--- Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 11:06:24AM -0500, Steve > Sloan II wrote: > > I was wondering if you could give a capsule summary > of that transfer. > I don't know much about it, but I have wondered how > it occurred. Most > importantly I'd like to know exactly when, how, and > by whom were > individual Palestinians evicted from their homes and > their land. If you > have a good reference on the web, that would be > helpful, too. > > Did it happen before the 1948 war? Did Britain go in > an kick > Palestinians out of their homes? > > Did it occur during the first Middle-East War? If > so, how did the > Israelis have the resources to go house to house to > evict the > Palestinians while fighting off virtually all the > other Middle-Eastern > countries? Or was it more of a scorched earth sort > of thing, the > Palestinians fleeing because their land and homes > were in the middle of > a war zone?
Well, I'm not Steve, but you're getting into what might be the single most contentious issue in all of historical research right now. I think one of Leon Uris's novels actually does a really good job of telling the story - unfortunately I can't remember which one. My best guesstimate of the slowly evolving historical consensus based on the revisionist work of the new generation of Israeli historians, who tend to be fairly critical of the earlier, very pro-Zionist interpretations, goes something like this: The Jews of the Middle East were a very large (some say majority) of the population of the area, despite the fact that their emigration to the region was extremely tightly restricted by the British, who did not similarly restrict Arab emigration. David Ben-Gurion was the most prominent leader (among many, including Begin, who was considerably more radical) of the Jewish forces opposing British rule of what was then called Palestine. In 1948 as British control over the area was steadily weakening (due to British weakness following the Second World War, among other things) Ben-Gurion and his fellows declared independence and the foundation of the state of Israel. The British basically chose not to get in the way (any longer). The surrounding states immediately declared war on Israel and invaded, calling on all Arabs in the region to leave until they could be repatriated behind the victorious Arab armies. The hot question is, of course, how many left voluntarily and how many left out of fear of Jewish attacks. Recent Israeli scholarship argues that the Irgun (Ben-Gurion's group, IIRC) has a pretty good record with regards to the Arab residents, while some of the more radical groups definitely did not. There was at least one massacre of innocent Arab residents in a village, and this certainly contributed to a general climate of fear among the Arab residents. On the whole, however, it does seem that most left voluntarily. At no point did Jewish forces engage in an ethnic cleansing campaign of forcing people out of their homes. Israeli sources have traditionally (until the past 10 years or so) argued that all the Palestinians left voluntarily, Arab ones that they were all forced out (conveniently ignoring the Arab governments urgings that they leave). Israel is a free society where academic dissent is encouraged and the open discussion of ideas is as easy as it is in the United States. Every Arab country is an autocratic police state. You tell me which one you think has more credibility :-) At any rate, the Arab governments invaded with armies that were quite well equipped and trained by Western forces. They were met by a lightly armed force that was largely made up of guerrilla who had fought the British. No one in the world had any doubt that the outcome would be a swift and certain Arab victory. Apparently no one told Ben-Gurion that, though. In what still ranks, to my mind, as one of the handful of most extraordinary military feats in human history, the Jewish forces successfully repulsed the Arab attacks, eventually doubling the size of the state of Israel, before a cease-fire was imposed by outside forces. Eliot Cohen's marvelous book _Supreme Command_ has a history of Ben-Gurion's efforts before the war to rebuild Irgun into a force capable of defeating the inevitable Arab attack. It was a remarkable achievement - he essentially held a several-month-long seminar on what Irgun would have to be, figured it out, then rebuilt it. Cohen believes that Ben-Gurion ranks with Lincoln and Churchill as among the greatest strategists in the history of democratic states. Steve Rosen (one of my profs at Harvard) believes that Lincoln might well be the finest strategist _ever_. I agree with that assessment - but Ben-Gurion isn't far behind and had, if anything, a more difficult task. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
