In this overarching March 2014 inaugural lecture at the newly established Center for Palestine Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, while reminiscing about the genesis and evolution of the new narrative on the 1948 war, provides fresh analyses of both the Balfour Declaration and UN Security Council Resolution 242. He also addresses such pressing Palestinian issues as the one-state/two-state debate, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), and the Hamas/Fatah relationship. He concludes by highlighting the potentially catastrophic nature of the disputes centering on Jerusalem's Muslim holy places and the threat to the Middle East posed by the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, “the most dangerous political leader in the world today.”

Hasib Sabbagh, who died on 12 January 2010 after a long illness, was arguably the preeminent Palestinian entrepreneur in the business and contracting fields in the post-1948 period. Born to an old and distinguished Greek Catholic family of Safad in Eastern Galilee, Sabbagh established the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) in 1945 in Haifa with several partners after graduating in engineering from the American University of Beirut. Under his dynamic leadership and with the cooperation of his life-long partner, Said Khoury, the CCC (which Sabbagh reconstituted in Lebanon after the fall of Palestine) evolved from a modest local enterprise into the giant global multinational corporation that it is today. Using the CCC as his base, he began as of the early 1970s to devote his great energy to the service of Palestine, not only through his philanthropic ventures promoting social and educational causes, but also through his behind-the-scenes political mediation and reconciliation efforts. The following reminiscences trace the unusual partnership and friendship between the author, whose orientation was largely academic, and Sabbagh, whose approach reflected his big-business milieu. The two met in 1972 around the time when Sabbagh was embarking on his public service phase. They became fast friends and remained so until Sabbagh's death, joined by their common dedication to Palestine. The memoir includes Sabbagh's own account of his departure from Palestine in 1948 and sheds light on some relatively little known activities of the Palestinian business and academic elite in the post-1967 period.

Challenging the widely accepted premise that the 1948 war was a war of Jewish self-defense, the author demonstrates that the 1947 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) partition resolution was fundamentally a green light for the Yishuv's fully mobilized paramilitary organizations (supported by the resources of the World Zionist Organization) to effect the long-planned establishment of a Jewish state by force of arms. He further argues that as a national movement, Zionism was inherently conquest-oriented from the moment of its birth in Basel in 1897 and that it most closely resembles——in the alchemy of its religious and secular motivation and its insatiable land hunger, irredentism, and indifference to the fate of the "natives"——the Iberian Reconquista of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Almost fifty years ago, Walid Khalidi published ““The Fall of Haifa”” in the December 1959 issue of the now-defunct Middle East Forum . On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the fall of Haifa on 22 April 1948, a major landmark in the Palestine war, JPS is republishing the article, long unavailable, to which Professor Khalidi has added endnotes and an introduction.

The myth that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was triggered by orders from the Arab leaders——a cornerstone of the official Israeli version of the 1948 war and intended to absolve it of responsibility for the refugee problem——dies hard. Thus, it continues to be deployed by apologists for Israel as a means of blaming the Palestinians for their own fate. Even Benny Morris, one of whose major conclusions in his 1986 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was to discredit the Israeli claim, cannot seem to let go of it completely. Thus, the conclusion of the substantially revised update of the book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) , states that although the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) and the local National Committees made efforts to block the exodus of army-aged males, ““at the same time, they actively promoted the depopulation of villages and towns. Many thousands of Arabs——women, children, and old people……left, well before battle was joined, as a result of advice and orders from local Arab commanders and officials……. Indeed, already months before the war the Arab states and the AHC had endorsed the removal of dependents from active and potential combat zones……. There can be no exaggerating the importance of these early, Arab-initiated evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual exodus, of the remaining rural and urban populations”” (pp. 589––90). Given the endurance of this central plank of the Israeli doctrine of 1948, JPS has decided to reprint for the first time a difficult-to-obtain article published in July 1959 by Walid Khalidi in a long-defunct periodical of the American University of Beirut (AUB), Middle East Forum . Entitled ““Why Did the Palestinians Leave? An Examination of the Zionist Version of the Exodus of '48,”” the article was based on a talk Professor Khalidi gave at AUB earlier that year. After tracing the origins and first appearance of the Zionist claim, the article, using AHC and Arab League archival material, Arab and Palestinian press releases and reports, Arab and Haganah radio broadcasts, and other Arab and Israeli sources exhaustively rebuts the claim through showing both what the broadcasts did not say and what they did say. JPS is reprinting the article as is. While the July 1959 article debunks the myth using documents at the national or Arab level, a second article by Professor Khalidi published in December 1959, ““The Fall of Haifa,”” touches on the Arab orders at the local level, an issue equally emphasized by Morris. The article, also published in the Middle East Forum , puts the exodus from the city after the Haganah offensive that led to its capture in April 1948 within the overall military context: Anglo-Zionist collusion, the balance of power, and so on. The article also deals directly with the orders and reproduces the texts of the eleven communiquéés issued by the Haifa National Committee between the UN General Assembly partition decision (November 1947) and the fall of Haifa in April, all of which have bearing on the subject. JPS is reproducing these pages as an appendix but intends to publish ““The Fall of Haifa”” in its entirety at a later date.

