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{{Short description|Expulsion and flight of Palestinians during the 1948 Palestine war}}
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The '''Palestinian exodus''' (]: الهجرة الفلسطينية ''al-Hijra al-Filasteeniya'') refers to the ] flight of ] during the ]. It is called the '''Nakba''' (]: النكبة), meaning "disaster" or "cataclysm", by ]s.
{{Nakba}}

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During the war of 1948, many fled or were expelled from their homes in the part of the land that would become the ] to other parts of the land or to neighbouring countries.
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In the ], more than 700,000 ] – about half of ]'s predominantly Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes, at first by ] paramilitaries,{{Efn|Namely ], ], and ].}} and after the establishment of ], by ].{{Efn|{{cite book |title=Dear Palestine A Social History of the 1948 War |first=Shay |last=Hazkani |publisher=] |date=2019 |isbn=978-1-5036-2766-6 |quote="It is noteworthy that the aforementioned silk gloves were not invoked when discussing the Palestinian "exodus," i.e., the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, which became a pressing concern in the months following the adoption of Plan D (tokhnit dalet) by the Haganah’s general staff in March 1948."}}{{cite book |last1=Warf |first1=C. |last2=Charles |first2=G. |title=Clinical Care for Homeless, Runaway and Refugee Youth: Intervention Approaches, Education and Research Directions |publisher=Springer International Publishing |year=2020 |isbn=978-3-030-40675-2 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=irzhDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA384 |quote=By 1948, the majority of Palestinians, about 700,000 to 800,000 people from 500 to 600 villages, were displaced. They were either expelled or fled from their homes for fear of being killed, as had actually taken place in a number of villages.}}{{cite book |last=Gerber |first=H. |title=Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present |publisher=] UK |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-230-58391-7 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7-eMDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA189 |quote=One of the more important consequences of the 1948 war was the expulsion and/or flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes inside Israel, and the refusal of Israel to allow them to return, despite an express UN decision calling on it to do so. ... About 750,000 of the 900,000 strong Palestinian population were expelled, or fled, all completely terrorized and fearing for their lives}}{{cite book |title=Peace Philosophy in Action |editor1-first=Candice C. |editor1-last=Carter |editor2-first=Ravindra |editor2-last=Kumar |chapter=3. Retooling Peace Philosophy: A Critical Look at Israel’s Separation Strategy |first1=Kristofer J. |last1=Petersen-Overton |first2=Johannes D. |last2=Schmidt |first3=Jacques |last3=Hersh |publisher=] |date=27 September 2010 |isbn=978-0-230-11299-5 |doi=10.1057/9780230112995 |page=49 |url=https://www.academia.edu/37602648 |quote="as scores of historical documentation has since revealed, the Yishuv encouraged the flight or directly forced 750,000 Palestinians (more than 80 percent of the population at the time) from their homeland in 1948 and destroyed 531 Palestinian villages"}}{{cite book |title=Catastrophes Views from Natural and Human Sciences |editor-first=Andreas |editor-last=Hoppe |chapter=The Nakba—Flight and Expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 |first=Ghaleb |last=Natour |publisher=Springer |date=2015 |quote=The Nakba is a catastrophe describing "the expulsion and flight of the Palestinians which reached its peak in 1948" |page=81}}{{cite book |last=Slater |first=Jerome |title=Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 |publisher=] |year=2020 |isbn=978-0-19-045908-6 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=y1AAEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA406 |quote=There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba. All of the leading Israeli New Historians—particularly Morris, Shlaim, Pappé, and Flapan—extensively examined the issue and revealed the facts. Other accounts have reached the same conclusions. For example, see Ben-Ami, "A War to Start All Wars"; Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948"; Walid Khalidi, "Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited"; Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Raz, Bride and the Dowry. Reviewing the evidence marshaled by Morris and others, Tom Segev concluded that "most of the Arabs in the country, approximately 400,000, were chased out and expelled during the first stage of the war. In other words, before the Arab armies invaded the country" (Haaretz, 18 July 2010). Other estimates have varied concerning the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled before the May 1948 Arab state attack; Morris estimated the number to be 250,000–300,000 (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 262); Tessler puts it at 300,000 (A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 279); Pappé’s estimate is 380,000 (The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 96). In another recent review of the evidence, the Israeli historian Daniel Blatman estimates the number to be about 500,000 (Blatman, "Netanyahu, This Is What Ethnic Cleansing Really Looks Like"). Whatever the exact number, even Israeli "Old Historians" now admit that during the 1948 war, the Israeli armed forces drove out many of the Palestinians, though they emphasized the action as a military "necessity." For example, see Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, 167–68. In July 2019, the Israeli government sought to cover up the extensive documentary evidence in its state archives that revealed detailed evidence about the extent of the Nakba—even the evidence that had already been published by newspapers and Israeli historians. A Haaretz investigation of the attempted cover-up concluded: "Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba, including Israeli eyewitness reports at the time" (Shezaf, "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs").}}{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44114385 |title=Why Nakba is the Palestinians' most sombre day, in 100 and 300 words |publisher=] |date=15 May 2018 |quote=up to 750,000 Palestinians who had lived on that land fled or were expelled from their homes.}}{{cite web|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/the-meaning-of-nakba-israel-palestine-1948-gaza/560294/ |title=A 'Catastrophe' That Defines Palestinian Identity |first=Hussein |last=Ibish |date=14 May 2018 |work=] |quote=the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs, perhaps 700,000 to 800,000 people, had either fled or been expelled}}{{cite book |last1=McDowall |first1=David |title=The Palestinians |year=1987 |publisher=] Report no 24 |isbn=978-0-946690-42-8 |first2=Claire |last2=Palley |page=10}}}} The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the ].<ref>Honaida Ghanim, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211106040944/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40608203 |date=6 November 2021 }} ] March 2009 Vol. 22, No. 1 pp.23-39 p.37 Stern, Yoav (13 May 2008). {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210517035746/https://www.haaretz.com/1.4979391 |date=17 May 2021 }}. '']''. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080612162136/http://www.badil.org/Publications/badil-nakba-60-info-packet/index.html |date=12 June 2008 }}, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights; Cleveland, William L. ''A History of the Modern Middle East'', Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004, p. 270. {{ISBN|978-0-8133-4047-0}}{{cite journal |first1=Honaida |last1=Ghanim |jstor=40608203 |title=Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba |journal=] |date=March 2009 |volume=22 |number=1 |pages=23–39 |doi=10.1007/s10767-009-9049-9 |s2cid=144148068 | issn=0891-4486 }}</ref> ] targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between ] were destroyed. Village ] in a ] ] and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Benny |last1=Morris |author1-link=Benny Morris |first2=Benjamin Z. |last2=Kedar |author2-link=Benjamin Z. Kedar |doi=10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 |title='Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War |journal=] |date=19 September 2022 |volume=59 |issue=5 |pages=1–25 |s2cid=252389726 }}</ref><ref name=Pappe2006 /> Other sites were subject to ].<ref>{{cite journal |last=Bardi |first=Ariel Sophia |title=The "Architectural Cleansing" of Palestine |journal=] |date=March 2016 |volume=118 |issue=1 |pages=165–171 |doi=10.1111/aman.12520}}</ref>
The UN estimates their number at 711,000 while the Israeli estimate of the refugees is 420,000 and the Palestinian estimate is 900,000.
The degree to which the flight of the refugees was voluntary or involuntary is hotly debated. Some cases of expulsion are well-documented, such as in ]. In other cases, such as in ] and ], the Arabs fled before Jewish troops had entered. Paradoxically, there were instances of Jewish leaders requesting that resident Arabs stay, as well as Arab leaders who called for evacuation of civilian Arabs from the war zone. How much each factor has contributed is disputed.


The precise number of ], many of whom settled in ] in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute,<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Crenshaw |editor-first=Martha |title=The Consequences of Counterterrorism |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eqrbWrjrvDAC&pg=PA356 |year=2010 |publisher=Russell Sage Foundation |location=New York |isbn=978-0-87154-073-7 |page=356 |last1=Pedahzur |first1=Ami |last2=Perliger |first2=Arie |chapter=The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Israel}}</ref> although the number is around 700,000, being approximately 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel.<ref>] (1992). ''Expulsion of the Palestinians''. Institute for Palestine Studies, this edition 2001, p. 175.</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Rashid |last=Khalidi |title=Palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pQx8u8MN13AC&pg=PA21 |date=September 1998 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-231-10515-6 |pages=21– |author-link=Rashid Khalidi |quote=In 1948 half of Palestine's ... Arabs were uprooted from their homes and became refugees |access-date=19 March 2016 |archive-date=14 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230114054409/https://books.google.com/books?id=pQx8u8MN13AC&pg=PA21 |url-status=live }}</ref> About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the ], before the ] on 14 May 1948. The desire to prevent the collapse of the Palestinians and to avoid more refugees were some of the reasons for the entry of the ] into the country, which began the ].<ref>Gelber 2006, p. 137: "Drawn into the war by the collapse of the Palestinians and the ], the Arab governments' primary goal was preventing the Palestinians' total ruin and the flooding of their own countries by more refugees."</ref>{{refn|Matthew Hogan (2001). ''The 1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin Revisited'': "Meanwhile, the subsequent May 1948 outbreak of regional war between the newly declared state of Israel and the Arab states, beginning the prolonged Arab-Israeli conflict, was contemporaneously explained by Arab League chief ] in terms of the ]: "The massacre of Deir Yassin was to a great extent the cause of the wrath of the Arab nations and the most important factor for sending the Arab armies."}}
On 5th May 1949, the UNGA debated accepting Israel into the UN, and Israel promised to abide by both UN General Assembly (GA) and Security Council (SC) resolutions . However, at the ] Apr-Sept of the same year, Israel's offer was to take back around 1/5th of the refugees in return for recognition by its neighbours, and this was rejected.


Although the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus remain a significantly controversial topic in public and political discourse, with a prominent amount of ], most scholarship today agrees that expulsions and violence, and the fear thereof, were the primary causes.{{refn|Slater, Jerome (2020). Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-19-045908-6. "There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba. All of the leading Israeli New Historians—particularly Morris, Shlaim, Pappé, and Flapan—extensively examined the issue and revealed the facts. Other accounts have reached the same conclusions. For example, see Ben-Ami, "A War to Start All Wars"; Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948"; Walid Khalidi, "Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited"; Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Raz, Bride and the Dowry. Reviewing the evidence marshaled by Morris and others, Tom Segev concluded that "most of the Arabs in the country, approximately 400,000, were chased out and expelled during the first stage of the war. In other words, before the Arab armies invaded the country" (Haaretz, 18 July 2010). Other estimates have varied concerning the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled before the May 1948 Arab state attack; Morris estimated the number to be 250,000–300,000 (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 262); Tessler puts it at 300,000 (A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 279); Pappé's estimate is 380,000 (The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 96). In another recent review of the evidence, the Israeli historian Daniel Blatman estimates the number to be about 500,000 (Blatman, "Netanyahu, This Is What Ethnic Cleansing Really Looks Like"). Whatever the exact number, even Israeli "Old Historians" now admit that during the 1948 war, the Israeli armed forces drove out many of the Palestinians, though they emphasized the action as a military "necessity." For example, see Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, 167–68. In July 2019, the Israeli government sought to cover up the extensive documentary evidence in its state archives that revealed detailed evidence about the extent of the Nakba—even the evidence that had already been published by newspapers and Israeli historians. A Haaretz investigation of the attempted cover-up concluded: "Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba, including Israeli eyewitness reports at the time" (Shezaf, "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs").”}}{{refn|Abu-Laban, Yasmeen; Bakan, Abigail B. (July 2022). "Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting". ''The Political Quarterly'', Vol. 93, Issue 3, p. 511: "Palestinians have long known what happened to them in 1948 and its very human costs. However, the work of the 'new' (or revisionist) Israeli historians from the late 1970s also challenged the official state narrative of a miraculous wartime victory through access to material in the Israeli archives. This has established what Ilan Pappé has summarised as the 'ethnic cleansing of Palestine', a process involving massacres and expulsions at gunpoint. In light of the ever-growing historiography, serious scholarship has left little debate about what happened in 1948. However, Nakba denial remains a political issue of the highest order.}}{{refn|Laila Parsons, McGill University, 2009, Review of Ilan Pappé's 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', "Ilan Pappe has added another work to the many that have already been written in English on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. These include works by Walid Khalidi, Simha Flapan, Nafez Nazzal, Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, and Norman Finkelstein, among others. All but one of these authors (Morris) would probably agree with Pappe’s position that what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 fits the definition of ethnic cleansing, and it certainly is not news to Palestinians themselves, who have always known what happened to them." }} Scholars widely describe the event as ],<ref name="Ian Black-2010"/><ref name=Pappe2006 /><ref name="Shavit">Shavit, Ari. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210905113719/http://www.logosjournal.com/morris.htm |date=5 September 2021 }}. Logos. Winter 2004</ref> although some disagree.<ref>{{cite book |first=David |last=Matas |title=Aftershock: anti-zionism and anti-semitism |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DYR7SqcMe9gC&pg=PA56 |year=2005 |publisher=Dundurn Press Ltd. |isbn=978-1-55002-553-8 |pages=555–558 |access-date=19 March 2016 |archive-date=3 July 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240703040549/https://books.google.com/books?id=DYR7SqcMe9gC&pg=PA56#v=onepage&q&f=false |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Mêrôn |last=Benvenis'tî |title=Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7itq6zYtSJwC&pg=PA124 |year=2002 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-520-23422-2 |pages=124–127 |access-date=19 March 2016 |archive-date=3 July 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240703040549/https://books.google.com/books?id=7itq6zYtSJwC&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q&f=false |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>Benny Morris (21 February 2008). "Benny Morris on fact, fiction, & propaganda about 1948". '']'', {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081207221932/http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2008/02/benny-morris-on-fact-fiction-propaganda.html |date=7 December 2008 }}</ref> Factors involved in the exodus include direct expulsions by Israeli forces, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare including ], massacres such as the widely publicized ]<ref name="Morris-2004">{{cite book |last=Morris |first=Benny |author-link=Benny Morris |title=The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited |publisher=] |date=2004 |isbn=978-0-521-81120-0}}</ref>{{rp|239–240|date=November 2012}} which caused many to flee out of fear, crop burning,{{refn|Pappe, I. (1999). Were they expelled?: The history, historiography and relevance of the Palestinian refugee problem. In G. Karmi & E. Cotran (Eds.), The Palestinian exodus, 1948–1988(pp. 37–61). London: Ithaca Press – "Where expulsion failed, transfer was encouraged, by every possible means (even by setting fire to the fields of Palestinian villages considered wealthy or by cutting water supply to city neighborhoods). Weitz convinced the Israeli government in May 1948 to confiscate any looted Arab harvest for the needs of the newly born state. This policy of burning fields or confiscating them continued throughout the summer of 1948."}}{{refn|Morris 2004 "While before May, burning Arab crops was mainly a Haganah means of retaliation for Arab attacks, during May–June the destruction of the fields hardened into a set policy designed to demoralise the villagers, hurt them economically and, perhaps, precipitate their exodus."}} ] epidemics in some areas caused by Israeli well-poisoning,<ref>], ], {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230305221558/https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 |date=5 March 2023 }} ] 19 September 2022, pages =1-25 p.8:'The SHAI, in its report from the end of June 1948 on the causes of the Arab flight from Palestine, mentioned 'the typhus epidemic' as 'an exacerbating factor in the evacuation' in certain areas. 'More than the disease itself, it was the panic induced by the rumours of the spread of the disease in the area that was a factor in the evacuation', stated the report. In its site-by-site breakdown of the Arab flight, the report mentioned 'harassment and the typhus epidemic' as the causes of the partial exodus of the population from Acre on 6 May.'</ref> and the collapse of Palestinian leadership including the demoralizing impact of wealthier classes fleeing.<ref>J.P.D. Dunbabin, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221008140853/https://books.google.com/books?id=R9QFBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298 |date=8 October 2022 }} ] 2014 {{isbn|978-1-317-89293-9}} pp.256-258.</ref>
The exodus, along with the parallel ], and the resulting ] problem remain a central and controversial topic in the conflict between ] and the ].


Later, ] passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees.<ref>Kodmani-Darwish, p. 126; Féron, Féron, p. 94.</ref><ref name="UNRWA"/> The existence of the so-called ] allowing for immigration and naturalization of any Jewish person and their family to Israel, while a ] has been denied, has been cited as evidence for the charge ].<ref>Human Rights Watch. "A Threshold Crossed," 27 April 2021. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210428073809/https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution |date=28 April 2021 }}.</ref><ref>Amnesty International. "Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime against Humanity," 1 February 2022. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230720191349/https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/ |date=20 July 2023 }}.</ref> The status of the refugees, and in particular whether Israel will allow them the right to return to their homes, or compensate them, are key issues in the ongoing ].
The responsibility itself of the exodus and refugee problem is still debated, with some blaming Israel and others blaming the Arab leadership (for rejecting the ] and waging ]).<ref>{{cite book
|author = Alan Dershowitz
|title = The Case for Israel
|publisher = John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
|date = 2003
|location = Hoboken, New Jersey
|pages = 265
|id = ISBN 0-471-67962-6
}}</ref><ref>, Stanford Israel Alliance, '']'', May 15, 2002</ref> Of the most quoted scholars and historians on the subject, ] writes: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab."<ref>Benny Morris, ''Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949'', 1989, p. 286</ref>


==History== ==History==
The history of the Palestinian exodus is closely tied to the events of the war in Palestine, which lasted from 1947 to 1949, and to the political events preceding it. The first phase of that war began on 30 November 1947,<ref>], ''1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War'', p. 77, Yale University Press, 2008.</ref> a day after the ] adopted the ], which split the territory into Jewish and Arab states, and an ].
], inside the green line west of ].]]
The history of the Palestinian exodus is closely tied to the events of the war in Palestine, which lasted from 1947 to 1949. Many factors played a role in bringing it about. What exactly those factors were, and how each of them contributed to the course events took, remains a hotly debated issue.
], near Jerusalem, overlooking Kibbutz Zova, which was built on the village lands.]]


In September 1949, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated 711,000 ]s existed outside Israel,<ref>{{cite web |author=United Nations General Assembly |date=23 August 1951 |url=https://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/b792301807650d6685256cef0073cb80/93037e3b939746de8525610200567883?OpenDocument |title=General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine |format=OpenDocument |access-date=3 May 2007 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110822123836/http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/b792301807650d6685256cef0073cb80/93037e3b939746de8525610200567883?OpenDocument |archive-date=22 August 2011}}</ref> with about one-quarter of the estimated 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remaining in Israel as "]".
:''For more information on the historical context, see ], ], ], and ].''


===First stage of the flight, December 1947 - March 1948=== ===December 1947 March 1948===
In the first few months of the civil war, the climate in the ] became volatile, although throughout this period both Arab and Jewish leaders tried to limit hostilities.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|90–99|date=November 2012}} According to historian ], the period was marked by Palestinian Arab attacks and Jewish defensiveness, increasingly punctuated by Jewish reprisals.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|65|date=November 2012}} ] wrote that attacks by the ] and ] resulted in Palestinian Arab retaliation and condemnation.<ref>Flapan, 1987, p. 95; also quoted by Finkelstein, 1995, p. 82.</ref> Jewish reprisal operations were directed against villages and neighborhoods from which attacks against Jews were believed to have originated.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|76|date=November 2012}}
In the first few months of the civil war the climate in Palestine became volatile. Hostilities between Jews and Arabs increased and general lawlessness spread as the British declared that their mandate would end in May 1948. Strategically, the period was marked by Arab initiatives and Jewish reprisals (Morris, 2003, p. 65), although the ] and ] reverted to their 1937-1939 strategy of placing bombs in crowded places such as bus stops, shopping centres and markets, and their attacks on British forces reduced British troops' ability and willingness to protect Jewish traffic (Ibid, p. 66). General conditions deteriorated: the economic situation became unstable and unemployment grew (Gelber, p. 75). Rumours spread that the Husaynis were planning to bring in bands of ''fallahin'' to take over the towns (Gelber, p. 76). Some Palestinian Arab leaders set a bad example by sending their own families abroad (Gelber, pp. 76-77). The ] embarked on a systematic evacuation of non-combatants from several frontier villages in order to turn them into military strongholds (Gelber, p. 79). By the end of March 1948 around 100,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled to other parts of Palestine such as Nazareth, Nablus and Bethlehem or had left the country altogether (Morris, p. 67) to settle in ] or ]. Many of these were Palestinian Arab leaders, middle and upper-class Palestinian Arab families from urban areas. Around ] the Arab governments agreed that their consulates in Palestine would only issues visas to old people, women and children and the sick (Ibid, p. 134). On 29-] the Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) reported that 'the ] was no longer approving exit permits for fear of panic in the country' (Ibid, p. 137 quoting Haganah Archive (HA) 105\257).


The retaliations were more damaging than the provoking attack and included killing of armed and unarmed men, destruction of houses and sometimes expulsion of inhabitants.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|76|date=November 2012}}{{rp|125|date=November 2012}} The Zionist groups of ] and ] reverted to their 1937–1939 strategy of indiscriminate attacks by placing bombs and throwing grenades into crowded places such as bus stops, shopping centres and markets. Their attacks on British forces reduced British troops' ability and willingness to protect Jewish traffic.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|66|date=November 2012}} General conditions deteriorated: the economic situation became unstable, and unemployment grew.<ref>Gelber, p. 75.</ref> Some Palestinian Arab leaders sent their families abroad.
During this period there was no official ] policy favoring expulsion and Jewish leaders anticipated that the new Jewish state would have a sizable Arab minority. The Haganah was instructed to avoid spreading the conflagration by indiscriminate attacks and to avoid provoking British intervention (Morris, 2003, pp. 68-86). On ], 1947 the Haganah approved an aggressive defense strategy, which in practice meant 'a limited implementation of "]" (''Tochnit Mai'' or ''Tochnit Gimel''), which, produced in May 1946, was the Haganah master plan for the defence of the Yishuv in the event of the outbreak of new troubles... The plan included provision, ''in extremis'', for "destroying Arab transport" in Palestine, and blowing up houses used by Arab terrorists and expelling their inhabitants''. (Ibid, p. 75). In early January the Haganah adopted ], a scheme to assassinate leaders affiliated to ], placing the blame on other Arab leaders, but in practice few resources were devoted to the project and the only attempted killing was of ] (Ibid, p. 76).


] wrote that the ] embarked on a systematic evacuation of non-combatants from several frontier villages in order to turn them into military strongholds.<ref>(Gelber, p. 79)</ref> Arab depopulation occurred most in villages close to Jewish settlements and in vulnerable neighborhoods in Haifa, Jaffa and West Jerusalem.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|99–125|date=November 2012}} The more impoverished inhabitants of these neighborhoods generally fled to other parts of the city. Those who could afford to flee further away did so, expecting to return when the troubles were over.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|138|date=November 2012}} By the end of March 1948 thirty villages were depopulated of their Palestinian Arab population.<ref name="Pappe2006">Ilan Pappé, 2006</ref>{{rp|82|date=November 2012}} Approximately 100,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled to Arab parts of Palestine, such as Gaza, Beersheba, Haifa, Nazareth, Nablus, Jaffa and Bethlehem.
Palestinian belligerency in these first few months was 'disorganised, sporadic and localised and for months remained chaotic and uncoordinated, if not undirected' (Morris, 2003, p. 86). ] lacked the resources to mount a full-scale assault on the Yishuv and restricted himself to sanctioning minor attacks and to tightening the economic boycott (Ibid, p. 87).


Some had left the country altogether, to ], Lebanon and ].{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|67|date=November 2012}} Other sources speak of 30,000 Palestinian Arabs.<ref>Glazer, p. 104.</ref> Many of these were Palestinian Arab leaders and middle- and upper-class Palestinian Arab families from urban areas. Around 22 March, the Arab governments agreed that their consulates in Palestine would issue entry visas only to old people, women, children and the sick.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|134|date=November 2012}} On 29–30 March the intelligence service of ], the main Zionist paramilitary, reported that "the ] was no longer approving exit permits for fear of panic in the country."<ref>Morris, 2004, p. 137, quoting Haganah Archive (HA) 105\257.</ref>
Throughout this period both Arab and Jewish leaders tried to limit the hostilities (Morris, 2003, pp. 90-99).


], near Jerusalem, overlooking Kibbutz Zova, which was built on the village lands]]
The only official expulsion at this time took place at ], south of Haifa, where Palestinian Arabs were evicted and their houses destroyed on ] - ] ] (Morris, 2003, p. 130).
], inside the green line west of ]]]


The Haganah was instructed to avoid spreading the conflagration by stopping indiscriminate attacks and provoking British intervention.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|68–86|date=November 2012}}
Overall Morris concludes that the 'Arab evacuees from the towns and villages left largely because of Jewish - Haganah, IZL or LHI - attacks or fear of impending attack' but that only 'an extremely small, almost insignificant number of the refugees during this early period left because of Haganah or IZL or LHI expulsion orders or forceful "advice" to that effect' (Morris, 2003, pp. 138-139).


On 18 December 1947, the Haganah approved an aggressive defense strategy, which in practice meant a limited implementation of "Plan May"; this, also known as "Plan Gimel" or "Plan C",<ref>''Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine''. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 27.</ref> produced in May 1946, was the Haganah master plan for the defence of the ] in the event that, the moment the British were gone, new troubles broke out. Plan Gimel included ] for assaults on Jewish houses and roads.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|75|date=November 2012}}<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210509094010/https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Pappe_Ilan/Ethnic_Cleansing_Palestine.html |date=9 May 2021 }} by ]. Oneworld Publications, 2006.</ref>
===Second stage of the flight, April 1948 - June 1948===
The fighting in these months was concentrated in the Jerusalem - Tel Aviv area, where consequently, most depopulations took place. The ] in early April, and the exaggerated rumours that followed it, helped spread fear and panic among the Palestinians (Morris, 2003, p. 264).


In early January the Haganah adopted ], a scheme to assassinate leaders affiliated to ], placing the blame on other Arab leaders, but in practice few resources were devoted to the project, and the only attempted killing was of ].{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|76|date=November 2012}}
By the estimates of Morris, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians became refugees during this stage (Ibid, p. 262).


