The Evening Gazette · 27 July 1967

CP-1967-018

Myths About Palestine Widespread

Arab image suffers

Antoine B. Zahlan, Beirut, Lebanon

Transcribed from the clipping

“The writer is chairman of the Department of Physics at American University of Beirut. The Observer’s Forum column of July 18 carried a letter from Rabbi Israel J. Gerber under the headline, ‘What About Aggressor Who Loses?’ Visiting your pleasant city, I noticed this letter and as a Palestinian Arab, now a citizen of the Republic of Lebanon, I feel I should try to clarify some points made or assumed in Rabbi Gerber’s comments on the Middle East. Rabbi Gerber begins by stating ‘Except for Russia and the Arab blocs, most governments, news correspondents, analysts and editorial writers agree that the Arab states were the aggressors ...’ It may have been stupid for the Arabs to have had all their planes on the ground when the Israelis attacked in June, but that type of unpreparedness is no characteristic of an aggressor. On the CBS news special July 13, the statements by Israeli military leaders and the comments of General Marshall (USA, Ret.) made it clear that Israel attacked first and at an hour when United Nations delegates would be asleep in New York. I should like to refute some of the many other myths about Palestine to which Americans are so often exposed. 1. The assertion that Palestine has been the property of the Jewish people ‘since the days of King David’ is a myth. For some 2,500 years prior to 1948, there was no political entity called Israel and Palestine was inhabited by Semitic peoples, Aramaic-speaking before the seventh century and mainly Arabic-speaking since. It is untrue that Palestine was an empty land when Zionist colonization began; Arab men, women and children were living there as they always had. 2. The refrain constantly echoed by Zionists that Palestinian Arabs left Palestine of their own accord or at the command of aggressive Arab governments is false. The truth — that Arabs fled from terrorism perpetrated against defenseless people such as those of Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem — is contained in the statement of a British Middle East authority: ‘The massacre of Deir Yassin, the latest link in a chain of terror, had struck fear into the hearts of these civilians whose homes lay in the path of Zionist forces. Just as, in 1940, Frenchmen in their thousands fled the advancing Nazis, so, in 1948, before the Zionists, thousands of Arabs did the same and for the same reason.’ (Stewart Perowne, ‘Levant Diary: the Refugee Situation,’ Middle East in Transition, ed. by Walter Z. Laqueur, p. 222) 3. The charge that Arabs are anti-Semitic and persecute Jews is a ludicrous libel. Arabs are Semites themselves. Jewish citizens traditionally played important roles in Arab society and cultural life; the Arab relationship with their Jewish ‘cousins’ was generally happy until the Zionist colonization of Palestine, a project with the declared aim of expelling the Arab population and establishing a Jewish nation-state, began in modern times. Arabs do not hate Jews; Arabs are hostile only to Zionism, a movement dedicated to the expropriation of land on which they had their homes and on which their forefathers had lived for centuries… 5. The assertion that refugees are deliberately confined to camps and kept in penury by Arab governments is untrue. An analogy will illustrate the magnitude of the refugee problem. In Lebanon, the 1948 war brought an influx of some 150,000 refugees into a population numbering 1.5 million. To Lebanon, this was like what bringing 18 million destitute persons into the United States within a few weeks would be to America. For Jordan the situation is worse; there are as many refugees as non-refugees. It should be remembered that some 92 per cent of all private property in Palestine was owned by Arabs before May 15, 1948 (see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1967, XVII, 171) and that the owners of this land were not only expelled from their homes and the land they loved but were not compensated for even the material loss. My own family, for example, holds United Nations records of our property holdings in Haifa; but for 20 years we have been exiled from our home and for 20 years we have received no offer of compensation. 4. The statement often made that Arab states have received more financial assistance than Israel has is false… 8. Contrary to general opinion here, the Arabs are working hard to solve the refugee problem. Unfortunately, our economic and educational handicaps have prevented our healing the physical wounds (to say nothing of the psychological ones) inflicted upon us by superior power. Like many Southerners, we Arabs perhaps brood overmuch on our wrongs and relive too often our defeats. And because we have not mastered Western techniques of persuasion and public relations, we have failed to do justice to our own just cause.”

Photograph caption

A cartoon runs in the same column, unrelated: two figures under an umbrella among a crowd, captioned “They say the earth will soon be overcrowded. How will we know?”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian physicist at the American University of Beirut answering a rabbi’s letter point by point in an American forum column, seven weeks after the June war. He cites the Britannica and a British diarist by page number, and gives his own family’s United Nations property records in Haifa as evidence. The closing comparison is to Southerners brooding on their defeats.

Cite this item

"Myths About Palestine Widespread," The Evening Gazette, 27 July 1967. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1967-018. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1967-018

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• A Solution for Palestinians?Toronto Star · 7 June 1967 · the same year
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• The Endlessly Embattled Land Of PalestineCalgary Herald · 14 June 1967 · the same year