White Washing the Palestinian Leadership

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Monday September 01, 2003 07:26 by Professor Francisco Gil White - Professor of Ethnopolitical Conflict University of Pennsylvania

Dispelling myths of the Palestinian propaganda

The Refugee Question
Critics of Israel from the moderate (my former position) to the most extreme portray it as an example of colonialism: European settlers push out the native population turning them into homeless refugees. And sure, they say, those Europeans were themselves victims of genocide, but do two wrongs make a right?

There are two problems with this view. First, it incorrectly portrays the makeup of the people who constitute most of the Jewish population in Israel. And second, it incorrectly describes the causes and nature of the Palestinian refugee problem.

We will deal with these points in the following two sections.

Is Israel a European “Settler State”?
That is the commonly held view, but the truth is quite different.

There are two problems with this view. First, it incorrectly portrays the makeup of the people who constitute most of the Jewish population in Israel. And second, it incorrectly describes the causes and nature of the Palestinian refugee problem.

We will deal with these points in the following two sections.

Is Israel a European “Settler State”?
That is the commonly held view, but the truth is quite different.

In fact, “following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, practically all the Yemenite, Iraqi, and Libyan Jews and major parts of the other Oriental Jewish communities migrated to Israel.”[1] These are the Mizrachim, or ‘Oriental Jews’, who used to live in North Africa and the Middle East, from Morocco to Iraq. As I document below, these Jews became more than half of all Jews in Israel.

Why did the Mizrachim end up in Israel?

The Mizrachim didn’t simply ‘migrate’ to Israel. Here is an excerpt from historian Howard Sachar that paints a picture of the environment in which these ‘Oriental Jews’ lived in the two decades leading up to the exodus of 1947-49:

“One particularly successful Axis technique of winning favor among the Arabs had its basis in ideology… the Arabs were reminded of the enemies they shared in common with the Nazis… Nazi German diplomats evinced no hesitation whatever in publicizing the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign. Hardly a German Arabic-language newspaper or magazine appeared in the Middle East without a sharp thrust against the Jews. Reprints of these strictures were widely distributed by the [Jerusalem] Mufti’s Arab Higher Committee. Upon introducing the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, therefore, Hitler received telegrams of congratulation and praise from all corners of the Arab world…. Throughout the Arab Middle East, a spate of ultra-right-wing political groupings and parties developed in conscious imitation of Nazism and Italian fascism.”[2]

Why was there so much ideological affinity between the Muslims in North Africa and the Middle-East, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany?

The usual explanation is that the Muslims were following the dictate, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ France and Britain had colonized the Middle East. Hitler was opposed to France and Britain. And so, the argument goes, Muslim leaders allied with Hitler in a marriage of convenience.

But a strategic marriage of convenience does not explain the enthusiasm with which the Nazi hatred of Jews was greeted by Arab Muslims. The historical status of Jews in Muslim lands, however, does help explain this enthusiasm.

Many claim that the status of Jews in the Arab world was not like that of Jews in Europe (i.e., it was supposedly better), and therefore Arabs did not have anti-Semitic attitudes until Zionists came to Palestine. In truth, Jewish life in the Arab world was characterized by institutionalized racism.[3]

In the Muslim lands, over the centuries, Christians and Jews lived as dhimmi people. One often hears that dhimmi status ‘protected’ Christians and Jews, because Muslims considered them ‘people of the book’ - that is, the Bible. But the question is: protected from what?

As it turns out, from complete extermination at the hands of the same Muslims.

Muslims took control of the Middle East through jihad - religious wars of conquest. In general, local people who refused to convert to Islam were commonly slaughtered. But Christianity and Judaism were perceived as religions of which Islam was the culmination. If the leaders of conquered Christians and Jews signed a dhimma (agreement) their people could be spared. The alternative to signing was death. So the dhimma was a forced agreement, a ‘contract’ of surrender. Jews and Christians were protected from jihad, at least in theory, as long as they adhered to the terms of this ‘agreement’.

