Fact-checking Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

Last updated on: May 27, 2017 at 7:17 am by Gerald McDermott

Fact-checking Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas 2017-05-27T07:17:26-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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In May 2011 Abbas published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Long Overdue Palestinian State.” In this piece he made two claims.

First, that in 1929 his family “was forced to leave [their] home in the Galilean city of Safed and less with his family to Safed.” Though they wished for decades to return home “they were denied that most basic of human rights.”

Second, that in 1947 when the UN recommended that Palestine should be partitioned into two states, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority . . . and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsion ensued.”

David Brog’s new Reclaiming Israel’s History shows that both these claims have been doctored. The first is proven false by Abbas’ own testimony. In a 2009 interview in Al-Filistiniya TV Abbas said, “People were motivated to run away [during the 1929 uprising]. . . . Those of us from Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge.”

But avenge what? The unprovoked Arab massacre of Jews. In August 1929 local Arabs invaded Safed’s Jewish quarter with weapons and kerosene, killing eighteen Jews and wounding eighty. They burned two hundred Jewish homes in Safed alone. In total across Palestine 133 Jews were murdered and 339 injured. Abbas and his family voluntarily fled Safed because they feared the Jews would seek revenge.

The second claim is equally fanciful. Israel did not start the 1948 War with the intent of driving out Palestine’s Arabs. Arabs started this war in an effort to destroy the new Jewish state. One day after the UN vote, militias from half of Palestine’s 800 Arab villages attacked Jewish neighborhoods across the country. In a matter of days the newborn state of Israel was invaded by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq.

The vast majority of Arabs who fled their homes did so because they were ordered to do so by Arab leaders. Israeli commanders in response expelled the inhabitants of Arab villages “when strategic considerations necessitated” (Brog, 10). Israeli commanders exercised this authority “inconsistently, expelling some Arab communities while leaving many in place” (10).

Brog concedes that “some of Israel’s wartime actions were not strategically justified.” But the emergency that compelled those hard Israeli choices was initiated by Arabs, not Jews.

So Abbas manipulated the facts. “The Arab states did not invade Israel to help the Palestinian refugees. It was the Arab invasion that produced the Palestinian refugees” (Brog, 11). If the Arabs had accepted the UN Partition Plan, they would have had a Palestinian state back in 1948, and there would not have been one Palestinian refugee.

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