Nadene Goldfoot
The Arabs weren't about to deal with the UN's decision of accepting Israel as a state who only had 650,000 Jews among the other nations of the world. Nor were the Arabs living in 1948 when this decision was made educated in the history of the Jews having lived in the land from 4,000 years ago to 1948. The fact remains that a certain number of Jews had always remained there, even though throughout the ages Jews had been killed, taken prisoners and deported, enslaved, starved to death and forced to leave, fleeing for their very lives. Some had always stayed.
David Ben-Gurion (AKA David Gruen) 1886-1973) Israel's 1st Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, wrote a long letter to his friend, Charles de Gaulle on December 6, 1967 to correct some of the troubling thoughts Charles held against Jews because of anti-Semitic beliefs.
Ben Gurion brings out some interesting facts that I'll list not realized by many.
Jews were the 1st people in the world to believe in one God thanks to Abraham and Isaac who carried on the belief. Such a faith was incomprehensible and undesirable to the other nations. The Greeks called us a "godless people" because they found no statutes of gods or our god in our settlements. The Romans accused us of idleness because we didn't work on one day out of the week of 7 days. yet the Christian religion grew out of the Roman Empire, a religion revolving around a Jewish man who did not attract the majority of Jews living on the same land.
Many of our Jewish people were forced to convert to Christianity upon pain of death. Later after 632 CE , it was the new Islam who also converted Jews by the sword. We were forced to either convert or die.
People have a homeland with borders to have their independence from other communities. 2 times our homeland was destroyed and our lives belonged to the attackers. 1st time was by the Assyrians in 721 BCE who took the best of our people. Our forefathers had been exiled to Babylonia 2,500 years ago, but did not forget their homeland and ached for her. "If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning..." Jerusalem was razed to the ground by the Romans and her name was erased temporarily in 70 CE.
No other people that have gone through their history of being exiled from their land and dispersed among the nations where they were hated, persecuted, expelled and slaughtered. That was life before the Holocaust. With the Holocaust, we had 6 million Jews slaughtered for being Jewish by the Nazis, yet we who have survived have refused to vanish from history, or despair or assimilate completely, but many did yearn to return to our original land. The land, in Hebrew was called Canaan, and later called The Land of Israel, and has had many conquerers; Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arab, Seljuks, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, English, yet was never the sole and unique homeland of any people in the world except THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
1. After the establishment of the Jewish State on May 14, 1948, not a single Arab was expelled from the country by the Israelis. The only Arabs to leave on their own volition were a small number who emigrated to the USA.
2. Palestinian refugees left their homes in Palestine during the period of the British Mandate which was up on May 14, 1948 and had lasted for the past 30 years. The large number who had left began to leave within 2 days of the General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947 calling for partition of the land. So many moved over to Jordan-land designated as an Arab state due to Abdullah's request of the British who was a prince from Saudi Arabia. He had settled there with his tribe, the Hashemites. The more wealthy Palestinians headed for Lebanon, and some even went to Syria where supposedly many were from originally.
3. Guerrilla Arab warfare broke out in cities only growing worse. Aggressive Arabs were not locals but came in groups from neighboring countries of Syria, parts of Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq, and lastly the Arab Legion that had been a part of the British Army. Even confronted with this attack, the Jews and their defense group of Haganah asked the Arab residents to stay put. The Arab obeyed the Mufti in Egypt and all of them fled. I think this was Haj Amin al- Husseini, Sherif of Jerusalem called the Grand Mufti who had instigated so much of this including the 1929 riots that killed so many Jews. .
4. With the declaration announcing it's birth, Israel's doors were open to Jewish refugees that abounded in a hostile world. Within 4 years, 700,000 Jews entered the country; 500,000 of them coming in from Arab lands where they had been ousted. They came with nothing; no money or belongings as they were not allowed to bring their belongings with them by the Arab governments from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon. Many settled in the deserted Arab homes in Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Beth She-an and Safed where I lived for over 4 years. Others found deserted Arab villages to settle down in. All the while, hundreds of Jews were being killed in the Arab attacks going on in the cities and villages that began with the General Assembly resolution, yet not a Jew living in Palestine at the time chose to flee the country like the Arabs did. In all, 400,000 Arabs did flee.
The Jews who came in from Arab lands never were able to get their property which was confiscated or divided up among their former Arab neighbors to this day. So 400,000 Arabs left and 500,000 Jews from Arabs lands entered. Since then, Israel has taken in as of 1967 40,000 to assist in family reunification. Israel had no homes, no food, no work for these Jewish refugees so made superhuman efforts to absorb and integrate them within 10 years, living in severe austerity until it was accomplished. Until May 14, the British still governed Palestine, and the Arab states didn't lift a finger to help the Arabs entering their states upon the advice of the Mufti. Government heads exploited these Arab refugees living in refugee centers as political weapons against Israel.
