WaPo falsifies Mideast history a la Ahmadinejad

By Leo Rennert

In the April 6 edition of the Washington Post, Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg writes that the Palestinian refugee problem originated when "Palestinian families (were) pushed out of what is now Israel when the Jewish state was created in 1948."

He again blames the Palestinian refugee problem on the creation of Israel when he writes that relatives of an Israeli-Arab actor, murdered in Jenin on the West Bank, "became refugees in Lebanon after Israel's creation."

This is a gross historical distortion that parallels the anti-Israel slander of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who similarly preaches that Israel's creation has been the source of regional tensions and conflicts ever since.

Israel's establishment was not responsible for an exodus of Arabs in 1948. When David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's independence on May 14, 1948, he urged Arab residents to remain in their homes and communities and become full-fledged citizens of the nascent Jewish state. Moreover, he extended an olive branch to neighboring Arab countries, pleading with them to abide by the UN's two-state partition resolution -- the last in a long string of international certifications of the ancient right of Jews to their own state that went back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, later endorsed by the League of Nations and the U.S. Congress.

What really caused the Palestinian refugee problem was the decision of Arab leaders to send six armies against Israel at its birth with the stated aim of destroying the Jewish state. Many Arabs within Israel responded to messages and broadcasts urging them to get out of the way for a short while so as to make it easier for Arab armies to push Israel into the sea. Other Palestinians became displaced in the course of a year-long war foisted on Israel by its Arab neighbors.

Had Arabs not invaded Israel in 1948, there would never have been a Palestinian refugee problem. Arab aggression and refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist are the real genesis of the Palestinian refugee problem -- not the phony thesis of Israeli guilt propounded by Greenberg and Ahmadinejad.