• Culture
• Cyber Rav
• Editor's Commentary
• Events
• Holidays
• News
• Other Viewpoints
• Shalom
• Travel
• Archives

• Brotherhood
• Business
• Community
• Culture
• Cyber Rav
• Editorials
• Health
• Letter to the Editor
• News
• People
• Rabbi's Message
• Travel

"Return" as Weapon to Destroy Israel

by Staff Writer

"Return" or the "Palestinian Law" of return, the idea to re-settle 3.5 million refugees inside Israel or even less is the P.L.O. old-new weapon of destruction, the elimination of the Jewish majority in Israel, and the end of the Zionist idea. Arab propaganda using human rights organization asks for justice ignoring the roots of this so called 'refugee problem.'

The following items are documented responses to Palestinian refugees by Arab and other sources:

On April 23, 1948 Jamal Husseini, acting chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher committee (AHC), told the UN Security Council: "The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce...They preferred to abandon their homes, belongings and everything they possessed."

On September 6, 1948, the Beirut Daily Telegraph quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the AHC as saying: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously..."

On October 2, 1948, the London Economist reported, in an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa's Arabs: "There is little doubt that the most potent of the factors (in the flight) were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit... And it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."

The Jordanian daily Falastin wrote on February 19, 1949: "The Arab states... encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies." On June 8, 1951, Habib Issa, secretary-general of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily al-Hoda that in 1948, Azzam Pasha, then League secretary, has "assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states."

On April 9, 1953, the Jordanian daily al-Urdun quoted a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying: "For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are responsible, because of the dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs... they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy." Another refugee told the Jordanian daily a-Difaa on September 6, 1954: "The Arab governments told us, 'Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in."

In the March 1976 issue of Falastin a-Thaura, then the official journal of the Bierut-based PLO, Mahmud Abbas ("Abu Mazen"), PLO spokesman, wrote: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."

The Prime Minister of Syria in 1948, Khaled al-Azem, in his memoirs, published in 1973, listed what he thought were the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948: "...the fifth factor was the call by the Arab governments to inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and leave for the bordering Arab countries... We bought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land."

Following a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported the following: "But while they express no bitterness against the Jews... they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes." - British Foreign Office Document #371/75342/XC/A/4991

On February 19, 1978, Joan Peters interviewed the U.S. Catholic Conference's expert on refugees, John McCarthy, who told her: "...I've worked in the Palestinian structure, trying to say, 'Let's resettle these people.' The governments of Egypt and so, they all said: 'Wait a while,' or 'No, we won't do it. The only place they're going to resettle is back in Israel, right or wrong.' You must remember - well - these people are simply pawns... You must remember one thing: the Arab countries don't want to take Arabs..."

Richard Meinertzhagen was a colonel in British Intelligence, and during the first years after the British conquest of "Palestine" from the Turks in 1917 served in our region and was deeply knowledgeable about events here. "Unfortunately," his intimate knowledge of British shenanigans at the time turned him into an ardent Christian Zionist, which after a bit cost him his assignment here. He published a fascinating "Middle East Diary," from which the following January 15, 1951 entry is taken, regarding a conversation he had with an unnamed Lebanese contractor in Kuwait: "...I remarked, 'Why do not you Arabs, with all your resources from oil, do something for these wretched refugees from Palestine?' 'Good God,' he said, 'do you really think we are doing to destroy the finest propaganda we possess: it's a gold mine... They are just human rubbish but a political gold mine.' In slightly different language I received identical views from other Arabs."