On the anniversary of the Nakba, do we set an appointment with the mind?

Today, 65 years have passed since the establishment of the State of Israel, during which the Arabs fought four wars, and Israel invaded four countries, carried out dozens of massacres, and was able - thanks to the Iron Wall policy devised by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, confirmed by David Ben-Gurion, and meticulously implemented by Moshe Dayan, Golda Mier, Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, and Ariel Sharon to double the land it seized under the partition resolution on November 29, 1947 to inaugurate Ben-Gurion’s historic slogan that we Arabs still chant as if we made it: “Land for peace”.

Despite what happened on the Arab arena of political, social and economic changes, which affected powerful thrones and future regimes and ended with the arrival of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in a number of Arab countries, led by the primary state confronting Israel, Egypt, Arab policy towards Israel remained between confusion, randomness, lack of clarity of vision, and the absence of an integrated strategic vision and a unified goal in dealing with this historical conflict in its entirety. Meanwhile, the Israeli policy has been maintaining a fixed and unchanging strategy in dealing with the Arabs, based on establishing the Jabotinsky’s idea about the Iron Wall, the fence that continues to protect Israel from any Arab thinking - just thinking - to storm it, a wall that makes the Arabs' acceptance of Israel - as a fait accompli - something self-evident.

Israelis seek and we do not

When this happens, talk of peace and coexistence becomes acceptable - but on Israeli terms. Israel and its leaders remained loyal to this line, despite the change of policies, governments and parties. We Arabs did not stop for a moment to study, evaluate and remember, because great nations - as the great journalist writer Mohamed Hassanein Heikal said - live to be remembered. It is more correct that it remembers in order to live, because forgetting is objectively equivalent to death or is one of its degrees, while remembrance is awakening, and vigilance is a state of returning awareness that may be a prelude to a thought that leads to an action, if it can arrange for itself an appointment with the mind.

Among the wonders of fate, they - the Israelis - always do this. As for us at such a time, we continue to regurgitate sorrows, slap our cheeks, and lament poems, but we never accept an act or even a thought that leads or draws plans. This generation does not necessarily have to implement it, but we do what we have to do so that someone can complete it after us, just as the Zionist movement did when it approved the idea and strived for it for fifty years from 1898-1948, then launched it in its entirety to reach its immediate moment for more than another half century.

In this context, the movement of new historians - Israeli and not Arab, unfortunately - is rewriting history - especially that period - in an attempt to monitor and rearrange the facts, with the utmost objectivity, based on what they call the Israeli lies about the 1948 war, which in Israel they call a war of “independence” and we call it “the Nakba” (Catastrophe). The traditional Zionist narrative recounts its perception of what happened as a bilateral conflict between the united Arab enemy and tiny Israel.

According to this narrative - as the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim explains in his book “The Iron Wall” - seven Arab armies invaded Palestine immediately after the end of the British Mandate, with one specific goal in mind, which was “to strangle the Jewish state in its cradle.” But is this really what happened? The two main claims associated with the official phase of the 1948 war - as Shlaim observes - relate to the Arab-Israeli military balance, and the Arabs' goals in the war.

Unjust war

As for the first claim, Shlaim asserts that the Arab forces in mid-May 1948 amounted to 25,000 fighters, while the number of IDF soldiers reached 35,000, increased to 65,000 in mid-July, and reached at the end of December 100,000, while the Arab armies combined did not reach half that number. This is at a time when the suspicious Czech arms deal to Israel turned the armament balance at a ratio of 3.5: 1 in favor of Israel. Is this a situation in which it is possible to talk about a victory achieved by the will of a small country over seven Arab armies?

The talk about the Arab goals of the war - from the reality of the documents released by Israel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 1998 - is bitter and shocking to the fullest extent. The old generation of Israeli historians - as Shlaim explains - believed that all the forces sent to Palestine - which in their belief were the superiority of the Jews and equipment - were united by one goal, which was to destroy the nascent Jewish state and throw the Jews into the sea.

But the reality was quite otherwise. While the military experts of the Arab coalition drew up their unified plan of conquest, Jordanian King Abdullah, the man in whose hands the authority of the unified command of these armies was placed, had another goal for this war, which was to help implement the partition resolution. In accordance with this deal, he would obtain the western part of Palestine and annex it to the Emirate of Transjordan and declare himself the king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Betrayal of Glubb Pasha

In a meeting - revealed by the British documents and copied by a complete structure in the book “Thrones and Armies” - between then-Jordanian Prime Minister Tawfik Abu al-Huda and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, in which Abu al-Huda explained to Bevin that the Jews in Palestine had prepared a government, a police force, and an army so that they could take over power immediately after the end of the British mandate over Palestine, while the Arabs had not prepared anything.

There are two possibilities. The first: that the Jews would ignore the partition resolution and occupy all of Palestine up to the Jordan River. The second: that Mufti Amin al-Husseini would return and try to install himself as ruler over Arab Palestine. Abu al-Huda added, denouncing that both possibilities are unacceptable, especially since King Abdullah had received a torrent of messages from notables from Palestine begging him that the Arab Legion in Jordan protect them when the British Mandate ends and that the Arab part of Palestine be a continuous connection to the eastern borders Jordan.

