Arab-Jewish Relations Quotes
While Ben Gurion’s strategy has been successful with many Arab citizens of Israel, it has not been completely so that the standard of living of Israeli Arabs is on the average still not quite the equal of the Jewish citizens. For those Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza, they have had the worst of both worlds—the occupation by Israel and dependence on the Palestinian Authority for economic development which has never occurred despite the fact that huge sums of money have gone to the Palestinian Authority for the purpose.
This quote is very important historically as it bears on the two different narratives of the creation of Israel given by the Jews and the Arabs. The Arabs claim that in the 1948 partition of Palestine, the Jew attacked the Arabs and drove them out of the areas in which they had lived for years, The Israelis claim that they urged the Arabs to stay and that all those who did, received full citizenship in the new state of Israel. The Arab leaders pressured and in some cases even forced the Arabs to leave so that the Arab armies could use artillery and other war weapons and not have to worry about hitting Arabs. They promised the Arabs who left that they could return in a few days when the Jews were defeated and pushed into the sea, and the Arabs could have the Jewish property. This report of an impartial actor, tends to support the Jewish view of the happening in so far as the behavior of the Jews was concerned. There was no pressure placed on Arabs by Jews to leave. It was actually, the reverse. There were however, two small rural areas where Jewish radicals did try and drive the Arabs out, but in general the Haifa experience was the norm.