5. Jews are a small group of people, like all other people with the same rights and obligations. Those living in Israel live there not because of conquering, plundering or pillaging land belonging to others, but because when we returned and joined our brothers here, we found our land had been neglected, largely desolate, a wilderness. We made it flourish by the sweat of our brow, by our stubborn and pioneering labor. We didn't rob anyone or take away a single inch of earth from those who worked it, but we did make the desert blossom.
David Ben Gurion had come to Palestine from Poland and helped in the development of Tel Aviv where they had first found the land to be a wilderness of sand dunes, without trees, without grass, without wild life with a small stream that by 1967 in Israeli hands had been irrigating a kibbutz on the Negev where he chose to finally live, 50 km S of Beersheba. 59 years ago in 1908 David had worked as a hired hand on land there so uninhabited and abandoned that 20 Bedouin couldn't support themselves in the area. Today the land is a kibbutz, home of 500 adults working there with hundreds of children, and it is one of the best farms in the Jordan Valley -Kibbutz Kinneret. It was done by creative pioneering where they turned a poor and arid soil into a fertile one and built settlements, villages and cities on desolate stretches of land where no living thing was to be found.
Had the United Nations resolution been accepted by the Arabs, had they not sought to forcibly to revoke it, we would not have had to lose 6,000 of the cream of our population during our War of Independence which was forced on us in 8 hours after our independence was declared by the armies of 5 Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, which outnumbered Israelis by 40 to 1. David Ben Gurion would never have had to fight in the Sinai Campaign of 1956 or the Six Day War of June 1967. None of the Israeli leaders wanted to attack our neighbors in order to improve our frontiers and expand our territory. They were all hoping to sign a peace treaty for the next 100 years to just keep the peace. Yet the entire world considered Palestine to be on both sides of the Jordan to be a single country. This same land had been promised by the Bible and the Prophets to belong to Israel again and it had been by the League of Nations originally in the 1920s. This had been the intention of the Balfour Declaration that was affirmed by France and the League of Nations when it approved the British Mandate. Do you realize that when the General Assembly decided to vote otherwise and spoil our hopes and dreams, we went along with them and accepted a broken deal, and if the Arabs had kept the peace we would have lived with it as it was.
Life works in mysterious ways. With the Arabs never accepting a deal, Israel has by default received its land back without being aggressively forceful about it. Israel has never fought anything but a defensive war. Now we have our small sliver of land back received once again in the Six Day War of 1967- the West Bank where Arabs have been living. What Israel has gained through no plotting of their own is the whole of Jerusalem, now a city undivided.
Arabs who never left though commanded to do so by the Arab leader, the Mufti, are Israeli citizens numbering 1.7 million living among 6 million Jews, and here it is, the year 2018 or as on the Jewish Calendar, the year 5778.
Resource: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ben-gurion-letter-to-french-general-charles-de-gaulle-december-1967 (thanks to Dr. Selwyn Super)
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
 |
| Prime Minister of France 1 June 1958 – 8 January 1959 President of France 8 January 1959 – 28 April 1969 |
 |
| May 14, 1948 Announcement of a State of Israel; pictured David Ben Gurion on left-1st Prime Minister of Israel, standing Golda Meir became 1st Israel Minister to USSR. She belonged to Mapai in Knesset by 1949. 1969 saw her as Prime Minister of Israel. |
Ben Gurion brings out some interesting facts that I'll list not realized by many.
 |
| Moses with 10 Commandments |
Many of our Jewish people were forced to convert to Christianity upon pain of death. Later after 632 CE , it was the new Islam who also converted Jews by the sword. We were forced to either convert or die.
 |
| Jews of the Holocaust, forced in lines to enter death camps, had to wear star of David as ID of being Jewish |
No other people that have gone through their history of being exiled from their land and dispersed among the nations where they were hated, persecuted, expelled and slaughtered. That was life before the Holocaust. With the Holocaust, we had 6 million Jews slaughtered for being Jewish by the Nazis, yet we who have survived have refused to vanish from history, or despair or assimilate completely, but many did yearn to return to our original land. The land, in Hebrew was called Canaan, and later called The Land of Israel, and has had many conquerers; Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arab, Seljuks, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, English, yet was never the sole and unique homeland of any people in the world except THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
1. After the establishment of the Jewish State on May 14, 1948, not a single Arab was expelled from the country by the Israelis. The only Arabs to leave on their own volition were a small number who emigrated to the USA.
