Dear Letter to the Editor,:

In March 2024 The Canadian Arab Lawyers Association (CALA) listed denial of the Nakba as an example of anti Palestinian racism.  Really? The position of the CALA shows total and complete disrespect for several generations of contemporaneous Muslim and Arab journalists who have unequivocally made clear that the "Nakba" was self inflicted.

CALA  ignores or willfully denies CONTEMPORANEOUS Muslim and Arab journalism  in order to promote the antisemitic calumny of "the 1948 forced displacement of 700,000 Palestinians and   the creation of the State of Israel".


CALA  ignores the reality that even a cursory glance at contemporaneous  Muslim newspapers and other contemporaneous  Muslim media makes clear that it was Arab leaders in 1947/1948  who commanded the local Arab population in Mandatory Palestine to “flee” their homes in anticipation of the genocide of the Jews — and an Arab populace who willingly obeyed that command. 

On April 3, 1949 the Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station reported: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem”. ("The Palestinian Delusion, The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process", Robert Spencer, 2019, page 83)

On October 12, 1963 the Egyptian  daily “Akbar el Yom” reported that : “The 15th May, 1948 arrived…On that day the Mufti of Jerusalem ( the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini) appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead”. ("The Palestinian Delusion",  page 83)

On April 9, 1953 the Jordanian daily “Al Urdan” reported: “For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumours exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs..By spreading rumours of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy”. See:  "The Palestinian Delusion", , page 83; . See also: "The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Der Yassin and the Creation of the Palestine Refugee Problem", Professor Eliezer Tauber, 2021)

Even the contemporaneous reporting of “The Economist” makes clear that the  “Nakba’  was self inflicted. On October 3, 1948 “The Economist” reported: “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades”. ("The Palestinian Delusion",  page 82).

On August 19, 1951 the Beirut weekly “Kul-Shay” opined:  “Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon  as refugees, suffering now the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor not conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their homes? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it”. ("The Palestinian Delusion, , page 84).

In 1955, the secretary of the Office of the Arab League in London, Edward Atiyah, admitted: 

"This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs enable to re enter and retake possession of their country". ("The Palestinian Delusion", , page 84).

Furthermore, the Jordanian newspaper Filastin on February 19, 1949 stated: “The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees” ("The Palestinian Delusion", , page 82-83).

 Ahistorical revisionism today by  CALA  and other academics in the tradition of Edward Said  cannot change the true history of the self inflicted  "Nakba" as  accurately reported  by contemporaneous Arab and Muslim journalists.

Also, Syrian intellectual Constantine Zureiq in  August 1948   FIRST used term nakba as “a self- inflicted and humiliating wound caused by the Arabs themselves”.(“Israel: A Simple Guide To  The Most Misunderstood Country On Earth”, page 114,  Noa  Tishby, 2021)

As Professor Richard Landes insightfully points out, the original meaning of "nakba" was "when we Arabs did it to ourselves". 

See : "Can 'The Whole World' Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad", Richard Landes, page 195, 2022).

Further Zureiq imputed agency to the Arabs and made them responsible for their own humiliation.  Zureiq’s own words make clear that “the Nakba” has nothing to  do with Israel or the Jews:

“When the battle broke out, our public diplomacy to speak of our imaginary victories, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily — until the Nakba happened….We must admit our mistakes…and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot”.("Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, page 114).

Only after 1968 did the anti-semites of the PLO encouraged by the KGB  and their jew hating  allies on the Left and later  Hamas   pervert Zureiq’s clear meaning, create the fiction of Palestinian Arab victimhood,  and make the Jews the villain. Clearly CALA like so many academics today  is a sycophant of this KGB balderdash and shows total disrespect -- racism? -- for contemporaneous Muslim and Arab journalists.

Richard Sherman POB 934853, Margate, Florida 33093(646)267-7904.