“Again 1967 was a pre-emptive strike too - another naked land grab. Egypt, Syria, Jordan were caught totally unaware (foolishly and naively in my opinion). Egypt left it's airfields totally exposed and it's airforce was wiped out in a matter of hours. Hardly what a country intending to launch an attack does.”
“Again 1967 was a pre-emptive strike too - another naked land grab. Egypt, Syria, Jordan were caught totally unaware (foolishly and naively in my opinion). Egypt left it's airfields totally exposed and it's airforce was wiped out in a matter of hours. Hardly what a country intending to launch an attack does.”
I’m not misrepresenting anything. It is said that most lies are “lies of omission.” This is when someone simply fails to mention critical facts about a particular situation, purposely misleading the reader to the wrong conclusion.
I wont speak for the Irgun or Stern, as I consider them terror groups like I view the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers. However, it wasn’t forced deportation of Palestinians after they refused the partition plan. It was the 1948 war initiated by the Arab states who also refused to accept the UN mandate.
Remember, the Palestinians had no homeland, and weren’t a government in 1947. The Brits controlled what is mostly current day Israel, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Jerusalem, while the Egyptian’s controlled Gaza. Neither nation agreed to give up land for a Palestinian state. So the Palestinians rejection, was a moot point. The Egyptian’s did allow a Palestinian government, but it was just a puppet government with no real power.
The whole truth is that an estimated 726,000 Arabs fled their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. That war was instigated not by the Jews but by the Arabs, who rejected the United Nations’ plan partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel accepted that plan, but the Arabs chose war.
The vast majority of Arabs left their villages out of their own free will to avoid being caught in the crossfire of war. They were encouraged to do so by their leaders, who told the Arab public that they would soon remove the Jewish population by force and after which they could return to their homes. So nice try.
And Palestinian groups were also attacking Israeli’s. And given that 2.5 million Palestinians are Israeli citizens inside Israel proper, supports my conclusion that it wasn’t ethnic cleaning, but fighting amongst Palestinians and Jewish groups.
That’s said, your interpretation of the 67’ war is rich. It’s been documented that Egypt, Jordan and Syria were planning a coordinated attack. The difference was Israeli intelligence, which thwarted their plans with a “preemptive” attack.
You, yourself, used the word “preemptive,” which literally means (definition) to preempt or forestall something, especially to prevent attack by disabling the enemy. These were your own words, so stop with the false narrative. Those countries were about to attack and moved their troops and tanks close to the Israeli borders, which they claimed were military exercises at the time.
1/5: What makes you think actors only strike pre-emptively in the face of an imminent threat? That’s the limitation international law places. But anyone living in the real world should know full well that pre-emptive force is often used to gain decisive strategic advantages. For opportunistic reasons when your adversary isn’t expecting it in order to change the circumstances on the ground in your favour. This is what the Israelis successfully managed to achieve in 1967 and what the Egyptians failed to accomplish in 1973 (more on that later). Alas, this isn’t the only shortcoming in your response. It’s yet another farrago of distortions and misrepresentations that demonstrate a factually incorrect and shallow understanding of the historical context which in turn render the conclusions you’ve drawn fundamentally flawed.
Anyone who’s reasonably knowledgeable on this subject should’ve clearly understood the overarching context and background behind my previous post re: what transpired between November 1947 to May 1948. The historical record isn’t disputed amongst serious observers. However, since you seem to be unaware of it, I’ll lay it out in greater detail for your benefit.
Zionism, at least its mainstream stand, is a settler colonial ideology that originated amongst European Jewry in the late 1800s to establish a homeland in between the between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact there are others, albeit a minority, who subscribe to the boundaries laid out in the Book of Exodus – from the Red Sea to the Euphrates River. At the turn of the 20th century, ~95% of the population on this land was Palestinian Arab (overwhelmingly Muslim with a small Christian community). There was also a small Mizrahi Jewish community of ~15,000 (3.2%) who’d lived there for generations alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbours. Early Zionists were fully cognisant of this demographic challenge from the get go. They knew that the creation of a Jewish majority state on all of the territory they coveted would require a drastic form of social engineering. And just to be clear, at no point were the Zionists ever interested in establishing bi-national state or a permanent partition of historic Palestine. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, partition was at most viewed as a first step, or a tactical manoeuver in their eventual goal. Flapan quotes David Ben-Gurion, who said in the late 1930s, “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” So much for “Israel accepted the plan, but the Arabs chose war.” As to why the Palestinians rejected the partition plan, briefly there were two reasons. First, the Palestinians, unlike the Zionists, weren’t allowed lobby their case to the UN. Second, Palestinians, who’d called this land their home for at 40-50 generations if not longer and made up two-thirds of the population were only given 44% of the land whereas the remaining 56% was given to a settler population of new migrants who’d been there for ~50 years. Failing to acknowledge that this was a fundamentally unjust proposal is “lying by omission.”
