Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

It isn't only "Who Started?" - it is "Who wanted to live in peace?"
Last minute chance to vote in the Blog-Off!
1960's style video of Mavi Marmara "peace activists"
Stunning IMAX aerial video footage of Israel
80% of PalArab "refugees" have citizenship!
Hamas not happy with "prisoner Facebook" story
Poster: How can you make peace with those...

It isn't only "Who Started?" - it is "Who wanted to live in peace?"

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 07:32 PM PDT

Last week, Shlomo Avineri wrote a nice essay in Ha'aretz called "The truth should be taught about the 1948 war." Excerpts:

In recent debates about the Palestinian "Nakba," the claim has been made that there are two "narratives," an Israeli one and a Palestinian one, and we should pay attention to both of them. That, of course, is true: Alongside the Israeli-Zionist claims regarding the Jewish people's connection to its historic homeland and the Jews' miserable situation, there are Palestinian claims that regard the Jews as a religious group only and Zionism as an imperialist movement.

But above and beyond these claims is the simple fact - and it is a fact, not a "narrative" - that in 1947, the Zionist movement accepted the United Nations partition plan, whereas the Arab side rejected it and went to war against it. A decision to go to war has consequences, just as it did in 1939 or 1941.

The importance of this distinction becomes clear upon perusing the op-ed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently published in The New York Times. Abbas mentioned the partition decision in his article, but said not one single word about the facts - who accepted it and who rejected it. He merely wrote that "Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs."

That is like those Germans who talk about the horrors of the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945, but fail to mention the Nazi attack on Poland, or the Japanese who talk about Hiroshima, but fail to mention their attack on Pearl Harbor. That is not a "narrative," it is simply not telling the truth. Effects cannot be divorced from causes.

The pain of the other should be understood and respected, and attempts to prevent Palestinians from mentioning the Nakba are foolish and immoral: Nobody prevents the descendants of the German refugees from Eastern Europe from communing with their suffering.

But just as nobody, even in German schools, would dream of teaching the German "narrative" regarding World War II, the 1948 war should also not be taught as a battle between narratives. In the final analysis, there is a historical truth. And without ignoring the suffering of the other, that is how such sensitive issues must be taught.

Joseph Dana, a prominent anti-Zionist writer, takes issue with Avineri:

The problem with Avineri's answer to the question of "who's to blame for the beginning of the war in 1948″ is that politically speaking, the question itself is no longer relevant.

...But what caused the war isn't and has never been the true challenge of the Nakba. The true challenge is what happened after the war was caused. Even if we accept Avineri's argument that "they started", it's still unclear why Israel had to expel neighborhoods, towns and villages; and if, somehow, we accepted that, it's very unclear why this had to be accompanied by massacres; and even if we accept (heaven forbids) that massacres and expulsions happen in wars, no amount of "they started" can excuse the still-standing ban on the refugees and survivors to return.

Since this is a little discussed aspect of Israel's War of Independence, and since Israel's detractors like to hold up "The Nakba" as one of the biggest single tragedies of the twentieth century, it is worthwhile to answer this.

While this is a much bigger topic than can be dealt with adequately in a blog post, I would like to republish a Palestine Post article by Dorothy Bar-Adon from August 17th, 1948, where she describes exactly why the Arab residents of Zer'in - her neighbors, who she knew by name and was on friendly terms with - should not be allowed back.

The reason is simple. The Arabs that she thought were her friends happily and lustily took up arms against the Jews. Their women encouraged them with war cries that the Jews in the valley below could clearly hear. The idea of allowing a hostile population back where they could again menace their Jewish neighbors was out of the question.

Read this article, and you can see that the Jews who didn't let their Arab neighbors back were not monsters, but were acting out of real fear and a very definite sense of self-preservation. This account is obviously not written by someone trying to rewrite history and fit it into 21st century ideas of morality; it was written by a real human being who had real feelings for the Arabs of the village.

The anecdote about the paralyzed Arab woman whose family deserted her when they fled, and who was taken care of by Jewish troops, says more than any number of history books about the 1948 war.

(This article originally mentioned on this blog in 2006.)

Last minute chance to vote in the Blog-Off!

