Even assuming that Palestinian nationalism was originally founded with cynical purposes (and I do not think that the facts bear this out - used by some for cynical purposes yes, but it was an indigenous example of ethno-nationalism) - that is, even assuming you are right - it has no bearing on the question.
The better analogy would be if someone was able to prove beyond a doubt that Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, was a con man. That simply does not prevent today’s Mormons from being sincerely religious, any more than if Jesus was a con man (or never existed at all) de-legitimizes modern Christians.
The problem with your “church of Malthus” analogy is that the same person doing the conning wants to reap the “benefit” of legitimacy. That is not the case with Palestinians (again, even assuming your historical contention could be proved).
And, of course, just to highlight the veracity of my claims:
Tony (on Morris’ research): “not only were the refugees expelled, but that it was a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing”
Morris (on Morris’ research): “What emerges from the wider reading that I did during the last few years before producing this new version of the book is that the loose talk, the occasional discussions about the subject, never amounted to anything concrete”
“There is the Arab charge that there was an overall Jewish policy of expulsion. This is what people like Sharif Kanaana continue to say, that there was an overall master plan for expulsion by the Zionists which was implemented in 1948. My feeling, based on the documentation, is that there was no blanket policy, no overall master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians. This is not what was implemented in 1948.”
In fact, even in the interview that Tony cited, he is dramatically misreading Morris’ words as he does not grok the context (nor the impact of the fact that Morris was responding on the spot to a somewhat hostile interviewer). What Morris actually means when he talks about expulsion is not driving Arabs out, but in refusing to allow them back in.
Morris: "once they had left their villages and the country, and then tried to come back and were barred - that is the point where one can talk of a policy of expulsion. "
I have to respectfully disagree here. The difference is what land demands made by the group have merit. If they are a pre-existing identity which was based around the specific patch of land that is now Israel, then it is wrong for Israel to refuse to address their claim to the land. If they are a later invention, then their land claims are baseless, and Israel is absolutely correct to not offer them a right of return to, or a state which includes portions of, Israel.
Well… what if they had a previous identity based around the land, but they didn’t actually own it. Remember, for centuries Jews have had an identity based around Israel/Jerusalem, too. It isn’t the concept of belonging that matters quite as much as both ownership and ‘facts on the ground’.
Well… no. Let’s say Johnny Palestinian owned a house which he held as personal property but didn’t particularly support self determination, and Petey Palestinian was only a renter but did support a Palestinian state, and Suzy Palestinian didn’t have any claim to land at all and was one of Bobby Palestinian’s wives. How do we sort that out?
The organized movement for Palestinian-landholding-as-a-nation was tainted by the rejectionist ideology and nature of the early PLO which was set on reclaiming “Palestine” from the Israelis while the West Bank and Gaza (and Jordan) were still Arab possessions. Of course, in '70, a Palestinian faction also tried to take over Jordan.
Unfortunately, the discussion is not ended once we determine what faction(s) held what view(s) at what points, and frankly it’s a bit irrelevant at this point. A negotiated compromise will have to be based on a just and lasting peace, and not so much on whether or not the Grand Mufti was a schmuck.
You are mixing cause and effect here. A compromise is not “based on a just and lasting peace”. The “just and lasting peace” may be based on compromise. Not in this area of the world, though. It will never happen. The Arabs refuse to consider Jews’ supremacy on any piece of the land that they consider theirs. And Jews refuse to become dhimmis.
I don’t agree with this premise. A “legitimate” pre-existing identity based on a specific patch of land, no matter how genuine, does not of necessity confer rights to it.
After all, Jews themselves had a “legitimate” pre-existing identity based on attachement to what is now Israel. If no-one ever started the Zionist project, that would not have sufficed to give them rights. “Next year in Jerusalem” is not enough.
The problem here is that of course more than one group can have legitimate pre-existing identification.
What confers rights, in my opinion, is provable ownership, subject to some notion of historical “latches” (a common-law term meaning that rights however legitimate fade over time). Israelis have rights to Israel because they are there. Palestinians who are not Israelis but whose ancestors used to own bits in Israel have rights, fading over time, to compensation for their loss.
This formula makes sense of the numerous historical dislocations which have occurred in pretty well every nation. We cannot at this juncture hand the US back to the Native Americans even if their dispossession was fully unjust; nor can we remove the Poles from what was once Prussia or return the Pakistanis to India.