Since dhimmis were, by definition, people who refused to convert to Islam, their existence had to be a living expression of the inferiority of Judaism and Christianity. This inferiority was codified in the rules of the dhimma, such as:

* dhimmi people had to cede the center of the road to Muslims;
* the only animal they could ride was a donkey;
* they could not testify against a Muslim in court;
* they could not build houses taller than those of Muslims;
* they could not build new places of worship;
* they had to pray quietly so as not to offend the ears of passing Muslims;
* a dhimmi man could not so much as touch a Muslim woman, but a Muslim man could take Jewish or Christian women as wives;
* a dhimmi could not defend himself if physically assaulted by a Muslim;
* dhimmis could not bear arms;
* dhimmis had to pay a special tax every year and were treated in humiliating fashion when paying it;
* in public, dhimmis had to wear distinctive clothing, intentionally designed to be humiliating;
* at least in the 9th century, dhimmis had to nail wooden images of devils to their doors;
* Et cetera….

Beyond institutionalized inequality and constant humiliation, the dhimma also meant unrelieved insecurity. Why? Because the dhimma was a treaty of surrender by a people conquered in jihad (holy fighting) and its maintenance was conditional. A Jew or Christian perceived by Muslims as violating the dhimma could be severely punished. Moreover, the dhimma itself could be cancelled at any time, subjecting the entire community to a renewal of jihad.

Consider this example: If a Jew or Christian prospered, an envious Muslim might use force or legal maneuvers to seize his wealth. Resistance could be treated as a violation of the dhimma, placing the entire dhimmi community in mortal danger. A Muslim official could rule that the dhimma was void or religious fanatics could rouse a Muslim mob, and the Jews or Christians could be slaughtered en masse.

Ordinary Muslims were brought up to believe in the justice of “dhimmitude” and therefore the poorest Muslim could feel superior to the richest Christian or Jew. This scorn for the 'lowly' dhimmi people strengthened the ties between Muslim ruling classes and the Muslim poor.

Why did Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine, elicit fury in many Arabs from its very beginnings? To understand this, one must look at the world from a traditionalist Arab/Islamic point of view.

The Arab upper classes saw “dhimmitude” as the cement of the social fabric, helping guarantee the loyalty of ‘the street’. Many ordinary Arabs perceived in the lowly status of Jews - that is, in “dhimmitude” - a confirmation of their own worth. And there was special contempt for the Jews, perhaps because, unlike the Christian case, no Jewish states existed to compete with Islamic states.

Jews had been dhimmi people in the Middle East and North Africa for more than a thousand years. By way of contrast, Black people were enslaved in the Americas starting ‘only’ about 400 years ago. And yet consider the ferocity with which many white Americans responded to the abolition of slavery (lynchings were common in the post-Civil War South). If one views a person as one’s natural inferior, then attempts at equality can be perceived as an affront and an abuse.

Why did millions of Arabs all over North Africa and the Middle East, who never met a Zionist, hate them? There are two reasons. First, they did not act like proper dhimmis. Second, the Zionist Jews carried the dangerous contagion of modern ideas. Of course, there were differences among them. "The Jews" are not some monolithic group. But many brought to the Middle East the ideas of liberal democracy, secular education and female equality - even socialism. These ideas not only challenged aspects of Arab culture, but, if allowed to spread, could destroy the power of ruling elites throughout the Arab world (in 1900 and today as well).

So, the immigrant Jews were challenging “dhimmitude”, a key part of the social fabric, and also had dangerous ideas.

This helps explain why the Mufti of Jerusalem, Nasser, Arafat, Hamas, etc. have not merely called for defeating Israel and/or extracting political concessions, but rather have always agitated for Israel’s total destruction. The existence of a Jewish State in the Middle East is seen as an offense to the natural order of Allah-proclaimed Jewish inferiority - and as a source of ideas that challenge the traditional Middle Eastern practices and power-relations. Arab leaders use both these perceived offenses to mobilize popular support from the Arab 'street'.

This also explains some otherwise odd facts. For example, the Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, organized a murderous attack against Jewish civilians in 1920. It was directed primarily at members of the ‘Old Yishuv’. These were not recent Jewish immigrants. Their families had been in Palestine for over 2000 years.[4] In 1929, Mufti-organized Arabs slaughtered Jews in Hebron and other towns. Although Palestinian leaders speak of the Hebron massacre as a heroic act of resistance to Zionism,[5] in fact, it was a terrorist pogrom, and directed largely at indigenous Palestinian Jews, not recent immigrants.[6]

The context of “dhimmitude” explains why so much terrorist violence was directed against non-immigrant Jews in Palestine. By presenting themselves as equal to Muslims, the Zionists had cancelled the dhimma; therefore, jihad could resume. Since the dhimma was an agreement that applied to the entire community, all Jews were now subject to jihad slaughter.