The only authorised expulsion at this time took place at ], south of Haifa, where Palestinian Arabs were evicted and their houses destroyed on 19–20 February 1948.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|130|date=November 2012}} In attacks that were not authorised in advance, several communities were expelled by the Haganah and several others were chased away by the Irgun.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|125|date=November 2012}}
===Third stage of the flight, July-October 1948===
The largest single expulsion of the war began in ] and ] ]. 60,000 inhabitants of the two cities were forcibly expelled on the orders of ] and ]. Rabin wrote in his memoirs:


According to ], the Zionists organised a campaign of threats,{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|55|date=November 2012}} consisting of the distribution of threatening leaflets, "violent reconnaissance" and, after the arrival of mortars, the shelling of Arab villages and neighborhoods.{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|73|date=November 2012}} Pappé also wrote that the Haganah shifted its policy from retaliation to offensive initiatives.{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|60|date=November 2012}}
:What would they do with the 50,000 civilians in the two cities ... Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution, and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route advancing eastward. ... Allon repeated the question: What is to be done with the population? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: Drive them out! ... 'Driving out' is a term with a harsh ring ... Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion. (''Soldier of Peace'', p. 140-141)


During the "long seminar", a meeting of ] with his chief advisors in January 1948, the main point was that it was desirable to "transfer" as many Arabs as possible out of Jewish territory, and the discussion focussed mainly on the implementation.{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|63|date=November 2012}} The experience gained in a number of attacks in February 1948, notably those on ] and ], was used in the development of a ] detailing how enemy population centers should be handled.{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|82|date=November 2012}} According to Pappé, ] was the master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians.{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|82|date=November 2012}} However, according to Gelber, ] instructions were: In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled outside the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was met, the residents could stay put, under military rule.<ref>{{cite book |first=Yoav |last=Gelber |title=Palestine 1948: War, Escape And The Emergence Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UcSUgrDsD_sC |year=2006 |publisher=Sussex Academic Press |isbn=978-1-84519-075-0 |pages=306 |quote=the method for taking over an Arab village: Surround the village and search it (for weapons). In case of resistance – … expel the population beyond the border… If there is no resistance, a garrison should be stationed in the village. . . appoint local institutions for administering the village internal affairs. The text clarified unequivocally that expulsion concerned only those villages that would fight against the Hagana and resist occupation and not all Arab hamlets.}}</ref>
Additionally, widespread looting and several cases of rape () took place during the evacuation. In total, about 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in this stage according to Morris (2003, p. 448).


Palestinian belligerency in these first few months was "disorganised, sporadic and localised and for months remained chaotic and uncoordinated, if not undirected".{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|86|date=November 2012}} ] lacked the resources to mount a full-scale assault on the Yishuv, and restricted himself to sanctioning minor attacks and to tightening the economic boycott.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|87|date=November 2012}} The British claimed that Arab rioting might well have subsided had the Jews not retaliated with firearms.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|75|date=November 2012}}
===Fourth stage of the flight, October 1948 - November 1948===
This period of the exodus was characterized by Israeli military accomplishments, which were met with resistance from the Palestinian Arabs who were to become refugees. The Israeli military activities were confined to the ] and the sparsely populated ]. It was clear to the villages in the Galilee, that if they left, return was far from imminent. Therefore far fewer villages were spontaneously depopulated than previously. Most of it was due to a clear, direct cause: expulsion and deliberate harassment, as Morris writes 'commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering' (2003, p. 490).


Overall, Morris concludes that during this period the "Arab evacuees from the towns and villages left largely because of Jewish—Haganah, ] or ]—attacks or fear of impending attack" but that only "an extremely small, almost insignificant number of the refugees during this early period left because of Haganah or IZL or LHI expulsion orders or forceful 'advice' to that effect."{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|138, 139|date=November 2012}}
], which was the Israeli military operation that conquered the upper Galilee, is one of the examples in which a direct expulsion order was given to the commanders: 'Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered.' (] ], ])


===April–June 1948===
Altogether 200,000 to 230,000 Palestinians left in this stage, according to Morris (Ibid, p. 492).
]
{{Palestinians}}
By 1 May 1948, two weeks before the ], nearly 175,000 Palestinians (approximately 25%) had already fled.<ref>Sachar, Howard M. ''A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time''. New York: Knopf. 1976. p. 332. {{ISBN|978-0-679-76563-9}}</ref>


The fighting in these months was concentrated in the ]–] area, On 9 April, the ] and the rumours that followed it spread fear among the Palestinians.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|264|date=November 2012}} Next, the Haganah defeated local militia in ]. On 21–22 April in ], after the Haganah waged a ] including psychological warfare a mass flight followed. Finally Irgun, under ], fired mortars on the infrastructure in ]. Combined with the fear inspired by Deir Yassin, each of these military actions resulted in panicked Palestinian evacuations.<ref>{{cite AV media
===Contemporary mediation and the Lausanne Conference===
| title = Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948
====UN mediation====
| medium = film
The United Nations was involved in the conflict from the very beginning. In the autumn of 1948 the refugee problem was a fact and possible solutions were discussed. ] said on ]:
| publisher = ]
| location = ], ], ]
| time = 13:09
| date = 1998
| quote = Only five days earlier, the entire Arab population of Tiberias, a town by the Sea of Galilee, had panicked and fled, after the defeat of their militia by the Haganah. This was the first instance of a mass Arab evacuation from a town. The Haganah commanders in Haifa were undoubtedly well aware of this precedent as their own battle unfolded.
| url = http://vimeo.com/3714871
| access-date = 4 December 2012
| archive-date = 18 November 2021
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20211118064727/https://vimeo.com/3714871
| url-status = live
}}</ref><ref>{{cite AV media
| people = ]
| title = Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948
| medium = film
| publisher = ]
| location = ], ], ]
| date = 1998
| time = 13:33
| quote = The Arabs for their part recalled that the Jews had ] outside Jerusalem only ten days before increasing their fear and panic as Haifa fell.
| url = http://vimeo.com/3714871
| access-date = 4 December 2012
| archive-date = 18 November 2021
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20211118064727/https://vimeo.com/3714871
| url-status = live
}}</ref><ref>{{cite AV media
| people = E. Toubassi
| title = Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948
| medium = film
| publisher = ]
| location = ], ], ]
| date = 1998
| time = 23:27
| quote = On the 25th or 26th of April, the people knew in Jaffa there was no hope. Also, the massacre in Deir Yassin or some other villages made panic among the Arab Palestinians. They started preparing for immigration.
| url = http://vimeo.com/3714871
| access-date = 4 December 2012
| archive-date = 18 November 2021
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20211118064727/https://vimeo.com/3714871
| url-status = live
}}</ref>


The significance of the attacks by underground military groups Irgun and Lehi on Deir Yassin is underscored by accounts on all sides. ] regards Deir Yassin as "a turning point in the annals of the destruction of the Arab landscape".<ref>]. ''Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948''. University of California Press. 2002. p. 116. "Long afterward Menachem Begin boasted that the panic that descended on the Arabs caused them to flee from the cities of Tiberias and Haifa as well. And indeed, the consequences of this barbaric act of ethnic cleansing were far-reaching. The Deir Yasin Massacre, which was reported on over and over again in all the Arab media, inspired tremendous fear, which led many Arabs to abandon their homes as the Jewish forces drew near. There is no doubt that Deir Yasin was a turning point in the annals of the destruction of the Arab landscape."</ref>
:No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and indeed, offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries (Bowker, 2003, pp. 97-98).


Israel began engaging in ] in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May.<ref>{{harvnb |Morris |Kedar |2023 |pp=752–776 |ps=, " Taken together, these documents revealed that the Acre and Gaza episodes were merely the tip of the iceberg in a prolonged campaign ... But bulldozing or blowing up houses and wells was deemed insufficient. With its back to the wall, the Haganah upped the ante and unleashed a clandestine campaign of poisoning certain captured village wells with bacteria – in violation of the Geneva Protocol ... The aim of ''Cast Thy Bread'' ... like the demolitions, was to hamper an Arab return. Over the weeks, the well-poisoning campaign was expanded to regions beyond the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and included Jewish settlements captured or about to be captured by Arab troops, and then to inhabited Arab towns, to facilitate their prospective conquest by the Haganah or to hinder the progress of the invading Arab armies ... The Yishuv’s decision to use the bacteriological weapons was taken at the highest level of the government and military and was, indeed, steered by these officers, with Ben-Gurion’s authorization, through the campaign ... The use of the bacteria was apparently fairly limited in Israel/Palestine during April–December 1948, and apart from Acre, seems to have caused no epidemic and few casualties. At least, that is what emerges from the available documentation."}};
UN General Assembly ], which was passed on ], ], and reaffirmed every year since, was the first resolution that called for Israel to let the refugees return:
{{harvnb |Nashef |2018 |ps=, p. 143 n. 4 (quoting Pappe 2006)}};
{{harvnb |Carus |2017 |p=145 |ps=, "Some BW programs relied on extremely crude methods, about as sophisticated as those employed by some terrorist groups or criminals ... The same was true of the reported activities associated with the early Israeli program in 1948."}};
{{harvnb |Docker |2012 |pp=19–20 |ps=, "The urbicide of May 1948 directed against the old Crusader city of Acre involved biological warfare, including poisoning of water, Pappé writing that it seems clear from Red Cross reports that the Zionist forces besieging the city injected 'typhoid germs' into the water supply, which led to a 'sudden typhoid epidemic'. There was a similar attempt to 'poison the water supply in Gaza' on 27 May 1948 by injecting typhoid and dysentery viruses into wells; this attempt was fortunately foiled."}};
{{harvnb |Martin |2010 |p=7 |ps=, "Israeli biological warfare activities included Operation Shalach, which was an attempt to contaminate the water supplies of Egyptian Army. Egypt reports capture of four 'Zionists' trying to infect wells with dysentery and typhoid. There are also allegations that a typhoid outbreak in Acre in 1948 resulted from a biological attack and that there were attacks in Egypt in 1947 and in Syria in 1948."}};
{{harvnb |Sayigh |2009 |p= |ps=, "A unit had been formed to develop biological weapons, and there is evidence that these were used during 1948 to poison the water supplies of Akka and Gaza with typhoid bacteria."}};
{{harvnb |Ackerman |Asal |2008 |p=191 |ps=, "Egyptian Ministry of Defense and, later, Israeli historians, contend that Israeli soldiers contaminated Acre’s water supply."}};
{{harvnb |Pappe |2006 |ps=, pp. 73–4 ("The flame-thrower project was part of a larger unit engaged in developing biological warfare under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir ... The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February . Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people.") and 100–101 ("During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak ... A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled.")}};
{{harvnb |Abu Sitta |2003 |ps=, "The Zionists injected typhoid in the aqueduct at some intermediate point which passes through Zionist settlements ... The city of Acre, now burdened by the epidemic, fell easy prey to the Zionists. ... Two weeks later, after their "success" in Acre, the Zionists struck again. This time in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had gathered after their villages in southern Palestine were occupied. The end however was different. ... The biological crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians in Acre and Gaza in 1948 are still being enacted today."}};
{{harvnb |Leitenberg |2001 |p=289 |ps=, "As early as April 1948, Ben Gurion directed one of his operatives in Europe (Ehud Avriel) to seek out surviving East European Jewish scientists who could "either increase the capacity to kill masses or to cure masses: both things are important". At that time, that 'capacity' meant chemical and biological weapons ... These were ultimate weapons that could be used either for offense or defense (and the context of the immediate military operations, as well as those that had preceded it, would be the critical factors in that categorization)."}};
{{harvnb |Cohen |2001 |p=31 |ps=, "It is believed that one of the largest operations in this campaign was in the Arab coastal town of Acre, north of Haifa, shortly before it was conquered by the IDF on May 17,1948. According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread in Acre in the days before the town fell to the Israeli forces was not the result of wartime chaos but rather a deliberate covert action by the IDF—the contamination of Acre's water supply ... The success of the Acre operation may have persuaded Israeli decisionmakers to continue with these activities. On May 23, 1948, Egyptian soldiers in the Gaza area caught four Israeli soldiers disguised as Arabs near water wells ... It seems that many people knew something about these operations, but both the participants and later historians chose to avoid the issue, which gradually became a national taboo ... Despite the official silence, it appears there is little doubt now about the mission of the failed Gaza operation."}}</ref>


====Haifa====
:the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
{{Further|Battle of Haifa (1948)}}
Palestinians fled the city of ] en masse, in one of the most notable flights of this stage. Historian ] writes that not only had half of the Arab community fled the city before the final battle in late April 1948, but another 5,000–15,000 left voluntarily during the fighting while the rest, some 15,000–25,000, were ordered to leave, as was initially claimed by an Israeli source, on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|195-198|date=November 2012}}


Karsh concludes that there was no Jewish grand design to force this departure, and that in fact the Haifa Jewish leadership tried to convince some Arabs to stay, to no avail.<ref>Karsh, E. "Nakbat Haifa: Collapse and Dispersion of a Major Palestinian Community" in ''Middle Eastern Studies'', Volume 37, Number 4/ 1 October 2001.</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.mideastweb.org/haifa1948.htm|title="Middle East Source Documents – Haifa – British Police Report Regarding Flight of Arabs – 1948|access-date=24 April 2016|archive-date=10 October 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211010054838/http://www.mideastweb.org/haifa1948.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> ] disputes this account, saying that two independent studies, which analysed ] and ] intercepts of radio broadcasts from the region, concluded that no orders or instructions were given by the Arab Higher Committee.<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090319003435/http://ipsnewsite.mysite4now.com/enakba/exodus/Erskine%20Childers%2C%20Walid%20Khalidi%2C%20Jon%20Kimche%2C%20et%20al.pdf |date=19 March 2009 }} 1961 Correspondence in "The Spectator" on "Why the Refugees Left" Originally Appendix E of Khalidi, Walid, "Plan Dalet Revisited: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" in 18 no. 1, (Aut. 88): 51–70.</ref> Benny Morris agrees with Karsh, while also acknowledging "an undercurrent of expulsive thinking."{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|date=November 2012|pages=198–207}}
====The Lausanne Conference of 1949====
''See also main article ]''


According to Morris, "The Haganah mortar attacks of 21–22 April were primarily designed to break Arab morale in order to bring about a swift collapse of resistance and speedy surrender. But clearly the offensive, and especially the mortaring, precipitated the exodus. The three-inch mortars "opened up on the market square a great crowd a great panic took hold. The multitude burst into the port, pushed aside the policemen, charged the boats and began to flee the town", as the official Haganah history later put it".{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|191, 200|date=November 2012}} According to Pappé,{{r|Pappe2006}}{{rp|96|date=November 2012}} this mortar barrage was deliberately aimed at civilians to precipitate their flight from Haifa, while Morris denies this claim.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|200|date=November 2012}}
In 1949 at the ], Israel proposed allowing 100,000 refugees to return, this number included an alleged 25,000 who had already returned surreptitiously and 10,000 projected family-reunion cases. The offer was conditional on a full peace treaty that would allow Israel to keep all the territory it had captured and on the Arab states agreeing to absorb the remaining refugees. The offer was rejected by the Arab states (Morris, 2003, pp. 549-587). Safran concluded that "The Arab states, who had refused even to negotiate face-to-face with the Israelis, turned down the offer because it implicitly recognized Israel's existence". (Nadav Safran, ''Israel: The Embattled Ally'', Harvard University Press, p 336)".


The Haganah broadcast a warning to Arabs in Haifa on 21 April: "that unless they sent away 'infiltrated dissidents' they would be advised to evacuate all women and children, because they would be strongly attacked from now on".<ref>"British Proclamation in Haifa Making Evacuation Secure", ''The Times'', London, 22 April 1948; p. 4; Issue 51052; col D</ref>
==Causes of the Palestinian exodus==
Historians have given over the years different reasons and assigned different responsibilities to the Palestinian exodus. This topic remains controversial today, more than half a century after the events. The answers given to these questions could have important consequences for the future of these refugees and their descendants, as well as to other Arabs and Jews in Israel.


Commenting on the use of "psychological warfare broadcasts" and military tactics in Haifa, ] writes:
The following theories were proposed:
<blockquote>Throughout the Haganah made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that "the day of judgement had arrived" and called on inhabitants to "kick out the foreign criminals" and to "move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals". The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to "evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven". Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were "to kill every Arab encountered" and to set alight with fire-bombs "all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route."{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|191, 192|date=November 2012}}</blockquote>
* The 'Arab leaders' endorsement of the refugee flight' was the official line taken by the governments of Israel and mainstream Israeli Historians, assigning the main responsibility for the exodus to calls made by local and foreign Arab leaders.
* The 'Transfer principle' Theory, proposed by the Israeli 'New Historians' (mainly Benny Morris), contends that displacement of population was a consequence of a common line of thought in Zionist politics that emphasized the transfer of Palestinian Arabs as a precondition to the establishment of a Jewish state.
* The 'Master Plan' theory, proposed by Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, claims that the Palestinian exodus was planned and organised in advance by Jewish authorities.
* The 'Two-stage explanation' is a theory brought forth by Yoav Gelber, which distinguishes between two phases of the exodus. Before the Arab invasion, it explains the exodus as a result of the crumbling Arab social structure, and after the invasion as a result of actions by the Israeli army during the campaign in the Galilee and Negev.


By mid-May there were only ~4,000 Palestinians in Haifa. This remaining Arab population was relocated to the neighbourhood of ], in a process that has been described as "]".<ref>Benny Morris (1988). "Haifa’s Arabs: Displacement and Concentration, July 1948". Middle East Journal, 42(2), 241–259. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4327736</ref><ref>], ] (2006)</ref>{{refn|Finkelstein, Norman. "Myths, Old and New". Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 1 (1991): 66–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/2537366 – "In July, Haifa's remaining inhabitants, some 3,500, were packed into a ghetto in the downtown Wadi Nisnas neighborhood."}}{{refn|Azoulay, Ariella. "Declaring the State of Israel: Declaring a State Of". Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 265–85. https://doi.org/10.1086/657293 – " the ghetto in Wadi Nisnas that had been established for them after they had been expelled from their homes."}} A systematic destruction of Arab housing in certain areas, which had been planned before the War, was implemented by Haifa's Technical and Urban Development departments in cooperation with the IDF's city commander ].{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|209–211|date=November 2012}}
===The "Arab leaders' endorsement of flight" Theory===
====Claims that the Flight was Instigated by Arab Leaders====
Israeli official sources have long claimed that the refugee flight was in large part instigated by Arab leaders. For example, Yosef Weitz wrote in October 1948: 'The migration of the Arabs from the ] was not caused by persecution, violence, expulsion deliberately organised by the Arab leaders in order to arouse Arab feelings of revenge, to artificially create an Arab refugee problem.' (] official ], 1948)


====Further events====
In a 1959 paper, Walid Khalidi attributed the "Arab evacuation story" to ], who wrote two 1949 pamphlets in which 'the evacuation order first makes an elaborate appearance'.
According to Glazer (1980, p.&nbsp;111), from 15 May 1948 onwards, expulsion of Palestinians became a regular practice. Avnery (1971), explaining the Zionist rationale, says, <blockquote>I believe that during this phase, the eviction of Arab civilians had become an aim of David Ben-Gurion and his government... UN opinion could very well be disregarded. Peace with the Arabs seemed out of the question, considering the extreme nature of the Arab propaganda. In this situation, it was easy for people like Ben-Gurion to believe the capture of uninhabited territory was both necessary for security reasons and desirable for the homogeneity of the new Hebrew state.<ref>Avnery, Uri (1971). ''Israel Without Zionism: A Plan for Peace in the Middle East''. New York: Collier Books, pp. 224–25.</ref></blockquote>


Based on research of numerous archives, Morris provides an analysis of Haganah-induced flight:
In his book ''Palestine 1948'', Yoav Gelber explains why he believes that Arab authorities did not prompt the Palestinian population to flee but on the contrary tried to stop it. Referring to historiographic work of Schechtman, he writes that the exodus greatly astonished the Yishuv's leaders and that 'attempting to explain the phenomenon they raised several conjectures that later become pillars of the Israeli argumentation on the issue' (Gelber, p. 84).
<blockquote>Undoubtedly, as was understood by IDF intelligence, the most important single factor in the exodus of April–June was Jewish attack. This is demonstrated clearly by the fact that each exodus occurred during or in the immediate wake of military assault. No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before the Haganah/IZL assault... The closer drew the 15 May British withdrawal deadline and the prospect of invasion by Arab states, the readier became commanders to resort to "cleansing" operations and expulsions to rid their rear areas.<ref name="Morris-2004" />{{rp|265}}


elatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually fled their homes before or during battle... though (Haganah commanders) almost invariably prevented inhabitants, who had initially fled, from returning home...<ref name="Morris-2004" />{{rp|165}}</blockquote>
Benny Morris concluded that during the period preceding the 1948 war, and particularly during the invasion of Palestine by Arab armies, there were calls by the Arab High Committee for elements of the Palestinian population to leave their homes:


Edgar O'Ballance, a military historian, adds, <blockquote>Israeli vans with loudspeakers drove through the streets ordering all the inhabitants to evacuate immediately, and such as were reluctant to leave were forcibly ejected from their homes by the triumphant Israelis whose policy was now openly one of clearing out all the Arab civil population before them... From the surrounding villages and hamlets, during the next two or three days, all the inhabitants were uprooted and set off on the road to Ramallah... No longer was there any "reasonable persuasion". Bluntly, the Arab inhabitants were ejected and forced to flee into Arab territory... Wherever the Israeli troops advanced into Arab country the Arab population was bulldozed out in front of them.<ref>O'Ballance, Edgar (1956) pp. 147, 172.</ref></blockquote>
:At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself. ] - From an ] interview prior to the publication of Morris' latest findings in ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', 2003.


After the fall of Haifa the villages on the slopes of ] had been harassing the Jewish traffic on the main road to Haifa. A decision was made on 9 May 1948 to expel or subdue the villages of ], ], ], ] and ].<ref>Morris, 2004, p. 246; Summary meeting of the Arab Affairs Advisor in Netanya 9 May 1948 IDF 6127/49//109.</ref> On 11 May 1948 Ben-Gurion convened the "Consultancy"; the outcome of the meeting is confirmed in a letter to commanders of the Haganah Brigades telling them that the ] offensive should not distract their troops from the principal tasks: "the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of ]."<ref>Yehuda Slutzky, ""Summary of the Hagana Book"", pp. 486–7. Cited from Ilan Pappé, 2006, p. 128.</ref>
Morris, however, did not find any blanket call for evacuation, such as Weitz claims had existed. On that matter he writes:


The attention of the commanders of the ] was turned to reducing the ] pocket. ], being on the coast, gave the Carmel villages access to the outside world and so was chosen as the point to surround the Carmel villages as a part of the Coastal Clearing offensive operation in the beginning of the ].
:Had such a blanket order (or series of orders) been given, it would have found an echo in the thousands of documents produced by the Haganah's Intelligence Service, the IDF Intelligence Service, the Jewish Agency's Political Department Arab Division, the Foreign Ministry Middle East Affairs Department; or in the memoranda and dispatches of the various British and American diplomatic posts in the area (in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo); or in the various radio monitoring services (such as the BBC's). Any or all of these would have produced reports, memoranda, or correspondence referring to the Arab order and quoting from it. But no such reference to or quotation from such an order or series of orders exists in the contemporary documentation. This documentation, it should be noted, includes daily, almost hourly, monitoring of Arab radio broadcasts, the Arab press inside and outside Palestine, and statements by the Arab and Palestinian Arab leaders. (Tikkun, Jan/Feb 1990, p80)


On the night of 22–23 May 1948, one week and one day after the declaration of Independence of the State of ], the coastal village of Tantura was attacked and occupied by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah. The village of Tantura was not given the option of surrender and the initial report spoke of dozens of villagers killed, with 300 adult male prisoners and 200 women and children.<ref>Morris, 2004, p. 247; unsigned short report on Tantura Operation, IDFA 922/75//949, and Ya'akov B.,' in the name of the deputy OC "A" company "Report on Operation Namal" 26 May 1948, IDFA 6647/49//13.</ref> Many of the villagers fled to ] (previously captured) and to Arab-held territory. The captured women of Tantura were moved to Fureidis, and on 31 May Brechor Shitrit, Minister of Minority Affairs of the provisional Government of Israel, sought permission to expel the refugee women of Tantura from Fureidis as the number of refugees in Fureidis was causing problems of overcrowding and sanitation.<ref>Morris, 2004; ] to Ben-Gurion 31 May 1948 ISA MAM 302/48.</ref>
The Israeli historian ], who was a participant in these events as ] spokesman, in his book ']' writes:


A report from the military intelligence SHAI of the Haganah titled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948", dated 30 June 1948, affirms that:
<blockquote><blockquote>
<blockquote> At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations. To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases...<ref>Morris, Benny (1986): "The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: The Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948". ''Middle Eastern Studies''. Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 5–19.</ref><ref>Kapeliouk, Amnon (1987). "New Light on the Israeli–Arab Conflict and the Refugee Problem and Its Origins". ''Journal of Palestine Studies''. Vol. 16, No. 3. (Spring 1987). p. 21.</ref><ref>Intelligence report "Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947, and June 1, 1948". {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210516043921/https://www.akevot.org.il/en/article/intelligence-brief-from-1948-hidden-for-decades-indicates-jewish-fighters-actions-were-the-major-cause-of-arab-displacement-not-calls-from-arab-leadership/?full#popup/15413e71e82f9865d9e05c83102c4751 |date=16 May 2021 }}</ref></blockquote>
"the Arab refugees were not driven from Palestine by anyone. The vast majority left, whether of their own free will or at the orders or exhortations of their leaders, always with the same reassurance-that their departure would help in the war against Israel. The Arabs are the only declared refugees who became refugees not by the action of their enemies or because of well-grounded fear of their enemies, but by the initiative of their own leaders." (Katz, 1973, pp. 72)
</blockquote></blockquote>


According to Morris's estimates, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians left Israel during this stage.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|262|date=November 2012}} "Keesing's Contemporary Archives" in London place the total number of refugees before Israel's independence at 300,000.<ref>Quoted in Mark Tessler's ''A History of the Arab–Israeli Conflict'': "Keesing's Contemporary Archives" (London: Keesing's Publications, 1948–1973). p. 10101.</ref>
The American journalist ], who had covered Palestine for years, claimed that the Arab leaders' rationale for the flight was:
<blockquote><blockquote>
:"Let the Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab countries to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea." (''New Star In The Near East, New York, 1950''). </blockquote></blockquote>


] cablegram stating the expulsion of, at that point, 250,000 Palestinians, as a reason for their entry into the territory]]
Further quotations:
In Clause 10.(b) of the ] from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the UN Secretary-General of 15 May 1948 justifying the intervention by the Arab States, the Secretary-General of the League alleged that "approximately over a quarter of a million of the Arab population have been compelled to leave their homes and emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries."<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140107030419/http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=S%2F745 |date=7 January 2014 }}</ref>


===July–October 1948===
* "'Doesn't he have anything more important to do?' was Ben-Gurion's reaction when told, during his visit to Haifa on ] 1948, that a local Jewish leader was trying to convince the Arabs not to leave. 'Drive them out!' was Ben-Gurion's instruction to ], as recorded by ] in a censored passage of his memoris published in 1979, with regard to the Arabs of Lydda after the city had been taken over on 11 July 1948." (] (2006). ''Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy''. Oxford University Press, p. 44.)
{{Further|1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle}}
Israeli operations named ] and Dekel that broke the truce were the start of the third phase of expulsions.{{citation needed|date=August 2024}} The largest single expulsion of the war began in ] and ] 14 July under Operation Dani when 60,000 inhabitants of the two cities (nearly 8.6% of the whole exodus) were forcibly expelled on the orders of ] and ] in events that came to be known as the "Lydda Death March".


