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The New York Times Misrepresents the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

(Quillette) Prof. Benny Morris - The underlying narrative of the New York Times magazine piece of Feb. 6, 2024, "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948," is that the Palestinians have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This, plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments, has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab-Israeli war and its origins. The Times article consists of a lengthy "discussion" between six Arab and Jewish scholars, five of whom can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. The three Arab panelists almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line. The drift of the Times article is that the innocent Arabs of Palestine just sat back and watched, as suffering victims, as the Zionists, Israel, and some international actors, principally Great Britain, did their worst. This is pure nonsense. Throughout the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Palestine's Arabs consistently rejected all proposals for a political compromise and flatly demanded all of Palestine, "from the river to the sea." In April 1920, May 1921, and August 1929, Arab mobs, whose passions had been whipped up by religious and political leaders, attacked their Jewish neighbors and passers-by in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Safad, killing dozens in a succession of pogroms. (The Times studiously avoids this word, referring to them only as "assaults.") Times staff writer Emily Bazelon says the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem "turned into a deadly riot," in which "five Jews and four Arabs [were] killed." She fails to mention that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews, or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted "we will drink the blood of the Jews." After three days of rampage and despoliation, British mandate security forces finally restored order, killing all or most of the four Arabs Bazelon mentions in the process. The findings of the subsequent British investigation are included in the July 1920 Palin Report, which states: "All the evidence goes to show that these [Arab] attacks were of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women and children - frequently in the back." The 1948 War, Bazelon explains, simply "broke out." What actually happened is that the Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states rejected the UN General Assembly partition proposal of Nov. 29, 1947, and the following day, terrorists ambushed two Jewish buses near Tel Aviv and snipers fired at Jewish passers-by in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In May 1948, the armies of the neighboring Arab states invaded the country. Canadian Derek Penslar of Harvard University, one of the three Jewish panelists, claims that "between 9,000 and 12,000 Palestinians fought for the Allied forces in World War II." In fact, as far as I know, it is doubtful whether any Palestine Arabs actually "fought" during the war, though perhaps some 6,000 of Palestine's 1.2 million Arabs signed up with the British and served as cooks, drivers, or guards in British installations in Palestine. By comparison, 28,000 of Palestine's Jews - out of a population of 550,000 - joined the British army, and many actually fought in North Africa and Italy in 1941-1945. The writer is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University.
2024-02-29 00:00:00
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