Thus, what was misperceived by Westerners as an irrational outbreak of communal hatred was in fact a continuation - albeit in modern dress - of an ancient cultural interaction: the lynching of dhimmis, much like the lynching of ‘uppity’ Black people in the post-Civil War U.S. South.

This explains why many North African and Middle-Eastern Muslims welcomed Nazi anti-Semitism. The German Nazi ideology coincided with their view of what should be done to ‘uppity Jews.’ To read more about “dhimmitude” in the Islamic world, visit this excellent resource: http://www.dhimmitude.org.

"Murder the Jews! Murder them all!"
Bad as the situation became for Jews in Muslim countries with the approach and explosion of World War II, the 1948 war in Palestine (the Israeli War of Independence) made things infinitely worse. The surrounding Arab states declared war - en masse - against the tiny strip of land that proclaimed itself the new State of Israel in 1948.[7] Hostility towards the Jews of the Mizrachi Diaspora got much worse as a result.

The Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Saudi armies and Iraqi and Palestinian irregulars did not invade Israel because it had attacked or threatened those countries, but because Israel had chosen to exist. By doing so, it had cancelled the dhimma on a grand scale.[8]

When the dhimma is cancelled, jihad resumes. Thus, in 1947, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini issued a fatwa: "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!"[9]

Arab leaders were just as violent in addressing the non-Arab world. Unlike today, they did not claim they were the victims. They made no effort to win over world opinion, because they expected to wipe out the Jews quickly. In their public statements, they boasted of the mayhem that was to come. Thus, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, promised: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."[10]

They made no effort to convince the world they were responding to a Jewish attack. In addressing the UN Security Council in April 1948, Jamal Husseini, spokesperson for the Mufti's Arab Higher Committee, said: "The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight."[11]

When the Jews announced the formation of a state of Israel, the Arab armies and paramilitaries attacked Jewish communities - that is, they attacked civilians. Since they made no pretense that they were acting in self-defense, their attack was illegal under international law; its only rationale was that the attackers hated Jews and refused to accept the existence of a Jewish state. Launching a war because one dislikes the other side and wants to destroy it is the very definition of a war of aggression. And in international law, launching a war of aggression is itself a war crime, for it makes possible all other war crimes.

The return to a state of jihad made the situation of Jews living in Arab countries extremely dangerous even if they had nothing to do with the Zionist movement, which was European in origin.

As sociologist Shlomo Swirski writes in Israel: The Oriental Majority:

“…the military confrontation between the Jews in Palestine and the Palestinian Arabs and the armies of the Arab states in 1947-49 created an impossible climate for the Jews living throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Within a short period of time, they evacuated en masse to the new state of Israel. Whole communities were transplanted - most of the 130,000 Jews of Iraq, the 45,000 Jews of Yemen, and the 35,000 of Libya - as well as substantial parts of other communities, from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the west to Iran in the east. From 1948 to 1956, a total of some 450,000 Jews arrived in Israel from Asia and Africa, compared to 360,000 Jews from Europe and America.”[12]

So the Oriental Jews didn’t simply migrate to Israel; they fled the countries where their ancestors had lived for a hundred generations or more.[13] They lost virtually everything they owned.

The numbers cited above are staggering. As hundreds of thousands of Oriental Jews fled, countries that once had large Jewish communities became virtually Judenfrei. And according to a Library of Congress study, “By the early 1970s, the number of Israelis of African-Asian origin outnumbered European or American Jews.”[14] In 1985, the Oriental Jews were “the majority of the Israeli Jewish population - 43.3% - of first and second-generation Israelis…[including non-Jews]”[15] In fact, “until the recent Russian immigration, the majority in Israel was the 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and their millions of children… Mizrachim are still today 50% of the Jewish population.”[16]

Thus, the general perception that Arabs are the only refugees produced by the Arab-Jewish conflicts since 1947 is simply wrong. The difference is that Jewish refugees who fled to Israel - and who had everything taken from them in the process - became Israeli citizens (or citizens of other countries). By way of contrast, Palestinian refugees were refused citizenship by every Arab state except Jordan.

