Don Krausz
An online article by pro-Palestinian Mahmoud Issa presents a different picture and highlights, inter alia, Daitz’s selectiveness of facts. She writes of the results of the Arab and Palestinian totally unprovoked aggression.
The UN partitioned Palestine in 1947 and on May 14 1948 Israel declared its independence. It was immediately invaded by the established armies of five Arab states and had to endure barbaric and merciless attacks from its Palestinian neighbours.
At the time of this attack the secretary of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, proclaimed that “this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre…”
Well before Israel’s establishment in May 1948, the British commander of the Jordanian Legion, General Glubb “Pasha”, reported: “That in January ’48 the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria and Jordan. They were in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine.”
When Israel declared independence, its army did not have a single cannon, tank or fighter plane. There was an arms embargo against the fledgling country but not against its aggressors, the Arab states. The Arabs had no difficulty in obtaining all the weapons they needed. (Sachar, p 452.)
This is in contrast to Mahmoud Issa’s statement that the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Lubya were assaulted by Israeli cannon, planes and armoured vehicles.
Daitz writes of the expulsion of 800 000 Palestinians by Israel “in an act of ethnic cleansing”. She also accuses the Jewish National Fund of being complicit in this act.
Significantly she omits to mention the attacks on the Jewish inhabitants of neighbouring Muslim countries, their expropriation and expulsion numbering more than 750 000 of which most were absorbed by Israel.
And the Jewish National Fund (JNF)? In his 1867 account of a visit to the Holy Land Mark Twain described the country as a desert with hardly an inhabitant to be seen outside of the cities. Hardly a tree, malaria infested swamps and little agriculture. Nowadays the Jews are renowned for having made the desert bloom and for that we can thank the JNF.
The cost to Israel was enormous. “Many of its most productive fields lay gutted. The citrus groves, the basis of the Jewish economy, were largely destroyed. (Sachar p 452). 6 000 Israelis were killed out of a population of 650 000; 30 000 were wounded. (British Encyclopaedia. p142).
Not a word thereof by Daitz.
Killarney, Johannesburg
abu mamzer
May 22, 2015 at 12:55 am
‘The earth of Lavi(Lubya in the mishna and Talmud,as a Jewish inn) is soaked with the blood of 21 brave Israeli Golani soldiers and the film The village under the forest by the eponymous Heid Gruenbaum(who rather believes in deforestation than afforestation) is one big thumbsuck sanitizing a staging post of the arab liberation army in lower Galilee to attack Jews, in 194, as a peaceful village where even peaceful sheep were massacred .Her film is untrue,unresearched and a deft piece of pure pro-Palestinian propaganda,while her visceral and long santioned anti Zionism as well as that of Saul Musker (by signing other anti-Israeli group protests,publically ) sticks out embarrassingly.’
nat cheiman
May 22, 2015 at 5:19 pm
‘People like Daitz start at a point in time that suits their argument. Expediently avoiding the pitfalls of 4000 years ago when the Romans kicked butt and chased the Jews out of the Galillee.Daitz should read up on her history because the world existed before 1948.
Dayan made a HUGE mistake in not allowing the Palestinians to go to Jordan after the 1967 war.
There would not be this problem with the West Bank or Gaza today.
However, let me predict that because of the war in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya etc, and because of the savagery and destruction evinced by IS, the next war with Hamas and Hezbollah is going to end the Palestinian question once and for all. The Arabs that have made war against Israel in the past have extremely short memories. Perhaps its the desert or maybe the sun.’