Talk:1948 Arab–Israeli War/Archive 2

message: "May 28, when the Arab Legion succeeded in expelling Israeli forces from the Arab quarters of Jerusalem"
What happened on May 28 1948 was the occupation and subsequent expulsion of 1,600 Jews living in the Jewish quarter of the Old City for generations. Calling the Jewish quarter "Arab quarters" and speaking only about Israeli forces is an ugly piece of disinformation. 
:Avihu 16:34, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jersualem 

message: "This immigration drew immediate and violent opposition from local Arabs." Should be revised. All indications that this was certainly not the case. For the most part, the local Arab population did not become armed for many years. The violent Jewish gangs (Stern gang for one) had a agenda from the early 20's to annex the entire area they now (outside of the Sinai) control. The Turks were able to keep control of the Arabs because only the Jordanians East of the West Bank had any considerable fighting force. The Egytians and the Persians did much later, but had little issue with Israel in the 20's.
:This is incorrect, there was indeed immediate (and violent) opposition to Jewish immigration in the 1920s by the Arabs of Palestine, see for example: the Jerusalem pogrom of April, 1920 (which actually led to the creation of Haganah), the attacks on Tel Hai in 1920, and the Jaffa riots of 1921, not to mention the riots of 1929.  While the Revisionist Zionists did indeed want to control the entire area of modern Israel, they did not organize until 1925 (and then mostly in Europe) and the Irgun was not created until 1931, and the Stern gang until 1940.  The chronology you are giving is not correct. --Goodoldpolonius2 02:43, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Authors should revise line to be more accurate. 

message: The table of ordnance gives the Haganah estimates made at the time with incomplete information.  It is not a table based on the best information that has become available since then.  As Morris notes (Victims, p217), "In practice [the Arabs] had far less, much of the equipment (especially the aircraft) being unserviceable, and some of the remainder never reaching Palestine."  A good source on this in English is "The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race: Arms, Embargo, Military Power and Decision in the 1948 Palestine War" by Amitzur Ilan (Hebrew University).  It can't be too biased to the left, since even Daniel Pipes likes it. --Zero 16:17, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arab ordnance 

message: I don't have good sources on this...but...I understand that the IDF was across the international border in Egypt in early 1949 and indeed came under British and American pressure to leave, however I think they were already out of Egypt by Jan 7.  I could easily be wrong.  Also, I have one book that says the British planes were shot down over Egyptian territory; is it wrong?  Ian, if you could cross-check your information with another source that would be good.  Also, I think that the names of the pilots of the planes is way too fine detail for a summary page like this.  --Zero 22:34, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll check a few more sources. I don't have a strong opinion on the level of detail. --Ian Pitchford 07:05, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's Aloni's description: "Early next morning 1 January 1949, and Israeli B-17 bombed the Egyptian ships that had shelled Tel Aviv the previous evening, but no hits were recorded. It was at this stage that the successful Israeli offensive resulted in a British demand that Israel's forces should retreat from Sinai back to the international border otherwise Britain would have to act in accordance with the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. The British demand was followed by American diplomatic pressure, and the Israeli Prime Minister David Be-Gurion ordered the Israel Defence Force to retreat to the international border. This however, did not end the Israeli offensive and a new effort to cut the Egyptian Army at the Gaza Strip was launched on 4 January 1949 centred on Rafah junction... The major diplomatic breakthrough finally came on the morning of 5 January 1949 when the Egyptian government informed the UN of its willingness to accept a ceasefire and open negotiations with Israel under the UN umbrella. As a consequence a ceasefire was agreed to start at 1600 on 7 January 1949." (pp. 21-22). Boris Senior, who took part in the attack on the RAF on 7 January, also reports it as an accident. He thought the planes were Egyptian. See Senior, Boris (2005). New Heavens: My Life as a Fighter Pilot and a Founder of the Israel Air Force. Potomac Books. . pp. 240-241. BTW there's what looks like an accurate list of Attributed Israeli Air Combat Victories here--Ian Pitchford 12:53, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  British aircraft 

message: Hi folks,
I am very interested in the 1947-1949 Arab-Israeli War and want to learn more about it. Wikipedia has helped me very much in this regard. I do, however, have one question regarding this particular conflict. My question is as follows:
Was there organized fighting BETWEEN Arabs during the course of the 1947-1949 Arab-Israeli War? Please let me know if there was. Thanks.
Best wishes,
Albert
: There were frequent disputes but no actual fighting of any significance.  --Zero 22:22, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inter-Arab fighting during the 1947-1949 Arab-Israeli War 

message: ", while China broadly backed the Arab claims" 
Which China? Was it nationalist china (today Taiwan) or Red China (mostly referred as China today)?
Since they had their own civil war at that time it's not clear who was the supporter of the arab side. 213.191.70.226 12:20, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  China 