And this means that…

The Arab States, Not Israel, Are Responsible For The Palestinian Refugee Problem
Why didn't the Arab states let these Palestinians be citizens? To what end?

Answer: to keep the refugees as a festering political sore that could - and still can - be used against the State of Israel. Whether the policy towards these refugees is cruel or benign, the attitude is the same: they are denied citizenship so they can be maintained as a political issue, to put Israel on the defensive.

Consider the examples of Lebanon and Syria. The following quotes are from the Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, which is strongly biased in favor of Arab leaders’ view of the Palestinian conflict. That bias makes their words especially credible on this point:

“Many Palestinian refugees in Lebanon still live in squalid camps… After more than half a century in exile, their situation remains precarious. Without citizenship, or even the same options as guest workers from Egypt or Sri Lanka, the Palestinians cannot work in many occupations. Nor do they receive assistance from the cash-strapped Lebanese government. In some cases, residents are unable even to repair damaged houses because they cannot ‘import’ building materials into the camps.

“Because Beirut refuses to accept the de facto resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the refugees have never been granted citizenship or residency rights by the Lebanese government, which wants to keep the pressure on Israel to permit the refugees’ return. This policy, however, has caused hardship for many Palestinians.”[17]

So Lebanon plays politics with the unfortunate lives of these Palestinians. According to Washington Report, the Syrian government’s policy is more benign, but it has the same political objective:

“Circumstances for Palestinians just across the border in Syria are remarkably different. According to Angela Williams, director of UNRWA in Syria, the key reason is the Syrian government's official policy of hospitality toward the refugees. ‘They are not faced with the kind of restrictions they have in Lebanon,’ Williams explained.

“‘Palestinians have the same access as Syrians to government services, education, government hospitals and employment. Here they can even purchase one parcel of domestic property for their own use.’

“The extension of rights to Palestinian refugees in Syria stems from the government's philosophy that, rather than standing in the way of political aspirations, improved living conditions help to build up Palestinians’ ability to achieve a final settlement and return home when they are able. Although they don’t have citizenship, cannot vote and cannot purchase farmland, [my emphasis - FGW] Palestinians are fully integrated into Syrian society.”

How can one be “fully integrated” into a society in which one cannot vote, be a citizen, or, if one is a farmer, start a farm? The answer is that one cannot, and that makes sense, because the Syrians want the Palestinians to “achieve a final settlement and return home.” Syria’s somewhat more benign policy follows their philosophy that a healthy and well-educated (but all the same, politically-in-limbo and second-class) Palestinian is a sharper geopolitical weapon.

We may contrast these attitudes with those of the Israeli government. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence includes the following: “WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the up-building of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”[18]

UN Resolution 194, which was acceptable to the Israelis, stated in point 11 that “…refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property…” This resolution was unanimously rejected by the Arabs.[19]

The perception, common in some circles, that the Israelis are to blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis will therefore not withstand historical scrutiny. I summarize the relevant facts:

1) The post-World War II military confrontations between Jews and Arabs began when the 1947 UN partition plan “was immediately opposed by the [Palestinian] Arabs who... attacked Jews throughout Palestine as the British withdrew.”[20]

2) The surrounding Arab states followed through with an unprovoked and simultaneous declaration of war on Israel in 1948.

3) The anti-Semitism of the Arab states, heightened by the war against Israel, is what made the living conditions of the Mizrachi Diaspora so dangerous that they fled en masse to Israel. Thus, the Arab states caused a Jewish refugee crisis that the Israeli state then proceeded to absorb.
4) The Arabs lost the 1948 war with Israel. The resulting Palestinian refugees were not given citizenship by the Arab countries that had created the refugee crisis by attacking Israel (the exception is Jordan).

The above list speaks for itself. One has to argue against it in order to lay the blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis on the Israelis.

