The Region: Self-made Nakba

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668667620&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

By BARRY RUBIN


It's become fashionable to match the celebration of Israel's founding (part of the media can't even admit that Israelis are celebrating) with Palestinians' marking of their 1948 "nakba," or catastrophe.

Yet whose fault is it that they didn't use those six decades constructively? And who killed the independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that was part of the partition plan? Answer: The Arab states and Palestinian leadership themselves.

The mourners were the murderers.

You can read details in my book, The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict. A summary: The key point is that in rejecting partition, in demanding everything and starting a war it could not win, the Arab side ensured endless conflict, the Palestinian refugee issue, and no Palestine. It wasn't murder - it was suicide.
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Or in the words of General John Glubb, commander of Jordan's army: "The politicians, the demagogues, the press, and the mob were in charge... Warnings went unheeded. Doubters were denounced as traitors."

Briefly, the British tried to help the Arabs win; the Americans to assist them in finding a last-minute way out; and the soon-to-be Israeli Jews were ready to have a Palestinian state alongside Israel if their neighbors had accepted it.

THE BRITISH government provided money and arms to Arab states (for Egypt, 40 warplanes and 300 troop carriers; for Iraq, planes as well as antiaircraft and antitank guns; for Saudi Arabia, a military training mission) while embargoing them to Israel. The British government also tipped off Arabs about the timing of its withdrawals (giving Arabs a head start to seize abandoned installations), subsidized the Arab League, blocked Jewish immigration and let British officers run Jordan's army in the war against Israel. <snip>

One thing that does often go unsaid is how badly the Palestinians were betrayed by their supposed Arab allies and the British. The truth is that while the Jews were willing to live side by side with a Palestinian state, the neighboring Arab kingdoms weren't. Jordan, with British connivance, planned to use the war to insure that there would never be a Palestinian sovereignty, and Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon intended to take whatever they could, and keep it. They were not going to allow a Palestinian state after the war; win, lose, or draw. The only way the Palestinians were going to achieve statehood (if that is what they wanted) was to avoid a war in the first place. Instead, they started one.

unless the resolution is the end of Israel, replaced by yet another Muslim theocracy.

I think it is time to be clear about this.

At least Hamas is honest about these goals.

. . well documented reality as expressed in this article - and the fabricated narrative (such as exemplified in the Barghuoti thread running now) and that is echoed constantly by so many members of this forum.

In almost every instance the actual verifiable history shows the fabricated narrative to be a cruel hoax. Yet, it is eagerly believed and indignantly supported by so many. One side or the other here is denying a huge segement of reality. After reading some of the anti-Israel comments in this forum - and seeing how strongly they are embraced and how angrily they are defended - I periodically question if maybe I'm the one who's denying the general major elements of the history of the conflict as laid out in this article.

So far I have seen no reasonable evidence, much less compelling evidence, that that is the case but I'll remain open to a reasoned argument from anyone who cares to make it.

history and then there is history.

Wow what an idiot.

The crime for me was that I even visited this thread. This will be the last time.

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it's called selective exposure. It's one of the strategies used to eliminate or decrease dissonance between two or more conflicting cognitions.