Going back to the social engineering that would be necessary for the Zionists to accomplish their ambition. From the very beginning, early Zionists knew that it’d have to involve ethnic cleansing. Theodore Herzl articulated this in somewhat benign, ambiguous terms when he wrote in his diary in 1895, “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment…. Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” By the mid-1930s however, Zionist leaders voiced their plans were far more explicitly. In fact, the Jewish Agency held a closed door meeting in June 1938 in which they recognised that the only way to accomplish their goal was through “compulsory transfer.” Ben-Gurion clarified in no uncertain terms what this meant when he wrote in 1941, “it is impossible to imagine (a) general evacuation of the Arab population without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.” Israel’s chief historian Benny Morris makes it very clear that “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”
2/5: When it became clear that the UN wasn’t going to try and mediate a more equitable solution (that consulted with the majority population and took demographics into account) than the 56-44 partition plan, the Zionists seized the opportunity to alter the conditions on the ground decisively in their favour. Between November 1947 and May 1948 (i.e. before Israel declared its independence), Zionist militias started the process of forcibly depopulating cities, towns and villages of its Palestinian inhabitants. By late February 1948, after the British withdrew all their forces to the port city Haifa, the militias seized doubled down to accelerate this process (putting into effect Plan Dalet a couple of weeks later). By the end of April, Palestinians were driven out of their homes en masse in the cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, Beisan, Acre and West Jerusalem. This was followed by massacres such as Deir Yassin which increased the fear amongst the population and caused more people to flee. Over 250,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled and fled to neighbouring Arab countries. In response to this rapidly escalating refugee crisis, the Arab armies reluctantly attacked Israel after its declaration of independence in May 1948. In short, it’s blatantly dishonest to suggest that the “Arabs chose war.”
In fact, the record shows that the neighboring Arab states were reluctant to attack Israel as they were militarily inferior. After all, the Zionist militias which became the IDF had developed into a formidable fighting force under the tutelage of the British in the 1930s and 1940s when they brutally crushed the 1936 Palestinian revolt and fought alongside the British Army in North Africa during WWII. Inevitably, the Arab armies were successfully repelled and another 0.5 million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as Israel expanded beyond the partition plan borders and captured 78% of the land by the time the armistice was signed in 1949. You’ve raised three factually incorrect points which relate to the 1947-49 period that I’ll address separately in greater detail in the interest of clarity – the status of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Arabs fled voluntarily.
Israeli elites at that time were remarkably candid about their fundamental character as a colonising force, and cognisant of the antagonism that this would ferment amongst Palestinians and the larger Arab world. In the wake of the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion candidly told the President of World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel, It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” Or Ze’ev Jabotinsky who wrote, “Colonisation is self-explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonisation. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.”
As such, an honest reading of the historical record shows that the 1949 armistice gave birth to a new and uneasy status quo. On one hand, there was Israel whose territorial aspirations weren’t completely fulfilled (I’m just focussing on the mainstream Zionist interpretation of “river to the sea” here). On the other hand, there were the neighbouring Arab countries who were humiliated in 1948 and faced with a more powerful, adversarial and expansionist settler colonial state that they wanted to push back against and ideally dismantle in what was in essence an anti-colonial endeavour from their perspective.
3/5: To digress slightly before discussing June 1967, it is patently false to claim that the West Bank and Jerusalem were part of Transjordan in 1917. Nice try to redraw the map and reinvent history! Look at any map of Mandatory Palestine, throughout 1917-1948, included what is today Green Line Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1917-1948. Even an arm of the Israeli Hasbara machine got it correct (refreshingly for a change, see: https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Maps/Pages/The%20League%20of%20Nations%20Mandate%20for%20Palestine%20-%201920.aspx?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Cities and towns that are in the West Bank today, such as Jericho, Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah etc. were all part of Mandatory Palestine, never Transjordan. Jerusalem too was under British control throughout the mandate. This is completely in line with the intent expressed in the Balfour Declaration. Gaza and the West Bank only came under Egyptian and Jordanian control post 1948 (I’ll discuss Gaza separately further below in response to your point on the Palestinian citizens of Israel). In his book “Collusion Across the Jordan,” British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim provides a detailed account of how the Hashemite King of Jordan covertly negotiated with the Zionists before the end of the British mandate to gain control of the West Bank because he wanted access to more fertile land (Jordan itself is mostly arid desert). In exchange, the Jordanians held back their forces while the Zionist militias went on to capture and ethnically cleanse cities such as Lydd and Ramleh as well as the surrounding towns and villages just beyond the West Bank and absorb them all into the state of Israel. The Israelis were prepared to temporarily accept this outcome so they wouldn’t have to contend with potentially having another ~300,000 Palestinians within their borders for the time being (contextualised further below in response to your point regarding the Palestinian citizens of Israel).
Attack by Jordan and Syria and Egypt was imminent in 1967: this assertion is patently false. When Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban told Lyndon Johnson on May 26, 1967 that its Arab neighbours were about to launch an attack, Robert McNamara refuted this claim with reports from three separate intelligence groups who all unanimously agreed “that an attack was not imminent.” Moreover, Washington knew full well that Israel’s military was far superior to the militaries of all the Arab countries combined. Johnson’s response to Eban makes this abundantly clear: “if they do, you’ll whip the hell out of them.” Following the Six Day War, five Israeli Generals – Ezer Weizmann, Chiam Herzog, Haim Bar Lev, Matitiyahu Peled and Yeshiyahu Gavish – the affirmed this assessment. As I already mentioned in my previous post, Israel launched this pre-emptive attack in June 1967 to expand its borders, to correct the “fatal historical mistake.” This is completely in line with the territorial ambitions of the Zionist project, which coveted the West Bank from the get go. Not only was the land very fertile, but its symbolic importance in Jewish tradition is massive.
