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Arab Leaders Responsible for Refugee Problem

(Ynet News) Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky - Today, the Palestinians and the Arab and Muslim worlds say it was Israel that, in 1948, attacked and expelled the Palestinians. But who did Palestinians blame for their fate in 1949? One of the largest Palestinian communities in the U.S. is located in Dearborn, Michigan. On December 15, 1949, the Michigan Arab newspaper As Sabah published an editorial on the question of the Palestine Arab refugees: "The poor refugees committed the crime of listening to those deceivers, they believed the liars, and went to the extreme foolishness of leaving their homes, counting on their deceitful leaders to bring them back....If there should be another war, it should be against the Arab leaders, the princes and kings who brought this catastrophe upon the poor people of Palestine." British officials on the scene at the time, hardly pro-Zionist, were convinced that Palestinian leaders were steadily abandoning their people. In June 1949 Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo, reported that while the refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves), they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states." "'We know who our enemies are,' they say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes." Israeli officials maintained from the beginning that a majority of the Palestinians were encouraged to flee by their own leaders and those of Arab states, who then abandoned them before or in the midst of battle. British officials on the scene and opposed to Israel, and Palestinians in America, would not have simply parroted their enemy's assessment.
2011-07-27 00:00:00
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