ISRAELI PROF: "JEWS CAME
AND TOOK..."
"A LAND THAT WAS ARAB"
"Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We
wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same
time."
"The Arab armies -- chiefly from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, now Jordan --
totaled just over 20,000 men. The core of the Arab nations' fighting forces remained
behind, in part to ensure the internal stability of their own fledgling regimes."
"Crucially, Israel had a quiet agreement with Transjordan that its Arab Legion,
the strongest of the invading armies, would take over only the West Bank, which the U.N.
partition plan had intended as the center of a Palestinian Arab State."
MER - Washington - 7 January 1998:
Not the words of an Arab historian; rather of an Israeli one -- Professor Ilan Pappe at
Haifa University.
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is written about in considerable
volumes by many. Most, especially what is in English, and especially what has been written
by Israeli and Jewish apologists, is, well, full of it. There are major exceptions among
Jews however -- indeed, some of the best literature about theconflict has been authored by
Jews, Noam Chomsky in the U.S. and Maxim Rodinson and Maxim Ghilan in Europe among them.
Many of the key people involved with MER and the Committee on the Middle East, especially
in the beginning, are Jewish.
Jewish Israeli historians have been in the forefront of correcting the historical
record since the 1970s. In the past two decades important books by Simcha Flapan
(deceased) and Benny Morris (now at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba) -- published in
both Hebrew and English -- have revealed the myths and lies of the extensive Israeli
propaganda that has misled so many for so long. And Israeli General Mattityahu Peled --
one of the five commanding Generals in the 1967 war and then a Professor of Arabic
Literature at Tel Aviv University, was among the most outspoken Israeli advocates of a
Palestinian State back in the days when it would have been much more possible than is the
case today, and back in the days when even talking to the PLO landed Jews in Israeli
prisons.