According to Flapan (1987, pp.&nbsp;13–14) in Ben-Gurion's view Ramlah and Lydda constituted a special danger because their proximity might encourage co-operation between the Egyptian army, which had started its attack on Kibbutz Negbah, near Ramlah, and the Arab Legion, which had taken the Lydda police station. However the author considers that Operation Dani revealed that no such co-operation existed.
* An interview frequently cited in Zionist historiography was with Monsignor ], then Greek Catholic bishop of Galilee, in the Beirut newspaper ''Sada al Janub,'' August 16, 1948: "The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the "Zionist gangs" very quickly, and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile." ] investigated these claims, and wrote in ] May 12, 1961: "I wrote to His Grace, asking for his evidence of such orders. I hold signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he has categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years; and that the Arabs fled through panic and forcible eviction by Jewish troops.". Hakim later commented on this use of his words: "There is nothing in this statement to justify the construction which many propagandists had put on it... At no time did I state that the flight of the refugees was due to the orders, explicit or implicit, of their leaders, military or political, to leave the country... On the contrary, no such orders were ever made... Such allegations are sheer concoctions and falsifications. ...as soon as hostilities began between Israel and the Arab States, it became the settled policy of the Government to drive away the Arabs..." (quoted in E. B. Childers, The Wordless Wish, in I. Abu-Lughod (ed) ''Transformation of Palestine'', Northwestern University Press (1971), 197-198.) But Katz brings another quote where George Hakim confirms to the Rev. ], Executive Secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, that the Arabs of Haifa "fled ''in spite of the fact'' that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel (New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949). Katz explains Hakim's sudden change of opinion of his earlier quote in 1971 as a calculated transfer of blame in what became a powerful propaganda weapon in the general war against Israel.


In Flapan's opinion, "in Lydda, the exodus took place on foot. In Ramlah, the IDF provided buses and trucks. Originally, all males had been rounded up and enclosed in a compound, but after some shooting was heard, and construed by Ben-Gurion to be the beginning of an Arab Legion counteroffensive, he stopped the arrests and ordered the speedy eviction of all the Arabs, including women, children, and the elderly."<ref name="Oren1976">Oren, Elhanan (1976): ''On the Way to the City''. Hebrew, Tel Aviv.</ref> In explanation, Flapan cites that Ben-Gurion said that "those who made war on us bear responsibility after their defeat."{{r|Oren1976}}
* The Jewish Haganah broadcast a warning to Arabs in Haifa on ]: "that unless they sent away 'infiltrated dissidents' they would be advised to evacuate all women and children, because they would be strongly attacked from now on" ('British Proclamation In Haifa Making Evacuation Secure', ''The Times'', Thursday, ], 1948; pg. 4; Issue 51052; col D ). Commenting on the use of "psychological warfare broadcasts" and military tactics in Haifa , The ] ] Benny Morris writes:<blockquote><blockquote>Throughout the Haganah made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that 'the day of judgement had arrived' and called on inhabitants to 'kick out the foreign criminals' and to 'move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals'. The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to 'evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven'... Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every Arab encountered' and to set alight with firebombs 'all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route' (Morris, 2003, pp. 191-192).</blockquote></blockquote>


Rabin wrote in his memoirs:
* Katz writes that in a report by the Haifa District HQ of the British Palestine Police sent on April 26, 1948, to Police HQ in Jerusalem , it was said :
{{blockquote|What would they do with the 50,000 civilians in the two cities... Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution, and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route advancing eastward... Allon repeated the question: What is to be done with the population? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: Drive them out!... "Driving out" is a term with a harsh ring... Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion. ("Soldier of Peace", pp. 140–141)}}


Flapan maintains that events in Nazareth, although ending differently, point to the existence of a definite pattern of expulsion. On 16 July, three days after the Lydda and Ramlah evictions, the city of Nazareth surrendered to the IDF. The officer in command, a Canadian Jew named ], had signed the surrender agreement on behalf of the Israeli army along with ] (then a brigadier general, later IDF chief of staff). The agreement assured the civilians that they would not be harmed, but the next day, Laskov handed Dunkelman an order to evacuate the population, which Dunkelman refused.<ref>"Peretz Kidron interview with Ben Dunkelman". ''Haolam Hazeh''. 9 January 1980.</ref><ref>Kidron, Peretz (1988). "Truth Whereby Nations Live". In ] and ] (Eds.). '']'' Verso. {{ISBN|978-1-85984-340-6}}, p. 87.</ref>
<blockquote><blockquote>
"Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe." The Jewish effort was in vain. The police report continues: "A large road convoy, escorted by military -- left Haifa for Beirut yesterday. -- Evacuation by sea goes on steadily." Two days later, the Haifa police continued to report. The Jews were "still making every effort to persuade the Arab populace to remain and to settle back into their normal lives in the towns"; as for the Arabs, "another convoy left Tireh for Transjordan, and the evacuation by sea continues. The quays and harbour are still crowded with refugees and their household effects, all omitting no opportunity to get a place on one of the boats leaving Haifa" (Katz, 1973, pp. 74) </blockquote></blockquote>


Additionally, widespread looting and several cases of rape<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210905113719/http://www.logosjournal.com/morris.htm |date=5 September 2021 }}, Logos, Winter 2004.</ref> took place during the evacuation. In total, about 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in this stage according to Morris.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|448|date=November 2012}}
====Claims by Arab leaders====
After the war, a few Arab leaders tried to present the Palestinian exodus as a victory by claiming to have planned it.
The prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Said, declared: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." (''Sir Am Nakbah”, Nazareth, 1952'').


Glazer<ref>Glazer 1980, p. 109.</ref> quotes the testimony of Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, who reported that "the exodus of the Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. Almost the whole of the Arab population fled or was expelled from the area under Jewish occupation."<ref>UN Progress Report, 16 September 1948, Part 1 Section V, paragraph 6; Part 3 Section I, paragraph 1 to 3. According to Glazer, this observation by Count Folke Bernadotte is frequently cited not only as an example of descriptions of panic, but also as evidence that the Zionists pursued a policy of expulsion.</ref><ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120609143305/http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/ab14d4aafc4e1bb985256204004f55fa |date=9 June 2012 }} Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations Part 1 Section V para 6. "It is not yet known what the policy of the ] with regard to the return of Arab refugees will be when the final terms of settlement are reached. It is, however, undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which, under the Assembly resolution of 29 November, was to be included in the Jewish State. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."</ref>
An oft-quoted example from the memoirs of ], who was prime minister of Syria from ] ], to ] ], (after most of the exodus had already taken place), gives a different explanation, however. In his memoirs, Al-Azm listed a number of reasons for the Arab defeat in an attack on the Arab leaders, including his own predecessor, ]:


On 26 September, ] alerted Ben-Gurion to the problem of masses of Palestinians endeavouring to return to their land in Israel or to lands Israel was about to take control of. On being asked how to deal with the problem, Weitz advocated a policy of endless 'harassment' (''''). Later on the same day, his cabinet turned down his proposal that Israel launch an invasion against the ] in order to wrest control over part, or all, of the West Bank where the latter was entrenched. It was in this context that Ben-Gurion then ordered ] extend Israel's biological warfare operations abroad, beginning with the poisoning of Cairo's water network with toxic bacteria. Both this and other projects to take similar measures in Syria and Lebanon, for a variety of reasons, were never activated.<ref>], ], {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230305221558/https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 |date=5 March 2023 }} ] 19 September 2022, pages =1-25 pp.16-18.</ref>
:Fifth: the Arab governments' invitation to the people of Palestine to flee from it and seek refuge in adjacent Arab countries, after terror had spread among their ranks in the wake of the Deir Yassin event. This mass flight has benefited the Jews and the situation stabilized in their favor without effort.<br>...<br>Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homeland, while it is we who constrained them to leave it. Between the invitation extended to the refugees and the request to the United Nations to decide upon their return, there elapsed only a few months.<br>-''Al-`Azm, Mudhakarat'' (al-Dar al Muttahida lil-Nashr, Beirut, 1972), Volume I, pp 386-7. ]


===October 1948 – March 1949===
However, as ] argues 'Neither . . . is the admission of the Syrian leader Khalid al-Azm that the Arab countries urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their villages until after the victory of the Arab armies final proof that the Palestinian Arabs in practice heeded that call and consequently left.' . In his re-examination of the Palestinian exodus ] is even more skeptical, concluding:
]
This period of the exodus was characterized by Israeli military accomplishments; ], in October, this cleared the road to the Negev, culminating in the capture of ]; ] that same month which cleared the ] from pockets of resistance; ], at the end of October, resulted in the capture of the ]; ] in December 1948 and ] in March 1949, completed the capture of the Negev (the Negev had been allotted to the Jewish State by the United Nations) these operations were met with resistance from the Palestinian Arabs who were to become refugees. The Israeli military activities were confined to the ] and the sparsely populated ]. It was clear to the villages in the Galilee, that if they left, return was far from imminent. Therefore, far fewer villages spontaneously depopulated than previously. Most of the Palestinian exodus was due to a clear, direct cause: expulsion and deliberate harassment, as Morris writes "commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering".{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|490|date=November 2012}}


During Operation Hiram in the upper Galilee, Israeli military commanders received the order: "Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered." (31 October 1948, ]) The UN's acting Mediator, ], reported that United Nations Observers had recorded extensive looting of villages in Galilee by Israeli forces, who carried away goats, sheep and mules. This looting, United Nations Observers reported, appeared to have been systematic as army trucks were used for transportation. The situation, states the report, created a new influx of refugees into Lebanon. Israeli forces, he stated, have occupied the area in Galilee formerly occupied by Kaukji's forces, and have crossed the Lebanese frontier. Bunche goes on to say "that Israeli forces now hold positions inside the south-east corner of Lebanon, involving some fifteen Lebanese villages which are occupied by small Israeli detachments."<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120609143322/http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/a1c20f7009def4fe85256a70006891fd |date=9 June 2012 }} UN Press Release, 6 November 1948.</ref>
:The former Prime Minister of Syria, Khalid al'Azm, in his memoirs Mudhakkirat Khalid al'Azm, I, 386, wrote: 'We brought destruction on 1 million Arab refugees by calling upon them and pleading with them repeatedly to leave their lands and homes and factories.' (I am grateful to Dr Gideon Weigart of Jerusalem for this reference.) But I have found no contemporary evidence of such blanket, official 'calls' by any Arab government. And I have found no evidence that the Palestinians or any substantial group left because they heard such 'calls' or orders by outside Arab leaders. The only, minor, exceptions to this are the traces of the order, apparently by the Syrians, to some of the inhabitants of Eastern Galilee to leave a few days prior to, and in preparation for, the invasion of 15-16 May. This order affected at most several thousand Palestinians and, in any case, 'dovetailed' with Haganah efforts to drive out the population in this area. (Morris, 2003, p. 269).


According to Morris, 200,000–230,000 Palestinians fled during Operation Hiram and Operation Yoav.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|492|date=November 2012}} According to ], "In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape and imprisonment of men in labor camps for periods over a year."<ref>{{cite web | author = Pappe, Ilan | date = Spring 2006 | url = http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2006/Spring/article03.htm | title = Calling a Spade a Spade: The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine | access-date = 3 May 2007 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070527093509/http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2006/Spring/article03.htm | archive-date = 27 May 2007 | url-status = dead}}</ref>
Morris goes on to speculate that, although al-`Azm may have been referring to the minor Syrian order mentioned above, it is more probable that 'he inserted the claim to make some point within the context of inter-Arab polemics (i.e., blaming fellow Arab leaders for the exodus).'


==Contemporary mediation and the Lausanne Conference==
]


===UN mediation===
Furthermore Katz says that "as late as 1952, the charge had the official stamp of the Arab Higher Committee. In a memorandum to the Arab League states, the Committee wrote" (Schechtman, pp. 197-198):
The United Nations, using the offices of the ] and the ], was involved in the conflict from the very beginning. In the autumn of 1948 the refugee problem was a fact and possible solutions were discussed. ] said on 16 September:


{{blockquote|No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and indeed, offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120609143305/http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/ab14d4aafc4e1bb985256204004f55fa |date=9 June 2012 }} Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations see part 1 section V para 6.</ref><ref>Bowker, 2003, pp. 97–98.</ref>}}
<blockquote><blockquote>
"Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals -- declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestinian Arabs were misled by their declarations... It was natural for those Palestinian Arabs who felt impelled to leave their country to take refuge in Arab lands -- and to stay in such adjacent places in order to maintain contact with their country so that to return to it would be easy when, according to the promises of many of those responsible in the Arab countries (promises which were given wastefully), the time was ripe. Many were of the opinion that such an opportunity would come in the hours between sunset and sunrise".
</blockquote></blockquote>


], passed on 11 December 1948 and reaffirmed every year since, was the first resolution that called for Israel to let the refugees return:
The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following the March 8, 1948, instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes:
:"Any opposition to this order...is an obstacle to the holy war...and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts" (Morris, ''Middle Eastern Studies'', January 1986).
Morris also documented that the Arab Higher Committee ordered the evacuation of "several dozen villages, as well as the removal of dependents from dozens more” in April-July 1948. "The invading Arab armies also occasionally ordered whole villages to depart, so as not to be in their way" (''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 592).


{{blockquote|the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/C758572B78D1CD0085256BCF0077E51A |title=United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 |publisher=] |date=11 December 1948 |access-date=6 June 2011 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150702150304/http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/C758572B78D1CD0085256BCF0077E51A |archive-date=2 July 2015}}</ref>}}
The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, ], wrote in his book, ''The Arabs'':


===Lausanne Conference of 1949===
<blockquote><blockquote>
{{main|Lausanne Conference of 1949}}
"This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re­enter and retake possession of their country. ''But it was also, and in many parts of the country, largely due to a policy of deliberate ] and eviction followed by the Jewish commanders in the areas they occupied, and reaching its peak of brutality in the ].''</br></br>
At the start of the ], on 12 May 1949, Israel agreed in principle to allow the return of some of the Palestinian refugees.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Israel's membership in the UN - Ad Hoc Political Committee - Summary record |url=https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-185978/ |access-date=2024-11-03 |website=Question of Palestine |language=en-US}}</ref> At the same time, Israel became a member of the U.N. upon the passage of ] on 11 May 1949, which read, in part,
''There were two good reasons why the ] should follow such a policy. First, the problem of harbouring within the Jewish State a large and disaffected Arab population had always troubled them. They wanted an exclusively Jewish state, and the presence of such a population that could never be assimilated, that would always resent its inferior position under Jewish rule and stretch a hand across so many frontiers to its Arab cousins in the surrounding countries, would not only detract from the Jewishness of ], but also constitute a danger to its existence. Secondly, the Israelis wanted to open the doors of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration. Obviously, the fewer Arabs there were in the country the more room there would be for Jewish immigrants. If the Arabs could be driven out of the land in the course of the fighting, the Jews would have their homes, their lands, whole villages and towns, without even having to purchase them. And this is exactly what happened."'' ("The Arabs", 1955, pp. 182-183) ”
</blockquote></blockquote>
] himself in ] 23 June 1961 dismissed that his book could be used as evidence of "Arab orders". He wrote: <blockquote><blockquote>....there is no suggestion whatever in what I wrote that the exodus of the Arab refugees was a result of a ''policy'' of evacuating the Arab population. What I said is something quite different from the ] allegation that the Arab refugees were ''ordered'' or ever ''told'' by their leaders to evacuate which is the main point in the whole controversy. (Quoted in ], p.80.)</blockquote> </blockquote>


{{blockquote|Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it "unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them from the day when it becomes a member of the United Nations".}}
The ] claims their reasons for limited assistance and instructions to bar the granting of citizenship to Palestinian Arab refugees (or their descendants) is "to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland". <ref> by
P.K. Abdul Ghafour, ]. October 21 , 2004. Accessed July 20, 2006</ref> Many critics find the lack of Arab effort to relieve the refugee crisis as a way of using the Palestinians as political pawns, and/or to promote anti-Israel sentiment.


Instead Israel made an offer of allowing 100,000 of the refugees to return to the area, though not necessarily to their homes, including 25,000 who had returned surreptitiously and 10,000 family-reunion cases.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|577|date=November 2012}} The proposal was conditional on a peace treaty that would allow Israel to retain the territory it had captured which had been allocated to the Arab state by the ], and, contrary to Israel's UN acceptance promise, on the Arab states absorbing the remaining 550,000–650,000 refugees. The Arab states rejected the proposal on both legal, moral and political grounds, and Israel quickly withdrew its limited offer.
During the ] Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on Al-Manar television :


Benny Morris, in his 2004 book, ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', summarizes it from his perspective:
<blockquote><blockquote>
"I have a special message to the Arabs of ], to your martyrs and to your wounded. I call you to leave this city. I hope you do this. ... Please leave so we don't shed your blood, which is our blood."
</blockquote></blockquote>


{{blockquote|In retrospect, it appeared that at Lausanne was lost the best and perhaps only chance for a solution of the refugee problem, if not for the achievement of a comprehensive Middle East settlement. But the basic incompatibility of the initial starting positions and the unwillingness of the two sides to move, and to move quickly, towards a compromise—born of Arab rejectionism and a deep feeling of humiliation, and of Israeli drunkenness with victory and physical needs determined largely by the Jewish refugee influx—doomed the "conference" from the start. American pressure on both sides, lacking a sharp, determined cutting edge, failed to budge sufficiently either Jew or Arab. The "100,000 Offer" was a classic of too little, too late.{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|580|date=November 2012}}}}
Some analysts have drawn a comparison between these sayings and the alleged Arab leaders' endorsement for flight in 1948.


==Results of the Palestinian exodus==
====Claims by Arabs who fled====
The expulsion of Palestinians in 1947–49 resulted in the significant depopulation of territory occupied by Israel, in which "about 90 percent of the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed – many by psychological warfare and /or military pressure and a large number at gunpoint."<ref name="Masalha-2009">{{cite journal |journal=Holy Land Studies |volume=8 |issue=2 |pages=245–247 |date=2009 |first=Nur |last=Masalha |doi=10.3366/E1474947509000614 |title=Rosemary M. Esber, Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians}}</ref> Historic Arabic place names were replaced with Hebrew names, based on biblical names.<ref name="Masalha-2009"/>
A leading Palestinian nationalist of the time, ], revealed the attitude of the fleeing Arabs:


===Economic damage===
<blockquote>
As towns and villages were either conquered or abandoned in the conflict, looting by Jewish forces and residents was so widespread that, in the aftermath, ] remarked on 24 July 1948: 'It turns out that most of the Jews are thieves.' ], a Palmach commander likened the pillaging she observed in ] to the classic behavior seen by their oppressors during anti-Jewish ] in Europe:
"The Arabs of Palestine left their homes, were scattered, and lost everything. But there remained one solid hope: The Arab armies were on the eve of their entry into Palestine to save the country and return things to their normal course, punish the aggressor, and throw oppressive Zionism with its dreams and dangers into the sea. On May 14, 1948, crowds of Arabs stood by the roads leading to the frontiers of Palestine, enthusiastically welcoming the advancing armies. Days and weeks passed, sufficient to accomplish the sacred mission, but the Arab armies did not save the country. They did nothing but let slip from their hands Acre, Sarafand, Lydda, Ramleh, Nazareth, most of the south and the rest of the north. Then hope fled (''Middle East Journal'', October 1949)."
<blockquote>Such pictures were known to us. It was the way things had always been done to us, in the Holocaust, throughout the world war, and all the pogroms. Oy, how well we knew those pictures. And here – here, we were doing these awful things to others. We loaded everything onto the van – with a terrible trembling of the hands. And that wasn't because of the weight. Even now my hands are shaking, just from writing about it.<ref>Ofer Aderet, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211123095801/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-jews-looted-arab-property-en-masse-in-48-the-authorities-let-them-1.9201926 |date=23 November 2021 }} ] 2 October 2020</ref></blockquote>
</blockquote>


===Abandoned, evacuated and destroyed Palestinian localities===
One refugee quoted in the Jordan newspaper, ''Ad Difaa'' (September 6, 1954), said, "The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."
{{Main|Depopulated Palestinian locations in Israel}}
Several authors have conducted studies on the number of Palestinian localities that were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed during the 1947–1949 period. Based on their respective calculations, the table below summarises their information.<ref>''Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine''. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 34.</ref>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Abandoned, evacuated or destroyed Palestinian localities (comparative figures)
|-
! Reference
! Towns
! Villages
! Tribes
! Total
|-
! Morris
| 10
| 342
| 17
| 369
|-
! Khalidi
| 1
| 400
| 17
| 418
|-
! Abu Sitta
| 13
| 419
| 99
| 531
|}
<small>'''Source''': The table data was taken from ''Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine''. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p.&nbsp;34.<br />
'''Note''': For information on methodologies; see: Morris, Benny (1987): ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949''. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Khalidi, Walid (ed.): ''].'' Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992, App. IV, pp. xix, 585–586; and Sitta, Salman Abu: ''The Palestinian Nakba 1948''. London: The Palestinian Return Centre, 2000.</small>


According to the ] (COHRE) and BADIL, Morris's list of affected localities, the shortest of the three, includes towns but excludes other localities cited by Khalidi or Abu Sitta. The six sources compared in Khalidi's study have in common 296 of the villages listed as destroyed or depopulated. Sixty other villages are cited in all but one source. Of the total of 418 localities cited in Khalidi, 292 (70 percent) were completely destroyed and 90 (22 percent) "largely destroyed". COHRE and BADIL also note that other sources refer to an additional 151 localities that are omitted from Khalidi's study for various reasons (for example, major cities and towns that were depopulated, as well as some Bedouin encampments and villages "vacated" before the start of hostilities). Abu Sitta's list includes tribes in Beersheba that lost lands; most of these were omitted from Khalidi's work.<ref>''Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine''. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 35.</ref>
] (a.k.a. Abu Mazen, then-refugee and PLO member, now-PA leader), wrote in "What We Have Learned and What We Should Do", published in Falastin-el-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO, of Beirut, in March 1976: "The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the States of the world did so, and this is regrettable".


