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Wed, May 18, 2011 | The Atlantic | Prime Minister’s Office | Daled Amos

Mahmoud Abbas in a july 2009 interview about his evacuation of Safed in 1948. (Source: MEMRITV)

Mahmoud Abbas is ‘Grossly Distorting’ Documented History

National correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the Atlantic on Tuesday, “There is no particular reason to hope for a successful peace process when the leader of the Palestinians is selling a false history of Israel’s independence.”

Goldberg is referring to an op-ed in the New York Times by Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinians, in which he writes,

“It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.”

Abbas argues that while the United States, minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, granted it recognition, “a Palestinian state remained a promise unfulfilled,” meaning that recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN in September would mend a historic wrong.

However, the sole reason for this ‘unfulfilled promise’ is because the Arab states in 1947 opposed the UN partition plan to create two states, a Jewish and an Arab-Palestinian state.

But it’s not only Jeffrey Goldberg who is troubled by this Stalinist-style rewriting of history. Israel’s PM Netanyahu issued a statement on Tuesday calling it a “a gross distortion of well-known and -documented historical facts.”

“It was the Palestinians who rejected the partition plan for two states while the Jewish leadership accepted it. It was the armies of Arab countries — assisted by Palestinian forces — that attacked the Jewish state in order to destroy it. None of this is mentioned in the [NYT] article. Moreover, one could conclude from the article that the Palestinian leadership views the establishment of a Palestinian state as a means to continue the conflict with Israel instead of ending it, ” Netanyahu said.

Source: Prime Minister’s Office.

And Dales Amos has an article with more evidence:

“The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem.”

— Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph September 6, 1948. (same appeared in The London Telegraph, August 1948)

That same article also quotes Rick Richman who points out that the Palestinian Arabs have been offered a state of there own on 7 different occasions: 1919, 1937, 1947, 1978, 2000 (twice) and 2008.

“We are now in the 92nd year of a peace process in which the Palestinians are the first people in history to be offered a state seven times, reject it seven times, and set preconditions for discussing an eighth offer,” Richman writes.

In his Atlantic article, Jeffrey Goldberg also writes that Mahmoud Abbas’s account of his family’s departure from British mandated-Palestine are contradicting. Abbas writes the following contradictory story about his evacuation:

“Sixty-three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family to Syria. He took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees. Though he and his family wished for decades to return to their home and homeland, they were denied that most basic of human rights.”

But Goldberg rightfully notes that this is shamelessly the opposite of what Abbas said in earlier interviews:

Scant attention was paid last week to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s revelations on Al-Palestinia TV. Abbas talked about his youth in Safed, from whence he routinely claims his family was forcibly driven out by Israeli troops in 1948. Abbas revels in his supposed refugee status. It’s his stock-in-trade on the Arab scene and the international arena….Fatah’s cofounder reminisced at length about his Safed origins and haphazardly let the truth slip out. “Until the nakba” (calamity in Arabic – the loaded synonym for Israeli independence), he recounted, his family “was well-off in Safed.” When Abbas was 13,

“we left on foot at night to the Jordan River… Eventually we settled in Damascus… My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work. “People were motivated to run away… They feared retribution from Zionist terrorist organizations – particularly from the Safed ones. Those of us from Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what happened during the 1929 uprising. This was in the memory of our families and parents… They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale – saving our lives and our belongings.”

So here it is from the mouth of the PA’s head honcho himself. He and no other verifies that nobody expelled Safed’s Arabs. Their exile was voluntary, propelled by their extreme consciousness of guilt and expectation that Jews would be ruled by the same blood-feud conventions that prevail in Arab culture. Unrealistically they anticipated that Jews would do to them precisely what the Arabs had done to Safed’s Jews. If that was their premise, they indeed had cause to panic. The “uprising” Abbas alluded to was one among the serial pogroms instigated by infamous Jerusalem mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who’s still revered throughout the Arab world.

Source: JPost, July 17, 2009

Hillel Fendel writes in a July 07, 2009 article in IsraelNationalNews:

“It is notable that the Abbas family moved back to Damascus, as that is likely the place where it had originated less than 90 years earlier. Joan Peters, in her scholarly work “From Time Immemorial” on the Arab population of Israel, writes that in 1860, “Algerian tribes moved from Damascus en masse to Safed.” She notes that the Muslims in the city were mostly descended from Moorish settlers and from Kurds — more evidence negating the claim that the Arabs in the Land of Israel had been there “from time immemorial.”

Also this video clip of an interview in which PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas talks about the Arab evacuation of Safed in 1948:

Following are excerpts from an interview with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, which aired on Al-Filistiniya TV on July 6, 2009:

Interviewer: When the Palestinians were forced to leave their land, they were driven by strong motives. Do you recall that?

Mahmoud Abbas: The main reason was that the people wanted to flee for their lives, and protect the honor of their women, which was very important. They feared the violence of the Zionist terrorist organizations. We, in Safed, in particular – just like the people of Hebron – could feel that there was [Jewish] vengeance for the 1929 uprising. This remained in the memories of our families and parents. The balance of military power – actually, it was not a military power in the true sense of the word… All [we] had was several young men fighting with primitive [weapons]… When they felt that the balance [of power] had shifted, they decided to leave. The city in its entirety left, in order to protect their lives and their women’s honor.

Source: MEMRITV.

And more from Abbas himself in the Daled Amos article:

In his book, Politics, Lies and Videotape, Yitschak Ben Gad has other quotes by Abbas — from a different Arabic interview he gave:

In the first quote, Abbas admits that the Arabs themselves encouraged those Arabs living in then-Palestine to leave — with the promise of ‘throwing the Jews into the sea’ after which the Arabs could return and take their land.

In the second quote, Abbas again acknowledges that the Arab armies — and not the Jewish armies — were responsible for the Arabs leaving.

View these quotes in the online version of the book here. Hat tip: Elder of Ziyon.

Jeffrey Goldberg writes that it is “Mahmoud Abbas” who “cannot bring himself to note that the Jews accepted the partition plan, while the Arabs rejected it, and went to war to extinguish the new Jewish state in the cradle, and then lost their offensive war.” And where the Palestinian Authority claims a “Right of Return” for all Palestinian refugees, Goldberg notes that war refugees and displaced people are “not a unique historical event; most wars cause massive population dislocations. It is worth noting that some Jews, a smaller number, were also expelled from their towns and farms by Arab forces. Larger numbers of Jews — 800,000 — were subsequently expelled from Arab countries …. These Jews are not considered refugees today because they were taken in by Israel and given citizenship. The Arab refugees from Palestine were not treated nearly so well by their brethren.”

And instead of reciting and distorting this history, Goldberg adds that it would be wiser if Mahmoud Abbas and PM Benjamin Netanyahu focused on the aftermath of the 1967 war.

“Mahmoud Abbas won’t be returning to Safed,” Goldberg writes, “but he could be president of an independent state of Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in Jerusalem. If only he — and, of course, Prime Minister Netanyahu — could find a way to avoid rehearsing old grievances and instead work toward a future in which both parties don’t get all that they want, but get enough to live.”