Question: All of us can make a mistake, but I have a real problem when someone takes the time to ...

Question: I wrote to you to point out that you were in error in saying that in 1948 the Arabs broadcast orders to the Palestinians that they should flee their homeland. I sent you documentation showing no such broadcasts ever took place....Since that time, you have released a video entitled Israel, Islam and Armageddon which repeats the same lie.... All of us can make a mistake, but I have a real problem when someone takes the time to politely write to you and supply documentation point­ing out a factual error in your materials, and yet you go on repeating the same errors. Sorry, but if you have to spread lies in order to make your point on the Palestine question, then your opinions do not carry any weight with me. As a Christian bookstore owner, I have sold and promoted your books over the years. But based on your...use of demonstrated falsehoods to “prove” your points, I have to question the reliability and accuracy of everything you have published....I do not intend to purchase any more of your books for my bookstore. I suspect that this is the only type of protest that you and your organization would understand.

Answer: Here is only part of the proof that I did not spread lies “about the Arab radio broadcasts.” On April 22, 1948, Aubrey Lippincott, U.S. Consul-General in Haifa, stated that “local mufti-dominated Arab leaders [were urging] all Arabs to leave the city, and large numbers did so” (Foreign Relations of the U.S. 1948, Vol. V. [GPO, 1976], 838). The Economist 10/2/48 reported, “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight...the most potent...were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive urging all Arabs to leave...[and] that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”  New York Times 5/3/48 reported that “The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city....” Middle Eastern Studies 1/86 reported that The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes and warned, “Any opposition to this order...is an obstacle to the holy war...and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.”

      Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said declared, “We will smash the country...Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down”(Myron Kaufman, The Coming Destruction of Israel [The American Library Inc., 1970], 26-27).  Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm admitted, “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees....But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave” (The Memoirs of Haled al Azm [Beirut, 1973], Part 1, 386-87).  On April 3, 1949, Near East Broadcasting Station of Cyprus said, “...the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight....” (Samuel Katz, Battleground—Fact and Fantasy in Palestine [Bantam Books, 1985], 15). The Jordanian news­paper Filastin 2/19/49 reported, “The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.” Another Jordanian newspaper, Ad Diofaa 9/6/54, quoted a complaining refugee: “The Arab government told us: ‘Get out so that we can get in.’  So we got out, but they did not get in.” According to the New York Lebanese paper Al Hoda 6/8/51, “The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, [gave] brotherly advice to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.” Further similar documentation can be found.

      You based your information on a 32-page booklet by a Jewish but anti-Israel group....that there was “theft of real estate and personal property from the Palestinian Arabs by the Jews in 1948.” Shouldn’t you at least question this assertion, considering the fact that it was the Arabs who attacked the Jews? The Arabs refused to accept the UN partition of so-called Palestine even though it gave them 82 percent of the territory, all of which the League of Nations and Allied victors of World War I had promised to Israel. The regular armies of six Arab nations attacked the new state of Israel with the declared intention of annihilating all Jews.

      The Jews did not attack the Arabs. That fact should help to evaluate Arab claims about “theft of real estate and personal property.” The Arabs publicly threatened to take every square yard of land belonging to the Jews and to kill every one of them!  Did that booklet mention these facts?

      In contrast to Arab vows to annihilate the Jews and take all of the land (as Islam requires), Haifa’s British police chief, A.J. Bridmead, reported in April 1948, “Every effort is being made by the Jews to per­suade the Arab population to remain.”  The New York Times of 4/23/48 reported a foreign visitor’s observation: “In Tiberias I saw a placard affixed to a sealed Arab Mosque that read, ‘We did not dispossess them...the day will come when the Arabs will return...let no citizen touch their property.’” It was signed by the Jewish Town Council of Tiberias. Did your source give such facts?

      Never have the Jews threatened to wipe out Arabs. The “Palestinians” would have had their State had they not attacked the Jews, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and rejected every peaceful solution ever offered. On 4/4/88 Time commented, “Had Egypt, Syria and the other Arab nations accepted Israel’s right to exist in 1947, the Palestinians could have been living for the past 40 years in a state of their own.”  During the 19 years in which Jordan held East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Egypt held the Gaza Strip (1948-67), there was never a word about a “Palestinian State.” Why didn’t the Arabs form that state then? Instead, they put the refugees in pitiful camps and have kept them there ever since. 

      The truth is that there were twice as many Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries, where they had endured the most horrible treatment for 1,300 years since the advent of Islam. Israel’s 650,000 settlers absorbed 800,000 refugees into normal life, but Arab nations with 700 times the land refused to absorb 400,000 refugees.

      “Theft of real estate and personal property from the Palestinian Arabs”? On the contrary, Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, issued May 14, 1948, said, “In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions. We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples....” The response came from Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, who said in an interview over BBC the next day, “The Arabs intend to conduct a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres....”

      Yet Israel kept its word!  The Arabs who remained in Israel comprise 16 percent of the voters today, with full citizenship rights, and some Arabs are even members of the Knesset. In contrast, no Jew has such rights in any Arab or Muslim country, and a Jew isn’t even allowed to enter Saudi Arabia!