"Nakba survivor" admits she fled without seeing a single Jew

Every year, on "Nakba Day," Arab newspapers scramble to find old people who can act as eyewitnesses to the horrors of how Israel treated their people who would become to be known years later as "Palestinians."

Al Watan Voice published an interview with 80-year old Mrs. Kalhout, who lived in a village called Ni'ilya which was near Gaza.

She describes how her family fled the town - and makes an interesting admission.

Residents of the village and surrounding areas tried to prepare themselves battle. Leaders gave them clubs to go out and attack the Jews. But they didn't find any, and returned to their homes.

Then, she says, after hearing about the massacre by Israel in Deir Yassin and in other Arab towns and villages up north, home towns of the northern region and carrying out massacres there, everyone fled to Gaza without seeing a single Jew enter their towns.

In fact, this happened in November 1948, many months after Deir Yassin, and the IDF fought with Egyptian forces in the area. Mrs. Kalhout says that they thought they would be able to return after a day but they couldn't.

In fact, this was the pattern for the large majority of the Arab refugees - they left their homes based on wild Arab rumors or direction from Arab leaders, promising that they would return in no time. But the vast majority of Arabs who left what became Israel were not expelled and never even saw an Israeli soldier.

I don't recall ever seeing a first-hand account of Arabs who were told to or forced leave their homes by Israeli soldiers. It definitely happened in some cases, especially where the areas were critical for Israel's defense, but that was by far the exception rather than the rule.

And that goes as well for none other than Mahmoud Abbas, who admits that his family left Safed voluntarily:

"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.... 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."

When people say that the Nakba is the anniversary of the Arabs being expelled from Palestine, they are lying.

"126 year old Palestinian remembers the Nakba" (update)

From Turkey's Anadolu Agency:

Rajab al-Toum, a 126-year-old Palestinian man, says the history books fail to accurately describe the days that followed the Palestinian Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic), which coincided with the establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948.

Al-Toum still vividly recalls events, including the atrocities committed by Jewish terrorist gangs against the local Palestinian population – memories that still bring tears to his eyes.

"The massacres that took place at the time remain etched on my memory," al-Toum told Anadolu Agency.

Already 59 years old when the Nakba occurred, al-Toum had been working on a farm in Beersheba (in what is now southern Israel) when violent Zionist gangs forced hundreds of thousands Palestinians to flee their homes and villages.

He remembers seeing Jewish soldiers dragging a young pregnant Palestinian woman away before killing her in front of her husband and children.

"I trembled in fear when I saw this," al-Toum said. "I was afraid they would kill me too."

Given that the oldest verified person ever was 122, and the oldest person alive is almost 116, it appears that his claim of massacres is as accurate as his claim of how old he is.

In an earlier interview:

When the British ruled, the Palestinian story began and revolutionaries emerged, he said. “I was with them and I had a gun; I knew how to carry it and shoot. We used to go at night and destroy bridges used by occupiers.”

See also Israellycool from last year where he doesn't seem to remember how many children he had.

UPDATE: In 2013 he was said to be born in 1885. So he must be 130!

(H/t Bob K)

Arab writer admits Arabs must take their share or responsibility for "Nakba"

Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar has an article by Majed Kayali that is highly unusual in the Arab world.

While it of course blames Israel for the "nakba" in 1948, this is the first time I've seen an Arab columnist admit that Arabs must take some responsibility for the Palestinian Arab situation today.

Excerpts:

Since the beginning we have regarded the Nakba as the product of a Zionist colonial act, and this is true, but it is not the whole story, or does not explain the truth of what happened.

In particular, the Nakba didn't happen suddenly, but it came within the framework of a series of events and developments, related to the establishment of the Zionist movement, and directing Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the establishment of the nuclei of political, military and economic and educational entities to Israel, before 1948.

The talk about the Nakba raises the question year after year, as to how the Arab reality not only could not do anything for the Palestinians, but for that very reason the Nakba continues. With all due respect to talk about the centrality of the question of Palestine, the love of Palestine, this has not translated in a practical way that makes it easier for the Palestinians, who have been the subject of all kinds of discrimination and extortion and being used in the Arab world.

In addition to all the above, the Arab system is responsible for preventing Palestinians from statehood. Arabs aborted the "All-Palestine Government" [puppet government in Gaza in the 1950s], and they annexed their land, which did not fall under Israeli control, namely the West Bank and Gaza.

Under the Arab system, Palestinian refugees have no rights, no power, under the pretext of maintaining their unity.

So you can not talk about the Nakba without a critical review of history, because history is written recounted a particular story, focused on the creation of Israel, and history is withholding of stories on the responsibility of Arab nations for the Nakba, within which they facilitated the migration of Jews from Arab countries to Palestine / Israel  to the extent that this State doubled its population within three years, and 80 percent of Jewish immigrants came from Arab countries.

