But, really, like 95% ran away in part because there were good reasons to do that. So many of them who fled were migrant laborers living in shanty shacks who owned nothing. And it was no big deal to leave behind one’s worldly possessions for what they assumed to be for a few days.

Most of these migrant workers had come from all over Araby. From Morocco to Yemen to Iraq and were illiterate, unskilled manual laborers who had no permanent homes and possessions in Mandatory Palestine.

But then there were other Arabs who did run away and did have homes and possessions; the crème de la crème really. Like Edward Said’s uncle who lived in Jerusalem in the Arab Christian neighborhood of Talbieh next to Jewish Rehavia, an Arab neighborhood for Christians, mostly Lebanese like the Saids, which neighborhood would not have existed without the Zionists first creating Rehavia. These far more sophisticated Arabs – especially those living in Haifa, because they had come recently from Lebanon to get in on the development of the Zionists – still had family in Beirut. And so it was not much of an ordeal when the war began to throw some clothes into a suitcase and drive the family car – an indication of their greater wealth – over the border into Lebanon to spend some time with family as the Arab armies overran developed Palestine and took it away from the Jews. What shameless thieves these Arabs are.

Yes, the first wave of 100,000 Arabs left Palestine even before the war began, following the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 of 2 November, 1947 which called for – finally – creating a Jewish state on 12% of the original promise to the Jews.

(The Merchant of Venice, come to think of it, is also about doing business with a Jew and breaking one’s promise to him.)

So the first exodus from Palestine, after word came from New York in early November of ‘47, were these 100,000 richest and most sophisticated Arabs: the lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, successful merchants, Edward Said’s people, who simply picked up and left because they did not want to fight for Palestine – which made Edward Said’s career all the more, in my eyes, contemptibly disgusting.

In a way, the career indignation about the alleged theft of Palestine by us racist Jews was really for Said a masquerade meant to cover the truth that his people did not fight for Palestine. They were cowards.

And this goes for all of them. Mahmoud Abbas as well is on record remembering his flight from Tsfat as a young teenager, when teenage Jewish boys were helping with the war effort. Arafat as well was living in Gaza at the time when he fled to Cairo even before the IDF showed up.

So these first 100,000 Arab refugees were not driven from their homes. And the bulk of the rest weren’t either.

Yet this is the fairy tale of Jewish evil that is in the head, at this very moment, of hundreds of antiJews on nine small vessels having, I am sure, this evening a wonderful time partying aboard ship as they cruise toward Gaza to act out the fairy tale of Jews starving the Ancient Ones to death after having in 1948 stolen their country from them…