Again, as in the notion I describe above, I would not agree with that. If a particular Palestinian identified with pan-Arabism and not Palestinian nationalism, he’d be just as entitled to compensation.
Note I say “compensation” and not (say) moving the borders. Rights belong to individuals. Borders are matters of peace and war and political compromise.
I have neither your apparently infinite time, nor your desperate need for approval, so I’ll just let this stand as an example of how even when you cherry-pick your quotes, they say the opposite of what you claim.
My claim was that according to Morris, the Palestinians were driven out, rather than voluntarily leaving. Your unfortunate example shows that they indeed left for a multiplicity of reasons: being fired at, being bombed, being massacred, and avoiding a full-scale battle. Sounds voluntary to me!
The book I cited clearly shows that the Palestinians were driven out, and the interview I cited clearly shows that Morris called it ethnic cleansing. In your desperation, besides all the innuendo about my nefarious use of Jewish or Palestinian sources (and I’m still not clear on which you think is worse), you blame me for not anticipating every nuance he put on that in subsequent books and interviews. You earlier claimed that he never said there was an expulsion, and now you triumphantly claim vindication when in a later interview, he clearly says the Palestinians were driven out, but that the expulsion was, in his view, not technically complete until they were not allowed to return.
But they weren’t allowed to return, were they, so how is that not an expulsion?
“In general, the Arabs fled as a result of direct Jewish attack or an attack in the neighborhood. It was the same in the countryside and towns. So one can probably safely say that, though there were other reasons, the major precipitant to the flight of the Arabs of Palestine throughout the war was Jewish attack or what was felt to be the threat of imminent attack by Jewish forces.”
In other words, they were driven out. Knowing you, you’ll move heaven and earth to find an example of a Palestinian who left voluntarily, and then make another 20 posts claiming vindication, but you’re fooling only yourself.
You also seem incapable of grasping the difference between a formal policy and a deliberate policy. I never claimed that expulsion was written into the Israeli constitution, I just claimed that it was a deliberate policy. And Morris confirms that, in the same source:
“On the 6th or 7th of February 1948, Ben Gurion gives a speech in which he says that in western Jerusalem there were no Arabs left anywhere. And he adds this sentence - and this is the crucial point at which I think he understands what is happening - if we continue as we are - in other words, fighting - and we hold fast to our positions and fight properly, there will be vast demographic changes throughout the country. This is what happened in Jerusalem. It will happen elsewhere around the country. These are Ben-Gurion’s words.
At this point, he begins to think of exploiting the situation. If they are already moving by themselves without a Jewish policy of moving them, per¬haps with a little more deliberate nudging we can get even more to leave. So in terms of the leader of the Yishllv Oewish community), the vital change I think, if there is a change, occurs in February 1948. He understands that we have to exploit the situation to establish the Jewish state and to increase its ter¬ritory beyond what the United Nations had earmarked for Jewish statehood.
The change among other leaders was slower. Ben-Gurion acted as a lob¬byist and was also able to instruct and order the military establishment under his command about what he wanted. You can see the change occur¬ring among other Israeli leaders and officials from April onwards. Up to then, they were thinking in terms of the Arabs staying. Then they, too, adopted the idea of exploiting the military situation in order to evacuate the Arabs.”
I don’t know what else to call driving Arabs out, and then not letting them back, based on a strategy originating with Ben-Gurion, other than a deliberate policy of expulsion.
But nobody else is following this, and I know you will never admit you’re wrong, so I’m done.
TonySinclair, your problem (insofar as I understand the debate) is that you are attempting to make a moral point - that the Israelis were responsible for the Palestinians leaving, as a “a deliberate policy of expulsion”.
However, the cites you & Finn keep posting do not show that.
What they show, is that the Palestinian civilians left, generally speaking, because they were afraid of the consequences of the battles raging around them [I assume the Israeli civilians did not leave for the same reason because they had nowhere to go].
This makes good factual sense - hell, if I was a Palestinian in that time & place, I’d have left too, for the same reason. Especially as the smart money was on the Israelis being defeated by the numerous Arab armies facing them, but after what looked to be a grim fight.
No doubt some Israeli leaders were delighted to see Arab civilians leaving, and said so. Others were not. What you are missing was just how chaotic and close-to-the-wire the '48 war was. Mostly what the Israeli leaders cared about was surviving.
