The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The prevailing conviction among the refugees that they had been the victims of their fellow Arabs rather than of Israeli aggression was grounded not only in their personal experience but in the larger facts of inter-Arab politics

The desertion of the élites had a domino effect on the middle classes and the peasantry. But huge numbers of Palestinians were also driven out of their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces, whether out of military considerations or, more actively, to prevent them from becoming citizens of the nascent Jewish State. In the largest and best-known example of such a forced exodus, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa against their wishes on the instructions of the AHC, despite sustained Jewish efforts to convince them to stay

Seven Arab states – in control of vast strategic territories and abundant oil and other natural resources, and enjoying the sympathy of an omnipotent Muslim World – lost Palestine merely because of their reliance on romantic notions of legality and justice. Culpability for the loss of Palestine does indeed lie with some of the Arab leaders who lacked the will and the capacity for self-sacrifice

At a deeper level, the roots of this conflict stretch back to the Roman destruction of Jewish statehood in the land that has since come to be known as Palestine.