In May of 1986, Murray Bookchin (America’s second most famous Anarchist, right after Noam Chomsky) wrote an article for the Burlington Free Press titled “Attacks on Israel Ignore the Long History of Arab Conflict.” Below is a long excerpt, and below that are links to the entire article.
The United Nations resolution of 1947, which partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, was followed by the invasion of the country by Arab armies, notably the Egyptian, Syrian, and highly trained Jordanian “Arab Legion,” with direct or indirect aid from Iraq and other Arab nations.
In some cases these armies, particularly the Arab irregulars who accompanied them, took no prisoners in their assaults on Jewish communities. Generally, they tried to systematically obliterate all Jewish settlements in their paths until they were stopped by furious and costly Jewish resistance.
The invasion and the annihilatory combat it created set a terrible pattern of fear and bitterness that is not easy to erase from the minds of Israeli Jews. That a desperate lunatic element of Jewish zealots behaved in kind before it was stopped by the newly formed Israeli military forces should not allow us to forget the Jewish men and women who were slaughtered by stalwarts of Arab nationalism even after they had raised white flags of surrender.
I have seen very little mention of this fearful pattern of “combat” which stained the Arab invasions of Palestine and so profoundly influenced Jewish confidence in the value of “truce negotiations” and the predictability of peace agreements with Arab irredentists. Indeed, the partition lines that were eventually established after the 1948 invasions were the product of bloody warfare — literally the give-and-take of battle — not of “imperialistic” or “land-grabbing Zionists,” to use the language that is so much in vogue these days.
Nor do I hear any longer of the earnest attempts by the Haganah — the Jewish citizens’ militia of the partition era — to encourage Arabs to remain in their neighborhoods and towns, of the Israeli vehicles with loudspeakers that went through the streets of Jaffa, for example, urging Arabs not to succumb to the feelings of panic engendered by battle conditions and by extremists on both sides of the conflict.
That many Arabs remained in Israel clearly challenges the myth that Israeli Jews tried to rid the country of its Moslem inhabitants. What seems to be totally ignored is the certainty that there would have been an Arab state in Palestine side-by-side with a Jewish one if Egyptian armies in the south, Syrian in the north, and Jordanian in the east had not tried to seize both U.N.- partitioned lands with imperialist interests of their own and, when this failed, used the Palestinian refugees as pawns in future negotiations with the Israelis and their western supporters.
I downloaded the pdf from the theanarchistlibrary.org website, where they felt the need to provide a trigger warning: “This text contains disturbing material consisting of Zionist tropes.” !!!!
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-attacks-on-israel-ignore-the-long-history-of-arab-conflict
You can also download it here:
https://buddhist-zionists.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/murray-bookchin-attacks-on-israel-ignore-the-long-history-of-arab-conflict.pdf
