Arab anti-Jewish genocide campaign: calls, plan pre 1948 defeat

 

• January 27, 1947, and in 1948:
  Jamal Husseini, then spokesperson for the Arab Higher Committee explains Arab rejection to a State of Israel, that it will interrupt Arab 'race' "honogeneity."


• July 1947:
  Fawzi al-Qawuqji, (Arab nationalist military figure in the interwar period, who aided the Nazis, and then served as the Arab Liberation Army’s field commander in 1948): "The only option is the annihilation of every Jew - in Palestine and in every Arab state.”


• Mid-August 1947:
  Fawzi al-Qawuqji—soon to be named the head of the Arab League's volunteer army in Palestine, the Arab Liberation Army (ALA)—threatened that, should the vote go the wrong way, "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish". It would be a "holy war", the Arabs suggested, which might even evolve into "World War III".


• Sept. 29, 1947:
  Jamal el-Husseini, spokesman for the Arab Higher Committee, served notice today that they would drench the soil of the Holy Land "with the last drop of our blood in the lawful defense of all and every inch of it.


• October 1947:
  Arab League's Azzam Pasha threatens "a war of extermination."


• 1947:
  The Arab Higher Committee warned the British not to intervene in their violence against the Jews. It distributed a leaflet stating: "The Arabs have taken the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out." ("Final Solution" - of course Nazi euphemism for annihilating the Jews).


• 1948:
  Isma'il Safwat, who served as the Chief of Staff of the Arab Forces in Palestine (which included al-Qawuqji’s troops). He wrote down his goals in a telegram he sent to the Arab League: "The destruction of Jews in Palestine and the complete cleansing of them from this country."


• April 1948:
  The mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims.
• 
  
• 9 March 1948:
  al-Qawuqji stated that his objectives in Palestine were "the defeat of partition and the annihilation of the Zionists."


• March 1948:
  al-Qawuqji: "I have come to Palestine to stay and tight until Palestine is a free and united Arab country or until I am killed and buried here," he announced. His aim, he declared, borrowing the slogan that was becoming the leitmotiv of the Arab leadership, was "to drive all the Jews into the sea." "Everything is ready," he proclaimed. "The battle starts when I give the word."


• Aug 1, 1948:
  Muslim Brotherhood's Hassan al-Banna:
• "If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea."

___________

NOTES:

*JAMAL HUSSEINI: "DRENCH THE HOLY LAND WITH BLOOD"*

PALESTINIAN ARABS REJECT U.N. PLANS; WARN OF A BATTLE; Jamal el-Husseini Threatens to Drench Holy Land With Blood 'in Lawful Defense'.
By Thomas J. Hamilton. (The New York Times).
Sept. 30, 1947.
LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y., Sept. 29 -- Declaring that Palestinian Arabs would accept neither partition nor a federal Palestine, Jamal el-Husseini, spokesman for the Arab Higher Committee, served notice today that they would drench the soil of the Holy Land "with the last drop of our blood in the lawful defense of all and every inch of it."
[https://www.nytimes.com/1947/09/30/archives/palestinian-arabs-reject-un-plans-warn-of-a-battle-jamal-elhusseini.html]

______

*ISMAIL SAFWAT, JAMAL HUSSEINI*

Schwartz, A., Wilf, E. (2020). The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. United States: St. Martin's Publishing Group, 1: waging war (1948).
[https://books.google.com/books?id=qCWaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT18]

Magen David Square and burst into exuberant song and dance as soon as they heard the result of the vote.
The Zionist movement had initially demanded the whole of Mandatory Palestine (claiming even more at the end of the First World War); but from the mid-1930s, it had begun to consistently express openness to territorial compromise and partition, because its objective was sovereignty. As such, Jewish leaders saw the partition plan as a tremendous achievement that fulfilled the foremost purpose of Zionism: political independence, even if only in part of the Land of Israel. "Our aspirations have been reduced, our territory has been shrunk, and the borders are politically and militarily bad," said Ben-Gurion on December 3, 1947, "but there has never been a greater achievement than this. We have received most of the coastal plain, most of the valleys, most of the water sources in the north, most of the empty spaces, two seas, and recognition of our independence from most of the world."11 By contrast, the Arab world completely rejected partition. In their view, the entire land, carved out from the deceased Ottoman Empire, should have been given for an Arab state. From the beginning of the Mandate, they had tried to prevent Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel through violence, consistently rejecting any possibility of compromise (including the Peel Commission proposal of 1937, the first partition plan).12 In their minds, the Jews had no political or collective rights in the land, because they were not a nation.13 At most, they were eligible for the status Islam accords non-Muslims of monotheistic religions: the status of protected persons (dhimmis), who may live and retain their property and faith, but must be reconciled to their social and political inferiority to Muslims.