Before General Glubb Pasha finished translating the last sentence, Bevin interrupted him, saying that this is the only reasonable and acceptable thing for Britain, provided that the Arab Legion does not exceed what is allocated to the Palestinians in the partition resolution. Then he addressed his words to General Glubb, saying, “I also expect from the Arab Legion more than that, which is to prevent other Arabs from objecting to the implementation of the partition resolution regarding the part allocated to the Jewish state.”

Indeed, throughout the war, the Jordanian Arab Legion succeeded - as the war diaries confirm - in defending its positions in Ekron, Ramallah and Old Jerusalem, but it never tried - despite the availability of opportunities - to seize any land belonging to the Jewish state in the partition decision.

The Israeli documents document what is more painful about a number of meetings that took place between King Abdullah and Golda Meir, in which they agreed - before the outbreak of battles - on the king’s acceptance of the partition resolution and the symbolic participation in the war to prevent anyone from violating the borders stipulated in the resolution. At the time when the reference 293/5 - which came in the war diaries - from the command of the Egyptian army requested the speed of striking Tel Aviv - due to the raid of an Israeli Austin aircraft on Amman - Glubb Pasha, the commander of the Jordanian army, was withdrawing his forces to the central region, claiming to preserve it, which led to the discovery of the positions of many Arab armies, led by the Egyptian army, which facilitated its defeat and at the same time facilitated Israel's task by crossing the division lines agreed upon in the resolution.

El-Nokrashy Pasha and miscalculation of the situation

The situation in Jordan was no darker than in Egypt. Two days before the end of the mandate and under enormous popular pressure, El-Nokrashy Pasha stood before the Egyptian Parliament to defend King Farouk’s decision to enter the Egyptian army into Palestine, stressing the army’s ability to deter the Zionist gangs and explaining that the army possesses weapons and ammunition sufficient to fight for a period of three months. This was at the time when Major General Ahmed al-Mawawi (the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian forces in Palestine), when he was summoned by El-Nokrashy Pasha and Haider Pasha to ask him about the conditions of the army, assured him that the situation was very bad, the units were not trained, and we were not ready at all to enter a war. El-Nokrashy assured him by saying that the king believed that the clashes would be just a political demonstration and not an act of war, adding that the issue would urgently be resolved politically and that the United Nations would intervene to resolve the situation.

This is the main reason behind the sudden change in the position of King Farouk from opposing the entry of the Egyptian army and helping the Palestinians with money and weapons to agree to the idea of intervention. The king had a conviction that the bulk of the fighting duties would fall on the shoulders of the Jordanian army, in addition to the illusion that the king and his war minister had in mind of Britain’s desire to discipline the Jews before its exit from Palestine, provided that no violation of the partition resolution occurred, which would allow a propaganda work to get the king out of his embarrassment without any real losses.

This is how the Arab kings conducted the war with Israel. Each throne had its own interests and goals that motivated it, which all disappeared behind the pretext of securing Palestine for the Palestinians, at a time when the Jewish agency had been moving decisively - since the issuance of the partition resolution - towards the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Arabs did not reach a clear vision of what could happen in the coming weeks, relying on what some American parties - especially oil companies - had been saying that the American position is on the way to change, which would lead to the placement of Palestine under international trusteeship for several years so that the parties concerned could review the facts and positions well.

We teach lies to our children

Therefore, it was not surprising that what happened between May 15, 1948 and January 1949, when all the Arab and Israeli forces complied with the ceasefire decision, as Israel came to control not only 55% of the land according to the partition decision, but 78% of the land, and then increased to 100% after June 1967 - which witnessed events similar to what happened in 1948 - and unfortunately, we still repeat many lies to our students in history books and a great deal about what happened without even daring for once to mention the truth. Perhaps we can re-read, absorb the lesson and restore the awareness that was lost! I wish the matter would stop at this point, but the great calamity began when the demands of Arab kings and presidents began to drop year after year.

After Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini rejected the first partition resolution approved by the Peel Commission in 1937 following the outbreak of the Arab revolution, which destroyed a small Jewish state on an area of 5,000 square kilometers, and passing through the refusal to establish a Palestinian state on all Palestinian soil within which a Jewish minority lives - according to the White Paper of 1939 - under the claim that the Palestinians should not establish their state by the decision of the British and that they should fight in the ranks of the Germans against the British and then expel everyone - Jews and British – declaring the establishment of their Palestinian state (this was the vision of Hajj Amin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who proceeded to implement it at that time), then rejected the partition resolution of the United Nations in 1947, in which Israel was granted 55% of the land, then inhabited by 400,000 Palestinians and half a million Jews, until the Arabs were forced after June 5, 1967 to accept Resolution 242, which stipulates the return of the territories occupied in 1967 in exchange for recognition of the State of Israel. After more than 45 years, they are now talking about a state without sovereignty over 42% of the West Bank and 70% of the Gaza Strip, and they ask Israel to agree to Arab-Palestinian religious supervision of the Temple Mount.

This is what confused politics, cloudy visions, and a sect that still does in the Arab body what cancer does in the body of those who carry it. Continuing in the clouds of vision, and the ambiguity of the situation, we block our ears from hearing, our eyes from looking, and our minds from understanding, contemplating and thinking in an attempt to forget and escape responsibility, spreading in the faces of everyone the sword of songs and slogans that only create illusion.