2. Palestinian refugees left their homes in Palestine during the period of the British Mandate which was up on May 14, 1948 and had lasted for the past 30 years. The large number who had left began to leave within 2 days of the General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947 calling for partition of the land. So many moved over to Jordan-land designated as an Arab state due to Abdullah's request of the British who was a prince from Saudi Arabia. He had settled there with his tribe, the Hashemites. The more wealthy Palestinians headed for Lebanon, and some even went to Syria where supposedly many were from originally.
 |
| Grand Mufti |
4. With the declaration announcing it's birth, Israel's doors were open to Jewish refugees that abounded in a hostile world. Within 4 years, 700,000 Jews entered the country; 500,000 of them coming in from Arab lands where they had been ousted. They came with nothing; no money or belongings as they were not allowed to bring their belongings with them by the Arab governments from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon. Many settled in the deserted Arab homes in Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Beth She-an and Safed where I lived for over 4 years. Others found deserted Arab villages to settle down in. All the while, hundreds of Jews were being killed in the Arab attacks going on in the cities and villages that began with the General Assembly resolution, yet not a Jew living in Palestine at the time chose to flee the country like the Arabs did. In all, 400,000 Arabs did flee.
 |
| Jews expelled from Arab lands holding deeds to homes they were forced out of |
The Jews who came in from Arab lands never were able to get their property which was confiscated or divided up among their former Arab neighbors to this day. So 400,000 Arabs left and 500,000 Jews from Arabs lands entered. Since then, Israel has taken in as of 1967 40,000 to assist in family reunification. Israel had no homes, no food, no work for these Jewish refugees so made superhuman efforts to absorb and integrate them within 10 years, living in severe austerity until it was accomplished. Until May 14, the British still governed Palestine, and the Arab states didn't lift a finger to help the Arabs entering their states upon the advice of the Mufti. Government heads exploited these Arab refugees living in refugee centers as political weapons against Israel.
 |
| Jews on St. Louis which was denied a chance to land with refugees from Holocaust for which Israel was created. turned back and all slaughtered. MS St. Louis was a German ocean liner. In 1939, she set off on a voyage in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany. At the time, Palestine's English would not let Jews in. |
5. Jews are a small group of people, like all other people with the same rights and obligations. Those living in Israel live there not because of conquering, plundering or pillaging land belonging to others, but because when we returned and joined our brothers here, we found our land had been neglected, largely desolate, a wilderness. We made it flourish by the sweat of our brow, by our stubborn and pioneering labor. We didn't rob anyone or take away a single inch of earth from those who worked it, but we did make the desert blossom.
 |
| Regaining the Wailing Wall or Kotel in Jerusalem through the attack on Israel in 1967. Nobody figured that the Jews could possibly win against this huge all-out aggressive attack. Here IDF soldiers are celebrating by dancing. |
David Ben Gurion had come to Palestine from Poland and helped in the development of Tel Aviv where they had first found the land to be a wilderness of sand dunes, without trees, without grass, without wild life with a small stream that by 1967 in Israeli hands had been irrigating a kibbutz on the Negev where he chose to finally live, 50 km S of Beersheba. 59 years ago in 1908 David had worked as a hired hand on land there so uninhabited and abandoned that 20 Bedouin couldn't support themselves in the area. Today the land is a kibbutz, home of 500 adults working there with hundreds of children, and it is one of the best farms in the Jordan Valley -Kibbutz Kinneret. It was done by creative pioneering where they turned a poor and arid soil into a fertile one and built settlements, villages and cities on desolate stretches of land where no living thing was to be found.
Had the United Nations resolution been accepted by the Arabs, had they not sought to forcibly to revoke it, we would not have had to lose 6,000 of the cream of our population during our War of Independence which was forced on us in 8 hours after our independence was declared by the armies of 5 Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, which outnumbered Israelis by 40 to 1. David Ben Gurion would never have had to fight in the Sinai Campaign of 1956 or the Six Day War of June 1967. None of the Israeli leaders wanted to attack our neighbors in order to improve our frontiers and expand our territory. They were all hoping to sign a peace treaty for the next 100 years to just keep the peace. Yet the entire world considered Palestine to be on both sides of the Jordan to be a single country. This same land had been promised by the Bible and the Prophets to belong to Israel again and it had been by the League of Nations originally in the 1920s. This had been the intention of the Balfour Declaration that was affirmed by France and the League of Nations when it approved the British Mandate. Do you realize that when the General Assembly decided to vote otherwise and spoil our hopes and dreams, we went along with them and accepted a broken deal, and if the Arabs had kept the peace we would have lived with it as it was.
 |
| Jerusalem showing Wall (Kotel) |
Life works in mysterious ways. With the Arabs never accepting a deal, Israel has by default received its land back without being aggressively forceful about it. Israel has never fought anything but a defensive war. Now we have our small sliver of land back received once again in the Six Day War of 1967- the West Bank where Arabs have been living. What Israel has gained through no plotting of their own is the whole of Jerusalem, now a city undivided.
Arabs who never left though commanded to do so by the Arab leader, the Mufti, are Israeli citizens numbering 1.7 million living among 6 million Jews, and here it is, the year 2018 or as on the Jewish Calendar, the year 5778.
Resource: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ben-gurion-letter-to-french-general-charles-de-gaulle-december-1967 (thanks to Dr. Selwyn Super)
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
No comments:
Post a Comment