Madam, - Two recent indictments of Israel in your pages, based on gross distortion of historical events, deserve an answer. Hikmat Ajjuri (Letters, January 12th) is evidently hoping to exploit the widespread ignorance of Israel's early history to sustain his charge of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the nascent Israeli state in 1948.
Vincent Browne (Opinion, January 16th) reaches into the depths of his own ignorance to conjure up what can only be described as an anti-Israel hate piece. The man who told us that last summer's attempt to incinerate travellers at Glasgow airport was a mere matter of "minor fire damage to a terminal" by "otherwise decent, compassionate people" rewrites history to claim that the present conflict derives from a "violent plantation" of Palestinian lands by immigrant "invader" Jews.
Let us recall the events of the time. Immediately after the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947, attacks on Jews by Arabs began. Within three months, 426 Jews had been killed (284 Arabs were killed by Jews in self-defence and retaliatory attacks). By late February 1948, a 5,000-strong volunteer "Arab Liberation Army", composed of Syrians, Iraqis and Bosnian Muslims, with a scattering of Nazi SS veterans, had entered northern Palestine. Further south were a 5,000-strong local militia and 2,000 Muslim Brotherhood volunteers from Egypt. By late March they controlled most of the main roads, threatening to isolate the Jewish cities and making it impossible for supply convoys to reach Jerusalem's Jewish population.
In the fierce fighting of April 1948 for the Jerusalem roads, the outgunned Israelis enacted their "Plan D", drawn up to counter an Arab invasion. Its text states that its primary goal was "to gain control of the areas of the Hebrew state and defend its borders". It did envisage clearing operations against certain villages in order to prevent their being used as enemy bases. It added: "In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state". This, I submit, is the language of military necessity, not of ethnic cleansing.
It must be set alongside the efforts elsewhere of Israelis to persuade Palestinians to stay. After the April 1948 capture of Haifa, Jewish leaders, including the city's mayor, pleaded unsuccessfully with 65,000 Arabs not to leave the city. The local Federation of Jewish Workers appealed to them: "Do not fear. Do not destroy your homes with your own hands. . .Do not bring tragedy upon yourselves by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens. . ." When the Jewish forces' capture of Tiberias was followed by the evacuation (supervised by the British) of 6,000 Arabs, the Jewish Community Council stated: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course. . .Let no citizen touch their property."
Prof Benny Morris's accounts are recognised as both detailed and even-handed. In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), he concedes that "the displacement of Arabs. . .from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish state was inherent in Zionist ideology". But he adds that "war, and not design, Jewish or Arab, gave birth to the Palestinian refugee problem. . .there was no pre-war Zionist plan to expel 'the Arabs' from Palestine or the areas of the emergent Jewish State. . .Nor was the pre-war 'transfer' thinking ever translated, in the course of the war, into an agreed, systematic policy of expulsion" (p. 588).
As for Mr Browne's "violent plantation", over 70 per cent of Palestine's land in 1947 was owned by the British Mandate government, which had acquired it from the Turks. Part of it later passed directly to the Israeli state. Jews owned 9 per cent of the land, most of it (387,500 of 463,000 acres) bought from Arabs, mainly large landowners (the rest from the Mandate and various churches). Less than 18 per cent of the total was owned by Arabs who fled in the 1948-9 war.
For real ethnic cleansing intent and practice, we need to turn to the other side. The invasion by six Arab armies in May 1948 was preceded by the pronouncement of Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades".
"Muslim brothers. . .murder the Jews, murder them all" was the cry of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. This Palestinian despot had orchestrated the August 1929 massacre of 133 Jews throughout Palestine, including 59 unarmed Jews in Hebron. Al-Husseini, the man whom Yasser Arafat would call "Uncle", spent the war years in Berlin, where he pleaded with Hitler to extend the Final Solution to the Jews of Palestine. Had the Führer, or the Mufti after him, been victorious, there can be little doubt as to the likely fate of those Jews. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.
