Stage effects

In Jaffa we talk

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Most Arabs left Jaffa after the city's leaders and those who could afford it had left. Most Arabs left what is now Israel in 1948 mostly at the request of their current hosts whilst they attempted to “push the Jews into the sea”. A former Syrian Prime Minister, Khaled al-Azm, writing in his memoirs, published in 1973, confirmed that, “Since 1948, it is we who demand the return of the refugees while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging…all this in the service of political purposes.” Israel invited them all to return in 1948 to live beside them in peace but they, or their representatives, wouldn’t.
Of all the millions of displaced persons following WW2 the Palestinians should have been the easiest to settle. They shared the culture, religion, language and race of their host communities who had plenty of room for them. Indeed many were from what is now Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria originally.
The role of the UN in all this has been a crime against humanity. Through UNWRA, an agency that exists solely for the maintenance of the Palestinian’s refugee status, the claims of a “right of return” have been kept alive while leaving Palestinians locked into an impossible limbo that denies Israel’s right to exist. This has been accomplished for sixty years by pouring in millions to underwrite all or most of their housing, food, education through university, medical care and social services whilst colluding with their hosts to prevent them from leaving or obtaining citizenship. Compared to the millions of refugees settled in the year or two after WW2 none had a set up remotely as generous and it continues to this day. On top of UNWRA assistance, the Palestinian Arabs also receive a total of a billion dollars a year in aid from other United Nations agencies, the United States, the European Community, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, and Iran.
The contrast with the treatment of the 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands could not be starker. They were mostly resident in Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, etc. since before Islam was invented but ejected with nothing and no UN help. These Jews were made citizens of Israel, given tents, food, medical care and work. There were no complaints. They just got on with it. An exchange of population had occurred; the Arab nations got their people and Israel got theirs so that should, in a sane world, be it. They effectively doubled Israel’s population and to this day, Jewish refugees from Arab lands and their descendents make up more than half the population of Israel.
Whilst the Jews went on to build the biggest economy and the most civilised society in the Middle East their counterparts in Arab lands were left to fester, denied citizenship, travel or work, manipulated by Arab despots like Assad and Nasser. Stolen from by their trusted representatives like Arafat and forced into human shields by the most violent terrorists in the world. After 60 years they are still political tools, kept as a human wave to overrun Israel for when the Arabs destroy Israel. Well, Israel is not about to let that happen.


Reading this article, one would think the poor Arabs of Jaffa were peacefully coexisting with the Jews, when the ruthless Jewish militias suddenly decided to ethnically cleanse the city.If the author had even a minimal amount of decency, he should have mentioned that the Arab inhabitants of Jaffa (and the British mandate in general) started an all-out war to eradicate the Jewish inhabitants, and that Jaffa was used numerous times as a base for mortar attacks against Tel-Aviv. This was the reason for the Irgun's attack on it (which succeeded, as Jaffa was retaken by Irgun forces with Haganah assistence, despite the intervention of the British forces on behalf of the Arabs).Unlike other human catastrophes, especially the Holocaust, here the "victims" were very much to blame for their plight.


As a relatively moderate Israeli, this article has lots of mistakes.
First of all, no mention that the arabs didnt accept the Partition plan, with more or less all the middle eastern countries sending their soldiers to abolish the new jewish country, not that i have any problems with that, if i would be arab i would probably do the same, the problem is that the writer of this article makes it sounds like the crazy jewish terrorist attacked the city while arabs putting their white flags and growing their oranges, if you declare a war and lose there are consequences, if you win, you win, if you lose you pay a price (Even the pacificist Swedish made a hit song called "the winner gets it all")
Once again the Holocaust is mentioned as a parallel to the "nakba", well, with all the respect i wont even start to explain the diffrences, i didnt expect the writer to do a parallel between the nakba and the violent deportation of jews from arab countries (My father tells me that we have a very big home in Baghdad 50 years ago, he doesnt care about it, neither do I, thats the diffrence between moving on and hating)
So, let this writer keep on writing and feeding us information that is by the least uninforming, send him to gaza to tell us how the israeli occupation has to do with the violent slaughter Hamas executed against his brothers from the Fatah, send him to Iraq so he can explain how the mystified Nakba has to do with arabs targetting their own brothers in terrorist attacks, send him to Lebanon to inform us all of the Israeli occupation has to do with those machine guns going off in the streets, send him to London and Madrid to explain how the Nakba has to do with frustration of young Muslims attacking their own country.
The Economist is better than this emotional uninformative Blog, so many facts here are out of order, the editor is on a break? :)


