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The Arabs Should Take a Good Hard Look in the Mirror
(Ha'aretz) Shlomo Avineri - The very concept of Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe or disaster - as though the events of 1948 were a natural disaster rather than the result of human action - blurs the historical context of the events. The so-called Nakba was not a natural disaster. It was the outcome of military and political defeat resulting from political decisions for which specific people were responsible. One sometimes hears comparisons between the Nakba and the Holocaust. But the very comparison is morally obtuse: What happened to the Palestinians from 1947 to 1948 was the result of a war in which they were defeated, while the Holocaust was the planned, methodical mass murder of civilians. The 6 million Jews of Europe who were killed in the Holocaust had not gone to war against Germany. German Jews were in fact good German patriots. The Palestinian discourse does not address the fact that Arab political decisions are what brought the terrible disaster down on the Palestinians. To this day there is no willingness to deal with a simple fact: The decision to go to war against the UN resolution to partition Mandatory Palestine was a terrible political and moral mistake on the part of the Arab world. If the Palestinians and the Arab countries had accepted the partition plan, the Arab state of Falastin would have been established in 1948 and there would have been no refugee problem. It was not the establishment of the State of Israel that created the refugee problem, but rather the fact that the Arabs went to war against the establishment of a Jewish state in part of Palestine. When you go to war and lose, there are consequences. The writer, professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, served as director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry.