From an excellent article, in the Australian, by Henry Ergas

When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.

A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.
Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.
In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.
Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.

I love the Bee.

Satan Asks Democrats To Tone Down All The Evil

Dr. John Campbell with Professor Clancy

They’re discussing vax injuries and long covid. Professor Clancy says that his practice has pretty much been taken over by this issue.

Israel recovers three dead hostages from Gaza

• By chao deng , stephen kalin and anat peled
• Dow Jones
• 9:31AM May 18, 2024
• No Comments

The Israeli military said it had recovered the dead bodies of three Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip based on intelligence from interrogating militants, renewing the focus on the hostage issue as Israel’s leadership presses a military offensive in the southern Gazan town of Rafah.
The three hostages – Amit Buskila, 28, Shani Louk, 23, and Itzik Gelernter, 57 – were kidnapped from a music festival on Oct. 7 and recovered Thursday night in a special operation.
The military didn’t specify the location in which they were found, although it said they were killed on October 7 while the three tried to escape from the Nova music festival near the Gaza border, which was overrun with Hamas militants.
Some 125 of the over 240 hostages taken on Oct. 7 remain in Gaza, according to Israel.
The latest hostage operation shows how challenging it is for Israeli authorities to recover the hostages and comes as negotiations with Hamas, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the U.S., have fizzled. U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan will travel to Saudi Arabia on Saturday to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then go to Israel on Sunday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Sullivan’s talks with Israelis will include stalled efforts to reach a hostage deal. He will also press Israelis to take a more targeted approach against Hamas.
In the past two weeks, the Israeli military has sent its tanks and ground troops into Rafah, which it says is Hamas’s last stronghold and where some hostages are being held.

There have been two successful rescue operations by the Israeli military to recover a total of three hostages alive so far in the war. Recovering hostages as well as destroying Hamas are two goals Israel has said it seeks to achieve in the war in Gaza.
In response to Israel’s announcement, Hamas said that it would only allow Israel to retrieve hostages dead or through an exchange deal.

Whoever edits the letters page in the Oz needs to be demoted to other projects. I wrote a short sarcastic letter about Mark Scott not running a Trotskyite collective like the ABC anymore and they edited out any reference to Trots and the ABC.

May as well have not published it.