Conclusion: Let Us Reassess
If Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, organized the Arab Higher Committee as his instrument of anti-Semitic violence; if the Mufti was an enthusiastic leader of Hitler's Final Solution; if veterans of the Mufti's Arab Higher Committee founded Fatah... (see Part II)

If Arafat, the supreme leader of Fatah, boasts that he was Hajj Amin's foot soldier; if Arafat's Fatah, more radical even than the PLO, took over the PLO, an organization that already called for the utter destruction of Israel... (see Part II)

If the Oslo 'Peace' Process created the Palestinian Authority out of Arafat's PLO; if Yasser Arafat, right after signing the Oslo 'Peace' Accords, said it was a covert strategy of jihad against Israel; if other prominent Palestinian leaders have echoed this statement, even calling the 'Peace' Process a Trojan Horse... (see Part III)

If the al-Aqsa Intifada was planned well in advance, as the Palestinian Authority Communications Minister himself boasted; if the Tanzim, the main militia in Arafat's Fatah, carries out attacks against Israeli civilians; and if it got the al-Aqsa Intifada started; if the terrorists in the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - a salaried component of Fatah - are “the deadliest Palestinian militia”... (see Part III)

Then, what follows?

That the murderous racism of Palestinian leaders is not a recent aberration, nor does it result from Israeli provocations.

Arafat's Fatah has been a millenarian Islamist and terrorist organization from the beginning. Any contrary appearance is the product of propaganda by the likes of Michael Elliot and Time magazine and the rest of the mainstream media. (see Part I)

We are witnessing the rewriting of history in real time. My own recent naivetי stands in evidence: the bolder the lies involved in the rewrite, the less people notice. This is a principle Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, and Hitler himself, understood well.

Of course, one could say that the facts presented here - though they complete the picture - do not erase other facts, for example, that Israel has responded militarily by sending troops into the occupied territories. This is true: such facts remain. What may change, however, is the interpretation we give to them, if the documentation presented here changes our view of the forces that the Israelis have been fighting.

Terrible things happen in war. That is why launching a war of aggression is itself considered a crime. And of course, the worst wars are those intended not simply to conquer, but to eradicate another people: for example, as in the mission to liquidate Israel and purge the Jews.

This hatred and drive to exterminate another people is a recurrent theme in Arab hostility towards Jews in Israel and elsewhere, and constantly finds expression in revealing turns of phrase that betray the legacy of “dhimmitude”. The ‘lowly Jews’, is how a high Iraqi official refers to them.[21] Or, as the Arab killers cried as they slaughtered Jewish men, women, and children in Hebron in 1929: “Palestine is our land and the Jews, our dogs.”

This jihad - this holy war - against the Jews, which has been waged non-stop by Arab leaders since the founders of the Zionist movement dared to challenge the dhimmi status of Jews in the Middle East, is not the responsibility of the Zionists or of the state they founded. Israel has a right to exist and flourish.

The honor of ending this war - this jihad - which causes so much suffering on both sides - rests primarily with Arabs, who are in the best position to do something. The first step would be to reject the leadership of the ideological descendants of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who even in death, dominates his people’s political life and distorts their aspirations, leading them down a path of intolerance and war. The peoples of the Middle East deserve better. They deserve peace.

I consider my current position now to be truly pro-Palestinian, because I am completely opposed to Yasser Arafat and his politics of murder and hate, which have brought so much suffering to the Palestinians, the people whose interests he claims to look after. And because I see a future of hope for the unfortunate Palestinians. Should Palestinians call forth a different kind of leader, different from Arafat and the Mufti of Jerusalem past, they would give to the Middle East the future that they, the Arab people, and the Jewish people, deserve.

“El respeto al derecho ajeno, es la paz” [To respect the right of another, that is peace.] – Benito Juarez (Oaxacan Indian, and former President of Mexico)

Footnotes:
[1] “Oriental Jews”, Encyclopזdia Britannica http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=58803 [Accessed September 17, 2002]
[2] Sachar, Howard Morley - A History of Israel : From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time / Howard M. Sachar. 1982, c1979. (pp.195-196)
[3] To read about the dhimma, which institutionalized racism against Christians and Jews in Arab lands, visit: http://www.dhimmitude.org.
[4] "...the disturbances during the al-Nebi Musa celebrations in April 1920, were limited to Jerusalem. A large angry crowd of Arabs surged through Haffa Gate into the narrow alleyways of the Old City and attaacked Jews whom it encountered along the way. There were also attempts by Arabs to assault Jews in the newer sections of Jerusalem." -- Shapira, A. (1992). Land and Power. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.110.
[5] In his statement "Palestine Between Dreams And Reality", Dr. George Habash, then General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, states that: "Our people did not understand the purposes of the first wave of Jewish pioneers to our country. But when the Jews set about buying up the land, our people... ignited a series of struggles, beginning with pickets and demonstrations, through the Buraq Uprising (the 1929 confrontation over Jewish attempts to seize control of part of Jerusalem adjacent to the so-called Wailing Wall), down to the strike and Revolt of 1936." (http://members.tripod.com/~freepalestine/gh2000.html) Clearly, Habash is proud of the 1929 disturbances. Indeed, he presents them as an anti-colonial struggle. Notice, also, that he refers only to the peaceful means of "pickets and demonstrations."