In practice, partition would have meant that out of the 11.5 million square kilometers encompassed by Arab states at the time, many of which were also set in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, some fifteen thousand square kilometers (one one-thousandth) would be allocated to the Jewish people, who were also an indigenous people. In fact, had the Jewish people been allocated their fair share of the lands of the Ottoman Empire, based on their population, the land allocated to them would have been more than seven times larger. Partition also meant that out of sixty million Arabs, a few hundred thousand (a little more than half a percent) would live as a minority in a Jewish state.
But for the Arabs, the very idea of a sovereign state where the Jewish people would enjoy international status equivalent to that of Arab and Muslim states was a blow to natural justice, and therefore anathema. In 1944, for example, the Palestine Arab Party, which spoke for the center ground of Palestinian society, demanded the immediate "dissolution of the Jewish National Home," and at the inaugural conference of the Arab League in October 1944, it was ruled that "Palestine constitutes an important part of the Arab world." The Arab Higher Committee, which led the Palestinians before and during the 1948 war, informed the UN Special Committee on Palestine on its 1947 visit that "all of Palestine must be Arab." Arab Higher Committee member Hussein al-Khalidi told the delegation that the Jews had always enjoyed comfortable lives in Arab countries until they began demanding their own sovereign state. He rejected the possibility of territorial partition and called for a single state with an Arab majority.
Indeed, as soon as the result of the UN vote became known, Hajj Amin al-Husseini declared that the Arabs neither recognized the partition resolution nor intended to respect it. ..
Jamal al-Husseini, vowed that "the blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East." ...

But there were also cases—most notably in Haifa—where the leaders of the Jewish Yishuv implored the Arabs to remain, but they opted to flee out of fear or lest they be considered traitors. There were also further reasons for the Arabs' flight. For one, the departure at the outset of the war of thousands of families from the Palestinian elite ultimately swept up the common people as well.

Additionally, the prolongation of the war caused the economy to suffer, and many could no longer bear the hardship and turmoil. And the flight from Jaffa was aided by the behavior of the Arab volunteers there: sent to fight the Jews, in reality they also abused the local Arab population and committed numerous acts of murder and rape.

The nature of the war was the major contributor to the Arabs' departure, much more than any specific instance of fighting during the war. The Arab side defined it at the outset as a struggle between life and death. The secretary-general of the Arab League declared on the eve of the war, "This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."

In a telegram to the Arab League at the start of the hostilities, Ismail Safwat, who was in charge of coordination between the different Arab forces, described the war's objectives, starting with "to eliminate the Jews of Palestine, and to completely cleanse the country of them."

In March 1948, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinians, declared that the Arabs would "continue to fight until the Zionists are eliminated, and the whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state."

Indeed, not a single Jew remained in the areas conquered by Arab forces. The Palestinian fighters sought to expel the Jews and destroy their communities, as in Gush Etzion, on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, and in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, where Jews had lived for millennia. All twelve Jewish towns and villages captured by the Arab armies were completely leveled, and their inhabitants had either fled, were murdered, or fell into captivity.

With such a state of affairs, in the context of a bloody war of survival...

________

*I. SAFWAT, F. QAUKJI & HAARETZ LIES*

How academia omits facts to make Palestinians the perpetual victim.
Opinion: Academics have personal opinions and agendas like the rest of us, but erasing evidence only because it contradicts researchers' political positions is wrong and misleading.
Ben-Dror Yemini | published:12.05.22 |

Recently, Prof. Shay Hezkani claimed in an article he wrote for “Haaretz” newspaper that I misled my readers when I wrote that the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine faced an existential threat in 1947 and 1948.

I challenge Hezkani to an intellectual debate. I am even willing to provide him here with some of the arguments at my disposal - shall he answer my call.

“Every week Ben-Dror Yemini tells readers of ‘Yedioth Ahronoth’ about Arab leaders in 1947 who called to throw the Jews into the sea, planning to systematically murder them,” Hezkani wrote in his Haaretz column last week.
“Throughout 15 years of my research, looking into hundreds of propaganda pieces from 1947-1949, I ran into only one case in which Hassan al-Banna - founder of the Muslim Brotherhood – mentions the ‘sea’ and ‘Jews’ in the same sentence - while calling to expel the Jews from Egypt,” Hezkani wrote.