Another study, involving field research and comparisons with British and other documents, concludes that 472 Palestinian habitations (including towns and villages) were destroyed in 1948. It notes that the devastation was virtually complete in some sub-districts. For example, it points out that 96.0% of the villages in the Jaffa area were totally destroyed, as were 90.0% of those in Tiberias, 90.3% of those in Safad, and 95.9% of those in Beisan. It also extrapolates from 1931 British census data to estimate that over 70,280 Palestinian houses were destroyed in this period.<ref>Saleh, Abdul Jawad and Walid Mustafa (1987): p. 30.</ref>
The '']'', on June 5, 2003 published an article entitled: “Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” that read:


In another study, Abu Sitta<ref>Abu Sitta, Salman (2001).</ref> shows the following findings in eight distinct phases of the depopulation of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. His findings are summarized in the table below:
<blockquote>Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) penned an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe" (emphasis added).</blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Information on the depopulation of Palestinian towns and villages (1947–1949)
|-
! Phase:
! No. of destroyed/depopulated localities
! No. of refugees
! Jewish/Israeli lands (km<sup>2</sup>)
|-
! 29 Nov. 1947 – Mar. 1948
| 30
| >22,600*
| 1,159.4
|-
! Apr. – 13 May 1948<br />
(Tiberias, Jaffa, Haifa, Safed, etc.)
| 199
| >400,000
| 3,363.9
|-
! 15 May – 11 June 1948<br />
(an additional 90 villages)
| 290
| >500,000
| 3,943.1
|-
! 12 June – 18 July 1948<br />
(Lydda/Ramleh, Nazareth, etc.)
| 378
| >628,000
| 5,224.2
|-
! 19 July – 24 Oct. 1948<br />
(Galilee and southern areas)
| 418
| >664,000
| 7,719.6
|-
! 24 Oct. – 5 Nov. 1948<br />
(Galilee, etc.)
| 465
| >730,000
| 10,099.6
|-
! 5 Nov. 1948 – 18 Jan. 1949<br />
(Negev, etc.)
| 481
| >754,000
| 12,366.3
|-
! 19 Jan. – 20 July 1949<br />
(Negev, etc.)
| 531
| >804,000
| 20,350
|}
<small><nowiki>*</nowiki> Other sources put this figure at over 70,000.<br />
'''Source''': The table data was taken from ''Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine''. ] & BADIL, May 2005, p.&nbsp;34. The source being: Abu Sitta, Salman (2001): "From Refugees to Citizens at Home". London: Palestine Land Society and Palestinian Return Centre, 2001.</small>


===Palestinian refugees===
An Arab viewer called PA TV and citing his father's testimony, complained that in 1948 the Arab District Officer ordered all Arabs to leave Palestine, or be labeled traitors. In responding, Ibrahim Sarsur, Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, cursed the leaders who ordered Arabs to leave, thus, acknowledging Israel’s assertion. .
{{Main|Palestinian refugees|Estimates of the Palestinian Refugee flight of 1948}}
{{Infobox ethnic group| group=Palestinian refugees | pop=4.9 million (Registered with UNRWA—including descendants and re-settled)<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.un.org/unrwa/publications/pdf/rr_countryandarea.pdf |title=Total Registered Refugees per Country and Area |date=31 March 2005 |publisher=UNRWA |access-date=2009-09-23 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080723174310/http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications/pdf/rr_countryandarea.pdf |archive-date=23 July 2008 }} Refugees Per Country & Area; 2005</ref> | popplace=], Jordan, ], Lebanon, ] | rels=Islam and Christianity | langs=]}}


On 11 December 1948, 12 months prior to UNRWA's establishment, ] was adopted. The resolution accepted the definition of Palestinian refugees as "persons of Arab origin who, after 29 November 1947, left territory at present under the control of the Israel authorities and who were Palestinian citizens at that date" and; "Persons of Arab origin who left the said territory after 6 August 1924 and before 29 November 1947 and who at that latter date were Palestinian citizens; 2. Persons of Arab origin who left the territory in question before 6 August 1924 and who, having opted for Palestinian citizenship, retained that citizenship up to 29 November 1947"<ref>{{cite book | title=International law and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict | publisher=Taylor & Francis | author=Susan Akram | author-link=a rights-based approach to Middle East peace | year=2011 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oeJ50a76z5cC&q=DEFINITION+OF+A+%E2%80%9CREFUGEE%E2%80%9D+UNDER+PARAGRAPH+11+OF+THE+GENERAL+ASSEMBLY+RESOLUTION+OF+11+DECEMBER+1948&pg=PA38 | pages=38, 19 | isbn=978-0-415-57322-1 | quote=This was the definition accepted by the drafters of the resolution 194 for the purposes of defining the entire group of Palestinians who were entitled to the protection of the International Community | access-date=29 October 2020 | archive-date=3 July 2024 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240703040550/https://books.google.com/books?id=oeJ50a76z5cC&q=DEFINITION+OF+A+%E2%80%9CREFUGEE%E2%80%9D+UNDER+PARAGRAPH+11+OF+THE+GENERAL+ASSEMBLY+RESOLUTION+OF+11+DECEMBER+1948&pg=PA38 | url-status=live }}</ref>
On April 30, 1999, An Arab viewer called ], head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, on PA TV:
<blockquote>Caller: Mr. Ibrahim, I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me, that during the Nakba our district officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel is a traitor, he is a traitor.<br>
Sarsur: I don’t want to blame the one who caused this situation but we are forced to cope with this situation. The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for this, in this life and the Afterlife throughout history until Resurrection Day.</blockquote>


] was established under UNGA resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949.<ref name="UNRWA">{{cite web | url=http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=85 | title=Overview | publisher=United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) | access-date=29 October 2011 | archive-date=17 May 2021 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210517065958/https://www.unrwa.org/?id=85 | url-status=live }}</ref> It defines refugees qualifying for UNRWA's services as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli conflict" and also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The UNRWA mandate does not extend to final status.<ref name="UNRWA mandate">{{cite web | url=http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=87#final_status | title=Q/A Final Status | publisher=UNRWA | access-date=30 October 2011 | quote=Q) Is UNRWA involved in the Middle East peace negotiations and in the discussions on a solution to the refugee issue? A) No. UNRWA is a humanitarian agency and its mandate defines its role as one of providing services to the refugees. | archive-date=6 September 2013 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130906121016/http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=87#final_status | url-status=live }}</ref>
====Other claims====
A British police memo in 1948 reads :
<blockquote>The situation in Haifa remains unchanged. Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe. On the other side the evacuation goes on and a large road convoy escorted by Military and containing a large percentage of Christians left Haifa for Beirut yesterday. An estimated number of 700 has been given for this convoy and evacuation by sea goes on steadily. At the same time the convoy and evacuation of women, children and older inhabitants from Tireh and surrounding villages has become a problem and these are taking refuge in a disused army camp near Tireh. They are being carried out to Transjordan and Military lorries have been loaned to get this section clear. At the moment it looks as if the greater part of very healthy crops which will soon require attention are going to be abandoned and lost.
Tireh was attacked again yesterday morning but managed to repulse the attack. There have been no other incidents reported.</blockquote>


The final 1949 UNRWA estimate of the refugee count was 726,000,{{r|Morris-2004}}{{rp|602|date=November 2012}} but the number of registered refugees was 914,000.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090806150018/http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/whois.html |date=6 August 2009 }} UNRWA's operational definition</ref> The U.N. Conciliation Commission explained that the number was inflated by "duplication of ration cards, addition of persons who have been displaced from area other than Israel-held areas and of persons who, although not displaced, are destitute," and the UNRWA additionally noted that "all births are eagerly announced, the deaths wherever possible are passed over in silence," as well as the fact that "the birthrate is high in any case, a net addition of 30,000 names a year." By June 1951, UNRWA had reduced the number of registered refugees to 876,000 after many false and duplicate registrations had been weeded out.<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140407095842/http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/181c4bf00c44e5fd85256cef0073c426/8d26108af518ce7e052565a6006e8948 |date=7 April 2014 }}, Report of the Director of the UNRWA, 28 September 1951.</ref>
'']'', on May 3, 1948, published an article on the Arab flight from Haifa:
<blockquote>The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city…. By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.</blockquote>


Today the number who qualify for UNRWA's services has grown to over 4 million, one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon (Bowker, 2003, p.&nbsp;72) and around 15% in other Arab and Western countries. Approximately 1 million refugees have no form of identification other than an UNRWA identification card.<ref>Bowker, 2003, pp. 61–62.</ref>
The Bulletin of the Research Group for European Migration Problems found in 1957 that,
<blockquote>As early as the first months of 1948, the Arab League issued orders exhorting the people to seek a temporary refuge in neighboring countries, later to return to their abodes ... and obtain their share of abandoned Jewish property.</blockquote>


===Prevention of Infiltration Law===
The Canadian-Palestinian Educational Exchange writes, "Exile was supposed to be temporary, but with the political impasse that followed the ceasefire, a resolution to the Palestinian refugee problem was not forthcoming and to this day remains elusive." <ref></ref>
{{Main|Prevention of Infiltration Law}}
Following the emergence of the ] problem after the ], many Palestinians tried, in one way or another, to return to their homes. For some time these practices continued to embarrass the Israeli authorities until they passed the ], which defines offenses of armed and non-armed infiltration to Israel and from Israel to hostile neighboring countries. {{citation needed|date=March 2021}} According to Arab Israeli writer ], the purpose of the law was to prevent Palestinians from returning to Israel, those who did so being regarded as ].<ref>Jiryis, Sabri (1981): "Domination by the Law". ''Journal of Palestine Studies''. Vol. 11, No. 1, 10th Anniversary Issue: Palestinians under Occupation. (Autumn, 1981), pp. 67–92.</ref>


According to Kirshbaum,<ref name="Kirshbaum, David A. 2007"/> over the years the Israeli Government has continued to cancel and modify some of the ], but mostly it has added more as it has continued to extend its declared state of emergency. For example, even though the Prevention of Infiltration Law of 1954 is not labelled as an official "Emergency Regulation", it extends the applicability of the "Defence (Emergency) Regulation 112" of 1945 giving the Minister of Defence extraordinary powers of deportation for accused infiltrators even before they are convicted (Articles 30 & 32), and makes itself subject to cancellation when the ] ends the ] upon which all of the Emergency Regulations are dependent.
====Criticisms of the "endorsement of flight" theory====
], an ] and author, examined the British record of the radio broadcasts by the Arab leaders at the time, and claimed not to find evidence of such orders. "There was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to stay put."<ref>http://www.alhewar.org/INTIFADAH%20PAGE/intifadah_questions_and_answers.htm</ref>


===The "Transfer principle" Theory=== ===Land and property laws===
{{Main|Israeli land and property laws}}
]
Following its ], Israel designed a system of law that legitimised both a continuation and a consolidation of the ] of land and property, a process that it had begun decades earlier. For the first few years of Israel's existence, many of the new laws continued to be rooted in earlier ] and ]. These laws were later amended or replaced altogether.
The idea that 'transfer ideology' is responsible for the exodus was first brought up by several Palestinian authors, and supported by ] in his 1971 article, "The wordless wish". However, historian ] became in the 1980s the most well-known advocate of this theory. In his book ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem'' he presented the prevalent idea of population transfer within ] thinking as the 'ultimate cause' for the Palestinian exodus. According to Morris, the demographic reality of Palestine, in which most residents were non-Jewish Arabs, had long been a major obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish national state. He also notes that the attempt to achieve a demographic shift through ] (Jewish immigration to the land of Israel) had not been successful (due both to higher Arab birth rate and immigration and to restrictions by the mandatory administration. As a result, some Zionist leaders adopted the transfer of a large Arab population as the only viable solution. (Morris, 2003, p. 69)


The first challenge facing Israel was to transform its control over land into legal ownership. This was the motivation underlying the passing of several of the first group of land laws.<ref>"Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine". COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 37.</ref>
The idea of ] was first placed on Palestine's political agenda in 1937 by the ]. The commission recommended that Britain should withdraw from Palestine and that the land be partitioned between Jews and Arabs. It called for a "''transfer'' of land and an ''exchange'' of population", including the removal of 250,000 Palestinian Arabs from what would become the Jewish state (Arzt, 1997, p. 19), along the lines of the mutual population exchange between the Turkish and Greek populations after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. This solution, writes Morris, was embraced by Zionist leaders, including ], who wrote:


====Initial "Emergency Laws" and "Regulations"====
:... and greater than this has been done for our case in our time . ... And we did not propose this - the Royal Commission ... did ... and we must grab hold of this conclusion as we grabbed hold of the ], even more than that - as we grabbed hold of Zionism itself we must cleave to this conclusion, with all our strength and will and faith (quoted in Morris, 2001, p. 42).
Among the more important initial laws was article 125 of the "Defence (Emergency) Regulations"<ref name="Kirshbaum, David A. 2007">Kirshbaum, David A.{{cite web|url=http://geocities.com/savepalestinenow/emergencyregs/essays/emergencyregsessay.htm |title=Israeli Emergency Regulations & The Defense (Emergency) Regulations of 1945 |access-date=2010-11-13 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091028101623/http://geocities.com/savepalestinenow/emergencyregs/essays/emergencyregsessay.htm |archive-date=28 October 2009}} .</ref>


According to Kirshbaum, the Law has as effect that "no one is allowed in or out without permission from the Israeli Military." "This regulation has been used to exclude a land owner from his own land so that it could be judged as unoccupied, and then expropriated under the 'Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law (1953)'. Closures need not be published in the Official Gazette."<ref name="Kirshbaum, David A. 2007"/>
However, while Ben-Gurion was in favor of the Peel plan, he and other Zionist leaders considered it important that it be publicized as a British plan and not a Zionist plan. To this end, Morris quotes ], director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, who said (during a meeting of the ] on ] ] to consider the ] resolution supporting transfer):


====Absentees' Property Laws====
:Transfer could be the crowning achievements, the final stage in the development of policy, but certainly not the point of departure. By we could mobilizing vast forces against the matter and cause it to fail, in advance. ... What will happen once the Jewish state is established - it is very possible that the result will be the transfer of Arabs'' (quoted in Morris, 2001, p. 46).
The Absentees' Property Laws were several laws, first introduced as emergency ordinances issued by the Jewish leadership but which after the war were incorporated into the laws of Israel.<ref>{{cite web|title=Absentees' Property Law (1950) |url=http://www.geocities.com/savepalestinenow/israellaws/fulltext/absenteepropertylaw.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091028090048/http://www.geocities.com/savepalestinenow/israellaws/fulltext/absenteepropertylaw.htm |archive-date=28 October 2009 |url-status=dead}}</ref> As examples of the first type of laws are the "Emergency Regulations (Absentees' Property) Law, 5709-1948 (December)", which according to article 37 of the "Absentees Property Law, 5710-1950" was replaced by the latter;<ref>See article 37 {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120609143352/http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/d80185e9f0c69a7b85256cbf005afeac/e0b719e95e3b494885256f9a005ab90a |date=9 June 2012 }}</ref> the "Emergency Regulations (Requisition of Property) Law, 5709-1949", and other related laws.<ref>''Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine''. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 41.</ref>


According to COHRE and BADIL (p.&nbsp;41), unlike other laws that were designed to establish Israel's "legal" control over lands, this body of law focused on formulating a "legal" definition for the people (mostly Arabs) who had left or been forced to flee from these lands.
All of the other members of the JAE present, including ] (later Israel's first interior minister), ] (director of the immigration department), ] (Israel's first finance minister), ] (later Israel's justice minister) and ] (a Hebrew University executive) spoke favorably of the transfer principle (Morris, 2001, p. 47).


The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954, more than one third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.<ref>Peretz, (1958)</ref>
Morris concludes that the idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, a new one. He writes:


The absentee property law is directly linked to the controversy of parallelism between the ] and the Palestinian exodus, as advocacy groups have suggested that there are strong ties between the two processes and some of them even claim that decoupling the two issues is unjust.<ref>Mendes, Philip. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081205002325/http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~ajds/mendes_refugees.htm |date=5 December 2008 }}, Presented at the 14 Jewish Studies Conference Melbourne March 2002. Retrieved 12 June 2007.</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.jimena.org/faq.htm|title=Jimena Faq|access-date=21 July 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120717104328/http://www.jimena.org/faq.htm|archive-date=17 July 2012|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/25/middleeast.middleeastthemedia |title=Lyn Julius: Recognising the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries |work=The Guardian |location=London |date=25 June 2008 |access-date=6 May 2010 |archive-date=29 August 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210829230356/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/25/middleeast.middleeastthemedia |url-status=live }}</ref><ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210418005331/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/23/israelandthepalestinians.middleeast |date=18 April 2021 }}. ''The Guardian'', 23 June 2008.</ref>
:Many if not most of Zionism's mainstream leaders expressed at least passing support for the idea of transfer during the movement's first decades. True, as the subject was sensitive they did not often or usually state this in public (Morris, 2001, p. 41; see Masalha, 1992 for a comprehensive discussion).


However, al-Husseini, Palestinian governor of East Jerusalem in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), has said that the Israeli law "is racist and imperialistic, which aims at seizing thousands of acres and properties of lands".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90854/7074643.html|title=Palestinians warn of executing Israeli "absentee property" law in Jerusalem|author=F_404|access-date=24 April 2016}}</ref>
Other authors, including Palestinian writers and Israeli ], have also described this attitude as a prevalent notion in Zionist thinking and as a major factor in the exodus. Israeli historian and former diplomat ] wrote:


====Laws enacted====
:The debate about whether or not the mass exodus of Palestinians was the result of a Zionist design or the inevitable concomitant of war should not ignore the ideological constructs that motivated the Zionist enterprise. The philosophy of transfer was not a marginal, esoteric article in the mindset and thinking of the main leaders of the Yishuv. These ideological constructs provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field actively to encourage the eviction of the local population even when no precise orders to that effect were issued by the political leaders (Ben-Ami, Shlomo ''Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy'', 2005, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84883-6).
A number of Israeli laws were enacted that enabled the further acquisition of depopulated lands. Among these laws were:
* The "Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance (1943)". To authorise the confiscation of lands for Government and public purposes.
* The "Prescription Law, 5718-1958". According to COHRE and BADIL (p.&nbsp;44), this law, in conjunction with the "Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance (Amendment) Law, 5720-1960", the "Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance (New Version), 5729-1969" and the "Land Law, 5729-1969", was designed to revise criteria related to the use and registration of Miri lands—one of the most prevalent types in Palestine—and to facilitate Israel's acquisition of such land.


==Israeli censorship of documents==
While not discounting other reasons for the exodus, the 'transfer principle' theory suggests that this prevalent 'attitude of transfer' is what made it easy for local ] and ] commanders to resort to various means of expelling the Arab population, even without a 'master plan' or a blanket command given by Israeli authorities. Morris sums it up by saying that the circumstances, 'had prepared and conditioned hearts and minds (...) so that, when it occurred, few Jewish voices protested or doubt; it was accepted as inevitable and natural by the bulk of the Jewish population' (Morris, p. 60). Morris also points out that " Zionist support for 'Transfer' really is 'unambiguous'; the connection between that support and what actually happened during the war is far more tenuous than Arabs propagandists will allow" (Morris, p.6).
Following the large-scale declassification of Israeli archival material in the 1980s, additional information about the circumstances surrounding the expulsion and flight of Palestinians became available, contributing to modern understandings of these events.<ref>{{cite book |first1=Benny |last1=Morris |author1-link=Benny Morris |editor1-last=Rogan |editor1-first=Eugene L. |editor2-last=Shlaim |editor2-first=Avi |title=The War for Palestine |date=2012 |chapter=Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948 |page=37}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Levey |first=Zach |date=August 24, 2020 |title=Israel's Archives: Digitization, Delays and Nostalgia for the Reading Room |url=https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/israels-archives-digitization-delays-and-nostalgia-reading-room |access-date=November 28, 2024 |website=Wilson Center |language=en}}</ref> At the same time, there has been evidence of Defense Ministry officials searching Israeli archives to remove previously declassified documents evidencing Israeli massacres of Palestinian villagers in 1947 and 1948 that led to the Palestinian expulsion and flight.<ref>{{cite news |first=Hagar |last=Shezaf |date=4 July 2019 |url=https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-systematically-hides-evidence-of-1948-expulsion-of-arabs-1.7435103 |title=Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211128084245/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-systematically-hides-evidence-of-1948-expulsion-of-arabs-1.7435103 |archive-date=28 November 2021 |work=]}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |first=Dina |last=Kraft |date=20 April 2018 |url=https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-hidden-stories-of-the-nakba-1.6010350 |title=Nakba, Even as Israel Cuts Them Off From Their Sources |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211108125306/https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-hidden-stories-of-the-nakba-1.6010350 |archive-date=8 November 2021 |work=]}}</ref>


==Historiography==
Historian Christopher Sykes saw the causes of the Arab flight differently:
{{Further|Nakba denial|Causes of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight}}
In the first decades after the exodus, two diametrically opposed schools of analysis could be distinguished.<ref>Erskine Childers. ''The Other Exodus''. "The BBC monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put."
Erskine Childers: The Other Exodus ''The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict'', (1969) rev.ed. Pelican, 1970 pp. 179–188 p. 183.</ref>


] at ] noted in 2010 that the events of the Nakba were by that point "widely described" as involving ],<ref name="Ian Black-2010">{{cite news |title=Memories and maps keep alive Palestinian hopes of return |author=Ian Black |newspaper=The Guardian |date=26 November 2010 |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/26/palestinian-refugees-middle-east-conflict |access-date=10 December 2016 |archive-date=20 November 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211120173426/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/26/palestinian-refugees-middle-east-conflict |url-status=live }}</ref> with Israeli documents from 1948 themselves using the term "to cleanse" when referring to uprooting Arabs.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262428 |title=Survival of the Fittest (Cont.) |work=Haaretz |date=8 January 2004 |access-date=24 April 2016 |archive-date=19 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230319084559/https://www.haaretz.com/2004-01-08/ty-article/survival-of-the-fittest-cont/0000017f-e86d-da9b-a1ff-ec6fb5000000 |url-status=live }}<!-- this is part 2 of {{cite news |author=Ari Shavit |title=Survival of the Fittest |newspaper=Haaretz |date=7 January 2004 |url=https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262454}}--></ref> Not all historians accept this characterization.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1008/S00201/book-review-palestine-betrayed-by-efraim-karsh.htm|title=Book Review: Palestine Betrayed by Efraim Karsh|access-date=24 April 2016|archive-date=1 May 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210501055434/https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1008/S00201/book-review-palestine-betrayed-by-efraim-karsh.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> ] is among the few historians who still consider that most of the Arabs who fled left of their own accord or were pressured to leave by their fellow Arabs, despite Israeli attempts to convince them to stay. He says that the expulsions in Lod and Ramle were driven by military necessity.<ref>{{cite web|last=Karsh |first=Efraim |url=http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/mems/people/staff/academic/karsh/articles/WerethePalestiniansExpelled.pdf |title=Were the Palestinians Expelled? |work=] |access-date=2014-08-06 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140224112045/http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/mems/people/staff/academic/karsh/articles/WerethePalestiniansExpelled.pdf |archive-date=24 February 2014 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last=Karsh|first=Efraim|url=http://www.meforum.org/302/rewriting-israels-history|title=Rewriting Israel's History|journal=The Middle East Quarterly|date=June 1996|access-date=2014-08-10|archive-date=22 July 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140722100118/http://www.meforum.org/302/rewriting-israels-history|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>cf. {{cite journal|last=Teveth|first=Shabtai|title=The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and Its Origins|journal=Middle Eastern Studies|volume=26|issue=2|pages=214–249|date=April 1990|jstor=4283366|doi=10.1080/00263209008700816}}</ref>
::It can be said with a high degree of certainty that most of the time in the first half of 1948 the mass-exodus was the natural, thoughtless, pitiful movement of ignorant people who had been badly led and who in the day of trial found themselves forsaken by their leaders. Terror was the impulse, by hearsay most often, and sometimes through experience as in the Arab port of Jaffa which surrendered on the 12th of May and where the Irgunists, to quote Mr. John Marlowe, 'embellished their Dir Yassin battle honours by an orgy of looting'.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"But if the exodus was by and large an accident of war in the first stage, in the later stages it was consciously and mercilessly helped on by Jewish threats and aggression towards Arab populations. (''Cross Roads to Israel'', 1973)


===Palestinian narrative===
The 'transfer principle' theory came under attack from several historians, notably ], who claimed that 'Morris engages in five types of distortion: he misrepresents documents, resorts to partial quotes, withholds evidence, makes false assertions, and rewrites original documents" (Karsh, Efraim, 'Benny Morris and the Reign of Error', ''The Middle East Quarterly'', Vol. 4 No. 2, 1999 ) Also See: . To the point in question, Karsh argued that transferist thinking was a fringe philosophy within Zionism, and had no significant effect on expulsions. The debate is still going strong today.
The term "]" was first applied to the events of 1948 by ], a professor of history at the ], in his 1948 book "Ma'na al-Nakba" (The Meaning of the Disaster) he wrote "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history."<ref name="Honaida Ghanim-2009">{{cite news |author=Honaida Ghanim |title=Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, gender, and social change among Palestinian poets in Israel after Nakba |journal=International Journal of Political and Cultural Science |volume=22 |year=2009 |pages=33–39}}</ref> The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet ].<ref name="Honaida Ghanim-2009"/>


In his encyclopedia published in the late 1950s, ] wrote: "How Can I call it but Nakba? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we expelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons."<ref name="Honaida Ghanim-2009"/> ] also used the term Nakba in the title of his book "Sir al Nakba" (The Secret behind the Disaster) written in 1955. After the ] in 1967, Zureiq wrote another book, ''The New Meaning of the Disaster'', but the term Nakba is reserved for the 1948 war.
===The "Master Plan" Theory===
]
Based on the aforementioned alleged prevalent idea of transfer, and on actual expulsions that took place in the ], Walid Khalidi, a Palestinian historian, introduced a thesis in 1961 according to which the Palestinian exodus was planned in advance by the Zionist leadership. He based that thesis on ], a plan devised by the Haganah high command in March 1948, which stipulated, among other things that if Palestinians in villages controlled by the Jewish troops resist, they should be expelled (Khalidi, 1961). Plan D was aimed to establish Jewish sovereignty over the land allocated to the Jews by the United Nations (Resolution 181), and to prepare the ground toward the expected invasion of Palestine by Arab states after the imminent establishment of the state of Israel. In addition, it was introduced while Jewish-Palestinian fighting was already underway and while thousands of Palestinians had already fled. Nevertheless, Khalidi argued that the plan was a master-plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians from the territories controlled by the Jews. He argued that there was an omnipresent understanding during the war that as many ] ]s as possible had to be transferred out of the ], and that that understanding stood behind many of the expulsions that the commanders on the field carried out.


Together with ]'s "]" (the barefoot child always drawn from behind), and the symbolic key for the house in ] carried by so many Palestinian refugees, the "collective memory of that experience has shaped the identity of the Palestinian refugees as a people".<ref name="Bowker, 2003, p. 96">Bowker, 2003, p. 96.</ref>
Khalidi and ] (''A History of Modern Palestine'', p. 131) are among the scholars to defend this thesis. Others are skeptical of their conclusion: they emphasize that no central directive has surfaced from the archives and that if such an omnipresent understanding had existed, it would have left a mark in the vast amounts of documentation the Zionist leadership produced at the time. Furthermore, Yosef Weitz, who was strongly in favor of expulsion, had explicitly asked Ben-Gurion for such a directive and was turned down. Finally, settlement policy guidelines drawn up between December 1947 and February 1948, meant to handle the absorption of the anticipated first million immigrants, planned some 150 new settlements, about half of them in the Negev, with the rest along the lines of the UN partition map (] ]) for the north and centre of the country.


The events of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War greatly influenced the ]. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba. The exodus is usually described in strongly emotional terms. For example, at the controversial 2001 ] in ], prominent Palestinian scholar and activist ] referred to the Palestinians as "...a nation in captivity held hostage to an ], as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, ''apartheid'', racism, and victimization" (original emphasis).<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210304060303/http://www.i-p-o.org/palestine-ashrawi.htm |date=4 March 2021 }}, Durban (South Africa), 28 August 2001. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances.</ref>
Benny Morris, in particular, disagrees with the "Master Plan" theory but argues transfer was inevitable. He writes:


In the Palestinian calendar, the day after Israel declared independence (15 May) is observed as ]. It is traditionally observed as an important day of remembrance.<ref name="Bowker, 2003, p. 96"/> In May 2009 the political party headed by Israeli foreign minister ] introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance.<ref>Boudreaux, Richard. {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20120707155623/http://articles.latimes.com/2009/05/26/news/fg-israel-loyalty26 |date=7 July 2012 }}, ''Los Angeles Times'', 26 May 2009.</ref> Following public criticism the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the ] would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions that hold the commemorations. The new draft was approved by the ] in March 2011.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.acri.org.il/he/680|title=חוק הנכבה|date=4 May 2011|access-date=24 April 2016|archive-date=27 February 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210227180116/https://www.acri.org.il/he/680|url-status=live}}</ref>
:My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 War, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan for expulsion. But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism - because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv's leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure. By 1948, transfer was in the air. The transfer thinking that preceded the war contributed to the denouement by conditioning the Jewish population, political parties, military organisations and military and civilian leaderships for what transpired. Thinking about the possibilities of transfer in the 1930s and 1940s had prepared and conditioned hearts and minds for its implementation in the course of 1948 so that, as it occurred, few voiced protest or doubt; it was accepted as inevitable and natural by the bulk of the Jewish population. (''Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', p. 60)


] writes that the Israeli version of history is that the "Palestinians left voluntarily or under orders from their leaders and that Israelis had no responsibility, material or moral, for their plight." She also finds a ] among Israelis that Palestinians bear the blame for the Nakba by not accepting the UN's ] of Palestine into separate ethnic states.<ref>{{Cite web |url= http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/476/op5.htm |title=Denial and the future of peace |work= Al-Ahram Weekly |access-date=7 September 2010 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110605164146/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/476/op5.htm |archive-date=5 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref>
Supporters of the "Master Plan" theory argue that the missing central directives have not been found because they were deliberately omitted or because the understanding of the significance of expulsion was so widespread that no directive was necessary. They claim that the Zionist leadership in general and Ben-Gurion in particular were well aware of how historiography worked. What would be written about the war and what light Israel would be presented in was so important that it was worth making an intentional effort to hide those of their actions that might seem reprehensible.


