For the book excerpt this reply letter refers to and for the critique of the book by Norma Archbold, click here.

Dear Norma:

Some months ago I read Father Elias Chacour's book Blood Brothers (of which MidEast Web says in its Bibliography of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict: A Galilee priest tells of his fight for brotherhood and coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis). I was so impressed by its message of peace and truth that I posted 33 pages here on Indymedia, where it is still to be found. You responded on-line from Illinois: "Don't take too seriously the things written in this book. Chacour in Blood Brothers leads us to believe that the Israeli Army slaughtered the people of an Arab Christian town (Jish or Gish) and buried them in a shallow grave where 8-year old Chacour discovered the decomposed bodies."

You continued: "I went with another journalist to Gish and spoke with an Arab Christian who was 16-years-old and living in Gish when the massacre was supposed to have happened. He had never heard of a massacre there." And: "I spoke to the town historian on the phone and he had never heard of a massacre there. When I mentioned Chacour and Blood Brothers, he said, "I wouldn't take too seriously the things written in that book."

You say: "Chacour presents himself as forgiving the Israelis for a massacre that (according to the people living there) didn't happen. How difficult is it to forgive someone for something that never happened?"

You end: "What concerns me about this book is that it is sixth on Amazon's bestselling list out of more than 8,000 books. That means that tens of thousands of people around the world have received false information. The Middle East is a powder keg. False information could start a world war there. It is in the best interests of everyone in the world to demand that absolute truth be published about the situation there. The false information is all the more damaging because of the beautiful ideas expressed, which make us want to believe what Chacour says. Two publishers stopped publication of this book and a third publisher listed it as fiction after finding out that it is not true."

Norma, following communication with you, and having visited Fr. Elias Chacour, I have the following to report. You told me to speak to "the priest and historian of the village". I spoke with him this week by phone (after seeing Fr. Elias, because I wanted him to have the first word). He tells me, contrary to what you have written as above, that everyone knew about the massacre. In his Hebrew words "Haya kever. Ze haya yadua." (There was a grave. It was well-known.) He says that you were told this by the people you interviewed, but that they threw some doubt on whether an 8-year old boy would have found the mass grave.

I recently met with Fr. Elias. I couldn't see him sooner, he was abroad, fund-raising for his university, which is suffering from massive economic cutbacks, as is all Israel under Sharon, we are all bearing an intolerable burden for the continuing denial of peace and Palestinian statehood not to mention Israeli soldiers' and settlers' lack of control and suicide bombers' desperate carnage. I had previously phoned Fr. Elias twice, first to ask permission to put sections of his book on Indymedia and again, once I'd sent him the pages I proposed posting, for his approval of my representative choice. You wrote: "Several times in the last 7 years I have tried unsuccessfully to reach Father Chacour by phone. Some months ago I emailed him. He did not answer." Norma, he is incredibly busy working for peace (not for nothing has he been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize), and for the education of local youth, but far from elusive or evasive. Oh no.

I'm sorry you didn't meet him. He has such presence that just talking on the phone gave me goosebumps and radiance. I could feel the love in his voice. Maybe because I'm not a foreign journalist out to deny his story (Why? The truth will always win, it simply takes time...), but a fellow human being from this part of the world who recognised the voice of truth in his simple telling and wanted to help him spread that word of truth. And peace. When I met him, I came away shining and uplifted.

I had with me your list of questions that I'd asked you for. The first was:

"How can I get the names of the 2 dozen men, women and children you say in Blood Brothers were found in a mass grave?" (Actually, p. 45 in the book says: "Later, the shallow graves were uncovered. Buried beneath a thin layer of sand were two dozen bodies. The gunfire that the old man had heard had done its bitter work. The victims were hastily re-buried in honorable graves. There was seething anger and talk of retribution. But how could there be any retribution when we had no power against this madness? Most of the men, Father especially, would have no part of such ugly talk. As for me, the innocence and durability of youth were on my side. No one mentioned the incident to me at all. Mother, Father and my grandparents were overly kind, ignoring my outbursts of impatience or tears. My brothers and cousins eventually distracted me with more games, though we avoided the sandlot for quite some time.")

