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Mostly we have avoided this topic, and I prefer not to fight, but I do want to make a few comments: One, Nazis did not remove Jews, they exterminated them; Two, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and other prominent Arabs in the region were open Nazi sympathizers; Three, Turkish census figures show rough parity among the two populations (Jewish and Arab) by about the turn of the century; Four, although there were older families in the area, the Turkish census shows that there was a movement of Arab immigrants into the area in the last half of the 19th century; Five, it was the practice of the Jewish community to buy, not steal, land from the Arabs before war broke out; Six, the Arab states reacted to independence with a call for total annihilation of the Jews in Israel; Seven, it was not just real estate, but the ancestral homeland of the Jews, from which they had been expelled by Rome. Israel, and most historians, agree that most Palestinians left voluntarily at the advice of the Arab League, to get out of the way while the Jews were "driven into the sea". However, it seems that some factions of the Irgun, the more radical paramilitary force, used this as a pretext to drive out some villagers, so they are not guiltless. What one thinks of the subsequent history depends, at least in part, on what one thinks of the implacable hostility of the Arab powers, which antedated the Palestinian refugee problem or quasi- annexation...... |