“The quote [used by Yemini and attributed to ex-Secretary General of the Arab League in Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam] is not[sic] backed by credible[sic] sources in Arabic, and it’s unclear whether or not it was actually ever said.” 
I read the Haaretz article and could not believe my eyes. In the book I published titled “Industry of Lies,” I presented a more detailed list of threats made against the Jews, with credible sources, during that time period.

But, Hezkani looked into hundreds of documents and somehow found nothing. It’s a little weird that I did not spent 15 years researching this topic in an academic setting, yet found so much more information. To clear all doubts, prior to publishing the research-backed chapters of my book, they were reviewed by three prominent academics.
It could be that Hezkani has difficulty reading books. So, let’s start with the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1941 arrived at Nazi Germany and called to kill every Jew, before returning to lead the Palestinians.
If Hezkani believes that al-Husseini had changed his mind later on, he should refer us to the relevant sources. In an interview to the “Al Sarih” newspaper, al-Husseini said the Arab goal during the 1948 War of Independence wasn’t to undo the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, but to “continue to fight until the Zionists are dead.”

Then, there is Fawzi al-Qawuqji, an Arab nationalist military figure in the interwar period, who aided the Nazis, and then served as the Arab Liberation Army’s field commander in 1948.

In July 1947, he said: "The only option is the annihilation of every Jew - in Palestine and in every Arab state.”

Finally, there is Isma'il Safwat, who served as the Chief of Staff of the Arab Forces in Palestine (which included al-Qawuqji’s troops). He wrote down his goals in a telegraph he sent to the Arab League: "The destruction of Jews in Palestine and the complete cleansing of them from this country."

The secretary general of the Arab League at the time, Abdul Rahman Azzam, promised Safwat personally that this was indeed the goal of the Arab establishment, and the 1948 war will “lead to annihilation and slaughter." But, according to Hezkani, this is not “aren’t backed by credible sources in Arabic.”
It’s odd that an academic whose studies pertain to researching these events wouldn’t know that in 2011, two researchers, Efraim Karsh and David Brent, found the original quote as said by Azzam - written in Arabic.

Further, Hezkani misleads his readers about al-Banna. He didn’t call to deport the Jews, and wanted more than just Egypt. His original quote was published on August 2, 1948 in the New York Times: “If a Jewish state was to be established, the Arab people will throw the Jews living in it into the sea.” But, Hezkani again could not find anything.
I can go on and on. There were more similar statements made by various Arab officials. But this is an article, not a research paper or a book.

Look, it’s fine for academics to have a political agenda. But, when their agenda impacts their research, they are not academics anymore, they are ideological salespeople. Nevertheless, Hezkani is still invited to debate me in public. Alternatively, he can simply admit he was wrong.
[https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r13c00w5do]

______

*QAUKJI: 1947; MUFTI APR-1948; JIHAD - FATWA CALLS BY VARIOUS RELIGIOUS LEADERS.

Morris, B. (2008). 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. United States: Yale University Press.

p. 61.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=CC7381HrLqcC&pg=PA61]

As early as mid-August 1947, Fawzi al-Qawuqji—soon to be named the head of the Arab League's volunteer army in Palestine, the Arab Liberation Army (ALA)—threatened that, should the vote go the wrong way, "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish". It would be a "holy war", the Arabs suggested, which might even evolve into "World War III";

p.394-396
[https://books.google.com/books?id=CC7381HrLqcC&pg=PA396]

SOME CONCLUSIONS .

The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the "inescapable obligation on every Muslim," declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938. Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forego the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine.

In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended "to take over .. . all the lands of Islam." Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, "the memories of the Battle of Badr . . . as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din's [Saladin's] liberation of Pales-tine" from the Crusaders.

Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: "The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: '0 Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mo-bilization of the "street" and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November—December 1947 and May—June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and culema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the ARC-affiliated Arab Women's Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war:
"The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders. . . . [A Jewish state ] has no chance to survive now that the 'holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massa-cred."

The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encom-passed all or almost all Arabs:
"No Moslem can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands," reported Kirkbride from Amman "Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda] ... who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject."

Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the culema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing "the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics, .. . and leaders of public opinion." It was, ruled the council, "necessary to liber-ate Palestine from the Zionist bands . . . and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes." The Arab armies had "fought victoriously" (sic) "in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty." The culema condemned King Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: "Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers," concluded the culema.

