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An Indisputable Historical Fact: Decisions by Palestinian Leadership Led to "Nakba"

(Ha'aretz) Shlomo Avineri - Some facts of history really ought not to be left to historians, and any attempt to ignore them is morally flawed. It is a fact that on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. and not vice versa. It is also true that what is called the Nakba ("disaster") is the result of a political decision by the Palestinian leadership and the Arab states to reject the UN partition resolution, to try to prevent its implementation by force and to attack the Jewish community in the Land of Israel before and after the state's establishment. Usually, Arab discourse simply never mentions the partition resolution, just as it never mentions the violent opposition to its implementation. I suggest going to the newspaper archives and reading the headlines following the UN partition resolution. They are full of reports of Arab violence and the beginnings of armed Arab resistance to the establishment of the State of Israel, first by the Arab militias inside the country and later via the coordinated invasion by Arab armies when the British Mandate ended on May 15, 1948. Arab discourse prefers simply to wipe those historical facts from memory. The Nakba was the tragic result of an Arab political decision to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in the portion of the Land of Israel that had been under the British Mandate, just as the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary after 1945 was the tragic result of German aggression in 1939. In both cases, masses of innocent civilians paid the price of their leaders' aggression. But if anyone today tried to describe the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe as a "disaster" that had nothing to do with the Third Reich's aggression, he would rightly be called a neo-Nazi. The writer, professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, served as director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2014-05-08 00:00:00
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