Bearing in mind that the story IS true, Fr. Elias must have been hurt by your question. He reacted strongly, and these are my notes: "What a question! That's impossible to answer... it's just too nasty. What does she want? She wants me to go digging in the graves!? I'm not interested to smell the graves. I don't want to answer these sort of questions. What to do now for a better future, that's what she should be asking. They would come every day and choose 10 or 12, take them away, shoot them and say come back tomorrow, so of course everyone fled. Why does anyone doubt this? It's been fully documented about Deir Yassin and Kafr Kassem."

Having had this answer, I felt it was unnecessary, nay offensive to continue with your list, except for one question that seemed to me less offensive and impertinent: "How do you feel about Arab Christians and Jewish messianic Christians meeting together in Israel? Are you active in this group." Fr. Elias responded that he is not active because "they don't want us."

Norma, in one of your emails to me you said "May the Lord go with you and show you the truth." I believe, beyond doubt, that Fr. Elias is more than just an honest man. He is a deeply religious, brave, loving and good man, whom it was a great joy to meet and with whom I hope to maintain contact: "Keep in touch" he called after me, as he continued into another meeting. He is the best of the best. Everyone I have met who knows him (including his Australian and Scottish secretaries) respects and loves him. He really is a man of God and you would do very well one day to meet him, and perhaps even ask his forgiveness, like Doubting Thomas, for your doubts and your hard work (nasty work, I still think - was it you who persuaded publishers to withdraw the book, or list it as fiction?) in undermining the message of this important witness. If you are really interested in peace, then you should think very deeply, I believe, as to how it is to be achieved. Denial is simply not useful. Truth and reconciliation may be too late ...

Did you read the article by Jerome Slater (What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli Palestinian Peace Process) that I told you of, before I went to meet Fr. Elias? It is in The Political Science Quarterly, available online. In it Slater states: "Ben-Gurion was quite explicit, as in a 1937 letter to his son: "A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish state will serve as a means in our historical efforts to redeem the country in its entirety. ... We shall organize a modern defense force ... and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means. ... We will expel the Arabs and take their places ... with the force at our disposal."

Slater continues: "Beginning in 1947, the Israeli army began implementing a detailed strategic plan (Plan D) [in preparation since 1944: ed. See Kristall quoted later] for dealing with the Palestinians, especially but by no means exclusively those who were actively resisting the Israelis. The plan called for the "destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously," and "mounting [of] operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and ... in the event of resistance ...the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state." (The full text of Plan D was published in the Journal of Palestine Studies 18 (Autumn 1988). Many of the Israeli participants have provided details in memoirs or interviews, the best known of which was Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs, in which he wrote that after he led an army unit into a Palestinian village he asked Ben Gurion: "What is to be done with the population?" Ben Gurion responded with a "wave of his hand, in a gesture which clearly meant ‘Drive them out.'" Israeli censors deleted this passage from the English translation of Rabin's memoirs, but it was revealed by the New York Times, 29 October 1979.) That's what was officially written down. In fact, there were many Israeli murders, political assassinations, and even wholesale massacres including women and children that went beyond the guidelines, some by so-called "uncontrollable" groups like the Irgun, but some even by regular Israeli army units. The general frame of mind was revealed in a memo of Ezra Dannin, the Israeli government adviser on Arab affairs: "If the High Command believes that by destruction, killing, and human suffering its aims will be achieved faster, then I would not stand in its way. If we don't hurry up, our enemies will do the same things to us." (He is quoted by David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (Boston, Faber and Faber, 1983), 36. For further evidence of direct Israeli government complicity in the massacres, see Benny Morris, "Falsifying the Record," Journal of Palestinian Studies 24 (Spring 1995); and Tom Segev, "What Really Happened in the Conquest of Lod?" Ha'aretz, 12 May 2000.) In the wake of the expulsions or the terrified flights of entire Palestinian villages who could see what fate might await them, the army moved in, either bulldozing the abandoned villages to the ground or housing incoming Jewish immigrants in them. In short, there is now irrefutable evidence that most of the Palestinians who became refugees from Israel in the 1947-1949 period did so because they were either forcibly expelled or fled as a result of Israeli psychological warfare, economic pressures, artillery bombardments, terrorism, and massacres, all carried out, as one leading scholar has put it, "under a general umbrella of protection and encouragement from Ben-Gurion and other political leaders..." (Ian Lustick, Israeli Studies Bulletin 13 (Fall 1997): 17.