The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. The Zionist movement, except for its fringes, accepted the proposal. Most lamented the imperative of giving up the historic heartland of Judaism, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), with East Jerusalem's Old City and Temple Mount at its core; and many were troubled by the inclusion in the prospective Jewish state of a large Arab minority. But the movement, with Ben- Gurion and Weizmann at the helm, said "yes." The Palestinian Arabs, along with the rest of the Arab world, said a flat "no"—as they had in 1937, when the Peel Commission had earlier proposed a two-state solution. The Arabs refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. And, consistently with that "no," the Palestinian Arabs, in November–December 1947, and the Arab states in May 1948, launched hostilities to scupper the resolution's implementation. Many Palestinians may have been unenthusiastic about going to war—but to war they went.
They may have been badly led and poorly organized; the war may have been haphazardly unleashed; and many able-bodied males may have avoided service. But Palestinian Arab society went to war, and no Palestinian leader publicly raised his voice in protest or dissent. The Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception. The Arab states hoped to accomplish this by conquering all or large parts of the territory allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. And some Arab leaders spoke of driving the Jews into the sea and ridding Palestine "of the Zionist plague."

The struggle, as the Arabs saw it, was about the fate of Palestine/ the Land of Israel, all of it, not over this or that part of the country. But, in public, official Arab spokesmen often said that the aim of the May 1948 invasion was to "save" Palestine or "save the Palestinians," definitions more agreeable to Western ears. The picture of Arab aims was always more complex than Zionist historiography subsequently made out. The chief cause of this complexity was that fly-in-the-ointment, King Abdullah. Jordan's ruler, a pragmatist, was generally skeptical of the Arabs' ability to defeat, let alone destroy, the Yishuv, and fashioned his war aim accordingly: to seize the Arab-populated West Bank, preferably including East Jerusalem...

p.409
[https://books.google.com/books?id=CC7381HrLqcC&pg=PA409]

In March 1948 he told an interviewer in a Jaffa daily Al Sarih that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but "would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state."

In 1974, just before his death, he told interviewers: "There is no room for peaceful coexistence with our enemies. The only solution is the liquidation of the foreign conquest in Palestine within its natural frontiers and the establishment of a national Palestinian state on the basis of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants and its Jewish [inhabitants] who lived here before the British conquest in 1917 and their descendants."
Haj Amin was nothing if not consistent. In 1938, Ben-Gurion met Musa Husseini in London. Musa Husseini, a relative and supporter of the mufti (he was executed in 1951 by the Jordanians for his part in the assassination of King Abdullah), told Ben-Gurion that Haj Amin "insists on seven per cent [as the maximal percentage of Jews in the total population of Palestine], as it was at the end of the World War." In 1938 the Jews constituted 30 percent of the country's population. How Haj Amin intended to reduce the proportion from 30 to 7 percent Musa Husseini did not explain. (It is not without relevance that this objective was replicated in the constitution of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], the Palestine National Charter, formulated in 1964 and revised in 1968. Clause 6 states: "The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine before the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be con-sidered Palestinians " This "beginning" is defined elsewhere as "1917" or the moment of promulgation of the Balfour Declaration [2 November 1917].) Such sentiments translated into action in 1948. During the "civil war," when the opportunity arose, Palestinian militiamen who fought alongside the Arab Legion consistently expelled Jewish inhabitants and razed coquered sites, as happened in the 'Etzion Bloc and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. Subsequently, the Arab armies behaved in similar fashion. All the Jewish settlements conquered by the invading Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian armies—about a dozen in all, including Beit Ha'arava, Neve Yaeakov, and 'Atarot in the Jordanian sector; Masada and Sha'ar Hagolan in the Syrian sector; and Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim, and Kfar Darom in the Egyptian sector—were razed after their inhabitants had fled or been incarcerated or expelled. These expulsions by the Arab regular armies stemmed quite naturally from the expulsionist mindset prevailing in the Arab states. The mindset characterized both the public and the ruling elites. All vilified the Yishuv and opposed the existence of a Jewish state on "their" (sacred Islamic) soil, and all sought its extirpation, albeit with varying degrees of bloody-mindedness. Shouts of "Idbah al Yahud" (slaughter the Jews) characterized equally street demonstrations in Jaffa, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad both before and during the war and were, in essence, echoed, usually in tamer language, by most Arab leaders.

p.491:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=CC7381HrLqcC&pg=PA491]

...interview, in Al-Ahram, 9 March 1948, in which al-Qawuqji stated that his objectives in Palestine were "the defeat of partition and the annihilation of the Zionists."

