Some notes
editWL, p.98: "The Arab villagers were not particularly lazy (as anyone familiar with early Zionist writers such as Moshe Smilanski can attest), but they were certainly poor, disease ridden, and not highly educated. The Zionist mission to bring "progress" to the Arabs was misguided. The Zionist found it difficult to understand how an educated Arab such as Musa Alami could say that he preferred another century of backwardness to receiving the blessings of civilization from the Zionism."
GF. p.231: Note 8: "In his memoirs Ben Gurion, describing the conversation, [] Musa Alami, he says, "preferred that the country should remain poor and empty for another hundred years, until the Arabs were in a position to develop it themselves", a sentiment he found understandable in a Nationalist.
In general Ben Gurion´s account agrees with Musa´s recollection of the conversations, but contains a number of errors of fact, the most serious of which is to describe Musa as a "confidant of the Mufti" and to imply that in this and subsequent contacts he acted as a link to the latter."
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- WL, p.162: "Musa Alami was aware of popular Palestinian feelings. In his autobiography, he describes the political scene in Jerusalem after the establishment of Israel in 1948. He writes,
- "The new [Palestinian] leaders were a set of young men of some education, all of them in the traumatic condition induced by the consciousness of having suffered a resounding defeat at the hand of an enemy whom they heartily despised."
- Note 1: Musa Alami never wrote an autobiography, AFAIK. GF. writes, p.161: "He [=Musa Alami] found the local political scene extremely confusing. The former Higher Arab Commmittee was still scattered, and in any case largely discredited, and the new leaders were a set of young men of some education, all of them in the traumatic condition induced by the consciousness of having suffered a resounding defeat at the hand of an enemy whom they heartily despised, and all of them searching round for some means of revenge without having any idea how to act."
- In other words; the words belong to GF, not MA.
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- WL, p.162: "In 1934, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, requested a meeting with Musa Alami, not in his capacity as a senior government official but as a leading person in Arab political like, a supporter of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin, and a brother-in-law of Jamal Husseini, who was another central figure in the Arab world. We have only Ben-Gurion´s account of these meetings, but Alami writes that these accounts were more or less correct. While Sharett (Shertok, as he then was) opened with soothing words comparing Palestine with crowded hall in which there was always room for more people, Ben-Gurion was more forthright. He wanted to know whether the Palestinians would accept the creation of a Jewish state in return for Jewish support of a federation of independent Arab states with which the Jewish state would be associated, perhaps even incorporated."
- Note: we also have Musa Alami ´s account of the meetings, but those accounts WL choose to ignore.
- Note: The "caveat" about the correctness of Ben-Gurion´s account has been "censored"... so Ben-Gurion´s wrong assertion that Alami was supporter of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin, denied already in 1969, is given new life by WL in 2006.
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- WL, p.163: "As his biographer [=GF] later wrote, "He seems at times to have regarded the Zionists rather as Kenyan farmers regards elephants; dangerous creatures, always liable to destroy his property, and quite capable of being lethal, which he expects the government to keep under control, but against which he feels no personal enimity."
- Note: The quote is taken from GF, p. 104, and reproduced perfectly correct. WL proves here that he is familiar with the GF-book, which he so falsely "quotes" from on the previous page.
Bibliography
edit- David Ben-Gurion: My talk with Arab leaders. 1972. (Hebrew version in 1967)
- GF: Sir Geoffrey Furlonge: Palestine is my country. The story of Musa Alami. 1969. (Author´s note, at the start of the book: "Any opinion expressed where obviously not those of Musa Alami himself, are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the British Government from whose service I retired nine years ago." GF was, among other appointments, British Ambassador to Jordan (1952-54) and Ethiopia (-1959)).
- WL: Walter Laqueur: Dying for Jerusalem. The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City. 2006. Sourcebooks, Inc. ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0632-0, ISBN-10: 1-4022-0632-1