is that their paper catapulted them overnight from obscurity into the public
limelight, netting them a reported $750,000 advance by a prominent New York publisher to expand
their ill-conceived and poorly researched paper to a book and landing Walt a personal blog in the
widely read Foreign Policy internet magazine. Following in their footsteps a decade later,
former New Republic editor Peter Beinert sought to have his fifteen minutes of fame with a similarly
malignant book.[39]

Yet nobody has personified this phenomenon more than the late Edward Said, university professor
of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who died in September 2003. For
decades, Said was venerated for his bravery in his role as the most articulate and visible proponent
of the Palestinian cause. Despite Said's constant protestations that "Palestine is unfashionable and
it brings no rewards," the truth is that it was his status as an activist and polemicist on the Palestine
issue rather than his scholarly work, or academic career, that gained him international celebrity as
well as plaudits, honors, and fame beyond the wildest dreams of most English professors.

Said was smart to embrace the Palestinian cause in the late 1960s, at a time of growing Western
sympathy for Third World causes and anti-colonial ideology, which in turn enhanced the belief that
Zionism was an anachronistic, even illegitimate ideology, while the Palestinian struggle was one of
liberation. Over the next three decades, nobody was more adept than Said at pronouncing the
freedom fighter slogans and anti-colonial language that made generations of Westerners weak at the
knees, and no one was more adept than Said at presenting Israel as nothing but the artificial colonial
creation of Western imperialists. Not surprisingly, his views on Palestine quickly endeared him to
the world's media. In 1971, Said wrote his first piece for Le Monde Diplomatique. In 1973, he made
his debut in The New York Times. Both articles were on the Arab-Israeli conflict. By 1977, he was a
member of the Palestine National Council, and by 1979, he had published The Question of
Palestine and was being invited to Paris by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the
Middle East with Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the apartment of Michael Foucault.
The young English professor, who had labored in obscurity prior to embracing the Palestinian cause,
had come a long way. Said may have been a competent literary critic, his early studies of Jane
Austen and Joseph Conrad may have been valid contributions to the scholarly field, but from this
point on, this work had little to do with his reputation or standing. Palestine became, as one admirer
puts it, "an almost overwhelming repetitive theme in Said's work," and it was now near on
impossible to draw a line between his polemics on the Palestine question and the rest of his writing.
[40]

Likewise, the British journalist Robert Fisk has been venerated by legions of fans for drawing the
world's attention in his reporting to Israel's supposed injustices and crimes against the Palestinians.
Like Said, one of Fisk's major complaints about the Western media is the way it oversimplifies the
situation and plays on the prejudices of its audience in reporting on the Muslim Middle East. But
also like Said, he is himself guilty of the same vice in his approach to Israel. In his recently published
memoirs, he tells us that it is "something of a relief to find Israelis eloquent and brave enough to
challenge this colonial mentality." In truth, Israelis (unlike their Arab neighbors) do not need to be
brave to make a public stand against their government on any issueit is a free society with a free
press, and many of the most harsh critics of government policy are in leading positions in the media,
universities, and other state-funded institutions. The extent of this one-dimensional approach to
reporting on Israel means that nobody reading Fisk would know that violence, turmoil, and
upheaval were part of the fabric of the Middle East long before the dreaded Zionists established their
state. If you believe this, you'll believe anything. But perhaps that is what these cohorts of Israel-
bashers have been banking on all along.

More recently the Israeli "New Historians," who made their entry onto the scene in the late 1980s,
have been lionized as pioneers of anti/post-Zionism who courageously defy the oppressive and
heretical Zionist ideology. Claiming to have uncovered the "historical truth" about the creation of the
State of Israel and the advent of the Arab-Israeli conflict, they have become celebrated figures
cashing in on the prestige, book deals, and travel opportunities on offer across the world for Jewish
Israel-bashers. As Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist and "new historian" jokingly told one American
journalist, "we perform at weddings and bar mitzvas."[41] This despite the total unfamiliarity of
most "new historians" with the Arab worldits language, culture, history, and politics; their
condescending treatment of the Palestinians as passive objects; their failure to unearth new facts or
offer novel interpretations;[42] and the fact that the recent declassification of millions of documents
from the period of the British Mandate and Israel's early days paint a much more definitive picture
of the historical record, and one that is completely at odds with the anti-Israel caricature painted by
the "new historians."

Other Jews, like US academic Norman Finkelstein, have been feted in Germany, among other places,
for their highly offensive claims that Israel and the Diaspora Jewish communities have overplayed
the Holocaust for their own benefit.[43] Even worse, a number of Jews, including Hebrew
University professor Moshe Zimmerman and the late Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
lionized by Said and Fisk, have drawn parallels between the actions of Israeli governments and the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Nazis. Since this claim enables Europeans to shed some of their
own guilt over the Holocaust, it has been adopted with alacrity. A Euro-barometer poll conducted in
nine European countries and released on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day 2004, found that
35.7% of respondents believed that Jews "should stop playing the victim for the Holocaust."

The recent surge in anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews and Jewish targets on a level unknown in
Europe since the 1930s would seem to take this mindset one step forward. If all Jews are Israelis,
and all Israelis are Nazis, then their targeting is legitimate. And, of course, this attitude has been
spurred on by the tendency of Europe's political and intellectual elites to demonize Israel:
Remember the January 2002 New Statesman cover of a gold Star of David piercing a Union Jack,
with the headline below: "A kosher conspiracy?"

The 2006 Lebanon war has once more underlined just how widely Jews and Israelis are perceived as
one and the same. During the crisis, there was a doubling of anti-Semitic attacks and incidents in the
UK compared with July 2005 and a threefold increase in these events in Canada over the same
period in the previous year. At the same time, the Jewish Memorial for Holocaust victims in Brussels
and Berlin's Holocaust memorial have been desecrated and daubed with swastikas as have two
synagogues in Sydney, Australia, and one in the Brazilian town of Campinas; twenty Jewish shops in
Rome were also vandalized and daubed with swastikas, and a Pakistani-American walked into the
Jewish Community center in Seattle in July 2006 and opened fire on innocent Jewish civilians,
killing one and wounding five.

What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is that the media and Western political leaders
have been bending over backward since 9/11 to prevent the spread of Islamophobia when the truth
is that it is Jews, not Muslims, whose lives have been most adversely affected by increasingly hostile
attitudes on the groundafter all, it is the Jews, not Muslims of France, who have been emigrating
in record numbers to find a safe-haven. It is Jews who feel vulnerable to attack, who have faced the
most violence, and whose institutions from synagogues to community buildings to Jewish
newspaper offices have been under heavy police guard for years because of events in the Middle East
no Muslim community in the West has had to undertake similar security precautions. And yet, just
as politicians and the media ignored Hezbollah and Hamas missiles on Israeli population centers
but jumped up and down over Jerusalem's military response, they also ignore the reality that it is
not Islamophobia but anti-Semitism that is the major hate crime in Europe, and increasingly in the
US, Canada, and Australia, with both Israel and these countries' Jewish communities bearing the
brunt of this vicious assault.

Conclusion: Israel and the Human Conscience

The equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism will no doubt be dismissed as "Zionist

propaganda" by many opponents of Israel. But in fact, this argument not only runs counter to the
prevailing wisdom among Israeli academics and intellectuals, for whom such claims are anathema,
but it also challenges one of the most fundamental tenets of Zionismthat the creation of a Jewish
state, where the Jewish diasporas would congregate and become normalized, would solve the
"Jewish problem" and ameliorate if not eliminate altogether the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.

What this line of thinking by the founding fathers of Zionism failed to consider, however, is that the
prejudice and obsession that had hitherto been reserved for Jewish individuals and communities
would be transferred to the Jewish state. If prior to Israel's establishment Jews had been despised
because of their helplessness, they are now reviled because of their newly discovered physical and
political empowerment as evidenced by the repeated criticism of Israel's supposed used of
"disproportionate force" whenever it defends itself against indiscriminate terror attacks by groups
committed to its destruction.

For millennia, the Jewish people, in the words of the eminent philosopher Martin Buber, was a
sinister, homeless specter. This people, which resisted inclusion in any category, a resistance which
the other peoples could never become quite accustomed to, was always the first victim of fanatical
movements and vile prejudice and branded as the cause of mass misfortunes. As the poet Heinrich
Heine, himself a convert from Judaism, once wrote, Judaism is "the family curse that lasts a
thousand years"; and no matter how much it has tried, the state of Israellike individual Jews and
Jewish communities before ithas never been able to escape this disturbing reality.

A saddening thought, indeed. But is there any other explanation as to why, more than sixty years
after its establishment, Israel remains the only state in the world whose citizens are presented as the
heirs to the Nazi mantle; whose economy faces relentless calls for sanctions, boycotts, and
divestment; whose policies and actions year in and year out are condemned by the international
community, and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged?
Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College
London, principal researcher of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently,
of Palestine Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010).

[1] Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller, "Freya Stark in America: Orientalism, Anti-Semitism, and
Political Propaganda," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 3 (July 2004), 327.
[2] Joseph W. Bendersky, "From Cowards and subversives to Aggressors and Questionable Allies:
US Army Perception of Zionism since World WW I," Journal of Israeli History, 25:1 (2006), 123-24.
[3] Rivka Yadlin, Genuis Yahir Veosheq:Anti-Zionut ke-Anti-Yahadut be-Mitsraim (Jerusalem: Yad
Ben-Zvi, 1988), 127.
[4] Akhbar al-Yom (Cairo), Oct. 11, 1947. For background of the statement and its full translation
see: David Barnett and Efraim Karsh, "Azzam's Genocidal Threat," Middle East Forum, Fall 2011,
85-88.
[5] "Political Program for the Present Stage drawn up by the 12th PNC, Cairo, June 9, 1974,"Journal
of Palestine Studies, Summer 1974, 224-25.
[6] Efraim Karsh, Arafat's War: the Man and his Battle for Israeli Conquest (New York: Grove,
2003).
[7] As early as October 11, 1949 the prominent Egyptian politician Muhammad Salah al-Din, soon to
become his country's foreign minister, wrote in the influential Egyptian daily al-Misrithat "in
demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the
masters of the homeland and not as slaves. More specifically, they intend to annihilate the state of
Israel" (quoted in Israel's Foreign Ministry, Research Department, "Refugee RepatriationA Danger
to Israel's security," Sept. 4, 1951, Israel's State Archives, ISA, FM 2564/1.
[8] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980), 1213.
[9] Edward Said, "My Right of Return," interview with Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit, Aug. 18, 2000.
[10] Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," New York Review of Books, Oct. 23, 2003.
[11] The most infamous pogrom took place in the Polish town of Kielce, where on July 4, 1946, local
mobs attacked surviving and returning Jews in the city after false rumors spread that Jews had
abducted a Christian child whom they intended to kill for ritual purposes. The rioters killed at least
42 Jews and wounded approximately 50 more.
[12] "Interview [by] Clare Hollingowith with Azzam Pasha, Mar. 23, 1948, ISA, S25/9020; Cairo to
London, Jun. 4, 1948, FO 371/68527.
[13] David Ben Gurion's Diary (Sde Boker), Jun. 2, 1949.
[14] Daniel Pipes, "The Hell of Israel is Better than the Paradise of Arafat," Middle East Quarterly,
Spring 2005, 43-50.
[15] Yale Law School, the Avalon Project, "Hamas Covenant," Articles 11.
[16] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: the Conquest of the Middle East (New York:
Vintage, 2007).
[17] Hillel C. Neuer, "The Struggle against Anti-Israel Bias at the U.N. Commission on Human
Rights," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, No. 40, Jan. 1, 2006; "UN Wipes Israel Off the Map
Photos Nov. 29, 2005, UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian
People,"http://www.eyeontheun.org/view.asp?l=21&p=142.
[18] Edwin Black, "Ford Foundation Aided Groups Behind Biased Durban Parley," Forward, Oct. 17,
2003; Jerusalem Post, Sept. 2, 2001; Anne F. Bayefsky, "Terrorism and Racism: the Aftermath of
Durban," Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints, No. 468, Dec. 16,
2001(http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp468.htm); Irwin Cotler, "Durban's Troubling Legacy One Year
Later: Twisting the Cause of International Human Rights Against the Jewish People,"Jerusalem
Issue Brief, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Aug. 20, 2002).
[19] "Record of Conversation which the Prime Minister and Secretary of State had with the United
States Ambassador on the 28th April 1948," FO 800/487.
[20] For Banna's ideology and political career see: Hassan al-Banna: Shaheed (Karachi:
International Islamic Publishers, 1981); Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim
Brothers(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert St. John, The Boss: The Story of Gamal
Abdel Nasser (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960), 41-42.
[21] Muhammad Amin Husseini, Haqa'iq an Qadiyat Filastin (Cairo: Maktab al-Hay'a al-
Arabiyya al-Ulya li-Filastin, 2nd ed., 1956; Abdel Karim Umar, Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Muhammad
Amin al-Husseini (Damascus: Ahali, 1999), pp. 107, 124-27.
[22] See, for example, Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine
Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965).
[23] "Tutu Condemns Israeli Apartheid," BBC News, Apr. 29, 2002.
[24] Jimmy carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
[25] "Mairead Corrigan-Maguire: Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid," Stop de
Landroof(http://www.stopdebezetting.com/wereldpers/mairead-corrigan-maguire-stand-up-to-
israeli-apartheid.html), accessed Mar. 19, 2012.
[26] Palestine Royal Commission, Report. Presented to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in
Parliament by Command of his Majesty, July 1937 (London: HMSO; rep. 1946), 93 (vii).
[27] Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Jewish War Front (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), 216.
[28] Ibid., 216-20.
[29] David Ben-Gurion, Bama'araha (Tel Aviv: Mapai Publishing House, 1949), Vol. 4, Part 2, 265.
[30] Hagana Commander-in-Chief to Brigade Commanders, "The Arabs Residing in the Enclaves,"
Mar. 24, 1948, Hagana Archiva (HA), 46/199z.
[31] Statistical data in this article is mainly taken from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics
(http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/?MIval=cw_usr_view_Folder&ID=141). See also two articles by
Amnon Rubinstein in Haaretz, Sept. 10, 2002 and Apr. 7, 2003.
[32] David Polock, "What do the Arabs of East Jerusalem Really Want?" Jerusalem Center for Public
Policy, Sept. 7, 2011.
[33] Jeffrey Herf, "Convergencethe Classic Case: Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism
during World War II," Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 2006), 75, 77-78.
[34] Bendersky, "From Cowards and Subversives," 114-15, 118.
[35] "Jews and Free Masons Controlled War on Iraq, Says No. 10 advisor," Daily Telegraph, Sept.
12, 2005.
[36] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Harvard
University: John F. Kennedy School of Government, March 2006), 1.
[37] Efraim Karsh, Neutrality and Small States (London: Routledge, 1988; reissued 2010), 70-72.
[38] Irving Howe, "Vietnam and Israel," in Irving Howe and Carl Gershman (eds.), Israel, the Arabs
and the Middle East (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 343-44.
[39] The Crisis of Zionism (New York: Times Books, 2012).
[40] Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller, "Did Edward Said Really Speak Truth to Power?" Middle East
Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter 2008), 13-21.
[41] Michael Kennedy, "rewriting History," Inquirer Magazine, Feb. 1, 1998, p. 12.
[42] Thus, for example, Benny Morris (of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba) admitted that in
writing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987), he had "no access to"elsewhere he
said he "was not aware of"the voluminous documents in the archives of the specific Israeli
institutions whose actions in 1948 formed the burden of his indictment: the Hagana underground
organization and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). See: Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of
1948," in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of
1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37.
[43] Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (London: Verso, 2003).

Ankara's Unacknowledged Genocide

Turkey, Past and Future

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2013, pp. 17-26 (view PDF)

It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political spectrum to idealize the
Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example of tolerance. "The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish
Empire," wrote American journalist Robert Kaplan, "was more hospitable to minorities than the uni-
ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it Violent discussions over what group got to
control which territory emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War I."[1]
 The ethnic cleansing of Turkish Armenia
was accomplished in a variety of ways
including deportations and outright
massacres. Here, Armenian deportees
struggle to survive in makeshift tents
erected in the Syrian desert to which they
were deported in 1915.

Bernard Lewis went a significant step

further, ascribing the wholesale
violence attending the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire to attempts to reform
its Islamic sociopolitical order. "The
classical Ottoman Empire enabled a
multiplicity of religious and ethnic
groups to live side by side in mutual
tolerance and respect, subject only to the primacy of Islam and the supremacy of the Muslims," he
wrote. "The liberal reformers and revolutionaries who abolished the old order and proclaimed the
constitutional equality of all Ottoman citizens led the Ottoman Empire into the final bitter and
bloody national strugglesthe worst by far in the half-millennium of its history."[2] And Edward
Said, in an exceptional display of unanimity with his intellectual foe, was similarly effusive. "What
they had then seems a lot more humane than what we have now," he argued. "Of course, there were
inequities. But they lived without this ridiculous notion that everymillet has to have its own
state."[3]

Even Elie Kedourie, whose view of Ottoman colonialism was far less sentimental, could see some
advantages in the empire's less than perfect sociopolitical order: "Ottoman administration was
certainly corrupt and arbitrary, but it was ramshackle and inefficient and left many interstices by
which the subject could hope to escape its terrors, and bribery was a traditional and recognized
method of mitigating severities and easing difficulties."[4]

While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact
that, in almost every particular, it is demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very
definition, posits the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over another, and the
Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the existence of vast non-Muslim subject
populations in its midst, as did earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empiresprovided they
acknowledged their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these
groups dared to question their subordinate statuslet alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke
they were brutally suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians during World War I.

Historical Context

An important strand in Ottoman idealization has been the charge that it was the importation of
European ideas to the empire, notably those of nationalism and statehood, that undermined the
deeply ingrained regional order with devastating consequences to subjects and rulers alike. In
Kedourie's words: "A rash, a malady, an infection spreading from Western Europe through the
Balkans, the Ottoman empire, India, the Far East and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to
leave it weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers, for further horror
and atrocity: Such are the terms to describe what the West has done to the rest of the world, not
wilfully, not knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by example of its prestige and
prosperity."[5]

Evocative of the fashionable indictment of nationalism as the scourge of international relations, this
prognosis is largely misconceived. For it is the desire to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or
communities, and to occupy territories well beyond the "ancestral homeland" that contains the
inevitable seeds of violencenot the wish to be allowed to follow an independent path of
development. In each of imperialism's three phasesempire-building, administration, and
disintegrationforce was the midwife of the historical process as the imperial power vied to assert
its authority and to maintain its control over perennially hostile populations; and while most
empires have justified their position in terms of a civilizing mission of sorts, none willfully shed its
colonies, let alone its imperial status, well after they had outlived their usefulness, or had even
become a burden. Hence the disintegration of multinational, multidenominational, and multilingual
empires has rarely been a peaceful process. On rare occasionsthe collapse of the Soviet Union
being a salient exampleviolence has followed the actual demise of the imperial power. In most
instances, however, such as the collapse of the British, the French, and the Portuguese empires,
among others, violence is endemic to the process of decolonization as the occupied peoples fight
their way to national liberation.

The Ottoman Empire clearly belonged to the latter category. A far cry from the tolerant and tranquil
domain it is often taken for, Turkey-in-Europe was the most violent part of the continent during the
century or so between the Napoleonic upheavals and World War I as the Ottomans embarked on an
orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek
war of independence of the 1820s, the Danubian nationalist uprisings of 1848, the Balkan explosion
of the 1870s, and the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897all were painful reminders of the cost of breaking
free from an imperial master.[6] And all pale in comparison with the treatment meted out to the
foremost nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: the Armenian.

Prelude to Catastrophe

Unlike Europe, where the rise of nationalism dealt a body blow to Ottoman imperialism, there was
no nationalist fervor among the Ottoman Empire's predominantly Arabic-speaking Afro-Asian
subjects. One historian has credibly estimated that a mere 350 activists belonged to all the secret
Arab societies operating throughout the Middle East at the outbreak of World War I, and most of
them were not seeking actual Arab independence but rather greater autonomy within the Ottoman
Empire.[7] This made the rise of Armenian nationalism the foremost threat to Ottoman integrity in
that part of the empire.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire
totaled some two million persons, three-quarters of whom resided in so-called Turkish Armenia,
namely, the vilayets of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Sivas, Kharput, and Diarbekir in eastern Anatolia. The
rest, about half a million Armenians, were equally distributed in the Istanbul-eastern Thrace region
and in Cilicia, in southwestern Anatolia.[8]

As a result of Russian agitation, European and American missionary work, and, not least, the
nationalist revival in the Balkans, a surge of national consciousness began to take place within the
three Armenian religious communitiesGregorian, Catholic, and Protestant. In the 1870s,
Armenian secret societies sprang up at home and abroad, developing gradually into militant
nationalist groups. Uprisings against Ottoman rule erupted time and again; terrorism became a
common phenomenon, both against Turks and against noncompliant fellow Armeniansbefore it
was eventually suppressed in a brutal campaign of repression in 1895-96, in which nearly 200,000
people perished and thousands more fled to Europe and the United States.

Turkish Armenia did not remain quiet for long. By 1903, a vicious cycle of escalating violence was in
operation yet again, and two years later, Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid narrowly escaped an
assassination attempt by Armenian nationalists. In the early 1910s, despite years of cultural
repression, including a ban on the public use of the Armenian language and a new round of
horrendous massacres (in the spring of 1909), Armenian nationalism had been fully rekindled. In
April 1913, for example, Armenian nationalists asked Britain to occupy the southern region of Cilicia,
from Antalya to Alexandretta, and to internationalize Istanbul and the straits as a means of
"repairing the iniquity of the [1878] Congress of Berlin," which had stipulated Ottoman reforms "in
the provinces inhabited by the Armenians." At about the same time, a committee of the Armenian
National Assembly, the governing body of the Apostolic Ottoman Christians, submitted an elaborate
reform plan for Ottoman Armenia to the Russian embassy in Istanbul.[9]
Bowing to international pressure, in February 1914, the Ottoman authorities accepted a Russo-
German proposal for the creation of two large Armenian provinces, to be administered by European
inspectors-general appointed by the great powers. This was a far cry from the Armenians'
aspirations for a unified independent state as its envisaged territory was partitioned into two
separate entities rather than creating a cohesive whole, yet it was the most significant concession
they had managed to extract from their suzerain, and most of them were anxious to preserve this
gain come what may. Hence, when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the
German-Austro-Hungarian Triple Alliance, the Armenians immediately strove to demonstrate their
loyalty: Prayers for an Ottoman victory were said in churches throughout the empire, and the
Armenian patriarch of Istanbul, as well as several nationalist groups, announced their loyalty to the
Ottoman Empire and implored the Armenian masses to perform their obligations to the best of their
ability.

Not everyone complied with this wish. Scores of Ottoman Armenians, including several prominent
figures, crossed the border to assist the Russian campaign. Others offered to help the Anglo-French-
Russian entente by different means. In February 1915, for example, Armenian revolutionaries in the
Cilician city of Zeitun pledged to assist a Russian advance on the area provided they were given the
necessary weapons; to the British, they promised help in the event of a naval landing in
Alexandretta.[10]

Although these activities were an exception to the otherwise loyal conduct of the Armenian
community, they confirmed the Ottoman stereotype of the Armenians as a troublesome and
treacherous people. This view was further reinforced by a number of crushing defeats in the
Caucasus, in which (non-Ottoman) Armenians were implicated in the Russian war effort. Above all,
as the largest nationally-aware minority in Asiatic Turkey, the Armenians constituted the gravest
internal threat to Ottoman imperialism in that domain; and with Turkey-in-Europe a fading
memory and Turkey-in-Africa under Anglo-French-Italian domination, the disintegration of Turkey-
in-Asia would spell the end of the Ottoman Empire, something that its rulers would never accept.

Before long, the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to the kind of retribution that had been
inflicted on rebellious Middle Eastern populations since Assyrian and Babylonian times: deportation
and exile. Having been rendered defenseless, they were uprooted from their homes and relocated to
the most inhospitable corners of Ottoman Asia, with their towns and villages swiftly populated by
new Muslims arrivals, and their property seized by the authorities or plundered by their Muslim
neighbors.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Turkish Armenia

The first step in this direction was taken in early 1915 when Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army
were relegated to "labor battalions" and stripped of their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-
laborers would be marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold blood, often after being
forced to dig their own graves. Those fortunate enough to escape summary execution were employed
as laborers in the most inhumane conditions.

At the same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to disarm the entire Armenian
population of personal weapons before embarking on a genocidal spree of mass deportations and
massacres. By the autumn of 1915, Cilicia had been ethnically cleansed and the authorities turned
their sights on the foremost Armenian settlement area in eastern Anatolia. First to be cleansed was
the zone bordering Van, extending from the Black Sea to the Iranian frontier and immediately
threatened by Russian advance; only there did outright massacres often substitute for otherwise
slow deaths along the deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian desert. In other
districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between July and September, the Turks attempted to
preserve a semblance of a deportation policy though most deportees were summarily executed after
hitting the road. In the coastal towns of Trebizond, for example, Armenians were sent out to sea,
ostensibly for deportation, only to be thrown overboard shortly afterward. Of the deportees from
Erzerum, Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a handful survived the initial stages of the journey.[11]
The Armenian population in western Anatolia and in the metropolitan districts of Istanbul was
somewhat more fortunate as many people were transported in trainsalthough grossly overcrowded
for much of the deportation route, rather than having to straggle along by foot. In Istanbul,
deportations commenced in late April when hundreds of prominent Armenians were picked up by
the police and sent away, most of them never to be seen again; some five thousand "ordinary"
Armenians soon shared their fate. Though the majority of the city's 150,000-strong community
escaped deportation, Armenians were squeezed out of all public posts with numerous families
reduced to appalling poverty. Deportations in Ankara began toward the end of July; in Broussa, in
the first weeks of September; and in Adrianople, in mid-October. By early 1916, scores of deportees,
thrown into a string of concentration camps in the Syrian desert and along the Euphrates, were
dying every day of malnutrition and diseases; many others were systematically taken out of the
camps and shot.[12]

The Ottoman authorities tried to put a gloss of legality and innocence on their actions. The general
deportation decree of May 27, 1915, for example, instructed the security forces to protect the
deportees against nomadic attacks, to provide them with sufficient food and supplies for their
journey, and to compensate them with new property, land, and goods necessary for their
resettlement. But this decree was a sham. For one thing, massacres and deportations had already
begun prior to its proclamation. For another, as is overwhelmingly borne out by the evidence, given
both by numerous firsthand witnesses to the Ottoman atrocities and by survivors, the rights granted
by the deportation decree were never followed.

Consider the provisions for adequate supplies for the journey and compensation for the loss of
property. After the extermination of the male population of a particular town or village, an act
normally preceding deportations, the Turks often extended a "grace period" to the rest of the
populace, namely, women, children, and the old and the sick, so they could settle their affairs and
prepare for their journey. But the term normally given was a bare week, and never more than two,
which was utterly insufficient for all that had to be done. Moreover, the government often carried
away its victims before the stated deadline, snatching them without warning from streets, places of
employment, or even their beds. Last but not least, the local authorities prevented the deportees
from selling their property or their stock under the official fiction that their expulsion was to be only
temporary. Even in the rare cases in which Armenians managed to dispose of their property, their
Muslim neighbors took advantage of their plight to buy their possessions at a fraction of their real
value.[13]

Nor did the deportees receive even a semblance of the protection promised by the deportation
decree. On the contrary, from the moment they started on their march, indeed even before they had
done so, they became public outcasts, never safe from the most atrocious outrages, constantly
mobbed and plundered by the Muslim population as they straggled along. Their guards connived at
this brutality. There were, of course, exceptions in which Muslims, including Turks, tendered help to
the long-suffering Armenians, but these were very rare, isolated instances.

Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were exhibited like slaves in a public place,
often before the government building itself. Female slave markets were established in the Muslim
areas through which the Armenians were driven, and thousands of young Armenian women and
girls were sold in this way. Even the clerics were quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the
white slave market.

Suffering on the deportation routes was intense. Travelers on the Levantine railway saw dogs
feeding on the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children on both sides of the track, with
women searching the clothing of the corpses for hidden treasure. In some of the transfer stations,
notably Aleppo, the hub where all convoys converged, thousands of Armenians would be left for
weeks outdoors, starving, waiting to be taken away. Epidemics spread rapidly, chiefly spot typhus. In
almost all cases, the dead were not buried for days, the reason being, as an Ottoman officer
cheerfully explained to an inquisitive foreigner, that it was hoped the epidemics might get rid of the
Armenians once and for all.[14]
As the deportees settled into their new miserable existence, they were forced to work at hard labor,
making roads, opening quarries, and the like; for this, they were paid puny salaries, which effectively
reduced them to starvation; work in the neighboring villages that could earn them some livelihood
was strictly forbidden. Water was normally brought to the camps by trains; no springs were to be
found within a radius of miles. The scenes at the arrival of the water trains, by no means a regular
phenomenon, were heartbreaking. Thousands of people would rush toward the stopping place,
earth-jars and tin cans in hand, in a desperate bid for their share of this elixir of life. But when at
long last the taps were opened, people would often be barred from filling their vessels, having to
watch the precious water running out on the sun-baked ground.

Independent estimates of the precise extent of Armenian casualties differ somewhat, but all paint a
stark picture of national annihilation. In his official report to the British parliament in July 1916,
Viscount Bryce calculated the total number of uprooted Armenians during the preceding year as
1,200,000 (half slain, half deported), or about two thirds of the entire community. Johannes
Lepsius, the chief of the Protestant Mission in the Ottoman Empire who had personally witnessed
the atrocities and had studied them thoroughly, put the total higher, at 1,396,000, as did the
American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which computed the number of deaths at
about 600,000 and of deportees at 786,000. Aaron Aaronson, a world-renowned Zionist agronomist
who set up the most effective pro-Anglo-French-Russian entente intelligence network in the Middle
East during World War I, estimated the number of deaths at between 850,000 and 950,000.[15]

Genocide or "Collateral Damage"?

Turkey has never acknowledged any wrongdoing vis--vis the Armenians. While some leaders and
administrators of the Young Turks regime, which ruled the empire since July 1908, were court-
martialed immediately after the war for crimes committed during their ten-year rule, including the
Armenian atrocities, this was done in deference to the victorious Allied powers rather than out of
true conviction. Even the newly-established Turkish republic (1923), despite its renunciation of
much of the Ottoman imperial legacy, would not disown its arguably most heinous crime since its
founding father, Gen. Mustafa Kemal Atatrk "whatever his disagreements with the Young Turks
leaders was after all imbued with Young Turk ideas."[16] Not only did Ankara fail to acknowledge
any intention or plan to destroy Armenian nationalism, but the deportations and killings were
presented as a natural act of self-defense against a disloyal population. In the words of Yusuf Hikmet
Bayur, doyen of Turkish historians: "It's one thing to say that the Turks killed the Armenians
spontaneously, and another to say that, when the Armenians revolted, the Turks, who were locked in
a life or death struggle, used excessive force and killed a good many people."[17]

Given their idealization of the Ottoman legacy, it was only a question of time for Western scholars to
adopt this narrative.[18] "The Turks had an Armenian problem caused by the advance of the
Russians and an anti-Ottoman population living in Turkey, which was seeking independence and
openly sympathized with the Russians coming from the Caucasus," argued Lewis.