This historical narrative mixed with personal reminiscences, undertaken to provide background for Albert Hourani's testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry elsewhere in this issue, focuses closely on the decade or so that precedes the committee's hearings in 1946. In recounting the establishment of the committee and the Arab Office (which Hourani represented), the author highlights the complex interaction between the local, regional, and international dimensions: the intra-Palestinian (involving primarily Haj Amin al-Husayni, Musa Alami, and Jamal Husayni), the regional (involving especially Nuri Pasha al-Said of Iraq), and the international (especially the process by which the United States began to replace Britain as the pacesetter of events in postwar Palestine). A supporting cast includes George Antonius, Ahmad Hilmi Pasha, Hussein Fakhry Khalidi, Ahmad Shukayri, and Wasfi Tall.

This address delves into the underpinnings of the current crisis in the occupied territories: the Bush administration's deemphasis on the Palestine problem to avoid confrontation with Israel over settlement policy; the designation of Sharon as a "man of peace" despite his history; rejection of any exploration of the political roots of 9/11; the deepening alliance between American Christian fundamentalism and Israel; the willful and gross distortion of the Palestinian stance at Camp David. Nonetheless, the author argues that the parameters of a settlement, reinforced by the Saudi initiative, remain the two-state solution, and it is up to Israel and the United States to respond.

One of the most difficult issues of the final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is Jerusalem. The complexity of this issue has been compounded by U.S. actions to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and by allegations that the prospective site of the embassy is Palestinian refugee property confiscated by Israel since 1948. Evidence of Palestinian ownership of the 7.7-acre site-the subject of this report-was gathered by a group of Palestinians from the records of the United Nations Conciliation Committee on Palestine (UNCCP) in New York, the Public Records Office (PRO) in London, the U.S. State Department (DOS), the Jerusalem Municipality, the Israeli Land Registry Records (Tapu), the Israeli Ministry of justice, and heirs of the original owners. The research extended over a six-year period and involved some forty individuals. Although hampered by the inaccessibility of the site to surveyors and by Israel's rezoning and reparcellation of the land in question, the evidence yielded by this research shows that at least 70 percent of the site is refugee private property, of which more than a third is Islamic waqf (trust). On 15 May 1948, the last day of the Mandate, the site was owned by seventy-six Palestinians. On 28 October 1999, the American Committee on Jerusalem (ACJ) addressed a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright outlining the results of this research and requesting a meeting to share the findings with the DOS. It was only on 28 December that the DOS replied to the effect that any data that the group had should be communicated to the DOS "to be kept on file." Given the grave implications of the embassy issue for the peace process and the credibility of the United States, the ACJ felt as a result of the correspondence that it had no alternative but to go public.

This article examines the 1947 UN resolution recommending the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state as the fulfillment of fifty years of Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and as the opportunity to expand that state. The article analyzes the components of the partition plan itself in the light of the demographic and land ownership realities of the time and discusses the implications to the present day of the general acceptance of the Zionist version of events.