Pritish DasMy response:

Mr. Das asks me to respond to his two posts, and I am happy to do so.
1) The Azzam Pasha quote. I am grateful for Mr. Das's contextualization. The quotation, it was finally determined after much argument, comes from an interview Azzam Pasha gave on October 11, 1947 to the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar El-Yom. He said "Personally I hope the Jews do not force us into this war because it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades. I think the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will exceed the Palestinian population." The question of partition of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish, was to be voted on in November of that year. Thus, the meaning of the sentence is pretty clear. If the Jews ever declare statehood the armies of the Arab League (of which Azzam Pasha was Secretary General) will attack and will massacre the Jews. I cited the quotation not to prove bloodthirstiness but the overconfidence of the Arabs going into the war. Nothing Mr. Das says in any way contradicts that point. (It is always a pleasure to have one's arguments confirmed by a hostile source, especially one this hostile.)
2) Gang of bloodthirsty fanatics. Mr. Das mistakenly thinks I cited the quotation from Azzam Pasha to prove, like the scurrilous Zionists he deplores, that Arab politicians and leaders are bloodthirsty fanatics. I would not have thought that anyone needed to prove that after the slaughter of Jewish civilians on October 7. Burning people alive, raping and beheading, aren't signs of bloodthirstiness? Mr. Das seems to set a very high bar. And giving uppers to your killers so they won't be affected by the horrors they are enacting is a pretty good sign that the leaders are even more bloodthirsty than those they lead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myg-vx1TH7c (That's the Hindustan Times, Mr. Das; I could also have linked to The Times of India.). But if Mr. Das wishes to exempt the Palestine Authority from seeming bloodthirsty and fanatical, he should know its Religious Authority posted instructions after the massacre to its Muslim preachers that they should preach the passage from the Haditha about the End of Time requiring the killing of all Jews. It is the same passage that can be found in Article 7 of the Hamas charter, and goes like this: The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, and the rock or a tree will say: ‘Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’; except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” You can find it, Mr. Das, on the PA Facebook page of October 18, 2023. Notice too that it says nothing about killing "Zionists," just Jews. If that is not just bloodthirsty but also fanatical, Mr. Das and I have very different understandings of the meaning of the words.
3) The Partition Plan. Israel accepted it; the Arabs didn't, because, like Mr Das, they don't think the Jews have any right to any part of the land. Ben Gurion didn't like it, but accepted it. Had the Arabs done so, there would have been peace.
4) What ancient homeland? Israel is the ancient homeland of the Jewish people. Scoffing and denying don't change that fact. Every year, at Passover, Jews end the feast by chanting "next year in Jerusalem." There were always Jews in Jerusalem and by the 1880's they may, depending on the estimate, have been a majority. Love of Zion is essential to the Jewish religion. If a Native American tribe went back to its old home, would it be fair to call them "settler colonialists? But that is exactly what the Jews have tried to do for millennia and finally were able to succeed in.
5) Petrodollars. Mr. Das seems to want to argue about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I would be happy to discuss these with him some other time, but I think we have enough on our hands dealing with the Jews.
6) Terrorism and racist connotations. The term "terrorism" has its origin in the French Revolution, where the Jacobins celebrated the use of Terror as a way of intimidating suspected counterrevolutionaries. Its classical history is European, and especially Russian. It means killing civilians to create terror and undermine the regime whose people are being killed. I refer Mr. Das to Walter Laqueur's work on terrorism. The idea that the word has a racist connotation is, to put it mildly, deeply unhistorical. Hamas and the PA (with its Martyr's Fund for the families of those who kill Jews) engage in terrorism by any reasonable definition of the word.
7) Some voluntary, some forced. Mr. Das accuses me of being disingenuous by saying that some Arabs left voluntarily in 1946.. Well, here are some quotations from contemporary Arab journalists.
a) On April 3, 1949 the Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station reported: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem”. ("The Palestinian Delusion, The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process", Robert Spencer, 2019, page 83)
b) On October 12, 1963 the Egyptian daily “Akbar el Yom” reported that : “The 15th May, 1948 arrived…On that day the Mufti of Jerusalem ( the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini) appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead”. ("The Palestinian Delusion", ibid, page 83)
c) On April 9, 1953 the Jordanian daily “Al Urdan” reported: “For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumours exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs..By spreading rumours of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy”. ("The Palestinian Delusion", ibid, page 83)
d) On October 3, 1948 “The Economist” reported: “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades”. ("The Palestinian Delusion", ibid, page 82).
e) On August 19, 1951 the Beirut weekly “Kul-Shay": “Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor not conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their homes? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it”. ("The Palestinian Delusion, ibid, page 84).
f) In 1955, the secretary of the Office of the Arab League in London, Edward Atiyah, admitted "This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs enable to re enter and retake possession of their country". ("The Palestinian Delusion", ibid, page 84).
6) The Jordanian newspaper Filastin on February 19, 1949: “The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees” ("The Palestinian Delusion", ibid, page 82-83).

I have tried to address the points Mr. Das has challenged me on. Now I would like him to consider and perhaps respond to my questions.
1) When you deny any claim made by Jews to their ancient homeland, a claim that is based on international law, on decisions made by the League of Nations and the United Nations, when you support the ambitions of Hamas and the PA, which gloat about the final extermination of the Jews, you must realize what a "Palestine Free From the River To the Sea" means. There are 7 million Jews in Israel. So either you support the slaughter of those Jews, descendants of refugees from European anti-Semitism and Arab Jew-hate or you have some other plan. Which is it and if the latter, what is it?
2) Do you care at all about the Palestinians? If so, why not put pressure on the Arab countries finally to allow the descendants of those 700,000 who fled in 1948 to assimilate and get citizenship in their countries? It was the cynical decision to use those refugees as a political football, a perpetual open sore that make the refugee question a live one today. There isn't a Muslim refugee problem in India or a Hindu one in Pakistan is there? Those countries absorbed their coreligionists, but the Arab states refused. And why don't you put pressure on the PA to make peace with Israel? Wouldn't an independent state on part of the territory be better than perpetual war? If not, why not?