Now let us look at other historians' testimony. Nathan Krystall, writing in News from Within, has studied Arab West Jerusalem. He says: "By December 1947, they (the Jewish Agency) were convinced that only Jerusalem could be the capital of Israel. Still, a majority of the leaders of Palestinian Arab political parties totally opposed the partition plan and its accompanying proposal to internationalise Jerusalem." His article relates that "according to the partition plan, the Jewish state, in which Jews at the time owned 1.67million dunums out of a total area of 15million dunums, would comprise 54% of Palestine, 55% of whose population would be Jewish. 500,000 Arabs - 40% of the total Palestinian Arab population within this area would become minority subjects of the Jewish state. In the Arab state would reside 725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Palestinian Arabs saw that partition was ... ‘Zionist in conception and tailored to meet Zionist needs and demands.' ... More recent revelations by historians profer additional reasons for Palestinian Arabs with the benefit of hindsight to have been apprehensive about the plan, namely the fact that the other major players in Palestine - the Jewish Agency, King Abdullah and Britain -- had no intention of allowing a Palestinian Arab state to come into being." Krystall's research goes into minute detail as to the Zionist taking of West Jerusalem, especially Katamon, from its Arab owners. For example: "Israel Amir, the Haganah commander in Jerusalem decided to drive Arabs completely out of these neighborhoods and to push them from a few small enclaves in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. The Haganah first tried to pressure Arab residents to vacate these areas through psychological warfare. Haganah members issued threats via posters, notes, and phonecalls to the Arab neighborhood leaders. Next, in order to create a general air of insecurity, Haganah raiding parties infiltrated the neighborhoods to sever phone lines and electricity wires, throw hand grenades and fire into the air. In addition, they blew up buildings on the pretext that they served as bases for Arab military actions. Clearing Lifta, Romema and Sheikh Badr of their Arab residents was given top priority, as these villages were strategically located at the city's entrance on the main road to Tel Aviv. On Lifta the Haganah and Irgun waged a series of attacks including a machine gun and grenade attack at a cafe on December 28, 1947 that left seven people dead. Most residents left the village very soon thereafter, and the rest departed after Zionist forces blew up several houses. Arabs in Romema and Sheikh Badr were forced out of their homes in early January 1948."

"The Haganah's bombing campaign included a devastating explosion in Qatamon's Semiramis Hotel on January 4, 1948, which killed 26 civilians. Most of the dead were members of two Christian Arab families of Jerusalem; one was a Spanish diplomat. The Arabs living in the prosperous western district of Qatamon began evacuating their homes after the Haganah bombing of the Semiramis Hotel. .. The Haganah suspected, mistakenly, that the hotel served as the headquarters of the local irregulars. Several Arab families, and the Spanish consul in the city, died in the explosion, and a sharp dispute broke out inside the Haganah and with the British authorities... The bombing caused major panic in Qatamon. Many flats were evacuated, but...only by women, the old and children. The young men stayed."

"In January, practically all the wealthy Palestinian Arab residents of West Jerusalem fled from the neighborhoods of Qatamon, Deir Abu Tor and Baq'a. They had the means to travel and reside outside Jerusalem or abroad and intended to return when the fighting subsided."

"The Haganah and Lehi also carried out military operations against neighborhoods and villages like Beit Safafa, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah. Sherut Yediot, the Haganah's intelligence service reports painted a picture of despair, fear, and abandonment among these Arab villages and also among front-line neighborhoods like Musrara. Concomitant with the Haganah's campaign to clear Arabs from their West Jerusalem neighborhoods was the Jewish settling of their homes."

"Ben Gurion appeared before the Mapai Council two days later and reported: "From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema ...there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been so Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single Arab. I do not assume that this will change ... What has happened in Jerusalem ... is like to happen in many parts of the country ... in the six, eight or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population of the country."

Kristall continues: "An estimated 30,000 Palestinian Arabs evacuated Jerusalem, Haifa and some villages near the Mediterranean coast between January and March 1948. By March, the neighborhoods of Jerusalem - except for the Jewish Quarter in the otherwise Arab Old City - were exclusively Arab or Jewish, with virtually no communication between them." We then come to Deir Yassin.

"As mentioned, during the first months of 1948 the local forces of Palestinian irregulars and militiamen, led by ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, concentrated their efforts on cutting off Jewish Jerusalem from the coastal plain by attacking Jewish convoys traveling along the narrow Jerusalem corridor. In March they also began to sabotage the water supplies flowing to the Jewish neighborhoods and to surround the city. By late March, Jewish Jerusalem was effectively under siege, deprived of food, water, and basic services."