Crouse, E. R. (2014). American Christian Support for Israel: Standing with the Chosen People, 1948–1975. United States: Lexington Books, p.26.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=tRmaCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA26]

In August 1947, Fawzi al-Qawuqji— soon to be the head of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) established in December —warned that if the UN granted the Jews a state, "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American, or Jewish."

While living in Nazi Germany during the war, al-Qawuqji recruited Muslim volunteers and broadcasted German propaganda.

Many Muslims saw the Arab-Jew conflict as nothing short of a "holy war." Realism was the "intellectual compass" for State Department officials committed to geopolitics and grand strategy. In a September 1947 memorandum protesting the plan of partition, Loy Henderson, the head of the Near East Division, used phrases such as "undermine our relations with the Arab . . . world," "we shall encounter numerous difficulties," "violent nationalist uprisings," "loss of confidence," "growing suspicion," "lacking in courage and consistency," and "any plan for partition-ing Palestine would be unworkable."

The language was pessimistic. The UNSCOP presented its official recommendations to the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947. There was a majority report from eight members and a minority report from three members. The majority report stipulated the partition of Palestine into two states with the Jewish state having most of the coastal area, western Galilee, and the Negev.

The land area of the proposed Arab state was approximately 43 percent; the Jewish state was to be about 56 percent, most of which was desert. Jews recognized two other shortcomings to the partition plan: The Jewish state would have an approximate seven Arabs to ten Jews ratio (which meant that the Arabs would attain a majority within decades), and Jerusalem would be under international control.

Conservative Christians believed it was inevitable that the Jewish people would gain additional land, and it made no difference that the Palestinian Jews were overwhelmingly secular. In the Moody Bible Institute Monthly, one fundamentalist proclaimed in December 1947 that "the Jews will eventually be given not a portioned Palestine, but the whole of the land, and ultimately the whole of Trans-Jordan as well."

When the motion went before the General Assembly, thirty-three voted in favor, thirteen against, and ten in abstention. Opposed were Muslim countries and India (all unwilling to vote against Islam), Yugoslavia, and Greece, but UN Resolution 181 received the necessary two-thirds majority. Despite the worrisome aspects of the plan, the Jews rejoiced. There was great celebration in packed Jerusalem streets throughout the night of November 29. Many cried out: "Medinath Hayehudim! [Jewish State!] Medinath Hayehudim!" Jews saw the UN vote and support for a Jewish state as representing "a return" rather than a "new creation."

_______

*QAUKJI: "THE JEWS INTO THE HE SEA"*

Collins, L., Lapierre, D. ([1972] 2007). O Jerusalem!. United States: Simon & Schuster, pp.200-202.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=qCRPDVje7WwC&pg=PA201]

AN UNLIKELY LAWRENCE.

As he did every morning at precisely seven-thirty, General Sir Gordon MacMillan, commander in chief of the British forces in Palestine, ate a Jaffa grapefruit as he read the overnight messages delivered to his mess by the King David signals room. The dispatches awaiting the general's eyes on Saturday morning, March 6, 1948, were going to spoil the taste of his grapefruit. They announced the arrival in Palestine of the delegate of an-other concert of nations, riding, too, in a military vehicle. At midnight, at the head of a column of twenty-five trucks and five hundred men, Fawzi el Kaukji had rolled over the Allenby Bridge into Palestine, absolutely un-molested by the troops MacMillan had stationed there. The general was furious. However tolerant the Foreign Office view of Kaukji might be, he could not be allowed, MacMillan well knew, "to go openly rampaging over territory in which Britain considered herself a sovereign power." As he feared, he had barely finished breakfast before he began to re-ceive "all kinds of screaming messages from London saying Kaukji and his people had to be run off and no nonsense about it."

