Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: le frottole di Abbas

magistralmente smontate dal prof. Efraim Karsh
Abbas's Fable
By EFRAIM KARSH
Jerusalem Post
05/19/2011 22:19
What really happened to the Arabs of Safed 63 years ago?
In the opening episode of the iconic series Boardwalk Empire, Nucky
Thompson, Atlantic City’s bootlegging strongman, tells a group of pro-
prohibition women activists a gutwrenching story about his abject
childhood, ravaged by the vagaries of alcoholism. Asked by his driver,
a young aspiring gangster, about the story’s veracity, Thompson
retorts: “The first law of politics is to never let the truth get in
the way of a good story.”
This episode comes to mind upon reading Mahmoud Abbas’s recent New
York Times op-ed. Turning the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, the
“moderate” PLO chairman and president of the Palestinian National
Authority says not a word of the Jewish acceptance of Palestinian Arab
statehood, as part of the UN partition resolution of November 1947,
let alone the violent Palestinian response to the resolution. Instead
he reminisces on his childhood in an attempt to turn aggressors into
hapless victims and vice versa.
“Sixty-three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to
leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family
to Syria,” Abbas writes. “He took up shelter in a canvas tent provided
to all the arriving refugees. Though he and his family wished for
decades to return to their home and homeland, they were denied that
most basic of human rights. That child’s story, like that of so many
other Palestinians, is mine.”
But was he expelled? Hardly. Not only did Abbas reveal a couple of
years ago, in an Arabic interview, that his family had not been
forcefully expelled and that his father was affluent enough to provide
for them for a year after their flight (so no canvas tent), but none
of the 170,000- 180,000 Palestinian Arabs fleeing urban centers, in
the five-and-a-half months from the passing of the UN resolution to
Israel’s proclamation on May 14, 1948, were expelled by the Jews.
Quite the reverse in fact, huge numbers of these refugees were driven
from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces
which had entered the country to fight the Jews, whether out of
military considerations or to prevent them from becoming citizens of
the prospective Jewish state.
In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were
ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa (on April 21-22) on
the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective
“government” of the Palestinian Arabs, despite strenuous Jewish
efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier, Tiberias’s 6,000-
strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own
leaders, against local Jewish wishes. In Jaffa, Palestine’s largest
Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of
residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the Arab Higher Committee
ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders
pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.
And what about Safed? Having declined an offer by Gen. Hugh Stockwell,
commander of the British forces in northern Palestine, to mediate a
truce, the Arabs responded to the British evacuation of the city with
a heavy assault on the tiny Jewish community, less than a quarter
their size. “Upon the British evacuation on April 16, we occupied all
the city’s strategic positions: the Citadel, the Government House, and
the police post on Mount Canaan,” recalled a local Arab fighter.
“We were the majority, and the feeling among us was that we would
defeat the Jews with sticks and rocks.”
What this prognosis failed to consider was the tenacity of the Jewish
resolve to hold on to Safed, awarded by the partition resolution to
the prospective Jewish state, on the one hand, and the intensity of
Arab flight psychosis, on the other. As tens of thousands of Arabs
streamed out of Tiberias and Haifa within days of the British
evacuation of Safed, members of the city’s leading families and
ordinary residents alike decided that now was the time to escape –
which is probably when Abbas’s affluent family fled. In the words of a
British intelligence report, “Such is their state of fear [that] Arabs
are beginning to evacuate Safed although the Jews have not yet
attacked them.”
In a desperate bid to save the day, a delegation of local notables
traveled to Damascus, only to be reprimanded as cowards fleeing the
battlefield and ordered to keep on fighting. A subsequent visit by
mayor Zaki Qadura to the royal court in Amman was far more affable yet
equally inconclusive. While King Abdullah was evidently moved by the
mayor’s pleas, he argued that there was nothing he could do before the
termination of the mandate on May 15 and that Qadura had better return
to Damascus and put his case to president Shukri Quwatly. The mayor
dutifully complied, and following his visit to Damascus some 130 pan-
Arab fighters (of the so-called Arab Liberation Army) were sent to
Safed, arriving in the city on May 9.
This was too little, too late. As fighting intensified, the trickle of
escapees turned into a hemorrhage.
On May 2, following the bombing of the Arab quarter by the deafening
albeit highly ineffective home-made “David’s mortar,” scores of Arabs
fled Safed en route to the Jordan Valley, accompanied by a substantial
number of Arab Liberation Army fighters. Four days later, the ALA’s
regional commander reported that “the majority of the inhabitants have
left [Safed’s neighboring] villages.
Their morale has collapsed completely.”
Heavy artillery bombardments of Jewish neighborhoods failed to do the
trick, and as the final battle for the city was joined on the night of
May 9 a mass flight ensued. By the time fighting was over the next
morning, Safed’s entire Arab population had taken to the road; a day
later, Hagana patrols reported that “the [Arab] quarter had emptied to
a man,” with evacuees leaving behind “a huge quantity of weapons and
ammunition.”
Such were the circumstances of the fall of Safed. There was no act of
Jewish expulsion, as there were none in other cities that were rapidly
emptying of their Arab residents at the time.
Rather it was fear that acted as the foremost catalyst of the rapid
unraveling of Palestinian Arab society, reinforced by the local
Palestinians’ disillusionment with their own leadership, the role
taken by that leadership in forcing widespread evacuations, and, above
all, a lack of communal cohesion or of a willingness, especially at
the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general
good.
But why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

 magistralmente smontate dal prof. Efraim Karsh
Efraim Karsh era lo storico che non accettava l'evidenza degli studi
di Benny Morris, sulla cacciata dei palestinesi?

 Efraim Karsh era
fatti da solo ecc. ecc.


era una domanda retorica. Il "magistrale" Karsh aveva torto marcio lì,
figuriamoci sul resto

 era una domanda retorica.
e invece sei riuscito a rivelare ai lettori che non capisci una fava.