There were also Armenian gangsthe Armenians boast of the heroic feats performed by the
resistance, and the Turks certainly had problems of maintaining order under wartime conditions.
For the Turks, it was a matter of taking punitive and preventive measures against an unreliable
population in a region threatened with foreign invasion.[19]

The distance from here to the substitution of perpetrators for victims and vice versa is short. In
Lewis's words: "No one disputes that terrible things happened [and] that many Armeniansand also
Turksdied. But the exact circumstances and the final tally of the victims will doubtless never be
known."[20] Elsewhere, he described the episode as a result of "a desperate struggle between two
nations for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible slaughter of 1915, when,
according to estimates, more than a million Armenians perished, as well as an unknown number of
Turks."[21]

The nature of the conflict was of course quite different. Far from "a desperate struggle between two
nations for the possession of a single homeland," it was a brutal repression by an imperial power of a
subject population; and while Armenian national aspirations undoubtedly posed a grave threat to
the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, there can be no moral or political equivalence between these
aspirations and their repression.

Moreover, even if most Armenians helped the Russian war effort, which they most certainly did not,
there was no militarylet alone moraljustification for the uprooting of almost an entire nation
from its ancestral habitat, not to mention those communities that were far removed from the war
zone (e.g., Cilicia, western Anatolia, etc.). Even the Nazis, who exacted horrendous collective
punishment for acts of resistance, did not exile a single occupied nation from its homeland (apart, of
course, from their Jewish citizens, singled out for collective destruction).

Nor for that matter is there any symmetry between the military (and other) resources at the empire's
disposal and those available to its subjects, not least since states by definition control the means of
collective violence. In the Armenian case, this inherent inequality was aggravated by the
comprehensive disarming of the community; and while some "gangs" may have retained their
weapons, the vast majority of Armenians surrendered them to the authorities despite their stark
realization that the 1895-96 massacres had been preceded by very similar measures.

The ethnic cleansing of a virtually unarmed nation cannot, therefore, but indicate that, in the words
of Turkish-American scholar Taner Akam, "the wartime policies of the Ottoman government
toward the Armenians were never the result of military exigencies" but were rather the
culmination of a preconceived design to destroy Armenian nationalism, for which war provided the
ideal pretext.[22]

Drawing on a wealth of Ottoman, German, British, and U.S. documents, Akam unveils a disturbing
picture of elaborate planning and meticulous execution of Ottoman Armenia's ethnic cleansing. He
traces this design to the Ottomans' defeat in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, which sealed their creeping
expulsion from Europe and convinced the Young Turks leadership, dominated since January 1913 by
the radical triumvirateminister of war Enver Pasha, minister of the interior Talat Pasha, and
minister of the navy Djemal Pashaof the empire's imminent demise absent drastic homogenization
of the Anatolian homeland: "The Christian population was to be reduced; that is, removed, and the
non-Turkish Muslim groups were to be assimilated."[23]

This resulted in a campaign of massacres and expulsions against the Ottoman Greeks, suspended
after November 1914 under German pressure, and culminating in the cleansing of the Armenians.
The six historically Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia were emptied of their inhabitants, who
either perished on the harrowing track to exile or were resettled in the deserts of present-day Syria
and Iraq. Most of the Cilician and West Anatolian Armenians endured a similar fate.

Akam identifies a "dual track mechanism" used for the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians, and
Christians more generally:

A legal track, comprising official state acts such as the bilateral population exchange
agreements of 1913-14 with Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, or the May 1915 decree authorizing
the Armenian deportation. Representing Atatrk's subscription to the Young Turk belief in
the need to homogenize the fatherland, the "legal" ethnic cleansing of the Anatolian Greeks
was eventually completed by the 1923 population exchange that drove some 1.3 million
Greeks out of Turkey (and about 400,000 Turks out of Greece).
An unofficial track, consisting of extrajudicial acts of violence, including forced evacuations,
killing orders, and massacres. Maximum effort was expanded to create the impression that
none of these actions were ever connected to the government, both during the war and in
subsequent decades through systematic destruction of archival source material, yet the
massive documentation provided by Akam proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the deep
involvement of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the Young Turks' ruling party
from local administrators and bureaucrats all the way to senior members, including Talatin
the orchestration and implementation of extrajudicial violence and massacres.[24]
Not that these findings should surprise anyone. For one thing, the "dual track mechanism" described
by Akam has remained a lasting feature of Turkish political life to this very day. In republican
Turkey, this phenomenon has been known as the "deep state"an opaque underworld where
powerful elements within the state, especially the military and security services, act in conjunction
with violent extremist groups and the apolitical criminal underworld to undertake special, illegal
operations in the political interest of the country's ruling elite. For another, the antique imperial
practice of exiling entire nations and communities has become an extreme rarity in modern times,
precisely because of its deliberate genocidal intent to destroy "a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group, as such."[25] It must have occurred to the Ottoman leadership that the exiling of almost an
entire nationover a million men, women, and childrento a remote, alien, and hostile
environment amidst a general war without the minimal provisions for surviving the harrowing
voyage and its aftermath, was tantamount to a collective death sentence.[26] In the end, whatever
their initial intention, the Ottoman actions amounted to nothing short of genocide.

Conclusion

Few crimes against humanity have been so widely and so comprehensively ignored as the Ottoman
Empire's ethnic cleansing of its Armenian population during World War I.

Mesmerized by the myth of a benevolent Ottoman colonialism (in stark contrast to their scathing
indictment of the Western colonial legacy), Western scholars and intellectuals have turned a blind
eye to the overwhelming body of evidence of Ottoman genocidal intentions and practices. For their
part, Western politicians and leaders were loath to bring the Armenian skeleton out of the closet
given Turkey's position as an important anti-Soviet bastion and an alluring bridge to the Muslim
Middle East. And while the end of the Cold War has increased Western propensity to address the
issuein 2005 the European parliament conditioned Turkey's accession to the European Union on
its recognition of the Armenian genocide[27]Ankara has remained as defiant as ever.

When in March 2010 a U.S. congressional committee passed a resolution branding the Armenian
massacres as "genocide," over the objections of the Obama administration, Turkey recalled its
ambassador for "consultations."[28] In his 2008 election campaign, presidential hopeful Barack
Obama stated that "America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide
and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President." As president, he chose to
make Turkey the site of his first overseas trip ignoring the Armenian genocide altogether in his
address to the Turkish parliament.[29] When in December 2011, France's lower chamber approved a
bill making denial of any genocide a criminal offence, Ankara froze relations with Paris, recalling its
ambassador and suspending all economic, political, and military meetings.[30]

With its strategic significance made more complex by recent Middle Eastern upheavals, and the
ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi, AKP) openly pining for lost
Ottoman glories, Turkey is unlikely to shed this longtime denial and own up to its painful past.

Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean
studies at King's College London.

[1] Robert D. Kaplan, "At the Gates of Brussels," The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2004.
[2] Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 1998),
pp. 129-30.
[3] Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader (London: Granta Books,
2001), p. 430.
[4] Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and other Middle-Eastern Studies (Hanover and
London: Brandeis University Press, 1984), p. 293.
[5] Ibid., p. 286.
[6] Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle
East, 1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chaps. 2, 5, 6.
[7] Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank Cass, 1993), chap. 28.
[8] For population figures, see, for example, Mallet to Grey, Oct. 7, 1914, British Foreign Office
(hereafter FO), FO 371/2137/56940; "Turkey: Annual Report, 1913. By the Embassy," FO
371/2137/79138, 25.
[9] See Fontana to Lowther, Mar. 25, 1913, FO 371/1773/16941; Lowther to Grey, Apr. 5, 10, 1913,
FO 371/1773/16736; Admiralty to FO, Apr. 15, 1913, FO 371/1775/17825.
[10] Ironside to Foreign Office, Mar. 3, 1915, and War Office to the Foreign Office, Mar. 4, 1915, FO
371/2484/25073 and 25167; Foreign Office to Ironside, Mar. 9, 1915, FO 371/2484/28172 and
22083.
[11] Karsh and Karsh, Empires of the Sand, chap. 10.
[12] Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Presented to
Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Laid before the Houses of
Parliament as an Official Paper and Now Published by Permission (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1916), pp. 645-9.
[13] Ibid., pp. 641-2; Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes (Potsdam:
Missionshandlung und Verlag, 1930), pp. 301-4.
[14] Aaron Aaronson, "On the Armenian Massacres: Memorandum Presented to the War Office,
London, Nov. 1916," Aaronson Archives (Zichron Yaacov, Israel), File 2C/14.
[15] Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians, pp. 649-51, "Annex F: Statistical Estimate Included in the
Fifth Bulletin of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, Dated New York, 24th
May 1916"; Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenian, 1914-1918 (Potsdam: Tempelverlag,
1919), pp. lxv, 256; Lepsius, Der Todesgang, pp. 301-4; Aaron Aaronson, "Pro Armenia," Nov. 16,
1916, p. 13, Aaronson Archives, File 2C/13; Aaronson, "On the Armenian Massacres."
[16] Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), pp. 95-6.
[17] Taner Akam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic
Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. xi.
[18] See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, Reform, Revolution, and Republic:
The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 315; Guenther Lewy, "Revisiting the Armenian
Genocide," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2005, pp. 3-12; Michael Gunter, Armenian History and the
Question of Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See also Michael M. Gunter, Middle
East Quarterly, Winter 2013, pp. 37-46.
[19] Bernard Lewis, interview with Le Monde, Nov. 16, 1993.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 356. Interestingly, in the first and second editions of the book (1961,
1968), Lewis described these tragic events as "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and half
Armenians perished." (p. 356). In his Le Monde interview, he reduced the fatality figure to
"hundreds of thousands of Armenians [who] died of hunger and cold," dismissing the description of
these deaths as genocide as "the Armenian version of this event." While he raised the figure to more
than a million in the third edition of The Emergence, he still put Armenian casualties on a par with
those of their Ottoman oppressors.
[22] Akam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity, p. xix.
[23] Ibid., p. xv.
[24] Akam's research also reaffirms the validity of early documentation of the Armenian atrocities
whose authenticity has subsequently been questioned, notably Aram Andonian's 1920 book The
Memoirs of Naim Bey, as many newly discovered documents echo their now discredited
predecessors.
[25] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 78 U.N. Treaty Series
(UNTS) 277, entered into force on Jan. 12, 1951, art. 2.
[26] It has been argued (see Michael Gunter's article in this issue) that the claim of an Armenian
genocide "rests on a logical fallacy and ignores the huge loss of life among Turkish civilians, soldiers,
and prisoners-of-war. that surely cannot be explained in terms of a Young Turk plan of
annihilation." Of course, the Young Turks' indifference to their own people's suffering and mortality
does not preclude the existence of an annihilationist plan vis--vis the Armenians, just as Hitler's
readiness to sacrifice millions of German lives did not preclude his annihilationist design vis--vis
the Jews.
[27] "European Parliament resolution on the opening of negotiations with Turkey," Sept. 38, 2005.
[28] "Armenian genocide resolution passes US Congress Committee," Voice of America, Mar. 3,
2010.
[29] "Barack Obama calls for passage of Armenian genocide resolution," Armenian National
Committee of America, Jan. 20, 2008; remarks by President Obama to the Turkish parliament,
Ankara, Office of the Press Secretary, Apr. 6, 2009.
[30] The Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011.

Israel's Arabs: Deprived or Radicalized?

by Efraim Karsh
Israel Affairs
January 2013, pp. 1-19

October 1, 2000, was a watershed in Arab-Jewish relations in the state of Israel. On that day, as
most Israelis were celebrating the Jewish new year, their Arab compatriots unleashed a tidal wave of
violence in support of the 'al-Aqsa intifada', an all out war of terror launched by Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian Authority a couple of days earlier.

For full ten days, Israeli Arabs blocked several main roads, cutting off Jewish localities and forcing
some of them to defend against armed assaults by neighbours with whom they had maintained
cordial relations for decades. Scores of Jewish families spending the holiday season in the Galilee
found themselves attacked by frenzied Arab mobs wielding Molotov cocktails, ball bearings in
slingshots, stones, even firearms. Stores, post offices, and other public places were ransacked as
rioters clashed with police. Forests were set ablaze. In Nazareth, thousands of Arabs marched in the
streets chanting, 'With our souls and our blood we will redeem Palestine'. Jaffa and Haifa, the
showcases of Arab-Jewish coexistence, were rocked by violence and vandalism.

Shaken to the core, the Israeli government headed by Ehud Barak, who only days earlier had hosted
Arafat in his private residence for what he described as 'a very good, warm, and open meeting',
[1] apologized to the thirteen rioters killed in violent clashes with the police and appointed an official
commission of inquiry headed by deputy chief justice Theodore Orr to investigate the events.
Submitting its official report at the end of August 2003, long after Barak had been swept from
power, the commission acknowledged the riots' strong chauvinistic impetus, noting grimly that
'Jews were attacked on the roads merely for being Jewish and their property was destroyed. In a
number of incidences, they were just inches from death at the hands of an unrestrained mob'. And it
rebuked Israeli Arab leaders not only for failing to direct their grievances into democratic, rather
than violent, channels but also for having worked over the years to delegitimize the state and its
institutions in the eyes of their constituents:

Messages transmitted prior to and during the October disturbances blurred and sometimes erased
the distinction between [on the one hand] Israel's Arab citizens and their legitimate struggle for civil
rights and [on the other hand] the armed struggle against Israel by organizations and individuals in
Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. More than once, the two struggles were presented by leaders of the Arab
community as a single struggle against one adversary, if not an enemy. The concept of citizenship is
incompatible with the presentation of the state as the enemy; with practises that treat the state and
its legitimate institutions as an enemy; or with praising violent activities by the state's enemies
against the state and its citizens.[2]

Yet even while denouncing such actions as 'incompatible with the loyalty owed by citizens to their
country', the Orr commission refrained from proposing disciplinary measures against Israeli Arab
leaders who had incited their constituents to violence. Instead, it attributed the volcanic eruption to
something else entirely - namely, a longstanding callousness on the part of the Israeli establishment
itself towards the state's Arab minority:
The state and successive generations of its government have failed to address in a comprehensive
and deep fashion the difficult problems created by the existence of a large Arab minority inside the
Jewish state. Government handling of the Arab sector has been primarily neglectful and
discriminatory. The establishment did not show sufficient sensitivity to the needs of the Arab sector,
and did not do enough to give this sector its equal share of state resources. The state did not do
enough or try hard enough to create equality for its Arab citizens or to uproot discriminatory or
unjust practices.[3]

Behind this self-incriminatory diagnosis lay the conviction that Arab resentment and distrust of the
Jewish state were corollaries of socioeconomic deprivation and that with growing affluence, such
feelings would be supplanted by their opposites. The fact that Arab enmity had not given way, but on
the contrary had intensified, was thus seen as proof that the 'Arab sector' had been a victim of
official discrimination and had yet to receive 'its equal share of state resources'.

Unfortunately, this theory is false in general, and especially false in this particular case. In the
modern world, it is not the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions and/or
carried out the worst deeds of violence; rather, it is militant vanguards from among the better
educated and more moneyed circles of society. So it was with the Palestinian Arabs - in both
mandatory Palestine and the state of Israel. The more prosperous, affluent, and better educated they
became, the stronger and more vociferous their leaders' incitement against their state of citizenship,
to the point of open rejection of the fundamental principles underpinning its very existence. But to
understand this requires a look back at the history of Arab-Jewish relations during the past century.

Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land

The inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I revived Palestine's hitherto
moribund condition. If prior to the war, some 2,500-3,000 Arabs, or one out of 200-250
inhabitants, emigrated from the country every year, this rate was slashed to about 800 per annum
between 1920 and 1936 while Palestine's Arab population rose from about 600,000 to some
950,000 owing to the substantial improvement in socioeconomic conditions attending the
development of the Jewish National Home.[4] The British authorities acknowledged as much in a
1937 report by a commission of enquiry headed by Lord Peel:

The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the
increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A
comparison of the Census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase in Haifa
was 86%, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was
only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 per cent.[5]

Raising the standard of living of the Palestinian Arabs well above that in the neighbouring Arab
states, the general fructifying effect of the import of Jewish capital into the country was not limited
to the upper classes, or the effendis, who 'sold substantial pieces of land [to the Jews] at a figure far
above the price it could have fetched before the War', but extended to the country's predominantly
rural population, the fellaheen, who 'are on the whole better off than they were in 1920'. The
expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of citrus growing, Palestine's
foremost export product, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how
did much to improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the world wars, Arab-owned
citrus plantations grew six-fold, as did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves
quadrupled and that of vineyards increased threefold.[6]

No less remarkable were the advances in Arab social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality
rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27
to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in Egypt). Between 1927-29 and 1942-44, child mortality was
reduced by 34% in the first year of age, by 31% in the second, by 57% in the third, by 64% in the
fourth, and by 67% in the fifth. The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third (from 23.3 per
1000 people in 1922-25 to 30.7 in 1941-44) - well ahead of the natural increase (or of the total
increase) of other Arab/Muslim populations.[7]
That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighbouring British-ruled Arab
countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to state
revenues (in 1944-45, for example, the Jewish community paid 68% of Palestine's income tax
compared with 15% by the twice larger Arab community).[8] In addition, the extensive Jewish public
health provision greatly benefited the country's Arab population. Jewish reclamation and anti-
malaria work slashed the prevalence of this lethal disease (during the latter part of 1918, for
example, 68 of 1000 people in the Beit Jibrin region died of malaria; in 1935 the number of malaria-
related deaths in the whole of Palestine was 17), while health institutions, founded with Jewish funds
primarily to serve the Jewish National Home, also served the Arab population. It is hardly surprising
therefore that the greatest reductions in Arab mortality, as well as the rise in the quality and
standard of living, occurred in localities in or near those in which Jewish enterprise had been most
pronounced.[9]

Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably
have been content to get on with their lives and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the
growing Jewish presence in the country. Throughout the British Mandate era (1920-48), periods of
peaceful coexistence were far longer than those violent eruptions and the latter were the work of a
small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.

But then, rather than follow the wishes of its constituents, the corrupt and extremist Palestinian
Arab leadership, headed since the early 1920s by the Jerusalem Mufi Hajj Amin Husseini, embarked
on a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, which culminated in the violent
attempt, supported by the entire Arab world, to destroy the state of Israel at birth. In the mournful
words of the Peel commission,

We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to
Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary with almost mathematical
precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the
political situation.[10]

The Arab Minority in the Jewish State

The end of the 1948 war found the Palestinian-Arab community profoundly shattered. Of the
750,000 Arab residents of the territory that came to be Israel, only 158,000 had stayed put through
the hostilities; at the state's founding, they formed 13.6% of the total population.[11] But these
numbers did not stay low for long. Thanks to remarkable fertility rates, and despite successive waves
of Jewish immigration into Israel, the proportion of Arabs grew steadily over the decades. By the
end of 2009, Israel's Arab minority had leapt eightfold in number to over 1.6 million, or 20.6% of the
state's total population.[12]

The mass exodus of 1948-49 took Israel's leadership by surprise, as the Zionist movement had
always assumed the existence of a substantial Arab minority in the future Jewish state on an equal
footing 'throughout all sectors of the country's public life', to use the words of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the
founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today's Likud party.[13]

As early as 1905 Jabotinsky argued that 'we must treat the Arabs correctly and affably, without any
violence or injustice', reiterating this position in his famous 1923 article 'The Iron Wall': 'I am
prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything
contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to
me a fairly peaceful credo'.[14]

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine.
According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of
statehood, notably including military and civil service; Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same
legal standing; and 'in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be
offered to an Arab and vice versa'.[15] Echoing this vision, David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of
his own (Mapai) party in December 1947 that the non-Jews in the Jewish state 'will be equal
citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is, the state will be their state as well'.[16]

Committees laying the groundwork for the nascent state discussed in detail the establishment of an
Arabic-language press, the improvement of health, the incorporation of Arab officials into the
government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-
Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction. Even military plans for rebuffing an anticipated pan-
Arab invasion in the late 1940s were predicated, in the explicit instructions of the commander-in-
chief of the foremost Jewish underground organization, the Hagana, on the 'acknowledgement of the
full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a
desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity'.[17]

The same principle was enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence, issued on 14 May 1948.
The new state undertook to 'uphold absolute social and political equality of rights for all its citizens,
without distinction of religion, race, or sex'. In particular, Arab citizens were urged 'to take part in
the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and on the basis of appropriate
representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent'. While the declaration lacked
constitutional status, its principles were taken as guidelines for governmental behaviour; over the
years, they would gain legal authority through supreme-court decisions and acts of the Knesset
(parliament).

In its first meeting on 16 May 1948, the provisional Israeli government discussed a basic law
regulating the nascent state's ruling institutions and practices, which ensured inter alia the right of
Arab citizens to be elected to parliament and to serve as cabinet ministers, as well as the continued
functioning of the autonomous Muslim (and Christian) religious courts that had existed during the
mandate. Four months later, the government decided that Arabic, alongside Hebrew, would serve as
the official language in all public documents and certificates.[18]

Israeli Arabs have indeed enjoyed full equality before the law, and are endowed with the full
spectrum of democratic rights - including the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.
(From the first, Arabs have been members of the Knesset.) This is in itself a remarkable fact. From
the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays
as legal resting days for their respective communities, to the granting of educational, cultural,
judicial, and religious autonomy, Arabs in Israel may well enjoy more formal prerogatives than
ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world, not to mention the Middle East and the Muslim
world.

This hardly means that the state's treatment of its Arab minority has been spotless. Civic equality,
like any other principle, does not exist in a vacuum, or in isolation from other fundamental political
values like stability and public security. In every modern nation-state, majority-minority relations
have been a problem, and all the more so when an ethnic minority forms part of a larger nation or
group that is hostile to the state in which it resides. Early on, the attempt of the Arab states and the
Palestinian Arab leadership to destroy Israel at birth, the repeated talk of a 'second round', and the
fact that many Israeli Arab enclaves were located in sensitive border areas fuelled fears within the
Jewish state of a possible transformation of its Arab communities into hotbeds of subversive activity.

For security reasons, then, the main Arab population centres were placed under military
administration, a policy that ended only in December 1966. Similar considerations precluded the
conscription of most Arabs into military service. The exemption was also designed to ease the Arabs'
'dual loyalty' dilemma, sparing them the need to confront their cousins on the battlefield; it
corresponded, as well, with the wishes of the Arab population itself.

The policy of exempting Israeli Arabs from military service had real-life effects. In the short term, it
conferred a certain practical benefit, giving young Arabs a three-year head start over most of their
Jewish counterparts in entering the labour force or acquiring a higher education. Over the longer
term, however, it worked to constrain Arab economic and social mobility, for the simple reason that,
until the 1990s, military service was the main entry point into the corridors of adult Israeli life. But
these constraints were not the result of 'insufficient sensitivity', let alone of discrimination on the
basis of religion or nationality; the same disadvantages beset and continue to beset Jewish
individuals and communities that have likewise been exempted from military service, notably the
ultraorthodox Jews.

Deprived and Marginalized?

The issue of discrimination aside, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that, contrary to the dismal
pronouncements of the Orr commission, the Arabs living in the Jewish state have made astounding
social and economic progress. Far from lagging behind, their rate of development has
often surpassed that of the Jewish sector, with the result that the gap between the two communities
has steadily narrowed.

Health statistics are but one indicator. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates among Israeli
Arabs have fallen by over two-thirds since the establishment of the Jewish state, while life
expectancy has increased 30 years, reaching 78.5 (women 80.7, men 76.3) in 2009. At the end of the
1940s, life expectancy of Israeli Arabs was fifteen years lower than that of their Jewish counterparts;
by the 1970s, the gap had decreased to 2-3 years and has remained virtually unchanged since then
(3.7 years in 2009).[19] Not only does this compare favourably with the Arab and Muslim worlds,
but the average Israeli Arab male can expect to live longer than his American (76 years in 2007) and
many European counterparts.[20]

Thanks to Israel's medical and health-education programs, infant-mortality rates have similarly
been slashed: from 56 per 1,000 live births in 1950 to 6.5 in 2008 - slightly above the US mortality
rate and much lower than that of the neighbouring Middle Eastern states (in Algeria, for example, it
is 24.9 deaths/1,000 live births, in Egypt 30, in Iraq 40, in Iran 41).[21] Another indication of the
improving socioeconomic position of the Israeli Arabs has been the steady decline in fertility rates
since the 1970s: from 8.4 children per women in 1965 to 3.6 in 2008.[22]

No less remarkable have been the advances in education. Since Israel's founding, while the Arab
population has grown tenfold, the number of Arab schoolchildren has multiplied by a factor of 40.
[23] If, in 1961, the average Israeli Arab spent one year in school, today the figure is over eleven
years. The rise was particularly dramatic among Arab women who in 1961 received virtually no
school education and today are equally, indeed better educated than their male counterparts (in
1970-2000, for example, the proportion of women with more than eight years of schooling rose
nearly sevenfold - from 9% to 59%).[24]

In 1961, less than half of Arab children attended school, with only 9% acquiring secondary or higher
education. By 1999, 97% of Arab children attended schools, with 46% completing high school studies
and 19% obtaining university/college degrees. In 2011, over a half of Arab twelfth-grade students
(two thirds of Christian students) won the matriculation certificate, with dropout rates of Arab
students similar to those in the Jewish sector: 1.8% and 1.5% respectively. Indeed, the dropout rate
in the weaker parts of Jewish society were higher than their Arab equivalent: 3.1% among
ultraorthodox Jews and 3.6% among foreign native Jews, compared to 2.6% in the Bedouin sector -
the weakest part of Arab society.[25]

Nor do Jewish schools enjoy better individual services than their Arab counterparts. In 2007/08, for
example, Arab students were six times more likely to receive didactic assessment, and five times
more likely to have a nurse based in their school, than their Jewish counterparts. Arab students had
somewhat more frequent access to youth and/or social workers, as well as truancy officers, while
Jewish students had somewhat better access to psychological and educational counselling.[26]

More important, during the past twelve years, relative investment in Arab education has far
exceeded that in the Jewish sector resulting in a significantly larger expansion across the board:
Teaching posts in pre-primary Arab education trebled, compared to a twofold increase in the Jewish
sector; Arab primary education posts grew three times faster than their Jewish counterparts while
the relative increase in Arab secondary education posts was six times higher than in the Jewish
sector.[27]

Still more dramatic has been the story in higher education where the numbers of Arab graduates
multiplied fifteen times between 1961 and 2001. Fifty years ago, a mere 4% of Arab teachers held
academic degrees; by 1999, the figure had vaulted to 47%. In 1999, the proportion of Arab students
studying for advanced degrees was 19%; a decade later 34% of Arab high school graduates passed
the university entry exams. And while this figure is still lower than in the Jewish sector (48%), it is
compensated by the much larger Arab presence in education colleges where Arab students occupy
33% of all places - way above their relative population share.[28]

Last but not least, during Israel's first fifty years of existence, adult illiteracy rates among Israeli
Arabs dropped from 57.2% (79% among women) to 7.7% (11.7% among women).[29] This not only
places Israeli Arabs miles ahead of their brothers in the Arab world - in Morocco illiteracy is at 44%,
in Egypt at 38%, in Iraq at 22% - but reflects a pace of improvement nearly double that of the Jewish
sector.[30]

Standard of living? In the late 1940s, following the flight of its more affluent classes and the
breakdown of economic relations with neighbouring Arab states, the Arab minority in Israel was left
largely impoverished. As they became increasingly incorporated into local economic life, Arabs
experienced a steep rise in earnings and a visible improvement in their material circumstances.
More Arabs than Jews have come to own the dwelling they live in - 82.2% vs. 68.8% in 1997, 91.5%
vs. 68.6% in 2000, 82.3% vs. 70.4% in 2008.[31] By 2002, 86% of Arab households - more Arab
households than Jewish ones - occupied dwellings of three or more rooms; and by 2006, Arab
households surpassed their Jewish counterparts in ownership of key durable goods, such as
refrigerators (99.8% vs. 99.4%), deep-freezers (23.8 % vs. 18.3%), washing machines (97.7% vs.
94.5%), televisions (97.7% vs. 89.9%), and one cellular phone at least (88.8% vs. 86.7).[32]

Contrary to the standard image of cramped neighbourhoods and acute land shortages, population
density in Arab localities is substantially lower on average than in equivalent Jewish locales. While
Jewish neighbourhoods in central Israel, where most of the country's population lives, are
hopelessly congested - 21,031 persons per square kilometre in Bene Brak, 16,329 in Giv'atayim,
15,913 in Bat Yam, and 9,759 in Holon, 7,947 in Tel Aviv, among other places - the urban Arab
population in the same area enjoys a much more spacious existence: 1,958 persons per sq. km. in
Taibe, 1,894 in Tire, 1,756 in Umm al-Fahm, and so on and so forth. Even the Galilean city of
Nazareth, Israel's largest and most congested Arab locality has a population density of 5,113 - less
than a quarter its Jewish equivalent.[33]

As for income statistics, it is undeniable that, on average, Israeli Arabs still earn less than Jews. But
to what is this attributable? For one thing, the average Muslim in Israel is ten years younger than his
Jewish counterpart; all over the world, younger people earn less. Then, too, far fewer Arab women
enter the labour market than do Jewish women: in 2008, for example, only 21% of Arab women,
compared to 57% of Jewish women, worked outside their homes.[34]

The salience of these and other factors - family size, level of schooling, cultural tradition, and so
forth - may be judged by looking at segments of Israeli Jewish society like the ultraorthodox or
residents of development towns (localities established during the 1950s and 1960s to absorb the
fresh waves of Jewish immigration, especially from Arab countries), whose income levels more
closely resemble those in the Arab sector. Thus, for example, while the 2008 average monthly salary
in Arab Nazareth was lower than in the mostly Jewish Upper Nazareth (4,749 vs. 5,437 shekels), the
average self employed monthly earning there was higher than in Upper Nazareth: 7,498 vs. 7,351
shekels. No less important, income inequality was lower in Arab Nazareth than in Jewish Upper
Nazareth: 0.36 vs. 0.37 on the Income Gini coefficient (a value of 0 represents absolute equality, a
value of 100 - absolute inequality).[35]

Since the late 1990s, the unemployment rate in Israel's Arab sector was consistently lower than in
Jewish development towns. In 2009, for instance, the unemployment rate in the Arab sector was
8.5% compared to 10.8% in development towns, with 76.5% of Arab men having a fulltime job
compared to 69.7% of their Jewish counterparts. Unemployment rate among Arab women was
similarly lower (9.4% vs. 11.2%), though their share in the civilian labour force was only half that of
their Jewish counterparts - underscoring the persistent Arab social constraints on women's
integration in Israeli society, with the attendant lower family income.[36]

Has the government given short shrift to the economic needs of the Arab sector, as the Orr
commission asserts? Quite the reverse. Allocations to Arab municipalities have grown steadily over
the past decades and are now on a par with, if not higher than, subsidies to the Jewish sector. By the
mid-1990s, Arab municipalities were receiving about a quarter of all such allocations, well above the
'share' of Arabs in Israel's overall population, and their relative growth has continued to date. In
numerous cases, contributions to Arab municipal budgets substantially exceed contributions to
equivalently situated and sized Jewish locales, let alone the larger and more established Jewish cities
where government allocations amount to a fraction of municipal budget. In 2008, for instance,
relative disbursements to the Arab town of Kafr Qassem were five times higher than to the Jewish
town of Zichron Yaacov; nearly four times higher to (Arab) Tamra and Umm Fahm than to (Jewish)
Yahud and Ra'anana respectively; five times higher to (Arab) Abu Snan than to (Jewish) Even
Yehuda; six times higher to (Arab) Iksal than to (Jewish) Azur. And so on and so forth.[37]

Chauvinist Radicalization

The preceding analysis proves the attribution of the October 2000 riots to social and economic
deprivation to be totally misconceived. If indeed the culprits were poverty and second-class status,
why had there never been any disturbances remotely like the October 2000 riots among similarly
situated segments of Jewish society in Israel, or, for that matter, among Israeli Arabs in the much
worse-off 1950s and 1960s? Why, indeed, did Arab dissidence increase dramatically with
improvements in the standard of living, and why did it escalate into an open uprising after a decade
that saw government allocations to Arab municipalities grow by 550 per cent, and the number of
Arab civil servants nearly treble?