"The Haganah's Operation Nahshon, designed to break the siege, began on April 6, 1948. This operation was in the framework of Plan Dalet (Plan D), which had been in preparation since 1944. The largest Jewish offensive to date, Plan Dalet aimed to enlarge the boundaries allotted to the Jewish state and simultaneously conquer dozens of villages from which the Palestinian Arab inhabitants would be expelled. According to Benny Morris, Operation Nahshon was "a watershed, characterized by an intention and effort to clear a whole area, permanently, of Arab villages and hostile or potentially hostile Arab villagers." .. The Jewish Agency leadership, however, had long prepared for, and even counted on, such a window of opportunity to widen the Jerusalem corridor. On February 6, 1948, Ben Gurion had told the Mapai Party Council that ‘without populating the Jerusalem mountains and the hills [surrounding] the coastal plains ... I am doubtful whether we would be able to maintain the link with Jerusalem,' and therefore that ‘it is necessary to be in [to settle] the mountains.' When one audience member objected that ‘we have no land there' Ben Gurion replied: ‘The war will give us the land. The concept of "ours" and "not ours" are peace concepts, only, and in war they lose their whole meaning.'"

"As their contribution to Operation Nahshon, the Irgun and Lehi planned an attack on the village of Deir Yassin, strategically located a mile west of the Jerusalem suburbs, close to the highway leading into the Jerusalem corridor. Deir Yassin was one of several Arab villages in the area which had already concluded non-belligerency agreements with Jewish Jerusalem."

"Deir Yassin's particular agreement was made in February 1948, and the villagers had been assured that, in return for their readiness to collaborate with the Haganah, they and their village would be spared. In keeping with their part of the bargain, Deir Yassin residents had driven out an Arab military group which had wanted to use their village as a base."

"In his book The Palestinian Catastrophe, Michael Palumbo provides evidence that the Irgun and Lehi not only intended to vanquish the village but to commit a massacre. Benzion Cohen, the Irgun commander of the raid, noted that at the pre-attack meeting ‘the majority was for liquidation of all the men in the village and any others found that opposed us, whether it be old people, women and children.' Also, according to the Irgun officer Yehuda Lapidot, ‘the Lehi forwarded a proposal to liquidate the residents of the village after the conquest to show the Arabs what happens when the Irgun and Stern Gang [Lehi] set out together on an operation.'"

"There is record of prior Haganah knowledge of the attack. The following memo was sent from the Jerusalem Haganah Commander David Shaltiel to Mordechai Ranaan and Yehoshua Zetler, Jerusalem commanders of the Irgun and Lehi respectively: ‘I learn that you plan an attack on Deir Yassin. I wish to point out that the capture of Deir Yassin and its holding are one stage in our general plan. I have no objection in you carrying out the operation provided you are able to hold  the village.'"

"Shaltiel implored them, were they to proceed with the attack, to totally conquer and occupy the village as a second attack on a refortified Deir Yassin would cost many more Jewish lives. The Haganah provided rifles and hand grenades for the action, which was code-named "Operation Unity" as a symbol of cooperation between the three Zionist forces. Altogether, 120 men took part in the initial attack on April 9, 1948, which Jacques de Reynier, the International Red Cross' Chief Delegate in Jerusalem, reported was ‘without any military reason or provocation of any kind.'"

"According to Meir Pa'il, a Haganah officer who said he joined the attack as an ‘observer', the Zionists encountered resistance from a dozen villagers using old rifles. The attackers had only captured the eastern half of the village, and Pa'il summoned help from the Haganah. A Palmach platoon soon arrived and easily occupied the rest of the village, after which the Palmach troops withdrew. The Palestine Post of April 13, 1948 simply stated that the Palmach ‘provided covering fire' during Operation Unity while, according to Irgun and Lehi sources, a Palmach unit shelled Deir Yassin with a mortar. After the Palmach unit's withdrawal, apparently, the massacre began."

"Benny Morris tersely summarizes the massacre as follows: After a prolonged firefight, in which Arab family after family were slaughtered, the dissidents rounded up many of the remaining villagers, who included militiamen and unarmed civilians of both sexes, and children, and murdered dozens of them."

