Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine - Specific Chapters

Specific Chapters

• In one of his chapters, Katz writes about the presence of the Jews in the Land of Israel (“Palestine”), explaining that it has gone unbroken since 1700 BCE, including the period between the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE and the rebirth of the Jewish state in the 20th century. He makes clear that Jewish communities in Hebron have been continuous from 1500 until the 1929 Arab massacres of the Jews, as have been the Jewish communities in Safed, Tiberias and elsewhere.

• Another central issue is Katz's argument against the notion of "Palestinian refugees". Katz claims that the Arab refugees were not driven from Palestine by anyone – the vast majority left, whether of their own free will or at the orders or exhortations of their leaders, with the reassurance that their departure would help in the war against Israel. The Arabs are supposedly the only declared refugees who became refugees not by the action of their enemies or because of well-grounded fear of their enemies, but by the initiative of their own leaders. For nearly a generation, those leaders have wilfully kept as many people as they possibly could in degenerating squalor, preventing their rehabilitation, and holding out to all of them the hope of return and of "vengeance" on the Jews of Israel, to whom they have transferred the blame for their plight.