A collection of historical quotations relating
to the Arab refugees
A collection of historical quotations relating
to the Arab refugees:
Collected by Moshe Kohn
ON APRIL 23, 1948 Jamal Husseini, acting
chairman of the Palestine ArabHigher Committee (AHC), told the UN Security
Council: "The Arabs did notwant to submit to a truce ... They preferred
to abandon their homes,belongings and everything they possessed."
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1948, the Beirut Daily
Telegraph quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the AHC, as saying: "The fact
that there are those refugees isthe direct consequence of the action of
the Arab states in opposingpartition and the Jewish state. The Arab states
agreed upon this policy unanimously..."
ON JUNE 8, 1951, Habib Issa, secretary-general
of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily al-Hoda that in
1948, Azzam Pasha, then League secretary, had "assured the Arab peoples
that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as
a military promenade ... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine
to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighbouring
fraternal states."
IN THE MARCH 1976 issue of Falastin a-Thaura,
then the official journal of the Beirut-based PLO, Mahmud Abbas ("Abu Mazen"),
PLO spokesman, wrote: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the
Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them,
forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into
prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."
ON APRIL 9, 1953, the Jordanian daily al-Urdun
quoted a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying:
"For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are
responsible, because of the dissemination of rumours exaggerating Jewish
crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs
... they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine
until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy."
ANOTHER refugee told the Jordanian daily
a-Difaa on September 6, 1954: "The Arab governments told us, 'Get out so
that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in."
THE JORDANIAN daily Falastin wrote on February
19, 1949: "The Arab states... encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave
their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion
armies."
ON OCTOBER 2, 1948, the London Economist
reported, in an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa's Arabs: "There
is little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in the flight] were
the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging
all Arabs in Haifa to quit ... And it was clearly intimated that those
Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded
as renegades."
THE PRIME Minister of Syria in 1948, Khaled
al-Azem, in his memoirs, published in 1973, listed what he thought were
the reasons for the Arabfailure in 1948: " ... the fifth factor was the
call by the Arab governments to theinhabitants of Palestine to evacuate
it and leave for the bordering Arab countries ... We brought destruction
upon a million Arab refugees bycalling on them and pleading with them to
leave their land."
"FOLLOWING a visit to refugees in Gaza,
a British diplomat reported the following: 'But while they express no bitterness
against theJews...they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians
and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and
they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded
them unnecessarily to leave their homes." -
British Foreign Office Document #371/75342/XC/A/4991
[From "Revising or Devising Israel's History" by Prof. Shlomo Slonim in
Jewish Action, Summer 5760/2000, Vol. 60 #4]
This page was produced by Joseph
E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious
History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
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