Israeli Arabs seek right to return to villages abandoned in 1948

According to a position paper written by Mossawa - the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel and presented in a conference in Nazareth on Friday, Israeli Arabs want the right to return to villages abandoned in 1948, educational autonomy and changes to the Israeli flag and national anthem.

So why did the Israeli Arabs leave in 1948 anyway? On May 14, 1948, the Palestinian Jews declared their own State of Israel. Later that same day and on the next day, May 15, 1948, Israel was invaded by seven Arab armies.

The seven Jew-phobic nations are Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen.

Most of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the newly declared Israel were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies to facilitate the slaughter of the Jews and were promised to be given all Jewish property when the victorious Arabs won the war.

When the war ended, Israel won and survived despite a 1% loss of it's entire population. Those Arabs who did not run away became today's Israeli Arab citizens. Those who fled became the seeds of the first wave of "palestinian Arab refugees."

At the end of that war, the West Bank and Gaza did not become part of a Palestinian state but were occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively. Israel conquered these territories only in 1967, which is why it prefers to speak of 'disputed' and not 'occupied' land. In a legal sense occupation requires that the territory in question was the recognized part of a sovereign state before its conquest.

By getting this history wrong, the anti-Israel community implies that the complete withdrawal to the 1967 lines would return the region to some previous state of order. Acknowledging that there never were any borders to begin with would make the insistence on the complete withdrawal to arbitrary battle lines appear less than objective, dontcha think?

Arab leaders bear responsibility for the mass flight of Arabs from Israel in 1948, and were the cause of the "refugee" problem. Furthermore, the fact that this information has been validated by public figures and the media in the Palestinian Authority confirms that this responsibility is well-known - even though, for propaganda purposes, its leaders continue to blame Israel publicly for "the expulsion."