Abbas tvingades inte fly

Mahmoud Abbas brukar beteckna sig som en palestinsk flykting som tvingats fly från staden Safed. Men senaste vecka berättade Abbas i en TV-intervju om hans och föräldrarnas "flykt" från Safed. Det verkar som om han då skulle ha pratat sabbare än han tänkt.
Familjen var välbärgad och de gav sig iväg av fruktan för att judarna skulle hämnas en tidigare arabisk massaker på judarna i staden,sade han
Det var alltså inte judarna som drev iväg araberna från Safed utan fruktan för att judarna när de blev starkare skulle handla på samma sätt mot araberna som araberna handlat mot judarna.

Läs mera: Another Tack: Self-exiled by guilt (Sarah Honig, Jerusalem Post)
"Scant attention was paid last week to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's revelations on Al-Palestinia TV. Abbas talked about his youth in Safed, from whence he routinely claims his family was forcibly driven out by Israeli troops in 1948.
"Until the nakba" (calamity in Arabic - the loaded synonym for Israeli independence), he recounted, his family "was well-off in Safed." When Abbas was 13, "we left on foot at night to the Jordan River... Eventually we settled in Damascus... My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work.
"People were motivated to run away... They feared retribution from Zionist terrorist organizations - particularly from the Safed ones. Those of us from Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what happened during the 1929 uprising. This was in the memory of our families and parents... They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale - saving our lives and our belongings."
The "uprising" Abbas alluded to was one among the serial pogroms instigated by infamous Jerusalem mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who's still revered throughout the Arab world. He was a Berlin-resident avid Nazi collaborator during World War II and a wanted war criminal postwar.
In August 1929 Husseini rallied Arabs to slaughter Jews on trumped-up allegations of Jewish takeover attempts at the Temple Mount. Sixty-seven members of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron were hideously hacked to death. That was the most notorious massacre, but others were perpetrated throughout the country. In the equally ancient Jewish community of Safed, 21 were butchered no less gruesomely (a cat was stuffed into one old woman's disemboweled abdomen). A child and young woman, due to be married the next day, were cold-bloodedly shot dead by Arab constables whom British mandatory officers assigned to watch over the majority of Safed's Jews who sought safety in the police courtyard.