Another liar about the "nakba" - in Slate

Saleem Haddad writes in Slate:

My grandmother remembers clearly the night her family left. They were woken up in the middle of the night by loud banging on the front door. My grandmother’s cousins, who lived in an Arab neighborhood of Haifa, had arrived to tell them that Haifa was falling. The British had announced they were withdrawing, and there were rumors that the country was being handed to the Zionists. At the time, the German Colony had been relatively insulated from the incidents of violence in the rest of the country, which included raids and massacres of Palestinian villages by Zionist paramilitary groups. Yet the Haganah, a paramilitary organization that later formed the core of the Israel Defense Forces, saw the British withdrawal from Haifa as an opportunity and carried out a series of attacks on key Arab neighborhoods where my grandmother’s aunts and cousins were living.

“That night our Jewish neighbors told us not to leave,” my grandmother remembers. “And my father wanted to stay, to wait it out. But my mother … well she had 11 children, and of course she wanted us to be safe. And her sisters were leaving because of the attacks in their neighborhoods.”

The family debated all night. In the morning, they reached a decision. They each quickly packed a small suitcase and left the rest of their belongings. “We hid the most valuable things we couldn’t take in a locked room in our house, thinking it would be safe until we came back,” she tells me, chuckling.

As the women of the family packed, my grandmother’s older brother, who had once been employed by the British forces, struck a deal, allowing them to leave on one of the last British vehicles withdrawing from Haifa. With what little they could carry, my grandmother’s family travelled to the Lebanese border, hiding in a British army vehicle.

Does this sound like they were "expelled," or that they fled?

But only a few paragraphs later:

My grandmother’s story is not a unique one. ... An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and many who were unable to flee were massacred.

Two lies in one sentence. Relatively few were expelled, just like Saleem's family. And the idea that those that chose to remain behind were massacred is an outright lie.

Haddad notices the contradiction, and tries to reconcile it:

But as her memories made their way onto the page, I had a moment of self-doubt: In my grandmother’s recollection, she was clear that her family had made a decision to leave. Might this play into one of the myths used to justify the establishment of modern-day Israel on Palestinian land—the myth that, despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, Palestinians left on their own free will?

“Are you sure you left voluntarily?” I ask my grandmother. “There was a war,” she replies.

“But no one kicked you out, yes? No one was directly attacking you?” I continue.

“Not us personally, but my mother was worried by the reports. We thought we would be gone for a few weeks at most.”

Could my grandmother’s memory of the Nakba bolster the false narrative that Palestinians voluntarily left, given that her family had not been physically removed form their home? As I considered this, my thoughts began to coalesce ... What constitutes voluntary displacement? On May 15, 1948, in the face of growing hostilities and the threat of a regional war, my great-grandmother did the only thing she knew to protect her children: She left. Does running away from an imminent war, with a small suitcase and plans to return, constitute a voluntary departure? And if so, is the departed then unentitled to the land and belongings they left behind, and forbidden from ever returning?

Well, yes, it is voluntary. Because you can contrast it with the Jews - who fought because they had no place to go. The Jews' choice was to fight or die. The Arabs had the choice to fight or flee - or stay. No one was on the radio calling for Arabs to be thrown into the sea. Rewriting the definition of "expulsion" is not an intellectually honest way to approach the question.

As far as his second question, yes, if you leave a country that you are not yet a citizen of in support of those who are trying to destroy it, you cannot expect that its immigration rules will allow you to pretend as if nothing had happened when you want to go back. Israel was happy to let a significant number of the Arabs who fled in support of Israels' enemies to return, in the context of a peace agreement. That didn't happen. Israel remained in a state of war for decades, and the Arabs who fled supported Israel's enemies.

Haddad is giving a very accurate description of what happened to the Jews who lived in the Old City of Jerusalem and in Gush Etzion, however. Every single one of them were either expelled or massacred, and the illegally annexed West Bank became completely Judenfrei.

Here is what the Jewish Quarter looked like in 1948:

That is what ethnic cleansing looks like. And that was emphatically not the case where the 160,000 Arabs who decided not to flee became citizens of the Jewish state.

The real nakba was that the Arab world has treated these refugees like dirt for 67 years. 

Today, Lebanon and Iraq and Jordan are behaving admirably in accepting hundred of thousands of Syrian refugees, just as Arab nations accepted so many Iraqi refugees in the past couple of decades. But the exception to Arab hospitality has been the Palestinians - even today, they are putting refugees of Palestinian ancestry into separate camps and giving them fewer rights.

But you will be hard pressed to find any Palestinian Arab descendant mentioning how they were treated by their Arab brethren. Slate's bravery in publishing these stories doesn't extend to criticizing the so-called moderate nations of Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan concerning how they hate their Palestinian "guests." It won't even mention the small fact that there are "refugee camps" where tens of thousands live under Palestinian Arab rule. Because the commemorations of the "nakba" are not meant to improve the lives of Palestinians, but to be another weapon aimed at Israel.

And the actual stateless Arabs are treated by Arab nations as nothing more than cannon fodder.

(h/t @JedGalilee)