For as long as he was in power, Ben-Gurion was caught in a dilemma. On one hand, he lamented colluding with King Abdullah I in what he termed “bechiya ledorot” or a “fatal historical mistake.” Yet throughout his time in power until 1963, he ultimately resisted pressure from other factions within Israel to capture the West Bank because he firmly believed that the nascent Jewish state wasn’t in a position to absorb hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, the “Greater Israel Lobby” gained far more influence after Ben-Gurion left government and pushed much harder for the annexation of the West Bank. In short, the impetus to launch an attack to achieve this end markedly increased from 1963 onwards.
This is not to say that the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians didn’t ‘poke the bear’ with provocative skirmishes with the Israelis throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Gamal Abdul Nasser employed a dangerous tactic called “brinksmanship” where he test the limits of the Israeli and UN response by deploying some troops in the Sinai Peninsula (which was to be a demilitarised zone after the 1956 Suez Crisis). While the Jordanians employed hostile rhetoric on occasion, they actually killed and captured more Palestinians attempting to infiltrate the Green Line than the Israelis did throughout the 1960s. And yes, there were tit for tat retaliations between Israel and Syria along the border. Damascus also hosted the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which undoubtedly antagonised the Israelis. But to contend that Israel somehow faced an existential threat, an imminent attack from its neighbours is hyperbolic nonsense.
4/5: To close the loop with the argument I made in my last post, Israel undoubtedly asserted its dominance following the June 1967 war. In October 1973, Egypt launched a surprise pre-emptive attack to in an attempt to regain the Sinai Peninsula (which it had lost in the 1967 war). Once again, Israeli military superiority prevailed and Egypt finally conceded that it did not have the capacity to comprehensively defeat Israel on the battlefield. Israel too recognised that waging war on multiple fronts every few years was not sustainable (particularly because the military was now needed to maintain the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza) and therefore entered into the Camp David Accords which led to the peace deal in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. With the largest and most powerful Arab country pacified, the Jordanians eventually signed a peace treaty as well 15 years later in 1994.
The playground fight like ‘but they started it’ type of argumentation that you’ve persistently employed is inherently reductionist and invariably results in gross over-simplifications if not outright obfuscation. It’s intellectually bankrupt for anyone purporting to be knowledgeable on the subject to completely disregard the fundamental nature of the Zionist enterprise when discussing this subject. To disregard the gross asymmetry of power in favour of the Zionists and later Israel since the early 20th century due to great power patronage and how that has enabled Israel to assert its will is dishonest. You’ve raised some other absurd arguments in your comment which also warrant a response to correct the response, or at the very least add more nuance.
Palestinians had no homeland: this is a ridiculous line of reasoning. A number of villages, towns and cities in what became Mandatory Palestine (and eventually Israel) were continuously and habitually inhabited by successive generations of Arabs for at least a millennium, if not longer (40-50 generations at minimum). Family homes, farmland etc. passed down from generation to generation clearly evidences their connection to the villages, towns, cities (i.e. their hometowns) in that particular geography – i.e. their “homeland.” Just because they didn’t specifically call themselves “Palestinians” since time immemorial doesn’t in any way dilute or diminish this connection. To draw an analogy, prior to the 1850s, the Indian subcontinent consisted of various kingdoms and fiefdoms (as many as 600-700 at some points). Today, their descendants live in what is currently called India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just because their forefathers were subjects of another political entity, be it the Mughals or the Marathas and never referred to themselves as Indians or Pakistanis or Bangladeshis doesn’t in any way dilute their progenies connection to the same land. In fact, their present day nationality originates from this very historic connection. The same logic applies to the Palestinians, just because they were at subjects of the Malmuks, the Ottomans etc. some point in history doesn’t diminish their connection to the same land that was rechristened Mandatory Palestine in 1917, and later Israel in 1948. Politics is fluid and whose authority any given territory falls under has repeatedly changed throughout history. But a change in who controls the territory it doesn’t negate a particular peoples connection to lands that they’ve lived on for generations – i.e. their “homelands.”
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that peoples cannot forge connections to new lands over time. The Scots and the English moved to North America in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. They gradually established roots in these places cultivating the land, building homes, running businesses and so on. Today, it not controversial for their descendants to call Canada or the United States their homeland. If you go to Guyana, or Fiji or Malaysia, you’ll find plenty of Indians whose forefathers 10-12 generations ago went there from India as indentured labourers and stayed on. Again, their descendants today would naturally refer to Guyana, or Fiji or Malaysia as their “homeland.” The same standard applies to Israelis. 76 years later in 2024, there are many Jewish Israelis who are of European descent, but Israel is all they’ve ever known. There is simply no disputing the fact that Tel Aviv or Ashkelon or Nazareth or any other city, town, village to where they have family ties, economic ties etc. is their hometown in what has become their “homeland.” But argue that this affinity is only exclusive to some, while actively denying it those with a much older and longer historical connection to the same land (i.e. the Melanesians, Amazonian tribes, Malays, the Cree, the Sioux, the Palestinians) is intellectually bankrupt.
