Syndicated columnist Ray Hanania's April article about Palestinian Arabs accepting "reality" was actually an exercise in accomplishing the exact opposite.



While later uttering some welcome common sense, he prefaced this by rehashing the same, time-worn, fractured fairy tales and toxic untruths with which Arabs have poisoned their own people for decades. Compared to Hamas & Co., Hanania may be a moderate, but everything is relative.



As it appeared in at least its April 27th version in the Orlando Sentinel, much of "Palestinians Must Accept Reality of the 'Right of Return'" was devoted to demonizing Israel for its alleged original sin regarding Arab refugees. Hanania then shifts gears and proposes that Arabs should next forget about all of this and accept a two-state solution. Who's kidding whom here?



There were so many errors in this alleged "reality" article, it is hard to know where to begin. The assertion that Israel bears full blame for the flight of Arabs from the area it won in 1948 totally ignores the fact that if a half-dozen Arab states didn't invade a reborn Israel in 1948, if they had accepted the 1947 partition plan, there would not have been one Arab refugee. After Arabs initiated hostilities, all Hades broke out. No one wants to stay in a war zone and no one is squeaky clean once hostilities erupt.



The author ignores the fact that the purely Arab state of Jordan was itself created in 1922 from some 80% of the original 1920 Palestinian Mandate. Had Arabs accepted the '47 plan, Arab nationalism would have thus wound up with some 90% of the total pie. So much for the Arab claim that Jews got all or most of the land.



Contrary to the article's main thrust, volumes of solid, well-documented evidence -- from Arab sources, as well as others -- show that Arabs bore far more responsibility for the flight of their own refugees than the Jews did. As just a few of numerous sources, consider the following:



The current darling of the West, Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas stated in Falastin A-Thawra in March 1976: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians... but instead they abandoned them, forced them to leave... and threw them into prisons [refugee camps] similar to the ghettoes in which Jews were earlier forced to live."



A frequent critic of the Zionists, the Economist had this to say on October 2, 1948: "Various factors influenced their decision... there is little doubt that the most potent were the announcements by the Higher Arab Executive urging the Arabs to quit... clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."



And, as the last of numerous other examples that could be given, consider The Memoirs of Haled Al-Azm (Beirut, 1973), Syria's prime minister in 1948: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees.... But we ourselves encouraged them to leave."



Now, also consider some other crucial facts that Hanania ignores.



When the United Nations Relief Works Agency -- UNRWA -- was set up to assist Arab refugees, the very word "refugee" had to be redefined to assist those people. So many Arabs were recent arrivals themselves into the Palestinian Mandate that UNRWA had to adjust the definition of "refugee" from its prior meaning of "persons normally and traditionally resident" to instead include those who lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948. Do you really understand what this is saying?



Also keep in mind that for every Arab who was forced to flee the fighting that Arabs started (after all, how dare Jews want in one tiny, resurrected state what Arabs demand for themselves in some two dozen others -- and most of them, conquered and forcibly Arabized) a Jewish refugee was forced to flee Arab or Muslim lands (where they were commonly known as kilab yahud, "Jew dogs") to Israel and elsewhere - but with no UNRWA set up to assist them. As just one of many examples, greater New York City alone now has tens of thousands of Syrian Jewish refugees and their descendants.



As for those "native Palestinians", Yasser Arafat himself was born in Cairo, Egypt. Scores of thousands of other Arabs came from Egypt earlier, in the 19th century, with Muhammad Ali and son's Ibrahim Pasha's armies. Many, like Arafat a bit later, settled in Palestine. Hamas' patron saint, Sheikh 'Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam, was from Latakia, Syria, possibly a neighbor of those Syrian Jews in New York.



During the Mandatory period after World War I, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission recorded additional scores of thousands of Egyptian, Syrian, and other Arabs entering into Palestine and settling there. Indeed, this influx of Arabs (with one of the world's highest birthrates) into the land is well documented, but few -- except scholars -- usually delve into these sources. And too many of the latter these days tend to have an anti-Israel bias and agenda, so such facts are simply ignored, downplayed or suppressed.



It is estimated that for each one of these incoming Arabs who were recorded, many others crossed the border under cover of darkness to enter into one of the few areas in the region where any economic development was going on, because of the influx of Jewish capital. These folks later became known as "native Palestinians". Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from some of those same "Arab" countries -- Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and so forth -- became the so-called "settlers".



While this is not to say that there were not native Arabs also living in Palestine, it is to say that many, if not most, of the Arabs were also relative newcomers -- settlers -- themselves. And there were Jews whose families never left Israel/Judaea/Palestine despite the tragedy of the Roman wars and the subsequent great Diaspora as well.



Perfect justice exists nowhere in the realm of man. However, the Arab-Israeli conflict could have been solved long ago had Arabs been willing to grant Jews (or Kurds, or Berbers, or black African Sudanese, etc.) a tiny sliver of the very rights they so forcibly demand for themselves. And that's the real reality Hanania refuses to confront his own rejectionist brethren with.