Today in Jewish History - Tevet 2

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On this date in 1947, the Arab Legion surrounded Jerusalem and isolated its 100,000 Jews from the rest of the Israeli population. By March 1948 the city was under full siege, and in May, Jordan invaded and occupied east Jerusalem, dividing the city for the first time in its history, and driving thousands of Jews into exile. The Arabs proceeded to destroy all 58 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, and used Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives to build roads and latrines. The Western Wall would be off-limits to Jews (in spite of the cease-fire agreement granting freedom of access to holy places), restored again with Israel's victory in the 1967 war.

How Amateur Astronomers Helped Israel Win the War of Independence

From How Amateur Astronomers Helped Israel Win the War of Independence:

Mordechai Gihon, 85, a professor, archaeologist and historian, was a former intelligence officer in the pre-state Haganah's astronomers unit - amateur astronomers who assisted in gathering intelligence about the Arab Legion's movements in and around Jerusalem. Gihon recalls that in the fall of 1947, David Zaichik, a botany professor and an amateur astronomer, "said that he could help us with his telescopes. We tried it and discovered that his telescopes permitted us to see deep into enemy territory, 100 times better than we had in the past." About 30 amateur astronomers from Jerusalem were enlisted by Gihon and Zaichik to observe enemy positions from hills, towers and tall buildings in the city. The astronomers, who worked in shifts throughout the day, provided daily close-ups of Arab Legion positions at a level of definition that permitted the identification of firing apertures and gun barrels pointed at Jewish forces. Zaichik's people attached cameras to the telescopes and produced detailed pictures for intelligence officers.

"Historical insight" from a Jewish self-loather

An excerpt from the excellent, must-read essay by Seth Frantzman, currently in the doctoral program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and whose master's thesis was on the 1948 war, in a counterpoint rebuttal of Ilan Pappe, a communist anti-Zionist self-loathing Jewish historian at Haifa University who has defended a student, Teddy Katz, for written essays documenting a fictitious Israeli massacre at the village of Tantura in 1948, and presenting it as truth. Via JPost:

It has become fashionable in recent decades to frame the 1948 war as one in which the Arabs were victims of Zionist aggression. Anti-Zionist scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappe have presented the war as if the only important events were Deir Yassin and the flight or expulsion of Arabs from Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, west Jerusalem, Jaffa and numerous villages.

These views are those of the "new historians" - leftist scholars who in the 1980s began to reinterpret Israeli and Palestinian history. He is the author of six works on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Middle East. In his recently released book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe claims that Israel prepared a special plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arab population known as Plan D for dalet. Pappe's "evidence" is derived from his interpretations of files found in the Hagana and Israel state archives.

But Pappe makes one egregious mistake. He never bothers to ask the same question of the Arabs he does of the Jews: What about their lists, their intelligence reports and their ethnic-cleansing plans? What were Arab intentions in the five months between the passage of the UN partition plan on November 29, 1947, and the birth of Israel?

The archives of The Palestine Post, now The Jerusalem Post and then the newspaper of record of Mandatory Palestine, provide some of the answers and tell a very different story from the one presented by Pappe.

-- Sixty-two Jews were murdered by Arabs in the first week after the UN partition plan was passed, and by May 15, 1948, a total of 1,256 Jews had been killed, most of them civilians. These deaths were caused by Arab militias, gangs, terrorists and army units which attacked every place of Jewish inhabitation in Palestine.

The attacks succeeded in placing Jerusalem under siege and eventually cutting off its water supply. All Jewish villages in the Negev were attacked, and Jews had to go about the country in convoys. In every major city where Jews and Arabs lived in mixed neighborhoods the Jewish areas came under attack. This was true in Haifa's Hadar Hacarmel as well as Jerusalem's Old City.

Massacres were not uncommon.

-- Thirty-nine Jews were killed by Arab rioters at Haifa's oil refinery on December 30, 1947. On January 16, 1948, 35 Jews were killed trying to reach Gush Etzion. On February 22, 44 Jews were murdered in a bombing on Jerusalem's Rehov Ben-Yehuda. And on February 29, 23 Jews were killed all across Palestine, eight of them at the Hayotzek iron foundry.

-- Thirty-five Jews were murdered during the Mount Scopus convoy massacre on April 13. And 127 Jews were massacred at Kfar Etzion on May 15, 1948, after 30 others had died defending the Etzion Bloc.

-- In Arab countries more than 100 Jews were also massacred and synagogues were burned in Aleppo and Aden, driving thousands of Jews from their homes.

Back in Palestine many small kibbutzim were subjected to attacks, including Gvulot, Ben-Shemen, Holon, Safed, Bat Yam and Kfar Yavetz - all in December. In January and February, it was the turn of Rishon Lezion, Yehiam, Mishmar Hayarden, Tirat Zvi, Sde Eliahu, Ein Hanatziv, Magdiel, Mitzpe Hagalil and Ma'anit.

In March and April these attacks culminated with an assault on Hartuv by 400 Arabs based in the village of Ishwa and an attack on Kfar Darom by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Arab attackers also bombed The Palestine Post in February. In March, the Jewish Agency, the Solel Boneh building in Haifa and an Egged bus were also bombed.

Some of today's scholars prefer to present every massacre of Jews as a "response" to some Jewish deed, and to portray as a "myth" the very idea that Israel struggled desperately for existence in 1948.

But it was no myth.

The fact is 1,256 Jews were killed in five months. Even before the first Arab villages were captured in April, 924 Jews had already been killed.

Ilan Pappe should have pondered what might have been if those Jews had not been slaughtered.

For more on the scourge known as Illan Pappe, see this, this and this.

Click here to read the full essay, Ethnic cleansing in Palestine?

Israelis Laud Alaska Sailor for 1947 Exodus Mission

From Israelis Laud Alaska Sailor for 1947 Exodus Mission:

A young Alaskan named Jack Johnson sailed into history and an Israeli hero's stature in 1947, but never really realized it until he returned to the Mediterranean this winter at age 80. Johnson, who in December retired from piloting ships around Alaska, had a dizzying youth during World War II and then found himself at the right bar in Marseille when the Zionist group trying to slip Jewish refugees past a British blockade into Palestine asked him to join their crew. An Orthodox Russian Christian, he signed on to crew aboard the Exodus, a ship that attempted to move some 4,500 refugees and in so doing is widely credited with evoking the world's sympathy toward the formation of Israel.

Who really owns Palestine?

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