5/5: Palestinians weren’t a government in 1947: two points. Firstly, under the relatively decentralized system of administration during Ottoman times, local peoples governed their local affairs and were generally left to be as long as they pledged allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. Local elites were co-opted into the Ottoman nobility in what was essentially system of indirect rule. Secondly, by contrast, post WWI, early Zionists successfully lobbied the British to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and used their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The use of the word “establishment” itself in the Balfour Declaration is very telling – for it recognises that massive social engineering would be required to convert a land that was 94 percent Palestinian at the time into a Jewish state. Naturally therefore, mandatory rule was designed to deny and exclude Palestinians from the polity in their homeland. Unlike all of the other British and French mandates, the Palestinians were never allowed to formally establish a quasi-governmental body representing its interests and aspirations because the British denied it to them. Although organisations such as the AHC which emerged when Palestinian elites organised themselves in the 1920s, they nonetheless remained outside the system unlike their Zionist counterparts. Various articles in the mandate for Palestine clearly evidence this. Article 2 for example only allowed for the creation of self-governing institutions for the Jewish immigrants, not the Palestinians. Article 4 gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status thereby according wide-ranging powers to the Zionists to develop economic and social policy as well as acquiring international diplomatic status. Palestinians were not allowed to create their own institutions, nor were joint Jewish-Palestinian bodies ever permitted. Articles 6 and 7 gave the Jewish Agency full control over immigration and citizenship – such that European Jews immigrating could immediately acquire nationality while a Palestinian who may have been abroad prior to 1917 (for higher education let’s say) was stripped of their citizenship and couldn’t return home to their families. So yes, they didn’t have a government in 1947 because political participation was systematically denied to them. But again, deliberate political and social engineering to deny Palestinians a voice at the table doesn’t change the overarching fact that Mandatory Palestine was nonetheless their “homeland.” To tie it back to the comments I made at the start of this response, this also explains why the AHC didn’t have a seat at the table in negotiating the terms of resolution 181 with the Zionists and other UN members.
Arabs voluntarily fled, or encouraged by their leaders: this is “lying by omission.” Arabs fled out of fear, in particular after the Deir Yassin Massacre in April 1948. As the news of the brutality of the Zionist militias spread like wildfire, terrified Palestinians fled their homes. This could hardly be described as “voluntary.” As far as the Arab leaders were concerned, many of them preferred an orderly withdrawal to a chaotic and bloody one to save lives. The Zionist claim of “voluntary transfer” is completely illogical. Why would anyone flee from their homes unless they’re threatened with brutal violence? As I’ve already explained above, it was a culmination of forcible expulsions + massacres that eventually compelled the Arab armies to attack Israel and prevent the refugee crisis spilling over into their borders from becoming unmanageable. To reiterate, they were reluctant to attack because they were significantly weaker than the Zionist militias, who, under the tutelage of their British patrons during the Mandate, had become a formidable fighting force that were instrumental in putting down Palestinian rebellions in the mid 1930s and had gained fighting experience in North Africa during the Second World War.
Palestinians attacked Israelis in 1948, 2.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel so no ethnic cleansing: Sure, but again there is a simple explanation. Most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel originate from the North – particularly the Galilee. By the time the Zionist militias got to this region, news of the forcible expulsions and massacres reached them, and they organised themselves and resisted. Survival, keeping your home, are remarkably strong incentives to fight back! Resultantly, there were about 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians that weren’t successfully expelled. Historians such as Benny Morris say the job to entirely clear the land out of its inhabitants was only partially completed by the time the armistice agreements were signed in 1949. The ~2 million remaining within the Green Line today are the descendants of those who successfully managed to resist their expulsion (this population has grown naturally, just like the Israeli Jewish population did from about 1.4 million in the early 1950s to 7.5 million today). It is absurd to argue that clearing out ~750,000 Palestinians, or ~75% of the Palestinian population from what became Green Line Israel in less than two years was not ethnic cleansing because less than ~25% of them managed to remain behind. It’s the overarching principle that’s truly informative of the intent – i.e. the only way that a Jewish majority state could have been formed in a land that just 50 years earlier was 95 percent Palestinian is ethnic cleansing. And if the intent was never forcible expulsion, then why did the UN resoundingly pass resolution 194? Why haven’t the Palestinians languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries been allowed to return to their homes? The reason is simple. It comes down to maintaining the demographic reality that was engineered in 1947-49. As a consequence of their resistance, Palestinian citizens of Israel were subjected to military rule until 1966 to pacify and subjugate them. This had the added benefit of fine tuning the system of military occupation that would be required to bring hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under direct Israeli control after capturing the West Bank and Gaza following the June 1967 war.
More on Gaza: to further debunk your attempt to invent the map and the history in the Mandatory period, Egypt, it was already under British control since the late 19th century (i.e. before the Mandate) and at no point before the 1948 war was Gaza ever under its jurisdiction. In fact, during Ottoman times, about a sixth of the Sinai in the north (immediately south of what is today the Gaza strip and the Negev desert) was part of the Levant province. Israel preferred for Gaza to be taken by the Egyptians in 1948 because over 200,000 Palestinian refugees fled there after being driven out of what became south and central Israel. This is completely understandable. A nascent Jewish state did not want to govern, or directly face possible resistance on two fronts because they already had the Palestinians of the North (in the Galilee in particular) to contend with. This wasn’t any different from the logic behind Ben-Gurion’s dealings with the Jordanians in 1948 re: the West Bank.