] writes that "the Nakba was so swift and catastrophic that no Palestinian political organization of any kind existed for over a decade after it."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Anderson |first1=Perry |author-link1=Perry Anderson |title=The House of Zion |journal=] |date=November–December 2015 |issue=96 |pages=5–37 |url=https://newleftreview.org/II/96/perry-anderson-the-house-of-zion |access-date=15 September 2016 |archive-date=1 May 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210501112400/https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii96/articles/perry-anderson-the-house-of-zion |url-status=live }}</ref>
===The Two-Stage Theory===
Yoav Gelber has a different approach. Underlining the importance of the consequences of the debate he writes: 'Since the abortive talks at Camp David in July 2000, the Palestinian refugee problem has re-emerged as the hard core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For five decades, the Israelis have swept the problem under the carpet, while the Palestinians have consistently developed their national ethos around their Right of Return'


=== Israeli narrative ===
Gelber describes the "master plan thesis" as propaganda in which Palestinian historians 'have composed a false narrative of deliberate expulsion, stressing the role of Deir Yassin and Plan Dalet in their exodus', but he also dismisses the "call of flight from Arab leadership thesis": 'Later, this guess would become the official line of Israeli diplomacy and propaganda. However, the documentary evidence clearly shows that the Arab leaders did not encourage the flight.'
The approach of the State of Israel and of Israeli-Jews to the causes of the exodus are divided into two main periods: 1949 – late 1970s, late 1970s – present (a period characterized by the advent of the ]).


Beginning in 1949, the dominant Israeli narrative was presented in the publications of various Israeli state institutions such as the national Information Center, the Ministry of Education (history and civic textbooks) and the army (IDF), as well as in Israeli-Jewish societal institutions: newspapers, memoirs of 1948 war veterans, and in the studies of the research community.<ref>Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2008). "The Israeli national Information Center and collective memory of the Israeli-Arab conflict". ''The Middle East Journal'', 62 (4), 653–670; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004." ''Journal of Peace Research'', 48 (2), 235–248; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012). Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem. ''Peace Review''. 24 (2), 187–194.</ref>
Gelber distinguishes two main phases during the exodus: before and after the intervention of Arab armies in May 1948.


There were some exceptions: the independent weekly '']'', the ]'s daily/weekly '']'' and the socialist organisation ] presented the Palestinian and the balanced/critical narratives.{{citation needed|date=April 2017}} A number of Jewish scholars living outside of Israel – including Gabbay and Peretz – since the late 1950s also presented a different narrative. According to this narrative, some Palestinians left willingly while others were expelled by the Jewish and later Israeli fighting forces.<ref>Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004". ''Journal of Peace Research'', 48 (2), 235–248.</ref>
====First Stage: The Crumbling of Arab Palestinian social structure====
Gelber describes the exodus before May 1948 as being mainly due to the inability of the Palestinian social structure to withstand a state of war:


====Changes from the late 1970s====
:Mass flight accompanied the fighting from the beginning of the civil war. In the absence of proper military objectives, the antagonists carried out their attacks on non-combatant targets, subjecting civilians of both sides to deprivation, intimidation and harassment. Consequently, the weaker and backward Palestinian society collapsed under a not-overly-heavy strain. Unlike the Jews, who had nowhere to go and fought with their back to the wall, the Palestinians had nearby shelters. From the beginning of hostilities, an increasing flow of refugees drifted into the heart of Arab-populated areas and into adjacent countries... The Palestinians’ precarious social structure tumbled because of economic hardships and administrative disorganization. Contrary to the Jews who built their “State in the Making” during the mandate period, the Palestinians had not created in time substitutes for the government services that vanished with the British withdrawal. The collapse of services, the lack of authority and a general feeling of fear and insecurity generated anarchy in the Arab sector.
The dominance in Israel of the willing-flight Zionist narrative of the exodus began to be challenged by Israeli-Jewish societal institutions beginning mainly in the late 1970s. Many scholarly studies and daily newspaper essays, as well as some 1948 Jewish war veterans' memoirs have begun presenting the more balanced narrative (at times called the "post-Zionist" view). According to this narrative, some Palestinians left willingly (due to calls of Arab or their leadership to partially leave, fear, and ]), while others were expelled by the Jewish/Israeli fighting forces.<ref>Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004". ''Journal of Peace Research'', 48 (2), 235–248; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012). "Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem". ''Peace Review'', 24 (2), 187–194.</ref>


From the late 1970s onwards, many newspaper articles and scholarly studies, as well as some 1948 war veterans' memoirs, began to present the balanced/critical narrative. This has become more common since the late 1980s, to the point that since then the vast majority of newspaper articles and studies, and a third of the veterans' memoirs, have presented a more balanced narrative. Since the 1990s, also textbooks used in the educational system, some without approval of the Ministry of Education, began to present the balanced narrative.<ref>Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2008). "The Israeli National Information Center and collective memory of the Israeli-Arab conflict". ''The Middle East Journal'', 62 (4), 653–670; Nets-Zehngut, R. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004". ''Journal of Peace Research'', 48 (2), 235–248; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012); Podeh, Eli. (2002). "The Arab-Israeli conflict in history textbooks (1948–2000)." Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey. Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem. ''Peace Review''. 24 (2), 187–194.</ref>
According to Gelber the disintegration of the civil structure built by the British amplified the problem: 'Thousands of Palestinian government employees — doctors, nurses, civil servants, lawyers, clerks, etc. — became redundant and departed as the mandatory administration disintegrated. This set a model and created an atmosphere of desertion that rapidly expanded to wider circles. Between half to two-thirds of the inhabitants in cities such as Haifa or Jaffa had abandoned their homes before the Jews stormed these towns in late April 1948.'


The Israeli-Jewish societal change intensified in the late 1980s. The publication of balanced/critical newspaper essays increased, the vast majority, along with balanced 1948 war veterans' memoirs, about a third. At the same time, Israeli NGOs began more significantly to present the balanced and the Palestinian narratives more significantly in their publications.<ref>Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012). "Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem". ''Peace Review'', 24 (2), 187–194.</ref>
====Second Stage: Israeli army victories and expulsions (after May 1948)====
Moreover, Israel opened up part of its archives in the 1980s for investigation by historians. This coincided with the emergence of various Israeli historians, called ] who favored a more critical analysis of Israel's history. The Arab/Palestinian official and historiographical versions hardly changed,<ref>Khalidi, Walid (1961)</ref> and received support from some of the New Historians. Pappé calls the exodus an ethnic cleansing and points at Zionist preparations in the preceding years and provides more details on the planning process by a group he calls the "Consultancy".{{r|Pappe2006}} Morris also says that ethnic cleansing took place during the Palestinian exodus, and that "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing... when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing."<ref name="Shavit"/>
During the second phase of the war, after the Arab invasion, Gelber considers the exodus to have been a result of Israeli army's victory and the expulsion of Palestinians. He writes:


Pappé's scholarship on the issue has been subject to severe criticism. ] says that Pappé's research is flecked with inaccuracies and characterized by distortions.<ref>{{cite news |title=The Liar as Hero |url=http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.Mcgi?ID=7814 |author=Benny Morris |date=21 March 2011 |work=SPME }}{{Dead link|date=August 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref>
:"The position of these new escaping or expelled Palestinians was essentially different from that of their predecessors of the pre-invasion period. Their mass flight was not the result of their inability to hold on against the Jews. The Arab expeditions failed to protect them, and they remained a constant reminder of the fiasco. These later refugees were sometimes literally deported across the lines. In certain cases, IDF units terrorized them to hasten their flight, and isolated massacres — particularly during the liberation of Galilee and the Negev in October 1948 — expedited the flight."
] refers to Pappé's assertion of a master plan by Jews to expel Arabs, as contrived.<ref>{{cite news |title=Pure Pappe |url=http://www.meforum.org/897/a-history-of-modern-palestine-one-land-two-peoples |author=Ephraim Karsh |date=Winter 2006 |work=The Middle East Quarterly |access-date=29 May 2018 |archive-date=9 October 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211009195139/https://www.meforum.org/897/a-history-of-modern-palestine-one-land-two-peoples |url-status=live }}</ref> On his part, ]—who has been described by '']'' as "the most classical" and "the most mainstream" of the New Historians<ref>{{cite news|newspaper=The Economist|url=https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2009/09/24/distilled-history|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20210304163613/https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2009/09/24/distilled-history|archivedate=2021-03-04|url-status=live|title=Distilled history|date=26 September 2009}}</ref>—has been critical of Benny Morris, saying that, since the beginning of the ], Morris's scholarship has "veered from the leftwing to the rightwing end" and that "racist undertones" against Arabs and Palestinians has become a characteristic of his work.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/history1|last=Shlaim|first=Avi|website=The Guardian|date=31 May 2008|title=No sentiments in war|access-date=26 March 2022|archive-date=3 July 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240703040610/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/history1|url-status=live}}</ref> Of Karsh, Shlaim has written that he gives "a selective and tendentious account designed to exonerate the Jewish side of any responsibility" for some of the events that took place in 1948 and that he engages in "distort and misrepresent the work of his opponents".<ref>{{cite journal|title=A Totalitarian Concept of History|last=Shlaim|first=Avi|journal=Middle East Quarterly|volume=3|issue=3|date=September 1996|url=https://www.meforum.org/92/a-totalitarian-concept-of-history|pages=52–55|access-date=26 March 2022|archive-date=24 September 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210924183153/https://www.meforum.org/92/a-totalitarian-concept-of-history|url-status=live}}</ref>


In March 2015, ], Yesh Atid party MK, and former education minister of Israel, called for Israel to have all schools include the Nakba in their curriculum. "I'm for teaching the Nakba to all students in Israel. I do not think that a student can go through the Israeli educational system, while 20% of students have an ethos, a story, and he does not know that story." He added that covering the topic in schools could address some of the racial tensions that exist in Israeli society. His comments broke a taboo in the traditional Israeli narrative, and conflicts with efforts on the part of some Israeli lawmakers to defund schools that mark Nakba.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210501085737/https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-education-minister-calls-for-nakba-studies-in-school/ |date=1 May 2021 }}. ''The Times of Israel''. 24 March 2015.</ref>
Morris agrees that such expulsions occurred. For example, concerning whether in ] there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order he replied :


The 1948 Palestinian exodus has also drawn comparisons with the ], which involved the departure, flight, migration, and expulsion of 800,000–1,000,000 Jews from ] and ] between 1948 and the 1970s. In three resolutions between 2007 and 2012 ({{USBill|110|hres|185}}, {{USBill|110|sres|85}}, {{USBill|112|hr|6242}}), the US Congress called on the ] to "pair any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees with a similar reference to Jewish or other refugee populations".<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishFeatures/Article.aspx?id=279865 | title=Congress considers recognizing Jewish refugees | work=Haaretz | agency=JTA | date=2 August 2012 | access-date=22 September 2012 | archive-date=12 May 2021 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210512041820/https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Congress-considers-recognizing-Jewish-refugees | url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/jewish-refugees-bill-being-considered-by-u-s-house-of-representatives-1.455503 | title=Jewish refugees bill being considered by U.S. House of Representatives | work=Haaretz | agency=JTA | date=2 August 2012 | access-date=22 September 2012 | archive-date=26 May 2021 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210526080150/https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/u-s-lawmakers-push-jewish-refugees-bill-1.5275904 | url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite news | url=http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4262885,00.html | title=House members seek recognition for Jewish refugees from Arab countries | newspaper=Yedioth Ahronot | date=31 July 2012 | access-date=22 September 2012 | archive-date=7 May 2021 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210507095733/https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4262885,00.html | url-status=live }}</ref>
:Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of ] .


Israeli historian ] has rejected the comparison, arguing that the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are totally different and that any similarity is superficial. Porath says that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was from a Jewish-Zionist perspective the fulfilment of "a national dream" and of Israeli national policy in the form of the ]. He notes the efforts of Israeli agents working in Arab countries, including those of the ] in various Arab countries since the 1930s, to assist a Jewish "]". Porath contrasts this with what he calls the "national calamity" and "unending personal tragedies" suffered by the Palestinians that resulted in "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic".<ref>{{cite news |first=Ada |last=Porath |title=What about Jewish Nakba? |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/jan/16/mrs-peterss-palestine/?pagination=false |work=YnetNews |date=16 January 1986 |access-date=19 February 2012 |archive-date=24 October 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151024105951/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/jan/16/mrs-peterss-palestine/?pagination=false |url-status=live }}</ref>
Other historians, such as Karsh, deny the expulsion , but they refer only to the first phase of the war which is not contested by Gelber or Morris.


Israeli academic ] has written in an article entitled "Hitching A Ride on the Magic Carpet" published in the Israeli daily '']'' regarding this issue. "], a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq, adamantly opposed the analogy: "I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists."{{full citation needed|date=January 2020}} In a Knesset hearing, ] stated emphatically: "I have this to say: I am not a refugee." He added: "I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee."<ref>{{cite news |first=Yehouda |last=Shenhav |url=https://www.haaretz.com/1.5361803 |title=Hitching a Ride on the Magic Carpet |work=] |date=15 August 2003 |access-date=24 April 2016 |archive-date=26 October 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211026024806/https://www.haaretz.com/1.5361803 |url-status=live }}</ref>
Gelber also underlines that Palestinian had certainly in mind the opportunity they would have to return their home after the conflict and that this hope must have eased their flight: 'When they ran away, the refugees were confident of their eventual repatriation at the end of hostilities. This term could mean a cease-fire, a truce, an armistice and, certainly, a peace agreement. The return of escapees had been customary in the Middle East's wars throughout the ages'.


==Results of the Exodus== ====Criticism of the Israeli approach====
An ongoing scholarly critique of the Israeli narratives about the events of 1948 is the overreliance of Israeli historians on Israeli official documents and archival sources.{{efn|Israeli historians generally believe they are both ideologically and empirically impartial, and that the only reliable sources for the reconstruction of the 1948 war are in Israeli official documents and the archives of the Israel Defense Forces.<ref name="Masalha-2009"/>}} American historian ], an expert on Arab oral history, has argued that the often "excessive or even exclusive reliance on Israeli archives", even by the New Historians, with the exception of Ilan Pappé, has "limited their narratives and conclusions".<ref name="Masalha-2009"/>
==="Absentee" property===
]
In 1950, the Absentee Property Law was passed in Israel. It provided for confiscation of the property and land left behind by departing Palestinians, the so-called "absentees". Arabs who never left Israel, and received citizenship after the war, but stayed for a few days in a nearby village had their property confiscated. (Fischbach, 1999, p. 23; p. 39) About 30,000-35,000 Palestinians became "present absentees" - persons present at the time but considered absent (Benvenisti, 2002, p. 201).


In response, ] has pointed out that the archives of the Arab states, including those of the main Arab political parties, royal courts, and armies, all remain closed and that historians are forced to rely primarily on Western and Israeli documentation.<ref>{{Cite speech |first=Benny |last=Morris | title="1948 as Jihad" |event=The Second Annual Professor William Prusoff Honorary Lecture |location=] |date=3 February 2009 |url=https://isgap.org/media/2009/02/benny-morris-1948-as-jihad/ |quote="Several methodological problems arise here. The first and most obvious is that the archives of the Arab states, of the main Arab political parties, royal courts, and armies are all closed – all the Arab states are dictatorships of one sort or another and dictatorships, as is well known, do not open archives. This means that anyone interested in understanding the Arab side in the 1948 War is forced, in the main, to view it through the eyes and documentation of Western and Israeli diplomats, analysts, and intelligence officers."}}</ref><ref>{{cite interview |last=Morris |first=Benny |interviewer=Niram Ferretti |date=21 August 2019 |title=Covering and uncovering history: An interview with Benny Morris |publisher=L'informale |url=https://www.linformale.eu/covering-and-uncovering-history-an-interview-with-benny-morris/ |quote=The first thing I would say is that those who say this are completely hypocritical, because when you look at Arab archives they are ''all'' closed. They haven’t opened anything. So, here they are criticizing Israel for having opened certain documents and then having closed them again while the Arabs and the Palestinians have closed everything and have been hiding everything from researchers.}}</ref>
How much of Israel's territory consists of land confiscated with the Absentee Property Law is uncertain and much disputed. According to ], an Israeli ], told him that, including the ] and ] it could amount to up to 70% of the territory:


==Films==
:The Custodian of Absentee Property does not choose to discuss politics. But when asked how much of the land of the state of Israel might potentially have two claimants - an Arab and a Jew holding respectively a British Mandate and an Israeli deed to the same property - Mr. Manor believes that 'about 70 percent' might fall into that category (], 'The Land of Palestine, Part Eight: The Custodian of Absentee Property', ''The Times'', ], ]).
* '']'' (1997), a documentary film by Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jansse that follows the events surrounding the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.
* '']'' (2002), a documentary film directed by ] about ], a Palestinian village that was captured and depopulated by Israeli forces in the 1948 war.
* '']'' (2007), a documentary film by ] that tells the story of the exodus and return of a small Palestinian village called ] in 1948.
* '']'' (2011), a British mini-series written and directed by ] that deals with a young woman going to Israel in the present day and using her visit to investigate her soldier grandfather's part in the post-war phase of the ].
* '']'' (2022), a historical drama film directed by ] about a Palestinian girl's experience during the Nakba, based on a true story she was told as a child about a girl named Radieh.


==Gallery==
Other sources, such as the ], claim that Custodial and Absentee land is only 12% of the total:
<gallery>
File:Boy sister school nakba.jpg|Makeshift school for Palestinian refugees
File:Woman nakba dress jug.jpg|Palestinian woman, a child and a jug{{cn|date=September 2024}}
File:Oldman girl nakba.jpg|Refugees in the open, 1948{{cn|date=September 2024}}
File:Olddman boy nakba.jpg| Old and young in the entrance of a tent, 1948{{cn|date=September 2024}}
</gallery>


==See also==
<blockquote>The third source of national land pertains to the remaining 12 percent, the most politically sensitive type of national land. A statutory body established in 1950, the Development Authority, received its holdings from the Custodian of Absentee Property, a governmental body that took charge of land owned mostly by Arab residents who left or were expelled from their place of residence during the 1948-9 war. Most of these lands have been leased or sold. </blockquote>
{{portal|Palestine}}

{{columns-list|

* ]
-------------
* ]
The Jewish National Fund, from ''Jewish Villages in Israel'', 1949:
* ]

* ]
<blockquote>Of the entire area of the State of Israel only about 300,000-400,000 dunums -- apart from the desolate rocky area of the southern Negev, at present quire unfit for cultivation -- are State Domain which the Israeli Government took over from the Mandatory regime. The J.N.F. and private Jewish owners possess under two million dunums. Almost all the rest belongs at law to Arab owners, many of whom have left the country. The fate of these Arabs will be settled when the terms of the peace treaties between Israel and her Arab neighbours are finally drawn up. The J.N.F., however, cannot wait until then to obtain the land it requires for its pressing needs. It is, therefore, acquiring part of the land abandoned by the Arab owners, through the Government of Israel, the sovereign authority in Israel.<br />
* ]
<br />
* ]
Whatever the ultimate fate of the Arabs concerned, it is manifest that their legal right to their land and property in Israel, or to the monetary value of them, will not be waived, nor do the Jews wish to ignore them. Legal conquest of territory is a powerful factor in determining the frontiers and the sovereignty of a state. But conquest by force of arms cannot, in law or in ethics, abrogate the rights of the legal owner to his personal property. The J.N.F., therefore, will pay for the lands it takes over, at a fixed and fair price. The Government will receive the money and in due time will make compensation to the Arabs.<br />
* ]
<br />
* ]
<small>from Jewish Villages In Israel, by the Jewish National Fund, (Keren Kayemeth Leisrael) Summer 1949 Jerusalem pg XXI</small></blockquote>


The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954, more than one third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property (Peretz, ''Israel and the Palestinian Arabs'', 1958).

===Palestinian refugees===
''See also main article ]''
{{ethnic group|
|group=Palestinian refugees
|poptime=4.9 million<ref>, </ref>
|popplace=], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ]
|rels=], predominantly; ]
|langs=]
|related= ], ], ], ], ], ], other ] groups
}} }}
Although there is no accepted definition of who can be considered a Palestinian refugee for legal purposes, UNRWA defines them as 'persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict'. UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. Under this definition, the total number of Palestinian refugees is estimated to have grown form 914,000 in1950 to 4.9 million , one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon (Bowker, 2003, p. 72) and around 15% in other Arab and Western countries. Approximately 1 million refugees have no form of identification other than an UNWRA identification card (Bowker, 2003, pp. 61-62).


==References==
==The Nakba's role in the Palestinian narrative==
===Notes===
'''The Nakba''' or '''Al-Nakba''' (]: النكبة, pronounced ''An-Nakba'') is a term meaning "cataclysm" or "catastrophe". It is the term with which ]s usually refer to the ], or more specifically, the Palestinian exodus.
{{notelist}}


===Citations===
The term "Nakba" was coined by ], a professor of history at the ], in his 1948 book ''Ma'na al-Nakba'' (The Meaning of the Disaster). After the ] in 1967 Zureiq wrote another book, ''The New Meaning of the Disaster'', but the term Nakba is reserved for the 1948 war.
{{reflist}}
]'s ''Handala'']]
Together with ]'s '']'' (the barefoot child always drawn from behind), and the symbolic key for the house in ] carried by so many Palestinian refugees, the 'collective memory of' the Nakba 'has shaped the identity of the Palestinian refugees as a people' (Bowker, 2003, p. 96).


===Sources===
The events during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War had a great influence on the ]. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about it. The exodus is usually described in strongly emotional terms. For example, at the controversial 2001 ] in ], prominent Palestinian scholar and activist ] referred to the Palestinians as "a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba , as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization."
{{refbegin|2}}

* {{Cite news |last=Abu Sitta |first=Salman |authorlink=Salman Abu Sitta |title=Traces of Poison–Israel's Dark History Revealed |work=] |date=2003 |url=https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2003/traces-of-poison%E2%80%93israels-dark-history-revealed |access-date=2024-01-30 |via=Palestine Land Society |archive-date=29 January 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240129231652/https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2003/traces-of-poison%E2%80%93israels-dark-history-revealed |url-status=live }}
], the day Israel declared independence, is considered an important day in the Palestinian calendar and is known as Nakba Day to Palestinians. It is traditionally observed as a day of remembrance (Bowker, 2003, p. 96).
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* {{Cite book |first1=Gary |last1=Ackerman |first2=Victor |last2=Asal |chapter=A Quantitative Overview of Biological Weapons: Identification, Characterization, and Attribution |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IUNpSkB510EC&pg=PA186 |pages=186–213 |title=Terrorism, War, or Disease?: Unraveling the Use of Biological Weapons |editor1-last=Clunan |editor1-first=Anne |editor-last2=Lavoy |editor-first2=Peter R. |editor-link2=Peter Lavoy |editor-last3=Martin |editor-first3=Susan B. |date=2008 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-8047-7981-4|access-date=8 February 2024 |archive-date=8 February 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240208181048/https://books.google.com/books?id=IUNpSkB510EC&pg=PA186 |url-status=live }}
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* Beit-Hallahmi, Benny (1993). ''Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel''. Oliver Branch Press. {{ISBN|978-1-56656-131-0}}
==Notes==
* Benvenisti, Meron (2002) ''Sacred Landscape''. University of California Press. {{ISBN|978-0-520-23422-2}}