That was precisely what Sir Gordon MacMillan did not want to be obliged to do. Concerned above all with the lives of his men, he saw "no point in getting a lot of British soldiers killed in that kind of operation." Since Kaukji was already inside Palestine, the best tactic, he reasoned, would be to persuade him to lie low and avoid stirring an international incident until the British had left. MacMillan convinced High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham to send a district officer along with one of his generals to try to reason with Kaukji.
Kaukji was in a cordial and expansive mood when the British delegation caught up with him late in the afternoon. The essence of MacMillan's message was quite simple. We are responsible for law and order, Kaukji was told, and if you start stirring things up we will have no choice but to run you off. After all, you shouldn't even be here in the first place; but we'll make an exception this time if you promise to behave.
Kaukji smilingly agreed and offered his visitors a cup of coffee to seal their agreement.
He had, of course, no intention of keeping it, but his formal pledge to behave himself was enough for MacMillan. As he had hoped it would, it "placated His Majesty's Government for a while and got us off the hook."
In any event, Kaukji was not in a great hurry to open operations. He had, thanks to the regular infiltrations of the past two months, four thousand armed men under his command. Grouped into four regiments, they were concentrated in the Galilee and around Nablus.

So openly acknowledged was their presence in Nablus that six hundred of them had paraded before ten thousand residents of the city, then received an official welcome from the mayor.

By Palestine standards, his men were relatively well armed. Communications and logistics, however, were primitive. Runners ran word-of-mouth commands or handwritten messages from post to post. The shortage of food and other essential items did not unduly concern Kaukji. He intended to let his army live off the plunder of conquered Jewish settlements. Nor did the fact that his medical supplies consisted of aspirin, bandages and laxatives worry him. He anticipated neither a long campaign nor serious casualties.

"I have come to Palestine to stay and tight until Palestine is a free and united Arab country or until I am killed and buried here," he announced. His aim, he declared, borrowing the slogan that was becoming the leitmotiv of the Arab leadership, was "to drive all the Jews into the sea."

"Everything is ready," he proclaimed. "The battle starts when I give the word."

_________

*JAMAL HUSSEINI: ARAB 'RACE' "HOMOGENEITY"*

Gold, D. (2009). The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City. United Kingdom: Skyhorse Publishing, p.152.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=sLZDIk4GUDsC&pg=PA152]

(The Fight For Jerusalem)

In October 1937, Husseini fled British Palestine, first heading for Lebanon, then Iraq and finally Europe, where he met in Berlin with Adolf Hitler during November 1941 and became a close ally of the Nazi cause. (He would seek asylum after the war, fearing he would be prosecuted as a war criminal.) In the meantime, back in 1937, the Palestinian strike metasta-sized into an armed revolt, with volunteers arriving from neighboring countries. Other leaders arose to lead the Palestinian Arabs' military struggle.
A major side effect of the 1936 Arab Revolt was that rural chieftains in British Mandatory Palestine provided much of the revolt's leadership. Jerusalem, in fact, lost its pre-eminent place in Palestinian politics. For example, of the 281 Arab officers involved, only ten (or 3.5 percent) came from Jerusalem." It was noteworthy that prior to the adoption of the UN General Assembly resolution in .. 1947 calling for the partition of Palestine, the representatives of the Palestinian Arabs did not make the issue of Jerusalem their primary focus. Jamal al-Husseini, the mufti's cousin, who presented the Palestinian Arab position before the United Nations, still used pan-Arab motifs in making the case of the Arab Higher Committee that he repre-sented: "one consideration of fundamental importance to the Arab world was that of racial homogeneity." He explained that "the Arabs lived in a vast territory stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, spoke one language, had the same history, tradition, and aspirations." He referred to the threat of an "alien body" entering the Middle East region.

Herf, J. (2022). Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, pp.65-66, 239.

p.65
[https://books.google.com/books?id=8YlZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA65]

In February 1947 the State Department received still more very public evidence about the presence of antisemitism and racism within the leadership of the Arab Higher Committee. On February 3 G. Lewis Jones, the second secretary in the US Embassy in London, sent "Initial Text of Jamal Husseini at the Opening of the Palestine Conference in London, January 27, 1947" to the Office of the Secretary of State, an office that George Marshall had assumed earlier that week.
Husseini, a cousin of Haj Amin, represented the Arab Higher Committee at the conference. He spoke at length about what he regarded as the injustice of the Balfour Declaration, the violation of Arab rights of self-determination it caused, and the unacceptability of the recommendation by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to support the admission of 100,000 Jews in Europe to Palestine. The Arabs of Palestine would resist partition with all the means at their disposal. To the Arab world, partition presents a further menace.