“Again 1967 was a pre-emptive strike too - another naked land grab. Egypt, Syria, Jordan were caught totally unaware (foolishly and naively in my opinion). Egypt left it's airfields totally exposed and it's airforce was wiped out in a matter of hours. Hardly what a country intending to launch an attack does.”
I’m not misrepresenting anything. It is said that most lies are “lies of omission.” This is when someone simply fails to mention critical facts about a particular situation, purposely misleading the reader to the wrong conclusion.
I wont speak for the Irgun or Stern, as I consider them terror groups like I view the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers. However, it wasn’t forced deportation of Palestinians after they refused the partition plan. It was the 1948 war initiated by the Arab states who also refused to accept the UN mandate.
Remember, the Palestinians had no homeland, and weren’t a government in 1947. The Brits controlled what is mostly current day Israel, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Jerusalem, while the Egyptian’s controlled Gaza. Neither nation agreed to give up land for a Palestinian state. So the Palestinians rejection, was a moot point. The Egyptian’s did allow a Palestinian government, but it was just a puppet government with no real power.
The whole truth is that an estimated 726,000 Arabs fled their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. That war was instigated not by the Jews but by the Arabs, who rejected the United Nations’ plan partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel accepted that plan, but the Arabs chose war.
The vast majority of Arabs left their villages out of their own free will to avoid being caught in the crossfire of war. They were encouraged to do so by their leaders, who told the Arab public that they would soon remove the Jewish population by force and after which they could return to their homes. So nice try.
And Palestinian groups were also attacking Israeli’s. And given that 2.5 million Palestinians are Israeli citizens inside Israel proper, supports my conclusion that it wasn’t ethnic cleaning, but fighting amongst Palestinians and Jewish groups.
That’s said, your interpretation of the 67’ war is rich. It’s been documented that Egypt, Jordan and Syria were planning a coordinated attack. The difference was Israeli intelligence, which thwarted their plans with a “preemptive” attack.
You, yourself, used the word “preemptive,” which literally means (definition) to preempt or forestall something, especially to prevent attack by disabling the enemy. These were your own words, so stop with the false narrative. Those countries were about to attack and moved their troops and tanks close to the Israeli borders, which they claimed were military exercises at the time.
1/5: What makes you think actors only strike pre-emptively in the face of an imminent threat? That’s the limitation international law places. But anyone living in the real world should know full well that pre-emptive force is often used to gain decisive strategic advantages. For opportunistic reasons when your adversary isn’t expecting it in order to change the circumstances on the ground in your favour. This is what the Israelis successfully managed to achieve in 1967 and what the Egyptians failed to accomplish in 1973 (more on that later). Alas, this isn’t the only shortcoming in your response. It’s yet another farrago of distortions and misrepresentations that demonstrate a factually incorrect and shallow understanding of the historical context which in turn render the conclusions you’ve drawn fundamentally flawed.
Anyone who’s reasonably knowledgeable on this subject should’ve clearly understood the overarching context and background behind my previous post re: what transpired between November 1947 to May 1948. The historical record isn’t disputed amongst serious observers. However, since you seem to be unaware of it, I’ll lay it out in greater detail for your benefit.
Zionism, at least its mainstream stand, is a settler colonial ideology that originated amongst European Jewry in the late 1800s to establish a homeland in between the between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact there are others, albeit a minority, who subscribe to the boundaries laid out in the Book of Exodus – from the Red Sea to the Euphrates River. At the turn of the 20th century, ~95% of the population on this land was Palestinian Arab (overwhelmingly Muslim with a small Christian community). There was also a small Mizrahi Jewish community of ~15,000 (3.2%) who’d lived there for generations alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbours. Early Zionists were fully cognisant of this demographic challenge from the get go. They knew that the creation of a Jewish majority state on all of the territory they coveted would require a drastic form of social engineering. And just to be clear, at no point were the Zionists ever interested in establishing bi-national state or a permanent partition of historic Palestine. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, partition was at most viewed as a first step, or a tactical manoeuver in their eventual goal. Flapan quotes David Ben-Gurion, who said in the late 1930s, “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” So much for “Israel accepted the plan, but the Arabs chose war.” As to why the Palestinians rejected the partition plan, briefly there were two reasons. First, the Palestinians, unlike the Zionists, weren’t allowed lobby their case to the UN. Second, Palestinians, who’d called this land their home for at 40-50 generations if not longer and made up two-thirds of the population were only given 44% of the land whereas the remaining 56% was given to a settler population of new migrants who’d been there for ~50 years. Failing to acknowledge that this was a fundamentally unjust proposal is “lying by omission.”
