by Marlene Sabeh

Created on: February 22, 2010

The historical facts of Israel’s violence in Palestine are so disquieting, and the ways in which they were carried out, they simply cannot be ignored.

The violence culminated in Israel's ruthless 1947-49 "War of Independence," in which at least 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from their homes – half before any Arab armies joined the war. At every point in the war, Arabs were outnumbered by Israeli Zionist organizations such as the Irgun. The resulting humanitarian disaster is known among Palestinians and others as ‘The Catastrophe,’ or al Nakba in Arabic. Zionist forces committed at least 33 massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and towns. Author Norman Finkelstein states: “According to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’”

It is important to note that in 1947, Jewish land ownership was under 7%, yet the UN General Assembly proposed partition and granted the "Jewish state" ABOUT 60% of the total area of Palestine.

Would Americans cede sovereignty and over 60% of its land to a foreign minority, say Canadians, who actually owned under 7% of the land? If such a plan is unthinkable for an American, then how can one ask Palestinians to make a similar sacrifice? Perhaps that’s why the partition agreement was not so “agreeable” to Palestinians.

The Israeli government at the time pursued a policy of non- compromise, in order to prevent the return of the refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion himself put it), despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been calling for this since 11 December 1948. Palestinian villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared among the surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties" - which was designed to make possible the seizure of any land belonging to persons who were "absent" - legitimized this project of general confiscation as of December 1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or “Judaized”, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report drawn up in 1952, Israel

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