"While there was a firefight, the attackers killed most of the Deir Yassin villagers afterwards. In all, 254 Deir Yassin villagers were massacred, according to the New York Times of April 13, 1948. A survivor, Fahmi Zeidan, described the slaughter of his family: The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri [four] in the head, my sister Sameh [eight] in the cheek, my brother Mohammed [seven] in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children."

"Haleem Eid, then thirty years old, said she saw ‘a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife.' She said that another woman witnessing the same scene, Aiesch Radwas, was killed when she tried to remove the unborn infant from the dead mother's womb. Many survivors described the savagery of killing, rape, and looting. In addition, Irgun and Lehi fighters dynamited many houses[...]"

"Survivors of the massacre were paraded, hands forced above their heads, through the streets of Jewish-held Jerusalem, said Eliyahu Arieli, the commander of the Haganah force which moved into Deir Yassin following the massacre. Meir Pa'il, the Haganah ‘observer,' recounted that, after parading a group of twenty-five men, Irgun and Lehi members ‘put them in a line in some kind of quarry, and shot them.' According to  Arieli, ‘All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women and children [...] the dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.' After the massacre, Zionist forces took the bodies of the victims to Deir Yassin's rock quarry, poured gasoline on them and set them alight."

"The Haganah command distanced itself from the massacre to maintain the image of a force committed to ‘purity of arms' and avoid the risk of moral dissonance within its ranks. As former Palmach soldier Tikva Honig-Parnass recalls, ‘We in the Haganah saw this as an inhumane, terrible act by the right wing. It wasn't us, we told ourselves. It wasn't part of any plan. It was those right-wing devils. Not by us, the pure. I never had any doubt about our purity.' On April 10, 1948, Jerusalem Haganah commander Shaltiel issued a communique in effect disclaiming Haganah participation in - and implying that he had no prior knowledge of - the attack: This morning, the last Lehi and Etzel [Irgun] soldiers ran from Deir Yassin and our soldiers entered the village. We were forced to take command of the village after the splinter forces [Irgun and Lehi members] opened a new enemy front and then fled, leaving the western neighborhoods of the city open to enemy attack. Enraged by Shaltiel's hypocrisy, Ranaan and Zelter made public his earlier memo to them in which he approved the attack.

"In what they claimed was retaliation for Deir Yassin, Palestinian Arab fighters attacked a Jewish medical convoy on its way to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus on April 14. The convoy which was ambushed in Sheikh Jarah, included doctors, nurses, Irgun fighters wounded at Deir Yassin, and Haganah escorts. The British Army, though fully aware of the ensuing battle, waited six hours before intervening. By then 76 Jews, including 40 medical staff, had been killed, some as they tried to escape their burning vehicles. Fourteen Arabs were also shot dead."

"The Deir Yassin massacre terrorized the entire Palestinian Arab population, particularly those living in and around Jerusalem. [...] News of the attack spread fear among Arabs throughout Palestine, particularly in the Jerusalem area. De Reynier observed that ‘a general terror was built up among the Arabs, a terror astutely fostered by the Jews.' Haganah Radio repeated incessantly ‘Remember Deir Yassin' as an ominous warning to Arab listeners. In addition, loudspeaker vans broadcast messages in Arabic such as: ‘Unless you leave your homes the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate.'"

"Despite the AHC National Committee of Jerusalem's order to the Arab population to stay put on pain of punishment, the massacre immediately provoked a mass flight of Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem and the surrounding villages. According to Morris, Deir Yassin ‘probably had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine. [...] While it is important to keep in mind the psychological impact of Deir Yassin, it is also significant that many Palestinian Arabs did not budge or, when possible, returned to their homes after a few days, as in the case of Beit Safafa.'"

"On April 22, the Haganah General Command initiated Operation Jevussi, which lasted from April 22 until the beginning of May. The goal of this operation was to occupy parts of the city that the British had evacuated. The Haganah command charged the Etzioni Brigade with the occupation of large parts of the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings, including: Sheikh Jarah, the American Colony, al-Zahara and Wadi Joz in north Jerusalem; and Qatamon, Baq'a and Deir Abu Tor in the south; and, centrally, British strategic points and Talbiyeh."