"The Arab world is a territorial continuity inhabited by a homogenous population with one national outlook. As such it is free from serious frictions and a natural bulwark for peace. Homogeneity in race has always been the natural basis for mutual understanding and community of interests. The creation of an alien Jewish state in Palestine means the destruction of this territorial continuity and national homogeneity and the creation of a running sore that will undoubtedly become a permanent source of trouble in the Middle East..."

p.239
[https://books.google.com/books?id=8YlZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA239]

Jamul Husseini Defends "Homogeneity in Race" and unapologetic. Perhaps because the discourse about homogeneity and heterogeneity, uniformity and diversity, racism and antiracism was not ubiquitous then, as it would become in subsequent decades, this remark-able statement did not receive the attention that it warranted. It made clear, however, that, as the journalists at The Nation and PM and liberal politicians such as Robert Wagner and Emanuel Celler had claimed, the rejection of the Zionist project by the Arab Higher Committee, the ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Jamal Husseini rested on the rejection of religious and racial diversity.

Husseini made no secret of his support for racial homogeneity. Perhaps he was unaware of the racist nature of the arguments he was making. In any case, he presented his beliefs as principles to defend, not hatreds that were a source of shame or scorn. Despite his denials, the antisemitic nature of his argument was equally obvious. His speech revealed a wish for an Arab world that was self-enclosed, xenophobic, and intolerant of difference and thus, in a fundamental sense, antimo-dern and illiberal. His was a reactionary form of nationalism, one that, like its European predecessors, was inseparable from racism. Jamal Husseini, like other advocates of racial homogeneity before him, argued that it was Europe's cultural and "racial" diversity and heterogeneity that had caused World War II. It was, to use more modern terms, an unvarnished attack on difference — in this case, the Jews as the intoler-able other. Jamal Husseini's views on race were not only a form of hatred. As his explanation of the causes of war in Europe made apparent, it was also part of the ideological framework with which he interpreted events.

The ideas about the causes of World War II that Jamal Husseini repeated in New York in September 1947 had been commonplace in government offices in Nazi Berlin. Only from this perspective was it thus "illogical" for the United Nations, an organization formed by the victors of World War II, to foster diversity and seek to break up the alleged racial homogeneity of the Arab world with "alien" peoples.

In the eyes of Jamal Husseini, the Zionist project, by making the Middle East more diverse, would foster war and disorder just as, in his view, diversity and racial heterogeneity had done in Europe. While the United States, or at least part of it, proclaimed itself a nation of immigrants proud of ethnic diversity, Jamal Husseini praised it for what he saw as its racial homogeneity.

_________

*AZZAM PASHA: ANNIHILATION*

Middle East Quarterly.
Fall 2011. Volume 18: Number 4
Azzam’s Genocidal Threat.
By: David Barnett, Efraim Karsh.

Of the countless threats of violence, made by Arab and Palestinian leaders in the run up to and in the wake of the November 29, 1947 partition resolution, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-general, that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”...

War of Extermination.
An October 11, 1947 report on the pan-Arab summit in the Lebanese town of Aley, ([https://tinyurl.com/3nm2vfrn].
[https://tinyurl.com/bdssn3cj]) by Akhbar al-Yom‘s editor Mustafa Amin, contained an interview he held with Arab League secretary-general Azzam. Titled, “A War of Extermination,”...

"...this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre..."
[https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/azzam-genocide-threat]

_________

*AHC: "FINAL SOLUTION" FLYER*

Yonay, E. (1993). No Margin for Error: The Making of the Israeli Air Force. United States: Pantheon Books, pp.9-11.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=NbHfAAAAMAAJ&q=%22final+solution%22]

Introduction.
A Line of Blood and Fire.
[...]
United States and the Soviet Union, the UN General Assembly voted to Partition Palestine between its embattled Arab and Jewish communities. Few decisions before or since have been imbued with such drama and historic imperative. Just half a decade earlier, 6 million Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps. Since World War II, shiploads of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe for a promise of a homeland in Palestine were turned back by British warships and imprisoned behind barbed wire on the island of Cyprus.
Now the civilized world was setting things right by that haunted, homeless minority. The vote was not about a Jewish state alone. Addressing Jewish and Arab national aspirations alike, the partition resolution provided for the establishment of two states -- once the British mandate for Palestine expired and His Majesty's troops pulled out in May of 1948 -- one Arab and one Jewish. Partition seemed equitable and biblically symmetrical. After thousands of years of war, exiles, and retribution, the children of Abraham would formally share that sliver of ancient land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

