The True Story
EFRAIM KARSH
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally
recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only
state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of
the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose
policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the
international community; and whose right to exist is constantly
debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by
segments of advanced opinion in the West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the
Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these
educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called,
is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by
a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic
Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a
permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the
“original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words
of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved
through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its
native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent
creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem”
forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars
pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western
supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As
early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C.
Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings
were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and
writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s
revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to
establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly
stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the
Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the
period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early
days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and
ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paint a much more
definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that
the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but
the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh
research into these documents, which contain many facts and data
hitherto unreported.
Original Source