700,000 Jews were forceably expelled from arab lands during the 1948/49 war too. Also of those 700,000 Palestinian arabs who left Israel most left of their own accord after being asked to by the arab league, being told they could return after the arab nations had defeated Israel. 700,000 arabs also stayed and later became citizens of Israel! Get your facts right before you post articles on here.

And to counter the anti-Israel, pro Palestinian bias on Indymedia I suggest people go to  http://www.betar.co.uk to read the other side of the story from the Jewish point of view.

Sorry to feed the troll...same old stuff about to appear...

1) Betar is a fascist organisation ( a machine...YES! A machine... )

2) Arabs were massacred in 1948 including famously the Deir Yassein massacre. If by voluntary you mean fleeing for their lives, then I suppose you are correct

sorry micheal, but betar repressent the Zionist view, NOT the Jewish view.

No Betar represent a zionist view not THE zionist view. that is like saying North Korea represent THE communist view. Stop twisting things.

Now in 1948 a group of deperate survivors of hatred, the holocaust, pogroms, victims of anti semitism and idealist jewish socialists declared a state following a UN vote on partition.

The jews were poorly armed, badly trained, poor, ill and in mourning for the millions that were killed.

Armed with little more than a spirit for life, they recahed out a hand to the Arabs and pleaded for friendship. It was not taken.

The Jews had taken land purchased from absentee Turkish landowners and which was mostly swamp or dessert. They worked on it (many died of Malaria) and made it into farmland. All the time staving off Arab tribal attacks for the land.

Then on the day of the declaration of the State of Israel and the day when the dream the Jews was realised - to have a land where we could be Jewish, in the land promised by God, in the land mentioned in most of our prayers - the deperate, ragged band of Jews were attacked.


The cry of 'push them into the sea' came from the Arabs, led by Haj Amin Al Husseni (Hilter's friend) and the well trained Arab League who told the Arab villagers to leave while the Jews were slaughtered and promised the newly established Jewish farms.

Those Arabs who did not leave now live in Israel and prosper as citizens with full rights.

You talk of slaugter at Deir Yassin (an inexcusable action by a rogue gang not affiliated to the main Hagannah or Palmach army)but fail to mention the slaughter of 5 times the number of Jews at the Etzion bloc. Why? because only Jews were killed.

You talk of demolition of a home in Israel - what of the seizing of the home of my friend in Iran and the explusion of his family for being Jewish. Perhaps you will start a letter campaign to the Iranian government to ask for reparations for him - no you will not - why?

The postings on this site re-write history in a way which would make David Irving proud.

Interesting how historical narratives can completely contradict each other. There is a good history written by Gush Shalom on
 http://www.cactus48.com/Truth_Eng.pdf, which tries to reconcile the different narratives.

I'm simply going to quote from it in response, as I've written so much about this, cut and paste is my current weapon.

You said
"The jews were poorly armed, badly trained, poor, ill and in mourning for the millions that were killed.

Armed with little more than a spirit for life, they recahed out a hand to the Arabs and pleaded for friendship. It was not taken.

The Jews had taken land purchased from absentee Turkish landowners and which was mostly swamp or dessert. They worked on it (many died of Malaria) and made it into farmland. All the time staving off Arab tribal attacks for the land."

OK

"The struggle between the two nations in the country appeared in the emotional sphere as the "war of the traumas". The Israeli-Hebrew nation carried with them the old trauma of the persecution of the Jews in Europe - massacres, mass expulsions, the Inquisition, pogroms and the Holocaust. They lived with the consciousness of being an eternal victim. The clash with the Arab-Palestinian nation appeared to them as just a continuation of anti-Semitic persecution.

The Arab-Palestinian nation carried with them the memories of the long-lasting colonial oppression, with its insults and humiliations, especially on the background of the historical memories from the glorious days of the Caliphs. They, too, lived with
the consciousness of being victims, and the Naqba (catastrophe) of 1948 appeared to them as the continuation of the oppression and humiliation by Western colonialists.