The city of Jaffa is, literally, thousands of years old. The Arabs who resided there prior to 1948 were certainly not it's "original inhabitants" nor were they descendants of them nor were they, even, lords of the land. Rather, they are descendants of Arabs who moved there from other parts of the Ottoman empire after the Ottoman conquest of the land of Israel and both they and the city's Jewish inhabitants were subjects of the Ottomans. The tide of the middle East has now turned, the Jewish people have regained control of their homeland, Jews who resided in Arab lands have returned home (largely expelled by their Arab neighbors - a little point which the Economist chooses to overlook) and the Arab residents of Jaffa have returned to the Arab lands whence they came (after failing in their attempt to massacre their Jewish neighbors - another little point which the Economist chooses to overlook).Such injustice as exists in the story of the 'Palestinians' comes later, when their own people refused to allow them to resettle as citizens in Arab lands, sequestering them and all their descendants for generations in refugee camps and subjugating them to poverty and humiliation, in stark contrast to the manner in which tiny Israel welcomed and assimilated the flood of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. This is all very convenient for Arab leaders as the artificial plight of the 'Palestinians' deflects public attention from their despotic regimes.


Everyone knows emotions run high on this topic. However, I believe the author's primary point is to lament the loss of connection between people and place.

Everyone also knows that Jews have been expelled from almost every home they have ever inhabited. This story merely highlights the fact that Palestinians also know this particular pain.

The difference is that the Jews have been compressed into a new homeland, while the Jaffans have been expelled out. The cost of this awkward process has been so high that Jews, Arabs, and the wider world continue to pay it. That sadness, I think, is what compelled this writer to tell this tale.


Istrob:The unprovoked Israeli attack on Jaffa was only the beginning of 60 years Palestinian suffering. And the UN has been powerless to help.The role of the UN in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has indeed been a crime against humanity. While Palestinians are expected to submit meekly to any and all Israeli-imposed degradation, humiliation and all-out aggression, America's blind political and military support as well as its automatic anti-Palestine veto at the UN has crippled any attempts to apply a fair and lasting solution to the conflict.Worse yet, in gross violation of the Oslo Accords, Jewish settlements keep growing and expanding like a cancer on Palestinian land. The Israeli apartheid system purposely keeps water supplies and the most fertile plots in Jewish hands therefore forcing Palestinian farmers to abandon their remaining land. Israel systematically, and in clear violation of international law, applies collective punishment to the Palestinian population in the form of fuel boycotts, its purposeful destruction of civilian infrastructure and its ongoing economic stranglehold of Gaza. The current Israeli regime launched over a million cluster bombs against civilian targets in southern Lebanon in 2006 after a cease-fire agreement had been reached, rendering more than one quarter of the cultivatable land useless. Numerous Israeli prime ministers have been accused of terrorist atrocities and war crimes during countless attacks on their Palestinian subjects and invasions of neighboring Arab countries.These facts (and this is only the tip of the iceberg) clearly illustrate that the primary intent of the Israeli government is to prevent the creation of a viable Palestinian state through the forcible elimination of the original Arab inhabitants. Indeed, Israel's strategy in Palestine has been a carbon copy of the colonisation of America and Australia where waves of foreign-born colonists with religious grievances and vastly superior weaponry simply liquidated the original inhabitants and left those remaining to rot on small patches of unproductive land.Perverse as it may sound, the rise of Iran as a regional power will bring about peace in the region. Given Israel's enormous military advantage, only a balance of power will result in the stalemate which is the prerequisite to peace. When Iran demonstrates a nuclear weapons capability to counter Israel's existing arsenal, the Palestinian people will finally have a realistic chance of throwing off the yoke of Israeli oppression.


