C – “Creation” of Israel, “the War Over Israel’s Creation,” and the Seemingly-Exclusive Arab Refugees of that War
Among the most fundamentally misleading mainstream Western media’s misportrayals of Mideast history is its persistent mischaracterization of Israel having been “created” and “founded” in 1948, of the occurrence of a “war over Israel’s creation,” and of seemingly exclusively “Palestinian” refugees of that war.
The historical reality is
*** Modern Israel is the land of Israel’s next native e state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea – every ruler in between was an invading foreign empire, and mostly non-Arab at that;
*** The Jews never abandoned their homeland, and again became Jerusalem’s majority population during pre-Zionist 19th century Turkish rule;
*** Modern Israel was not “created and founded” but reattained the Jewish homeland’s independence in 1948;
*** The re-declared Jewish state was instantly attacked by invading Arab states and its homeland Jewish army, Haganah, which became the Israel Defense Force, threw back that invasion in Israel’s 1948War of Independence (not “of Creation and Founding”);
*** There were more Jewish refugees from vast Muslim lands in that 1948-49 Arab-Jewish war than Arabs left what became tiny Israel;
*** Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees while descendants of those Arabs who left languish today in Western-supported “refugee camps” isolated in lands of their fellow Arab “hosts,” including in Arab-controlled portions of Palestine.
None of this is purveyed honestly by the Western media, which insistently calls Israel “created and founded” in 1948, refers to “the war that followed Israel’s creation” instead of calling it the UN paritition-rejecting multi-nation invasion that it was and without naming the invading Arab states, and refers exclusively to the Arab refugees of that war as “the Palestinian refugee issue.”
The mainstream Western media:
*** Washington Post, 8/11/14: “. . . [The 2002 “Arab Peace Initiative”] was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, entailing concessions too painful for Israel to accept, such as a withdrawal from the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, and ‘a right of return’ for Palestinians who fled when Israel was founded in 1948.”
*** AP, 5/21/14: “… Palestinians marked the anniversary of their uprooting in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation”
*** AP, 5/16/14: “Palestinians marched in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to commemorate their displacement in the Mideast war over Israel’s 1948 creation”
*** AP, 2/17/14: “About 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war surrounding Israel’s establishment in 1948.”
Actually, “about 700,000” Arabs (btw, not yet known as “The Palestinians”), is a decided tilt in favor of historical fact from the “almost four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants” which the mainstream Western media shamelessly touted for years. E.g.:
Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .
– Knight-Ridder News Service on front page of Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/4/01
This misportrayal has had some effect on Westerners’ thinking:
“It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”
– President of The United States, Barack H. Obama, to the whole world from Cairo, June 4, 2009