The Arabs believed that the Jews had been implanted in Palestine by Western Imperialism, in order to subjugate the Arab world and control its natural resources. This conviction was supported by the fact that the Zionist movement, from the outset, strove for an alliance with at least one Western power, in order to overcome Arab resistance (Germany in the days of Herzl, Britain from the Uganda plan and the Balfour Declaration until the end of the Mandate, the Soviet Union in 1948, France from the 1950s until the 1967 war, the United States from then on.) This resulted in practical
cooperation and a community of interests between the Zionist enterprise and imperialist and colonialist powers, directed against the Arab national movement.

The Zionists, on the other hand, were convinced that the Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise - which was intended to save the Jews from the flames of Europe - was simply the consequence of the murderous nature of the Arabs and of Islam. In their eyes, Arab fighters were "gangs", and the uprisings of the time were "riots".

The Zionists were proud of their "Redemption of the Land". They had purchased it at full price with money collected from Jews around the world. "Olim" (new immigrants, literally pilgrims) many of whom had been intellectuals and merchants in their former lives now earned their living by hard manual labor. They believed that they had achieved all this by peaceful means and without dispossessing a single Arab. For the Arabs this was a cruel narrative of dispossession and expulsion: The Jews acquired lands from Arab absentee landowners living in the cities of Palestine and abroad, and then forcibly
evicted the peasants who had been farming this land for generations. To help them in this effort, the Zionists engaged the Turkish and, later, the British police. The Arab masses looked on in despair as their land was taken from them."




You said "Then on the day of the declaration of the State of Israel and the day when the dream the Jews was realised - to have a land where we could be Jewish, in the land promised by God, in the land mentioned in most of our prayers - the deperate, ragged band of Jews were attacked."

OK

The myth of "the few against the many" was created on the Jewish side to describe the stand of the Jewish community of 650,000 against the entire Arab world of over a hundred million. The Jewish community lost 1% of its people in the war. The Arab side saw an entirely different picture: A fragmented Arab population with no national leadership to speak of, with no unified command over its meager forces, poorly equipped with mostly obsolete weapons, facing an extremely well organized Jewish community that was highly trained in the use of the weapons that were flowing to it (especially from the Soviet bloc.) The neighboring Arab countries betrayed the Palestinians and, when they finally did send their armies into Palestine, they mainly operated in competition with each
other, with no coordination and no common plan. From the social and military points of view, the fighting capabilities of the Israeli side were far superior to those of the Arab states, which had hardly emerged from the colonial era.

This from Benny Morris
"In fact, the Arab forces were inferior to the IDF. By mid-May 1948 the IDF was fielding 65,000 troops; by early spring 1949, 115,000. The Arab armies had an estimated 40,000 troops in July 1948, rising to 55,000 in October 1948, and slightly more by the spring of 1949. Of the Arab aircraft, only less than a dozen fighters and three to four bombers saw action, the rest were unserviceable. With only a dozen or so airplanes the IDF achieved air superiority by the fall of 1948. And the IDF had superiority in firepower and knowledgeable personnel, many of whom had seen action in WWII". Source: "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001", Benny Morris (2001), pp. 217-18





Your language you are using is romanticising the narrative and not really paying much attention to the facts. The 'deperate, ragged band of Jews' is not really accurate, just a romantic image in your mind, just as 'reaching out a hand in the spirit of friendship'. Read David Ben-Gurion if you really want to know the attitude towards the Arabs. He was not so romantic about these things.

OK, here are some accounts of 1948...this is from Zionsit Historian Benny Morris...

According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?

"About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg."

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."


OK, finally, on Wikipedia, there is a list of massacres committed by both Arabs and Israelis.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_committed_during_the_1948_Arab-Israeli_war

Of course, most of the numbers are disputed, and the whole conflict seems to be fought out all over again on Wikipedia. What is certain though, is that you statement of '5 times the number of Jews killed' at Kfar Etzion is a bit a stretch, as it seems less than the numbers killed at Deir Yassin by most estimates.