Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

604 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:595The refusal of the Arab nations to make peace with Israel in 1949, andthe open statements by Arab leaders to the effect that returning refugeescould be used as a fifth column that would facilitate the destruction of thenew state of Israel, understandably made Israeli leaders unwilling to allowthe repatriation of the 700,000 Palestinian refugees. 54A REFUGEE PROBLEMThis history is of course not of purely academic interest; it is vitallyrelevant to debates about Middle East peace that continue today. Considerthe May 17, 2011, New York Times editorial by Mahmoud Abbas, chairmanof the PLO and president of the Palestinian National Authority. In Abbas’version of the history of 1947-8, after the UN partition resolution ofNovember 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure adecisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.War and further expulsions ensued.” Ever since, Israel has denied tothe refugees “that most basic of human rights,” the right to return home.Capable historians have thoroughly demolished this inaccurate and selfservingdistortion of what actually happened in Palestine in 1947-8. 55 I willonly add here that President Abbas fails to advert to a most important aspectof the Israeli War of Independence, namely, that it was a genocidal war inwhich the 650,000 Jews of Palestine faced the very real threat of liquidationat the hands of a foe with a proven track record of collaboration with theNazi genocide. Abbas’ political agenda is clear: his aim is to portray Zionistforces as aggressors who initiated violence against innocent Palestiniancivilians in order to achieve a Jewish-majority state. This inversion of thetruth obviously places the moral burden of solving the Palestinian refugeeproblem on the alleged aggressors, namely, the Zionists. 56 An accurate andhonest historical narrative would not suit Abbas’ purpose nearly as well, for54. Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, 221-9; Morris, 1948, 411.55. Efraim Karsh, “Abbas’s Fable,” The Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2011, andBenny Morris, “Exposing Abbas,” The National Interest, May 19, 2011.56. In The Question of Palestine, Edward Said also completely ignores the roleplayed by Hajj Amin al-Husseini in driving the violence of 1936-9 and 1947-8.Indeed, the name “Hajj Amin al-Husseini” does not appear even once in Said’sbook. He thus is able to portray the Palestinian refugee problem as solely the productof alleged Zionist racism and aggression, as if Arab antisemitism had nothing todo with poisoning relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and wrecking anypossibility of a peaceful compromise as the British mandate drew to a close. On thegeneral failure of Arab and Palestinian writers to deal honestly with the career ofHajj Amin al-Husseini, see Litvak and Webman, From Empathy to Denial, 297-307.