Sunday, August 22, 2010

George Will

"Asad Abukhalil has already nailed Will for getting the date of the Peel Commission report wrong. It was 1937, not 1936. And the Arab Revolt broke out in Palestine before the Peel Commission introduced its findings. I would also add that David Ben Gurion privately accepted the Peel Commission’s recommendations because he saw them as the basis for a later partition that would gift the Zionist settler minority with major port cities like Jaffa and Haifa and throw the Palestinian Arabs back to the hinterlands."  Max is right. Ben Gurion only grudgingly accepted the Peel in the hope of later change.  And as he wrote to his son (see Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs) he talked about population exchange when he talked about whole sale expulsion of Arabs (the trade off was between more than 100,00 in Jewish designated areas in return for no more than 3000 Jews in Arab designated areas).   (thanks Nadine)