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 style='color:blue'> datetime="2002-10-18T13:54"> datetime="2002-10-18T13:55">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 ...
datetime="2002-10-18T13:55">

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