“The Arabs rejected the partition plan, and a day after Israel proclaimed its independence in 1948, the Arab countries attacked the new state. They were defeated. Amid violence by militias and mobs on both sides, huge numbers of Jews and Arabs were displaced.”
In fact, the violence began in late 1947 between both sides and half the expulsions and the Deir Yassin masssacre of April 1948 took place before the Arab armies attacked.
And “huge numbers of Jews and Arabs were displaced” is meant to downplay the deliberate expulsion of the Palestinians, the Nakba. The borders of the Jewish state laid out by the U.N. Partition Plan contained only a slim majority of Jews; after the Nakba and the Palestine war/Israeli war of independence, those borders were greatly expanded, and 80 percent of the Palestinians who had lived there were gone, and not allowed to return. The numbers of Jews displaced from Hebron and Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank were far smaller. (The Times’s use of the phrase “violence by… mobs on both sides” is eerily reminiscent of Donald Trump’s equivocation after Charlottesville.)
This is hasbara, or explanation of the conflict that serves Israeli claims. There is no comment section on the piece, of course.
There was, in fact, some violence on both sides, even before 1947. 1936-39 comes to mind.
However, the reason for such Palestinian violence as there was was either the local problem of the eviction of farming families from lands they had been tenants on for generations and expected to remain on (the absentee landlords having sold the lands to Zionists) or the larger problem of the abundantly clear intention on the part of the more aggressive Zionists (such as Jabotinsky, Begin, Shamir) to create a more-or-less-Arab-cleared Zionist-majority state in most or all of Palestine — or even all of Palestine-plus-Jordan.
No-one among the Palestinians invited the Zionists to imagine or plan for (or effectuate) this take-over. No-one among the Palestinians forced the Zionists to dream these dreams or to put them into action. This was all voluntary on the part of the Zionists and most of it was imagined and planned pre-holocaust, mostly on the basis of very real and very terrible Polish antisemitism.
So the story is just as so many have described it: Zionists said, basically, we’ve had pain in Poland (and Russia) and so we are going to solve our problem-of-pain by evicting the Palestinians and giving them pain. A sort of trade, as it were.
Here, you lucky Palestinians, you, take our pain from us. But don’t expect thanks or apologies. In fact, get off our land!
Guess NYT couldn’t publish that!
“on the basis of very real and very terrible Polish antisemitism.”
No offense, pabelmont, but could you provide some evidence or historically documented references for this statement?
I am somewhat skeptical, given that today, “antisemitism ” seems to have no definition whatsoever. And if Poles were so terribly antisemitic, why did half the worlds Jewish population reside in Poland for centuries?
Thanks to Phil and pabelmont for saying what NYT didn’t. NYT’s spinning history seems particularly shameful to me because, at this point in history, the Zionists have won. They have nothing to fear from the historical truth. NYT could afford to live up to its asserted ideals of objectivity and honesty without any threat to Zionist dominion.
I stopped perceiving the NYT as anything but a rag tag newspaper delivering what its Zionist donors,
management and contributors demand. How else can you explain the blatant bias on the I/P issue – https://www.salon.com/2016/05/26/journalists_blast_ny_times_for_grotesque_pro_israel_bias_and_distortion_of_illegal_occupation_of_palestine/
They are nothing more than an instrument of the PEP crowd – liberal bigots – who believe in, defend and play cover for a settler colonial religious supremacist state that has and is systematically erasing a whole indigenous population from their native lands.
The sooner we start treating their news coverage of the I/P issue as anything but propaganda the better. They live by and off their credibility – let’s at least rob them of that.