Going back to the social engineering that would be necessary for the Zionists to accomplish their ambition. From the very beginning, early Zionists knew that it’d have to involve ethnic cleansing. Theodore Herzl articulated this in somewhat benign, ambiguous terms when he wrote in his diary in 1895, “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment…. Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” By the mid-1930s however, Zionist leaders voiced their plans were far more explicitly. In fact, the Jewish Agency held a closed door meeting in June 1938 in which they recognised that the only way to accomplish their goal was through “compulsory transfer.” Ben-Gurion clarified in no uncertain terms what this meant when he wrote in 1941, “it is impossible to imagine (a) general evacuation of the Arab population without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.” Israel’s chief historian Benny Morris makes it very clear that “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”
2/5: When it became clear that the UN wasn’t going to try and mediate a more equitable solution (that consulted with the majority population and took demographics into account) than the 56-44 partition plan, the Zionists seized the opportunity to alter the conditions on the ground decisively in their favour. Between November 1947 and May 1948 (i.e. before Israel declared its independence), Zionist militias started the process of forcibly depopulating cities, towns and villages of its Palestinian inhabitants. By late February 1948, after the British withdrew all their forces to the port city Haifa, the militias seized doubled down to accelerate this process (putting into effect Plan Dalet a couple of weeks later). By the end of April, Palestinians were driven out of their homes en masse in the cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, Beisan, Acre and West Jerusalem. This was followed by massacres such as Deir Yassin which increased the fear amongst the population and caused more people to flee. Over 250,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled and fled to neighbouring Arab countries. In response to this rapidly escalating refugee crisis, the Arab armies reluctantly attacked Israel after its declaration of independence in May 1948. In short, it’s blatantly dishonest to suggest that the “Arabs chose war.”
In fact, the record shows that the neighboring Arab states were reluctant to attack Israel as they were militarily inferior. After all, the Zionist militias which became the IDF had developed into a formidable fighting force under the tutelage of the British in the 1930s and 1940s when they brutally crushed the 1936 Palestinian revolt and fought alongside the British Army in North Africa during WWII. Inevitably, the Arab armies were successfully repelled and another 0.5 million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as Israel expanded beyond the partition plan borders and captured 78% of the land by the time the armistice was signed in 1949. You’ve raised three factually incorrect points which relate to the 1947-49 period that I’ll address separately in greater detail in the interest of clarity – the status of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Arabs fled voluntarily.
Israeli elites at that time were remarkably candid about their fundamental character as a colonising force, and cognisant of the antagonism that this would ferment amongst Palestinians and the larger Arab world. In the wake of the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion candidly told the President of World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel, It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” Or Ze’ev Jabotinsky who wrote, “Colonisation is self-explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonisation. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.”
As such, an honest reading of the historical record shows that the 1949 armistice gave birth to a new and uneasy status quo. On one hand, there was Israel whose territorial aspirations weren’t completely fulfilled (I’m just focussing on the mainstream Zionist interpretation of “river to the sea” here). On the other hand, there were the neighbouring Arab countries who were humiliated in 1948 and faced with a more powerful, adversarial and expansionist settler colonial state that they wanted to push back against and ideally dismantle in what was in essence an anti-colonial endeavour from their perspective.
3/5: To digress slightly before discussing June 1967, it is patently false to claim that the West Bank and Jerusalem were part of Transjordan in 1917. Nice try to redraw the map and reinvent history! Look at any map of Mandatory Palestine, throughout 1917-1948, included what is today Green Line Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1917-1948. Even an arm of the Israeli Hasbara machine got it correct (refreshingly for a change, see: https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Maps/Pages/The%20League%20of%20Nations%20Mandate%20for%20Palestine%20-%201920.aspx?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Cities and towns that are in the West Bank today, such as Jericho, Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah etc. were all part of Mandatory Palestine, never Transjordan. Jerusalem too was under British control throughout the mandate. This is completely in line with the intent expressed in the Balfour Declaration. Gaza and the West Bank only came under Egyptian and Jordanian control post 1948 (I’ll discuss Gaza separately further below in response to your point on the Palestinian citizens of Israel). In his book “Collusion Across the Jordan,” British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim provides a detailed account of how the Hashemite King of Jordan covertly negotiated with the Zionists before the end of the British mandate to gain control of the West Bank because he wanted access to more fertile land (Jordan itself is mostly arid desert). In exchange, the Jordanians held back their forces while the Zionist militias went on to capture and ethnically cleanse cities such as Lydd and Ramleh as well as the surrounding towns and villages just beyond the West Bank and absorb them all into the state of Israel. The Israelis were prepared to temporarily accept this outcome so they wouldn’t have to contend with potentially having another ~300,000 Palestinians within their borders for the time being (contextualised further below in response to your point regarding the Palestinian citizens of Israel).
Attack by Jordan and Syria and Egypt was imminent in 1967: this assertion is patently false. When Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban told Lyndon Johnson on May 26, 1967 that its Arab neighbours were about to launch an attack, Robert McNamara refuted this claim with reports from three separate intelligence groups who all unanimously agreed “that an attack was not imminent.” Moreover, Washington knew full well that Israel’s military was far superior to the militaries of all the Arab countries combined. Johnson’s response to Eban makes this abundantly clear: “if they do, you’ll whip the hell out of them.” Following the Six Day War, five Israeli Generals – Ezer Weizmann, Chiam Herzog, Haim Bar Lev, Matitiyahu Peled and Yeshiyahu Gavish – the affirmed this assessment. As I already mentioned in my previous post, Israel launched this pre-emptive attack in June 1967 to expand its borders, to correct the “fatal historical mistake.” This is completely in line with the territorial ambitions of the Zionist project, which coveted the West Bank from the get go. Not only was the land very fertile, but its symbolic importance in Jewish tradition is massive.
