Arab Denial of Jewish History and Justice

Arab Denial of Jewish History and Justice

The Arab denial of history has become an important tool in the Arab-Palestinian narrative. The obfuscation of the forced Jewish exodus from Arab countries is part of a larger revisionist endeavor. For instance, the official Arab-Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida quotes Muslim writer Safi naz Kallan's statement that: "there is no people or land named Israel, only Zionist thieves unfit to establish a nation or have their own language and religion." These Jews are "Shylocks of the land, busy emptying Arab-Palestinian pockets." At the Camp David talks in July 2000, Yasser Arafat denied any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, thereby contradicting the Koran and 1920 literature distributed by the Wakf at Temple Mount, the hadith, and other Islamic sources. His representative Saeb Erekat said the very idea of the Temple is a Jewish invention with no historical basis. President Clinton replied: "it is not just all the Jews around the world who believe that the Temple was there but the majority of Christians as well."³³
The Arabs' claim of a right of return for the Arab-Palestinian refugees relies on false premises: that there is such a right under international law, that it was granted to the Arab-Palestinians in UN resolutions, and that Israel is responsible for creating the refugee problem. The case of the million Jewish refugees from Arab countries highlights the Arabs' unwillingness to recognize the Jewish right to their homeland and calculated policy of exploiting the conflict to pursue their goal of an "ethnic cleansing" of Israel. This policy has long and consistently been practiced by the Arabs. Today almost no Jews live in the Arab world, and Christian communities have dwindled sharply there.
In launching their war against the Jewish state in 1948, the Arab countries were directly responsible for both the Jewish and Arab refugee problems. During this eighteen-month confrontation, in which Arab armies invaded Israel and battles raged in almost every city and settlement, there were instances in which Israeli troops asked the local Arab population not to leave their homes. These were acts of self-defense in a war that killed six thousand of the six hundred thousand Jews then in the country, and it is clear that Israel did not, as alleged, mastermind a large-scale expulsion of Arab-Palestinians. According to their own testimonies, most of the Arab-Palestinians left because of the threats and fear-mongering of Arab leaders.
In his memoirs the former prime minister of Syria, Khalid Al-Azm, placed the entire blame for the refugee problem on the Arabs:
Since 1948 it is we the Arab who demanded the return of the refugees...while it is we the Arab armies who made them leave....We brought disaster upon...Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave....We have rendered them dispossessed....Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon...men, women and children - all this in the service of political purposes.
In March 1976, in the official PLO journal in Beirut, Falastin Al- Thawra, current Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas wrote:
The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Arab-Palestinians from Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homes in Palestine, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews were forced to live in Eastern Europe....
The Arab demand for a right of return is a formula for destroying Israel as a Jewish state and reflects the unwillingness of the Arab-Palestinians to seek a realistic settlement. Open discussion of the million Jews' forced flight from Arab countries will encourage a more objective scrutiny of the myths about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab nations and Arab-Palestinian responsibility for the population exchange that occurred weakens their argument for a "return" and highlights the double standard the UN has consistently applied to the conflict.

The case of the million Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their harsh expulsion and confiscation of all their assets including land 6 times the size of Israel is a critical element in transforming the refugee question from a political-military tool to a humanitarian issue and helping to set the Middle East narrative straight.