Summary
Senior Zionist leader in Pappe’s account, who visited the emptied Palestinian homes of Haifa a few days after its cleansing in April 1948 and met King Abdullah in Amman on 13 May 1948 as he played his double game between the Arab League and the Jewish state.
Details
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Visiting Haifa a few days after its cleansing, Meir at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables and children had left toys and books on the floor; the sights reminded her of the stories her family had told her about Russian brutality against Jews, but left no lasting mark on her or her associates’ determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.124-125).
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On 13 May 1948 she met King Abdullah in Amman, where the king seemed more tense than ever because of the double game he was playing — promising the Arab League to head the military effort in Palestine while striving for an agreement with the Jewish state (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.150).
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Makdisi quotes Meir to the London Times in 1969, in support of the claim that Israel denies the Palestinians are a single people: “it was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them,” “they did not exist” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.124).