Reddit reviews Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

>When they stop demanding the right to determine what happens to Tel Aviv you will have a point.

I haven't heard a single "demand" from the PA/PLO regarding Tel Aviv since 1993 when they accepted the state of Israel and negotiations began for an end to the occupation.

You're correct that Jewish civilians were also targeted, but as Israel won the conflict there was a vastly greater number of Arabs who were displaced than Jews, and there is no part of Israel currently occupied by an Arab country. The point of discussing these issues is to resolve the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, which continues today.

>>massacre

No. There have been more than one massacre documented by Israeli Historians. e.g. Benny Morris:

>According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

>Morris: "Twenty-four. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved. The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/01/16/an-interview-with-benny-morris/

The article you linked is an interesting and reasonable one. One of the main points addressed is whether the expulsion of the Arabs was planned by the Zionist leaders. There is some evidence that it was planned there is other evidence that they were planning for a large Arab minority. On the balance of evidence the author makes his judgement:-

>The pre-independence musings among Zionist leaders about population transfer represented one political inclination. The Situation Committee report represented an opposing inclination, among the same people, for integrating a large Arab minority into the Jewish state. Events on the ground tipped the balance.

Other (Israeli) Historians come to a different conclusion, e.g. Shlomo Ben Ami:-

>reality on the ground [during the 1948 war] an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community. (pg 25)


>philosophy of transfer, had a long pedigree in Zionist thought provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field actively to encourage the eviction of the local population. (pg 42)

http://www.amazon.com/Scars-War-Wounds-Peace-Israeli-Arab/dp/0195181581

Or Benny Morris (same interview cited above)

>The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."

>They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

>There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing......it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

>The term `to cleanse’ is terrible.

>"I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed."

The key point here is that the debate is focused on the extent to which the atrocities were part of a planned policy of transfer by the zionist leadership. No serious scholar disputes that the atrocities occurred any more, they are too well documented (by Israeli historians).

The other point to mention that is not in dispute is that a concious decision was made not to allow the refugees to return. From your article:

>as the fighting continued, cases of the Israeli army expelling Arabs grew more common. The decision to prevent return was the turning point, transforming what began in the chaos of war into a choice.