"As a precursor to its attack on Qatamon, the Zionist forces subjected the neighborhood to weeks of heavy artillery shelling. Qatamon was strategically located on a hill and the Arab forces knew that its fall would signify their defeat in West Jerusalem. In preparation for a big battle, on April 22 the National Committee of Jerusalem ordered its local branches to relocate all women, children and elderly people from the neighborhoods. The Battle of Qatamon, which began on April 30, lasted for three days and resulted in the deaths of 150 Arabs."

"The Zionist conquest of Qatamon was accompanied by widespread looting of the neighborhood's Arab homes. Many Palestinians who fled West Jerusalem lost all their belongings. As UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte noted: ‘while those who had fled in the early days of the conflict had been able to take with them some personal effects and assets, many of the latecomers were deprived of everything except the clothes in which they stood, and apart from their homes (many of which were destroyed) lost all furniture and assets and even their tools of trade.' Some Qatamon residents stood and watched from a nearby vantage point as their property was loaded onto trucksand driven off to an unknown destination."

"On May 16, the  Zionist forces took over Baq'a, an event described in his memoirs by John Rose, an Armenian Jerusalemite who remained in the neighborhood: ‘There was no resistance of any sort; they just walked in, gradually taking over buildings in strategic places. Nearly every house was empty: set tables with plates of unfinished food indicated that the occupants had fled in disarray, haste and fear. In some kitchens cooking stoves had been left alight, reducing the ingredients of a waiting meal to blackened remains.'"

"After the fall of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, only about 750 non-Jews remained in the area. Of these, many were Greeks who were allowed to continue living in their houses in the German Colony and the Greek Colony. Almost all the Arabs - most of whom were Christian - were concentrated by the Jewish forces into Upper Baq'a.

"Later on, in June, Jewish residents of Jerusalem took advantage of a formal cease-fire to loot the empty Arab homes in Baq'a. According to John Rose, who was one of those confined to Baq'a: ‘Our movements were restricted but Jewish residents from the western suburbs and elsewhere were allowed to circulate freely. During this time, looting of Arab houses started on a fantastic scale, accompanied by wholesale vindictive destruction of property. First it was the army who broke into the houses, searching for people and for equipment that they could use. Next came those in search of food, after which valuables and personal effects were taken. From our veranda we saw horse-drawn carts as well as pick-up trucks laden with pianos, refrigerators, radios, paintings, ornaments and furniture, some wrapped in valuable Persian carpets [...] Safes with money and jewelry were pried open and emptied. The loot was transported for private use or for sale in West Jerusalem. To us this was most upsetting. Our friends' houses were being ransacked and we were powerless to intervene.'"

Moving to May 14, "Ben-Gurion declared ‘the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel.' By a vote of five to four the Jewish Agency leadership decided not to delineate Israel's borders in the declaration. Still, there was no doubt in Ben-Gurion's mind that Jerusalem was part and parcel of the State of Israel, as he told the provisional government of the new state on May 24."

By "August 2, the Israeli provisional government declared West Jerusalem ‘territory occupied by the State of Israel,' whose laws were to be enforced throughout the city, and appointed Dov Joseph as military governor. At this time Israeli leaders took no further official action towards the annexation of West Jerusalem due to their interest in Israel attaining UN membership. Ben Gurion, however, was still mulling over plans to conquer the whole of Jerusalem and the whole of Palestine. On September 26 he proposed to the provisional government a plan he recorded in his diary, according to which Israeli forces would invade ‘Bethlehem and Hebron, where there are about a hundred thousand Arabs. I assume that most of the Arabs of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron would flee, like the Arabs of Lydda, Jaffa, Tiberias and Safad, and we will control the whole breadth of the country up to the Transjordan.' In another diary entry he wrote about the same plan: ‘It is not impossible ...that we will be able to conquer the way to the Negev, Eilat, and the Dead Sea and to secure the Negev for ourselves; also to broaden the corridor to Jerusalem from north and south; to liberate the rest of Jerusalem and to take the Old City; to seize all of central and western Galilee and to expand the borders of the state in all directions.'"