The truth is that the growing defiance of the state, its policies, and its values was not rooted in
socioeconomic deprivation but rather in the steady radicalization of the Israeli Arab community by
its ever more militant leadership, not unlike their mandatory predecessors.

The process began with the Six-Day war of June 1967. In the relatively relaxed aftermath of that
conflict, Israeli Arabs came into renewed direct contact with their cousins in the West Bank and
Gaza as well as with the wider Arab world. Family and social contacts broken in 1948 were restored,
and a diverse network of social, economic, cultural, and political relations was formed. For the first
time since 1948, Israeli Muslims were allowed by Arab states to participate in the sacred pilgrimage
to Mecca and Medina, thus breaking an unofficial ostracism and restoring a sense of self-esteem and
pan-Arab belonging - and encouraging a correlative degree of estrangement from Israel.

Six years later came the Yom Kippur war, shattering Israel's image as an invincible military power
and tarnishing its international reputation. One result was quickly felt on the local political scene.
During the 1950s and 1960s, most Arab voters had given their support to Israel's ruling Labour party
and/or a string of associated Arab lists. This had already begun to change by 1969, when Raqah, a
predominantly Arab communist party and a champion of radical anti-Israelism, made its successful
electoral debut. By 1973, in elections held three months after the Yom Kippur war, Raqah (or
Hadash, as it was later renamed) had become the dominant party in the Arab sector, winning 37% of
the vote; four years later, it totally eclipsed its rivals with 51% of Arab ballots cast. By the late 1990s,
things had moved so far in an anti-Israel direction that many Arabs, apparently finding
Raqah/Hadash too tame, were shifting their allegiance to newer and still more militant parties.[38]

Nor did the PLO fail to capitalize on these internal developments. Founded in 1964, it had at first
ignored the Israeli Arabs but soon embarked on a sustained effort to incorporate them into its
struggle for Israel's destruction and, by the late 1960s, had recruited scores of young Israeli Arabs.
[39] In January 1973, the Palestine National Council, the PLO's quasi-parliament, decided 'to
strengthen the links of national unity and unity in struggle between the masses of our countrymen in
the territory occupied in 1948' - i.e., Israel 'and those in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and outside
the occupied territory'.[40] Things came to a head on 30 March 1976 in the form of mass riots -
harbingers of worse to come. The occasion was the government's announced intention to
appropriate some 5,000 acres of the Galilee for development. Though most of the land was owned
either by the state or by private Jewish individuals, the announcement triggered a wave of violence
that ended in the deaths of six Arab rioters and the wounding of dozens more. 'Land Day', as the
disturbances came to be known, was thenceforth commemorated annually in renewed and
increasingly violent demonstrations, often in collaboration with the PLO and its political affiliates in
the West Bank.[41]

Meanwhile the 'Palestinization' of Israeli Arabs continued apace. In February 1978, scores of
Palestinian intellectuals signed a public statement urging the establishment of a Palestinian state,
and a year later, Israeli Arab students openly endorsed the PLO as 'the sole representative of the
Palestinian people, including the Israeli Arabs', voicing support for the organization's pursuit of the
'armed struggle' (the standard euphemism for terror attacks), indeed for its commitment to Israel's
destruction.[42] By 1976, less than half of Israeli Arabs defined themselves as Palestinians; by 1985
more than two thirds did.[43]

By then, too, extremist politics and violence had become institutionalized, with the PLO funnelling
funds to Arab bodies and institutions in Israel, and Israeli Arabs increasingly implicated in the sale
of weapons and explosives to terrorist organizations in the territories.[44]December 1987 saw the
outbreak of the first widespread Palestinian uprising (intifada) in the West Bank and Gaza. Showing
their support for their brethren in the territories, Israeli Arabs committed acts of vandalism
(burning forests, stoning private cars, destroying agricultural crops and equipment) and launched
armed attacks on Jews within Israel proper. In the course of two years, the number of such
individual attacks rose sharply from 69 (in 1987) to 187 (in 1989), and acts of sedition from 101 to
353.

The Road to October 2000

If the intifada strained Arab-Jewish relations within Israel to their limits (till then), other factors
contributed to the worsening of the situation as well. One was the rising power and influence of the
Islamist movement in Israel and the disputed territories, which injected into the conflict a religious
element that had largely lain dormant ever since 1948. Another was the growing 'post-Zionist' trend
among educated Israelis, which, by creating the impression of a fatigued society ready to pay any
price for respite, emboldened the most radical elements on the Arab side to dream of delivering a
final blow.

Yet it was the delusional the embrace of the Oslo accords, signed in 1993 between Israel and the
PLO, despite the latter's brazen and continual flouting of its contractual obligations, that did the
greatest damage. In recognizing the PLO as 'the representative of the Palestinian people', the Rabin
government effectively endorsed that organization's claim of authority over a substantial number of
Israeli citizens and gave it carte blanche to interfere in Israel's domestic affairs. Such a concession
would be a sure recipe for trouble even under the most amicable of arrangements; made to an
irredentist party still officially committed to the destruction of its 'peace partner', it proved nothing
short of catastrophic.

From the moment of his arrival in Gaza in July 1994, Arafat set out to make the most of what Israel
had handed him, indoctrinating not only the residents of the territories but also Israeli Arabs with
an ineradicable hatred of Israel, of Jews, and of Judaism. His intention was made clear as early as
his welcoming speech, which smeared his new peace partner with extensive references to
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and ended with a pledge to 'liberate' Israel's Arab citizens from
their alleged subjugation. 'I am saying it clearly and loudly to all our brothers, from the Negev to the
Galilee', Arafat proclaimed, 'and let me quote Allah's words: "We desired to be gracious to those that
were abased in the land, and to make them leaders, and to make them the inheritors, and to
establish them in the land."'[45]
Within a month of his arrival in Gaza, Arafat had secretly ordered the extension of Palestinian
Authority's activities to Israeli Arabs, allocating $10 million in initial funding and appointing Ahmad
Tibi, his political adviser and an Israeli citizen, to head the subversive operation. In subsequent
years, PLO and PA interference in Israel's domestic affairs would range from mediation of internal
Arab disputes, to outright attempts to influence the outcome of Israeli elections, to the spread of vile
propaganda calling for Israel's destruction.[46] 'Zionist - your death is in my hands', proclaimed a
videocassette produced by Force 17, Arafat's praetorian guard, and distributed in Nazareth in the
mid-1990s. 'The one who has forcefully robbed my land will only give it back by force. [Force] 17 in
Gaza and Jaffa, 17 in Jerusalem and Haifa, 17 in Jenin and Ramleh, 17 in Lod and Acre'. And the
PA's daily, al-Hayat al-Jadida put it in similarly blunt terms: 'Our people have hope for the future,
that the occupation state [Israel] will cease to exist'.[47]

The incitement struck an eager chord. As the 1990s wore on, open identification with Israel's sworn
enemies and even euphemistic calls for its destruction became regular themes of Israeli Arab
leaders. If in the mid-1970s, one in two Israeli Arabs repudiated Israel's right to exist, by 1999, four
out of five were doing so.[48] When, in February 1994, a Jewish fanatic murdered 29 Muslims at
prayer in Hebron, large-scale riots erupted in numerous Arab localities throughout Israel with mobs
battling police for four full days. The scenario repeated itself in April 1996 when dozens of
Palestinians were mistakenly killed in an Israeli bombing of terrorist targets in south Lebanon, and
yet again in September 1996 when Arafat, capitalizing on the opening of a new exit to an
archaeological tunnel in Jerusalem, stirred a fresh wave of mass violence in which fifteen Israelis
and fifty-eight Palestinians died. In this respect, at least, the riots of October 2000 were an event
foretold although one could not have predicted their scope and duration.

The first signs occurred as early as July. As the Camp David summit was about to convene amid
widespread talk of a breakthrough for peace, Abdel Malik Dahamshe, the Islamist movement's most
senior Knesset representative, threatened that any Arab concessions over Jerusalem would trigger a
violent eruption of cosmic proportions. 'Our souls yearn for martyrs' death for the defence of al-Aqsa
and blessed Jerusalem, and millions of Muslims and Arabs will respond to the call to martyr
themselves', he declared. 'I am willing and praying to be the first shahid [martyr] to sacrifice his
body in defence of Islam's holiest sites in Jerusalem'. Not to be outdone was his Islamist colleague,
Sheikh Raid Salah. In public appearances, newspaper articles, and poems, he urged his followers to
make the ultimate sacrifice for the liberation of the 'stolen homeland'. Azmi Bishara, a member of
the Knesset and founding head of the Arab nationalist Balad party, applauded Hezbollah's armed
struggle, which in May 2000 culminated in Israel's swift unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon.
[49]

The Camp David talks ended on 25 July with Arafat's blanket repudiation of Barak's proposal for the
establishment of an independent Palestinian state in virtually the entire territory of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, with east Jerusalem as its capital. In the following months, the PA made
comprehensive preparations for a full-fledged confrontation with Israel, and on 29 September, the
day after a mutually agreed visit by Ariel Sharon to the Muslim-administered areas of the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, launched the 'al-Aqsa intifada' with open clashes between Palestinian rioters
and the security forces throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

The next day, as low scale violence spilled over from the territories to Israel itself, the 'follow-up
committee' - the effective leadership of the Israeli Arabs - issued an official statement deriding the
deaths of seven Palestinian rioters as a 'premeditated, horrendous massacre' by the Barak
government and proclaiming 1 October a day of national mourning, strikes, and demonstrations.
'The blood of our wounded has mixed with the blood of our people in defending the blessed al-Aqsa
and crossed the green line [i.e., the pre-1967 line]', ran the statement. 'It does not stand to reason
that we will remain aloof in the face of the... barbaric actions in Jerusalem and the attempt to
desecrate al-Haram al-Sharif and to subject it to Israeli sovereignty'.[50]

The following day the Israeli Arab sector exploded.

Epilogue

The October 2000 riots were not an act of social protest, and they did not mark a stage in 'a
legitimate struggle for civil rights'. They were a violent internal uprising in support of an external
attack. It was as if tens of thousands of Japanese Americans had responded to Pearl Harbour by
engaging in wholesale violence against their fellow Americans. Of course, that particular uprising
never happened - which did not prevent the American government from interning thousands of
American citizens of Japanese origin for much of the war as suspected members of a 'fifth column'.

In Israel, the violence did happen - on a massive scale. But the Barak government, declining to
acknowledge it for what it was and what it portended, sought to appease the aggressors by
announcing increased economic support for the Arab sector to the tune of four billion shekels and
appointing the Orr commission to investigate not the rioters but the state's response to them. Small
wonder, then, that this commission ended up lifting the lion's share of the blame from the shoulders
of the aggressors, or satisfied itself with uttering the naive wish that its own demonstration of good
faith would 'contribute, in the final analysis, to a meeting of hearts among Arabs and Jews in Israel'.
[51]

No such meeting of hearts has remotely occurred. On the contrary, just as Hajj Amin Husseini
dragged his reluctant constituents into a disastrous conflict that culminated in their collective
undoing, and Arafat used the Oslo accords to implicate his equally grudging subjects in the worst
military confrontation with Israel since the 1948 war, rather than create the independent Palestinian
envisaged by these accords, so Israel's Arab leaders have shown no remorse over the dire
consequences of their reckless behaviour, instead intensifying their efforts to widen the breach with
the country's Jewish majority.

Thus we have Bishara asking the Knesset (in May 2001) to explore the 'dispensation of poisoned
candies from IDF aircraft overflying the Gaza Strip'[52] before departing for Syria to commemorate
the first anniversary of the death of Hafez Assad, one of Israel's most implacable enemies. Flanked
by other avowed enemies of the Jewish state, he then implored the Arab states to enable anti-Israel
resistance activities, reiterated his admiration for Hezbollah, and urged the Israeli Arabs to celebrate
the terrorist organization's achievements and internalize its operational lessons.[53] His subsequent
prosecution for visiting an enemy state and supporting a terrorist organization only served to boost
his international profile and intensify his recklessness. So much so that in 2006 he fled Israel to
avoid arrest and prosecution for treason, having allegedly assisted Hezbollah during its war with
Israel in the summer of that year.[54]

Bishara's Arab peers remained unimpressed. Ignoring 2002 legislation forbidding unauthorized
visits by Israelis to enemy countries, they embarked on a string of trips to the neighbouring Arab
states where they conferred with various heads of the anti-Israel 'resistance'.[55] Ahmad Tibi, whose
years in Arafat's service would have made him a persona non grata in Hafez Assad's Syria given the
latter's loathing of the Palestinian leader, was beside himself with joy on meeting the deceased
tyrant's son. 'Heads of state are begging to shake [Bashar] Assad's hand, crawling to shake his hand',
he gloated at an Israeli Arab election gathering (in January 2009). 'Yet what they fail to obtain
despite their crawling, others get'.[56]

The following year Tibi travelled to Libya with a delegation of Israeli Arab parliamentarians to meet
Muammar Qaddafi, whom he lauded as 'king of the Arabs' and his peer praised as 'a man of peace
who treats his people in the best possible way'.[57] Confronted with scathing Knesset criticism upon
their return, Knesset member Taleb Sana was unrepentant. 'Israel's enemy is Israel itself', he said.
'As Qaddafi said during the visit, they have no problem with Jews but only with Zionism. Perhaps
you'll learn and understand some time - that is: Abolish the Jewish state of Israel'.[58]

By this time, open calls for Israel's destruction had substituted for the 1990s' euphemistic advocacy
of this goal. Bishara, whose Balad party was predicated on making Israel 'a state of all its citizens' -
the standard euphemism for its transformation into an Arab state in which Jews would be reduced
to a permanent minority - became increasingly outspoken after his flight from the country,
predicting the Jewish state's fate to be identical to that of the crusading states.[59]His successor as
Balad leader, Jamal Zahalka, preferred a more contemporary metaphor claiming that just as South
Africa's apartheid had been emasculated, so its Zionist counterpart had to be destroyed.[60] And
Sheikh Ra'id Salah, who never tired of crying wolf over Israel's supposed designs on al-Aqsa, 'while
our blood is on their clothes, on their doorsteps, in their food and water', prophesied the Jewish
state's demise within two decades should it not change its attitude to the Arab minority.[61]

Meanwhile the 'follow up committee' escalated the 'Nakba Day' events - observed alongside Israel's
Independence Day to bemoan the 'catastrophe' wrought on the Palestinians by the establishment of
the Jewish state - by instituting (in May 2001) a national minute of silence. Seven years later, as
Israel celebrated its sixtieth year of existence, the committee dedicated these events to the 'right of
return' - the standard Arab euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic subversion.
[62] Even in Haifa, the epitome of Arab-Jewish coexistence since the early 1920s, local politicians
attempted to replace the name of The Zionism Avenue with its pre-Israel precursor.[63]

This incitement had its predictable effect. Commemoration of the October 2000 events was often
accompanied by violence, at times coordinated with the PA, as have Israel's defensive measures
against Palestinian terrorism. When on 29 March 2002, two days after the murder of 29 Israelis as
they celebrated the Passover meal in a Netanya hotel, the IDF launched a large scale offensive
against the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank, violent demonstrations broke out in Arab
localities throughout Israel, and the Islamist movement initiated widespread activities in support of
the Palestinians in the disputed territories; similar outbursts of violence occurred in December
2008-January 2009 when Israel moved to end years of rocket and missile attacks from Hamas-
controlled Gaza on its towns and villages.[64] No less alarming was the steady increase in Israeli
Arabs involved in terrorist activities. In 2001, for example, the number of arrested suspected
terrorists increased tenfold compared to 1999: from 2 to 25, with 19 further terror suspects arrested
in 2002's first five months.[65]

And so it goes. With Israeli Arab leaders bent on blaming the Jewish state for every conceivable ill,
including most recently the September 2012 anti-Islamic video that allegedly sparked the deadly
riots across the Muslim world;[66] with 40 per cent of Israeli Arabs denying the existence of the
Holocaust, and one in two refusing to send their children to Jewish schools or have Jewish
neighbours,[67] is there any way to encourage them to normalize their minority status within the
Jewish state, intensify their identification with its destiny, and thereby help convince their
Palestinian cousins to reconcile themselves as well to its permanent existence?

One good place to start would be with conscription of Israeli Arabs into military service, or
equivalent national duties. This would not require any special legislation; the 1986 Defence Service
law obligates all Israeli citizens to serve in the army upon reaching the age of eighteen. But it would
certainly be a revolutionary move, one that would force Muslim and Christian Arabs to decide where
their deepest loyalties lie and act accordingly. (The Druze community, whose sons already serve in
the armed forces, made its choice as early as 1948.)

Defending one's state against external aggression is indeed the ultimate test of citizenship. Just as
French Jews fought German Jews during World War I, Italian Americans and German Americans
fought Italians and Germans during World War II, and Arabs have incessantly fought other Arabs,
why should Israel's Arab citizens not undertake to defend their country against external enemies?
Failure to share the burden, the anxieties, and the suffering of their Jewish compatriots runs counter
to the very principle of equality that Israeli Arabs have been trumpeting for so long as their
watchword. Why not test it?

Of course, to raise this possibility may seem utopian in the extreme. Or is it? A 2007 survey, for
example, revealed a surprisingly high level of support for the idea of voluntary civil service among
Israeli Arabs: 75% among young Arabs (aged 16-22), 71.9% among Arab men, and 89% among Arab
women.[68] Another silver lining may be found in the fact that whenever an Israeli politician
proposes the inclusion of some frontier Israeli-Arab settlements in the future Palestinian state, as
part of a land exchange within the framework of a peace agreement, the residents of these localities
immediately voice their indignation. Indeed, even most East Jerusalem Palestinians, who are
entitled to Israeli social benefits and are free to travel across Israel's pre-1967 borders, would rather
become citizens of the Jewish state than citizens of a new Palestinian one.[69] They all seem to be
keenly aware that life in a civil, democratic, and pluralistic society, albeit a Jewish one, is preferable
to what is on offer in the Palestinian Authority and the neighbouring Arab states.

One can only hope that, unlike their destructive predecessors, Israel's Arab leaders would pay
greater heed to the wishes of their constituents and halt their steady drive towards an all out
collision. Given their conduct over the past decades, this may prove one hope too many.

Efraim Karsh is Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, Principal
Research Fellow at the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia), and author most recently of Palestine
Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010). This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article
submitted for consideration in Israel Affairs [copyright Taylor & Francis];Israel Affairs is
available online athttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fisa20. Substantial portions of the article
were originally published in Commentary ("Israel's Arabs vs. Israel," December 2003) and appear
here by kind permission of that journal's editors.

Notes

[1] Efraim Karsh, Arafat's War (New York: Grove, 2003): 186.
[2] 'Vaadat Orr. Vaadat Hakira Mamlachtit Leberur Hitnagshuyot ben Kohot Habitahon leven
Ezrahim Israelim Behodesh October 2000. Din Vehshbon: Nosah Ma'le' (Jerusalem: August
2000), Shaar Shishi: Sikum Umaskanot: 20 (http://uri.mitkadem.co.il/vaadat-or/vaadat-or-
part6.html). For English summary of the conclusions see 'The Official Summation of the Or
Commission Report', Jewish Virtual Library, Sept. 2, 2003.
[3] 'Vaadat Orr, Shaar Shishi': 5.
[4] See, for example, David Ben-Gurion's Diary (Sde Boker), 24 Nov. 1929; Z. Abramowitz and Y.
Guelfat, Hameshek Haarvi Beeretz Israel Uveartzot Hamizrah Hatichon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz
Hameuhad, 1944): 5-7.
The decline in Arab emigration from Palestine was particularly marked in comparison with the
neighbouring Arab states. While over 103,000 people left Syria and Lebanon from 1920 to 1931, only
9,272 non-Jews left Palestine during the same period: less than half the Syrian/Lebanese rate given
that their population was five times as large. Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World (London: W.
H. Allen, 1970): 225.
[5] Palestine Royal Commission, Report. Presented to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in
Parliament by Command of his Majesty, July 1937 (London: HMSO; rep. 1946): 93 (vii).
[6] Ibid.: 94, 157-58; Abramowitz and Guelfat, Hameshek Haarvi, 48-50.
[7] A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the information of the
Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (reprinted 1991 in full with permission from Her Majesty's
Stationary Office by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington D.C.), Vol. 2, 708-15.
[8] Ibid: 570-80; Cohen, Israel, 228.
[9] Ibid.: 699-700, 710-14, 719-20; Peel Commission Report, 93 (vi), 231.
[10] Ibid.: 63, 271.
[11] Efraim Karsh, 'How Many Palestinian Arab Refugees Were There?' Israel Affairs, Apr. 2011:
224-46.
[12] Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 'Press Release', 25 Apr. 2012.
[13] Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Jewish War Front (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940): 216.
[14] Ze'ev Jabotinsky, 'What is to be Done?' (1905), in his Ktavim Zioniim Rishonim(Jerusalem: Eri
Jabotinsky, 1949): 209-10; originally published in Russian in Rassvyet (4 Nov. 1923), the 'Iron Wall'
was reprinted several times, including Jewish Herald (South Africa), 26 Nov. 1937
(http://www.mideastweb.org/ironwall.htm).
[15] Jabotinsky, The Jewish War Front: 216-20.
[16] David Ben-Gurion, Bamaaraha (Tel-Aviv: Mapai Publishing House, 1949), Vol. 4, Part 2: 260.
[17] Hagana Archives (Tel Aviv), Hagana Commander-in-Chief to Brigade Commanders, 'The Arabs
Residing in the Enclaves', 24 Mar. 1948, HA/46/199z.
[18] Zionist Archive (Jerusalem), Protocol of Israel's Provisional Government Meeting, 16 May 1948,
11-18, 20; Protocol of the Provisional Government Meeting, 5 Sept. 1948: 5.
[19] CBS, 'Society in Israel', Report No. 4, October 2011: 198; CBS, 'The Arab Population in
Israel' (Jerusalem, Nov. 2002): 6.
[20] World Health Organization (WHO), 'World Health Statistics 2009: Mortality and Burden of
Disease': 42
[21] Central Intelligence Agency, 'The World Factbook: Infant Mortality Rate (Death/1,000 Live
Births)'.
[22] CBS, 'The Arab Population in Israel 2008', Statisti-Lite 102.
[23] CBS, 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010. Tables 8.7/8.17: Schools, Classes and Students in
Primary/Secondary Education'.
[24] CBS, 'Jubilee Publications: Education' (Jerusalem, May 1999): 12, 15; 'The Arab Population in
Israel': 8.
[25] Ibid.: 16; 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2012. Table 8.25: Matriculations Examinees, by
Entitlement to a Certificate and Selected Characteristics; 'Society in Israel': 145, 167-68.
[26] 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010. Table 1: Individual Services in All Schools in Hebrew and
Arab education, by Supervision'.
[27] 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2012: Table 8.3 & Table 8.6: Teaching Jobs, Full time Equivalent
Jobs (F.T.E.) and Teaching Staff in Pre-Primary/Primary Education, by supervision, District, and
Selected Characteristics'; 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010. Table 8.16: Teaching Jobs, Full time
Equivalent Jobs (F.T.E.) and Teaching Staff in Secondary Education, by supervision, District, and
Selected Characteristics'.
[28] 'The Arab Population in Israel': 9; 'Society in Israel': 149.
[29] 'Jubilee Publications: Education': 12.
[30] Human Development Reports, accessed 11 Oct. 2012.
[31] 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010: Tables 9.1 & 9.2: Selected Data on Housing in Arab/Jewish
Households'; CBS, 'Society in Israel', Report No. 3, October 2010: 47.
[32] 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010. Tables 14.1 & 14.2 - Ownership of Durable Goods, Arab in
Arab/Jewish Households'.
[33] Ibid., Table 2.15: Population and Density per Sq. Km. in Localities Numbering 5,000 Residents
and More on 31 XII 2009': 130-32.
[34] 'The Arab Population in Israel 2008'.
[35] CBS, 'Local Authorities in Israel 2009', Publication 1451, 22 June 2011.
[36] 'Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010. Table 1.27: Population Aged 15 and Over, By Civilian Labour
Force Characteristics, Type of Locality of Residence, Population group and Sex 2009'.
[37] Ibid.: 'Local Authorities in Israel, 2009'.
[38] Sabri Jiryis, 'The Aras in israel, 1973-79', Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 1979: 31-33,
35-40.
[39] Maariv, 27 Nov. 1969.
[40] 'Aims of the Political Programme of the Palestinian Revolution Adopted by the 11 thPalestine
National Congress, Cairo, 11 Jan. 1973', Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1973: 170.
[41] Maariv, 22 Jan. 1979.
[42] Ibid., 22 Feb. 1979; Jiryis, 'The Arabs in Israel'.
[43] 'Vaadat Orr: Shaar Rishon': 81.
[44] Maariv, 2 Feb., 26 May 1986.
[45] Radio Monte Carlo in Arabic, 1 Jul. 1994; al-Nahar, 3 Jul. 1994. The Koranic quote is from the
28th Sura - 'The Story', verse 4. See, The Koran, translated with an Introduction by Arthur J. Abberry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982): 392.
[46] On PA interference in the Israeli elections of 1996 and 1999 see, for example, Haaretz, 14 June
2001.
[47] Quoted in PMW, 'PA depicts a world without Israel.'
[48] 'Vaadat Orr. Shaar Rishon', 77.
[49] Haaretz, 26, 27 Feb. 2002.
[50] 'Vaadat Orr: Shaar Sheni: 7, 45.
[51] Ibid.: Shaar Shishi: 43.
[52] Alexander Bligh, 'Israeli Arab Members of the 15th Knesset: Between Israeli Citizenship and
their Palestinian National Identity', Israel Affairs, Dec. 2002: 10.
[53] Haaretz, 13-17 June, 11 July, 4 Nov. 2001, 26 Feb. 2002.
[54] See, for example, Haaretz, 2 May 2007.
[55] Thus, for example, Ahmad Tibi visited Lebanon in 2005, Jamal Zahalka and Wasil Taha visited
Lebanon and Syria in 2006, and Said Nafa visited Syria in 2007. Haaretz, 14 Dec. 2008.
[56] Haaretz, 12 Jan. 2009.
[57] Ynetnews.com, 25 April 2010, 25 Feb. 2011; YouTube video of the visit.
[58] Ynetnews.com, 27 Apr. 2010.
[59] Haaretz, 5 June 2008.
[60] Ibid.: 22 Jan. 2009.
[61]The Marker, 16 Feb. 2007; Haaretz, 1 Apr. 2007.
[62] Haaretz, 24 Apr. 11 May 2001, 6 Mar., 15 May 2008.
[63] Ibid.: 20 Apr. 2001.
[64] Ibid.: 30 Jul., 1 Oct. 2001; 3, 14, 15 Apr. 2002; 29 Sept. 2002; 2 Mar., 9 Oct., 28 Dec. 2008; 12
Jan. 2009; 1 Oct. 2012.
[65] Ibid.: 5 Sept., 7 Oct. 2001; 7 June 2002; 30 Apr. 2009.
[66] Ynetnews.com, 9 Sept. 2012.
[67] Ibid. 17 May 2009.
[68] Haaretz, 27 Oct. 2007, 18 Dec. 2007; 20 Feb. 2008.
[69] David Pollock, 'What Do the Arabs of East Jerusalem Really Want?' Jerusalem Centre for Public
Affairs, 7 Sept. 2011; Khaled Abu Toameh, 'Why Palestinians Want Israeli Citizenship', 23 Oct. 2012.

Seven Pillars of Fiction

by Efraim Karsh
The Wall Street Journal
August 9, 2013

The modern Middle East was born when the European powers exploited the declining Ottoman
Empire's entry into World War I to gobble up its lands. They did so by duping naive Arab
nationalists to rise against their Ottoman suzerain and then cheated the Arabs of the fruits of their
uprising.

So goes the popular narrative about the origins of the region's troubles. It's an emotionally gripping
tale, but it's also the inverse of truth. It wasn't British officials but a Meccan potentate, Sharif
Hussein ibn Ali of the Hashemite family, who in the summer of 1915 hatched the idea of
overthrowing the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by Hussein's promises to raise the Ottomans' Arab
subjects in revolt, Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, tentatively
accepted Hussein's vision of an Arab successor empire and facilitated the revolt that began in June
1916.

Hussein never came close to fulfilling his end of the bargain. Most of the Arabic-speaking population
remained loyal to the Turks until the bitter end, viewing the Hashemite insurrection with disdain.
Even in his hometown of Mecca the sharif didn't command absolute loyalty. Had he not been armed
and fed by Britain (and, to a lesser extent, France) and provided with troops, military guidance and
lavish shipments of gold to buy Bedouin loyalty, Hussein would have never been able to launch his
uprising, let alone sustain it.

