"Jews came and took, by means of uprooting
        and expulsion, a land that was Arab.  We
        wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet
        to come across as moral at the same time."

        "The Arab armies -- chiefly from Egypt, Syria,
        Iraq and Transjordan, now Jordan -- totaled
        just over 20,000 men.  The core of the Arab
        nations' fighting forces remained behind,
        in part to ensure the internal stability of
        their own fledgling regimes."

        "Crucially, Israel had a quiet agreement with
        Transjordan that its Arab Legion, the strongest
        of the invading armies, would take over only
        the West Bank, which the U.N. partition plan
        had intended as the center of a Palestinian
        Arab State."

MER - Washington - 7 January:
   Not the words of an Arab historian; rather of an Israeli one -- Professor Ilan Pappe at Haifa University.

   The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is written about in considerable volumes by many.  Most, especially what is in English, and especially what has been written by Israeli and Jewish apologists, is, well, full of it.  There are major exceptions among Jews however -- indeed, some of the best literature about the conflict has been authored by Jews, Noam Chomsky in the U.S. and Maxim Rodinson and Maxim Ghilan in Europe among them.  Many of the key people involved with MER and the Committee on the Middle East, especially in the beginning, are Jewish.

   Jewish Israeli historians have been in the forefront of correcting the historical record since the 1970s.  In the past two decades important books by Simcha Flapan (deceased) and Benny Morris (now at
Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba) -- published in both Hebrew and English -- have revealed the myths and lies of the extensive Israeli propaganda that has misled so many for so long.  And Israeli General
Mattityahu Peled -- one of the five commanding Generals in the 1967 war and then a Professor of Arabic Literature at Tel Aviv University, was among the most outspoken Israeli advocates of a Palestinian State
back in the days when it would have been much more possible than is the case today, and back in the days when even talking to the PLO landed Jews in Israeli prisons.