Now let's see how historians describe the event: "The [1929] riots were accompanied by militant Arab slogans such as: 'The law of Muhammad is being implemented by the sword'; 'Palestine is our land and the Jews, our dogs'; 'We are well armed and shall slaughter you by the sword.' There were also brutal acts by Arabs for the apparent sake of cruelty, such as the killings in Hebron, where small children were tortured by their murderers before being murdered. The dread that the Arabs were planning to annihilate the entire Jewish community - men, women, and children - in one concentrated burst of violence surfaced for the first time in the wake of the August 1929 disturbances... For the first time, the Jewish community in Palestine found itself caught up in a wave of violent disturbances that swept with a fury through Jewish settlements and neighborhoods throughout the length and breadth of the country. The danger now appeared to threaten the very survival of the entire Jewish community." – Shapira, A. 1992. Land and Power. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, (p.174)
[6] "The 1929 troubles constituted a crossroads... The hardest hit localities had been Hebron and Safed, mixed towns were Jews had lived together with Arabs for many generations... Moreover, the communities in those two towns were of the 'old Yishuv': deeply religious, non-Zionist Jews. They did not carry weapons or know how to protect themselves; nor did they believe their neighbors would harm them. In the aftermath of the riots, the surviving remnants of the old Jewish community in Hebron left the town. The Jews who were evacuated from Gaza during the riots never returned there." – Shapira, A. (1992). Land and Power. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, (p.176).
[7] To get an idea just how tiny, we have added links to two maps. One compares Israel to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The other map shows that including Gaza and the West Bank, Israel is almost as big as Vancouver Island.
Compared to the Arab world: http://www.iris.org.il/sizemaps/arabwrld.htm
Compared to Vancouver Island:http://www.iris.org.il/sizemaps/vancouv.htm
[8] "The Zionist militias gained the upper hand over the Palestinians through skill and pluck, aided considerably by intra-Arab rivalries. Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, was quickly recognized by the United States, the Soviet Union, and many other governments, fulfilling the Zionist dream of an internationally approved Jewish state. Neither the UN nor the world leaders, however, could spare Israel from immediate invasion by the armies of five Arab states — Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan (now Jordan) — and within a few days, the state's survival appeared to be at stake."
[9] Leonard J. Davis and M. Decter (eds.). Myths and Facts 1982; a Concise Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Washington DC: near east report, 1982), p. 199
[10] Howard M Sachar, A History of Israel (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 333
[11] Security Council Official Records, S/Agenda/58, (April 16, 1948), p. 19
[12] Swirski, Shlomo. 1989. Israel: The Oriental Majority. London & New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. (pp. 3-4)
[13] For a more personal account of the plight of the Mizrachim, go to http://www.loolwa.com/crisis.html
[14] “ISRAEL A Country Study,” Federal Research Division Library of Congress. Edited by Helen Chapin Metz. Research Completed December 1988 (http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/iltoc.html) Consult the chapter titled “POPULATION.”
[15] Swirski, Shlomo. 1989. Israel: The Oriental Majority. London & New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. (p.3)
[16] “A Mizrahi Perspective on the Current Middle East Crisis”, by Loolwa Khazoom (http://www.loolwa.com/crisis.html)
[17] “Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon and Syria Face Different, Uncertain Futures”. Dec 2000, Vol. 19 Issue 9, p26; Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; by Fecci, JoMarie
[18] Text of the Israeli Declaration of Independence: http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/Dec_of_Indep.html
[19] “The Palestinian Refugees”, by Mitchell Bard (http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/refugees.html)
[20] “on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to divide British-ruled Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. This decision was immediately opposed by the Arabs who, under the ostensible leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, attacked Jews throughout Palestine as the British withdrew.” – “Israel”, Encyclopזdia Britannica (http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=109507) [Accessed September 23, 2002].
[21] www.emperors-clothes.com/letters/shussein.htm#l