For as long as he was in power, Ben-Gurion was caught in a dilemma. On one hand, he lamented colluding with King Abdullah I in what he termed “bechiya ledorot” or a “fatal historical mistake.” Yet throughout his time in power until 1963, he ultimately resisted pressure from other factions within Israel to capture the West Bank because he firmly believed that the nascent Jewish state wasn’t in a position to absorb hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, the “Greater Israel Lobby” gained far more influence after Ben-Gurion left government and pushed much harder for the annexation of the West Bank. In short, the impetus to launch an attack to achieve this end markedly increased from 1963 onwards.
This is not to say that the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians didn’t ‘poke the bear’ with provocative skirmishes with the Israelis throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Gamal Abdul Nasser employed a dangerous tactic called “brinksmanship” where he test the limits of the Israeli and UN response by deploying some troops in the Sinai Peninsula (which was to be a demilitarised zone after the 1956 Suez Crisis). While the Jordanians employed hostile rhetoric on occasion, they actually killed and captured more Palestinians attempting to infiltrate the Green Line than the Israelis did throughout the 1960s. And yes, there were tit for tat retaliations between Israel and Syria along the border. Damascus also hosted the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which undoubtedly antagonised the Israelis. But to contend that Israel somehow faced an existential threat, an imminent attack from its neighbours is hyperbolic nonsense.
4/5: To close the loop with the argument I made in my last post, Israel undoubtedly asserted its dominance following the June 1967 war. In October 1973, Egypt launched a surprise pre-emptive attack to in an attempt to regain the Sinai Peninsula (which it had lost in the 1967 war). Once again, Israeli military superiority prevailed and Egypt finally conceded that it did not have the capacity to comprehensively defeat Israel on the battlefield. Israel too recognised that waging war on multiple fronts every few years was not sustainable (particularly because the military was now needed to maintain the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza) and therefore entered into the Camp David Accords which led to the peace deal in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. With the largest and most powerful Arab country pacified, the Jordanians eventually signed a peace treaty as well 15 years later in 1994.
The playground fight like ‘but they started it’ type of argumentation that you’ve persistently employed is inherently reductionist and invariably results in gross over-simplifications if not outright obfuscation. It’s intellectually bankrupt for anyone purporting to be knowledgeable on the subject to completely disregard the fundamental nature of the Zionist enterprise when discussing this subject. To disregard the gross asymmetry of power in favour of the Zionists and later Israel since the early 20th century due to great power patronage and how that has enabled Israel to assert its will is dishonest. You’ve raised some other absurd arguments in your comment which also warrant a response to correct the response, or at the very least add more nuance.
Palestinians had no homeland: this is a ridiculous line of reasoning. A number of villages, towns and cities in what became Mandatory Palestine (and eventually Israel) were continuously and habitually inhabited by successive generations of Arabs for at least a millennium, if not longer (40-50 generations at minimum). Family homes, farmland etc. passed down from generation to generation clearly evidences their connection to the villages, towns, cities (i.e. their hometowns) in that particular geography – i.e. their “homeland.” Just because they didn’t specifically call themselves “Palestinians” since time immemorial doesn’t in any way dilute or diminish this connection. To draw an analogy, prior to the 1850s, the Indian subcontinent consisted of various kingdoms and fiefdoms (as many as 600-700 at some points). Today, their descendants live in what is currently called India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just because their forefathers were subjects of another political entity, be it the Mughals or the Marathas and never referred to themselves as Indians or Pakistanis or Bangladeshis doesn’t in any way dilute their progenies connection to the same land. In fact, their present day nationality originates from this very historic connection. The same logic applies to the Palestinians, just because they were at subjects of the Malmuks, the Ottomans etc. some point in history doesn’t diminish their connection to the same land that was rechristened Mandatory Palestine in 1917, and later Israel in 1948. Politics is fluid and whose authority any given territory falls under has repeatedly changed throughout history. But a change in who controls the territory it doesn’t negate a particular peoples connection to lands that they’ve lived on for generations – i.e. their “homelands.”
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that peoples cannot forge connections to new lands over time. The Scots and the English moved to North America in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. They gradually established roots in these places cultivating the land, building homes, running businesses and so on. Today, it not controversial for their descendants to call Canada or the United States their homeland. If you go to Guyana, or Fiji or Malaysia, you’ll find plenty of Indians whose forefathers 10-12 generations ago went there from India as indentured labourers and stayed on. Again, their descendants today would naturally refer to Guyana, or Fiji or Malaysia as their “homeland.” The same standard applies to Israelis. 76 years later in 2024, there are many Jewish Israelis who are of European descent, but Israel is all they’ve ever known. There is simply no disputing the fact that Tel Aviv or Ashkelon or Nazareth or any other city, town, village to where they have family ties, economic ties etc. is their hometown in what has become their “homeland.” But argue that this affinity is only exclusive to some, while actively denying it those with a much older and longer historical connection to the same land (i.e. the Melanesians, Amazonian tribes, Malays, the Cree, the Sioux, the Palestinians) is intellectually bankrupt.