* Bowker, Robert (2003). ''Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace''. Lynne Rienner Publishers. {{ISBN|978-1-58826-202-8}}
<references/>
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* Atiyah, Edward Selim, ''The Arabs'', London, Penguin Books, 1958
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*{{cite book |last=Esber |first=Rosemary |author-link=Rosemarie Esber |date=2008 |title=Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians |publisher=Arabicus Books & Media |isbn=978-0-9815131-7-1}}
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* ] (2003). ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00967-7
* Khalidi, Walid (1961). "Plan Dalet, Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine". ''Middle East Forum'', November 1961.
* Masalha, Nur (1992). ''Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948''. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies. ISBN 0-88728-235-0
* ], ''La Diaspora Palestinienne'', Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. {{ISBN|978-2-13-048486-8}}
* Lehn, Walter & Davis, Uri (1988). ''The Jewish National Fund''. London: Kegan Paul.
* {{Cite journal |last=Leitenberg |first=Milton |authorlink=Milton Leitenberg |date=2001 |title=Biological Weapons in the Twentieth Century: A Review and Analysis |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20014091096774 |journal=]|volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=267–320 |doi=10.1080/20014091096774 |pmid=11791799 |s2cid=33988479 |issn=1040-841X |access-date=8 February 2024 |archive-date=19 March 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240319073357/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20014091096774 |url-status=live }}
* ] (1992). ''Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948''. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies. {{ISBN|978-0-88728-235-5}}
* ] (2012). ''The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory''. London: Zed Books, {{ISBN|978-1-84813-971-8}}
* ] (2003). ''The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem''. London, ].
* Milstein Uri (1998) ''History of Israel's War of Independence'', Vol III. 1998 (English). University Press of America {{ISBN|978-0-7618-0769-8}} {{ISBN|978-0-7618-0769-8}}.
* ] (2001). "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948". In ''The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948'' (pp.&nbsp;37–59). ]. {{ISBN|978-0-521-79476-3}}
* ] (2004). ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited''. ]. {{ISBN|978-0-521-00967-6}}
* {{Cite journal |last1=Morris |first1=Benny |authorlink1=Benny Morris |last2=Kedar |first2=Benjamin Z. |authorlink2=Benjamin Z. Kedar |date=2023-09-03 |title='Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 |journal=]|volume=59 |issue=5 |pages=752–776 |doi=10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 |s2cid=252389726 |issn=0026-3206 |access-date=8 February 2024 |archive-date=18 January 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240118223735/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 |url-status=live }}
* {{cite journal |last=Martin |first=Susan B. |date=2010 |title=The Battlefield Use of Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Weapons from 1945 to 2008: Structural Realist Versus Normative Explanations |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=1643305 |journal=American Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper |access-date=8 February 2024 |archive-date=19 March 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240319073352/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1643305 |url-status=live }}
* {{cite book|last=Nashef|first=Hania A.M.|title=Palestinian Culture and the Nakba: Bearing Witness|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QMV1DwAAQBAJ|date=30 October 2018|publisher=Taylor & Francis|isbn=978-1-351-38749-1|access-date=2 April 2021|archive-date=14 January 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230114054418/https://books.google.com/books?id=QMV1DwAAQBAJ|url-status=live}}
* O'Ballance, Edgar (1956): ''The Arab–Israeli War 1948''. London: Faber and Faber,
* {{citep |Pappe |2006 |Pappé, Ilan (2006). '']''. Oxford: One World Books. (2006) {{ISBN|978-1-85168-467-0}}}}{{sfn whitelist|CITEREFPappe2006}}
* Pappé Ilan (1992) ''The Making of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1947–1951'' Published by ] {{ISBN|978-1-85043-819-9}}
* Peretz, Don (1958). ''Israel and the Palestinian Arabs''. Washington: Middle East Institute. * Peretz, Don (1958). ''Israel and the Palestinian Arabs''. Washington: Middle East Institute.
* Plascov, Avi (1981). ''Palestinian Refugees in Jordan, 1948-1957''. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7146-3120-5 * Plascov, Avi (1981). ''Palestinian Refugees in Jordan, 1948–1957''. London: ]. {{ISBN|978-0-7146-3120-2}}
* Quigley, John B. (2005). ''The Case For Palestine: An International Law Perspective''. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3539-5 * Quigley, John B. (2005). ''The Case For Palestine: An International Law Perspective''. ]. {{ISBN|978-0-8223-3539-9}}
* Rogan, Eugene L., & Shlaim, Avi (Eds.). (2001). ''The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-79476-5 * Rogan, Eugene L., & Shlaim, Avi (Eds.). (2001). ''The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948''. ]. {{ISBN|978-0-521-79476-3}}
* Rogan, Eugene L., & Shlaim, Avi (Eds.). (2007). ''The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948'', 2nd edition. New York: ]. {{ISBN|978-0-521-87598-1}}
* Joseph B. Schechtman, The Refugees In the World (New York, 1963)
* ] & Abu-Lughod, Lila (Eds.). (2007). ''Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory''. ]. {{ISBN|978-0-231-13579-5}}
* Schulz, Helena L. (2003). ''The Palestinian Diaspora''. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26821-4
* Sternhell, Zeev (1999). ''The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State''. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00967-8 * Safran, Nadav. ''Israel: The Embattled Ally'', ].
* Saleh, Abdul Jawad and Walid Mustafa (1987): ''Palestine: The Collective Destruction of Palestinian Villages and Zionist Colonisation 1882–1982''. London: Jerusalem Centre for Development Studies

* {{cite journal |last=Sayigh |first=Rosemary |authorlink=Rosemary Sayigh |date=2009 |title=Hiroshima, al-Nakba: Markers of New Hegemonies |journal=Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies |volume=3 |issue=1 |pages=151–169 |url=https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/87462/1/10saigh.pdf |access-date=8 February 2024 |archive-date=30 January 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240130211349/https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/87462/1/10saigh.pdf |url-status=live }}
==See also==
* Schechtman, Joseph B (1963) ''The Refugees in the World'' (New York)
* ]
* Schulz, Helena L. (2003). ''The Palestinian Diaspora''. London: ]. {{ISBN|978-0-415-26821-9}}
* ]
* Shavit, Ari (2013). ''My Promised Land. The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel''. New York: ] (2013)
* ]
* Segev, Tom (1998). ''1949: The first Israelis''. Henry Holt. {{ISBN|978-0-8050-5896-3}}
* ]
* Sternhell, Zeev (1999). ''The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State''. ]. {{ISBN|978-0-691-00967-4}}
* ]
{{refend}}
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]


==External links== ==External links==
{{Wikisource|Cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the Secretary-General of the United Nations}}
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* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/19970704102838/http://www.papp.undp.org/ |date=4 July 1997 }}
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200201104731/http://www.sonsofeilaboun.com/ |date=1 February 2020 }}
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Latest revision as of 17:35, 13 December 2024

Expulsion and flight of Palestinians during the 1948 Palestine war

Part of a series on the
Nakba
Precipitating events
  • Background



1948 expulsion and flight
Discourse
Notable writers
Symbols and memory
Ongoing
Lists
1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight is located in Mandatory Palestine1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 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In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine's predominantly Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of Israel, by its military. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba. Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning. Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.

The precise number of Palestinian refugees, many of whom settled in Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute, although the number is around 700,000, being approximately 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel. About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the termination of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948. The desire to prevent the collapse of the Palestinians and to avoid more refugees were some of the reasons for the entry of the Arab League into the country, which began the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

Although the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus remain a significantly controversial topic in public and political discourse, with a prominent amount of denialism regarding the responsibility of Israeli/Yishuv forces, most scholarship today agrees that expulsions and violence, and the fear thereof, were the primary causes. Scholars widely describe the event as ethnic cleansing, although some disagree. Factors involved in the exodus include direct expulsions by Israeli forces, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare including terrorism, massacres such as the widely publicized Deir Yassin massacre which caused many to flee out of fear, crop burning, typhoid epidemics in some areas caused by Israeli well-poisoning, and the collapse of Palestinian leadership including the demoralizing impact of wealthier classes fleeing.

Later, a series of land and property laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees. The existence of the so-called Law of Return allowing for immigration and naturalization of any Jewish person and their family to Israel, while a Palestinian right of return has been denied, has been cited as evidence for the charge that Israel practices apartheid. The status of the refugees, and in particular whether Israel will allow them the right to return to their homes, or compensate them, are key issues in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

History

The history of the Palestinian exodus is closely tied to the events of the war in Palestine, which lasted from 1947 to 1949, and to the political events preceding it. The first phase of that war began on 30 November 1947, a day after the United Nations adopted the Partition Plan for Palestine, which split the territory into Jewish and Arab states, and an international Jerusalem.

In September 1949, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated 711,000 Palestinian refugees existed outside Israel, with about one-quarter of the estimated 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remaining in Israel as "internal refugees".

December 1947 – March 1948

In the first few months of the civil war, the climate in the Mandate of Palestine became volatile, although throughout this period both Arab and Jewish leaders tried to limit hostilities. According to historian Benny Morris, the period was marked by Palestinian Arab attacks and Jewish defensiveness, increasingly punctuated by Jewish reprisals. Simha Flapan wrote that attacks by the Irgun and Lehi resulted in Palestinian Arab retaliation and condemnation. Jewish reprisal operations were directed against villages and neighborhoods from which attacks against Jews were believed to have originated.

The retaliations were more damaging than the provoking attack and included killing of armed and unarmed men, destruction of houses and sometimes expulsion of inhabitants. The Zionist groups of Irgun and Lehi reverted to their 1937–1939 strategy of indiscriminate attacks by placing bombs and throwing grenades into crowded places such as bus stops, shopping centres and markets. Their attacks on British forces reduced British troops' ability and willingness to protect Jewish traffic. General conditions deteriorated: the economic situation became unstable, and unemployment grew. Some Palestinian Arab leaders sent their families abroad.

Yoav Gelber wrote that the Arab Liberation Army embarked on a systematic evacuation of non-combatants from several frontier villages in order to turn them into military strongholds. Arab depopulation occurred most in villages close to Jewish settlements and in vulnerable neighborhoods in Haifa, Jaffa and West Jerusalem. The more impoverished inhabitants of these neighborhoods generally fled to other parts of the city. Those who could afford to flee further away did so, expecting to return when the troubles were over. By the end of March 1948 thirty villages were depopulated of their Palestinian Arab population. Approximately 100,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled to Arab parts of Palestine, such as Gaza, Beersheba, Haifa, Nazareth, Nablus, Jaffa and Bethlehem.

Some had left the country altogether, to Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Other sources speak of 30,000 Palestinian Arabs. Many of these were Palestinian Arab leaders and middle- and upper-class Palestinian Arab families from urban areas. Around 22 March, the Arab governments agreed that their consulates in Palestine would issue entry visas only to old people, women, children and the sick. On 29–30 March the intelligence service of Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary, reported that "the Arab Higher Committee was no longer approving exit permits for fear of panic in the country."

Ruins of the Palestinian village of Suba, near Jerusalem, overlooking Kibbutz Zova, which was built on the village lands
Ruins of the former Arab village of Bayt Jibrin, inside the green line west of Hebron

The Haganah was instructed to avoid spreading the conflagration by stopping indiscriminate attacks and provoking British intervention.

On 18 December 1947, the Haganah approved an aggressive defense strategy, which in practice meant a limited implementation of "Plan May"; this, also known as "Plan Gimel" or "Plan C", produced in May 1946, was the Haganah master plan for the defence of the Yishuv in the event that, the moment the British were gone, new troubles broke out. Plan Gimel included retaliation for assaults on Jewish houses and roads.

In early January the Haganah adopted Operation Zarzir, a scheme to assassinate leaders affiliated to Amin al-Husayni, placing the blame on other Arab leaders, but in practice few resources were devoted to the project, and the only attempted killing was of Nimr al Khatib.

The only authorised expulsion at this time took place at Qisarya, south of Haifa, where Palestinian Arabs were evicted and their houses destroyed on 19–20 February 1948. In attacks that were not authorised in advance, several communities were expelled by the Haganah and several others were chased away by the Irgun.

According to Ilan Pappé, the Zionists organised a campaign of threats, consisting of the distribution of threatening leaflets, "violent reconnaissance" and, after the arrival of mortars, the shelling of Arab villages and neighborhoods. Pappé also wrote that the Haganah shifted its policy from retaliation to offensive initiatives.

During the "long seminar", a meeting of Ben-Gurion with his chief advisors in January 1948, the main point was that it was desirable to "transfer" as many Arabs as possible out of Jewish territory, and the discussion focussed mainly on the implementation. The experience gained in a number of attacks in February 1948, notably those on Qisarya and Sa'sa', was used in the development of a plan detailing how enemy population centers should be handled. According to Pappé, plan Dalet was the master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians. However, according to Gelber, Plan Dalet instructions were: In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled outside the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was met, the residents could stay put, under military rule.

Palestinian belligerency in these first few months was "disorganised, sporadic and localised and for months remained chaotic and uncoordinated, if not undirected". Husayni lacked the resources to mount a full-scale assault on the Yishuv, and restricted himself to sanctioning minor attacks and to tightening the economic boycott. The British claimed that Arab rioting might well have subsided had the Jews not retaliated with firearms.

Overall, Morris concludes that during this period the "Arab evacuees from the towns and villages left largely because of Jewish—Haganah, IZL or LHI—attacks or fear of impending attack" but that only "an extremely small, almost insignificant number of the refugees during this early period left because of Haganah or IZL or LHI expulsion orders or forceful 'advice' to that effect."

April–June 1948

Arabs leaving Haifa as Jewish forces enter the city
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By 1 May 1948, two weeks before the Israeli Declaration of Independence, nearly 175,000 Palestinians (approximately 25%) had already fled.

The fighting in these months was concentrated in the JerusalemTel Aviv area, On 9 April, the Deir Yassin massacre and the rumours that followed it spread fear among the Palestinians. Next, the Haganah defeated local militia in Tiberias. On 21–22 April in Haifa, after the Haganah waged a day-and-a-half battle including psychological warfare a mass flight followed. Finally Irgun, under Menachim Begin, fired mortars on the infrastructure in Jaffa. Combined with the fear inspired by Deir Yassin, each of these military actions resulted in panicked Palestinian evacuations.

The significance of the attacks by underground military groups Irgun and Lehi on Deir Yassin is underscored by accounts on all sides. Meron Benvenisti regards Deir Yassin as "a turning point in the annals of the destruction of the Arab landscape".

Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May.

Haifa

Further information: Battle of Haifa (1948)

Palestinians fled the city of Haifa en masse, in one of the most notable flights of this stage. Historian Efraim Karsh writes that not only had half of the Arab community fled the city before the final battle in late April 1948, but another 5,000–15,000 left voluntarily during the fighting while the rest, some 15,000–25,000, were ordered to leave, as was initially claimed by an Israeli source, on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee.

Karsh concludes that there was no Jewish grand design to force this departure, and that in fact the Haifa Jewish leadership tried to convince some Arabs to stay, to no avail. Walid Khalidi disputes this account, saying that two independent studies, which analysed CIA and BBC intercepts of radio broadcasts from the region, concluded that no orders or instructions were given by the Arab Higher Committee. Benny Morris agrees with Karsh, while also acknowledging "an undercurrent of expulsive thinking."

According to Morris, "The Haganah mortar attacks of 21–22 April were primarily designed to break Arab morale in order to bring about a swift collapse of resistance and speedy surrender. But clearly the offensive, and especially the mortaring, precipitated the exodus. The three-inch mortars "opened up on the market square a great crowd a great panic took hold. The multitude burst into the port, pushed aside the policemen, charged the boats and began to flee the town", as the official Haganah history later put it". According to Pappé, this mortar barrage was deliberately aimed at civilians to precipitate their flight from Haifa, while Morris denies this claim.

The Haganah broadcast a warning to Arabs in Haifa on 21 April: "that unless they sent away 'infiltrated dissidents' they would be advised to evacuate all women and children, because they would be strongly attacked from now on".

Commenting on the use of "psychological warfare broadcasts" and military tactics in Haifa, Benny Morris writes:

Throughout the Haganah made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that "the day of judgement had arrived" and called on inhabitants to "kick out the foreign criminals" and to "move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals". The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to "evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven". Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were "to kill every Arab encountered" and to set alight with fire-bombs "all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route."

By mid-May there were only ~4,000 Palestinians in Haifa. This remaining Arab population was relocated to the neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas, in a process that has been described as "ghettoization". A systematic destruction of Arab housing in certain areas, which had been planned before the War, was implemented by Haifa's Technical and Urban Development departments in cooperation with the IDF's city commander Ya'akov Lublini.

Further events

According to Glazer (1980, p. 111), from 15 May 1948 onwards, expulsion of Palestinians became a regular practice. Avnery (1971), explaining the Zionist rationale, says,

I believe that during this phase, the eviction of Arab civilians had become an aim of David Ben-Gurion and his government... UN opinion could very well be disregarded. Peace with the Arabs seemed out of the question, considering the extreme nature of the Arab propaganda. In this situation, it was easy for people like Ben-Gurion to believe the capture of uninhabited territory was both necessary for security reasons and desirable for the homogeneity of the new Hebrew state.

Based on research of numerous archives, Morris provides an analysis of Haganah-induced flight:

Undoubtedly, as was understood by IDF intelligence, the most important single factor in the exodus of April–June was Jewish attack. This is demonstrated clearly by the fact that each exodus occurred during or in the immediate wake of military assault. No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before the Haganah/IZL assault... The closer drew the 15 May British withdrawal deadline and the prospect of invasion by Arab states, the readier became commanders to resort to "cleansing" operations and expulsions to rid their rear areas. elatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually fled their homes before or during battle... though (Haganah commanders) almost invariably prevented inhabitants, who had initially fled, from returning home...

Edgar O'Ballance, a military historian, adds,

Israeli vans with loudspeakers drove through the streets ordering all the inhabitants to evacuate immediately, and such as were reluctant to leave were forcibly ejected from their homes by the triumphant Israelis whose policy was now openly one of clearing out all the Arab civil population before them... From the surrounding villages and hamlets, during the next two or three days, all the inhabitants were uprooted and set off on the road to Ramallah... No longer was there any "reasonable persuasion". Bluntly, the Arab inhabitants were ejected and forced to flee into Arab territory... Wherever the Israeli troops advanced into Arab country the Arab population was bulldozed out in front of them.

After the fall of Haifa the villages on the slopes of Mount Carmel had been harassing the Jewish traffic on the main road to Haifa. A decision was made on 9 May 1948 to expel or subdue the villages of Kafr Saba, al-Tira, Qaqun, Qalansuwa and Tantura. On 11 May 1948 Ben-Gurion convened the "Consultancy"; the outcome of the meeting is confirmed in a letter to commanders of the Haganah Brigades telling them that the Arab legion's offensive should not distract their troops from the principal tasks: "the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet."

The attention of the commanders of the Alexandroni Brigade was turned to reducing the Mount Carmel pocket. Tantura, being on the coast, gave the Carmel villages access to the outside world and so was chosen as the point to surround the Carmel villages as a part of the Coastal Clearing offensive operation in the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

On the night of 22–23 May 1948, one week and one day after the declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, the coastal village of Tantura was attacked and occupied by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah. The village of Tantura was not given the option of surrender and the initial report spoke of dozens of villagers killed, with 300 adult male prisoners and 200 women and children. Many of the villagers fled to Fureidis (previously captured) and to Arab-held territory. The captured women of Tantura were moved to Fureidis, and on 31 May Brechor Shitrit, Minister of Minority Affairs of the provisional Government of Israel, sought permission to expel the refugee women of Tantura from Fureidis as the number of refugees in Fureidis was causing problems of overcrowding and sanitation.

A report from the military intelligence SHAI of the Haganah titled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948", dated 30 June 1948, affirms that:

At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations. To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases...

According to Morris's estimates, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians left Israel during this stage. "Keesing's Contemporary Archives" in London place the total number of refugees before Israel's independence at 300,000.

Clause 10 of the 15 May 1948 Arab League cablegram stating the expulsion of, at that point, 250,000 Palestinians, as a reason for their entry into the territory

In Clause 10.(b) of the cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the UN Secretary-General of 15 May 1948 justifying the intervention by the Arab States, the Secretary-General of the League alleged that "approximately over a quarter of a million of the Arab population have been compelled to leave their homes and emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries."

July–October 1948

Further information: 1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle

Israeli operations named Dani and Dekel that broke the truce were the start of the third phase of expulsions. The largest single expulsion of the war began in Lydda and Ramla 14 July under Operation Dani when 60,000 inhabitants of the two cities (nearly 8.6% of the whole exodus) were forcibly expelled on the orders of David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin in events that came to be known as the "Lydda Death March".

According to Flapan (1987, pp. 13–14) in Ben-Gurion's view Ramlah and Lydda constituted a special danger because their proximity might encourage co-operation between the Egyptian army, which had started its attack on Kibbutz Negbah, near Ramlah, and the Arab Legion, which had taken the Lydda police station. However the author considers that Operation Dani revealed that no such co-operation existed.

In Flapan's opinion, "in Lydda, the exodus took place on foot. In Ramlah, the IDF provided buses and trucks. Originally, all males had been rounded up and enclosed in a compound, but after some shooting was heard, and construed by Ben-Gurion to be the beginning of an Arab Legion counteroffensive, he stopped the arrests and ordered the speedy eviction of all the Arabs, including women, children, and the elderly." In explanation, Flapan cites that Ben-Gurion said that "those who made war on us bear responsibility after their defeat."

Rabin wrote in his memoirs:

What would they do with the 50,000 civilians in the two cities... Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution, and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route advancing eastward... Allon repeated the question: What is to be done with the population? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: Drive them out!... "Driving out" is a term with a harsh ring... Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion. ("Soldier of Peace", pp. 140–141)

Flapan maintains that events in Nazareth, although ending differently, point to the existence of a definite pattern of expulsion. On 16 July, three days after the Lydda and Ramlah evictions, the city of Nazareth surrendered to the IDF. The officer in command, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, had signed the surrender agreement on behalf of the Israeli army along with Chaim Laskov (then a brigadier general, later IDF chief of staff). The agreement assured the civilians that they would not be harmed, but the next day, Laskov handed Dunkelman an order to evacuate the population, which Dunkelman refused.

Additionally, widespread looting and several cases of rape took place during the evacuation. In total, about 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in this stage according to Morris.

Glazer quotes the testimony of Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, who reported that "the exodus of the Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. Almost the whole of the Arab population fled or was expelled from the area under Jewish occupation."

On 26 September, Yosef Weitz alerted Ben-Gurion to the problem of masses of Palestinians endeavouring to return to their land in Israel or to lands Israel was about to take control of. On being asked how to deal with the problem, Weitz advocated a policy of endless 'harassment' (). Later on the same day, his cabinet turned down his proposal that Israel launch an invasion against the Arab Legion in order to wrest control over part, or all, of the West Bank where the latter was entrenched. It was in this context that Ben-Gurion then ordered Yigael Yadin extend Israel's biological warfare operations abroad, beginning with the poisoning of Cairo's water network with toxic bacteria. Both this and other projects to take similar measures in Syria and Lebanon, for a variety of reasons, were never activated.

October 1948 – March 1949

IDF operation order for the destruction of Palestinian villages in November 1948

This period of the exodus was characterized by Israeli military accomplishments; Operation Yoav, in October, this cleared the road to the Negev, culminating in the capture of Beersheba; Operation Ha-Har that same month which cleared the Jerusalem Corridor from pockets of resistance; Operation Hiram, at the end of October, resulted in the capture of the Upper Galilee; Operation Horev in December 1948 and Operation Uvda in March 1949, completed the capture of the Negev (the Negev had been allotted to the Jewish State by the United Nations) these operations were met with resistance from the Palestinian Arabs who were to become refugees. The Israeli military activities were confined to the Galilee and the sparsely populated Negev desert. It was clear to the villages in the Galilee, that if they left, return was far from imminent. Therefore, far fewer villages spontaneously depopulated than previously. Most of the Palestinian exodus was due to a clear, direct cause: expulsion and deliberate harassment, as Morris writes "commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering".

During Operation Hiram in the upper Galilee, Israeli military commanders received the order: "Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered." (31 October 1948, Moshe Carmel) The UN's acting Mediator, Ralph Bunche, reported that United Nations Observers had recorded extensive looting of villages in Galilee by Israeli forces, who carried away goats, sheep and mules. This looting, United Nations Observers reported, appeared to have been systematic as army trucks were used for transportation. The situation, states the report, created a new influx of refugees into Lebanon. Israeli forces, he stated, have occupied the area in Galilee formerly occupied by Kaukji's forces, and have crossed the Lebanese frontier. Bunche goes on to say "that Israeli forces now hold positions inside the south-east corner of Lebanon, involving some fifteen Lebanese villages which are occupied by small Israeli detachments."

According to Morris, 200,000–230,000 Palestinians fled during Operation Hiram and Operation Yoav. According to Ilan Pappé, "In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape and imprisonment of men in labor camps for periods over a year."

Contemporary mediation and the Lausanne Conference

UN mediation

The United Nations, using the offices of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization and the Mixed Armistice Commissions, was involved in the conflict from the very beginning. In the autumn of 1948 the refugee problem was a fact and possible solutions were discussed. Count Folke Bernadotte said on 16 September:

No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and indeed, offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.

UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948 and reaffirmed every year since, was the first resolution that called for Israel to let the refugees return:

the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Lausanne Conference of 1949

Main article: Lausanne Conference of 1949

At the start of the Lausanne Conference of 1949, on 12 May 1949, Israel agreed in principle to allow the return of some of the Palestinian refugees. At the same time, Israel became a member of the U.N. upon the passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 on 11 May 1949, which read, in part,

Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it "unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them from the day when it becomes a member of the United Nations".

Instead Israel made an offer of allowing 100,000 of the refugees to return to the area, though not necessarily to their homes, including 25,000 who had returned surreptitiously and 10,000 family-reunion cases. The proposal was conditional on a peace treaty that would allow Israel to retain the territory it had captured which had been allocated to the Arab state by the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, and, contrary to Israel's UN acceptance promise, on the Arab states absorbing the remaining 550,000–650,000 refugees. The Arab states rejected the proposal on both legal, moral and political grounds, and Israel quickly withdrew its limited offer.

Benny Morris, in his 2004 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, summarizes it from his perspective:

In retrospect, it appeared that at Lausanne was lost the best and perhaps only chance for a solution of the refugee problem, if not for the achievement of a comprehensive Middle East settlement. But the basic incompatibility of the initial starting positions and the unwillingness of the two sides to move, and to move quickly, towards a compromise—born of Arab rejectionism and a deep feeling of humiliation, and of Israeli drunkenness with victory and physical needs determined largely by the Jewish refugee influx—doomed the "conference" from the start. American pressure on both sides, lacking a sharp, determined cutting edge, failed to budge sufficiently either Jew or Arab. The "100,000 Offer" was a classic of too little, too late.

Results of the Palestinian exodus

The expulsion of Palestinians in 1947–49 resulted in the significant depopulation of territory occupied by Israel, in which "about 90 percent of the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed – many by psychological warfare and /or military pressure and a large number at gunpoint." Historic Arabic place names were replaced with Hebrew names, based on biblical names.

Economic damage

As towns and villages were either conquered or abandoned in the conflict, looting by Jewish forces and residents was so widespread that, in the aftermath, David Ben-Gurion remarked on 24 July 1948: 'It turns out that most of the Jews are thieves.' Netiva Ben-Yehuda, a Palmach commander likened the pillaging she observed in Tiberias to the classic behavior seen by their oppressors during anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe:

Such pictures were known to us. It was the way things had always been done to us, in the Holocaust, throughout the world war, and all the pogroms. Oy, how well we knew those pictures. And here – here, we were doing these awful things to others. We loaded everything onto the van – with a terrible trembling of the hands. And that wasn't because of the weight. Even now my hands are shaking, just from writing about it.

Abandoned, evacuated and destroyed Palestinian localities

Main article: Depopulated Palestinian locations in Israel

Several authors have conducted studies on the number of Palestinian localities that were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed during the 1947–1949 period. Based on their respective calculations, the table below summarises their information.

Abandoned, evacuated or destroyed Palestinian localities (comparative figures)
Reference Towns Villages Tribes Total
Morris 10 342 17 369
Khalidi 1 400 17 418
Abu Sitta 13 419 99 531

Source: The table data was taken from Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 34.
Note: For information on methodologies; see: Morris, Benny (1987): The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Khalidi, Walid (ed.): All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992, App. IV, pp. xix, 585–586; and Sitta, Salman Abu: The Palestinian Nakba 1948. London: The Palestinian Return Centre, 2000.

