Last Sunday, the The New York Times published its second book review by a non-historian of Rashid Khalidi’s history book. (The first review was discussed here). The Editor of JCI has decided to publish the following letter, just in case the Editor of the New York Times Book Review decides not to do so:
January 9, 2007
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times Book Review229 W. 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036
To the Editor:
In his review of Rashid Khalidi’s “The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood” (Book Review, Jan. 7, 2007), Clyde Haberman notes that many Israelis would “challenge [Khalidi’s] assertion that most Arabs were forced from their homes and did not flee of their own volition when the state of Israel came into existence in 1948.”
Any observant reader would challenge Khalidi’s assertion, since his research is demonstrably out of date. Khalidi cites as “the standard work on this topic” Benny Morris’s 1987 book “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” and references that book 10 times in his footnotes. But Khalidi never mentions (much less discusses) Morris’s 2004 book, entitled “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” which was based on new documents released since Morris’ original book was published.
Morris summarized his revised findings in a January 14, 2004 article in The Guardian entitled "For the Record." Based on the new documents, Morris concluded that “a far greater proportion of the 700,000 Arab refugees were ordered or advised by their fellow Arabs to abandon their homes than I had previously registered,” and that “a great many villages [were encouraged or ordered] to send away their women, children and old folk” (that is, more than half the population). In addition, “[w]hole villages, especially in the Jewish-dominated coastal plain, were also ordered to evacuate” by the Palestinian leadership.
Morris concluded “the problem wasn’t created by the Zionists but by the Arabs themselves, and stemmed directly from their violent assault on
Israel. Had the Palestinians and the Arab states refrained from launching a war to destroy the emergent Jewish state, there would have been no refugees and none would exist today.” This basic point is omitted from both Khalidi’s book and Haberman’s review.
— Rick Richman
Haberman’s antiseptic description of the Palestinian refugee problem as something that happened “when the state of
Morris identifies the actual cause: the Arabs decided to ignore a U.N. resolution creating a miniscule new state (as part of a two-state solution), attacked it in an attempt to drive its people into the sea, ordered Arab women, children and old people to get out of the way so the invading armies could attack, and ordered the evacuation of entire Arab villages along the coast in Jewish areas for the same reason.
It is the war the Arabs started that caused the refugees, not the state that wanted only to exist, that recognized as citizens every Arab who remained, and that provided a home for the Jewish refugees expelled in 1948 from the surrounding apartheid Arab states.
Peace is unlikely to come to the Middle East until the Palestinians and their Arab allies take responsibility for the problem they created, instead of blaming it on the existence of