5/5: Palestinians weren’t a government in 1947: two points. Firstly, under the relatively decentralized system of administration during Ottoman times, local peoples governed their local affairs and were generally left to be as long as they pledged allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. Local elites were co-opted into the Ottoman nobility in what was essentially system of indirect rule. Secondly, by contrast, post WWI, early Zionists successfully lobbied the British to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and used their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The use of the word “establishment” itself in the Balfour Declaration is very telling – for it recognises that massive social engineering would be required to convert a land that was 94 percent Palestinian at the time into a Jewish state. Naturally therefore, mandatory rule was designed to deny and exclude Palestinians from the polity in their homeland. Unlike all of the other British and French mandates, the Palestinians were never allowed to formally establish a quasi-governmental body representing its interests and aspirations because the British denied it to them. Although organisations such as the AHC which emerged when Palestinian elites organised themselves in the 1920s, they nonetheless remained outside the system unlike their Zionist counterparts. Various articles in the mandate for Palestine clearly evidence this. Article 2 for example only allowed for the creation of self-governing institutions for the Jewish immigrants, not the Palestinians. Article 4 gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status thereby according wide-ranging powers to the Zionists to develop economic and social policy as well as acquiring international diplomatic status. Palestinians were not allowed to create their own institutions, nor were joint Jewish-Palestinian bodies ever permitted. Articles 6 and 7 gave the Jewish Agency full control over immigration and citizenship – such that European Jews immigrating could immediately acquire nationality while a Palestinian who may have been abroad prior to 1917 (for higher education let’s say) was stripped of their citizenship and couldn’t return home to their families. So yes, they didn’t have a government in 1947 because political participation was systematically denied to them. But again, deliberate political and social engineering to deny Palestinians a voice at the table doesn’t change the overarching fact that Mandatory Palestine was nonetheless their “homeland.” To tie it back to the comments I made at the start of this response, this also explains why the AHC didn’t have a seat at the table in negotiating the terms of resolution 181 with the Zionists and other UN members.
Arabs voluntarily fled, or encouraged by their leaders: this is “lying by omission.” Arabs fled out of fear, in particular after the Deir Yassin Massacre in April 1948. As the news of the brutality of the Zionist militias spread like wildfire, terrified Palestinians fled their homes. This could hardly be described as “voluntary.” As far as the Arab leaders were concerned, many of them preferred an orderly withdrawal to a chaotic and bloody one to save lives. The Zionist claim of “voluntary transfer” is completely illogical. Why would anyone flee from their homes unless they’re threatened with brutal violence? As I’ve already explained above, it was a culmination of forcible expulsions + massacres that eventually compelled the Arab armies to attack Israel and prevent the refugee crisis spilling over into their borders from becoming unmanageable. To reiterate, they were reluctant to attack because they were significantly weaker than the Zionist militias, who, under the tutelage of their British patrons during the Mandate, had become a formidable fighting force that were instrumental in putting down Palestinian rebellions in the mid 1930s and had gained fighting experience in North Africa during the Second World War.
Palestinians attacked Israelis in 1948, 2.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel so no ethnic cleansing: Sure, but again there is a simple explanation. Most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel originate from the North – particularly the Galilee. By the time the Zionist militias got to this region, news of the forcible expulsions and massacres reached them, and they organised themselves and resisted. Survival, keeping your home, are remarkably strong incentives to fight back! Resultantly, there were about 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians that weren’t successfully expelled. Historians such as Benny Morris say the job to entirely clear the land out of its inhabitants was only partially completed by the time the armistice agreements were signed in 1949. The ~2 million remaining within the Green Line today are the descendants of those who successfully managed to resist their expulsion (this population has grown naturally, just like the Israeli Jewish population did from about 1.4 million in the early 1950s to 7.5 million today). It is absurd to argue that clearing out ~750,000 Palestinians, or ~75% of the Palestinian population from what became Green Line Israel in less than two years was not ethnic cleansing because less than ~25% of them managed to remain behind. It’s the overarching principle that’s truly informative of the intent – i.e. the only way that a Jewish majority state could have been formed in a land that just 50 years earlier was 95 percent Palestinian is ethnic cleansing. And if the intent was never forcible expulsion, then why did the UN resoundingly pass resolution 194? Why haven’t the Palestinians languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries been allowed to return to their homes? The reason is simple. It comes down to maintaining the demographic reality that was engineered in 1947-49. As a consequence of their resistance, Palestinian citizens of Israel were subjected to military rule until 1966 to pacify and subjugate them. This had the added benefit of fine tuning the system of military occupation that would be required to bring hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under direct Israeli control after capturing the West Bank and Gaza following the June 1967 war.
More on Gaza: to further debunk your attempt to invent the map and the history in the Mandatory period, Egypt, it was already under British control since the late 19th century (i.e. before the Mandate) and at no point before the 1948 war was Gaza ever under its jurisdiction. In fact, during Ottoman times, about a sixth of the Sinai in the north (immediately south of what is today the Gaza strip and the Negev desert) was part of the Levant province. Israel preferred for Gaza to be taken by the Egyptians in 1948 because over 200,000 Palestinian refugees fled there after being driven out of what became south and central Israel. This is completely understandable. A nascent Jewish state did not want to govern, or directly face possible resistance on two fronts because they already had the Palestinians of the North (in the Galilee in particular) to contend with. This wasn’t any different from the logic behind Ben-Gurion’s dealings with the Jordanians in 1948 re: the West Bank.