This act of insubordination in a secondary theater of the Great War played a negligible part in the
fall of the Ottoman Empire. Yet it was instantly immortalized as the "Great Arab Revolt," winning
the Hashemites territories several times the size of the British Isles after the war: The emirate of
Transjordan (later to be known as the Kingdom of Jordan) was established in 1921 to satisfy the
ambitions of Hussein's second son, Abdullah, while in the same year the modern state of Iraq was
created at the instigation of Abdullah's younger brother Faisal. Hussein himself became king of the
Hijaz, Islam's birthplace, only to be evicted a few years later by Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founding
father of Saudi Arabia.
It was a young British participant, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), who single-handedly
produced this extraordinary feat of historical deception. Though aware that the revolt was but "a
sideshow of a sideshow," as he wrote in his cleverly titled 1922 memoir, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A
Triumph," Lawrence had no qualms about mythologizing it in grand style. In the process he
catapulted himself to fame as "Lawrence of Arabia" and became perhaps the first mega-celebrity of
modern times. His legend was amplified by generations of acolytes, including Lowell Thomas, whose
"The Last Crusade" lectures about Lawrence played to full houses in New York and London in 1919;
the British director David Lean, who gave us the Oscar-winning 1962 epic "Lawrence of Arabia"; and
a lengthy string of fawning biographers.

The illegitimate son of a disgraced Anglo-Irish aristocrat and his children's governess, Lawrence
studied archaeology at Oxford and spent the prewar years working on digs in Syria and Palestine.
When the Ottomans made their catastrophic decision to enter World War I on the side of the Triple
Alliance in November 1914, Lawrence was recruited to a new intelligence unit in Cairo, the
headquarters of Britain's war effort in the Middle East. Two years later, in October 1916, he
accompanied a senior British official to the Hijaz to inspect the state of the Hashemite insurrection
that had begun a few months earlier. Staying behind to report on the situation, he endeared himself
to Faisal, and the road from there to his creation of the myth of the revolt was short.

How did an archaeologist with no military education successfully brand himself a world authority on
guerrilla warfare with considerable impact on the future shape of the Middle East? The answer
offered by Scott Anderson's beautifully crafted but ultimately flawed account of the desert revolt is
that "Lawrence was able to become 'Lawrence of Arabia' because no one was paying much
attention." As Lawrence's superiors saw it, the author says, permitting a daring young operator to
lead the Arabs in distracting the Turks from the much bloodier and consequential European front
was a low-cost, high-return investment.

The problem with this theory is that London did actually commit massive resources and serious
efforts to the Middle East during the war. These ranged from the disastrous 1915 Gallipoli landing,
to the tortuous but successful Mesopotamian campaign (1915-16), to the conquest of the Levant
(1917-18) by the Egyptian Expeditionary Force headed by Gen. Edmund Allenby. By the time
fighting came to an end in 1918, no fewer than one million British and Commonwealth troops had
been deployed in the regionhardly a reflection of "the low regard with which British war strategists
viewed events in the Middle East," as Mr. Anderson claims.

The Hashemite uprising was indeed a minor sideshow in the grand order of things, yet it was never
the free-ranging operation suggested by the author. Rather it was an integral part of the Anglo-
French war effortParis sent a military mission to the revolt commanded by a colonelthat was led
by a string of seasoned officers, such as Col. Cyril Wilson and Lt. Col. Pierce Joyce, but never by
Lawrence. As Lawrence himself put it, "I never had any office among the Arabs: was never in charge
of the British mission with them. Wilson, Joyce, Newcombe, Dawnay and Davenport were all over
my head."

Mr. Anderson recounts Lawrence's life in chronological fashion, drawing on some contemporary
sources, official correspondence and the like. Yet he is too willing to take his subject at his word,
even as he acknowledges that "earlier than most, Lawrence seemed to embrace the modern concept
that history was malleable, that truth was what people were willing to believe."

To substantiate Lawrence's largely fictionalized version of his exploits, Mr. Anderson juxtaposes
them with those of three contemporaries, freelancers who the author thinks lived parallel lives to
Lawrence's. Throughout the book, the stories of these other men are interwoven with the central
narrative concerning Lawrence: William Yale, a young oil man "who, as the only American field
intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation's
postwar policy in the region"; Curt Prfer, a German antiquities scholar "who, donning the
camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial
powers"; and Aaron Aaronsohn, "a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman
government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a
Jewish homeland in Palestine."

Putting a human face on historical events is an appealing technique that makes "Lawrence in
Arabia" a gripping read. Yet eloquence and color can't authenticate a flawed historical argument.
Prfer is little more than a curiosity, notable only for his future Nazi sympathies. Yale was in no
position to affect the outcome of a war that his country joined at the 12th hour and even then took no
part in the Middle Eastern fighting. Yale's minor advisory role at the postwar Paris conference made
no difference whatsoever and, as Mr. Anderson writes, he "resigned from the American peace
delegation in disgust and sailed back to New York." As for Aaronsohn, he did indeed provide vital
intelligence that facilitated Allenby's rout of the Ottoman armies in Palestine, but he played no
"crucial role" in the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If anything, the exposure of his spy
ring in autumn 1917 triggered a draconian Turkish retribution, with the Levant's Ottoman master,
Djemal Pasha, warning Zionist leaders that should the Turks be driven out of Palestine, there would
be no surviving Jews to welcome the British forces.

Lawrence did indeed have a considerable impact on the creation of the modern Middle East, but this
had nothing to do with his real war record. The revolt had been a complete fiasco. For all the British
and French efforts, the Bedouins remained hopelessly immune to any concept of orderly warfare.
They would break for coffee in the middle of the fighting and drop off occasionally to see their
families; often a whole clan would tire of fighting and take a rest. They would attack small and lightly
armed Turkish garrisons but would disperse in panic when confronted with a significant force, or
even upon hearing artillery. Small wonder that they failed to vanquish the debilitated Ottoman
forces in the Hijaz, with the strategic (and holy) city of Medina holding out to the end of the war. It
was only in July 1917, more than a year after the start of the revolt, that the rebels managed to
overcome the meager Ottoman resistance and capture the small port town of Aqaba, in the extreme
northwest of the Arabian Peninsula. Their subsequent advances, which would carry them to
Damascus at the war's end, were but a corollary of Allenby's Palestine offensive, and even these were
achieved by the semiregular forces built by the British from among the prisoners of war shipped to
Arabia.

How Lawrence managed to pass off this sordid power-grab by a local potentate as a heroic national
revolt against an imperial oppressor Mr. Anderson doesn't tell. He describes Lawrence as a
"painfully shy" and "supremely private and hidden man" with a "craving for anonymity." But
painfully shy men, especially in the lowest rungs of strict, disciplinarian hierarchies like the military,
don't treat their superiors as equal or engage in high-level political machinations, let alone make
their inner feelings known to the entire world via international best sellersegomaniacs and
compulsive attention-seekers do.

Lawrence was an exceptionally gifted charlatan with a keen eye to networking and self-promotion,
who successfully cast his spell on far more senior and accomplished contemporaries, such as Allenby
and Winston Churchill, who in his capacity as colonial secretary put the final touches to the post-
Ottoman state system. As Lawrence admitted, tongue in cheek, in a rare moment of candor in
"Seven Pillars": "My proper share was a minor one, but because of a fluent pen, a free speech, and a
certain adroitness of brain, I took upon myself, as I describe it, a mock primacy."

Mr. Karsh is a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London and a
senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and at the Middle East Forum.
He is co-author of "Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923."
Michael Oren misunderstands the obstacle to peace
by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
January 30, 2014

For an accomplished historian, Michael Oren seems to have an extraordinarily short memory.

In a recent article on CNN's website, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States argued that
in the absence of a two-state solution, "One solution could be a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from
Palestinian population centers in the West Bank." This, he reasoned, would allow Israel to "end the
occupation of the Palestinians, preserve its security, and perhaps lay new foundations for peace."

But this precisely what Israel did some 20 years ago.

The declaration of principles (DOP, or Oslo I) signed on the White House lawn in September 1993
by the PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank
and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which Israel and the
Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. By May 1994, Israel had completed its
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of territory containing a small number of
Israeli settlements that "occupied" not a single Palestinian and were subsequently evacuated in
2005) and the Jericho area of the West Bank. On July 1, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat made his
triumphant entry into Gaza, and shortly afterward a newly-established Palestinian Authority (PA)
under his headship took control of this territory.

On September 28, 1995, despite the PA's abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the
territories under its control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year
Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank's populated areas with the exception of
Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On January 20, 1996, elections to the
Palestinian Council were held, and shortly afterward both the Israeli civil administration and
military government were dissolved.

The geographical scope of these Israeli withdrawals was relatively limited; the surrendered land
amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank's overall territory.

U.S. Secretary of State John

Kerry chats with Michael
Oren at Israel's Ben Gurion
International Airport, on April
9, 2013. (Image source: U.S.
State Department)

But its impact on the

Palestinian population
was nothing short of
revolutionary. In one
fell swoop, Israel
relinquished control
over virtually all of the
West Bank's 1.4 million
residents. Since that
time, nearly 60% of
them in the Jericho
area and in the seven
main cities of Jenin,
Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron have lived entirely under
Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40% live in towns, villages, refugee camps and hamlets where the
PA exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has maintained "overriding
responsibility for security."

Some 2% of the West Bank's population tens of thousands of Palestinians continue to live in
areas where Israel has complete control, but even there the PA maintains "functional jurisdiction."

In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment
from Hebron in January 1997, 99% of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip has not lived under Israeli occupation. As the virulent anti-Israel and anti-Jewish media,
school system and religious incitement can attest to, during these years, any presence of a foreign
occupation has been virtually non-existent.

That a former holder of Israel's top diplomatic post seems to be blissfully unaware of this basic fact,
nearly two decades after its occurrence, is a sad testament to the failure of the country's foreign
policy establishment to confront the well-oiled Arab propaganda machine and its biggest and most
damaging lies. And since the Israeli conquest of Gaza and the West Bank in the June 1967 war,
"occupation" has become the Palestinians' trump propaganda card, allowing them not only to
demonize Israel as a repressive apartheid state and justify terrorism but also to extract substantial
aid from the international community.

Of course the presentation of terrorism as a natural response to the so-called occupation is not only
completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. In the 26 years of Israeli occupation preceding
the signing of the DOP, some 450 Israelis were murdered; in the two years attending the formation
of the PA in July 1994, 224 people lost their lives in terrorist attacks, an almost sevenfold higher
average annual death toll (112 vs. 17).

And this death toll skyrocketed to unprecedented heights after the launch of the Palestinian war of
terror in September 2000 (euphemized as the "al-Aqsa intifada"), shortly after being offered an
independent state in the entire Gaza Strip and 92% of the West Bank with east Jerusalem as its
capital.

If occupation was indeed the cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual
occupation, why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of the occupation, and why
did it escalate into open war upon Israel's most far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one
might argue with far greater plausibility that the absence of occupation that is, the withdrawal of
close Israeli surveillance is precisely what facilitated the launching of the terrorist war in the first
place. Just as it was the partial restoration of security measures in the West Bank during the 2002
Operation Defensive Shield and its aftermath (albeit without reassuming control over the daily lives
of the Palestinian population there) that brought the Palestinian war of terror to an end.

It is not "occupation" that is the foremost obstacle to a two-state solution but the 67-year-long
Palestinian rejection of this notion as expressed in the 1947 UN Partition Resolution stipulating the
establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in mandatory Palestine. Until that disposition changes,
the idea of Palestinian-Israeli peace will mean little more than the continuation of war by other
means.

Efraim Karsh is Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, Principal
Research Fellow at the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia), and author most recently of Palestine
Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010).
The Palestinians' Real Enemies
by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2014

For most of the twentieth century, inter-Arab politics were dominated by the doctrine of pan-
Arabism, postulating the existence of "a single nation bound by the common ties of language,
religion and history. behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign states";[1] and no single issue
dominated this doctrine more than the "Palestine question" with anti-Zionism forming the main
common denominator of pan-Arab solidarity and its most effective rallying cry. But the actual
policies of the Arab states have shown far less concern for pan-Arab ideals, let alone for the well-
being of the Palestinians, than for their own self-serving interests. Indeed, nothing has done more to
expose the hollowness of pan-Arabism than its most celebrated cause.

Denying Palestinian Nationalism

Consider, for instance, Emir Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca, the celebrated hero of the "Great Arab
Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire and the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement.
Together with his father and his older brother Abdullah, Faisal placed Palestine on the pan-Arab
agenda by (falsely) claiming that they had been promised the country in return for their anti-
Ottoman rising. In January 1919, he signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, head of the
Zionists, supporting the November 1917 Balfour Declaration on the establishment of a Jewish
national home in Palestine and the adoption of "all necessary measures to encourage and
stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale."[2] Yet when the opportunity for self-
aggrandizement arose, in March 1920, he had himself crowned king of Syria "within its natural
boundaries, including Palestine." Had either option been realized, Palestine would have disappeared
from the international scene at that time.

Nor did Faisal abandon his grand ambitions after

his expulsion from Damascus by the French in
July 1920. Quite the reverse, using his subsequent
position as Iraq's founding monarch, he toiled
ceaselessly to bring about the unification of the
Fertile Crescent under his rule. This policy was
sustained after his untimely death in September
1933 by successive Iraqi leaders, notably by Nuri
Said, Faisal's comrade-in-arms and a long-time
prime minister. In the summer of 1936, Said
sought to convince Palestine's Arab and Jewish
communities, as well as the British government,
to agree to the country's incorporation into a pan-
Arab federation, and six years later, he published
a detailed plan for pan-Arab unification (known
as the Blue Book) that envisaged that "Syria,
Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan shall be
reunited into one state."[3]

Emir Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca became the effective leader

of the nascent pan-Arab movement. He placed Palestine on the
pan-Arab agenda by falsely claiming that he and his father and
brother had been promised the country in return for their anti-
Ottoman uprising.
The scheme was vigorously opposed by Abdullah, who strove to transform the emirate of
Transjordan (latterly Jordan), which he had ruled since 1921, into a springboard for the creation of a
"Greater Syrian" empire comprising Syria, Palestine, and possibly, Iraq and Saudi Arabia; and it was
the Arab states' determination to block this ambition and to avail themselves of whatever parts of
Palestine they could that underlay the concerted attempt to destroy the state of Israel at birth. This,
on the face of it, was a shining demonstration of pan-Arab solidarity; in reality, it was a scramble for
Palestinian territory in the classic imperialist tradition. As Arab League secretary-general Abdel
Rahman Azzam admitted to a British reporter, Abdullah "was to swallow up the central hill regions
of Palestine with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. [The]
Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon if its
inhabitants opted for it by a referendum [i.e., the inhabitants of the said coastal strip]."[4]

Had Israel lost the war, its territory would have been divided among the invading Arab forces. The
name Palestine would have vanished into the dustbin of history. By surviving the pan-Arab assault,
Israel has paradoxically saved the Palestinian national movement from complete oblivion.

Manipulating the Palestinian Cause

Having helped drive the Palestinians to national ruin, the Arab states continued to manipulate the
Palestinian national cause to their own ends. Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-
determination in the parts of Palestine they occupied during the 1948 war. Upon occupying the
biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, Abdullah moved to erase all traces of corporate Palestinian
Arab identity. On April 4, 1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan to be subsequently
known as the "West Bank" of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. Its residents became Jordanian
citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom's economic, political, and social
structures. And while Egypt showed no desire to annex the occupied Gaza Strip, this did not imply
support of Palestinian
nationalism or of any
sort of collective
political awareness
among the Palestinians.
The refugees were kept
under oppressive
military rule, were
denied Egyptian
citizenship, and were
subjected to severe
restrictions on travel.
"The Palestinians are
useful to the Arab states
as they are," President
Gamal Abdel Nasser
candidly responded to
an enquiring Western
reporter. "We will
always see that they do
not become too
powerful. Can you imagine yet another nation on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean!"[5] Had
these territories not come under Israel's control during the June 1967 war, their populations would
have lost whatever vestiges of Palestinian identity they retained since 1948. For the second time in
two decades, Israel unwittingly salvaged the Palestinian national cause.

Following the 1948 war, Palestinian refugees were kept under oppressive Egyptian military rule in Gaza, were denied Egyptian
citizenship, and were subjected to severe restrictions on travel. The situation has not changed significantly in Egypt. Here, young
Palestinian refugees from Syria ask for recognition in Egypt, May 6, 2013.
Nor was Syria more sympathetic to the idea of Palestinian statehood. During his brief presidency
(April-August 1949), Husni Zaim proposed the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Syria in
return for financial and political gain while Hafez Assad (1970-2000), who as late as September 1974
described Palestine as "a basic part of southern Syria,"[6] was a persistent obstacle to Palestinian
self-determination. He pledged allegiance to any solution amenable to the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO)appointed by the Arab League in October 1974 as the "sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people"so long as it did not deviate from the Syrian line
advocating Israel's destruction. Yet when in November 1988, the PLO pretended to accept the
November 1947 partition resolution (and by implication to recognize Israel's existence) so as to end
its ostracism by the United States,[7] Syria immediately opposed the move. The PLO then took this
pretense a step further by signing the September 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-
government Arrangements (DOP) with Israel. This provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire
West Bank and Gaza Strip for a transitional period of up to five years, during which Israel and the
Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. But the Syrian regime strongly
condemned the declaration while the Damascus-based Palestinian terrorist, Ahmad Jibril,
threatened PLO chairman Yasser Arafat with death.

A no less instrumental approach was exhibited by Saddam Hussein, another self-styled pan-Arab
champion whose professed allegiance to the Palestinian cause was matched by a long history of
treating that cause with indifference, if not outright hostility. Saddam stood firmly against Iraqi
intervention to aid the Palestinians in Jordan during the "Black September" of 1970 and
subsequently sought to exclude Palestinians from coming to work in Iraq's booming, oil-rich
economy. Though a vociferous critic of Egypt's Anwar Sadat for reaching a separate peace with Israel
in 1979, Saddam quickly reconsidered when he needed Egyptian military aid in his war against Iran
(1980-88), toiling tirelessly for Cairo's readmission into the Arab fold. Nor was Saddam deterred
from collaborating with Israel against Syrian interests in Lebanon (to punish Assad for his support
of Tehran in its war against Baghdad), or from seeking sophisticated Israeli military equipment.
[8] In 1984, at a time of pressure due to the war with Iran, he went so far as to voice public support
for peace negotiations with the Jewish state, emphasizing that "no Arab leader looks forward to the
destruction of Israel" and that any solution to the conflict would require "the existence of a secure
state for the Israelis."[9]

This support, to be sure, did not prevent Saddam from attempting to link his August 1990 invasion
of Kuwait to the Palestine problem. During the months of negotiations with the Kuwaitis before the
invasion, Saddam made no mention of Palestine. Once confronted with a firm international
response, he immediately opted to "Zionize" the crisis by portraying his predatory move as the first
step toward "the liberation of Jerusalem." But this pretense made no impression whatsoever on
most Arab states, which dismissed the spurious link as the ploy it obviously was and fought
alongside the West to liberate Kuwait.

Nor did the anti-Iraq coalition collapse when Saddam, in a desperate bid to widen the conflict, fired
thirty-nine Scud missiles at Israela move cheered by the Palestinians and by demonstrators in
marginal states such as Yemen but otherwise greeted with conspicuous calm by the proverbially
restive "Arab street." Not a single Arab regime was swept from power following its participation in
the war, with the war even producing an ad hoc tacit alliance between Israel and the Arab members
of the anti-Saddam coalition: Israel kept the lowest possible profile, eschewing retaliation for Iraq's
missile attacks while the latter highlighted the hollowness of Saddam's pan-Arab pretenses by
sustaining the war operations against Baghdad.[10]

If anything, it was the Palestinians who paid a heavy price for their entanglement in the conflict as
the PLO's endorsement of the Iraqi occupation led to its ostracism by the Arab world and the
postwar expulsion of most of the 400,000 Palestinians who had been living and working in Kuwait.
[11] So much for pan-Arab solidarity with "the sole representative of the Palestinian people."
Unwanted Guests

The political manipulation of the Palestinian cause was mirrored by the dismal treatment of the
Palestinian refugees based in Arab states since the 1948 war. Far from being welcomed, the new
arrivals were seen as an unpatriotic and cowardly lot who had shamefully abdicated their national
duty while expecting others to fight on their behalf, and this attitude was entrenched and
institutionalized over time. Yet with their desire to offload their Palestinian guests matched by the
lingering dream of Israel's destruction, the Arab states as well as the Palestinian leadership rejected
U.N. General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which conditioned repatriation on the
attainment of comprehensive peace and partial refugee resettlement in the host Arab states.[12] The
resolution's subsequent transformation into the cornerstone of an utterly spurious claim to a "right
of return" has only served to perpetuate the refugee problem as the Arab states used this "right" as a
pretext to prevent Palestinian assimilation into their societies in anticipation of their eventual return
to their homeland.

Nowhere has this state of affairs been more starkly illustrated than in Lebanon, the most liberal
Arab state up until the mid-1970s. Fearful lest the burgeoning and increasingly radicalized
Palestinian population (which grew from 100,000 in 1948 to about 500,000 in 2012)[13]undermine
the country's fragile confessional edifice, the authorities barred its incorporation into Lebanon's
social, political, and economic structures. As a result, the vast majority of Palestinians have
remained stateless refugees with more than half living in abject poverty in twelve squalid and
overcrowded camps (another five camps were destroyed during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90),
administered by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(UNRWA), created in 1949 for the exclusive relief of Palestinian Arab refugees.[14]

Camp residents or not, Lebanese Palestinians have been excluded from numerous walks of life and
spheres of activity due to their alien status; and unlike other foreign residents who can evade this
discrimination by virtue of their countries' reciprocity treaties with Lebanon, the stateless
Palestinians can claim no such rights and have consequently been singled out for distinct
mistreatment including severe restrictions on travel, property ownership, and ability to work. For
decades, they were barred by government decree from more than seventy professions, from
doorkeepers, to mechanics, to file clerks, to schoolteachers, to personnel managers; and while the
ministry of labor lifted the ban on fifty professions in June 2005, the actual application of this
measure has been haphazard at best. Likewise, only 2 percent of Palestinians took advantage of the
August 2010 legislation aimed at improving their access to the official labor market and the social
security benefit system with Lebanese law still barring Palestinians from at least twenty-five
professions requiring syndicated membership (such as law, medicine, and engineering) and
discriminating against their work and social conditions (e.g., Palestinians are underpaid in
comparison to Lebanese workers for performing the same jobs and overpay for their pensions).
Palestinian refugees are still prevented from registering property in accordance with a
discriminatory 2001 law.[15]

While Lebanon may offer the starkest example of abuse, nowhere in the Arab world have the
Palestinians been treated like "brothers." In accordance with Arab League resolutions, all Arab
states reject naturalization and/or resettlement as solutions to the refugee problem and refuse as a
matter of principle to contribute to UNRWA's budget or to assume responsibility for any of its
functions; and all restrict the freedom of movement of their Palestinian residents as well as their
property rights and access to such government services as health, education, and social benefits.
[16] When in 2004 Saudi Arabia revised its naturalization law allowing foreigners who had resided
in its territory for ten years to apply for citizenship, the estimated 500,000 Palestinians living and
working in the kingdom were conspicuously excluded. The pretext: the Arab League's stipulation
that Palestinians living in Arab countries be denied citizenship to avoid dissolution of their identity
and protect their "right to return" to their homeland.[17]

Even in Jordan, where most Palestinians have been naturalized and incorporated into the country's
fabric, they remain largely marginalized and discriminated against. Between 1949 and 1967, when
Jordan was in control of the West Bank, some 250,000-500,000 Palestinians moved across to the
East Bank or migrated abroad in search of a better life. But even East Bank Palestinians have been
subjected to systematic discrimination. They pay much heavier taxes than their Bedouin
compatriots; they receive close to zero state benefits; they are almost completely shut out of
government jobs, and they have very little, if any, political representation: Not one of Jordan's
twelve governorships is headed by a Palestinian, and the number of Palestinian parliamentarians is
disproportionately low.[18]

The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that more than two million Palestinians, most of
whom have full Jordanian citizenship, are registered as UNRWA refugees with some 370,000 living
in ten recognized camps throughout the country.[19] This has in turn resulted in the perception of
the kingdom's entire Palestinian population as refugees who would eventually depart to implement
their "right of return."[20]

This outlook can be traced to the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964,
which quickly challenged Jordan as the focus of Palestinian national identity. The situation came to
a head in the autumn of 1970 with the organization's attempt to overthrow the Hashemite dynasty.
This forced King Hussein to drive the PLO out of the country, gaining traction in July 1988 when
hundreds of thousands of West Bankers lost their Jordanian citizenship as a result of the king's
severance of "administrative and legal ties" with the territory. After the signing of the DOP and the
July 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, the process shifted to the East Bank where thousands of
Palestinians were stripped of their Jordanian citizenship.[21] "For East Bankers, the right of return
is often held up as the panacea which will recreate Jordan's Bedouin or Hashemite identity," read a
2008 confidential memo by the U.S. ambassador to Amman:

At their most benign, our East Banker contacts tend to count on the right of return as a solution to
Jordan's social, political, and economic woes. But underlying many conversations with East Bankers
is the theory that once the Palestinians leave, "real" Jordanians can have their country back In
fact, many of our East Banker contacts do seem more excited about the return [read: departure] of
Palestinian refugees than the Palestinians themselves.[22]

Brotherly Massacres

Not only have the host Arab states marginalized and abused their Palestinian guests, but they have
not shrunk from massacring them on a grand scale whenever this suited their needs. When in 1970
his throne was endangered by the Palestinian guerilla organizations, the affable and thoroughly
Westernized King Hussein slaughtered thousands of Palestinians during a single month, now known
as "Black September." Fearing certain death, scores of Palestinian fighters fled their Jordanian
"brothers" to surrender themselves to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Civilian casualties were
exorbitant with estimates ranging from three thousand to fifteen thousand deadhigher than the
Palestinian death toll in the 1948 war.[23]

In the summer of 1976, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian army, massacred some
3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel Zaatar. Six years later, these
very militias slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this
time under the IDF's watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians' rescue.

Palestinians flee Tel Zaatar refugee camp. In the

summer of 1976, Lebanese Christian militias,
backed by the Syrian army, massacred some
3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in Tel Zaatar.
None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians'
rescue.

When in 1983 the PLO tried to

reestablish its military presence in
Lebanon, having been driven out the
previous year by Israel, it was
unceremoniously expelled by the Syrian government, which went on to instigate an internecine war
among the Palestinian factions in Lebanon that raged for years and cost an untold number of lives.
So much so that Salah Khalaf (aka Abu Iyad), the number two man in the PLO, accused Damascus of
committing worse crimes against the Palestinian people than "those of the Israeli enemy."[24]

In the summer of 2007, the Lebanese army killed hundreds of Palestinians, including many
civilians, in the north Lebanese refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, inflicting widespread environmental
damage and driving some 30,000 persons to seek refuge in a nearby camp.[25]

Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Syrian civil war, and tens of thousands
have fled the country with refugee camps subjected to military attacks and prolonged sieges that
reduced their inhabitants to destitution and starvation. The large Yarmuk camp south of Damascus,
once home to some 250,000 Palestinians, including 150,000 officially registered refugees, is now
"nothing but ruins, and houses only around 18,000 residents who couldn't escape to Lebanon,
Jordan, or elsewhere."[26]

Brotherly Nakba

Much has been made of the Palestinian exodus of 1948, but during their decades of dispersal, the
Palestinians have been subjected to similarly traumatic ordeals at the hands of their Arab brothers.
As early as the 1950s, the Arab gulf states expelled striking Palestinian workers while the Black
September events led to the expulsion of some 20,000 Palestinians from Jordan and the demolition
of their camps.[27] And this tragedy pales in comparison with the eviction of most of Kuwait's
400,000 Palestinians after the 1991 Kuwait war. "What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse
than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories," Arafat lamented, as if
it were not the PLO's endorsement of Iraq's brutal occupation (August 1990-February 1991) that
triggered this deadly retribution.[28]

It mattered not that this community had nothing to do with the PLO's reckless move. Within months
of the country's liberation, only 50,000-80,000 Palestinians remained in the emirate, and by the
end of the year, the number had dwindled to some 30,000. Most of these were holders of Egyptian
travel documents, originally from Gaza; they were unable to obtain visas to anywhere in the world,
including Egypt, the governing power in their homeland at the time when they left for the gulf. By
contrast, as noted in The Palestine Yearbook of International Law, "Israel generally placed no
obstacles on the post-war return to the territories of Palestinian families from the West Bank,"
repatriating some 30,000 West Bankers and 7,000 Gazans with valid Israeli identity cards who had
been living and working in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.[29]

No sooner had the dust settled on the Kuwait exodus than the Palestinians experienced yet another
expulsion, this time from Libya. In a speech on September 1, 1995, as Israel was about to surrender
control of the Palestinian populated areas in the West Bank to Arafat's Palestinian Authority (control
of the Gaza population had been surrendered the previous year), Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi announced
his intention to expel all Palestinians living and working in the country, urging the Arab states to
follow his lead so as to expose the hollowness of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. He argued,

Since the Palestinian leaders claim they have now got a homeland and a passport, let the 30,000
Palestinians in Libya go back to their homeland, and let's see if the Israelis would permit them to
return. That's how the world will find out that the peace it's been advocating is no more than
treachery and a conspiracy.[30]

While no Arab state took up Qaddafi's advice and some implored him to rescind his decision, none
opened their doors to the deportees. Lebanon denied entry to several thousand arrivals without
Lebanese travel documents and banned maritime transport from Libya to preempt the possible flow
of deportees while Egypt allowed Palestinians with Israeli permits for entry to Gaza or the West
Bank to cross its territoryunder escortto the Palestinian-ruled areas, leaving thousands of
hapless refugees stranded in the Egyptian desert for months. Holders of residence permits elsewhere
were gradually able to move out; the rest were eventually allowed to remain in Libya when Qaddafi
rescinded his decision in early 1997.[31]

Last but not least, the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 unleashed a tidal wave of violence
and terror against Iraq's 34,000-strong Palestinian community, driving some 21,000 people to flee
the country in fear for their lives. Yet far from protecting their long time "guests," the
internationally-propped Iraqi government was implicated in the arbitrary detention, torture, killing,
and disappearance of Palestinians while none of the neighboring Arab states (with rare, temporary
exceptions) opened their doors to fleeing Iraqi Palestinians. "It's hard to understand why Syria has
provided refuge to nearly a million Iraqi refugees but is shutting the door on hundreds of
Palestinians also fleeing Iraq," commented a leading human rights watchdog. "The Syrian
government's mistreatment of these Palestinian refugees contrasts sharply with its declarations of
solidarity with the Palestinian people."[32] A few years later the same watchdog was voicing the
same grievance vis--vis the Lebanese government for preventing Palestinian refugees fleeing the
Syrian civil war from entering its territory.[33]

No Love Lost

In fairness to the Arab states, their animosity and distrust were more than reciprocated by the
Palestinians. As early as the 1948 war, the pan-Arab volunteer force that entered Palestine to fight
the Jews found itself at loggerheads with the community it was supposed to defend. Denunciations
and violent clashes were common with the local population often refusing to provide the Arab
Liberation Army, as this force was ambitiously named, with the basic necessities for daily upkeep
and military operations; for their part, Arab army personnel abused their Palestinian hosts of whom
they were openly contemptuous.

