OK So Maybe I Exaggerated Our ‘War Of Extermination’ Prowess A Little

By Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General, Arab League 1945-1952

Cairo, April 24 – Anyone familiar with the rhetoric surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict for the last eighty or so years has encountered a bombastic proclamation of mine from an interview I gave in 1947, warning against the violence that Arabs would visit upon the doomed Jews of Palestine if the latter dared to declare a state:  “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.” Well, see, about that… it might have, in retrospect, been a little overstated.

Looking back through the intervening eight decades, it would seem that I overstated the massacring capacity of our noble Arab volunteers. I was speaking of volunteers, not the actual armies that invaded to fight the Jews the following year, because when I gave the interview, there was no impending declaration – the UN hadn’t even voted on Partition yet. Regardless of the implications of that prediction as referring to the intent of the war that did break out, or simply as an expression of Arab sentiment, and the propaganda hay that partisans wish to make of it, the fact that I predicted a momentous massacre of Jews merely at the hand of volunteers, and not regular Arab armies, makes the failure of the actual armies that did end up invading all the more humiliating. Maybe a handful of local massacres at best.

That in fact was the original sense of “Nakba” – not the dispossession of Palestine’s Arabs, a sense that developed only later, but the mortifying shame of five armies, plus local and international guerrillas, not only failing to oust the Jews of Palestine from most of their strongholds, but losing large swaths of territory to those ragtag, under-supplied, under-trained, underfed underclass, many of whom barely escaped torturous death at the hands of our allies the Third Reich. The vast majority of “refugees” fled without seeing a single Zionist fighter. Momentous indeed.

I must admit my chagrin at the pathetic state of what remains of Arab solidarity with the Arabs of Palestine, now reduced to playing victim, grasping at every possible rhetorical straw, regardless of its credibility, to paint the lowly, dhimmi Jews as hulking brutes who ravage the innocent, helpless Arabs in Palestine. Have you no pride? You would portray yourself, and your clans, as hapless objects of superior force as wielded by the people you claim to believe are beneath you in every way?

You know what? Maybe you deserve this.

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