The notion that the Israelis engaged in a deliberate policy of expulsion has been repeatedly canvassed by historians. The problem has always been that, because of the chaotic nature of the battle, the contradictory things said by the actors on all sides at the time and since, and the high degree of polemics surrounding the matter afterwards, people have subsequently been able to read whatever they wanted into the record. Morris attempted to settle the matter by looking into specific cases, and overall his conclusions were that the Arab civilians left as a consequence of the battles (including some attrocities committed by Israelis), but that there was not a deliberate policy of expulsion.
And as I’ve cited and quoted, Morris’ own words put paid to your claims. This is repetitive.
Deliberate cherrypicking. Readers can check to see that is the example of one town, and readers can also realize that if a group of people flee from a war, that they are not actually being ‘expelled’ by anybody. This is repetitive as well, and you have yet to provide even the pretense of a cogent argument for how people leaving a war zone of their own free will are really being “expelled”.
Fictional on both counts. You didn’t cite the book, I did. You cited one blurb and one interview. I’ve cited and quotes Morris’ own work which shows that the vast majority was not driven out, and I’ve already shown you that not only did Morris not call it “ethnic cleansing” (the interviewer did), he has actually disputed, in print, the claim that it was ethnic cleansing. If you are unable to remedy your errors even when directly contradicted by facts, your argument is, perforce, less than worthless. It is harmful.
I explained this to you as well. Hit Control-F and enter “Token Jew” as well as "you used an unreliable, inaccurate, partisan source ".
Fictional on multiple counts. And people can read the cites to see that you’re wrong, so it’s an odd tactic. Morris makes clear that he is not saying that they were driven out, but that they left to avoid a war zone. You are also wildly distorting what he means when he said that they were “expelled”, which quite apart from “driven out” means “refused re-entry”. As for it being “not technically complete until…” you just invented that. He states clearly that only once the refugees were denied reentry could we talk abut a policy of expulsion. Not that there was one but that it was completed by refusal of reentry. This is basic and yet again, your argument’s foundation on fiction and error removes whatever positive gain you think it may provide.
Yes… I quoted and cited that. And no, that does not mean that they were driven out. As much as you try to weave the actual facts into your narrative, “left a war zone” does not mean “driven out”. Yet again, exactly as I said and Morris’ research confirms: the vast majority of Palestinians left due to war raging in/around their homes, which is perfectly understandable. There was no policy of expulsion, despite your claim. Morris says so explicitly.
There is no such difference and there was no such policy. Formal, informal, or double-secret-probation. Likewise, you are materially misrepresenting Ben Gurion’s words. He stated that if there was fighting, that there would be demographic changes. That does not state that the policy is to expel residents or cause demographic changes, but that he realized that as a result of the policy of self-defense, there would be demographic changes. Again, this is very, very basic logic. If I tell you “If you keep eating ice cream, you’ll get fat.” obviously I am telling you what the consequence is, not announcing that your plan all along is to pork up rather than enjoying ice cream. The fallacy you’re using, by the way, is called Affirming the Consequent.
You are, likewise, materially distorting Morris’ actual argument. Saying that some of the proto-Israeli leadership decided that “with a little more deliberate nudging we can get even more to leave” is a policy of expulsion is an absurdity. A teacher who, for example, makes his tests very hard so as to get lazy students to drop his class is not, in fact, “expelling” his students from his class.
The facts show you are wrong. You can admit it and move on, if you’d like. Your fictional narrative does a grave disservice to the causes of peace and factual accuracy. That the proto-Israelis did indeed expel the residents of numerous villages in accordance with Plan D is fact. You have been shown that 10’s of thousands left on the own accord before war even started, and yet you still haven’t modified your claim that they, too, were “expelled”.
Retract your errors, fix them, move on.
It’s simple.
No, I’m not so concerned about the morality, in the context of a brutal war. I actually think expulsion was not as bad as what the Jews could have done, given their military superiority. My original purpose was just to correct a misstatement.
Someone posted the history of the Mid-East conflict in a few lines, which seemed to think that the Balfour Declaration was justification for founding modern Israel, and I posted a brief rebuttal. After I posted it, I was rereading his post, and I decided to respond to another one of his points, namely: “In 1948 the United Nations created Israel and Palestine. Immediately the Arab nations attacked. The Palestinian Arabs were told to temporarily get out with promises of spoils of war once it was all over.”
