Due to the invention of the steamboat, Americans were finally able to travel to Europe and the Mideast starting around the middle of the 19th century. In 1867, just after the Civil War, Mark Twain set out on such a voyage. He joined a group of pilgrims (whom he dubbed “The Innocents”) and boarded a retired Civil War ship for a trip of several months to Europe and destinations in the Mideast.
Prior to his departure, Twain had signed contracts to write articles during the voyage. The material he wrote while on the voyage was combined with articles he wrote later, and the result was The Innocents Abroad (1869), a book which detailed his impressions of the places he encountered.
Regarding what he saw in the land of Israel, here is a sample of what he wrote: “Stirring scenes…occur in this valley [Hula] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent- not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride 10 miles, hereabouts, and not see 10 human beings…”
“These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms…”
“It was hard to realize that this silent plain had once… trembled to the tramp of armed men…A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely…We never saw a human being on the whole route.”
“Nazareth is forlorn…Jericho the accursed lies in a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew…high honor….”
In Jaffa, before he took leave of the country, he summarized:
“Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren…The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch…wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint…It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land… Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes…desolate and unlovely…”
P.S. Similar to Twain’s description, just a few years earlier in 1857, the British Consul in Palestine reported: “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population….”
Admittedly there were 472,000 to 750,000 Arabs who voluntarily left or were forced to leave Israel in 1947-49. (I am using the estimates in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, p. 87.) And as we all know an even greater number of Jewish refugees had to leave Arab lands shortly thereafter.
But let us just focus on the Arabs who left Israel. (Some left voluntarily to avoid the fighting. Others were encouraged by Arab leaders to leave. Some were forced to leave by Jewish fighters.)
A widespread assumption is that those Arabs and their ancestors had been there for decades, or perhaps centuries (“from time immemorial”). But the reality is quite different.
As further background, there were about 30,000 Jews in Israel in 1880. Jews began to come there in significant numbers in several waves beginning in 1882 (due in large part to pogroms in Russia, which began in 1881). Much agricultural and building work was done by the Jews in the subsequent decades to lay the groundwork for the future Jewish state.
In 1953, the Chairman of the American Christian Palestine Committee wrote: “The Arab population of Palestine was small and limited until Jewish resettlement restored the barren lands and drew to it Arabs from neighboring countries….When organized Jewish colonization began in 1882, there were fewer than 150,000 Arabs in the land. The great majority of the Arab population in recent decades were comparative newcomers- either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in the previous 70 years.”
Similarly, the British governor of Sinai from 1922 to 1936 stated: “It is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs [in Palestine] if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.”
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The special UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has a special definition of “refugee,” much more lenient than the definition of the other agency, UNHCR. UNRWA defines a refugee as anyone: 1) “whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948,” and 2) “who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” (Plus, in another leniency, UNRWA defines as “refugees” those who are the descendants of those who met the above criteria!)
As Dershowitz writes in The Case for Israel, “an Arab was counted as a refugee if he moved just a few miles from one part of Palestine to another- even if he returned to the village in which he had previously lived and in which his family still lived, from a village to which he had moved only two years earlier.”
In other refugee contexts, the typical definition of a refugee is one who is forced to leave a “permanent” or “habitual” home.
In light of the extensive immigration of Arabs into Palestine in the decades prior to the founding of the state in 1948, due to the job opportunities created by the extensive Jewish activity in Palestine, this two-year definition is a ridiculously generous one. This definition, specifically created for the Arab-Israeli context, shows that the Arabs were aware that a large percentage of their refugees were only relatively recent immigrants. That is why they had to obtain this liberal definition.
Dershowitz writes further, p. 87: “Tens of millions of other refugees had been created as a result of World War II. In virtually all of those cases, the refugees were displaced from locations in which they and their ancestors had lived for decades, sometimes centuries- certainly more than the two years required for being considered a Palestinian refugee.”
Ruth Wisse has written: “The two massive conflicts that framed Israel’s War of Independence- India’s war over the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the Korean War of 1950-53- produced more than 20 million refugees between them, yet most of these refugees were reabsorbed within a generation.”
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- If there would have been no Arab invasion in 1947-48, there would have been no refugees. The Arab States took their gamble of an invasion and should bear the consequences.
- A former Prime Minister of Syria, Khaled al-Azm, wrote in his 1972 memoirs: “Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees…while it is we who made them leave…We brought disaster upon…Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave…We have rendered them dispossessed…We have accustomed them to begging…All this in the service of political purposes…”
- A research report by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies concluded that 68% of the refugees in 1947-48 “left without seeing an Israeli soldier.” (Dershowitz, p. 84.) And yes, expulsions are sometimes necessary in a time of war, especially a defensive war forced on you by surrounding states.
There is a terrific pamphlet on all of this (67 pages) by David Meir-Levi: Big Lies: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel (2006). It can be found free online.
Mitchell First can be reached at [email protected]. Menachem Begin cited from The Innocents Abroad in his first visit with President Carter in 1977.
