“A Cup of Drunkenness” by Jack Kinsella
An Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli Knesset resigned his seat recently under suspicion that he aided Hezbollah during the 2nd Lebanon War last summer.Azmi Bishara is suspected of transferring information to Hezbollah during time of war, maintaining contacts with a foreign agent and money-laundering.Bishara has a long record of treason against the government of which he is a member.
Bishara was born to Palestinian-Christian parents in Nazareth, where he attended the Nazareth Baptist school before going on to attend Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1997, Bishara received a kidney transplant at the Jewish Hadassah Medical Center in a operation performed by Israeli doctors.
He demonstrated his gratitude by working actively to destroy the state that gave him so much.
It is one of the peculiar ironies of the Israeli-Arab conflict that Israel is not only willing, but is expected, to treat its enemies better than its enemies treat each other.
If Bishara had been born in a Palestinian ‘refugee’ camp in Jordan, Lebanon or Syria, he would still be languishing there today, assuming he was able to live another ten years without the kidney transplant.
How did an Arab enemy of the Israeli state manage to get himself elected to the Israeli Parliament? That is another of the peculiar ironies of the region.
Arab-Israelis enjoy the same rights and protections under the law as Jewish-Israelis, including the right to hold elective office in the Jewish state. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have an official policy of ethnic cleansing.
One of the main stumbling blocks to ‘peace’ (according to the Palestinians, the EU, the UN, etc., is the existence of Jewish settlements within the territories claimed by the Palestinians.
A Jew on the Palestinian side of the Green Line can be killed with impunity. No Palestinian-Arab has ever been prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority for killing a Jew inside its territory. The life of a Jew is of no more consequence under Palestinian rule than that of a dog.
But on the Israeli side, Bishara, an elected official who committed treason against the state is, to this point, still drawing his Knesset salary from exile in Egypt.
Bishara’s Israeli citizenship came as a result of the choices made by his grandparents. In the weeks leading up to the Israeli War of Independence, thousands of Palestinians fled to the Arab world, fully expecting to return to their homes after an early Arab victory.
As Palestinian nationalist Aref el-Aref explained in his history of the 1948 War;
“The Arabs thought they would win in less than the twinkling of an eye and that it would take no more than a day or two from the time the Arab armies crossed the border until all the colonies were conquered and the enemy would throw down his arms and cast himself on their mercy.”
Jewish leaders urged the Arabs to remain in Palestine and become citizens of Israel. The Assembly of Palestine Jewry issued this appeal on October 2, 1947:
“We will do everything in our power to maintain peace, and establish a cooperation gainful to both [Jews and Arabs]. It is now, here and now, from Jerusalem itself, that a call must go out to the Arab nations to join forces with Jewry and the destined Jewish State and work shoulder to shoulder for our common good, for the peace and progress of sovereign equals.”
On November 30, 1948, the day after the UN partition vote, the Jewish Agency announced: “The main theme behind the spontaneous celebrations we are witnessing today is our community’s desire to seek peace and its determination to achieve fruitful cooperation with the Arabs….“
Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, issued May 14, 1948, also invited the Palestinians to remain in their homes and become equal citizens in the new state:
“In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions….We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all.”
Did Israel keep its word? What about the Arab claims that the Palestinian refugees were forcibly deported? Bishara’s grandparents stayed in 1948 and Bishara is not only an Israeli citizen, but was a member of its parliament.
You tell me.
Despite the efforts of the revisionists, there is ample historical evidence backing up the claims that the Palestinians fled at the urging of the Arab world (in addition to the fact that Bishara’s own status as an Israeli citizen and lawmaker is lviing evidence to the fact).
The then-U.S. Consul General in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott, wrote on April 22, 1948, for example, that “local mufti dominated Arab leaders” were urging “all Arabs to leave the city, and large numbers did so.”
The London-based Economist — then as now — was no friend of the Jewish state.
In its October, 1948 issue, it reported that “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit….It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”
Time’s report of the battle for Haifa (May 3, 1948) was similar: “The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city….By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.”
Another of the ironies of the Middle East conflict is the fact that, had the Palestinians accepted the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan, not a single Palestinian-Arab would have become a refugee. And an independent Arab state would already exist beside Israel.
But then, as now, the Palestinians are not interested in having a state beside Israel — they will accept nothing less than a state INSTEAD of Israel. (A Palestinian state ethnically cleansed of all Jews.)
In 1957, the Palestinian Refugee Conference in Homs, Syria, passed a resolution that clearly outlined the real Palestinian ‘peace plan’ with Israel:
Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees’ right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason (Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957).
Today, Palestinian refugee camps exist in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There are no Palestinian refugee camps inside Israel, because any Palestinians who lived in Israel when it declared independence in 1948 were automatically granted Israeli citizenship.
But the Arab world has kept Palestinian ‘refugees’ interned in what are nothing less than concentration camps for almost sixty years. In 1998, five years after Oslo, a reporter for the Jerusalem Report asked a camp official why the camps were still in operation.
The reporter, Netty Gross, was told the Palestinian Authority had made a “political decision” not to do anything for the nearly half a million Palestinians living in the camps ‘until the final-status talks with Israel took place’.
The half-million Palestinians still remain interned by the Arabs themselves — and the world blames Israel.
This week, Hamas called on the Palestinian people to prepare for the NEXT war with Israel. It declared its ‘truce’ with Israel over and resumed its rocket barrages on Israeli cities along its borders. The world’s reaction was fascinating.
Read the rest here: Original Link.