im ern:Regarding your rather astounding claim that : " the Israeli state is founded upon the basis of being an exclusively jewish state ... one that is purely jewish and had no place for the then current residents of that godforsaken land" I find it almost embarrassing to point out the easily checkable fact that some 25% of the citizens of Israel are not Jewish but are, in fact, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bahai etc. All 'Palestinian' Arabs who remained in Israel were given Israeli citizenship. Yes, Israel is a Jewish state (as all Arab states are Arab and, generally, also Muslim) but, from its inception, Israel has had a place for non-Jews: a place that includes full citizenship. As an aside allow me to ask you to compare that to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries which a Jew may not even visit, let alone become a citizen of.


In May 1948 I was still in the British Army, stationed in the Canal Zone of Egypt. I heard on Egyptian radio President Naguib, Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army, repeat the following pronouncement incessantly: "Dalat ayam fi Tel Abib. (In three days we will be in Tel Aviv.) Moslems of Lod, Ramleh and Jaffa, leave your homes for a few days. The Egyptian Army will pass through your towns on the way to Tel Aviv and after you have left only Jews will remain there. We will drive them all into the sea."


rchrenko:Clearly, we have very different views of the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but I think that we will certainly get nowhere unless we can agree on the facts. And by 'we' I don't only mean the two of us. I won't attempt to debate all the factual claims you have made in your posts in a single post of my own but allow me to reply to, what seems to me to be, your central question: "So why doesn't Israel take the bold step of trying to *help* Palestinians rather than further oppress them?" Well, rchrenko, the obvious answer is that Israel has, almost ad nauseam, done exactly that, only to have the 'Palestinians' use whatever help Israel gave it (territory, arms, money, political backing, freedom of movement, release of terrorists, etc., etc.) to attack and murder Israelis. Having gone through this ritual many, many dozens of times Israelis are rather reluctant to go through it again unless they see a real possibility of a different outcome. The root problem here, rchrenko, is that the 'Palestinians' have not yet come to terms with the existence of Israel and still persist in pursuing its destruction. They won't succeed (and shouldn't) but until they finally make peace with the fact of Israel's existence they will give israel no peace and will receive none in return. The problem is that given the massive incitement against Israel and the wall-to-wall denial of it's right to exist (which starts with some pretty creative historical revisionism) in 'Palestinian' society, the chances that the 'Palestinians' will come to accept Israel and cease to dream of its destruction in the foreseeable future seem virtually non-existent. "So just what", you ask, "is the motivation for Palestinians to stop shooting?" The answer is: a viable Palestinian state in most of the West-Bank and Gaza, as Israel has been offering them for a long time now. Until they truly accept that as being enough we can look forwards to nothing but more of the same.


Zionisms "disregard" of the Arabs was a grave mistake, but not a significant mistake. The present conflict is not based solely on cultural "misunderstandings".Islam does not accept the existence of a free and democratic Jewish state in the midst of Muslim dictatorships". So they fight to remove this undesirable thorn. So understanding and good relations would have been very pleasant but would not have changed the FUNDAMENTAL agenda of Islam to have Israel removed.