The Arab side of the equation was a mere formality. Whether divided as the world now proposed, or left undivided as the Arab League demanded, an Arab state in Palestine was a given. A Jewish state was not. The partition vote was, above all else, a world referendum on whether the Jews would have a country to call their own.
Thus to Palestine's Jews and their supporters, the partition was a victory beyond fondest dreams, and they now burst into the streets from New York to Tel Aviv to sing and dance in swirls of hora circles. To them, even one half * of Palestine seemed a fulfillment of ancient prophecies of national resurrection. To the Arabs in Palestine and the surrounding states , partition was a bitter defeat. For them, keeping just one half of Palestine Arab was no more acceptable than having it all become Jewish. Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, the Arab League's secretary - general who just four days earlier warned the gathering that "the partition line shall be nothing but a line of fire and blood," now furiously led his delegation out of the hall. The die had been cast. Instead of sharing their biblical heritage, Jews and Arabs would have to fight for it.

The war began no more than five hours after the vote, when a well-dressed Arab flagged down a bus making its way from the small
beach town of Netanya to Jerusalem, When the bus slowed down, the Arab whipped out a submachine gun from under his coat and
began to fire, joined by other Arabs lying in ambush by the side of the road. Five Jewish passengers were killed, two men and three women. Half an hour later, the same Arab gang attacked another bus killed two more Jews.

That same day, the Palestine Arab Higher Committee called for a three-day general protest strike. Massive Arab riots broke out across the country. In a circular handed to British soldiers and policemen, the committee urged them to stand aside. "The Arabs have taken in hand the final solution of the Jewish problem," the leaflet said. "Soon you shall be evacuated from here. Your sisters, wives, lovers, and family members are waiting for you. You have no stake in the Arab war. Why should you get killed?"

The British troops took heed and stood by as Arab mobs sacked and burned the Jewish commercial district of Jerusalem on December 2, killing one Jew and wounding twenty. The violence quickly spread from the cities to the countryside, reaching even behind prison walls, where Arab prisoners rioted and attacked Jewish inmates. The open reference to a "final solution" - Hitler's code word for the extermination of Europe's Jewry - was not accidental. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the charismatic Grand Mul of Jerusalem and head of the committee, had spent most of World War II in Berlin, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Middle East. Now in Cairo, he had launched a jihad for the liberation of Palestine. His Army of Salvation consisted of two armed forces..

Karsh, E. (2014). The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp.11-12.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=imyICwAAQBAJ&pg=PA11]

Introduction.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into two independent states - one Jewish, the other Arab - linked in an economic union. The City of Jerusalem was to be placed under an international regime, with its residents given the right to citizenship in either the Jewish or the Arab states.
Thirty-three UN members supported the resolution, 13 voted against and 10 abstained, including Great Britain, which had ruled Palestine since the early 1920s under a League of Nations Mandate. For Jews all over the world this was the fulfilment of a millenarian yearning for national rebirth in the ancestral homeland.
For Arabs it was an unmitigated disaster, an act of betrayal by the international community that surrendered an integral part of the Arab world to foreign invaders. In Tel-Aviv, crowds were dancing in the streets. In the Arab capitals there were violent demonstrations. `We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is,' Jamal al-Husseini, Vice-President of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs, told the General Assembly as it was about to cast its vote. 'If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies.' And an AHC circular was even more outspoken. 'The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the  Jewish problem,' it read. 'The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.'

Rothrock, J. (2011). Live by the Sword: Israel's Struggle for Existence in the Holy Land. United States: WestBow Press, p.7.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=t5RIXqbwHoYC&pg=PA7]

Milstein, U. (1996). History of the War of Independence: The first month. United Kingdom: University Press of America, p.43.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=CviXmYN64xQC&pg=PA43]

_________

*MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD'S AL-BANNA: "THEY (Arab people) WILL DRIVE THE JEWS WHO LIVE IN THEIR MIDST INTO THE SEA"*

AIM TO OUST JEWS PLEDGED BY SHEIKH; Head of Moslem Brotherhood Says U.S., British 'Politics' Has Hurt Palestine Solution.
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES.By Dana Adams Schmidt.
Aug. 2, 1948
AIM TO OUST JEWS PLEDGED BY SHEIKH; Head of Moslem Brotherhood Says U.S., British 'Politics' Has Hurt Palestine Solution.

CAIRO, Egypt, Aug. 1 -- Sheikh Hassan el-Bana, head of the Moslem Brotherhood, largest of the extremist Arab nationalist organizations, declared in an interview today: "If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea."
[https://www.nytimes.com/1948/08/02/archives/aim-to-oust-jews-pledged-by-sheikh-head-of-moslem-brotherhood-says.html]