According to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) and BADIL, Morris's list of affected localities, the shortest of the three, includes towns but excludes other localities cited by Khalidi or Abu Sitta. The six sources compared in Khalidi's study have in common 296 of the villages listed as destroyed or depopulated. Sixty other villages are cited in all but one source. Of the total of 418 localities cited in Khalidi, 292 (70 percent) were completely destroyed and 90 (22 percent) "largely destroyed". COHRE and BADIL also note that other sources refer to an additional 151 localities that are omitted from Khalidi's study for various reasons (for example, major cities and towns that were depopulated, as well as some Bedouin encampments and villages "vacated" before the start of hostilities). Abu Sitta's list includes tribes in Beersheba that lost lands; most of these were omitted from Khalidi's work.

Another study, involving field research and comparisons with British and other documents, concludes that 472 Palestinian habitations (including towns and villages) were destroyed in 1948. It notes that the devastation was virtually complete in some sub-districts. For example, it points out that 96.0% of the villages in the Jaffa area were totally destroyed, as were 90.0% of those in Tiberias, 90.3% of those in Safad, and 95.9% of those in Beisan. It also extrapolates from 1931 British census data to estimate that over 70,280 Palestinian houses were destroyed in this period.

In another study, Abu Sitta shows the following findings in eight distinct phases of the depopulation of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. His findings are summarized in the table below:

Information on the depopulation of Palestinian towns and villages (1947–1949)
Phase: No. of destroyed/depopulated localities No. of refugees Jewish/Israeli lands (km)
29 Nov. 1947 – Mar. 1948 30 >22,600* 1,159.4
Apr. – 13 May 1948

(Tiberias, Jaffa, Haifa, Safed, etc.)

199 >400,000 3,363.9
15 May – 11 June 1948

(an additional 90 villages)

290 >500,000 3,943.1
12 June – 18 July 1948

(Lydda/Ramleh, Nazareth, etc.)

378 >628,000 5,224.2
19 July – 24 Oct. 1948

(Galilee and southern areas)

418 >664,000 7,719.6
24 Oct. – 5 Nov. 1948

(Galilee, etc.)

465 >730,000 10,099.6
5 Nov. 1948 – 18 Jan. 1949

(Negev, etc.)

481 >754,000 12,366.3
19 Jan. – 20 July 1949

(Negev, etc.)

531 >804,000 20,350

* Other sources put this figure at over 70,000.
Source: The table data was taken from Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 34. The source being: Abu Sitta, Salman (2001): "From Refugees to Citizens at Home". London: Palestine Land Society and Palestinian Return Centre, 2001.

Palestinian refugees

Main articles: Palestinian refugees and Estimates of the Palestinian Refugee flight of 1948 Ethnic group
Palestinian refugees
Total population
4.9 million (Registered with UNRWA—including descendants and re-settled)
Regions with significant populations
Gaza Strip, Jordan, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria
Languages
Arabic
Religion
Islam and Christianity

On 11 December 1948, 12 months prior to UNRWA's establishment, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 was adopted. The resolution accepted the definition of Palestinian refugees as "persons of Arab origin who, after 29 November 1947, left territory at present under the control of the Israel authorities and who were Palestinian citizens at that date" and; "Persons of Arab origin who left the said territory after 6 August 1924 and before 29 November 1947 and who at that latter date were Palestinian citizens; 2. Persons of Arab origin who left the territory in question before 6 August 1924 and who, having opted for Palestinian citizenship, retained that citizenship up to 29 November 1947"

UNRWA was established under UNGA resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949. It defines refugees qualifying for UNRWA's services as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli conflict" and also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The UNRWA mandate does not extend to final status.

The final 1949 UNRWA estimate of the refugee count was 726,000, but the number of registered refugees was 914,000. The U.N. Conciliation Commission explained that the number was inflated by "duplication of ration cards, addition of persons who have been displaced from area other than Israel-held areas and of persons who, although not displaced, are destitute," and the UNRWA additionally noted that "all births are eagerly announced, the deaths wherever possible are passed over in silence," as well as the fact that "the birthrate is high in any case, a net addition of 30,000 names a year." By June 1951, UNRWA had reduced the number of registered refugees to 876,000 after many false and duplicate registrations had been weeded out.

Today the number who qualify for UNRWA's services has grown to over 4 million, one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon (Bowker, 2003, p. 72) and around 15% in other Arab and Western countries. Approximately 1 million refugees have no form of identification other than an UNRWA identification card.

Prevention of Infiltration Law

Main article: Prevention of Infiltration Law

Following the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem after the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, many Palestinians tried, in one way or another, to return to their homes. For some time these practices continued to embarrass the Israeli authorities until they passed the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which defines offenses of armed and non-armed infiltration to Israel and from Israel to hostile neighboring countries. According to Arab Israeli writer Sabri Jiryis, the purpose of the law was to prevent Palestinians from returning to Israel, those who did so being regarded as infiltrators.

According to Kirshbaum, over the years the Israeli Government has continued to cancel and modify some of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, but mostly it has added more as it has continued to extend its declared state of emergency. For example, even though the Prevention of Infiltration Law of 1954 is not labelled as an official "Emergency Regulation", it extends the applicability of the "Defence (Emergency) Regulation 112" of 1945 giving the Minister of Defence extraordinary powers of deportation for accused infiltrators even before they are convicted (Articles 30 & 32), and makes itself subject to cancellation when the Knesset ends the State of Emergency upon which all of the Emergency Regulations are dependent.

Land and property laws

Main article: Israeli land and property laws

Following its establishment, Israel designed a system of law that legitimised both a continuation and a consolidation of the nationalisation of land and property, a process that it had begun decades earlier. For the first few years of Israel's existence, many of the new laws continued to be rooted in earlier Ottoman and British law. These laws were later amended or replaced altogether.

The first challenge facing Israel was to transform its control over land into legal ownership. This was the motivation underlying the passing of several of the first group of land laws.

Initial "Emergency Laws" and "Regulations"

Among the more important initial laws was article 125 of the "Defence (Emergency) Regulations"

According to Kirshbaum, the Law has as effect that "no one is allowed in or out without permission from the Israeli Military." "This regulation has been used to exclude a land owner from his own land so that it could be judged as unoccupied, and then expropriated under the 'Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law (1953)'. Closures need not be published in the Official Gazette."

Absentees' Property Laws

The Absentees' Property Laws were several laws, first introduced as emergency ordinances issued by the Jewish leadership but which after the war were incorporated into the laws of Israel. As examples of the first type of laws are the "Emergency Regulations (Absentees' Property) Law, 5709-1948 (December)", which according to article 37 of the "Absentees Property Law, 5710-1950" was replaced by the latter; the "Emergency Regulations (Requisition of Property) Law, 5709-1949", and other related laws.

According to COHRE and BADIL (p. 41), unlike other laws that were designed to establish Israel's "legal" control over lands, this body of law focused on formulating a "legal" definition for the people (mostly Arabs) who had left or been forced to flee from these lands.

The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954, more than one third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.

The absentee property law is directly linked to the controversy of parallelism between the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries and the Palestinian exodus, as advocacy groups have suggested that there are strong ties between the two processes and some of them even claim that decoupling the two issues is unjust.

However, al-Husseini, Palestinian governor of East Jerusalem in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), has said that the Israeli law "is racist and imperialistic, which aims at seizing thousands of acres and properties of lands".

Laws enacted

A number of Israeli laws were enacted that enabled the further acquisition of depopulated lands. Among these laws were:

  • The "Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance (1943)". To authorise the confiscation of lands for Government and public purposes.
  • The "Prescription Law, 5718-1958". According to COHRE and BADIL (p. 44), this law, in conjunction with the "Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance (Amendment) Law, 5720-1960", the "Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance (New Version), 5729-1969" and the "Land Law, 5729-1969", was designed to revise criteria related to the use and registration of Miri lands—one of the most prevalent types in Palestine—and to facilitate Israel's acquisition of such land.

Israeli censorship of documents

Following the large-scale declassification of Israeli archival material in the 1980s, additional information about the circumstances surrounding the expulsion and flight of Palestinians became available, contributing to modern understandings of these events. At the same time, there has been evidence of Defense Ministry officials searching Israeli archives to remove previously declassified documents evidencing Israeli massacres of Palestinian villagers in 1947 and 1948 that led to the Palestinian expulsion and flight.

Historiography

Further information: Nakba denial and Causes of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight

In the first decades after the exodus, two diametrically opposed schools of analysis could be distinguished.

Ian Black at The Guardian noted in 2010 that the events of the Nakba were by that point "widely described" as involving ethnic cleansing, with Israeli documents from 1948 themselves using the term "to cleanse" when referring to uprooting Arabs. Not all historians accept this characterization. Efraim Karsh is among the few historians who still consider that most of the Arabs who fled left of their own accord or were pressured to leave by their fellow Arabs, despite Israeli attempts to convince them to stay. He says that the expulsions in Lod and Ramle were driven by military necessity.

Palestinian narrative

The term "Nakba" was first applied to the events of 1948 by Constantin Zureiq, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book "Ma'na al-Nakba" (The Meaning of the Disaster) he wrote "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history." The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet Burhan al-Deen al-Abushi.

In his encyclopedia published in the late 1950s, Aref al-Aref wrote: "How Can I call it but Nakba? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we expelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons." Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari also used the term Nakba in the title of his book "Sir al Nakba" (The Secret behind the Disaster) written in 1955. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Zureiq wrote another book, The New Meaning of the Disaster, but the term Nakba is reserved for the 1948 war.

Together with Naji al-Ali's "Handala" (the barefoot child always drawn from behind), and the symbolic key for the house in Palestine carried by so many Palestinian refugees, the "collective memory of that experience has shaped the identity of the Palestinian refugees as a people".

The events of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War greatly influenced the Palestinian culture. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba. The exodus is usually described in strongly emotional terms. For example, at the controversial 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, prominent Palestinian scholar and activist Hanan Ashrawi referred to the Palestinians as "...a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization" (original emphasis).

In the Palestinian calendar, the day after Israel declared independence (15 May) is observed as Nakba Day. It is traditionally observed as an important day of remembrance. In May 2009 the political party headed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. Following public criticism the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the Minister of Finance would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions that hold the commemorations. The new draft was approved by the Knesset in March 2011.

Ghada Karmi writes that the Israeli version of history is that the "Palestinians left voluntarily or under orders from their leaders and that Israelis had no responsibility, material or moral, for their plight." She also finds a form of denial among Israelis that Palestinians bear the blame for the Nakba by not accepting the UN's proposed partition of Palestine into separate ethnic states.

Perry Anderson writes that "the Nakba was so swift and catastrophic that no Palestinian political organization of any kind existed for over a decade after it."

Israeli narrative

The approach of the State of Israel and of Israeli-Jews to the causes of the exodus are divided into two main periods: 1949 – late 1970s, late 1970s – present (a period characterized by the advent of the New Historians).

Beginning in 1949, the dominant Israeli narrative was presented in the publications of various Israeli state institutions such as the national Information Center, the Ministry of Education (history and civic textbooks) and the army (IDF), as well as in Israeli-Jewish societal institutions: newspapers, memoirs of 1948 war veterans, and in the studies of the research community.

There were some exceptions: the independent weekly Haolam Hazeh, the Communist Party's daily/weekly Kol HaAm and the socialist organisation Matzpen presented the Palestinian and the balanced/critical narratives. A number of Jewish scholars living outside of Israel – including Gabbay and Peretz – since the late 1950s also presented a different narrative. According to this narrative, some Palestinians left willingly while others were expelled by the Jewish and later Israeli fighting forces.

Changes from the late 1970s

The dominance in Israel of the willing-flight Zionist narrative of the exodus began to be challenged by Israeli-Jewish societal institutions beginning mainly in the late 1970s. Many scholarly studies and daily newspaper essays, as well as some 1948 Jewish war veterans' memoirs have begun presenting the more balanced narrative (at times called the "post-Zionist" view). According to this narrative, some Palestinians left willingly (due to calls of Arab or their leadership to partially leave, fear, and societal collapse), while others were expelled by the Jewish/Israeli fighting forces.

From the late 1970s onwards, many newspaper articles and scholarly studies, as well as some 1948 war veterans' memoirs, began to present the balanced/critical narrative. This has become more common since the late 1980s, to the point that since then the vast majority of newspaper articles and studies, and a third of the veterans' memoirs, have presented a more balanced narrative. Since the 1990s, also textbooks used in the educational system, some without approval of the Ministry of Education, began to present the balanced narrative.

The Israeli-Jewish societal change intensified in the late 1980s. The publication of balanced/critical newspaper essays increased, the vast majority, along with balanced 1948 war veterans' memoirs, about a third. At the same time, Israeli NGOs began more significantly to present the balanced and the Palestinian narratives more significantly in their publications. Moreover, Israel opened up part of its archives in the 1980s for investigation by historians. This coincided with the emergence of various Israeli historians, called New Historians who favored a more critical analysis of Israel's history. The Arab/Palestinian official and historiographical versions hardly changed, and received support from some of the New Historians. Pappé calls the exodus an ethnic cleansing and points at Zionist preparations in the preceding years and provides more details on the planning process by a group he calls the "Consultancy". Morris also says that ethnic cleansing took place during the Palestinian exodus, and that "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing... when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing."

Pappé's scholarship on the issue has been subject to severe criticism. Benny Morris says that Pappé's research is flecked with inaccuracies and characterized by distortions. Ephraim Karsh refers to Pappé's assertion of a master plan by Jews to expel Arabs, as contrived. On his part, Avi Shlaim—who has been described by The Economist as "the most classical" and "the most mainstream" of the New Historians—has been critical of Benny Morris, saying that, since the beginning of the Second Intifada, Morris's scholarship has "veered from the leftwing to the rightwing end" and that "racist undertones" against Arabs and Palestinians has become a characteristic of his work. Of Karsh, Shlaim has written that he gives "a selective and tendentious account designed to exonerate the Jewish side of any responsibility" for some of the events that took place in 1948 and that he engages in "distort and misrepresent the work of his opponents".

In March 2015, Shai Piron, Yesh Atid party MK, and former education minister of Israel, called for Israel to have all schools include the Nakba in their curriculum. "I'm for teaching the Nakba to all students in Israel. I do not think that a student can go through the Israeli educational system, while 20% of students have an ethos, a story, and he does not know that story." He added that covering the topic in schools could address some of the racial tensions that exist in Israeli society. His comments broke a taboo in the traditional Israeli narrative, and conflicts with efforts on the part of some Israeli lawmakers to defund schools that mark Nakba.

The 1948 Palestinian exodus has also drawn comparisons with the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, which involved the departure, flight, migration, and expulsion of 800,000–1,000,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the 1970s. In three resolutions between 2007 and 2012 (H.Res. 185, S.Res. 85, H.R. 6242), the US Congress called on the Barack Obama administration to "pair any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees with a similar reference to Jewish or other refugee populations".

Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath has rejected the comparison, arguing that the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are totally different and that any similarity is superficial. Porath says that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was from a Jewish-Zionist perspective the fulfilment of "a national dream" and of Israeli national policy in the form of the One Million Plan. He notes the efforts of Israeli agents working in Arab countries, including those of the Jewish Agency in various Arab countries since the 1930s, to assist a Jewish "aliyah". Porath contrasts this with what he calls the "national calamity" and "unending personal tragedies" suffered by the Palestinians that resulted in "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic".

Israeli academic Yehouda Shenhav has written in an article entitled "Hitching A Ride on the Magic Carpet" published in the Israeli daily Haaretz regarding this issue. "Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq, adamantly opposed the analogy: "I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists." In a Knesset hearing, Ran Cohen stated emphatically: "I have this to say: I am not a refugee." He added: "I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee."

Criticism of the Israeli approach

An ongoing scholarly critique of the Israeli narratives about the events of 1948 is the overreliance of Israeli historians on Israeli official documents and archival sources. American historian Rosemarie Esber, an expert on Arab oral history, has argued that the often "excessive or even exclusive reliance on Israeli archives", even by the New Historians, with the exception of Ilan Pappé, has "limited their narratives and conclusions".

In response, Benny Morris has pointed out that the archives of the Arab states, including those of the main Arab political parties, royal courts, and armies, all remain closed and that historians are forced to rely primarily on Western and Israeli documentation.

Films

  • Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (1997), a documentary film by Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jansse that follows the events surrounding the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.
  • 500 Dunam on the Moon (2002), a documentary film directed by Rachel Leah Jones about Ayn Hawd, a Palestinian village that was captured and depopulated by Israeli forces in the 1948 war.
  • The Sons of Eilaboun (2007), a documentary film by Hisham Zreiq that tells the story of the exodus and return of a small Palestinian village called Eilaboun in 1948.
  • The Promise (2011), a British mini-series written and directed by Peter Kosminsky that deals with a young woman going to Israel in the present day and using her visit to investigate her soldier grandfather's part in the post-war phase of the British Mandate of Palestine.
  • Farha (2022), a historical drama film directed by Darin J. Sallam about a Palestinian girl's experience during the Nakba, based on a true story she was told as a child about a girl named Radieh.

Gallery

  • Makeshift school for Palestinian refugees Makeshift school for Palestinian refugees
  • Palestinian woman, a child and a jug Palestinian woman, a child and a jug
  • Refugees in the open, 1948 Refugees in the open, 1948
  • Old and young in the entrance of a tent, 1948 Old and young in the entrance of a tent, 1948

See also

References

Notes

  1. Namely Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi.
  2. Hazkani, Shay (2019). Dear Palestine A Social History of the 1948 War. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-2766-6. It is noteworthy that the aforementioned silk gloves were not invoked when discussing the Palestinian "exodus," i.e., the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, which became a pressing concern in the months following the adoption of Plan D (tokhnit dalet) by the Haganah's general staff in March 1948.Warf, C.; Charles, G. (2020). Clinical Care for Homeless, Runaway and Refugee Youth: Intervention Approaches, Education and Research Directions. Springer International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-030-40675-2. By 1948, the majority of Palestinians, about 700,000 to 800,000 people from 500 to 600 villages, were displaced. They were either expelled or fled from their homes for fear of being killed, as had actually taken place in a number of villages.Gerber, H. (2008). Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-0-230-58391-7. One of the more important consequences of the 1948 war was the expulsion and/or flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes inside Israel, and the refusal of Israel to allow them to return, despite an express UN decision calling on it to do so. ... About 750,000 of the 900,000 strong Palestinian population were expelled, or fled, all completely terrorized and fearing for their livesPetersen-Overton, Kristofer J.; Schmidt, Johannes D.; Hersh, Jacques (27 September 2010). "3. Retooling Peace Philosophy: A Critical Look at Israel's Separation Strategy". In Carter, Candice C.; Kumar, Ravindra (eds.). Peace Philosophy in Action. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 49. doi:10.1057/9780230112995. ISBN 978-0-230-11299-5. as scores of historical documentation has since revealed, the Yishuv encouraged the flight or directly forced 750,000 Palestinians (more than 80 percent of the population at the time) from their homeland in 1948 and destroyed 531 Palestinian villagesNatour, Ghaleb (2015). "The Nakba—Flight and Expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948". In Hoppe, Andreas (ed.). Catastrophes Views from Natural and Human Sciences. Springer. p. 81. The Nakba is a catastrophe describing "the expulsion and flight of the Palestinians which reached its peak in 1948"Slater, Jerome (2020). Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-045908-6. There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba. All of the leading Israeli New Historians—particularly Morris, Shlaim, Pappé, and Flapan—extensively examined the issue and revealed the facts. Other accounts have reached the same conclusions. For example, see Ben-Ami, "A War to Start All Wars"; Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948"; Walid Khalidi, "Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited"; Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Raz, Bride and the Dowry. Reviewing the evidence marshaled by Morris and others, Tom Segev concluded that "most of the Arabs in the country, approximately 400,000, were chased out and expelled during the first stage of the war. In other words, before the Arab armies invaded the country" (Haaretz, 18 July 2010). Other estimates have varied concerning the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled before the May 1948 Arab state attack; Morris estimated the number to be 250,000–300,000 (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 262); Tessler puts it at 300,000 (A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 279); Pappé's estimate is 380,000 (The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 96). In another recent review of the evidence, the Israeli historian Daniel Blatman estimates the number to be about 500,000 (Blatman, "Netanyahu, This Is What Ethnic Cleansing Really Looks Like"). Whatever the exact number, even Israeli "Old Historians" now admit that during the 1948 war, the Israeli armed forces drove out many of the Palestinians, though they emphasized the action as a military "necessity." For example, see Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, 167–68. In July 2019, the Israeli government sought to cover up the extensive documentary evidence in its state archives that revealed detailed evidence about the extent of the Nakba—even the evidence that had already been published by newspapers and Israeli historians. A Haaretz investigation of the attempted cover-up concluded: "Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba, including Israeli eyewitness reports at the time" (Shezaf, "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs")."Why Nakba is the Palestinians' most sombre day, in 100 and 300 words". BBC News. 15 May 2018. up to 750,000 Palestinians who had lived on that land fled or were expelled from their homes.Ibish, Hussein (14 May 2018). "A 'Catastrophe' That Defines Palestinian Identity". The Atlantic. the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs, perhaps 700,000 to 800,000 people, had either fled or been expelledMcDowall, David; Palley, Claire (1987). The Palestinians. Minority Rights Group Report no 24. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-946690-42-8.
  3. Israeli historians generally believe they are both ideologically and empirically impartial, and that the only reliable sources for the reconstruction of the 1948 war are in Israeli official documents and the archives of the Israel Defense Forces.