im ern (continuation):Next. After extolling the virtues of Jewish life under benevolent Muslim rule you lament that in Israel, Arabs are, at best, second class citizens. Well, second class citizens they are certainly not: they are afforded all of the rights given to Jewish citizens while being exempt from the duty of military service (although, and this is a telling point, quite a few Arab Israelis waive their exemption, volunteer to serve in the IDF and do so with distinction). This does not mean that on the informal level no Arab Israeli has ever been given cause to feel prejudice - certainly, they are checked more thoroughly at security checkpoints than are most of their fellow Jewish citizens - but that is an unfortunate consequence of the nature of the situation, is openly apologized for and in no way makes them second class citizens. If you'd like to know what second class citizens are, go back to the last paragraph of my previous post.Next. You ask: "do you not agree that palestinians were actually living in the rest of the country when jewish immigrants began to arrive?" Well, im ern, the answer to that is: No, the vast majority of the land was uninhabited and utterly barren, Yes, there were several hundred thousand Arabs living in the land at the advent of the Zionist movement, No, they had no separate national identity or culture, No, they had no sovereignty over the land, No, they were not alone - Jews were also living in the land (and had been doing so for far, far longer than the land's Arab residents) and Yes, of the small number of people who resided in the land prior to the advent of the Zionist movement, there were more Arabs than Jews (although, even then, there were towns with Jewish majorities). Finally, you take umbrage with the fact that Israel has 'walled-off' Gaza (although what you think that has to do with Israeli Arabs I do not claim to understand). Well, life is short my dear im ern, so let me just note that 'fenced-off' would be the more exact bon mot and ask you if you can really think of no legitimate reason that Israel might have for doing this - I await your answer with fascination.Salaam, im ern.


im ern:Well, I'm glad to see that we are making some progress her. In your original post you claimed that: " the Israeli state is founded upon the basis of being an exclusively jewish state ... one that is purely jewish and had no place for the then current residents of that godforsaken land". After I pointed out that that is patently incorrect as some 25% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish at all you have responded by saying that: " arabs were only given israeli citizenship because it was impossible to banish them all from their previous homes" which, tacitly, admits my point (an open admission would be appreciated, henceforth, but we take what we can get in these forums). But, in your dauntless effort not to grant anything to Israeli goodwill you have added two very interesting claims, namely, first, that the Arabs who remained in their homes were allowed to so by the Israelis only because the Israelis found it impossible to banish them from there homes and, second, that the Israelis were then forced (seemingly against their will) to grant the remaining Arabs Israeli citizenship.Lets start with your first claim. The Israeli version is quite straightforward: with very few exceptions, the Arabs who left the land did so of their own choice (and, largely, at the advice of their leaders) while those that chose to stay were allowed to do so. Your version begs the question: what, historically, stopped the Israelis from banishing the Arabs that remained? A lack of transportation or a shortage of gas? Neither answer is likely as it was quite easy to walk from most remaining Arab settlements to the (1948) border; nor, for that matter, have I ever come across so much as a hint of such an historical event. What then? The Arab armies certainly did not prevent it - on the one hand they, themselves, were calling on their brethren to leave the land in the early stages of the war and, in its later stages (and, certainly at its end) they were in no position to stop the Israelis from doing anything at all; nor, once again, have I ever come across so much as a whiff of such an historical event. What then? Has Arab historical revisionism manufactured a brave 'Palestinian' battle of resistance: an alternate history in which the Israelis came to expel them but they fought and prevailed? I'd be very interested to read the full descriptions of all those (heretofore) unheard of battles. I'm making this point in some detail to show you, im ern, that the patent falsehood of your claim (it's not of your own making, I know) does nothing but highlight the veracity of the Israeli position.On to your second point. Who or what, in your opinion, 'forced' the Israeli's to grant citizenship to the Arabs (and, I might point out, that this citizenship was already assured to those of them as wished it in the Israel Declaration of Independence)? The Israeli version is, once again, clear and straightforwards - no one 'forced' such a measure upon them; rather, it is a natural extension of Israel's ideology and goodwill. As you seem to disagree, I'd be very interested to learn the details of just who twisted the Israeli's arm and how it was accomplished. It will, I don't doubt, make for fascinating reading.Onwards. You make the (oft repeated) Arab claim that: "the ottoman empire and preceeding arab dynasties were some of the only in the world to allow jews to worship freely and be safe from persecution". Well, the Jews openly admit that, generally, things were a lot worse for them under Christian dominion than they were under Muslim, but the Jewish memory of this period is nowhere near as bucolic as the Arab memory. Jews under Arab rule lived under continuous fear of violence (which was often practiced against them, although not, admittedly, with the same ferociousness and frequency as under the Christians) and forced conversions to Islam (under the threat of death, whoops, more violence and what were you saying about freedom of religion?). They were deemed, as a matter of course, to be inferior human beings: 'sons of apes and dogs' was (and still is) a fond Muslim phrase for them and a million little humiliations were de rigueur - they were, for instance, required to give right of way upon meeting a moslem on the road, pay extra taxes etc. (it is, in fact, this very supposed inferiority of the Jew that makes the Arab defeats at Israel's hands so unbearable for them). And, with the advent of Zionism, things got even worse. And so, when the 'Palestinians' made the Jews the kind offer of taking over all the land and allowing them to remain under their benevolent rule, the Jews were understandably reluctant. Oh, there was also that pesky little point of the Jews wanting self-determination, i.e., a country to call their own, in their own homeland. But we stray.To be continued (Inshaalla).