I had read Benny Morris’s book some 20 years ago, so I edited my post to add that a Jewish historian had refuted the idea that the Palestinian exodus was largely voluntary. At first I could remember neither the title or author, but then “Morris” popped into my head, and I thought it would be good to give a link to the actual book. But by this time, my post was over four minutes old, so I knew I only had seconds, and grabbed the first link that came up in my google search for the book and added it to the post. If the mods can trace post edits, they can verify at least the posting sequence.
OK so far. People could read the book or not, as they chose. But after I posted, and too late to edit, I noticed that the link was to a tendentious website, and apologized for it, and also posted an excerpt of an interview with Morris, to show that he was actually very hard line with regard to Palestinians, but still had the intellectual integrity to acknowledge that they were driven out.
Finnagain took it upon himself to decide that inadvertent use of a Palestinian link showed that I was, in his words, “slimy,” and that this was further confirmed by the fact that I mentioned Morris was Jewish, which in his mind was a very racist thing to do.
It escalated from there. I don’t know what his problem is, and I don’t care. I think I (and, inadvertently, he) have provided abundant evidence to show that, even if a policy of expulsion was not the cornerstone of the original master plan of Herzl in 1895, it had certainly become a strategy of Ben-Gurion’s by early 1948.
People are, of course, entitled to disagree. They are not entitled to call me a slimy racist.
Including, ironically enough, a tacit claim that gentiles would somehow have their civil and religious rights violated by living in a Jewish state but not a word on whether or not Jews would have those same rights violated by living in a Muslim state.
“But I got a black man to talk about Africa. Why is the argument not stronger?”
Again, it does not support your case when you are getting basic facts wrong about what’s happened in this thread, let alone what happened half a world away more than half a century ago. I pointed out that your tactic was (and still is) slimy. I did not call ‘you’ slimy. I also pointed out that your argument is awful. That does not mean I called you an awful person. Oh, and pointing out that you’ve gotten yet another material fact absurdly wrong, I did not call your argument slimy because you cited an awful website, I said “It’s profoundly slimy to point to the religion of someone as if it adds weight to the argument. Especially so since you’re obviously citing someone’s Jewishness because, by some strange alchemy, that places more weight on that person’s testimony.”
Again, if your argument contains imagined persecution and fictional allegations of racism, your argument should not be taken seriously when it purports to analyze actual examples of racism and actual persecution. I have not called you a racist. I did point out that by arguing that a Jewish historian somehow was important (and using the label “Jewish” rather than “Israeli”) you were evincing that you were conceiving of the issue in racial terms. Conceiving of an issue in racial terms does not make one a racist by necessity.
And yet again:
Morris (on Morris’ research): “What emerges from the wider reading that I did during the last few years before producing this new version of the book is that the loose talk, the occasional discussions about the subject, never amounted to anything concrete”
“There is the Arab charge that there was an overall Jewish policy of expulsion. This is what people like Sharif Kanaana continue to say, that there was an overall master plan for expulsion by the Zionists which was implemented in 1948. My feeling, based on the documentation, is that there was no blanket policy, no overall master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians. This is not what was implemented in 1948.”
That’s absolutely the case with the “Palestinians.” Why else would they want a “Palestinian State” on the West Bank but announce in advance that “Palestinians” living in “refugee camps” on the West Bank will not get citizenship?
What possible legitimate reason is there for such a decision?
Thank you for your response, which raises a couple questions for me:
First, are you saying that Rashid Khalidi is sufficiently authoritative that his conclusions should be accepted without scrutiny of the original sources?
Second, if there was a serious push for “Palestinian” self-determination in the 20s and 30s, do you agree that there would have been congresses, organizations, newspaper reports, and other indicia just like there were Zionist congresses, Zionist organizations, and coverage of these events?
No. Infighting, especially by the Grand Mufti’s cronies, made the affair into one long, drawn out Night of Long Knives. There were numerous clans/groups with their own ideas on how self determination should play out and unlike the Zionists, they never were a unified force. If I’m lazy I may be able to look up some citations a bit late.r
In that case, I would say that you have not sustained your claim.
If there weren’t congresses, rallies, organizations, etc., then it’s extremely hard to believe that there was a serious push for Palestinian self-determination at that time.
Let me ask you a slightly different question: In the 1920s and 1930s, what was the most prominent group or organization which pushed for “Palestinian” self-determination?