Citations

  1. Honaida Ghanim, Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba, Archived 6 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society March 2009 Vol. 22, No. 1 pp.23-39 p.37 Stern, Yoav (13 May 2008). "Palestinian refugees, Israeli left-wingers mark Nakba" Archived 17 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine. Haaretz. Nakba 60 Archived 12 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights; Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004, p. 270. ISBN 978-0-8133-4047-0Ghanim, Honaida (March 2009). "Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 22 (1): 23–39 . doi:10.1007/s10767-009-9049-9. ISSN 0891-4486. JSTOR 40608203. S2CID 144148068.
  2. Morris, Benny; Kedar, Benjamin Z. (19 September 2022). "'Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War". Middle Eastern Studies. 59 (5): 1–25 . doi:10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448. S2CID 252389726.
  3. ^ Ilan Pappé, 2006
  4. Bardi, Ariel Sophia (March 2016). "The "Architectural Cleansing" of Palestine". American Anthropologist. 118 (1): 165–171. doi:10.1111/aman.12520.
  5. Pedahzur, Ami; Perliger, Arie (2010). "The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Israel". In Crenshaw, Martha (ed.). The Consequences of Counterterrorism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. p. 356. ISBN 978-0-87154-073-7.
  6. Masalha, Nur (1992). Expulsion of the Palestinians. Institute for Palestine Studies, this edition 2001, p. 175.
  7. Khalidi, Rashid (September 1998). Palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness. Columbia University Press. pp. 21–. ISBN 978-0-231-10515-6. Archived from the original on 14 January 2023. Retrieved 19 March 2016. In 1948 half of Palestine's ... Arabs were uprooted from their homes and became refugees
  8. Gelber 2006, p. 137: "Drawn into the war by the collapse of the Palestinians and the ALA, the Arab governments' primary goal was preventing the Palestinians' total ruin and the flooding of their own countries by more refugees."
  9. Matthew Hogan (2001). The 1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin Revisited: "Meanwhile, the subsequent May 1948 outbreak of regional war between the newly declared state of Israel and the Arab states, beginning the prolonged Arab-Israeli conflict, was contemporaneously explained by Arab League chief Azzam Pasha in terms of the Deir Yassin incident: "The massacre of Deir Yassin was to a great extent the cause of the wrath of the Arab nations and the most important factor for sending the Arab armies."
  10. Slater, Jerome (2020). Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-19-045908-6. "There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba. All of the leading Israeli New Historians—particularly Morris, Shlaim, Pappé, and Flapan—extensively examined the issue and revealed the facts. Other accounts have reached the same conclusions. For example, see Ben-Ami, "A War to Start All Wars"; Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948"; Walid Khalidi, "Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited"; Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Raz, Bride and the Dowry. Reviewing the evidence marshaled by Morris and others, Tom Segev concluded that "most of the Arabs in the country, approximately 400,000, were chased out and expelled during the first stage of the war. In other words, before the Arab armies invaded the country" (Haaretz, 18 July 2010). Other estimates have varied concerning the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled before the May 1948 Arab state attack; Morris estimated the number to be 250,000–300,000 (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 262); Tessler puts it at 300,000 (A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 279); Pappé's estimate is 380,000 (The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 96). In another recent review of the evidence, the Israeli historian Daniel Blatman estimates the number to be about 500,000 (Blatman, "Netanyahu, This Is What Ethnic Cleansing Really Looks Like"). Whatever the exact number, even Israeli "Old Historians" now admit that during the 1948 war, the Israeli armed forces drove out many of the Palestinians, though they emphasized the action as a military "necessity." For example, see Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, 167–68. In July 2019, the Israeli government sought to cover up the extensive documentary evidence in its state archives that revealed detailed evidence about the extent of the Nakba—even the evidence that had already been published by newspapers and Israeli historians. A Haaretz investigation of the attempted cover-up concluded: "Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba, including Israeli eyewitness reports at the time" (Shezaf, "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs").”
  11. Abu-Laban, Yasmeen; Bakan, Abigail B. (July 2022). "Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting". The Political Quarterly, Vol. 93, Issue 3, p. 511: "Palestinians have long known what happened to them in 1948 and its very human costs. However, the work of the 'new' (or revisionist) Israeli historians from the late 1970s also challenged the official state narrative of a miraculous wartime victory through access to material in the Israeli archives. This has established what Ilan Pappé has summarised as the 'ethnic cleansing of Palestine', a process involving massacres and expulsions at gunpoint. In light of the ever-growing historiography, serious scholarship has left little debate about what happened in 1948. However, Nakba denial remains a political issue of the highest order.
  12. Laila Parsons, McGill University, 2009, Review of Ilan Pappé's 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', "Ilan Pappe has added another work to the many that have already been written in English on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. These include works by Walid Khalidi, Simha Flapan, Nafez Nazzal, Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, and Norman Finkelstein, among others. All but one of these authors (Morris) would probably agree with Pappe’s position that what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 fits the definition of ethnic cleansing, and it certainly is not news to Palestinians themselves, who have always known what happened to them."
  13. ^ Ian Black (26 November 2010). "Memories and maps keep alive Palestinian hopes of return". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 20 November 2021. Retrieved 10 December 2016.
  14. ^ Shavit, Ari. "Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris" Archived 5 September 2021 at the Wayback Machine. Logos. Winter 2004
  15. Matas, David (2005). Aftershock: anti-zionism and anti-semitism. Dundurn Press Ltd. pp. 555–558. ISBN 978-1-55002-553-8. Archived from the original on 3 July 2024. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
  16. Benvenis'tî, Mêrôn (2002). Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948. University of California Press. pp. 124–127. ISBN 978-0-520-23422-2. Archived from the original on 3 July 2024. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
  17. Benny Morris (21 February 2008). "Benny Morris on fact, fiction, & propaganda about 1948". The Irish Times, reported by Jeff Weintraub Archived 7 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  18. ^ Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81120-0.
  19. Pappe, I. (1999). Were they expelled?: The history, historiography and relevance of the Palestinian refugee problem. In G. Karmi & E. Cotran (Eds.), The Palestinian exodus, 1948–1988(pp. 37–61). London: Ithaca Press – "Where expulsion failed, transfer was encouraged, by every possible means (even by setting fire to the fields of Palestinian villages considered wealthy or by cutting water supply to city neighborhoods). Weitz convinced the Israeli government in May 1948 to confiscate any looted Arab harvest for the needs of the newly born state. This policy of burning fields or confiscating them continued throughout the summer of 1948."
  20. Morris 2004 "While before May, burning Arab crops was mainly a Haganah means of retaliation for Arab attacks, during May–June the destruction of the fields hardened into a set policy designed to demoralise the villagers, hurt them economically and, perhaps, precipitate their exodus."
  21. Benny Morris, Benjamin Z. Kedar, 'Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War Archived 5 March 2023 at the Wayback Machine Middle Eastern Studies 19 September 2022, pages =1-25 p.8:'The SHAI, in its report from the end of June 1948 on the causes of the Arab flight from Palestine, mentioned 'the typhus epidemic' as 'an exacerbating factor in the evacuation' in certain areas. 'More than the disease itself, it was the panic induced by the rumours of the spread of the disease in the area that was a factor in the evacuation', stated the report. In its site-by-site breakdown of the Arab flight, the report mentioned 'harassment and the typhus epidemic' as the causes of the partial exodus of the population from Acre on 6 May.'
  22. J.P.D. Dunbabin, The Post-Imperial Age: The Great Powers and the Wider World, Archived 8 October 2022 at the Wayback Machine Routledge 2014 ISBN 978-1-317-89293-9 pp.256-258.
  23. Kodmani-Darwish, p. 126; Féron, Féron, p. 94.
  24. ^ "Overview". United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Archived from the original on 17 May 2021. Retrieved 29 October 2011.
  25. Human Rights Watch. "A Threshold Crossed," 27 April 2021. A Threshold Crossed Archived 28 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
  26. Amnesty International. "Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime against Humanity," 1 February 2022. Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians Archived 20 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine.
  27. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War, p. 77, Yale University Press, 2008.
  28. United Nations General Assembly (23 August 1951). "General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine". Archived from the original (OpenDocument) on 22 August 2011. Retrieved 3 May 2007.
  29. Flapan, 1987, p. 95; also quoted by Finkelstein, 1995, p. 82.
  30. Gelber, p. 75.
  31. (Gelber, p. 79)
  32. Glazer, p. 104.
  33. Morris, 2004, p. 137, quoting Haganah Archive (HA) 105\257.
  34. Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 27.
  35. Excerpts from the book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Archived 9 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine by Ilan Pappé. Oneworld Publications, 2006.
  36. Gelber, Yoav (2006). Palestine 1948: War, Escape And The Emergence Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem. Sussex Academic Press. p. 306. ISBN 978-1-84519-075-0. the method for taking over an Arab village: Surround the village and search it (for weapons). In case of resistance – … expel the population beyond the border… If there is no resistance, a garrison should be stationed in the village. . . appoint local institutions for administering the village internal affairs. The text clarified unequivocally that expulsion concerned only those villages that would fight against the Hagana and resist occupation and not all Arab hamlets.
  37. Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. New York: Knopf. 1976. p. 332. ISBN 978-0-679-76563-9
  38. Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (film). Israel, Germany, Netherlands: Arte. 1998. Event occurs at 13:09. Archived from the original on 18 November 2021. Retrieved 4 December 2012. Only five days earlier, the entire Arab population of Tiberias, a town by the Sea of Galilee, had panicked and fled, after the defeat of their militia by the Haganah. This was the first instance of a mass Arab evacuation from a town. The Haganah commanders in Haifa were undoubtedly well aware of this precedent as their own battle unfolded.
  39. Benny Morris (1998). Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (film). Israel, Germany, Netherlands: Arte. Event occurs at 13:33. Archived from the original on 18 November 2021. Retrieved 4 December 2012. The Arabs for their part recalled that the Jews had massacred many of the inhabitants of a village called Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem only ten days before increasing their fear and panic as Haifa fell.
  40. E. Toubassi (1998). Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (film). Israel, Germany, Netherlands: Arte. Event occurs at 23:27. Archived from the original on 18 November 2021. Retrieved 4 December 2012. On the 25th or 26th of April, the people knew in Jaffa there was no hope. Also, the massacre in Deir Yassin or some other villages made panic among the Arab Palestinians. They started preparing for immigration.
  41. Meron Benvenisti. Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. University of California Press. 2002. p. 116. "Long afterward Menachem Begin boasted that the panic that descended on the Arabs caused them to flee from the cities of Tiberias and Haifa as well. And indeed, the consequences of this barbaric act of ethnic cleansing were far-reaching. The Deir Yasin Massacre, which was reported on over and over again in all the Arab media, inspired tremendous fear, which led many Arabs to abandon their homes as the Jewish forces drew near. There is no doubt that Deir Yasin was a turning point in the annals of the destruction of the Arab landscape."
  42. Morris & Kedar 2023, pp. 752–776, " Taken together, these documents revealed that the Acre and Gaza episodes were merely the tip of the iceberg in a prolonged campaign ... But bulldozing or blowing up houses and wells was deemed insufficient. With its back to the wall, the Haganah upped the ante and unleashed a clandestine campaign of poisoning certain captured village wells with bacteria – in violation of the Geneva Protocol ... The aim of Cast Thy Bread ... like the demolitions, was to hamper an Arab return. Over the weeks, the well-poisoning campaign was expanded to regions beyond the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and included Jewish settlements captured or about to be captured by Arab troops, and then to inhabited Arab towns, to facilitate their prospective conquest by the Haganah or to hinder the progress of the invading Arab armies ... The Yishuv’s decision to use the bacteriological weapons was taken at the highest level of the government and military and was, indeed, steered by these officers, with Ben-Gurion’s authorization, through the campaign ... The use of the bacteria was apparently fairly limited in Israel/Palestine during April–December 1948, and apart from Acre, seems to have caused no epidemic and few casualties. At least, that is what emerges from the available documentation."; Nashef 2018, p. 143 n. 4 (quoting Pappe 2006); Carus 2017, p. 145, "Some BW programs relied on extremely crude methods, about as sophisticated as those employed by some terrorist groups or criminals ... The same was true of the reported activities associated with the early Israeli program in 1948."; Docker 2012, pp. 19–20, "The urbicide of May 1948 directed against the old Crusader city of Acre involved biological warfare, including poisoning of water, Pappé writing that it seems clear from Red Cross reports that the Zionist forces besieging the city injected 'typhoid germs' into the water supply, which led to a 'sudden typhoid epidemic'. There was a similar attempt to 'poison the water supply in Gaza' on 27 May 1948 by injecting typhoid and dysentery viruses into wells; this attempt was fortunately foiled."; Martin 2010, p. 7, "Israeli biological warfare activities included Operation Shalach, which was an attempt to contaminate the water supplies of Egyptian Army. Egypt reports capture of four 'Zionists' trying to infect wells with dysentery and typhoid. There are also allegations that a typhoid outbreak in Acre in 1948 resulted from a biological attack and that there were attacks in Egypt in 1947 and in Syria in 1948."; Sayigh 2009, "A unit had been formed to develop biological weapons, and there is evidence that these were used during 1948 to poison the water supplies of Akka and Gaza with typhoid bacteria."; Ackerman & Asal 2008, p. 191, "Egyptian Ministry of Defense and, later, Israeli historians, contend that Israeli soldiers contaminated Acre’s water supply."; Pappe 2006, pp. 73–4 ("The flame-thrower project was part of a larger unit engaged in developing biological warfare under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir ... The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February . Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people.") and 100–101 ("During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak ... A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled."); Abu Sitta 2003, "The Zionists injected typhoid in the aqueduct at some intermediate point which passes through Zionist settlements ... The city of Acre, now burdened by the epidemic, fell easy prey to the Zionists. ... Two weeks later, after their "success" in Acre, the Zionists struck again. This time in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had gathered after their villages in southern Palestine were occupied. The end however was different. ... The biological crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians in Acre and Gaza in 1948 are still being enacted today."; Leitenberg 2001, p. 289, "As early as April 1948, Ben Gurion directed one of his operatives in Europe (Ehud Avriel) to seek out surviving East European Jewish scientists who could "either increase the capacity to kill masses or to cure masses: both things are important". At that time, that 'capacity' meant chemical and biological weapons ... These were ultimate weapons that could be used either for offense or defense (and the context of the immediate military operations, as well as those that had preceded it, would be the critical factors in that categorization)."; Cohen 2001, p. 31, "It is believed that one of the largest operations in this campaign was in the Arab coastal town of Acre, north of Haifa, shortly before it was conquered by the IDF on May 17,1948. According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread in Acre in the days before the town fell to the Israeli forces was not the result of wartime chaos but rather a deliberate covert action by the IDF—the contamination of Acre's water supply ... The success of the Acre operation may have persuaded Israeli decisionmakers to continue with these activities. On May 23, 1948, Egyptian soldiers in the Gaza area caught four Israeli soldiers disguised as Arabs near water wells ... It seems that many people knew something about these operations, but both the participants and later historians chose to avoid the issue, which gradually became a national taboo ... Despite the official silence, it appears there is little doubt now about the mission of the failed Gaza operation."
  43. Karsh, E. "Nakbat Haifa: Collapse and Dispersion of a Major Palestinian Community" in Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 37, Number 4/ 1 October 2001.
  44. ""Middle East Source Documents – Haifa – British Police Report Regarding Flight of Arabs – 1948". Archived from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  45. Erskine Childers, Walid Khalidi, and Jon Kimche Archived 19 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine 1961 Correspondence in "The Spectator" on "Why the Refugees Left" Originally Appendix E of Khalidi, Walid, "Plan Dalet Revisited: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" in 18 no. 1, (Aut. 88): 51–70.
  46. "British Proclamation in Haifa Making Evacuation Secure", The Times, London, 22 April 1948; p. 4; Issue 51052; col D
  47. Benny Morris (1988). "Haifa’s Arabs: Displacement and Concentration, July 1948". Middle East Journal, 42(2), 241–259. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4327736
  48. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)
  49. Finkelstein, Norman. "Myths, Old and New". Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 1 (1991): 66–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/2537366 – "In July, Haifa's remaining inhabitants, some 3,500, were packed into a ghetto in the downtown Wadi Nisnas neighborhood."
  50. Azoulay, Ariella. "Declaring the State of Israel: Declaring a State Of". Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 265–85. https://doi.org/10.1086/657293 – " the ghetto in Wadi Nisnas that had been established for them after they had been expelled from their homes."
  51. Avnery, Uri (1971). Israel Without Zionism: A Plan for Peace in the Middle East. New York: Collier Books, pp. 224–25.
  52. O'Ballance, Edgar (1956) pp. 147, 172.
  53. Morris, 2004, p. 246; Summary meeting of the Arab Affairs Advisor in Netanya 9 May 1948 IDF 6127/49//109.
  54. Yehuda Slutzky, ""Summary of the Hagana Book"", pp. 486–7. Cited from Ilan Pappé, 2006, p. 128.
  55. Morris, 2004, p. 247; unsigned short report on Tantura Operation, IDFA 922/75//949, and Ya'akov B.,' in the name of the deputy OC "A" company "Report on Operation Namal" 26 May 1948, IDFA 6647/49//13.
  56. Morris, 2004; Shitrit to Ben-Gurion 31 May 1948 ISA MAM 302/48.
  57. Morris, Benny (1986): "The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: The Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948". Middle Eastern Studies. Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 5–19.
  58. Kapeliouk, Amnon (1987). "New Light on the Israeli–Arab Conflict and the Refugee Problem and Its Origins". Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. 16, No. 3. (Spring 1987). p. 21.
  59. Intelligence report "Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947, and June 1, 1948". Scan of Hebrew original and English translation Archived 16 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine
  60. Quoted in Mark Tessler's A History of the Arab–Israeli Conflict: "Keesing's Contemporary Archives" (London: Keesing's Publications, 1948–1973). p. 10101.
  61. PDF copy of Cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the Secretary-General of the United Nations: S/745: 15 May 1948: Retrieved 6 June 2012 Archived 7 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  62. ^ Oren, Elhanan (1976): On the Way to the City. Hebrew, Tel Aviv.
  63. "Peretz Kidron interview with Ben Dunkelman". Haolam Hazeh. 9 January 1980.
  64. Kidron, Peretz (1988). "Truth Whereby Nations Live". In Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (Eds.). Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question Verso. ISBN 978-1-85984-340-6, p. 87.
  65. "Ari Shavit—Survival Of The Fittest? An Interview With Benny Morris" Archived 5 September 2021 at the Wayback Machine, Logos, Winter 2004.
  66. Glazer 1980, p. 109.
  67. UN Progress Report, 16 September 1948, Part 1 Section V, paragraph 6; Part 3 Section I, paragraph 1 to 3. According to Glazer, this observation by Count Folke Bernadotte is frequently cited not only as an example of descriptions of panic, but also as evidence that the Zionists pursued a policy of expulsion.
  68. UN Doc. a/648 Archived 9 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations Part 1 Section V para 6. "It is not yet known what the policy of the Provisional government of Israel with regard to the return of Arab refugees will be when the final terms of settlement are reached. It is, however, undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which, under the Assembly resolution of 29 November, was to be included in the Jewish State. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."
  69. Benny Morris, Benjamin Z. Kedar, 'Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War Archived 5 March 2023 at the Wayback Machine Middle Eastern Studies 19 September 2022, pages =1-25 pp.16-18.
  70. UN Doc. PAL/370 Archived 9 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine UN Press Release, 6 November 1948.
  71. Pappe, Ilan (Spring 2006). "Calling a Spade a Spade: The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine". Archived from the original on 27 May 2007. Retrieved 3 May 2007.
  72. UN Doc A/648 Archived 9 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to the Secretary-General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations see part 1 section V para 6.
  73. Bowker, 2003, pp. 97–98.
  74. "United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194". United Nations General Assembly. 11 December 1948. Archived from the original on 2 July 2015. Retrieved 6 June 2011.
  75. "Israel's membership in the UN - Ad Hoc Political Committee - Summary record". Question of Palestine. Retrieved 3 November 2024.
  76. ^ Masalha, Nur (2009). "Rosemary M. Esber, Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians". Holy Land Studies. 8 (2): 245–247. doi:10.3366/E1474947509000614.
  77. Ofer Aderet, 'Jewish soldiers and civilians looted Arab neighbors' property en masse in '48,' Archived 23 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine Haaretz 2 October 2020
  78. Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 34.
  79. Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 35.
  80. Saleh, Abdul Jawad and Walid Mustafa (1987): p. 30.
  81. Abu Sitta, Salman (2001).
  82. "Total Registered Refugees per Country and Area" (PDF). UNRWA. 31 March 2005. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 July 2008. Retrieved 23 September 2009. Refugees Per Country & Area; 2005
  83. Susan Akram (2011). International law and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Taylor & Francis. pp. 38, 19. ISBN 978-0-415-57322-1. Archived from the original on 3 July 2024. Retrieved 29 October 2020. This was the definition accepted by the drafters of the resolution 194 for the purposes of defining the entire group of Palestinians who were entitled to the protection of the International Community
  84. "Q/A Final Status". UNRWA. Archived from the original on 6 September 2013. Retrieved 30 October 2011. Q) Is UNRWA involved in the Middle East peace negotiations and in the discussions on a solution to the refugee issue? A) No. UNRWA is a humanitarian agency and its mandate defines its role as one of providing services to the refugees.
  85. "Who is a Palestine Refugee?" Archived 6 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine UNRWA's operational definition
  86. Assistance To Palestine Refugees UN Doc A/1905 Archived 7 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Report of the Director of the UNRWA, 28 September 1951.
  87. Bowker, 2003, pp. 61–62.
  88. Jiryis, Sabri (1981): "Domination by the Law". Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. 11, No. 1, 10th Anniversary Issue: Palestinians under Occupation. (Autumn, 1981), pp. 67–92.
  89. ^ Kirshbaum, David A."Israeli Emergency Regulations & The Defense (Emergency) Regulations of 1945". Archived from the original on 28 October 2009. Retrieved 13 November 2010. .
  90. "Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine". COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 37.
  91. "Absentees' Property Law (1950)". Archived from the original on 28 October 2009.
  92. See article 37 Absentees' Property Law 5710-1950 Archived 9 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  93. Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine. COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 41.
  94. Peretz, (1958)
  95. Mendes, Philip. "THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEES: the causes of the post-1948 Jewish Exodus from Arab Countries" Archived 5 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Presented at the 14 Jewish Studies Conference Melbourne March 2002. Retrieved 12 June 2007.
  96. "Jimena Faq". Archived from the original on 17 July 2012. Retrieved 21 July 2010.
  97. "Lyn Julius: Recognising the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries". The Guardian. London. 25 June 2008. Archived from the original on 29 August 2021. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  98. "A different kind of catastrophe" Archived 18 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine. The Guardian, 23 June 2008.
  99. F_404. "Palestinians warn of executing Israeli "absentee property" law in Jerusalem". Retrieved 24 April 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  100. Morris, Benny (2012). "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948". In Rogan, Eugene L.; Shlaim, Avi (eds.). The War for Palestine. p. 37.
  101. Levey, Zach (24 August 2020). "Israel's Archives: Digitization, Delays and Nostalgia for the Reading Room". Wilson Center. Retrieved 28 November 2024.
  102. Shezaf, Hagar (4 July 2019). "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 28 November 2021.
  103. Kraft, Dina (20 April 2018). "Nakba, Even as Israel Cuts Them Off From Their Sources". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 8 November 2021.
  104. Erskine Childers. The Other Exodus. "The BBC monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put." Erskine Childers: The Other Exodus The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, (1969) rev.ed. Pelican, 1970 pp. 179–188 p. 183.
  105. "Survival of the Fittest (Cont.)". Haaretz. 8 January 2004. Archived from the original on 19 March 2023. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  106. "Book Review: Palestine Betrayed by Efraim Karsh". Archived from the original on 1 May 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  107. Karsh, Efraim. "Were the Palestinians Expelled?" (PDF). Commentary. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 February 2014. Retrieved 6 August 2014.
  108. Karsh, Efraim (June 1996). "Rewriting Israel's History". The Middle East Quarterly. Archived from the original on 22 July 2014. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  109. cf. Teveth, Shabtai (April 1990). "The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and Its Origins". Middle Eastern Studies. 26 (2): 214–249. doi:10.1080/00263209008700816. JSTOR 4283366.
  110. ^ Honaida Ghanim (2009). "Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, gender, and social change among Palestinian poets in Israel after Nakba". International Journal of Political and Cultural Science. Vol. 22. pp. 33–39.
  111. ^ Bowker, 2003, p. 96.
  112. Address by Ms. Hanan Ashrawi Archived 4 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine, Durban (South Africa), 28 August 2001. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances.
  113. Boudreaux, Richard. "Israeli legislation raises loyalty issue" Archived 7 July 2012 at archive.today, Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2009.
  114. "חוק הנכבה". 4 May 2011. Archived from the original on 27 February 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  115. "Denial and the future of peace". Al-Ahram Weekly. Archived from the original on 5 June 2011. Retrieved 7 September 2010.
  116. Anderson, Perry (November–December 2015). "The House of Zion". New Left Review (96): 5–37. Archived from the original on 1 May 2021. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
  117. Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2008). "The Israeli national Information Center and collective memory of the Israeli-Arab conflict". The Middle East Journal, 62 (4), 653–670; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004." Journal of Peace Research, 48 (2), 235–248; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012). Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem. Peace Review. 24 (2), 187–194.
  118. Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004". Journal of Peace Research, 48 (2), 235–248.
  119. Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004". Journal of Peace Research, 48 (2), 235–248; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012). "Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem". Peace Review, 24 (2), 187–194.
  120. Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2008). "The Israeli National Information Center and collective memory of the Israeli-Arab conflict". The Middle East Journal, 62 (4), 653–670; Nets-Zehngut, R. (2011). "Origins of the Palestinian refugee problem: Changes in the historical memory of Israelis/Jews 1949–2004". Journal of Peace Research, 48 (2), 235–248; Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012); Podeh, Eli. (2002). "The Arab-Israeli conflict in history textbooks (1948–2000)." Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey. Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem. Peace Review. 24 (2), 187–194.
  121. Nets-Zehngut, Rafi. (2012). "Overview of the Israeli memory of the Palestinian refugee problem". Peace Review, 24 (2), 187–194.
  122. Khalidi, Walid (1961)
  123. Benny Morris (21 March 2011). "The Liar as Hero". SPME.
  124. Ephraim Karsh (Winter 2006). "Pure Pappe". The Middle East Quarterly. Archived from the original on 9 October 2021. Retrieved 29 May 2018.
  125. "Distilled history". The Economist. 26 September 2009. Archived from the original on 4 March 2021.
  126. Shlaim, Avi (31 May 2008). "No sentiments in war". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 3 July 2024. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
  127. Shlaim, Avi (September 1996). "A Totalitarian Concept of History". Middle East Quarterly. 3 (3): 52–55. Archived from the original on 24 September 2021. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
  128. "Ex-education minister calls for Nakba studies in school" Archived 1 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine. The Times of Israel. 24 March 2015.
  129. "Congress considers recognizing Jewish refugees". Haaretz. JTA. 2 August 2012. Archived from the original on 12 May 2021. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
  130. "Jewish refugees bill being considered by U.S. House of Representatives". Haaretz. JTA. 2 August 2012. Archived from the original on 26 May 2021. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
  131. "House members seek recognition for Jewish refugees from Arab countries". Yedioth Ahronot. 31 July 2012. Archived from the original on 7 May 2021. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
  132. Porath, Ada (16 January 1986). "What about Jewish Nakba?". YnetNews. Archived from the original on 24 October 2015. Retrieved 19 February 2012.
  133. Shenhav, Yehouda (15 August 2003). "Hitching a Ride on the Magic Carpet". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 26 October 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  134. Morris, Benny (3 February 2009). "1948 as Jihad" (Speech). The Second Annual Professor William Prusoff Honorary Lecture. ISGAP. Several methodological problems arise here. The first and most obvious is that the archives of the Arab states, of the main Arab political parties, royal courts, and armies are all closed – all the Arab states are dictatorships of one sort or another and dictatorships, as is well known, do not open archives. This means that anyone interested in understanding the Arab side in the 1948 War is forced, in the main, to view it through the eyes and documentation of Western and Israeli diplomats, analysts, and intelligence officers.
  135. Morris, Benny (21 August 2019). "Covering and uncovering history: An interview with Benny Morris" (Interview). Interviewed by Niram Ferretti. L'informale. The first thing I would say is that those who say this are completely hypocritical, because when you look at Arab archives they are all closed. They haven't opened anything. So, here they are criticizing Israel for having opened certain documents and then having closed them again while the Arabs and the Palestinians have closed everything and have been hiding everything from researchers.

Sources

External links

Nakba
Background
Main articles
Key incidents
Notable writers
Related categories/lists
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The Holocaust and the Nakba
Palestine refugee camps locations and populations as of 2015
 Gaza Strip
518,000 UNRWA refugees
 West Bank
188,150 UNRWA refugees
 Syria
319,958 UNRWA refugees
 Lebanon
188,850 UNRWA refugees
 Jordan
355,500 UNRWA refugees
Al-Shati (Beach camp)87,000
Bureij 34,000
Deir al-Balah 21,000
Jabalia 110,000
Khan Yunis 72,000
Maghazi 24,000
Nuseirat 66,000
Rafah 104,000
Canada closed
Aqabat Jaber6,400
Ein as-Sultan 1,900
Far'a 7,600
Fawwar 8,000
Jalazone 11,000
Qalandia 11,000
Am'ari 10,500
Deir 'Ammar 2,400
Dheisheh 13,000
Aida 4,700
Al-Arroub 10,400
Askar 15,900
Balata 23,600
'Azza (Beit Jibrin) 1,000
Ein Beit al-Ma' (Camp No. 1) 6,750
Tulkarm 18,000
Nur Shams 9,000
Jenin 16,000
Shu'fat 11,000
Silwad
Birzeit
Sabinah22,600
Khan al-Shih 20,000
Nayrab 20,500
Homs 22,000
Jaramana 18,658
Daraa 10,000
Hama 8,000
Khan Danoun 10,000
Qabr Essit 23,700
Unofficial camps
Ein Al-Tal 6,000
Latakia 10,000
Yarmouk 148,500
Bourj el-Barajneh17,945
Ain al-Hilweh 54,116
El Buss 11,254
Nahr al-Bared 5,857
Shatila 9,842
Wavel 8,806
Mar Elias 662
Mieh Mieh 5,250
Beddawi 16,500
Burj el-Shamali 22,789
Dbayeh 4,351
Rashidieh 31,478
Former camps
Tel al-Zaatar  ?
Nabatieh  ?
Zarqa20,000
Jabal el-Hussein 29,000
Amman New (Wihdat) 51,500
Souf 20,000
Baqa'a 104,000
Husn (Martyr Azmi el-Mufti camp) 22,000
Irbid 25,000
Jerash 24,000
Marka 53,000
Talbieh 8,000
Al-Hassan  ?
Madaba  ?
Sokhna  ?
References
  1. "Camp Profiles". unrwa.org. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
Palestinian Arab towns and villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestinian exodus by subdistrict
Acre 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight is located in Mandatory Palestine1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight1948 Palestinian expulsion and 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