Just How Easy Is It To Criticize Israel?

Edith Garwood is a long-time human rights activist in the Charlotte area and a member of Palestine Media Watch. Back in April, perhaps motivated by the approaching 60th anniversary of Israel,she came out with the following accusations against Israel:

We are often told the Palestinians fled of their own accord, but British and Israeli archives opened in the late 1970s tell a different story. The indigenous Arabs -- Muslim, Christian, secular -- were systematically driven out of areas desired for a new Jewish state.

...Archives show armed Jewish militias expelled Arabs using home demolitions, massacres, rape, beatings, bombings and widespread threats of terror. Some 300,000 were expelled before Israel declared itself an independent state in May 1948. Another 400,000 Palestinians were driven out or simply fled in the fighting that ensued.There are approximately 7 million Palestinians today, with 4 million still living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries as well as in the Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories. After 60 years of dead-end peace initiatives, all parties are frustrated, especially in the refugee camps where frustration is spiraling and hope is dead.

The odd thing is, that Garwood never actually gets around to revealing to us what these archives are--where they are and what they actually reveal. No details. None. On the other hand, if you do want details--you can check Myths and Facts Online:

On January 30, 1948, the Jaffa newspaper, Ash Sha'ab, reported: "The first of our fifth-column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere....At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle."⁸

Another Jaffa paper, As Sarih (March 30, 1948) excoriated Arab villagers near Tel Aviv for "bringing down disgrace on us all by 'abandoning the villages.'"⁹

Meanwhile, a leader of the Arab National Committee in Haifa, Hajj Nimer el-Khatib, said Arab soldiers in Jaffa were mistreating the residents. "They robbed individuals and homes. Life was of little value, and the honor of women was defiled. This state of affairs led many [Arab] residents to leave the city under the protection of British tanks."¹⁰

John Bagot Glubb, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, said: "Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war."¹¹

Lots more where those quotes came from.

For instance--Garwood claims that Jews raped the Arabs. Consistent with her sloppiness throughout her article, Garwood offers nothing to back up that accusation, but Myths and Facts has this:

Contrary to claims from Arab propagandists at the time and some since, no evidence has ever been produced that any women were raped. On the contrary, every villager ever interviewed has denied these allegations. Like many of the claims, this was a deliberate propaganda ploy, but one that backfired. Hazam Nusseibi, who worked for the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1948, admitted being told by Hussein Khalidi, a Palestinian Arab leader, to fabricate the atrocity claims. Abu Mahmud, a Deir Yassin resident in 1948 told Khalidi "there was no rape," but Khalidi replied, "We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews." Nusseibeh told the BBC 50 years later, "This was our biggest mistake. We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror."⁴⁵

Likewise, while Garwood brings no detail to substantiate her claim of Jews massacring Arabs, Myths and Facts recounts:

Syria's UN delegate, Faris el-Khouri, interrupted the UN debate on Palestine to describe the seizure of Haifa as a "massacre" and said this action was "further evidence that the 'Zionist program' is to annihilate Arabs within the Jewish state if partition is effected."¹⁶

The following day, however, the British representative at the UN, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told the delegates that the fighting in Haifa had been provoked by the continuous attacks by Arabs against Jews a few days before and that reports of massacres and deportations were erroneous.¹⁷

This is nothing compared to the prevarication exhibited last week at Columbia University. Efraim Karsh writes at Contentions:

In a panel discussion in Columbia University last week, commemorating “60 Years of Nakba - The Catastrophe of Palestine 1948-2008,” Lila Abu Lughod, a professor of anthropology and gender studies at the university, emotively told the audience how her father, Ibrahim, had been expelled from his hometown of Jaffa in Palestine in May 1948.

Karsh points out that her father himself contradicts her version of why he left:

Expelled? This is not exactly how Ibrhaim Abu Lughod himself described the circumstances of his flight in a 1990’s television documentary he prepared and presented with his friend and colleague Edward Said:

There was a Belgian ship, and one of the sailors, a young man, looked at us - and the ship was full of people from Jaffa, some of us were young adults - and he said: “Why don’t you stay and fight?” I have never forgotten his face and I have never had one good answer for him.

That was not her only misstatement at the conference:

Sociology professor Lila Abu Lughod described a homeland that was "buried, erased, and rewritten by Israel." She told the audience about her father's return to Israel and how he kept "getting lost because he couldn't read Hebrew, and was afraid to ask." It wasn't clear why, since Hebrew and Arabic are the official languages of Israel and it is legally required for all road signs to be in Hebrew, English, and Arabic. But why let facts stand in the way of a good story?

Why indeed.

[Hat tip: Media Backspin]

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