Sir:Your correspondent notes that 'In January 1948 the Stern Group, the extreme Zionist militia, blew up the New Seray building on the corner of Clock Tower Square, home to Jaffa's municipal offices and a soup kitchen for poor children.' In fact, the Serai building served as the headquarters of the Palestinian forces which were attacking Tel Aviv at the time and the Palestinian fire was being directed from it.


This article continues the long standing Economist tradition of discussing feelings and suffering of only one side of what is now a political dispute. Bagehot would be ashamed!


The article reminds me of the following story:
A biker was riding by the zoo, when he saw a little girl leaning into
the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabbed her by the cuff of her
jacket and tried to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes
of her screaming parents.

The biker jumped off his bike, ran to the cage and hit the lion square
jumped back and let go of the girl. The biker then took her to her
terrified parents, who thanked him endlessly.

A reporter saw the whole scene, and addressing the biker, said, 'Sir,
this was the most brave thing I saw a man do in my whole life.'

'Why, it was nothing,' said the biker, really. The lion was behind bars.

'I noticed a patch on your jacket,' said the journalist.

'Yeah, I ride with an Israeli motorcycle club,' the biker replied.

'Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed.
I'm a journalist with the
New York Times, you know, and tomorrow's papers will have this on
the front page.'

The following morning the biker bought the paper to see if it indeed
brought out the news of his actions. On the front page was the headline:


Michael Goetze

It may be true that the Palestinians were better off under Insraeli rule but somehow it reminds me of a favoured argument used here in Apartheid South Africa.
"You blacks are better off under us than elsewhere in Africa so shut up and stop asking for political rights"


typingmonkey:I read your summation of the article with some interest. You write: "The author shares with us another example of two peoples coming together to create a vibrant community of prosperity and beauty for all. In doing so, he both mourns its passing and invites us to ask ourselves "Can it not be so again?" My answer is that it is already so, and has never ceased to be so. If you ever have the opportunity, you may wish to visit Jaffa which, you will find, is a mixed city of Jews and Arabs who have been coexisting peacefully and fruitfully since 1948. Not all the Arabs ran, you see, and those who remained are simply Israeli citizens. The fact that this was not not clear to you from reading the correspondent's diary is not your own fault but rather that of the learned (and wholly unbiased, I'm sure) correspondent who spread so much sweet nostalgia on his viewfinder that you could not help but think that he was showing you a view of the distant past.

aamir k

Arab urban leadership always despised its rustic masses, but they
proved to be poor leadership. and by the way, till 1948 "Palestinian"
was nor a common term, Palestinians were both Jews and Arabs


Sir,Your correspondent has missed his true calling. He should be writing soap operas. I live in Tel Aviv, not far from Jaffa. I am in Jaffa several times a week - I shop there, do business, go to the beach, restaurants etc. - and have been doing so for quite a few years now. Many (if not most) of the people I meet and deal with are Arabs. I am friends with several and have had innumerable conversations with many. I have never, ever, in real life, met the angst and pathos which your correspondent is laying on so thickly and passing off as a description of the mood of the city.



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