This mutual animosity was greatly exacerbated in subsequent decades by the recklessness of the
Palestinian leadership, headed from the mid-1960s to November 2004 by Arafat, which turned on
Arab host societies whenever given the opportunity. As noted above, it was the PLO's subversive
activities against the Jordanian regime that set in train the chain of events culminating in the Black
September massacres. Likewise, the PLO's abuse of its growing power base in Lebanon, where it
established itself after its expulsion from Jordan, and its meddling in that country's internal politics,
helped trigger the Lebanese civil war that raged for nearly two decades and cost hundreds of
thousands of lives.

Yasser Arafat (in glasses) at a press

conference discussing the situation
between the Palestinians and
Jordanian authorities, Amman, 1970.
Their mutual animosity was greatly
exacerbated by the recklessness of the
Palestinian leadership, which turned on
Arab host societies whenever given the
opportunity. The PLO's subversive
activities against the Jordanian regime
culminated in the Black September
massacres.

"I remember literally

screaming at him in my own
house," the Palestinian
academic Walid Khalidi, then
based in Beirut, said, recalling
his desperate attempt to dissuade Arafat from taking sides in the nascent civil war. "I was really very
angry because it just didn't make sense for him to say that. I told him that we as Palestinians had no
business calling for the ostracism of the Phalangists, and that it would drive them all the way into
the hands of the Israelis."[34] This point was not lost on ordinary Palestinians, who often blamed
Arafat for their Lebanese misfortunes. When in summer 1976 the PLO chairman visited survivors of
the Tel Zaatar massacre, he was treated to a barrage of rotten vegetables and chants of "traitor" by
the embittered refugees who accused him of provoking the camp's blood-drenched fall.[35]

This political meddling was accompanied by wanton violence wreaked by the PLO on its host society.
In a repeat of their Jordanian lawlessness, Palestinian guerrillas turned the vibrant and thriving
Lebanese state, whose capital of Beirut was acclaimed as the "Paris of the Middle East," into a
hotbed of violence and anarchy. Several districts of Beirut and the refugee camps came under
exclusive Palestinian control, so much so that they became generally known as the Fakhani
Republic, after the Beirut district in which Arafat had set up his headquarters. Substantial parts of
southern Lebanon or "Fatahland" also were under Palestinian control. In flagrant violation of
Lebanese sovereignty, the PLO set up roadblocks, took over buildings and drove out local residents,
operated extortion rackets, protected criminals fleeing from Lebanese justice, and committed
countless atrocities against Lebanese civilians, notably the January 1976 massacre of hundreds of
residents of the Christian town of Damour, south of Beirut, and the expulsion of the remaining
population.[36]

Conclusion

Self-serving interventionism under the pretence of pan-Arab solidarity has transformed the bilateral
Palestinian-Israeli dispute into a multilateral Arab-Israeli conflict, thereby stirring unrealistic hopes
and expectations in Palestinian political circles and, at key junctures, inciting widespread and
horrifically destructive violence. The consequence has been to increase the intensity of the conflict
and make its resolution far more complex and tortuous, leaving the Palestinians stateless for over
six-and-a-half decades.

The sooner the Palestinians reject this spurious link and recognize that their cause is theirs alone,
the sooner are they likely to make their own peace with the existence of the Jewish stateas
stipulated by the 1947 partition resolutionand win their own state at long last despite their Arab
"brothers."

Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean
studies at King's College London and professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University where he is
also a senior research associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies. This article is part of a
wider study prepared under the auspices of the BESA Center.

[1] Walid Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State," Foreign Affairs, July
1978, pp. 695-6; Hisham Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1966), p. 3.
[2] Walter Laqueur, ed., The Israel-Arab Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 37.
[3] Gen. Nuri Said, Arab Independence and Unity: A Note on the Arab Cause with Particular
Reference to Palestine, and Suggestions for a Permanent Settlement to which Are Attached Texts of
All the Relevant Documents (Baghdad: Government Press, 1943), p. 11.
[4] "Interview [by] Clare Hollingowith with Azzam Pasha, Mar. 23, 1948, S25/9020"; see, also,
"Fortnightly Intelligence Newsletter No. 57," issued by HQ British Troops in Palestine for the period
6 Dec.-18 Dec. 1947, WO 275/64, p. 2; Cunningham to Creech Jones, Feb. 24, 1948, "Cunningham
Papers," VI/1/80; Kirkbride to Bevin, Dec. 23, 1947, FO 371/61583; Musa Alami, "The Lesson of
Palestine," Middle East Journal, Oct. 1949, p. 385.
[5] John Laffin, The PLO Connections (London: Corgi Books, 1983), p. 127.
[6] Damascus Radio, Mar. 8, 1974.
[7] Palestinians leaders went out of their way to reassure their constituents that this was merely a
tactical ploy aimed at enhancing the PLO's international standing and, as a result, its ability to
achieve the ultimate goal of Israel's destruction: "We vowed to liberate Palestine before 1967," stated
Abu Iyad, Yasser Arafat's second in command. "We will restore Palestine step by step and not in one
fell swoop, just as the Jews had done." He reiterated this pledge a few days later: "The establishment
of a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine is but a step toward the [liberation of the] whole of
Palestine." Al-Anba (Kuwait), Dec. 5, 13, 1988.
[8] Davar (Tel Aviv), Nov. 12, 1987; Hadashot (Tel Aviv), Nov. 13, 15, 1987.
[9] International Herald Tribune (Paris), Nov. 27, Dec. 5, 1984.
[10] For further discussion of this issue, see Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A
Political Biography (New York: Grove, 2003; rev. and updated ed.); Lawrence Freedman and
Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World
Order(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
[11] The New York Times, Mar. 16, 1991; "A New Beginning," US News & World Report, Sept. 13,
1993.
[12] "194 (III). Palestine - Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator," U.N. General Assembly,
New York, Dec. 11, 1948, art. 11; "393 (v) - Assistance to Palestine Refugees," idem, Dec. 2, 1950, art.
4; "Special report of the Director and Advisory Commission of the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East," idem, Nov. 29, 1951, A/1905/Add. 1, p. 4. For Arab
rejection of res. 194, see "Arab Broadcasts: Daily Summary," Israeli Foreign Office, Middle Eastern
Dept., no. 36, Sept. 12-13, 1948; Hagana Archive (Tel Aviv), HA 105/88, p. 153; "Arabs Firm on
Refugees," The New York Times, Sept. 9, 1948; British Middle East Office (Cairo) to Foreign Office,
Sept. 11, 1948, FO 371/68341; Davar, Aug. 8, 1948;al-Masri (Cairo), Oct. 11, 1948, quoted in
"Refugee RepatriationA Danger to Israel's security," Israeli Foreign Ministry, Research Dept.,
Sept. 4, 1951, FM 2564/1.
[13] "Where We Work Lebanon," UNRWA, New York, accessed Dec. 8, 2013; "Exiled and
Suffering: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon," Amnesty International, London, Oct. 2007, pp. 2, 10;
Julie Peteet, "From Refugees to Minority: Palestinians in Post-War Lebanon," Middle East Report,
July-Sept. 1996, p. 29.
[14] Lena El-Malak, "Betrayed and Forgotten: Palestinians Refugees in Lebanon," Yearbook of
Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, vol. 9, 2002-03, pp. 136-7; Souheil al-Natour, "The Legal Status of
Palestinians in Lebanon," Journal of Refugee Studies, no. 3, 1997, pp. 360-77.
[15] "Palestinians in Lebanon working under precarious conditions," International Labor
Organization, Geneva, Nov. 20, 2012; World Report 2010: Lebanon, World Report 2011:
Lebanon, World Report 2013: Lebanon, Human Rights Watch, New York; "Exiled and Suffering,"
Amnesty International, London, pp. 18-22.
[16] See, for example, "Recommendations by the Committee of Arab Experts in Reply to the
Proposals by the U.N. Secretary-General Regarding the Continuation of U.N. Assistance to the
Palestine Refugee" (Sofar, Leb.), Aug. 17, 1959, in Muhammad Khalil, The Arab States and the Arab
League: A Documentary Record (Beirut: Khayat, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 654-5; Abbas Shiblak,
"Residency Status and Civil Rights of Palestinian Refugees in Arab Countries," Journal of Palestine
Studies, Spring 1996, pp. 36-45.
[17] P.K. Abdul Gharfour, "A Million Expatriates to Benefit from New Citizenship Law," Arab
News (Riyadh), Oct. 21, 2004.
[18] Moshe Efrat, "Haplitim Hapalestinaim 1949-74: Mehkar Kalkali Vehevrati" (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
University, Horowitz Center for the Study of Developing Countries, Sept. 1976), pp. 22-3; Don
Peretz, Palestinian Refugees and the Middle East Peace Process (Washington, D.C.: United States
Institute of Peace Press, 1993), pp. 49-50; Mudar Zahran, "Jordan Is Palestinian," Middle East
Quarterly, Winter 2012, pp. 3-12.
[19] "Where We Work: Jordan," UNRWA. Figures as of Jan. 1, 2012.
[20] "World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples Jordan: Palestinians, 2008,"
Minority Rights Group International, London, accessed Feb. 3, 2014.
[21] Laurie A. Brand, "Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity," Journal of Palestine
Studies, Summer 1995, pp. 46-61; "Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of Their
Nationality," Human Rights Watch, New York, Feb. 1, 2010; "Jordan: Stop Withdrawing Nationality
from Palestinian-Origin Citizens," Human Rights Watch, Feb. 1, 2010.
[22] U.S. Ambassador to Jordan David Hale, "Confidential Memo on the Debate in Jordan
Concerning the Palestinian Right of Return, Amman, Feb. 5, 2008," Journal of Palestine Studies,
Winter 2012, pp. 220, 222.
[23] Said Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 114.
[24] Al-Majallah (London), Nov. 26, 1983.
[25] "Exiled and suffering," Amnesty International, London, pp. 5-6.
[26] Ramzy Baroud, "Starving to Death in Syria," al-Ahram (Cairo), Jan. 9-15, 2014; The Jerusalem
Post, Dec. 19, 2013; Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Jan. 2, 2014; The Guardian (London), Dec. 12, 2012.
[27] "From Badil Refugee Survey 2008-2009: Secondary Forced Displacement in Host Countries
- An Overview," BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,
Bethlehem, Summer-Autumn 2010.
[28] Al-Musawwar (Cairo), Nov. 15, 1991.
[29] "Nowhere to Go: The Tragedy of the Remaining Palestinian Families in Kuwait," Human Rights
Watch, Middle East Watch, Oct. 23, 1991, reprinted in The Palestine Yearbook of International
Law, vol. 6, 1990-91, pp. 99-102; Steven J. Rosen, "Kuwait Expels Thousands of
Palestinians," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2012, pp. 75-83; Ann M. Lesch, "Palestinians in
Kuwait," Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 1991, pp. 47-53.
[30] The Baltimore Sun, Sept. 14, 1995; The New York Times, Oct. 5, 1995.
[31] Abbas Shiblak, "A Time of Hardship and Agony: Palestinian Refugees in Libya," Palestine-
Israel Journal, no. 4, 1995; "The Palestinian Crisis in Libya, 1994-1996 (Interview with Professor
Bassem Sirhan)," Forced Secondary Displacement: Palestinian Refugees in the Gaza Strip, Iraq,
Jordan, and Libya, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,
Bethlehem, Winter 2010.
[32] "Syria: Give Refuge to Palestinians Fleeing Threats in Iraq," Human Rights Watch, Feb. 2,
2007.
[33] "Nowhere to Flee: The Perilous Situation of Palestinians in Iraq," Human Rights Watch, New
York, Sept. 2006; "Syria: Give Refuge to Palestinians Fleeing Threats in Iraq," idem, Feb. 2, 2007;
"Lebanon: Palestinians Fleeing Syria Denied Entry," idem, Aug. 8, 2013.
[34] Andrew Gowers and Tony Walker, Arafat: The Biography (London: Virgin, 1994), pp. 186,
200.
[35] Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 86,
102.
[36] Aburish, Arafat, p. 151.

Running Away from Statehood, Again

by Efraim Karsh
BESA Center Perspectives
April 28, 2014
The Palestinian Authority' decision to strike an agreement with Hamas instead of with Israel is of little surprise. Since before 1948, the Palestinian
leadership has continually rejected any possibility of attaining statehood, in favor of a commitment to violence and promoting their self-inflicted
plight for their own financial benefits. With the possibility of another failed round of peace talks, one wonders whether the Palestinian leadership is
even interested in independent statehood of any kind.

The "historic" agreement of last week between The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and
Hamas, to form a united government casts a serious doubt not only on the Palestinian leadership's
commitment to a two-state solution, but also on its interest in the attaining of statehood at all.

Not that this should have come as a surprise to anyone. For nearly a century, Palestinian leaders
never have missed an opportunity to impede the development of Palestinian civil society and the
attainment of Palestinian statehood.

Had the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, who led the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to
the late 1940s, chosen to lead his constituents to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish
neighbors, the Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial part of
mandate Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersal and
exile.

Had Yasser Arafat, who dominated Palestinian politics from the mid-1960s to his death in
November 2004, set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation instead of
turning it into one of the most murderous and kleptocratic terrorist organizations in modern times,
a Palestinian state could have been established on numerous occasions: In the late 1960s or the early
1970s; in 1979, as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; in May 1999, as part of the Oslo
process; or more recently at the Camp David summit of July 2000.

Had Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded

Arafat as PLO chairman and PA
president, abandoned his
predecessors' rejectionist path, a
Palestinian state could have been
established after the Annapolis
summit of November 2007, or in June
2009, during President Obama's first
term when Benjamin Netanyahu broke
with the longstanding Likud precept
by publicly accepting the two-state
solution and agreeing to the
establishment of a Palestinian state.

But why should the Palestinians engage in the daunting tasks of nation-building and state creation if
they can have their hapless constituents run around in circles for nearly a century while they bask in
international sympathy and enrich themselves from the proceeds of their self-inflicted plight?

The Palestinian leadership in Mandate Palestine (1920-48) had no qualms about inciting its
constituents against Zionism and the Jews while lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish
development and land purchases. So too, the cynical and self-seeking PLO "revolutionaries" have
used the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states and the international community to lead a
luxurious lifestyle in sumptuous hotels and villas, globe-trotting in grand style, acquiring properties,
and making financial investments worldwide while millions of ordinary Palestinians scramble for
a livelihood, many of them in squalid and overcrowded refugee camps.

This process reached its peak following the September 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of
Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I) and the establishment of the
Palestinian Authority. For all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat had never been as
interested in the attainment of statehood as he was in the violence attached to its pursuit.

In the late 1970s, he told his close friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state,
and that a Palestinian state would be a failure from the first day.

Once given control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza as per the Oslo accords,
Arafat made this bleak prognosis a self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing a repressive and corrupt
regime in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships. The rule of the gun prevailed, and huge sums of
money donated by the international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian population
were diverted to funding racist incitement, buying weaponry, and filling secret bank accounts.

Not only has Abbas done nothing to clean up the Palestinian Authorities' (PA) act, but he seems to
have followed in his predecessor's kleptocratic footsteps, reportedly siphoning at least $100 million
to private accounts abroad and making his sons at the PA's expense. In the words of Fahmi
Shabaneh, former head of the Anti-Corruption Department in the PA's General Intelligence Service:

"In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end financial corruption and
implement major reforms, but he hasn't done much since then. Unfortunately, Abbas has
surrounded himself with many of the thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public
funds and who became icons of financial corruption. Some of the most senior Palestinian
officials didn't have even $3,000 in their pocket when they arrived [after the signing of the Oslo
accords]. Yet we discovered that some of them had tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in
their bank accounts. "

The attainment of statehood would have shattered the paradise established on the backs of the long
suffering public in the West Bank and Gaza. It would have transformed the Palestinians in one fell
swoop from the world's ultimate victim, into an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state, thus
terminating decades of unprecedented international indulgence. It would have also driven the final
nail into the PLO's false pretense of being "the sole representative of the Palestinian people" (already
dealt a devastating blow by Hamas's 2006 electoral rout) and would have forced any governing
authority to abide, for the first time in Palestinian history, by the principles of accountability and
transparency.

Small wonder, therefore, that whenever confronted with an international or Israeli offer of
statehood, Palestinian leaders will never take "yes" for an answer.

Professor Efraim Karsh is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies, and a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Kings
College London, and principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia). His books
include Arafat's War andPalestine Betrayed.

Palestinian Leaders Don't Want an Independent State

by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2014 (view PDF)

The Palestinian leadership's serial rejection of the numerous opportunities for statehood since the
Peel Commission report of 1937 casts a serious doubt on its interest in the creation of an
independent state. Instead of engaging in the daunting tasks of nation-building and state creation,
all Palestinian leaders without any exceptionfrom the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, who
led the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the late 1940s; to Yasser Arafat, who dominated
Palestinian politics from the mid-1960s to his death in November 2004; to Mahmoud Abbashave
preferred to immerse their hapless constituents in disastrous conflicts that culminated in their
collective undoing and continued statelessness. At the same time, of course, these leaders have lined
their pockets from the proceeds of this ongoing tragedy.

It can be shown that the main sources of this self-destructive conduct are pan-Arab delusions,
Islamist ideals, and the vast financial and political gains attending the perpetuation of Palestinian
misery.

Pan-Arab Delusions

Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini (left), in one

of his letters to Hitler (right), did not speak of
Palestinian aspirations, but rather, pan-Arab
goals: "[T]he Arab people confidently expects
that the result of your final victory will be their
independence and complete liberation, as well
as the creation of their unity, when they will be
linked to your country by a treaty of friendship
and cooperation."

In discussions of the history of the

Arab-Israeli conflict, it is rarely
acknowledged that, as products of the
Ottoman imperial system where religion constituted the linchpin of the sociopolitical order of
things,

Palestinian Arab leaders during the British mandate era (1920-48) had no real grasp of the
phenomenon of nationalism, hence, had no interest in the evolution of a distinct Palestinian nation.
Instead they were wedded to the pan-Arab dream of a unified "Arab nation" (of which "Palestine"
was but a tiny fragment) or the associated ideology of Greater Syria (Suriya al-Kubra), stressing the
territorial and historical indivisibility of most of the Fertile Crescent.

As early as October 1919, Musa Kazim Husseini, a former Ottoman official, elected Jerusalem mayor
under the British, told a Zionist acquaintance that "we demand no separation from Syria."[1] Six
months later, in April 1920, his peers instigated the first anti-Jewish pogrom in Jerusalemnot in
the name of Palestine's independence but under the demand for its incorporation into the (short-
lived) Syrian kingdom headed by Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca, the celebrated hero of the "Great Arab
Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire and the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement.
Four years later, in a special report to the League of Nations, the Arab Executive Committee (AEC),
the umbrella organization of the Palestinian Arabs, still referred to Palestine as the unlawfully
severed southern part of "the one country of Syria, with its one population of the same language,
origin, customs, and religious beliefs, and its natural boundaries."[2] And in June 1926, the league's
permanent mandates commission was informed of an Arab complaint that "it was not in conformity
with Article 22 of the Mandate to print the initials and even the words 'Eretz Israel' after the name
'Palestine' while refusing the Arabs the title 'Surial Janonbiah' ['Southern Syria']."[3]

In July 1937, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the AEC's successor, justified its rejection of the
Peel Commission's recommendation for the partition of Palestine on the grounds that "this country
does not belong only to [the] Palestine Arabs but to the whole Arab and Muslim Worlds."[4] As late
as August 1947, three months before the passing of the U.N. resolution partitioning Mandate
Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the AHC's mouthpiece al-Wahdaadvocated the incorporation
of Palestine (and Transjordan) into "Greater Syria."[5]

Hajj Amin Husseini himself never acted as a local patriot seeking national self-determination but
rather as an aspiring pan-Arab regional advocate. An early admirer of the "Greater Syrian" ideal, he
co-edited the Jerusalem-based newspaper Suria al-Janubiyya and presided over the city'sArab
Club, which advocated Palestine's annexation to Syria. He cast his sights much higher after fleeing
the country in 1937 to avoid arrest by the British for the instigation of nationwide violence:
Presenting himself to Hitler and Mussolini as a spokesman for the entire "Arab nation," Husseini
argued that the Palestine problem necessitated an immediate solution not because of the national
aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs but because it constituted "an obstacle to the unity and
independence of the Arab countries by pitting them directly against the Jews of the entire world,
dangerous enemies, whose secret arms are money, corruption, and intrigue." His proposed solution,
therefore, was not Palestinian statehood but "the independence of [unified] Palestine, Syria, and
Iraq" under his leadership. As he put it in one of his letters to Hitler, "[T]he Arab people, slandered,
maltreated, and deceived by our common enemies, confidently expects that the result of your final
victory will be their independence and complete liberation, as well as the creation of their unity,
when they will be linked
to your country by a treaty of friendship and cooperation."[6]

While the young generation of diaspora Palestinian activists who began organizing in the 1950s
witha view to avenging the 1948 "catastrophe"of the creation of Israel did not share the mufti's
grandiose ambitions, they were no less committed to the pan-Arab ideal as evidenced by the name of
the first "resistance" groupthe Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). The pan-Arab ideal was also
evident in the diverse composition of the movement comprising Palestinian (e.g., George Habash,
Wadi Haddad) and Arab activists (notably Hani Hindi, scion of a respected Damascene family).[7]
 Ahmad Shuqeiri, a Lebanon-born politician of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi, and Turkish
descent, became the founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But
in May 1956, he told the U.N. Security Council, "Palestine is part and parcel in the
Arab homeland," adding that Palestine "is nothing but southern Syria."

Another prominent adherent to the pan-Arab ideal was Ahmad

Shuqeiri, a Lebanon-born politician of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi,
and Turkish descent, who served as the Arab League's deputy
secretary-general and as the Syrian and Saudi delegate to the U.N.
before becoming, on May 28, 1964, the founding chairman of the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), established that day by
the Arab states at the initiative of Egyptian president Gamal
Abdel Nasser.

"Palestine is part and parcel in the Arab home-land," Shuqeiri

told the U.N. Security Council on May 31, 1956: "The Arab world
is not prepared to surrender one single atom of their right to this
sacred territory." Clarifying to which part of the "Arab homeland"
this specific territory belonged, he added that Palestine "is nothing but southern Syria." In his
account, "the Palestine area was linked to Syria from time immemorial" and "there was no question
of separation" until the great powers brought this about by creating mandates under the League of
Nations, with Britain controlling Palestine and France administering Syria.[8]

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the PLO's hallowed founding document, the
Palestinian Charter, adopted upon its formation and revised four years later to reflect the
organization's growing militancy, has little to say about the Palestinians themselves. Devoting about
two-thirds of its thirty-three articles to the need to destroy Israel, it defines the Palestinians as "an
integral part of the Arab nation" rather than a distinct nationality and vows allegiance to the ideal of
pan-Arab unitythat is to Palestine's eventual assimilation into "the greater Arab homeland"while
seeking to harness this ideal to its short-term ends:

The destiny of the Arab Nation and, indeed, Arab existence itself depend upon the destiny of the
Palestinian cause. From this inter-dependence springs the Arab nation's pursuit of, and striving for,
the liberation of Palestine. Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine are two complementary
objectives, the attainment of either of which facilitates the attainment of the other. Thus, Arab unity
leads to the liberation of Palestine, the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity; and work toward
the realization of one objective proceeds side by side with work toward the realization of the other.
[9]

Jewish rabbis purchasing land from an Arab landowner (left), 1920s. In

Mandate Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by
their alleged betters for the crime of "selling Palestine" to the Jews.
Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves with impunity.
Many prominent leaders made a handsome profit by selling land to Jews.

Even the November 1988 "declaration of independence"

by the Palestine National Council, the PLO's
"parliament," while obviously endorsing the idea of
Palestinian statehood (in language that massively
plagiarized Israel's proclamation of independence),
[10] vows allegiance to the pan-Arab ideal by describing
the "State of Palestine" as "an integral part of the Arab
nation, of its heritage and civilization and of its present
endeavor for the achievement of the goals of liberation,
development, democracy and unity."[11]
As late as 2002, eight years after the establishment of a PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA)
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to lay the groundwork for Palestinian statehood in these
territories, the prominent Israeli Arab politician Azmi Bishara, founding leader of the nationalist
Balad Party (with seats in the Israeli parliament since 1999), asserted that "my Palestinian identity
never precedes my Arab identity. I don't think there is a Palestinian nation, there is [only] an Arab
nation. Palestine until the end of the nineteenth century was the southern part of Greater Syria,"
and the idea of a distinct Palestinian nation is a "colonialist invention" that happens to coincide with
the consistent Israeli attempt, by both left- and rightwing parties, to ignore the reality of pan-Arab
nationalism.[12]

While such plain speaking is hardly commonplace in PLO/PA current rhetoric, these words help
explain the group's continued subscription to the pan-Arab ideal as evidenced by its deliberate
failure to revise the Palestinian Charter so as to acknowledge the distinctness of Palestinian
nationalism; the frequent articulation of pan-Arab themes by its tightly controlled media; its
constitutional definition of the prospective state of Palestine as "part of the Arab homeland"
committed to the "goal of Arab unity";[13] and the steady reiteration of the claim that the
Palestinians are not fighting for their own corner but are rather the Arab nation's "front line of
defense."[14] No less important, the PLO continues to subordinate its policies, and by extension
Palestinian self-interest, to pan-Arab approvaland vetoas illustrated most recently by Abbas's
successful rallying of the Arab League behind his "absolute and decisive rejection to recognizing
Israel as a Jewish state."[15]

Upholding this positionsixty-six years after the creation of a Jewish state by an internationally
recognized act of self-determinationeffectively amounts to the rejection of Palestinian statehood
for the simple reason that Israel would not self-destruct while the Palestinians and the Arab states
are in no position to bring this about.

Islamist Imperial Dreams

If subscription to the pan-Arab dream has made the Palestinian cause captive to inter-Arab
machinations, stirring unrealistic hopes and expectations in Palestinian political circles and, at key
junctures, inciting widespread and horrifically destructive violence that has made the likelihood of
Palestinian statehood ever more remote, adherence to Islamist ideals has subordinated Palestinian
identity to the far wider ambition of Islamic world domination.

Consider the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas. Since
making its debut in the 1987-92 intifada, Hamas has established itself as the foremost political and
military Palestinian force, winning a landslide victory in the 2006 general elections and evicting the
PLO from Gaza the following year. Far from being an ordinary liberation movement in search of
national self-determination, Hamas has subordinated its aim of bringing about the destruction of
Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state on its ruins to the wider goal of establishing Allah's
universal empire. In doing so, it has followed in the footsteps of its Egyptian parent organization, the
Muslim Brotherhood, which viewed its violent opposition to Zionism from the 1930s and 1940s as
an integral part of the Manichean struggle for the creation of a worldwide caliphate rather than as a
defense of the Palestinian Arabs' national rights. In the words of the senior Hamas leader Mahmud
Zahar, "Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian
state In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state. [Hence] our main goal is to
establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic."[16] He further explained: "Our
position stems from our religious convictions This is a holy land. It is not the property of the
Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world."[17]

Echoing standard Muslim Brotherhood precepts, Hamas's covenant adopted in 1988 presents the
organization as designed not merely to "liberate Palestine from Zionist occupation" but to pursue the
far loftier goals of spreading Islam's holy message and defending the weak and oppressed
throughout the world: "As the Islamic Resistance Movement paves its way, it will back the oppressed
and support the wronged [throughout the world] in all its might. It will spare no effort to bring
about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this place and everywhere it can reach and
have influence therein."[18] As the movement's slogan puts it: "Allah is [Hamas's] target, the
Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is
the loftiest of its wishes."[19]

Palestinian Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar walks on an Israeli

flag during a rally to mark the anniversary of the group's
founding, Gaza City, December 9, 2010. Despite its anti-Israel
rhetoric, Hamas has subordinated its aim of destroying the
Jewish state and creating a Palestinian state to the wider goal
of establishing a universal Islamic empire. Zahar explained:
"Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing
an independent Palestinian state [Hence] our main goal is to
establish a great Islamic state."

In other words, the "question of Palestine" is

neither an ordinary territorial dispute between
two national movements nor a struggle by an
indigenous population against a foreign occupier.
It is an integral part of Islam's millenarian jihad
to expand its domain and prevent the fall of any
of its parts to the infidels: "[T]he land of Palestine
is an Islamic Waqf [Islamic religious endowment] consecrated for future Moslem generations until
Judgment Day. The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual
duty of every Moslem."[20]

In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other parts of the world conquered by
the forces of Islam throughout history. To this very day, for example, Arabs and many Muslims
unabashedly pine for the restoration of Muslim Spain and look upon their expulsion from that
country in 1492 as a grave historical injustice. Indeed, even countries that have never been under
Islamic imperial rule have become legitimate targets of Islamist fervor. Since the late 1980s, various
Islamist movements have looked upon the growing number of French Muslims as a sign that France,
too, has become a potential part of the House of Islam. Their British counterparts have followed suit.
"We will remodel this country in an Islamic image," the London-based preacher Sheikh Omar Bakri
Muhammad told an attentive audience less than two months after 9/11. "We will replace the Bible
with the Qur'an."[21]

Khaled Mash'al, head of Hamas's political bureau and the organization's effective leader, echoed this
sentiment as a tidal wave of Muslim violence swept across the world in response to satirical
depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in February 2006:

By Allah, you will be defeated ... Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you
will regret it. This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious ... Tomorrow, our nation will
sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact. Tomorrow we will
lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good.[22]

Nor is this supremacist worldview limited to Hamas. Since its rise in the early seventh century,
Islam has constituted the linchpin of Middle Eastern politics, and its hold on Palestinian society is
far stronger than is commonly recognized. Contrary to the received wisdom in the West, the PLO is
hardly a secular organization. Arafat was a devout Muslim, associated in his early days with the
Muslim Brotherhood, as were other founding fathers of Fatah, the PLO's foremost constituent
organization. And while the new generation of Fatah leaders in the territories may be less religious,
they, nevertheless, have a draft constitution for a prospective Palestinian state stipulating that
"Islam is the official religion in Palestine" and Shari'a is "a main source for legislation."[23]

They have, moreover, utilized the immense inflammatory potential of Islam to discredit the two-
state solutionand by implication, the prospect of Palestinian statehoodand to express their
grandiose supremacist delusions. In the words of the official PA television, "Where did Great Britain
disappear? By Allah's will, He will get rid of the US like he got rid of them. We [Muslims] have ruled
the world; a day will come by Allah, and we shall rule the world [again]. The day will come, and we
shall rule America; the day will come, and we shall rule Britain. We shall rule the entire world."[24]

Within these grand overlapping schemes of pan-Arab regional unity and Islamic world domination,
the notion of Palestinian statehood is but a single transient element whose supposed centrality
looms far greater in Western than in Islamic and Arab eyes.

