by Hugh Fitzgerald
Did Abbas' warmly applauding UN audience understand that Abbas aspires to erase the only Jewish state and establish a 23rd Arab/Muslim state on Israel's ruins?
Mahmoud Abbas, President for Life of the Palestinian Authority, strutted his poor hour upon the stage – twice the time he was allotted – at the UN on May 15, to observe what he and an army of Palestinian publicists want us to call “Nakba Day.” “Nakba” means “catastrophe” in Arabic; the catastrophe in question was the failure of five Arab armies to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state, which on May 14, 1948, had declared its independence; a day later, those armies entered Israel. More on how this first “Nakba Day” observance went at the UN, and why, after such a farrago of nonsense and lies from Mahmoud Abbas, it must never again be repeated, can be found here: “The UN Must Not Repeat Its ‘Nakba Day’ Farce,” by Colin Rubenstein, Algemeiner, May 30, 2023:
On May 15, the day following the 75th anniversary of Israel’s establishment, the United Nations chose to endorse the Palestinian rejectionist narrative by convening the first-ever “Nakba (Catastrophe) Day” commemoration.
For Palestinians, the term Nakba refers to losing the war that they and their Arab military allies launched to attempt to destroy Israel upon its establishment in 1948, a war that ultimately saw about 750,000 Palestinians displaced, many by choice.
The author overstates the number of Arabs – they only became “Palestinians” in the late 1960s – who left Mandatory Palestine, and then Israel, beginning in late November 1947, just after the Arabs had rejected the UNGA Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution. There were a total of approximately 800,000 Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine in 1947; at the end of the Arab-Israeli war, there were 160,000 Arabs in Israel. That means there could not have been more than 640,000 displaced Arabs, almost all of whom left voluntarily, as Arab broadcasters and the Arab Higher Committee urged them to do, in order to flee the coming battles; they were told to “get out of the way” of the Arab armies, and assured they would be able to return once the Arab victory was complete, which they were told would not take long. Hadn’t Azzam Pasha himself, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, predicted that if war broke out between Arabs and Jews, there “would be a momentous massacre. This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” Some Israeli officials, such as the mayor Haifa, Shabtai Levy, and the leaders of the Histadrut labor organization, urged the Arabs to remain, to little avail. And some Israeli fighters in a few places did expel Arabs from villages that were located in strategically key positions.
However, Nakba Day is only 25 years old. It was the PR brainchild of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who was looking to counter positive publicity surrounding Israel’s 50th anniversary. To this end, he chose the day after Israel had been established.
According to the false Nakba Day narrative, Israel’s creation itself caused the Palestinian refugee crisis, and this was always the Zionists’ intent.
Yet, in fact, UN General Assembly Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, endorsed partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab, with borders based on existing demographics. Majority-Jewish areas were assigned to the Jewish State and vice-versa. The Jews accepted the plan and began preparing their institutions for statehood.
The Arabs violently rejected it and launched a war of aggression, utilizing the armies of five Arab states to try to prevent the Jews from exercising their right to self-determination anywhere in the Mandate.
While Israel won this desperate, existential war, nearly one percent of its total population was killed (that would be the equivalent of more than 3 million Americans today).
The territory held by Arab armies the West Bank and Gaza] was ethnically cleansed to the last Jew. On the other side, most Arabs inside the newly formed Jewish state fled the fighting, sometimes at the behest of their leaders, though the residents of some particularly strategic villages were expelled in the context of Israel’s desperate war of survival. Around 156,000 people remained and became Israeli citizens.
While it’s understandable that Palestinians wish to mourn the displacements and losses they suffered in the war, even if their own leaders ultimately caused these, the UN has absolutely no business having a day of mourning for the loss of a war of aggression launched against a UN member state — and the UN’s own partition plan, in violation of the UN Charter — much less labeling that loss a “catastrophe.”
By what right does the UN “mourn” the Arabs’ loss of a war in which their intention was to drive out or kill every last Jew “between the river and the sea”? Would the UN have preferred such an outcome? If that war ended in what the Arabs regarded as a “catastrophe,” it was so only for them, the Arabs who were foiled in their attempt to destroy the Jewish state.
At the UN Nakba Day event, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas railed against Israel for a full hour, making hateful statements totally inimical to the international community’s consensus vision for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Given a half-hour to speak, Mahmoud Abbas took twice as long for his rant against the Zionists and those who, he claimed, supported Zionism only because “they wanted to get rid of their Jews.” That reflected the argument of Abbas’ 1982 doctoral dissertation, written when he was a graduate student at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, in which he maintained that the Nazis and the Zionists were secretly allied; the Nazis wanted to rid Germany of its Jews, and the Zionists wanted them to be expelled so that they would come to Palestine. Abbas left out the key difference that blew up his argument: the Zionists hoped to welcome Jews to Palestine, while the Nazis did not intend to let them go to Palestine but, instead, planned to murder them, wherever they could be found.
He denied any Jewish historical connection to Judaism’s holiest sites including not only the Temple Mount, but even the Western Wall.
Abbas thus denied the 3000-year history of Jews in Eretz Israel. There was no connection of Jews to this land, he said. None. He denied that there had ever been a First, or a Second, Temple on the top of what Jews have always called the Temple Mount. He denied the archeological evidence of the Jewish presence in the land, found at thousands of sites all over Israel, where archeologists, with many non-Jews among them, have unearthed Jewish oil lamps, utensils, coins, menorahs, pottery, and much else besides. None of this mattered to Abbas; he doesn’t mention those archeological sites and the incontrovertible evidence they provide of a Jewish presence in the land going back at least 3000 years. He does not mention, of course, the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in Hebrew (save for two written n Greek) on parchment, sometime between the first and third centuries B.C., and found in a cave at Qumran by a Bedouin in 1947. This written evidence of Jews in the Land of Israel is now on display at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. No doubt if Abbas had mentioned the Scrolls, he would have insisted they were a modern forgery produced by the ever-deceitful Zionists.
Abbas also reversed his previous comments about foregoing the “right of return” to his original hometown of Safed — now going all in on the Palestinian demand for implementing this legally baseless “right” in full, despite it being completely incompatible with a two-state resolution, or the survival of Israel as a Jewish nation.
A few years ago, Abbas told an interviewer that he was born in Safed, and would like “to visit it” but definitely “not to live in.” He seemed to be yielding on the Right of Return. But at the UN, on Nakba Day, he now claimed that he “wanted” Safed, and all the other Arab villages and towns, indeed all the territory, “from the river to the sea,” to which Palestinians scattered across the Middle East and the world would at long last be able to return. If millions of Palestinians were to exercise that Right of Return, as Abbas is now demanding, that would ensure the end of the only Jewish state; it would be replaced by a 23rd Arab one. Did his warmly applauding UN audience understand?
Hugh Fitzgerald
Source: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/06/lets-not-repeat-nakba-dayhttps://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/06/lets-not-repeat-nakba-day
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