[yshavurah] this wk's snippets
- From: "Cherie Kurland" <kurlandc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
- Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 22:34:52 -0400
From http://207.67.138.205/index.asp: ?The single largest gathering in the
world in support of Israel will celebrate the 56th anniversary of the State of
Israel on Sunday, May 23rd, 2004, on Fifth Avenue in New York City. This year?s
Parade theme, ?Let?s Go to Israel? NOW!? ?.?
From www.jcpa.org/daily for 4/26/04: · Israel at 56 - Editorial
Against all odds, the Jewish people has a country in its own land, after 2,000
years of exile. Israel's standard of living ranks 35th among the nations, and
19th in life expectancy (above the U.S. and UK). We have by far the largest
number of hi-tech start-ups per capita in the world and have attracted venture
capital at rates exceeding most European countries. Israel has,
proportionately, the highest number of university graduates in the world, and
the fourth largest air force, after the U.S., Russia, and China. (Jerusalem
Post)
· Palestinians Angered by UNRWA's Poster Ban in Schools - Mohammed Zaatari
The director general of UNRWA in Lebanon, Richard Cook, angered Palestinians
when he recently requested that pictures of Palestinian leaders be torn down
from UNRWA schools in northern Lebanon under the pretext of implementing UN
resolutions and in a bid to prevent children from getting accustomed to
violence and terrorism. Cook ordered the removal of pictures of Hamas leaders
Yassin and Rantissi, and children throwing stones at Israeli forces. (Beirut
Daily Star)
From http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12879: The Arab
Lie Whose Time Has Come By David Gutmann FrontPageMagazine.com | April 21, 2004
To back up its demands for full repatriation to Israel of Arab refugees and
their descendants, the Palestinian leadership has?for over fifty years?busily
spun the story of their "Naqba," their catastrophic flight from Palestine
during 1947-48?. This version of events?is a lie whose time has come, one now
almost universally believed by Gentile and Jew alike.
?.I was a witness to the Naqba times, and am compelled to challenge such
Israel-bashing by the Palestinians and their Jewish allies. As a trainee with
the Palmach and then with the regular Israeli forces during the Independence
War?., I can now?when the Palestinian myth is being legislated into hardened
truth, even for Jews?bear an elder's witness against the Naqba lie. Some facts
I can swear to:
A. The Palestinians initiated the war that led to their Naqba. Troops from
Tel-Aviv eventually conquered Jaffa, but it was Arab fighters in Jaffa who,
from the towers of their mosques, first fired into Tel-Aviv, and turned the
intercity border areas into a battleground.
B. The first refugees were not Arabs but Yemenite Jews, from the Tel
Aviv-Jaffa No-Man's Land that Arab aggression had created. Unlike the
Palestinians, theirs was only a temporary refugee status. Instead of packing
them away and forgetting them in squalid refugee camps, their Ashkenazi
compatriots took them into their own neighborhoods. For the most part the
Yemenites camped out in Tel Aviv apartment lobbies, and used the cooking and
sanitary facilities of the permanent residents. When Jaffa fell to Irgun
soldiers, they went back home.
C. The Palestinians fled for many reasons and from many threats, both real and
imaginary, and that thousands upon thousands fled when nobody pushed them. As
an example, when my unit occupied the abandoned British police station at
Sidn'a Ali in the Sharon Plain, British troops were still stationed in the
vicinity, and we had to train and patrol with our few guns (antiquated or
homemade) concealed. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Sidn'a Ali were long gone, way
before we could have pushed them out, and while the Brits were still in place
to protect them from us. Needless to say, in the absence of any Palestinian
targets (save for some abandoned camels) we committed no rapes.
I don't know why the Sidn'a Ali people fled, but they did leave a caretaker in
place, as a sign that they intended to return once those pesky Jews had been
ethnically cleansed. They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but
because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated;
we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes
forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit
those nice Jewish properties as well.
They guessed wrong; and the Palestinians are still tortured by the residual
shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running
from Jews was like running from women; and because there were so many Sidn'a
Alis. To relieve their shame they stridently and continually demand that their
unsavory history be rewritten and reversed.
While I witnessed no Israeli atrocities in the coastal Sharon Plain, Ralph
Lowenstein, an American volunteer in '48, ?. was a young half-track driver in
the 79th Battalion of the 7th Brigade, the formation that spearheaded Operation
Hiram?.:? I did see virtually every Arab village on a line between Safad and
Kadesh on the Lebanese border during Operation Hiram, and the pattern was:
villages occupied by Christian Arabs unharmed; Muslim villages deserted, long
before any Israeli troops got there?..?
?.We were only a few weeks into the first, irregular phase of the war when the
slaughters began: the wholesale murder by their Arab fellow workers of some 40
Jewish workers in the Haifa refineries; the massacre of Hebrew university
medical faculty and nurses on the road to Mt. Scopus; the killing of many
captured Palmach fighters and kibbutzniks in the Etzion Bloc; the decimation of
the truck convoys to Jerusalem. And after the killing, the real fun began. The
Arab way of war is to quite explicitly ?feminize? the enemy. And in '47-'48,
the Aravim castrated and mutilated? the fallen or captured Jewish soldiers?.I
have seen photographs; and I can say that our Palmach officers? instructed us,
when in action, to always save a bullet or a grenade for ourselves, so as not
to fall alive into the hands of Arab irregulars. Capture was not an option. ?.
In short, barely three years after the cessation of the Holocaust, the
Palestinian Arabs, led by Hitler's Holocaust consultant, Haj-Amin Al-Husseini,
Mufti of Jerusalem, gleefully promised a wholesale genocide??.The Jews of
Palestine responded as an outnumbered and outgunned people should answer: they
?cleansed? the Arab communities that had become?or threatened to become?the
instruments of the revived Holocaustic enterprise. Some examples: They drove
out the occupants of Tireh, who had the bad habit of shooting up Jewish traffic
on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway, and they drove out the occupants of Kastel and
other villages that bloodied the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road. So as to open up the
sea roads to the arms markets and refugee camps of Europe, they took the
seaport of Haifa; to free Tel-Aviv from continual gunfire, they took Jaffa; to
cut the Palestinians off from their Lebanese and Syrian armorers, they
conducted operation Hiram and took the Galilee.
?.Our Palestinian Cousins started the '48 war, and in so doing released the
warlike appetites of a nation of survivors, a people with no place to run, who
had repressed their rage for millennia, and had now earned full title to it. ?.
It was only three years after the Holocaust, and we were still learning the
full extent of the horror from the mouths of children coming to us from the DP
camps of Europe, the prison camps of Cyprus, and the graves of countless Anne
Franks in the Polish sky. Their voices mixed with the chatter of the
Palestinians, as they eagerly detailed, ?what they were going to do to this
particular pack of Yids. And now, fifty-five years later, all the ?noble
souls??the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Society of Friends, B'Tselem?are all so
disappointed with the Israelis of '48. Why? Because, as a nation of victims,
they didn't ?show empathy,? they ?didn't feel the Arab's pain.? Damn well right
they didn't. The really strange thing is how relatively restrained
the Jews actually were.
?.Any people that enters history in an active role will dirty its hands. But
the dirtiest hands belong to those Great Souls whose pristine consciences will
not allow them to fight even their own murderers. Let them look to their own
morality, and not burden the embattled Israelis with their twisted pieties.
--- Cherie Kurland
--- kurlandc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
--- EarthLink: The #1 provider of the Real Internet.
--- Cherie Kurland
--- kurlandc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
--- EarthLink: The #1 provider of the Real Internet.
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