message: I have changed the table to reflect the growth in the number of Arab soldiers throughtout the war.  Currently it looks like the Jews outnumbered the arabs by about 4:1 by Dec. 1948 which wasn't the case.  If someone can find a reliable estimate for their troop strength at the end of the war I would be grateful.- Moshe Constantine Hassan Al-Silverburg 08:54, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Israeli forces outnumbered the Arabs by about 2:1. I'll add the ref and figures as soon as I have time. --Ian Pitchford    Talk | Contribs    09:33, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Sorry I didn't mean to suggest that the Jews didn't outnumber the Arabs, I just knew it wasn't by a 4:1 margin. Thanks for the help by the way.- Moshe Constantine Hassan Al-Silverburg 09:52, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You're welcome. I should have the references to hand somewhere. --Ian Pitchford    Talk | Contribs     09:55, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table Edit 

message: The removal of the quotation (see the exchange in the "British Involvement" section above) seemed arbitrary and the deleter did not respond to any of these points:
*The source is widely referenced and quoted with the attributed quotation appearing in innumerable accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Almost all accounts written from an Israeli perspective include this quotation and many (if not most) from a more neutral position.
*While pro-Arab accounts tend to leave out this quotation, unlike innnumerable refutations of Israeli/Jewish claims that have been called into question, no one presented any reason to doubt the accuracy of this quotation, and a refutatation of it is tellingly absent in the pro-Arab literature.  As I noted in the discusion of the deletion of this quotation above:
:"For example, consider the 550 page Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem that was dedicated to the Mufti.  In it, you will find msssive justifcation for the Mufti's actions and not a word (that I could find) about whether or not the Mufti said what he is most famous for having said.  Why would Palestinian sources not address such an outrageous Israeli lie?  Maybe it isn't a lie.  Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the reasons that Arafat changed his name when he was seeking power was to distance himself from the Mufti, who was a close relative.  (Later, he openly acknowledged his admiration of the Mufti.)"
*The latter fact must be taken with the entirely unextraordinary nature of the quotation coming from a known Nazi collaborator who was horrified by Zionism and the influx of Jews into Palestine. and who at the time was calling his people to arms, i.e., to engage in murderous force in  war against the Jews.  Not only was such a quotation a commonplace sentiment at the time, but even when Article XXII of the 1995 Oslo 2 agreement obliged the parties to "abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other," the current Mufti of Jerusalem (who was appointed by Arafat) openly called for violence against Jews, "colonialist settlers who are sons of monkeys and pigs." He called on Allah to "take revenge" on them and to "destroy America, for she is ruled by Zionist Jews."  Later, he praised suicide bombings as a "legitimate" "response to the occupation" and called the 6,000,000 dead in the Holocaust "a fairy tale."  And he said the prospect of Jews praying on the Temple Mount would lead to "massacres the magnitude of which only Allah knows ... massacres and rivers of blood."  He also said,  "I am filled with rage toward the Jews. They are the most cowardly creatures Allah ever created." To suicide bombers, he said, "Oh, Muslims, attack and you will gain one of two blessings: either victory or martyrdom.... The Muslim loves death and martyrdom."  (Source: The Boston Globe)  The notion that such sentiments were not rampant back in 1948 and/or that this totally ordinary quotation and the sentiment it represents must be better documented than innumerable other claims in the Wikipedia is simply biased.
*If there were good reason to doubt the veracity of the quotation, the quotation must still be included and discussed in any encyclopedic article that tries to present a full and accurate picture of the current human understanding of this War.  When one entire side of the conflict (and much of the rest of the world) takes this quotation to be a simple fact---even if it were found to be provably false---it cannot be ignored.  It would need to be noted and discussed in any article on the human understanding and belief about this conflct.  Therefore, if its veracity was provably dubious, the article should be edited to discuss this fact and the quotation should not be deleted.  As I noted in the discusion of the deletion of this quotation above:
:"Certainly the fact that such a quotation is attributed to him, and is believed by nearly all those on the Israeli/Jewish side of this conflict, and is presented in innumerable forums as a "fact" is information that must be included if the Wikipedia is to present a complete picture of the 1948 War and the way it is understood today. This is simply information that must be included in any unbiased (!) presentation of the way the 1948 War is understood by one entire side of the conflict"
In that same discussion above, I concluded:
:"simply deleting the quotation and thus not allowing mention of something (the attributed quotation) that is almost universally believed by one side of this conflict/war to be a fact---and, I believe tellingly, unlike many, many less important "facts," is not disputed by the other side (probably because they either know it to be true or assume it to be because it is so un-extraordinary as to be commonplace [see the cleric in this video] and the Mufti was an active Nazi collaborator so that such an ordinary sentiment issued from a man known to be sympathetic to the content and who was, at the time, an active leader promoting armed violence among his followers is reasonable to believe)---distorts this article."
I waited several days to give the deleter an opportunity to respond to any of these points.  Other than a facetious sarcastic comment, there has been virtually no response to this complete set of points.
For all of these reasons, I placed the quotation back in the article. While one could argue that the article may need editing to discuss this quotation and give it a more balanced presentation, it simply cannot be ignored and left out of an aritcle claiming to limn a full picture of human understanding and belief about this phenomenon. Kriegman 12:40, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "Unfortunately, [Arafat] has proven himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion against the British mandate government and during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) - but also a trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied rejectionism - a rejection of any compromise with the Zionist movement. He had rejected two international proposals to partition the country into Jewish and Arab polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937 and by the UN general assembly in November 1947. In between, he spent the war years (1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht." Kriegman 15:04, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Mufti's quotation