Who Caused The Arab Refugee Problem
Debunking the myth that Israel primarily deserves the blame for the refugee problem. Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem is miniscule.
The claim that the Jews expelled the Arab refugees to build their country, that Israel’s creation created the refugee problem or that Israel is primarily or only responsible for the Arab refugee problem is false. This is the claim taken by anti-Israel propagandists, who claim that ethnic cleansing of Arabs was a fundamental part of the Zionist ideology. Yet even Benny Morris, an Israeli historian from the New Historians, even admits that the Israelis didn’t intentionally come to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs. Benny Morris said that “there was no Zionist policy to expel the Arabs or intimidate them into flight”. The Arab refugee problem is caused by wars started by rejectionist Arabs and Arab states in order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state and to annihilate Israel. And the notorious anti-Israel propaganda site Palestine Remembered recommended Morris’s book “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”. So apparently, that anti-Israel propaganda site doesn’t consider Morris to be a “Zionist propagandist”, since they recommend one of his books, which is something these anti-Israel propagandists don’t do to people who they consider to be “Zionist propagandists”.
Arabs who blame the Arab states for the refugee problem
Even many of the Arab refugees and Arab leaders blamed the Arab states for the refugee problem. Mahmoud Abbas, who later became President of the Palestinian Authority, said the following in the PLO official journal in Beirut Falastin al-Thawra in 1976:
The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the
Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to
emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political
and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the
ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.
Haled Al-Azm, who was Syria’s Prime Minister from 1948-1949, said:
Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.
An Israeli Arab Salma Abdullah made the following point:
They [the Arab regimes] made all these trillions because of the Palestinian problem. The money that’s supposed to go to the poor Palestinians, the refugees out of nowhere were asked to leave their land. You know, and I asked people, I wanted to be fair to everybody involved. I asked refugees who left and I asked people who lived in different countries, “Who asked you to leave your homes?” And they all say the Arab countries. They even offered us transportation. They would give them boats or whatever. They would go into the Arab countries and say,”All you have to do is stay here 15 days.” You hear the word 15 days repeated all the time. 15 days you’re going to stay here. 15 days you’re going to stay here. We’re going to beat the Zionists and we’re going to go back to your own country.
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