The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157339   Message #3716376
Posted By: Keith A of Hertford
13-Jun-15 - 11:42 AM
Thread Name: BS: Cultural genocide
Subject: RE: BS: Cultural genocide
Steve, the Ben Gurion letter quote.
A statement had words crossed out that reversed the original meaning and became inconsistent with the rest of the paragraph.
He did not make alterations normally.
I think he meant what he wrote not what it was altered to look like.

This from the man who first used the quote,
"The quote, from Ben-Gurion's letter of 5 October 1937 to his son Amos, as it appeared in my The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (CUP, 1988), read: "We must expel Arabs and take their places … " I had quoted it from Shabtai Teveth's much-lauded book Ben-Gurion and the Palestine Arabs (OUP 1985).

The problem was that in the original handwritten copy of the letter deposited in the IDF Archive, which I consulted after my quote was criticized, there were several words crossed out in the middle of the relevant sentence, rendering what remained as "We must expel the Arabs …" But Ben-Gurion rarely made corrections to anything he had written, and this passage was not consonant with the spirit of the paragraph in which it was embedded. It was suggested that the crossing out was done by some other hand, later — and that the sentence, when the words that were crossed out were restored, was meant by Ben-Gurion to say and said exactly the opposite ("We must not expel the Arabs … ").

In my subsequent works, I either omitted the quotation altogether or used the version allowed by the restoration of the crossed-out words."

The Sharon quote was definitely faked.
He never said it.

Jim,
"the Israeli regime is attempting to ethnically cleanse Israel of Palestinians."
Go read what the Israelis are doing
Stop trying to limit yur arguments - this is what you had#ve always done


You made the claim Jim.
Can you substantiate it or not?
That is the only issue I have made from your "page of gibberish" because it was the first point you made in it.
That is as far as we have got through it.