"While the state delayed officially annexing West Jerusalem, it employed its Absentee Property Regulations to confiscate all Arab homes, lands, and businesses, including any contents that had not already been looted. These regulations, later codified as the Absentee Property Law of 1950, allowed all property belonging to an ‘absentee' to be transferred to the Custodian of Abstentee Property. An ‘absentee' was defined as a person who, at any time between November 29, 1947 and the day on which the state of emergency declared in 1948 would cease to exist, became a national or citizen of an Arab country, visited an Arab country, or left his ordinary place of residence in Palestine ‘for a place outside Palestine before September 1, 1948.' (Israel has not, to this day, canceled the state of emergency, which provides legal justification for detention without trial and military censorship of the press.)"

"New immigrants, the first category of Israelis to be settled, were housed in the German Colony, Qatamon, Baq'a, Musrara, Deir Abu Tor and Talbiyeh. Arnon Golan writes that the settling of new immigrants in Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem was not so much a result of the lack of alternative housing, but rather a political strategy. ‘Starting in September, the Israeli government undertook a policy of annexation in practice of the part of the city under its control, despite the fact that it had not yet officially annulled its recognition of the UN [partition] resolution. The population by Jews of former Arab neighborhoods was supposed to create facts on the ground, after which it would be difficult to alter them in the framework of a political agreement. New immigrants, so very dependent, were the government's and the Jewish Agency's primary reserve for housing these neighborhoods.' ... However, those lacking housing grew impatient, and many broke into and squatted in empty houses in Qatamon.... Israeli soldiers were amongst the rank of squatters. Some had two apartments: one in the city center and one in Arab neighborhoods which they rented out for a considerable price. By early 1950 the Israeli housing authorities authorized almost all the squatters, soldier and civilian, to remain in the Palestinian homes they had broken into. Looting was still a problem in Jerusalem as related by Dov Joseph in a letter to Ben-Gurion. The Palestinian Arabs remaining in the West Jerusalem suburbs were confined to Baq'a. In mid-September, the Israeli military further concentrated them into a half-square mile area surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. During daylight hours they were permitted to roam around the compound, and at night were under curfew. Israeli marauders broke through the fence to steal what they could from the non-Jews. In addition, gangs of Israeli soldiers burst into the houses on the pretext that they were looking for "hidden arms and Arabs," and proceeded to extort money, jewelry and other valuables."

"The formal cessation of hostilities between Israel and the Arab States at the end of November 1948 allowed the expansion of Jewish settlement in Jerusalem into the Arab neighborhoods that until then had been military zones. Musrara [just outside the Old City] was one such neighborhood."

"[...] By the end of May 1949, all of West Jerusalem's Arab districts had been settled, at least to some extent, by Jews, most of them new immigrants. During the summer of 1949, several hundred new immigrants from Eastern Europe were settled in Deir Yassin, despite a protest to Ben Gurion by some of the Yishuv's leading intellectuals, including Martin Buber and Akiva Ernst Simon. They wrote, ‘Resettling Deir Yassin within a year of the crime, and with the framework of ordinary settlement, would amount to an endorsement of, or at  least an acquiescence with, the massacre.' Ben Gurion never responded to their repeated protests and Givat Shaul Bet was established at the site of the village. Henry Cattan estimates that, in all, Israel occupied some ten thousand Arab homes, mostly fully furnished, in West Jerusalem."

"Count Bernadotte, the UN Mediator for Palestine, was assassinated by the Lehi on September 16, 1948. For months he had been shuttling between the Arab states and Israel trying to arrange, among other issues, the repatriation of Palestinian Arab refugees. Bernadotte was skeptical about the viability and justice of the UN Partition Plan as a solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict. He recommended to the UN General Assembly that ‘the right of the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory at the earliest possible date should be affirmed by the United Nations.'"

As previously stated "The Zionist authorities were quick to populate each of the evacuated Arab neighborhoods in  West Jerusalem with Jews, not with the intention of providing temporary shelter, but to permanently Israelize all occupied territory. The Israeli government, encouraged by the UN's ineffectuality in enforcing its resolutions, drove home its position on Jerusalem by declaring the city the eternal capital of the State of Israel."

"Only a few hundred non-Jews remained in West Jerusalem: those in the divided village of Beit Safafa and those who had been concentrated in Baq'a. The rest were refugees. In the Jerusalem sub-district as a whole, Zionist forces had demolished 37 of 41 Arab villages. They had driven over 60,000 Palestinian Arabs from West Jerusalem and its immediate environs."