Profits of Misery

But whatever their ideological and political convictions, Palestinian leaders have never had a real
stake in statehood both because the hopes and wishes of their constituents did not figure in their
calculations and because they have vastly profited from having their hapless constituents run around
in circles for nearly a century while milking world sympathy for the plight they have brought about
in the first place.

In Mandate Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged betters for the
crime of "selling Palestine" to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves
with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight "until Palestine is
either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the
country,"[25] facilitated the transfer of 7,500 acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his
relatives, all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of
land. Many prominent leaders including Muin Madi, Alfred Rock, and As'ad Shuqeiri (father of
Ahmad, PLO founder) also sold land. Musa Alami, who bragged to David Ben-Gurion that "he would
prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred years" if the alternative was
its rapid development in collaboration with the Zionists,[26] made a handsome profit by selling 225
acres to the Jews. So, too, did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian
Arab clan during the mandate period, including Musa Kazim (father of Abdel Qader Husseini, the
famous guerrilla leader) and Muhammad Tahir, Hajj Amin's father.[27]

Hajj Amin himself had few qualms about profiting from the Jewish national revival, which he sought
to eradicate whenever this suited his needs. Prior to his appointment as the Jerusalem mufti, he
pleaded with Jewish leaders to lobby on his behalf with (the Jewish) Herbert Samuel, the first
British high commissioner for Palestine, and in 1927, he asked Gad Frumkin, the only Jewish
Supreme Court justice during the mandatory era, to influence Jerusalem's Jewish community to
back the Husseini candidate in the mayoral elections. He likewise employed a Jewish architect to
build a luxury hotel for the Supreme Muslim Council, which he headed, while ordering his
constituents to boycott Jewish labor and products.[28] Needless to say, the mufti never sought to
apply to his own father his religious authorization (fatwa) on the killing of those who sold land to
Jews.

"Arab nationalist feelings were never allowed to harm the interests of the Husseini family," wrote the
prominent Jerusalem lawyer and Zionist activist Bernard (Dov) Joseph, a future minister of justice
in the Israeli government:

One of [the mufti's] kinsmen, Jamil Husseini, had once engaged my services in land litigation which
went as high as the Privy Council in London For years, one of the Mufti's close relations prospered
mightily by forcing Arab small-holders to sell land, at niggardly prices, which he then resold to Jews
at a handsome profit.[29]

This institutionalized racketeering skyrocketed to new heights under the PLO. Just as the
Palestinian leadership during the mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents against
Zionism and Jews while lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish development and land
purchases, so the cynical and self-seeking PLO "revolutionaries" used the billions of dollars donated
by the Arab oil states and the international community to lead a luxurious lifestyle in sumptuous
hotels and villas, globe-trotting in grand style, acquiring properties, and making financial
investments worldwidewhile millions of ordinary Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.
This process reached its peak following the September 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of
Principles on Interim Self-government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I) and the establishment of the
Palestinian Authority. For all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat had never been as
interested in the attainment of statehood as in the violence attending its pursuit. In the late 1970s,
he told his close friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the
Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state, and that a
Palestinian state would be a failure from the first day.[30] Once given control of the Palestinian
population in the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, he made this bleak prognosis a
self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of Arab
dictatorships where the rule of the gun prevailed over the rule of law and where large sums of money
donated by the international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian population were
diverted to funding racist incitement, buying weaponry, and filling secret bank accounts. Extensive
protection and racketeering networks run by PA officials proliferated while the national budget was
plundered at will by PLO veterans and Arafat cronies (in May 1997, for example, the first-ever report
by the PA's comptroller stated that $325 million, out of the 1996 budget of $800 million had been
"wasted" by Palestinian ministers and agencies or embezzled by officials).[31]

Arafat himself held a secret Tel Aviv bank account accessible only to him and his personal advisor
Muhammad Rashid, in which he insisted that Israel deposit the tax receipts collected on imports to
the Palestinian territories (rather than transfer them directly to the PA). In 1994-2000, nearly
eleven billion shekels (about US$2.5 billion) were reportedly paid into this account, of which only a
small, unspecified part reached its designated audience.[32] Small wonder that, in 2004, the French
authorities opened a money-laundering inquiry into suspect regular transfers into the Paris bank
accounts held by Arafat's wife Suha, who resided there with their daughter. After Arafat's death,
Suha was reportedly promised an annual pension of $22 million to cover her sumptuous lifestyle,
paid from an alleged $4 billion "secret fortune" managed personally by the PA president and kept in
a number of bank accounts in Tel Aviv, London, and Zurich.[33]

Though this breathtaking corruption played an important role in Hamas's landslide electoral victory
of January 2006, the PLO/PA leadership seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten
nothing. Not only did Abbas, who succeeded Arafat as PLO chairman and PA president, blatantly
ignore the results of the only (semi) democratic elections in Palestinian historyestablishing an
alternative government to the legally appointed Hamas government and refusing to hold new
elections upon the expiry of his presidency in January 2009but he seems to have followed in his
predecessor's kleptocratic footsteps, reportedly siphoning at least $100 million to private accounts
abroad and enriching his sons at the PA's expense.[34] In the words of Fahmi Shabaneh, former
head of the Anti-Corruption Department in the PA's General Intelligence Service:

In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end financial corruption and implement
major reforms, but he hasn't done much since then. Unfortunately, Abbas has surrounded himself
with many of the thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public funds and who became
icons of financial corruption. Some of the most senior Palestinian officials didn't have even
$3,000 in their pocket when they arrived [after the signing of the Oslo accords]. Yet we discovered
that some of them had tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in their bank accounts. Had it
not been for the presence of the Israeli authorities in the West Bank, Hamas would have done
[there] what they did in the Gaza Strip. It's hard to find people in the West Bank who support the
Palestinian Authority. People are fed up with the financial corruption and mismanagement of the
Palestinian Authority.[35]

Conclusion

For nearly a century, Palestinian leaders have missed no opportunity to impede the development of
Palestinian civil society and the attainment of Palestinian statehood. Had Hajj Amin Husseini
chosen to lead his constituents to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, the
Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial part of mandate Palestine by
1948, if not a decade earlier, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersal and
exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation instead of
turning it into one of the most murderous and corrupt terrorist organizations in modern times, a
Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or the early 1970s; in 1979, as a
corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999, as part of the Oslo process; or at the very
latest, with the Camp David summit of July 2000. Had Abbas abandoned his predecessors'
rejectionist path, a Palestinian state could have been established after the Annapolis summit of
November 2007, or during President Obama's first term after Benjamin Netanyahu broke with the
longstanding Likud precept by publicly accepting in June 2009 the two-state solution and agreeing
to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

But then, the attainment of statehood would have shattered Palestinian leaders' pan-Arab and
Islamist delusions, not to mention the kleptocratic paradise established on the backs of their long
suffering subjects. It would have transformed the Palestinians in one fell swoop from the world's
ultimate victim into an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state thus terminating decades of
unprecedented international indulgence. It would have also driven the final nail in the PLO's false
pretense to be "the sole representative of the Palestinian people" (already dealt a devastating blow by
Hamas's 2006 electoral rout) and would have forced any governing authority to abide, for the first
time in Palestinian history, by the principles of accountability and transparency. Small wonder,
therefore, that whenever confronted with an international or Israeli offer of statehood, Palestinian
leaders would never take "yes" for an answer.

Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean
studies at King's College London and professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University where he is
also a senior research associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies. This article is part of a
wider study prepared under the auspices of the BESA Center.

[1] Daniel Pipes, "Palestine for the Syrians?" Commentary, Dec. 1986.

[2] Jamal Husseini, "Report of the State of Palestine during the Four Years of Civil Administration,
Submitted to the Mandate's Commission of the League of Nations through H.E. the High
Commissioner for Palestine, by the Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab CongressExtract,"
Oct. 6, 1924, Central Zionist Archive (CZA, Jerusalem), S25/10690, p. 1.

[3] "Minutes of the Ninth Session, Held at Geneva from June 8th to 25th, 1926, including the Report
of the Commission to the Council," 22nd meeting, Permanent Mandates Commission, League of
Nations, June 22, 1926.

[4] "The Arabs Reject Partition," quoted from Palestine & Transjordan, July 17, 1937, p. 1, CZA;
"Minutes of the JAE Meeting on Apr. 19, 1937," Ben-Gurion Archive (Sde Boker).

[5] The New York Times, Aug. 25, 1947.

[6] The Ambassador in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry (Enclosure), July 6, 1940, Documents on
German Foreign Policy 1918-1945 (London: HMSO, 1949), ser. D, vol. 10, pp. 143-4; The Grand
Mufti to Adolf Hitler, Jan. 20, 1941, ibid., ser. D, vol. 11, pp. 1151-5; Record of the Conversation
between the Fhrer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on Nov. 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich
Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Nov. 30, 1941, ibid., pp. 881-5.

[7] Ghada Hashem Talhami, Syria and the Palestinians: The Clash of Nationalisms(Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 49-50.

[8] "Excerpts from Statements in the U.N. on Mideast," The New York Times, June 1, 1956; "Syria
Says in U.N. Palestine Is Hers," ibid.
[9] The Palestinian National Charter, Resolutions of the Palestine National Council, July 1-17, 1968,
art. 13-14; see, also, art. 11, 12, 15.

[10] Daniel Pipes, "Declaring Independence: Israel and the PLO," Orbis, Mar. 1989, pp. 247-60.

[11] "Declaration of Independence (1988)," website of the "State of Palestine."

[12] Ari Shavit, "Ha'ezrah Azmi," Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Nov. 25, 2002; Bishara on Israeli Channel 2
TV, n.d., YouTube.

[13] 2003 Permanent Constitution Draft, Palestinian Basic Law, chap. 1, art. 2, May 4, 2003.

[14] See, for example, statements by Fatah's official spokesman Ahmad Assaf on official PA TV and
Egyptian TV, Mar. 19, 2014, "Fatah Spokesman: Israel's goal is to rule 'from the Euphrates to the
Nile,'" Palestinian Media Watch (Jerusalem), Mar. 23, 2014.

[15] Haaretz, Mar. 26, 2014.

[16] "Exclusive Interview with Hamas Leader," The Media Line, Sept. 22, 2005; Walid Mahmoud
Abdelnasser, The Islamic Movement in Egypt: Perceptions of International Relations, 1967-
81 (London: Kegan Paul, 1994), p. 39.

[17] Zahar's interview with Asharq al-Awsat (London), Aug. 18, 2005, in Special Dispatch, no. 964,
Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI, Washington, D.C.), Aug. 19, 2005.

[18] "Hamas Covenant," Yale Law School, Avalon Project, art. 10.

[19] Ibid., art. 8.

[20] Ibid., art. 11, 15.

[21] Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
p. 306; Michel Gurfinkiel, "Islam in France: The-French Way of Life Is in Danger,"Middle East
Quarterly, Mar. 1997; The Observer (London), Nov. 4, 2001; Anthony Browne, "The Triumph of the
East," The Spectator (London), July 24, 2004.

[22] Mash'al's address, al-Murabit Mosque, Damascus, aired on Aljazeera TV (Doha), Feb. 3, 2006,
in "Special Dispatch No. 1087," MEMRI, Feb. 7, 2006.

[23] 2003 Permanent Constitution Draft, chap. 1, art. 5, 7.

[24] Palestinian Authority TV, May 13, 2005, Palestinian Media Watch.

[25] "Conversation with Awni Abdel Hadi," June 3, 1920, Hagana Archive (Tel Aviv), 80/145/11.

[26] David Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), pp. 15-6.

[27] Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 182, 228-39.

[28] Gad Frumkin, Derekh Shofet Beyerushalaim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1956), pp. 216, 280-90; Eliahu
Elath, Shivat Zion Vearav (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1974), p. 245; Yehuda Taggar, The Mufti of Jerusalem
and Palestine: Arab Politics, 1930-1937 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), p. 83.

[29] Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1960), p. 194.
[30] Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons. Inside the Romanian Secret ServiceThe Memoirs of Ceausescu's
Spy Chief (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 28.

[31] Agence France-Presse, May 24, July 30, 1997; Khaled Abu Toameh, "Money down the
Drain?" Jerusalem Report, Jan. 8, 1998, p. 26; Ronen Bergman, Veharashut Netuna (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Ahronot, 2002), p. 156.

[32] Ehud Ya'ari, "The Independent State of Arafat," Jerusalem Report, Sept. 5, 1996, pp. 22-3;
Bergman, Veharashut Netuna, pp. 113-41; Rachel Ehrenfeld, "Where Does the Money Go? A Study
of the Palestinian Authority," American Center for Democracy, New York, Oct.1, 2002, pp. 7-10; Said
Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 306.

[33] Ynet (Tel Aviv), Aug. 16, 2006; Sydney (Aus.) Morning Herald, Feb. 13, 2004.

[34] Jonathan Schanzer, "Chronic Kleptocracy: Corruption within the Palestinian Political
Establishment," Hearing before U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the
Middle East and South Asia, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2012, pp. 17-8; Bergman, Veharashut
Netuna, pp. 162-3; Ehrenfeld, "Where Does the Money Go?" pp. 9-10; Yediot Ahronot (Tel Aviv),
July 14, 2002.

[35] The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 29, 2010.

The Myth of Palestinian Centrality

by Efraim Karsh
BESA Center
July 7, 2014

Executive Summary

The "Palestinian cause" has been at the

forefront of discourse on the Middle
East for nearly a century. It has long
formed the primary common concern
of pan-Arab solidarity and its most
effective rallying cry, yet neither the
Arab states nor Palestinian leaders
have truly acted in the interest of the
"liberation of Palestine."

While the "Nakba" may seemingly be

of chief concern to the Arab states,
Palestinian refugees have endured
marginalization and abuse from their fellow Arab nations since 1948 in countries such as Egypt,
Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait. In the meantime, countless opportunities to establish a
Palestinian state and develop Palestinian civil society have been rejected by Palestinian leaders.
Rather than seek to rectify the "Palestinian problem," their leaders have immersed their hapless
constituents in disastrous and wholly unnecessary conflicts, while lining their pockets from the
proceeds of this ongoing tragedy.

As such, any notion claiming a link between finding a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and attaining regional peace and stability is both false and misleading. The Palestinian leadership
has continually shown no sign of actually wanting neither peace with Israel nor an independent
state. Accepting reconciliation would transform the Palestinians in one fell swoop from the world's
ultimate victim into an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state, thus terminating decades of
unprecedented international indulgence. It would force Palestinian leaders into responsibility,
accountability and the daunting task of state building. It is therefore of little surprise that whenever
confronted with the International or Israeli offer of peace or statehood, Palestinian leaders will
never approve.

Introduction

No clich has dominated the discourse on Middle Eastern affairs more than the supposed "linkage"
between the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the attainment of regional peace and
stability. According to this argument, since Arabs and Muslims are so passionate about Palestinian
statehood, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate feeds regional anger and despair, gives a larger rationale
to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and to the insurgency in Iraq, and obstructs the formation of a
regional coalition that will help block Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. As President Obama asserted
after his first meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in May 2009: "[Making] peace with the
Palestinians. actually strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the
potential Iranian threat."[1]

This study demonstrates that this argument is not only completely unfounded, but the inverse of the
truth. For even though the "Palestine question" has long formed the main common denominator of
pan-Arab solidarity and its most effective rallying cry, neither the Arab states nor Palestinian leaders
have truly wanted the "liberation of Palestine."

The former have manipulated the "Palestine" cause to their own ends while blocking the
Palestinians' road to statehood, perpetuating the refugee problem, and abusing their guest
Palestinian populations. The latter have immersed their hapless constituents in disastrous and
wholly unnecessary conflicts, while lining their pockets from the proceeds of this ongoing tragedy.
As this study will show, for nearly a century Palestinian leaders have missed no opportunity to
impede the development of Palestinian civil society and the attainment of Palestinian statehood.

Nor have ordinary Arabs evinced any interest in the Palestinian cause. Quite the reverse in fact; from
their arrival in the Arab states during the 1948 war the Palestinians were deeply resented and
despised by the host societies and this sentiment has changed little over the years. Not once has the
proverbial "Arab street" driven the Arab regimes to war with Israel; it was rather the Arab masses,
indoctrinated for decades with vile anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred, who have been repeatedly
goaded into violence by their unelected rulers so as to divert attention from their own
marginalization and repression.

Denying Palestinian Statehood: The Pan Arab Ideal

It is the doctrine of pan-Arabism, postulating the existence of "a single nation bound by the common
ties of language, religion and history.... behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign
states"[2] that has transformed the "Palestine question" from a minor local dispute between Arabs
and Jews into an international problem of the first order. This, however, has had nothing to do with
the protection of Palestinian national rights for the simple reason that pan-Arabism
does not consider the Palestinians a distinct people deserving statehood, but rather an integral part
of a wider Arab framework stretching over substantial parts of the Middle East (e.g., "Greater Syria")
or the entire region. In the words of the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti:

There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not. [It is but] a very small tiny spot
there on the southern part of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by a vast
territory of Arab Muslim lands, beginning with Morocco, continuing through Tunis, Tripoli and
Egypt, and going down to Arabia proper, then going up to Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq
- one solid Arab-speaking bloc - 50,000,000 people.[3]
It was indeed common knowledge at the time that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent
state of Israel was more of a classic imperialist scramble for Palestinian territory, than a fight for
Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam,
admitted to a British reporter, Transjordan "was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine
with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. [The] Galilee would
go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon."[4] Had Israel lost
the war, its territory would have been divided among the invading Arab forces. The name Palestine
would have vanished into the dustbin of history. By surviving the pan-Arab assault, Israel has
paradoxically saved the Palestinian national movement from complete oblivion.

Ironically, this denial was shared by Palestinian Arab leaders during the British mandate era (1920-
48) who, as products of the Ottoman imperial system where religion constituted the linchpin of the
sociopolitical order of things, had no real grasp of the phenomenon of nationalism, hence had no
interest in the evolution of a distinct Palestinian nation. Instead they subscribed to the pan-Arab
dream of a unified "Arab nation" (of which "Palestine" was but a tiny fragment) or the associated
ideology of Greater Syria (Suriya al-Kubra), stressing the territorial and historical indivisibility of
most of the Fertile Crescent.

As early as October 1919, Musa Kazim Husseini, a former Ottoman official, elected Jerusalem mayor
under the British, told a Zionist acquaintance that "we demand no separation from Syria."[5] Six
months later, in April 1920, his peers instigated the first anti-Jewish pogrom in Jerusalem. This was
not in the name of Palestine's independence, but under the demand for its incorporation into the
(short-lived) Syrian kingdom, headed by Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca, the celebrated hero of the
"Great Arab Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire and the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab
movement. Four years later, in a special report to the League of Nations, the Arab Executive
Committee (AEC), the umbrella organization of the Palestinian Arabs, still referred to Palestine as
the unlawfully severed southern part of "the one country of Syria, with its one population of the
same language, origin, customs, and religious beliefs, and its natural boundaries."[6] And in June
1926, the league's permanent mandates commission was informed of an Arab complaint that "it was
not in conformity with Article 22 of the Mandate to print the initials and even the words 'Eretz
Israel' after the name 'Palestine', while refusing the Arabs the title 'Suria al-Janubiyya' ('Southern
Syria')."[7]

In July 1937, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the AEC's successor, justified its rejection of the
Peel Commission's recommendation for the partition of Palestine on the grounds that "this country
does not belong only to [the] Palestine Arabs but to the whole Arab and Muslim Worlds."[8] As late
as August 1947, three months before the passing of the U.N. resolution partitioning Mandate
Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the AHC's mouthpiece, al-Wahda,advocated the
incorporation of Palestine (and Transjordan) into "Greater Syria."[9]

Jerusalem Mufti, Hajj Amin Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs during this period, never acted
as a local patriot seeking national self-determination, but rather as an aspiring pan-Arab regional
advocate. An early admirer of the "Greater Syrian" ideal, he co-edited the Jerusalem-based
paper Suria al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria), as Palestine was named by pan-Arabists, and presided
over the city's Arab Club, which advocated Palestine's annexation to Syria. He cast his sights much
higher after fleeing the country in 1937 to
avoid arrest for the instigation of nationwide
violence.

Hajj Amin Husseini and Adolf Hitler

Presenting himself to Hitler and Mussolini as

a spokesman of the entire "Arab Nation,"
Husseini argued that the "Palestine problem"
necessitated an immediate solution not
because of the national aspirations of the
Palestinian Arabs, but because it constituted "an obstacle to the unity and independence of the Arab
countries by pitting them directly against the Jews of the entire world, dangerous enemies, whose
secret arms are money, corruption, and intrigue." His proposed solution, therefore, was not
Palestinian statehood but "the independence of [unified] Palestine, Syria and Iraq" under his
leadership. As he put it in one of his letters to Hitler, "[T]he Arab people, slandered, maltreated, and
deceived by our common enemies, confidently expects that the result of your final victory will be
their independence and complete liberation, as well as the creation of their unity, when they will be
linked to your country by a treaty of friendship and cooperation."[10]

While the young generation of diaspora Palestinian activists in the 1950s who sought to avenge the
1948 "catastrophe" of the creation of Israel did not share the Mufti's grandiose ambitions, they were
no less committed to the pan-Arab ideal. This was evidenced inter alia by the name of the first
"resistance" group - the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). The pan-Arab ideal was also evident in
the diverse composition of the movement comprising Palestinian (e.g., George Habash, Wadi
Haddad) and Arab activists (notably Hani Hindi, scion of a respected Damascene family).[11]

Another prominent adherent to the pan-Arab ideal was Ahmad Shuqeiri, a Lebanon-born politician
of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi, and Turkish descent who served as the Arab League's deputy secretary-
general, as well as Syrian and Saudi delegate to the UN. On May 28, 1964 he became the founding
chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), established that day by the Arab states at
the initiative of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

"Palestine is part and parcel in the Arab homeland," Shuqeiri told the Security Council on May 31,
1956";The Arab world is not prepared to surrender one single atom of their right to this sacred
territory." Clarifying to which part of the "Arab homeland" this specific territory belonged, he added
that Palestine "is nothing but southern Syria." In his account, "the Palestine area was linked to Syria
from time immemorial" and "there was no question of separation" until the great powers brought
this about by creating mandates under the League of Nations, with Britain controlling Palestine and
France administering Syria.[12]

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the PLO's hallowed founding document, the
Palestinian Charter, adopted upon its formation and revised four years later to reflect the
organization's growing militancy, has little to say about the Palestinians themselves. Devoting about
two-thirds of its thirty-three articles to the need to destroy Israel, it defines the Palestinians as "an
integral part of the Arab nation", rather than a distinct nationality and vows allegiance to the ideal of
pan-Arab unity - that is to Palestine's eventual assimilation into "the greater Arab homeland" - while
seeking to harness this ideal to its short-term ends:

The destiny of the Arab Nation and, indeed, Arab existence itself depend upon the destiny of the
Palestinian cause. From this interdependence springs the Arab nation's pursuit of, and striving
for, the liberation of Palestine. Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine are two
complementary objectives, the attainment of either of which facilitates the attainment of the other.
Thus, Arab unity leads to the liberation of Palestine, the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity;
and work toward the realization of one objective proceeds side by side with work toward the
realization of the other.[13]

Even the November 1988 "declaration of independence" by the Palestine National Council, the
PLO's "parliament," while obviously endorsing the idea of Palestinian statehood (in language that
massively plagiarized Israel's proclamation of independence),[14] vows allegiance to the pan-Arab
ideal by describing the "State of Palestine" as "an integral part of the Arab nation, of its heritage and
civilization and of its present endeavor for the achievement of the goals of liberation, development,
democracy and unity."[15]

Azmi Bishara, founding leader of the nationalist Balad Party (with seats in the Israeli parliament
since 1999), highlighted this in a statement he made in 2002: "My Palestinian identity never
precedes my Arab identity. I don't think there is a Palestinian nation, there is [only] an Arab
nation. Palestine until the end of the nineteenth century was the southern part of Greater Syria"
and the idea of a distinct Palestinian nation is a "colonialist invention" that happens to coincide with
the consistent Israeli attempt, by both left- and rightwing parties, to ignore the reality of pan-Arab
nationalism.[16] He made this statement eight years after the PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority
(PA) was established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to lay the groundwork for Palestinian
statehood in these territories.

While such plain speaking is hardly commonplace in PLO/PA current rhetoric, these words help
explain the group's continued subscription to the pan-Arab ideal. This is also evidenced by the
PLO/PA's deliberate failure to revise the Palestinian Charter so as to acknowledge the distinctness of
Palestinian nationalism; the frequent articulation of pan-Arab themes by its tightly controlled
media; its constitutional definition of the prospective state of Palestine as "part of the Arab
homeland" committed to the "goal of Arab unity";[17] and the steady reiteration of the claim that the
Palestinians are not fighting for their own corner but are rather the Arab nation's "front line of
defense."[18] No less important, the PLO continues to subordinate its policies, and by extension
Palestinian self-interest, to pan-Arab approval, and vice versa, as illustrated most recently by
Mahmud Abbas's successful rallying of the Arab League behind his "absolute and decisive rejection
to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state."[19] Upholding this position - sixty six years after the
creation of a Jewish state by an internationally recognized act of self-determination - effectively
amounts to rejection of Palestinian statehood for the simple reason that Israel would not self-
destruct while the Palestinians and the Arab state are in no position to bring this about.

Denying Palestinian Statehood: Islamist Imperial Dreams

If subscription to the pan-Arab dream has made the Palestinian cause captive to inter-Arab
machinations, stirring unrealistic hopes and expectations in Palestinian political circles, and inciting
widespread and horrifically destructive violence that has made the likelihood of Palestinian
statehood ever more remote, adherence to Islamist ideals has subordinated Palestinian identity to
the far wider ambition of Islamic world domination.

Consider the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas. Since
making its debut in the 1987-92 intifada, Hamas has established itself as the foremost political and
military Palestinian force, winning a landslide victory in the 2006 general elections and violently
evicting the PLO from Gaza the following year. Far from being an ordinary liberation movement in
search of national self-determination, Hamas has subordinated its aim of bringing about the
destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state on its ruins to the wider goal of
establishing Allah's universal empire. In doing so, it has followed in the footsteps of its Egyptian
parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which viewed its violent opposition to Zionism from
the 1930s and 1940s as an integral part of the Manichean struggle for the creation of a worldwide
caliphate, rather than as a defense of the Palestinian Arabs' national rights. In the words of the
senior Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar, "Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing
an independent Palestinian state In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state.
[Hence] our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic."[20] He
further explained: "Our position stems from our religious convictions This is a holy land. It is not
the property of the Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of
the world."[21]

Echoing standard Muslim Brotherhood precepts, Hamas's covenant adopted in 1988 presents the
organization as designed not merely to "liberate Palestine from Zionist occupation" but to pursue the
far loftier goals of spreading Islam's holy message and defending the weak and oppressed
throughout the world: "As the Islamic Resistance Movement paves its way, it will back the oppressed
and support the wronged [throughout the world] in all its might. It will spare no effort to bring
about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this place and everywhere it can reach and
have influence therein."[22] As the movement's slogan puts it: "Allah is [Hamas's] target, the
Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is
the loftiest of its wishes."[23]
In other words, the "question of Palestine" is neither an ordinary territorial dispute between two
national movements, nor a struggle by an indigenous population against a foreign occupier. It is an
integral part of Islam's millenarian jihad to expand its domain and prevent the fall of any of its parts
to the infidels: "[T]he land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Islamic religious endowment]
consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day... The day that enemies usurp part
of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem."[24]

Khaled Mash'al

In this respect, there is no difference between

Palestine and other parts of the world
conquered by the forces of Islam throughout
history. To this very day, for example, Arabs
and many Muslims unabashedly pine for the
restoration of Muslim Spain and look upon
their expulsion from that country in 1492 as a
grave historical injustice. Indeed, even
countries that have never been under Islamic
imperial rule have become legitimate targets
of Islamist fervor. Since the late 1980s,
various Islamist movements have looked
upon the growing number of French Muslims as a sign that France, too, has become a potential part
of the House of Islam. Their British counterparts have followed suit. "We will remodel this country
in an Islamic image," the London-based preacher Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, told an attentive
audience less than two months after 9/11. "We will replace the Bible with the Qur'an."[25]

Khaled Mash'al, head of Hamas's political bureau and the organization's effective leader, echoed this
sentiment as a tidal wave of Muslim violence swept across the world in response to satirical
depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. In February 2006 he declared:

By Allah, you will be defeated... Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you
will regret it. This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious... Tomorrow, our nation
will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact. Tomorrow
we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good.[26]

Nor is this supremacist worldview limited to Hamas. Since its rise in the early seventh century,
Islam has constituted the linchpin of Middle Eastern politics, and its hold on Palestinian society is
far stronger than is commonly recognized. Contrary to the received wisdom in the West, the PLO is
hardly a secular organization. Arafat was a devout Muslim, associated in his early days with the
Muslim Brotherhood, as were other founding fathers of Fatah, the PLO's foremost constituent
organization. And while the new generation of Fatah leaders in the territories may be less religious,
they, nevertheless, have a draft constitution for a prospective Palestinian state stipulating that
"Islam is the official religion in Palestine" and Shari'a is "a main source for legislation."[27]

They have, moreover, utilized the immense inflammatory potential of Islam to discredit the two-
state solution - and by implication the prospect of Palestinian statehood - to express their grandiose
supremacist delusions. In the words of the official PA television, "Where did Great Britain
disappear? By Allah's will, He will get rid of the US like he got rid of them. We [Muslims] have ruled
the world; a day will come by Allah, and we shall rule the world [again]. The day will come, and we
shall rule America, the day will come, and we shall rule Britain. We shall rule the entire world."[28]
Within these grand overlapping schemes of pan-Arab regional unity and Islamic world domination,
the notion of Palestinian statehood is but a single transient element whose supposed centrality
looms far greater in Western than in Islamic and Arab eyes.

