Lubya account doesn’t tally with facts

Don Krausz

An online article by pro-Palestinian Mahmoud Issa presents a different picture and highlights, inter alia, Daitz’s selectiveness of facts. She writes of the results of the Arab and Palestinian totally unprovoked aggression.

The UN partitioned Palestine in 1947 and on May 14 1948 Israel declared its independence. It was immediately invaded by the established armies of five Arab states and had to endure barbaric and merciless attacks from its Palestinian neighbours.

At the time of this attack the secretary of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, proclaimed that “this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre…”

Well before Israel’s establishment in May 1948, the British commander of the Jordanian Legion, General Glubb “Pasha”, reported: “That in January ’48 the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria and Jordan. They were in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine.”

When Israel declared independence, its army did not have a single cannon, tank or fighter plane. There was an arms embargo against the fledgling country but not against its aggressors, the Arab states. The Arabs had no difficulty in obtaining all the weapons they needed. (Sachar, p 452.)

This is in contrast to Mahmoud Issa’s statement that the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Lubya were assaulted by Israeli cannon, planes and armoured vehicles.

Daitz writes of the expulsion of 800 000 Palestinians by Israel “in an act of ethnic cleansing”. She also accuses the Jewish National Fund of being complicit in this act.

Significantly she omits to mention the attacks on the Jewish inhabitants of neighbouring Muslim countries, their expropriation and expulsion numbering more than 750 000 of which most were absorbed by Israel.

And the Jewish National Fund (JNF)? In his 1867 account of a visit to the Holy Land Mark Twain described the country as a desert with hardly an inhabitant to be seen outside of the cities. Hardly a tree, malaria infested swamps and little agriculture. Nowadays the Jews are renowned for having made the desert bloom and for that we can thank the JNF.

The cost to Israel was enormous. “Many of its most productive fields lay gutted. The citrus groves, the basis of the Jewish economy, were largely destroyed. (Sachar p 452). 6 000 Israelis were killed out of a population of 650 000; 30 000 were wounded. (British Encyclopaedia. p142).

Not a word thereof by Daitz.

Killarney, Johannesburg