http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/columnists/reese/061399_reese13_21.htm
Truth or myth about Israel? Read between quotation marks
By Charley Reese
The Orlando Sentinel, June 13, 1999
Benny Morris is an Israeli-born-and-educated historian
and one of several who have up-ended Israeli propaganda
about the Palestinians. What follows are direct quotations
published in Israel and translated by Israel Shahak, a
professor of chemistry at Hebrew University and a
Holocaust survivor.
Rami Tal interviewed Morris for the newspaper Yediot
Ahronot in December 1994.
Tal: "What attracted you to the eviction of Palestinian
Arabs during the War of Liberation?"
Morris: "Till then everyone in Israel spoke about Arabs
who had just run away in 1948, but there existed no real
historical research on it. There were two conflicting
propaganda versions, one Arab and another Jewish. As one
who received his education in Israel, I thought I knew that
the Arabs had 'run away.' But I knew nothing else. The
Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and
deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were
plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes . . . . The
soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what
they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies."
Previously secret, but now published, protocols of Israeli
government meetings revealed that David Ben Gurion,
prime minister and one of Israel's founders, actually used
the word "cleanse" when referring to getting rid of Arabs.
In a published protocol, Ben Gurion was arguing for a wider
war. At the time he was speaking, the Galilee area was still
in Arab hands. Here is the quotation as published in Israel:
"Regarding the Galilee, Mr. [Moshe] Sharett already told
you that about 100,000 Arabs still now live in the pocket of
Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will
be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee,
including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me
mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee
without war. What they meant was the populated Galilee.
They didn't offer us the empty Galilee, which we could
have only by means of a war. Therefore if a war is
extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain
will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military
effort which might imperil other fronts, only by using the
troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish
our aim of cleansing the Galilee."
At another meeting, of which a record has been found, Ben
Gurion stated, "We have decided to cleanse Ramla."
In an article in the Haaretz newspaper, Danny Rabinovitz
wrote, "What happened to the Palestinians in 1948 is
Israel's original sin. . . . Between the 1950s and 1976, the
state systematically confiscated most of the land of its
remaining Palestinian citizens."
Shahak stated in his article, "In this context let me mention
the pioneering work of Erskin Childers [Irish journalist].
Childers was first to show that the Zionist claim that Arab
propaganda had called on the Palestinians to run away from
their homes was a gross lie. He inspected all broadcasts
[the BBC recorded them and kept transcripts as did the
American government] of the Arab radios of the time to
find that no such call had ever been made."
Finally, this quote from the diary of Yitzhak Tabenkin, a
charismatic leader of the kibbutz movement. In his diary,
Tabenkin stated, "the ideals of Hitler which I like: ethnic
homogeneity, the possibility of exchange of ethnic
minorities; the transfers of ethnic groups for the sake of an
international order which for me are a particularly valuable
feature."
No wonder some people prefer myth to truth.