Manipulating the Palestinian Cause

Having helped drive the Palestinians to national ruin, the Arab states continued to manipulate the
Palestinian national cause to their own ends. Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-
determination in the parts of Palestine they conquered during the 1948 war. Upon occupying the
biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, King Abdullah moved to erase all traces of corporate
Palestinian Arab identity. On April 4, 1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan to be
subsequently known as the "West Bank" of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. Its residents became
Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom's economic, political, and
social structures. And while Egypt showed no desire to annex the occupied Gaza Strip, this did not
imply support of Palestinian nationalism or of any sort of collective political awareness among the
Palestinians. The refugees were kept under oppressive military rule, were denied Egyptian
citizenship, and were subjected to severe restrictions on travel. "The Palestinians are useful to the
Arab states as they are," President Gamal Abdel Nasser candidly responded to an enquiring Western
reporter. "We will always see that they do not become too powerful. Can you imagine yet another
nation on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean!"[29] Had these territories not come under
Israel's control during the June 1967 war, their populations would have lost whatever vestiges of
Palestinian identity they retained since 1948. For the second time in two decades, Israel unwittingly
salvaged the Palestinian national cause.

Nor was Syria more sympathetic to the idea of Palestinian statehood. During his brief presidency
(April-August 1949), Husni Zaim proposed the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Syria in
return for financial and political gain. Meanwhile, Hafez Assad (1970-2000), who as late as
September 1974 described Palestine as "a basic part of southern Syria,"[30] was a persistent obstacle
to Palestinian self-determination. He pledged allegiance to any solution amenable to the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) - appointed by the Arab League in October 1974 as the "sole
legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" - so long as it did not deviate from the Syrian
line advocating Israel's destruction. Yet when in November 1988, the PLO pretended to accept the
November 1947 partition resolution (and by implication to recognize Israel's existence) so as to end
its ostracism by the United States,[31] Syria immediately opposed the move. The PLO then took this
pretense a step further by signing the September 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-
government Arrangements (DOP) with Israel. This provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire
West Bank and Gaza Strip for a transitional period of up to five years, during which Israel and the
Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. But the Syrian regime strongly
condemned the declaration while the Damascus-based Palestinian terrorist, Ahmad Jibril,
threatened PLO chairman Yasser Arafat with death.

A no less instrumental approach was exhibited by Saddam Hussein, another self-styled pan-Arab
champion whose professed allegiance to the Palestinian cause was matched by a long history of
treating that cause with indifference, if not outright hostility. Saddam stood firmly against Iraqi
intervention to aid the Palestinians in Jordan during the "Black September" of 1970 and
subsequently sought to exclude Palestinians from coming to work in Iraq's booming, oil-rich
economy. Though a vociferous critic of Egypt's Anwar Sadat for reaching a separate peace agreement
with Israel in 1979, Saddam quickly reconsidered when he needed Egyptian military aid in his war
against Iran (1980-88), toiling tirelessly for Cairo's readmission into the Arab fold. Nor was Saddam
deterred from collaborating with Israel against Syrian interests in Lebanon (to punish Assad for his
support of Tehran in its war against Baghdad), or from seeking sophisticated Israeli military
equipment. In 1984, at a time of pressure due to the war with Iran, he went so far as to voice public
support for peace negotiations with the Jewish state, emphasizing that "no Arab leader looks
forward to the destruction of Israel" and that any solution to the conflict would require "the
existence of a secure state for the Israelis."[32]
This support, to be sure, did not prevent Saddam from attempting to link his August 1990 invasion
of Kuwait to the Palestine problem. During the months of negotiations with the Kuwaitis before the
invasion, Saddam made no mention of Palestine. Once confronted with a firm international
response, he immediately opted to "Zionize" the crisis by portraying his predatory move as the first
step toward "the liberation of Jerusalem." But this pretense made no impression whatsoever on
most Arab states, which dismissed the spurious link as the ploy it obviously was and fought
alongside the West to liberate Kuwait.

Nor did the anti-Iraq coalition collapse when Saddam, in a desperate bid to widen the conflict, fired
thirty-nine Scud missiles at Israel - a move cheered by the Palestinians and by demonstrators in
marginal states such as Yemen but otherwise greeted with conspicuous calm by the proverbially
restive "Arab street." Not a single Arab regime was swept from power following its participation in
the war, with the war even producing an ad hoc tacit alliance between Israel and the Arab members
of the anti-Saddam coalition: Israel kept the lowest possible profile, eschewing retaliation for Iraq's
missile attacks while the latter highlighted the hollowness of Saddam's pan-Arab pretenses by
sustaining the war operations against Baghdad.[33]If anything, it was the Palestinians who paid a
heavy price for their entanglement in the conflict. The PLO's endorsement of the Iraqi occupation
led to its ostracism by the Arab world and the postwar expulsion of most of the 400,000 Palestinians
who had been living and working in Kuwait, a move that created a major humanitarian crisis and
denied the PLO the substantial income received from the earnings of those workers. With the
additional loss of Gulf financial contributions and investments in Kuwaiti banks, the total amount
forfeited by the PLO as a direct result of the 1990-91 Gulf conflict exceeded $10 billion, bringing the
organization to the verge of bankruptcy.[34] So much for pan-Arab solidarity with "the sole
representative of the Palestinian people."

Unwanted Guests

The political manipulation of the Palestinian cause was mirrored by the dismal treatment of the
Palestinian refugees based in Arab states since the 1948 war. Far from being welcomed, the new
arrivals were seen by their host societies as an unpatriotic and cowardly lot who had shamefully
abdicated their national duty while expecting others to fight on their behalf. In Syria, Lebanon, and
Transjordan there were repeated calls for their return to Palestine, or at the very least of the young
men of military age, many of whom had arrived on the pretext of volunteering for the pan-Arab force
be assembled to fight in Palestine. The Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian
males between eighteen and fifty and ordered all "healthy and fit men" who had already entered the
country to register officially or be considered illegal aliens and face the full weight of the law. The
Syrian government took an even more stringent approach, banning from its territory all Palestinian
males between sixteen and fifty. When these restrictions drove Palestinians to Egypt, they were
often received with disdain. "Why should we go to Palestine to fight while Palestinian Arab fighters
are deserting the cause by flight to Egypt?" complained Alexandria residents upon the arrival of
refugee ships from Haifa in late April 1948. In Cairo, a large number of demonstrators marched to
the Arab League's headquarters to lodge a petition demanding that "every able-bodied Palestinian
capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay abroad." By October 1948 the Syrian and
Lebanese governments were reportedly "following a policy of concentrating refugees in their
territories in as small an area as possible, in order to be able to get rid of them quickly as soon as
U.N.O [United Nations Organization] was made responsible. They were totally convinced that
U.N.O. ought to take this responsibility and if it did not - it was quite possible that the Arab
Governments would simply allow the refugees to die."[35]

This attitude was entrenched and institutionalized over time. Yet with their desire to offload their
Palestinian guests, matched by the lingering dream of Israel's destruction, the Arab states as well as
the Palestinian leadership rejected the U.N. General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948,
which conditioned repatriation of the attainment of comprehensive peace and partial refugee
resettlement in the host Arab states.[36]The resolution's subsequent transformation into the
cornerstone of an utterly spurious claim to a "right of return" has only served to perpetuate the
refugee problem as the Arab states used this "right" as a pretext to prevent Palestinian assimilation
into their societies in anticipation of their eventual return to their homeland.
Nowhere has this state of affairs been more starkly illustrated than in Lebanon, the most liberal
Arab state up until the mid-1970s. Fearful lest the burgeoning and increasingly radicalized
Palestinian population (which grew from 100,000 in 1948 to about 500,000 in 2012)[37]undermine
the country's fragile confessional edifice, the authorities barred their incorporation into Lebanon's
social, political, and economic structures. As a result, the vast majority of Palestinians have
remained stateless refugees with more than half living in abject poverty in twelve squalid and
overcrowded camps (another five camps were destroyed during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90),
administered by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(UNRWA), created in 1949 for the exclusive relief of Palestinian Arab refugees.[38]

Palestinian refugees at the Jaramana Refugee

Camp in Damascus, Syria, 1948

Camp residents or not, Lebanese

Palestinians have been excluded from
numerous walks of life and spheres of
activity due to their alien status; and
unlike other foreign residents who can
evade this discrimination by virtue of
their countries' reciprocity treaties with
Lebanon, the stateless Palestinians can claim no such rights and have consequently been singled out
for distinct mistreatment including severe restrictions on travel, property ownership, and ability to
work. For decades, they were barred by government decree from more than seventy professions,
from doorkeepers, to mechanics, to file clerks, to schoolteachers, to personnel managers; and while
the ministry of labor lifted the ban on fifty professions in June 2005, the actual application of this
measure has been haphazard at best. Likewise, only 2 percent of Palestinians took advantage of the
August 2010 legislation aimed at improving their access to the official labor market and the social
security benefit system, with Lebanese law still barring Palestinians from at least twenty-five
professions requiring syndicated membership (such as law, medicine, and engineering) and
discriminating against their work and social conditions (e.g., Palestinians are underpaid in
comparison to Lebanese workers for performing the same jobs and overpay for their pensions).
Palestinian refugees are still prevented from registering property in accordance with a
discriminatory 2001 law.[39]

While Lebanon may offer the starkest example of abuse, nowhere in the Arab world have the
Palestinians been treated like "brothers" - by both the authorities and the population at large. In
accordance with Arab League resolutions, all Arab states reject naturalization and/or resettlement as
solutions to the refugee problem. As a matter of principle, they all refuse to contribute to UNRWA's
budget or to assume responsibility for any of its functions. All restrict the freedom of movement of
their Palestinian residents as well as their property rights and access to such government services as
health, education, and social benefits.[40] When in 2004 Saudi Arabia revised its naturalization law
allowing foreigners who had resided in its territory for ten years to apply for citizenship, the
estimated 500,000 Palestinians living and working in the kingdom were conspicuously excluded.
The pretext: the Arab League's stipulation that Palestinians living in Arab countries be denied
citizenship to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their "right to return" to their homeland.
[41]

Even in Jordan, where most Palestinians have been naturalized and incorporated into the country's
fabric, they remain largely marginalized and discriminated against. Between 1949 and 1967, when
Jordan was in control of the West Bank, some 250,000-500,000 Palestinians moved across to the
East Bank or migrated abroad in search of a better life. But even East Bank Palestinians have been
subjected to systematic discrimination. They pay much heavier taxes than their Bedouin
compatriots; they receive close to zero state benefits; they are almost completely shut out of
government jobs, and they have very little, if any, political representation: Not one of Jordan's
twelve governorships is headed by a Palestinian, and the number of Palestinian parliamentarians is
disproportionately low.[42]

The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that more than two million Palestinians, most of
whom have full Jordanian citizenship, are registered as UNRWA refugees with some 370,000 living
in ten recognized camps throughout the country.[43] This has in turn resulted in the perception of
the kingdom's entire Palestinian population as refugees who would eventually depart to implement
their "right of return."[44]This outlook can be traced to the founding of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) in 1964, which quickly challenged Jordan as the focus of Palestinian national
identity. The situation came to a head in the autumn of 1970 with the organization's attempt to
overthrow the Hashemite dynasty. This forced King Hussein to drive the PLO out of the country,
gaining traction in July 1988 when hundreds of thousands of West Bankers lost their Jordanian
citizenship as a result of the king's severance of "administrative and legal ties" with the territory.
After the signing of the DOP and the July 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, the process shifted to
the East Bank where thousands of Palestinians were stripped of their Jordanian citizenship.
[45] "For East Bankers, the right of return is often held up as the panacea which will recreate
Jordan's Bedouin or Hashemite identity," read a 2008 confidential memo by the U.S. ambassador to
Amman:

At their most benign, our East Banker contacts tend to count on the right of return as a solution to
Jordan's social, political, and economic woes. But underlying many conversations with East
Bankers is the theory that once the Palestinians leave, "real" Jordanians can have their country
back In fact, many of our East Banker contacts do seem more excited about the return [read:
departure] of Palestinian refugees than the Palestinians themselves.[46]

Brotherly Massacres

Not only have the host Arab states marginalized and abused their Palestinian guests, but they have
not shrunk from massacring them on a grand scale whenever this suited their needs. When in 1970
his throne was endangered by the Palestinian guerilla organizations, the affable and thoroughly
Westernized King Hussein slaughtered thousands of Palestinians during a single month, now known
as "Black September." Fearing certain death, scores of Palestinian fighters fled their Jordanian
"brothers" to surrender themselves to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Civilian casualties were
exorbitant with estimates ranging from three thousand to fifteen thousand dead - higher than the
Palestinian death toll in the 1948 war.[47]

In the summer of 1976, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian army, massacred some
3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel Zaatar. Six years later, these
very militias slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this
time under the IDF's watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians' rescue.

When in 1983 the PLO tried to reestablish its military presence in Lebanon, having been driven out
the previous year by Israel, it was unceremoniously expelled by the Syrian government, which went
on to instigate an internecine war among the Palestinian factions in Lebanon that raged for years
and cost an untold number of lives. So much so that Salah Khalaf (aka Abu Iyad), the number two
man in the PLO, accused Damascus of committing worse crimes against the Palestinian people than
"those of the Israeli enemy." [48]

In the summer of 2007, the Lebanese army killed hundreds of Palestinians, including many
civilians, in the north Lebanese refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, inflicting widespread environmental
damage and driving some 30,000 persons to seek refuge in a nearby camp.[49]

Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Syrian civil war, and tens of thousands
have fled the country with refugee camps subjected to military attacks and prolonged sieges that
reduced their inhabitants to destitution and starvation. The large Yarmuk camp south of Damascus,
once home to some 250,000 Palestinians, including 150,000 officially registered refugees, is now
"nothing but ruins, and houses only around 18,000 residents who couldn't escape to Lebanon,
Jordan, or elsewhere." "We live in a big prison," a local resident lamented. "But at least, in a prison,
you have food. Here, there's nothing. We are slowly dying."[50]

Brotherly Nakba

Much has been made of the Palestinian exodus of 1948, though far more Palestinians were actually
driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab armed forces than by Jewish/Israeli
forces.[51] Nowadays, the collapse and dispersal of Palestinian society has come to be known in Arab
discourse as al-Nakba, "the catastrophe," but it was not known as this at the time. To the contrary,
as a senior British official discovered to his surprise during a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June
1949, "while [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the
Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab
states. 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers
who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.... I even heard it said that
many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the
district over."[52]

Given this attitude, it is hardly surprising that during their decades of dispersal the Palestinians have
been subjected to similarly traumatic ordeals at the hands of their Arab brothers. As early as the
1950s, the Arab Gulf states expelled striking Palestinian workers, while the Black September events
led to the expulsion of some 20,000 Palestinians from Jordan and the demolition of their camps.
[53] And this tragedy pales in comparison with the eviction of most of Kuwait's 400,000
Palestinians after the 1991 Gulf War. "What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what
has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories," Arafat lamented, as if it were not
the PLO's endorsement of Iraq's brutal occupation (August 1990-February 1991) that triggered this
deadly retribution.[54]

It mattered not that this community had nothing to do with the PLO's reckless move. Within months
of the country's liberation, only 50,000-80,000 Palestinians remained in the emirate, and by the
end of the year, the number had dwindled to some 30,000. Most of these were holders of Egyptian
travel documents, originally from Gaza; they were unable to obtain visas to anywhere in the world,
including Egypt, the governing power in their homeland at the time when they left for the gulf. By
contrast, as noted in The Palestine Yearbook of International Law, "Israel generally placed no
obstacles on the post-war return to the territories of Palestinian families from the West Bank,"
repatriating some 30,000 West Bankers and 7,000 Gazans with valid Israeli identity cards who had
been living and working in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.[55]

No sooner had the dust settled on the Kuwait exodus, the Palestinians experienced yet another
expulsion, this time from Libya. In a speech on September 1, 1995, as Israel was about to surrender
control of the Palestinian populated areas in the West Bank to Arafat's Palestinian Authority (control
of the Gaza population had been surrendered the previous year), Muammar Qaddafi announced his
intention to expel all Palestinians living and working in the country, urging the Arab states to follow
his lead so as to expose the hollowness of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. He argued,

Since the Palestinian leaders claim they have now got a homeland and a passport, let the 30,000
Palestinians in Libya go back to their homeland, and let's see if the Israelis would permit them to
return. That's how the world will find out that the peace it's been advocating is no more than
treachery and a conspiracy.[56]

While no Arab state took up Qaddafi's advice and some implored him to rescind his decision, none
opened their doors to the deportees. Lebanon denied entry to several thousand arrivals without
Lebanese travel documents and banned maritime transport from Libya to preempt the possible flow
of deportees while Egypt allowed Palestinians with Israeli permits for entry to Gaza or the West
Bank to cross its territory - under escort - to the Palestinian-ruled areas, leaving thousands of
hapless refugees stranded in the Egyptian desert for months. Holders of residence permits elsewhere
were gradually able to move out; the rest were eventually allowed to remain in Libya when Qaddafi
rescinded his decision in early 1997.[57]
Last but not least, the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 unleashed a tidal wave of violence
and terror against Iraq's 34,000-strong Palestinian community, driving some 21,000 people to flee
the country in fear for their lives. Yet far from protecting their long time "guests," the
internationally-propped Iraqi government was implicated in the arbitrary detention, torture, killing,
and disappearance of Palestinians while none of the neighboring Arab states (with rare, temporary
exceptions) opened their doors to fleeing Iraqi Palestinians. "It's hard to understand why Syria has
provided refuge to nearly a million Iraqi refugees but is shutting the door on hundreds of
Palestinians also fleeing Iraq," commented a leading human rights watchdog. "The Syrian
government's mistreatment of these Palestinian refugees contrasts sharply with its declarations of
solidarity with the Palestinian people."[58] A few years later the same watchdog was voicing the
same grievance vis--vis the Lebanese government for preventing Palestinian refugees fleeing the
Syrian civil war from entering its territory.[59]

No Love Lost

In fairness to the Arab states, their animosity and distrust were more than reciprocated by the
Palestinians. As early as the 1948 war, the pan-Arab volunteer force that entered Palestine to fight
the Jews found itself at loggerheads with the community it was supposed to defend. Denunciations
and violent clashes were common with the local population often refusing to provide the Arab
Liberation Army, as this force was ambitiously named, with the basic necessities for daily upkeep
and military operations. For their part, Arab army personnel abused their Palestinian hosts of whom
they were openly contemptuous.

This mutual animosity was greatly exacerbated in subsequent decades by the recklessness of the
Palestinian leadership, headed from the mid-1960s to November 2004 by Arafat, which turned on
Arab host societies whenever given the opportunity. As noted above, it was the PLO's subversive
activities against the Jordanian regime that set in train the chain of events culminating in the "Black
September" massacres. Likewise, the PLO's abuse of its growing power base in Lebanon, where it
established itself after its expulsion from Jordan, and its meddling in that country's internal politics,
helped trigger the Lebanese civil war that raged for nearly two decades and cost hundreds of
thousands of lives.

"I remember literally screaming at him in my own house," the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi,
then based in Beirut, said, recalling his desperate attempt to dissuade Arafat from taking sides in the
nascent civil war. "I told him that we as Palestinians had no business calling for the ostracism of the
Phalangists, and that it would drive them all the way into the hands of the Israelis."[60] This point
was not lost on ordinary Palestinians, who often blamed Arafat for their Lebanese misfortunes.
When in summer 1976 the PLO chairman visited survivors of the Tel Zaatar massacre, he was
treated to a barrage of rotten vegetables and chants of "traitor" by the embittered refugees, who
accused him of provoking the camp's blood-drenched fall.[61]

This political meddling was accompanied by wanton violence wreaked by the PLO on its host society.
In a repeat of their Jordanian lawlessness, Palestinian guerrillas turned the vibrant and thriving
Lebanese state, whose capital of Beirut was acclaimed as the "Paris of the Middle East," into a
hotbed of violence and anarchy. Several districts of Beirut and the refugee camps came under
exclusive Palestinian control, so much so that they became generally known as the Fakhani
Republic, after the Beirut district in which Arafat had set up his headquarters. Substantial parts of
southern Lebanon or "Fatahland" were also under Palestinian control. In flagrant violation of
Lebanese sovereignty, the PLO set up roadblocks, took over buildings and drove out local residents,
operated extortion rackets, protected criminals fleeing from Lebanese justice, and committed
countless atrocities against Lebanese civilians. Most notable was the January 1976 massacre of
hundreds of residents of the Christian town of Damour, south of Beirut, and the expulsion of the
remaining population.[62]

Palestinian Self-Betrayal
As if the Palestinians' longtime manipulation and abuse by their supposed Arab "brothers" has not
been enough, their own leaders have never had a real stake in leading them to statehood. This is
both because the hopes and wishes of their constituents did not figure in their calculations, and
because they have vastly profited from having their hapless constituents run around in circles for
nearly a century while milking world sympathy for the plight they brought about themselves in the
first place.

In mandatory Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged betters for
the crime of "selling Palestine" to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching
themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight "until
Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in
the country,"[63] facilitated the transfer of 7,500 acres to the Zionist movement. Some of his
relatives, all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of
land. Many prominent leaders including Muin Madi, Alfred Rock, and As'ad Shuqeiri (father of
Ahmad, PLO founder) also sold land. Musa Alami, who bragged to David Ben-Gurion that "he would
prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred years" if the alternative was
its rapid development in collaboration with the Zionists,[64] made a handsome profit by selling 225
acres to the Jews. So, too, did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian
Arab clan during the mandate period, including Musa Kazim (father of Abdel Qader Husseini, the
famous guerrilla leader) and Muhammad Tahir, Hajj Amin's father.[65]

Hajj Amin himself had few qualms about profiting from the Jewish national revival which he sought
to eradicate whenever this suited his needs. Prior to his appointment as the Jerusalem mufti, he
pleaded with Jewish leaders to lobby on his behalf with (the Jewish) Herbert Samuel, the first
British high commissioner for Palestine, and in 1927, he asked Gad Frumkin, the only Jewish
Supreme Court justice during the mandatory era, to influence Jerusalem's Jewish community to
back the Husseini candidate in the mayoral elections. He likewise employed a Jewish architect to
build a luxury hotel for the Supreme Muslim Council, which he headed, while ordering his
constituents to boycott Jewish labor and products.[66] Needless to say, the mufti never sought to
apply to his own father his religious authorization (fatwa) to kill those who sold land to Jews.

"Arab nationalist feelings were never allowed to harm the interests of the Husseini family," wrote the
prominent Jerusalem lawyer and Zionist activist Bernard (Dov) Joseph, a future minister of justice
in the Israeli government.

One of [the mufti's] kinsmen, Jamil Husseini, had once engaged my services in land litigation
which went as high as the Privy Council in London For years, one of the Mufti's close relations
prospered mightily by forcing Arab small-holders to sell land, at niggardly prices, which he then
resold to Jews at a handsome profit.[67]

This institutionalized racketeering skyrocketed to new heights under the PLO. Just as the
Palestinian leadership during the mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents against
Zionism and Jews while lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish development and land
purchases, so too have the cynical and self-seeking PLO "revolutionaries". They have used the
billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states and the international community to lead a luxurious
lifestyle in sumptuous hotels and villas, globe-trotting in grand style, acquiring properties, and
making financial investments worldwide - while millions of ordinary Palestinians scrambled for a
livelihood.

This process reached its peak following the September 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of
Principles on Interim Self-government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I) and the establishment of the
Palestinian Authority. For all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat had never been as
interested in the attainment of statehood as in the violence attending its pursuit. In the late 1970s,
he told his close friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the
Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state, and that a
Palestinian state would be a failure from the first day.[68] Once given control of the Palestinian
population in the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, he made this bleak prognosis a
self-fulfilling prophecy. He established a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of
Arab dictatorships where the rule of the gun prevailed over the rule of law and where large sums of
money donated by the international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian population
were diverted to funding racist incitement, buying weaponry, and filling secret bank accounts.
Extensive protection and racketeering networks run by PA officials proliferated while the national
budget was plundered at will by PLO veterans and Arafat cronies. For example, in May 1997, the
first-ever report by the PA's comptroller stated that $325 million, out of the 1996 budget of $800
million had been "wasted" by Palestinian ministers and agencies or embezzled by officials.[69]

Arafat himself held a secret Tel Aviv bank account accessible only to him and his personal advisor
Muhammad Rashid, in which he insisted that Israel deposit the tax receipts collected on imports to
the Palestinian territories (rather than transfer them directly to the PA). Between 1994-2000, nearly
eleven billion shekels (about US$2.5 billion) were reportedly paid into this account, of which only a
small, unspecified part reached its designated audience.[70] Small wonder that in 2004 the French
authorities opened a money-laundering inquiry into suspect regular transfers into the Paris bank
accounts held by Arafat's wife Suha, who resided there with their daughter. After Arafat's death Suha
was reportedly promised an annual pension of $22 million to cover her sumptuous lifestyle, paid
from an alleged $4 billion "secret fortune" managed personally by the PA president and kept in a
number of bank accounts in Tel Aviv, London, and Zurich.[71]

Though this breathtaking corruption played an important role in Hamas's landslide electoral victory
of January 2006, the PLO/PA leadership seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten
nothing. Not only did Abbas, who succeeded Arafat as PLO chairman and PA president, blatantly
ignore the results of the only (semi) democratic elections in Palestinian history - establishing an
alternative government to the legally appointed Hamas government and refusing to hold new
elections upon the expiry of his presidency in January 2009 - but he seems to have followed in his
predecessor's kleptocratic footsteps, reportedly siphoning at least $100 million to private accounts
abroad and enriching his sons at the PA's expense.[72] In the words of Fahmi Shabaneh, former
head of the Anti-Corruption Department in the PA's General Intelligence Service:

In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end financial corruption and implement
major reforms, but he hasn't done much since then. Unfortunately, Abbas has surrounded himself
with many of the thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public funds and who became
icons of financial corruption.... Some of the most senior Palestinian officials didn't have even
$3,000 in their pocket when they arrived [after the signing of the Oslo Accords]. Yet we discovered
that some of them had tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in their bank accounts.... Had it
not been for the presence of the Israeli authorities in the West Bank, Hamas would have done what
they did in the Gaza Strip. It's hard to find people in the West Bank who support the Palestinian
Authority. People are fed up with the financial corruption and mismanagement of the Palestinian
Authority.[73]

Conclusion

For nearly a century, Palestinian leaders have

missed no opportunity to impede the
development of Palestinian civil society and
the attainment of Palestinian statehood. Had
the Mufti chosen to lead his constituents to
peace and reconciliation with their Jewish
neighbors, as he promised the British officials
who appointed him to his high rank in 1921,
the Palestinians would have had their
independent state over a substantial part of
mandate Palestine by 1948, if not a decade
earlier, and would have been spared the
traumatic experience of dispersal and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to
peace and reconciliation instead of turning it into one of the most murderous and corrupt terrorist
organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or
the early 1970s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999 as part of the
Oslo process; or at the very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000. Had Abbas abandoned
his predecessors' rejectionist path, a Palestinian state could have been established after the
Annapolis summit of November 2007, or during President Obama's first term, after Netanyahu
broke with the longstanding Likud precept by publicly accepting the two-state solution and agreeing
to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

But then, why should they engage in the daunting tasks of nation-building and state creation if they
could drive their hapless constituents to lasting dispersal and statelessness while basking in
international sympathy for the Palestinian plight and lining their pockets from the proceeds of this
self-inflicted tragedy? The attainment of statehood would have shattered Palestinian leaders' pan-
Arab and Islamist delusions, not to mention the kleptocratic paradise established on the backs of
their long suffering subjects. It would have transformed the Palestinians in one fell swoop from the
world's ultimate victim into an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state thus terminating
decades of unprecedented international indulgence. It would have also driven the final nail in the
PLO's false pretense to be "the sole representative of the Palestinian people" (already dealt a
devastating blow by Hamas's 2006 electoral rout) and would have forced any governing authority to
abide, for the first time in Palestinian history, by the principles of accountability and transparency.
Small wonder, therefore, that whenever confronted with an international or Israeli offer of
statehood, Palestinian leaders will never take "yes" for an answer.

Professor Efraim Karsh is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies, and a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Kings
College London, and principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia). His books
include Arafat's War and Palestine Betrayed.

Notes

[1] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "Remarks by President Obama and Prime
Minister Netanyahu of Israel in Press Availability," May 18, 2009.

[2] Walid Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State," Foreign Affairs, July
1978, pp. 695-96; Hisham Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1966), p. 3.

[3] Hearing before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Washington, D.C., State Department,
Jan. 11, 1946, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), V/9960/g, pp. 10-11.

[4] "Interview [by] Clare Hollingowith with Azzam Pasha, Mar. 23, 1948, S25/9020. See also:
"Fortnightly Intelligence Newsletter No. 57," issued by HQ British Troops in Palestine for the period
6 Dec-18 Dec 1947, WO 275/64, p. 2; Cunningham to Creech Jones, Feb. 24, 1948, Cunningham
Papers, VI/1/80; Kirkbride to Bevin, Dec. 23, 1947, FO 371/61583; Musa Alami, "The Lesson of
Palestine," Middle East Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1949), p. 385.

[5] Quoted in Daniel Pipes, "Palestine for the Syrians?," Commentary, Dec. 1986.

[6] Jamal Husseini, "Report of the State of Palestine during the Four Years of Civil Administration,
Submitted to the Mandate's Commission of the League of Nations through H.E. the High
Commissioner for Palestine, by the Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab CongressExtract,"
Oct. 6, 1924, Central Zionist Archive (CZA, Jerusalem), S25/10690, p. 1.
[7] "Minutes of the Ninth Session, Held at Geneva from June 8th to 25th, 1926, including the Report
of the Commission to the Council," twenty-second meeting, Permanent Mandates Commission,
League of Nations, June 22, 1926.

[8] "The Arabs Reject Partition," quoted from Palestine & Transjordan, July 17, 1937, p. 1, CZA;
"Minutes of the JAE Meeting on Apr. 19, 1937," Ben-Gurion Archive (Sde Boker).

[9] The New York Times, Aug. 25, 1947.

[10] The Ambassador in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry (Enclosure), July 6, 1940, Documents on
German Foreign Policy 1918-1945 (London: HMSO, 1949), ser. D, vol. 10, pp. 143-4; The Grand
Mufti to Adolf Hitler, Jan. 20, 1941, ibid., ser. D, vol. 11, pp. 1151-5; Record of the Conversation
between the Fhrer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on Nov. 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich
Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Nov. 30, 1941, ibid., pp. 881-5.

