Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter by R Karim entitled ‘No country should accept Israel’s actions’ (SN, Jan 18).
Mr Karim perpetuates the stream of disinformation from an increasingly desperate group of propagandists on behalf of the Arabs in Palestine. His contentions can be rebutted on several clear grounds, and one senses an increasing reluctance in the blogosphere to defend the indefensible. Not many persons chose to comment online, and those that did not agree with Mr Karim’s views had to wait.
Firstly, and significantly, Ilan Pappe and Edwin Montagu will go down in history as confused.
While Montagu’s utter tomfoolery has long been documented, Pappe’s is a work in progress.
Secondly, Mr Karim offers no references, no authority outside of Pappe’s delusion, to support his contentions, or any that illustrate that thousands of other Israeli scholars reject Pappe’s account of the factual record. On the other hand, we have consistently offered the online article ‘Mandate for Palestine: The Legal Aspects of Jewish Rights,’ yet Mr Karim refuses to rebut same.
A rebuttal in the absence of Mr Karim’s unwillingness to address ‘Mandate for Palestine…’ devolves to the simple task of providing an even wider net of evidence that rejects the idea of Arab ‘innocence’ in their departure from Israel. Readers will be astonished to know that Arabs were enraged when the UN offered to partition Israel in 1947, and scuttled the deal after “only being offered” 50% of Israel’s land (don’t forget, Israel had already given away 77% to enable the formation of Jordan). Their “rage” was immediately manifest in several brutal ways. The following extract is instructive: “The archives of The Palestine Post, now The Jerusalem Post and then the newspaper of record of Mandatory Palestine, provide some of the answers and tell a very different story from the one presented by Pappe.
“Sixty-two Jews were murdered by Arabs in the first week after the UN partition plan was passed, and by May 15, 1948, a total of 1,256 Jews had been killed, most of them civilians. These deaths were caused by Arab militias, gangs, terrorists and army units which attacked every place of Jewish inhabitation in Palestine.
“The attacks succeeded in placing Jerusalem under siege and eventually cutting off its water supply. All Jewish villages in the Negev were attacked, and Jews had to go about the country in convoys. In every major city where Jews and Arabs lived in mixed neighborhoods the Jewish areas came under attack. This was true in Haifa’s Hadar Hacarmel as well as Jerusalem’s Old City.
“Massacres were not uncommon… The fact is 1,256 Jews were killed in five months.
Even before the first Arab villages were captured in April, 924 Jews had already been killed. Ilan Pappe should have pondered what might have been if those Jews had not been slaughtered.”
There is also the book Fabricating Israel’s History: The New Historians – a brutal expose of Pappe’s misadventure into revisionism.
The mayhem that has followed every year thereafter has been well documented. Surely the Government of Guyana and Mr Karim, should have considered the implications of current Israeli responses after reading the online article ‘Chronology of Terrorist Attacks in Israel’ by WM Johnston.
Yours faithfully
Roger Williams
