Monday, September 03, 2007

Babbling Saba

Fuad S. Saba of Winfield, Ill. has a letter in today's NYTimes:-

“The Kibbutz Sheds Socialism and Regains Lost Popularity” (front page, Aug. 27), about the “renewal” of certain Kibbutzim in Israel, did not mention a core fact: many, if not most, of these collectives were built on land illegally expropriated from the original Arab Palestinian owners.

While the starry-eyed founders of the collectives pledged themselves to the Marxist axiom “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” they somehow managed to overlook the fact that the underlying land was taken from Arab owners, who certainly were not part of this socialist dream and who needed the land themselves.

Apparently your reporter does not see that as a problem. If the collectives had actually borne the fair market value cost for their lands, in transactions with willing, uncoerced sellers, I imagine that many of them never would have attained a semblance of economic independence in the first place.


How silly.

The land upon which kibbutzim were built was not "taken from Arab owners".

Until 1948, all kibbutzim were built on land bought from their Arab landowners. For cash.

After the 1947-49 war, one of aggression initiated by Arabs following the rejection of the United Nations partition resolution, yes, many kibbutzim are located on former Arab villages, just as many Arab villages prior to the return of Jews to their homeland were built on Jewish villages. The Arabs sought to destroy and ended up being displaced but that was their choice, as unfortunate as it is.

Is Saba the grandson of an Arab terrorist who wrote this leterr (see here) from his enforced exile? See this report as well. And this:

The Arab Higher Committee was formally established in April 1936, with Haj Amin Al-Husseini elected its Pres. on the 25th of that month. Its members were: Jamal Husseini, Hussein Fakhri Al-Khalidi, Yaqoub Al-Ghossein, Fuad Saba, Ragheb Nashashibi, Ahmed Hilmi Abed Baqi, Ahmed Latif Saleh, Alfred Rock and Awni Abdul Hadi - all of whom would remain at the forefront of the Palestinian national movement throughout the Mandate period and beyond.


In any case, our Saba it seems is economically active with the American University of Beirut and appears to be on the board of directors of ABANA and is a Partner with Ernst & Young’s International from a Google search I did.

All in all, another neat Arab propaganda sleight-of-word.

3 comments:

Suzanne Pomeranz said...

It's also important to remind the your readers (and others when possible) that while "many kibbutzim are located on former Arab villages, just as many Arab villages prior to the return of Jews to their homeland were built on Jewish villages," NO Arab villages (destroyed, abandoned or otherwise) in Judea and Samaria were used as foundation for the yishuvim built there either before 1948 or after 1967.

suzanne

Daniel said...

Alfred Rock?

YMedad said...

Rock is the phonetic way of spelling an Arabic surname that I would write out as Ra'ak.