[11] Ghada Hasehm Telhami, Syria and the Palestinians: the Clash of Nationalisms(Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 49-50.

[12] "Excerpts from Statements in the U.N. on Mideast," New York Times, June 1, 1956; "Syria Says
in U.N. Palestine is Hers," ibid, June 1, 1956.

[13] The Palestinian National Charter, Resolutions of the Palestine National Council, July 1-17, 1968,
art. 13-14; see, also, art. 11, 12, 15.

[14] Daniel Pipes, "Declaring Independence: Israel and the PLO," Orbis, Mar. 1989, pp. 247-60.

[15] "Declaration of Independence (1988)," website of the "State of Palestine."

[16] Ari Shavit, "Ha'ezrah Azmi," Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Nov. 25, 2002; Bishara on Israeli Channel 2
TV, n.d., YouTube.

[17] 2003 Permanent Constitution Draft, Palestinian Basic Law, chap. 1, art. 2, May 4, 2003.

[18] See, for example, statements by Fatah's official spokesman Ahmad Assaf on official PA TV and
Egyptian TV, Mar. 19, 2014, "Fatah Spokesman: Israel's goal is to rule 'from the Euphrates to the
Nile,'" Palestine Media Watch (Jerusalem), Mar. 23, 2014.

[19] Haaretz, Mar. 26, 2014.

[20] "Exclusive Interview with Hamas Leader," The Media Line, Sept. 22, 2005; Walid Mahmoud
Abdelnasser, The Islamic Movement in Egypt: Perceptions of International Relations, 1967-
81 (London: Kegan Paul, 1994), p. 39.

[21] Zahar's interview with Asharq al-Awsat (London), Aug. 18, 2005, in Special Dispatch, no. 964,
Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI- Washington, D.C.), Aug. 19, 2005.

[22] "Hamas Covenant," Yale Law School, Avalon Project, art. 10.

[23] Ibid., art. 8.

[24] Ibid., art. 11, 15.

[25] Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
p. 306; Michel Gurfinkiel, "Islam in France: The-French Way of Life Is in Danger,"Middle East
Quarterly, Mar. 1997; The Observer (London), Nov. 4, 2001; Anthony Browne, "The Triumph of the
East," The Spectator (London), July 24, 2004.
[26] Mash'al's address at the al-Murabit Mosque in Damascus as aired on Aljazeera TV on Feb. 3,
2006, MEMRI, "Special Dispatch No. 1087," Feb. 7, 2006.

[27] 2003 Permanent Constitution Draft, chap. 1, art. 5, 7.

[28] Palestinian Authority TV, May 13, 2005, PMW.

[29] John Laffin, The PLO Connections (London: Corgi Books, 1983), p. 127.

[30] Damascus Radio, Mar. 8, 1974.

[31] Palestinians leaders went out of their way to reassure their constituents that this was merely a
tactical ploy aimed at enhancing the PLO's international standing and, as a result, its ability to
achieve the ultimate goal of Israel's destruction. "We vowed to liberate Palestine before 1967," stated
Abu Iyad, Yasser Arafat's second in command. "We will restore Palestine step by step and not in one
fell swoop, just as the Jews had done." "The borders of our state noted [by the PLO declaration]
represent only a part of our national aspirations," he added. "We will strive to expand them so as to
realize our ambition for the entire territory of Palestine." A few days later he reiterated this pledge:
"The establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine is but a step toward the [liberation
of the] whole of Palestine" (Al-Anba, Kuwait, Dec. 5 & 13, 1988). For other Palestinian statements in
the same vein see, for example, interview by Khaled Hassan, head of the Palestine National Council's
(PNC) committee for external and parliamentary relations, with al-Musawar (Cairo), Jan. 20, 1989;
interview with PNC Deputy Chairman Salim Zaanun with al-Anba (Kuwait), Nov. 21, 1988;
interview by Ahmad Sidqi Dajani, a senior PLO member, with Ukaz (Riyadh), Nov. 22, 1988.

[32] International Herald Tribune, Nov. 27, Dec. 5, 1984; Davar (Tel Aviv), Nov. 12,
1987;Hadashot (Tel Aviv), Nov. 13, 15, 1987.

[33] For further discussion of this issue see: Efraim Karsh & Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A
Political Biography (New York: Grove, 2003; revised and updated edition); Lawrence Freedman
and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World
Order(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

[34] New York Times, Mar. 16, 1991; "A New Beginning," US News & World Report, Sept. 13, 1993,
p. 30.

[35] See, for example: Beirut Radio, May 4, 1948, in Foreign Broadcasts Information Service(FBIS),
European Section: Near & Middle East and North African Transmitters, May 5, 1948, II2; Tzuri to
Tene, "New from Semakh after the Evacuation," May 10, 1948, Hagana Archive (HA), 105/31, p. 46;
"Summary of News for the Alexandroni Brigade," Apr. 9, 1948, HA 105/143, p. 174; Philip Ernst
(American Consul in Port Said) to Department of State, "Arrival of Palestine Arab Refugees," Apr.
29, 1948 (dispatched May 11), RG 84, 800 - Refugees; Beirut Radio, Apr. 25, 1948, in BBC
Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), No. 48, Apr. 29, 1948, p. 60; Cairo to High Commissioner for
Palestine, May 1, 1948, Cunningham Papers, St. Antony's College, Oxford University; C. Waterlow,
"Arab Refugees," Oct. 22, 1948, FO 371/68681.

[36] UN General Assembly, "194 (III). Palestine - Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator,"
Dec. 11, 1948, Article 11. Refugee resettlement elsewhere was reiterated in subsequent UN
resolutions. See, for example: UN General Assembly, "393 (v) - Assistance to Palestine Refugees,"
Dec. 2, 1950, Article 4; General Assembly, "Special report of the
Director and Advisory Commission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East," Nov. 29, 1951, A/1905/Add. 1, p. 4. For Arab rejection of Resolution 194
see: Israel Foreign Office, Middle Eastern Department, "Arab Broadcasts: Daily Summary," No. 36,
Sept. 12-13, 1948, HA 105/88, p. 153; summary of Emile Ghouri's article in the Beirut Telegraph,
HA 105/102, pp. 43-43; "Arabs Firm on Refugees," New York Times, Sept. 9, 1948; British Middle
East Office (Cairo) to Foreign Office, Sept. 11, 1948, FO 371/68341; Davar (Tel Aviv), Aug. 8,
1948; al-Masri (Cairo), Oct. 11, 1948 as quoted in Israel's Foreign Ministry, Research Department,
"Refugee Repatriation - A Danger to Israel's security," Sept. 4, 1951, FM 2564/1.

[37] In 2012 there were 436,154 refugees registered with UNRWA, alongside 10,000-35,000 non-
registered "illegal aliens" and tens of thousands naturalized Palestinians. At the same time, some
100,000 UNRWA-registered Palestinians have reportedly left the country in search of livelihood
elsewhere. See: UNRWA, "Where We Work Lebanon," accessed December 8, 2013; Amnesty
International, "Exiled and Suffering: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon," October 2007, pp. 2, 10;
Julie Peteet, "From Refugees to Minority: Palestinians in Post-War Lebanon," Middle East Report,
No. 200 (Jul.-Sept. 1996), p. 29.

[38] Lena El-Malak, "Betrayed and Forgotten: Palestinians Refugees in Lebanon," Yearbook of
Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, Vol. 9 (2002-03), pp. 136-37; Souheil al-Natour, "The Legal
Status of Palestinians in Lebanon," Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1997), pp. 360-77.

[39] International Labor Organization, "Palestinians in Lebanon working under precarious

conditions," Nov. 20, 2012; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010: Lebanon, World Report
2011: Lebanon, World Report 2013: Lebanon; Amnesty International, "Exiled and Suffering," pp.
18-22.

[40] See, for example: "Recommendations by the Committee of Arab Experts in Reply to the
Proposals by the U.N. Secretary-General Regarding the Continuation of U.N. Assitance to the
Palestine Refugee" (Sofar, Lebanon, Aug. 17, 1959), in Muhammad Khalil, The Arab States and the
Arab League: a Documentary Record (Beirut: Khayat, 1962), Vol. 2, pp. 654-55; Abbas Shiblak,
"Residency Status and civil Rights of Palestinians Refugees in Arab Countries," Journal of Palestine
Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring 1996), PP. 36-45.

[41] P.K. Abdul Gharfour, "A Million Expatriates to Benefit from New Citizenship Law," Arab News,
Oct. 21, 2004.

[42] Moshe Efrat, "Haplitim Hapalestinaim 1949-74: Mehkar Kalkali Vehevrati" (Tel Aviv
University: Horowitz Center for the Study of Developing Countries, September 1976), pp. 22-23;
Don Peretz, Palestinian Refugees, and the Middle East Peace Process (Washington, D.C.: United
States Institute of Peace Press, 1993), pp. 49-50; Mudar Zahran, "Jordan is Palestinian," Middle
East Quarterly, Winter 2012, pp. 3-12.

[43] "Where We Work: Jordan," UNRWA. Figures as of Jan. 1, 2012.

[44] Minority Rights Group International, "World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples
Jordan: Palestinians, 2008. "

[45] Human Rights Watch, "Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their
Nationality," Feb. 1, 2010; idem, "Jordan: Stop withdrawing Nationality from Palestinian-Origin
Citizens," Feb. 1, 2010.

[46] U.S. Ambassador to Jordan David Hale, "Confidential Memo on the Debate in Jordan
Concerning the Palestinian Right of Return, Amman, Feb. 5 2008," Journal of Palestine Studies,
Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 220, 222.

[47] Said Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 114.

[48] Al-Majallah (London), Nov. 26, 1983, quoted in Daniel Pipes, "The Hell of Israel is Better than
the Paradise of Arafat," Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 2005), pp. 43-50.

[49] Amnesty, "Exiled and suffering," pp. 5-6.

[50] Ramzy Baroud, "Starving to Death in Syria," al-Ahram (Cairo), Jan. 9-15, 2014; Jerusalem
Post, Dec. 19, 2013; Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Jan. 2, 2014; Guardian (London), Dec. 12, 2012;
"Thousands of Palestinians Trapped in Syria Camp 'Slowly dying,'" Ma'an News
Agency(Bethlehem), Feb. 28, 2014.

[51] See: Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); idem, "1948,
Israel, and the Palestinians: Fully Annotated Text," Commentary, May 2008 (web only).

[52] Sir J. Troutbeck, "Summary of General Impressions Gathered during Week-End Visit to the
Gaza District," Jun. 16, 1949, FO 371/75342/E7816, p. 123.

[53] Badil, "From Badil Refugee Survey 2008-2009: Forced Displacement in Host Countries - An
Overview" (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

[54] Al-Musawwar (Cairo), Nov. 15, 1991.

[55] Middle East Watch, "Nowhere to Go: the Tragedy of the Remaining Palestinian Families in
Kuwait," The Palestine Yearbook of International Law, Vol. 6 (1990-91), pp. 99-102; Steven J.
Rosen, "Kuwait Expels Thousands of Palestinians," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2012, pp. 75-83.

[56] "Libya's Leader Urges Other Arab countries to Expel Palestinians," New York Times, Oct. 5,
1995; David Lamb, "Arab Countries Reluctant to Receive Expelled Palestinians," Tech, Sept. 12,
1995.

[57] Abbas Shiblak, "A Time of Hardship and Agony: Palestinian Refugees in Libya," Palestine-
Israel Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1995; accessed Dec. 28, 2013); Badil, "The Palestinian Crisis in Libya
1994-1996 (Interview with Professor Bassem Sirhan," (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

[58] Human Rights Watch, "Nowhere to Flee: the Perilous Situation of Palestinians in Iraq,"
September 2006; idem, "Syria: Give Refugee to Palestinians Fleeing Threats in Iraq," Feb. 2, 2007.

[59] Idem, "Lebanon: Palestinians fleeing Syria Denied Entry," Aug. 8, 2013.

[60] Andrew Gowers & Tony Walker, Arafat: The Biography (London: Virgin, 1994), pp. 186, 200.

[61] Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 86,
102.

[62] Aburish, Arafat, p. 151.

[63] "Conversation with Awni Abdel Hadi," June 3, 1920, Hagana Archive (hereinafter HA),
80/145/11.

[64] David Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), pp. 15-6.

[65] Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 182, 228-39.

[66] Gad Frumkin, Derekh Shofet Beyerushalaim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1956), pp. 216, 280-90; Eliahu
Elath, Shivat Zion Vearav (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1974), p. 245; Yehuda Taggar, The Mufti of Jerusalem
and Palestine Arab Politics, 1930-1937 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), p. 83.

[67] Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem 1948 (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1960), p. 194.
[68] Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons. Inside the Romanian Secret ServiceThe Memoirs of Ceausescu's
Spy Chief (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 28.

[69] Agence France-Presse, May 24, July 30, 1997; Khaled Abu Toameh, "Money down the
Drain?" Jerusalem Report, Jan. 8, 1998, p. 26; Ronen Bergman, Veharashut Netuna (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Ahronot, 2002), p. 156.

[70] Ehud Ya'ari, "The Independent State of Arafat," Jerusalem Report, Sept. 5, 1996, pp. 22-3;
Bergman, Veharashut Netuna, pp. 113-41; Rachel Ehrenfeld, "Where Does the Money Go? A Study
of the Palestinian Authority," American Center for Democracy, New York, Oct.1, 2002, pp. 7-10; Said
Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 306.

[71] Ynet (Tel Aviv), Aug. 16, 2006; Sydney (Aus.) Morning Herald, Feb. 13, 2004.

[72] Jonathan Schanzer, "Chronic Kleptocracy: Corruption within the Palestinian Political
Establishment," Hearing before U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the
Middle East and South Asia, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2012, pp. 17-8; Bergman, Veharashut
Netuna, pp. 162-3; Ehrenfeld, "Where Does the Money Go?" pp. 9-10; Yediot Ahronot (Tel Aviv),
July 14, 2002.

[73] Khaled Abu Toameh, "Corruption will let Hamas take W. Bank," Jerusalem Post, Jan. 29, 2010.

The Uses of Lydda

by Efraim Karsh
Mosaic
July 2014

In "What Happened at Lydda," Martin Kramer has performed a signal service by putting to rest
the canard of an Israeli massacre of Palestinian Arab civilians in that city in July 1948. The charge
has been most recently circulated by Ari Shavit in his best-selling My Promised Land. But Lydda is
hardly the only instance of such allegations at the time of the founding of the Jewish stateor, for
that matter, long afterward. As Kramer suggests at the outset of his investigation, "time and again
over the decades, Israeli soldiers have stood accused of just such wanton killing when in fact they
were doing what every soldier is trained to do: fire on an armed enemy, especially when that enemy
is firing at him."

Indeed. In late 1947, a violent Arab attempt was made to prevent the creation of a Jewish state in
line with November's UN partition resolution. No sooner had the Haganah rebuffed it than it was
accused of scores of nonexistent massacres. The same happened in the run-up to the establishment
of the state in May 1948 and the ensuing war launched by the Arab nations to destroy it. The fall of
the city of Haifa in April 1948 gave rise to totally false claims of a large-scale slaughter that
circulated throughout the Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false rumors were
spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18), during the battle of Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa,
where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of "hundreds of Arab men and women."
Accounts of a massacre at Deir Yasin (April 9), where some 100 people died, were especially lurid,
featuring supposed hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of Jewish fighters and fictitious charges
of havoc and rape.
In later years, Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause have even invented retroactive
atrocities, unknown to anyone at the time of their supposed occurrence. A notable instance is the
"Tantura massacre" of May 1948, an event glaringly absent from contemporary Palestinian Arab
historiography of the war. And this is not to mention more recent trumped-up allegations of
atrocities committed by Israel in, most
notoriously, Jenin (2002) and Gaza
(2009).

An Israeli fighter accepts cigarette from an Arab

resident in Lydda, July 1948.

It is into this crowded field that the

prominent Israeli journalist Ari Shavit
has stepped. "In 30 minutes, at high
noon, more than 200 civilians are
killed," Shavit writes dramatically;
"Zionism carries out a massacre in the
city of Lydda." But as Kramer conclusively shows, it is likelier that there was no massacre: only
casualties of war, killed or wounded in the fierce fighting between the small Israeli force in the city
and the numerically superior force of local Arab fighters supplemented by Transjordanian troops
and armored vehicles.

In its broad contours, the story of the conquest of Lydda, followed by the exodus of most of the city's
residents, was a matter of public knowledge shortly after the July 1948 events about which Shavit
writes; in subsequent decades, Israeli historians filled in the remaining gaps. But then, beginning in
the late 1980s, revisionist Israeli "New Historians" successfully transformed what the New York
Times had described at the time as "heavy casualties," incurred in the course of "considerable [Arab]
resistance," into a massacre of hapless victims.

Since Lydda (together with the simultaneously captured twin town of Ramleh) also constitutes the
only case in the war where a substantial urban population was displaced by Israeli forces, the
massacre trope won a position of pivotal importance in the larger Arab claim: namely, that there was
a premeditated and systematic plan to dispossess and expel the Palestinian Arabs. Shavit has picked
up this latter misrepresentation as well, writing that "the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of
Lydda" were "an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution" (emphasis added).

If, however, there was anything inevitable about the expulsion of Lydda, the cause lay not in Zionism
but in the actions of Palestinian Arab leaders and their counterparts in neighboring Arab states. Had
these notables accepted the UN partition resolution calling for the establishment of two states in
Palestine, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place. As for Lydda itself, no
exodus was foreseen in Israeli military plans for the city's capture or was reflected in the initial
phase of its occupation. Quite the contrary: the Israeli commander assured local dignitaries that the
city's inhabitants would be allowed to stay if they so wished. In line with that promise, the occupying
Israeli force also requested a competent administrator and other personnel to run the affairs of the
civilian population.

All this was rendered irrelevant when the city's notables and residents, rather than abiding by their
surrender agreement with the IDF, attempted to dislodge the Israelis by force. The IDF, its tenuous
grip on Lydda starkly exposed, thereupon decided to "encourage" the population's departure to
Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east, so as not to leave behind a potential hotbed of armed
resistance. In an area where Jordan's Arab Legion was counterattacking in strength, it was essential
to prevent any disruption of ongoing war operations.
As it happens, this spontaneous response by the IDF to a string of unexpected developments on the
ground was uncharacteristic of general Israeli conduct. Then and throughout the war, inhabitants of
other Arab localities who had peacefully surrendered to Israeli forces were allowed to remain in
place. In this respect, Lydda was an one of the very few exceptions that proved the rule, notas
Shavit arguesthe rule itself.

Those few exceptions, moreover, accounted for but a small fraction of the total exodus. Vastly more
Palestinians were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces than
by the Israeli army. In fact, no contemporary sources describe the collapse and dispersal of
Palestinian society as, in Shavit's words, "an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution." Here, from
June 1949, is the (somewhat surprised) report of a senior British official from a fact-finding mission
among Arab war refugees in Gaza:

While [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans
or ourselves), they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We
know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they
declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.

Martin Kramer is to be congratulated for helping to reclaim these historical truths, distorted by
decades of propaganda and revisionist history. In disposing of the Lydda "massacre" canard, he has
also exposed the disingenuous and shoddy scholarship underlying the ongoing endeavor to rewrite
Israel's history.

Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, a
senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and at the Middle East Forum,
and the author most recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale, 2010).

Palestinian Suffering Used to Demonize Israel

by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post

July 21, 2014

No sooner had Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to stop the sustained rocket and missile
attacks on its civilian population by the Gaza-based Hamas terror organization than it came under a
barrage of international criticism, with tens of thousands of violent demonstrators flocking into the
streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, Sydney, Buenos Aires and New York, among other places, to
demand an end to the "Gaza slaughter."

How can this be? Why do citizens of

democratic societies enthusiastically
embrace one of the world's most
murderous Islamist terror
organizations, overtly committed not
only to the destruction of a sovereign
democracy but also to the
subordination of Western values and
ways of life to a worldwide Islamic
caliphate (or umma)? Not out of a
genuine concern for Palestinian
wellbeing. For although the "Palestine
question" has received extraordinary
media coverage for decades to the exclusion of far worse humanitarian and political problems, the
truth is that no one really cares about the fate of the Palestinians: not their leaders, who have
immersed their hapless constituents in disastrous conflicts rather than seize the numerous
opportunities for statehood since the Peel Commission report of 1937; not the Arab states, which
have brazenly manipulated the Palestinian cause to their self-serving ends; and not Western
politicians, the media, NGOs, human rights activists, and church leaders enticed into self-righteous
indignation by any Israeli act of self-defense.

Had the Palestinians' dispute been with an Arab, Muslim, or any other non-Jewish adversary, it
would have attracted a fraction of the interest that it presently does. No one in the international
community pays any attention to the ongoing abuse of Palestinians across the Arab world from
Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, which deprives its 500,000-strong Palestinian population of the most
basic human rights from property ownership, to employment in numerous professions, to free
movement. Nor has there been any international outcry when Arab countries have expelled and/or
massacred their Palestinian populations on a grand scale. The fact that the thoroughly westernized
King Hussein of Jordan killed more Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel had in
decades was never held against him or dented his widely held perception as a man of peace.

As the supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist Robert Fisk put it in his memoirs, King Hussein was
"often difficult to fault."

Kuwait's 1991 slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians who lived and worked in the emirate
(and the expulsion of most of its 400,000-strong Palestinian population) passed virtually unnoticed
by the international media, as has the murder of thousands of Palestinians in the ongoing Syrian
civil war and the reduction of countless others to destitution and starvation.

By contrast, any Palestinian or Arab casualty inflicted by Israel comes under immediate
international criticism.

Take the blanket media coverage of Israel's military response in Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008-
09, 2012) but not of the original Hezbollah and Hamas attacks triggering it, in stark contrast to the
utter indifference to bloodier conflicts going on around the world at the same time. On July 19,
2006, for example, 5,000 Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia in what it claimed was an action to
"crush" an Islamist threat to its neighbor's government. A month later, Sri Lankan artillery has
pounded territory held by the rebel Tamil Tigers resulting in mass displacement and over 500
deaths, including an estimated 50 children following the Sri Lankan air force's bombing of an
orphanage. But neither of these events gained any media coverage, let alone emergency sessions of
the UN Security Council, just as the bloodbath in Iraq at the time, with its estimated 3,000 deaths a
month at the hands of Islamist militants sank into oblivion while the world focused on Lebanon, just
as the current slaughter in Syria and Iraq is presently ignored.

And what about the-then long-running genocide in Darfur, with its estimated 300,000 dead and at
least 2.5 million refugees? Or the war in the Congo, with over four million dead or driven from their
homes, or in Chechnya where an estimated 150,000- 160,000 have died and up to a third of the
population has been displaced, at the hands of the Russian military? None of these tragedies saw the
worldwide mass demonstrations as has been the case during the Lebanon and Gaza crises.

Nor should we forget that Hezbollah has been implicated in dozens of international terror attacks
from Brussels to Buenos Aires.

Indeed, the response to its July 18, 1994, terror attack on the Israeli- Argentine Mutual Association
(AMIA), a social center catering for Buenos Aires' large Jewish population, provides an illuminating
contrast to the relentless coverage of the 2006 events in Lebanon. It was the worst terror attack in
Argentina's history, killing 100 people and wounding more than 200. More died in this bombing
than in any single action in the 2006 Lebanese war. Yet the BBC, which prides itself on the
worldwide coverage, didn't find the atrocity worth mentioning in its evening news bulletin. When
confronted with a complaint by the normally timid Board of Deputies, British Jewry's umbrella
organization, the corporation offered an apology of sorts, blaming the omission on a particularly
busy day.

What were those daily events that could have possibly diverted the BBC's attention from the
Argentina massacre? A perusal of the papers reveals the British premier of Steven Spielberg's new
film, The Flintstones, attended by the prince of Wales. This was also the day when Gavin Sheerard-
Smith, caned and imprisoned for six months in Qatar after being convicted of buying and selling
alcohol, returned to Britain professing his innocence, and when David MacGregor, an agoraphobia
sufferer jailed for a fortnight for failing to pay poll tax arrears, had his sentenced quashed. An
eventful day indeed.

Given the BBC's indifference to the massacre of Argentinean Jews by Hezbollah, it is hardly
surprising that the corporation, along with much of the world's media, ignored the almost daily
rocket attacks by the same group on Israel's northern border, not to mention the constant
outpouring of rockets and missiles from Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal from the territory in 2005.

And why shouldn't they? The killing of Jews and the destruction or seizure of their worldly
properties is hardly news. For millennia Jewish blood has been cheap, if not costless, throughout the
Christian and Muslim worlds where the Jew became the epitome of powerlessness, a perpetual
punching bag and a scapegoat for whatever ills befell society. There is no reason, therefore, why
Israel shouldn't follow in the footsteps of these past generations, avoid antagonizing its Arab
neighbors and exercise restraint whenever attacked. But no, instead of knowing its place, the
insolent Jewish state has forfeited this historic role by exacting a price for Jewish blood and beating
the bullies who had hitherto been able to torment the Jews with impunity. This dramatic reversal of
history cannot but be immoral and unacceptable. Hence the global community outrage and hence
the world's media provision of unlimited resources to cover every minute detail of Israel's
"disproportionate" response, but none of the suffering and devastation on the Israeli side.

A profoundly depressing state of affairs indeed. But so long as the Palestinians continue to serve as
the latest lightning rod against the Jews, their supposed victimization reaffirming the latter's
millenarian demonization, Israel will never be allowed to defend itself without incurring the charge
of "disproportionate force" never directed against any other besieged democracy but evocative of
the classic anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as both domineering and wretched, both helpless and
bloodthirsty. In the words of the renowned American writer David Mamet, "The world was told Jews
used this blood in the performance of religious ceremonies. Now, it seems, Jews do not require the
blood for baking purposes, they merely delight to spill it on the ground."

The author is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, a
senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and at the Middle East Forum,
and the author most recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale, 2010).

It's Anti-Semitism, Stupid

by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
August 11, 2014

Let's admit it: Israel can never win the

media war against Hamas. No matter
what it does, no matter how hard it
tries.

Not because the Islamist terror group

that is raining missiles on its cities and
villages and using its own hapless
subjects as human shields is the
underdog in this conflict, but because the sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter)
is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bites-dog anomaly that cannot be
tolerated.

Imagine the following scenario: Thousands of foaming-at-the-mouth Jews rampaging through the
streets of London and Paris to protest the blitz bombing of their co-religionists by a murderous al-
Qaida/ISIS clone. They carry banners urging the killing of all Muslims wherever they are, hurl rocks
and petrol bombs at the police, set fire to mosques, destroy Muslim properties and establishments,
and attack all Muslims and Arabs coming their way.

Sound incredible? No doubt. For Jews in western (and Muslim) societies are be expected to know
their place: to act maturely, responsibly and compassionately, to never fight fire with fire, to always
understand the "other," to ever be ready to please, appease, and whenever necessary turn the other
cheek.

Not so Israel's enemies. With a sickening unanimity that has become all too familiar over the past
decades, whenever the Jewish state responded in strength to Palestinian terrorism be it rocket
attacks from Lebanon; West Bank-originated suicide bombing campaigns (euphemized as the Aqsa
intifada); or rocket, missile and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip hordes of hateful, violent
demonstrators flocked onto the streets of western cities throughout the world, not to call for peace
or an end of violence on all sides but to demonize a sovereign democracy for daring to protect its
citizens and to vilify and assault their own Jewish compatriots for no reason other than their
different religious and/or ethnic identity.

"Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for
things they didn't do," the late New York University professor Tony Judt lamented amid the growing
number of hate fests in the early 2000s. "The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and
elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at
Israel."

Anti-Semites, of course, have never been short of excuses for assaulting and killing Jews, and
infinitely larger numbers of Jews were exterminated shortly before the founding of the State of Israel
than in the 66 years of its existence, not to mention the millions massacred in Europe and the
Middle East since antiquity.

Neither did European Jew-haters await Israel's establishment to unleash on the remnants of the
Holocaust.

Anti-Semitic sentiments remained as pronounced as ever, especially in Eastern Europe, which

witnessed a few vicious pogroms shortly after the end of World War II. Even in Germany, Jews
found themselves attacked and abused in public with 60 percent of Germans condoning overt anti-
Jewish acts of violence.

Yet if this bleak record failed to prevent an astute student of European history like Judt from falling
for the canard that Israeli actions are the cause, rather than the pretext, for the worst wave of attacks
on Jews and Jewish targets in Europe since the 1930s, why should one be surprised by its
thoughtless dissemination by the international media? If it were not so appalling, one could even
marvel in the irony that 80 years after being forced to wear yellow stars so they could be targeted for
persecution, European Jews are being instructed to hide any signs of their Jewish identity, for their
own protection.

What makes this phenomenon particularly galling is that instead of clarifying in no uncertain terms
the unacceptability of this bigotry in civilized societies, western elites have treated these recurrent
hate fests as legitimate, if at times excessive, manifestations of Muslim solidarity with the
Palestinians, thus providing a safe environment for outright anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. (As
evidenced by the ongoing bloodbaths in Syria and Iraq, the notion of Muslim solidarity is a myth,
with far more Muslims killed throughout history by their co-religionists than by non-Muslims.) Just
as western politicians and the media have ignored Hamas's indiscriminate missile attacks on Israeli
civilians but jumped up and down over Israel's military response, so they have been bending over
backward since 9/11 to embrace their Muslim citizens and to accommodate their perceived needs
and sensitivities while remaining willfully blind to the fact that it is Jews, not Muslims, whose lives
have been most adversely affected by increasing hostile attitudes on the ground after all it is the
Jews, not Muslims of Europe, who are emigrating in record numbers to find a safe haven. It is Jews
who feel vulnerable to attack, and who have faced the most violence, and whose institutions from
synagogues to community buildings to Jewish newspaper offices have been under heavy police
guard for years, because of events in the Middle East no Muslim community in the West has had
to undertake similar security precautions.

The truth of the matter is that since anti-Semites have never really distinguished among Zionists,
Israelis and Jews (notwithstanding repeated protestations to the contrary), and since Israel is the
world's only Jewish state, it has been tacitly construed as epitomizing the worst characteristics
traditionally associated with Jews and has attracted the full brunt of anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred
hitherto reserved for individuals and communities, not least because it has reversed the millenarian
Jewish condition of dispersal, minority status and powerlessness. If prior to Israel's establishment
Jews were despised because of their wretchedness and helplessness, they have hitherto been reviled
because of their newly discovered physical and political empowerment.

So much so that 64 years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-
determination, the Jewish state remains the only state in the world whose right to self-defense,
indeed to national existence, is constantly challenged.

In Lord Byron's memorable words: "The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cove, mankind their
country Israel but the grave."

The author is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, a
senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and at the Middle East Forum,
and the author most recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale, 2010).