The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69858   Message #1191876
Posted By: CarolC
23-May-04 - 03:02 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: Palestine, My Palestine
Subject: RE: Lyrics: Palestine, My Palestine
Rabbi-Sol, the information that you are working with is seriously flawed. It is not in the least bit historically accurate. I can produce my documentation here in this thread if you like, but I think it would be a more constructive use of your time and mine for you to read my posting history instead.

The first thing I would point out, however, is that the Arab countries did most certainly not tell the Palestinians to leave while they crushed the Jews. What in fact happened is that the Jewish forces chased the Palestinians from their villages at gun point in some cases. In other cases, they massacred civilians in order to incite terror in the occupants of other villages so they would flee for their lives. This event is called the Nakba (catastrophe) by the Palestinians. Here is a description of one of the more notorious of these massacres:

"On April 9, 1948, the Lehi and Etzel attacked the village of Deir Yassin as part of the Nahshon Operation, killing an unknown number of residents, including women and children. Yesterday's ceremony included the reading of 93 names of victims."

Deir Yassin massacre, 55 years on (Haaretz)

Here's more:

Israelis join Palestinians for somber anniversary

"In front of the locked gates of the Kfar Saul psychiatric hospital in the sprawling suburbs of West Jerusalem, Bronstein was trying to unfurl the banner of Zochrot, a small Jewish group committed to educating Israelis about the 1948 war that founded their state (the name is Hebrew for "remember"). He was there with 100 demonstrators, drawn from what in Israel is seen as the far left, to commemorate a history most Israelis are never taught in school...

...The complex of buildings behind the hospital gates is all that remains of the village of Deir Yassin, a name that in the Palestinian collective memory still reverberates with chilling significance. Here, 55 years ago, on April 9, 1948, several weeks before the state of Israel was declared, the Irgun and Stern militias stormed the village, home to nearly 600 inhabitants. They killed nearly 100 men, women and children with guns and swords. Several captives were later paraded in Jerusalem before being killed.

The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, who went on to become a prime minister of Israel, later wrote that the Palestinians, hearing of the massacre, "were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives." Deir Yassin triggered an exodus that soon emptied the new state of 80 percent of its Arab population...

...Abdul Barakat recounted the morning when the Irgun and Stern gangs arrived, waking the villagers with the sound of gunfire. "The slaughter began at 4 a.m. in the morning and lasted till 6 p.m.," he said. Those who fled ended up in the refugee camps of the West Bank and Jordan. He concluded: "One day, God willing, Jew and Arab will once again be able to breathe the air together."

After the speeches, Bronstein erected a signpost to the village. "There are more than 400 villages that were destroyed in order to create our state but as a people we refuse to recognize the fact - even to this day," he said. "There are no signposts to any of them, nothing to acknowledge that they ever existed."

Bronstein has held similar ceremonies at 10 other destroyed villages but says the signposts are always taken down by the police or local families within hours. "At the moment, the signposting is just a symbolic act - we know that no one wants to know where these places are or what happened there.""