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 11:18 AM PDT

If you are a procrastinator, waiting to the very last minute to vote (hopefully for me) at the Israellycool Pro-Israel Blog Off Finals, your time is almost up.

Just imagine how much more I'd be able to blog with a brand new iPad! :)

I'm hoping to make the vote closer than it is.

Click on this link now and vote!

(If it doesn't work, try it with a different browser; people have been having problems all week.)

And...Happy Father's Day!

1960's style video of Mavi Marmara "peace activists"

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 10:20 AM PDT

Something to link to every time an Israel-hater says that "Israel killed nine peace activists in cold blood" on the Mavi Marmara.

Peace and love, baby.

Stunning IMAX aerial video footage of Israel

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 08:46 AM PDT

Jerusalem | Filmed in Imax 3D from JerusalemGiantScreen on Vimeo.

It looks good here, but click on the HD button and watch it, full screen, on Vimeo. Really, really beautiful.

A full-length version is going to be released as an IMAX 3-D movie in 2013.

(h/t Y. Medad)

80% of PalArab "refugees" have citizenship!

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 07:14 AM PDT

On the eve of World Refugee Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released some interesting numbers. From Wafa:

According to UNRWA records, registered Palestinian refugees totaled 4.8 million in 2010: 41.6% in Jordan, 23.2% in the Gaza Strip, 16.4% in the West Bank, 9.9% in Syria and 8.9% in Lebanon.

In the Palestinian Territory, refugees represent 43.4% of the total population in 2011, with 29.7% of them in the West Bank and 67.3% in the Gaza Strip.

The vast majority of "refugees" living in Jordan have had Jordanian citizenship since 1950, meaning that they cannot be considered refugees in any sense of the word - except for UNRWA's tortured definition.

But even more bizarre is the characterization of "Palestinian refugees" living in...Palestine! How can people be considered refugees if they live in their own purported country? The most they can claim to be are "displaced persons" which is a completely different thing.

If you add together the Jordanian "refugees" with citizenship and the Palestinian "refugees" who also are citizens of the Palestinian Authority, you see that about 80% of all so-called "Palestinian refugees" are nothing of the sort. You cannot be a citizen of a country and a refugee at the same time.

If UNRWA and the Palestinian Arab leadership and Jordan were interested in solving the so-called refugee problem, they would acknowledge these simple facts and work to mainstream those who still live in camps and depend on UNRWA services into their respective Jordanian and Palestinian Arab societies. Their refusal to do so shows, more than anything else, that the "refugee" problem is an artificial construct, a fake issue that is being exacerbated and prolonged by the very people who pretend that it is their primary concern.

The facts are clear. 80% of the so-called refugees, aren't. And the only reason they are still called refugees is to use them - some four million people, if you believe UNRWA's numbers - as pawns to help destroy the Jewish state.

If the US and EU truly want to see peace in the region, this issue must be dealt with head-on. The truth must be exposed, and these "refugees" must be properly categorized and their issues solved within the context of Jordan and the PA. Otherwise, all the calls for negotiations and Israeli concessions are a large shell game to conceal the truth of how the Arabs (and the UN) have been cynically using millions of people as political pawns.

Hamas not happy with "prisoner Facebook" story

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 05:48 AM PDT

Here's a funny item from Hamas mouthpiece Palestine Info:

The Gaza prisoner affairs ministry has called on local media not to reproduce Israeli media hype that Palestinian prisoners communicate with the outside world using social networking sites on the internet.

Israel tries to convince the world that the Palestinians enjoy all their rights while Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured in Gaza, is denied visits and access to family, the ministry's media director Riyadh al-Ashqar said in a statement on Saturday.

Ashqar added that Israel also uses such rumors to justify the prison authority's frequent violent raids on prisoners' cells in search of mobile phones.

Ashqar expressed surprise that Palestinian news outlets would reproduce such reports despite the ulterior motives behind them.

Note that Ashqar doesn't deny that Palestinian Arab prisoners are on Facebook, just that he wants to censor Arab media from mentioning it.

The good part? The story was not broken by Ma'ariv (which published it on Wednesday) - but by Al-Arabiya, which printed it last Monday!

So it was Arab reporters who came up with this Zionist propaganda to begin with!

(h/t Gaia K)