"Scholars and activists have waged endless debates on whether the dimensions of the Palestinian refugee problem are attributable to a conscious Zionist plan. While scholars have proven the existence of such plans, perhaps the best evidence of Zionist intentions is Israel's refual to allow the return of refugees. To this day, not one Palestinian Arab refugee has returned to his or her home in West Jerusalem."

Norma, thank you for making me go to the historians to learn the truth. As I told Father Elias, only when I read his book did I realise I'd been taken in by the myths... I had believed the lies that the early Zionists used in forwarding their, albeit pressing, agenda to house their refugees and establish a state. I had believed, 22 years ago when I came to live here as an Israeli, that "we never forced anyone from their homes. We never put anyone on trucks and drove them away. We have a strong devotion to the purity of arms." etc. etc. And I told him that in South Africa, from where I made aliyah to Israel, the Truth & Reconciliation Commission played a vital part in reconstructing that tortured country so that some sort of catharsis was afforded to those who had suffered for so many years as a result of so many lies and such evil discrimination. I believe that Israel (and America and other parts of the world) will only have real peace once the truth is known, the myths debunked -- Donald Rumsfeld talks of Israel defending herself against Arab attack! And once we Israelis are mature enough to face our less than glamorous past and start genuinely caring for the enormous suffering we have inflicted on an entire nation. Bearing in mind that Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister, is a man whom The Kahane Commission of Inquiry into Sabra & Shatila said should never have again be a cabinet member, because he lied to the government, one wonders how long it will take. And what will be the price for all those of us who deeply crave peace and full recognition of the Palestinians. And who continue to suffer... the refugees especially, but these days every single Palestinian, whether he is middle class and forced to leave because life here has been deliberately made intolerable, or whether he is working class, living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory ruins of 10,000 demolished houses that have been rained down on these homeless people since 1967. Norma, these cynical politicians have, since the start of the so-called Peace Process been holding a loaded gun to the heads of the Palestinians, by the ongoing settlement building, while Israeli citizens have paid the price with their lives, as a result of suicide bombings... Disputed territories? Bullshit. Was Egyptian Sinai disputed territory? Israeli settlements there (1967-82) were flagrant violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention (to which Israel is a signatory). Just as the settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory are.

And it continues. Norma, what is your solution to a better future? I believe in the healing power of the truth. Please God enough truth comes out soon enough to stop the carnage, because trust me, Norma, the powder keg went up a long time ago and everyone here who has any sense and heart, is heartily sick of all the endless pain and needless suffering. Ask yourself why Osama Bin Laden feels so strongly for the Palestinians. Why does Saddam Hussein want to rain down war on Israel? And why has Arafat been demonized and marginalised? Do you really want to continue defending an Israel that continues a policy of ethnic cleansing, Norma? History is one thing, but those same attitudes are exactly what Sharon and his coalition partners are still pursuing. Come to Israel, Norma, and I will show you around. You might not like the sightseeing; most Israelis prefer to ignore that reality. They have never entered a refugee camp and many, passionately hating "Arabs," have never even met a Palestinian face to face. Such cold, stone hearts. But I hope then you'll begin to understand (like the nearly 500 Israeli refuseniks) the Palestinians deserve a life.  Not just a better life. A basic life... As does Israel, because until there's a level of morality here, it'll continue to be a sick, selfish, short-sighted state. A fortress state, alienated and paranoid here in the Middle East. Norma, it's said that Rabin took Israel out of the ghetto, Netanyahu put her back 10 years, and Sharon has put her back 50 years. Where shall we go from there? More wars, more generals wrecking any hopes for peace (most don't understand the language... the army is an unstoppable monster machine by now). We are already back in the ghetto as an international pariah state…

Is Israel's apartheid and Bantustan policy the final solution? Is the "quiet transfer" that has been especially practised since 1967 to solve the so-called demographic problem to continue? With its official sanction of house demolitions, pass laws, closures, curfews and racist zoning laws? Norma. Wake up. Wake up and ask yourself – what, in God's name, is going on in Israel? It sure ain't, can't be God's will. Unless He's teaching us a lesson we don't seem very good at learning. How to share. How to accept the stranger in our midst. How not to kill. How not to covet. How not to inflict on anyone else what you yourself would not wish to have inflicted on you, yourself. How to live at peace. The basics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. An OPEN LOVING HEART. If we learn it, maybe then we can think about being a light to the nations…!!

I look forward to meeting you one day, but please -- come in peace,

Angela