Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote an article recently that was published as an op-ed piece by The New York Times. One of his distortions was that he neglected to point out that Israel accepted the UN partition plan, but the Arab states did not, and the Palestinian leadership did not. After the British pull-out from the land, Israel declared itself an independent state, and the Arab League states declared war on Israel and threatened genocide. The media today do not mention that May 15, the Naqba Day, is the anniversary of the Arab League's threat of genocide: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." -- Arab League Sec. Gen. Azzam Pasha, May 15, 1948, the day five Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel. [Source: Myths and Facts 1982, edited by Davis and Decter.]
To facilitate this genocide, without causing casualties among the Palestinians, the Arab leaders urged Palestinians to leave.
The organization Stand With Us has provided a collection of quotations from Arab and independent sources documenting that Arab leaders urged Palestinian Arabs to leave, which can be found at:
http://www.standwithus.com/pdfs/flyers/biglies06.pdf
"The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem."--- Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph September 6, 1948 (sae appeared in The London Telegraph, August 1948).
"The most potent factor [in the flight of Palestinians] was the announcements made over the air by the Arab-Palestinian Higher Executive, urging all Haifa Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades." -- London Economist October 2, 1948.
"It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem." -- Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949.
"Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe." -- Haifa District HQ of the British Police, April 26, 1948 (quoted in Battleground by Samuel Katz).
"The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa." -- Time Magazine, May 3, 1948, page 25.
"The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war." -- General John Glubb [commander of the invading military forces from the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan], The London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948.
...
"The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees." -- The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, February 19, 1949.
Source of above quotes: BIG LIES: Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel, by David Meir-Levi.
Read the rest. One quote is especially illuminating, because it comes from Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) himself, whose op-ed in The New York Times suggests that he seems to have forgotten or deliberately omitted what he said earlier. "Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" (Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2003): "Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: 'The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zioinist 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."
Source: BIG LIES: Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel, by David Meir-Levi.
