Causes of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight

This article is devoted to the different causes and explanations of the expulsion or flight of Palestinian Arabs during the 1947-1948 Civil War in Palestine and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The causes for the exodus are a matter of great controversy among commentators on the Arab-Israeli conflict and historians.

Roughly three positions of historians and commentators can be distinguished. According to Childers in 1961 ‘Israel claims that the Arabs left because they were ordered to, and deliberately incited into panic, by their own leaders who wanted the field cleared for the 1948 war.’ and ‘The Arabs charge that their people were evicted at bayonet-point and by panic deliberately incited by the Zionists.’ Benny Morris, a proponent of the Israeli New Historians, refers to these positions as ‘old-school Zionist’ and ‘Arab and pro-Arab’ respectively. Morris takes a third position: the flight was caused by neither Arab nor Israeli policies, but rather "born of war, not by design."

The following explanations of the exodus and factors contributing to the exodus have been offered by historians:

• The 'Arab leaders' endorsement of the refugee flight' was the official line taken by the governments of Israel and the traditional explanation adopted by Israeli historians, assigning the main responsibility for the exodus to calls made by local and foreign Arab leaders.
• The 'Master Plan', proposed by Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi and followed by the majority of Palestinian historians and the Israeli Ilan Pappe, claims that the Palestinian exodus was planned and organized in advance by Jewish authorities. They often present Plan Dalet as a proof of this.
• The idea of 'Transfer principle', proposed by Walid Khalidi, supported by Childers and developed by Benny Morris, contends that displacement of population in Zionist thinking influenced the events of 1948.
• Morris analysed the direct causes of the 'Four Waves' of the Palestinian exodus. He concludes that Jewish military attacks were the main cause, followed by Arab fear due to the fall of a nearby town, Arab fear of impending attack and expulsions.
• The 'Two-stage explanation' brought forth by Yoav Gelber and other historians synthetises the events of 1948 in distinguishing two phases in the exodus. Before the first truce (11 June - 8 July 1948), it explains the exodus as a result of the crumbling Arab social structure and justified Jewish military conduct, and after as a result of expulsions and massacres performed by the Israeli army during Operation Dani and the campaign in the Galilee and Negev.
• According to the 'Ethnic Cleansing' analysis by Pappé the Palestinian exodus can be described as ethnic cleansing. He says: ‘This was not a battlefield, it was a civilian space invaded by military troops. Ethnic ideology, settlement policy, and demographic strategy constituted the decisive factors here, not the military plans.’
• Some historians argue that Arab fears of Jewish retaliation initiated, accelerated or increased the Palestinian exodus.
• All historians agree that Jewish troops used psychological warfare that in some circumstances initiated, accelerated or increased the Palestinian exodus. The aspect is differently emphasized by historians.

The "Arab leaders' endorsement of flight" explanation

The first explanation published of what caused the 1948 Palestinian exodus was that the Arab political and military leaders within Palestine and in surrounding countries actually told Arab civilians in Palestine to leave their homes so as to avoid any casualties of war with the expectation that they would return to their homes once the Arab armies destroyed the Yishuv. Proponents of this explanation also cite exaggerations in the Arab media and word-of-mouth rumors among the Arab civilians of atrocities committed by Jews against Arab civilians which caused a large percentage of Palestinian Arabs to flee fearing for their lives. Critics of this explanation say that the policy of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee was to stop the flight. Most modern historians acknowledge that in some cases local commanders ordered evacuations out of harms way of women, children and the elderly. This would account for about five percent of the exodus.

Claims that support that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders

Israeli official sources, foreign press, and officials present at the time, and many historians 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 Land of Israel was not caused by persecution, violence, expulsion [but was] deliberately organised by the Arab leaders in order to arouse Arab feelings of revenge, to artificially create an Arab refugee problem." Israeli historian Efraim Karsh wrote, "The logic behind this policy was apparently that 'the absence of women and children from Palestine would free the men for fighting', as the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Abd al-Rahman Azzam put it." In his book, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948, Karsh cited the substantial, active role the Arab Higher Committee played in the exoduses from Haifa, Tiberias, and Jaffa as an important part of understanding what he called the "birth of the Palestinian refugee problem."

Specifically in the case of Haifa, The Economist asserted with that the 56,000-57,000 Palestinians who left the city did so mostly due to "the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit."

The Near East Broadcasting Station in Cyprus declared that "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem."

Sir John Troutbeck, a British diplomat in Cairo, went to Gaza on a fact-finding mission in June 1949. He reported that while the Palestinian Arab refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews […] they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes."

In the case of Ein Karem, William O. Douglas recorded that "the villagers were told by the Arab leaders to leave. It apparently was a strategy of mass evacuation, whether or not necessary as a military or public safety measure." From eyewitness accounts, Douglas found that this, along with fear of Jewish attack, was a key reason for the exodus from Ein Karem.

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."

A May 3, 1948 Time Magazine article states:

The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city. More than pride and defiance was behind . the Arab orders. By withdrawing Arab workers, their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa. Jewish leaders said wishfully: 'They'll be back in a few days. Already some are returning.'
'One entire jetty,' cabled TIME Correspondent Eric Gibbs, 'was packed with these refugees, sitting on their pathetic bundles or clutching them with the strength of despair. What did these simple, bewildered people seize in the moment of panic? A small Turkish carpet, a radio, a sewing machine were among the treasures. […] Hour after hour they sat, waiting for barges, British landing craft and other odd boats now doing ferry service across the blue bay to Acre.' Other thousands fled to the Arab-held hills near Nablus.

Evidence such as this led Shmuel Katz to conclude in his book Battleground "that 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." He explains that "The Arabs are the only declared refugee group 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."

Claims by Arab sources that support that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders

Former Prime Minister of Syria Khalid al-Azm recalled in his memoirs:

Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees to their country, while it is we who made them leave it. […]
We brought disaster upon one million Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave their land, their homes, their work and their industry. We have rendered them dispossessed, unemployed, whilst every one of them had work or a trade by which he could gain his livelihood.

After the war, a few Arab leaders tried to present the Palestinian exodus as a victory by claiming to have planned it.Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Said was later quoted as saying: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

Contemporary Jordanian politician Anwar Nusseibeh believed that the fault for the exodus and military loss was with the Arab commanders:

"the commanders of the local army thought in terms of the revolt against the British in the 1930s. The rebels had often retreated to the mountains, which made sense, as the British had not sought to take control of the country. But the Jews were fighting for complete domination, so the fighters had erred in withdrawing from the villages instead of defending them […]. He blamed himself as well. 'I underestimated the strength of my own people,' he wrote. […] His central thesis, however, was that the Palestinian Arabs could have won the country had their leaders not sabotaged the war effort and known how to cooperate."

Mahmoud Abbas, at the time Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, would later recall: "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, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."

Criticisms of the "endorsement of flight" explanation

Morris, with others of the New Historians school, concur that that Arab instigation was not the major cause of the refugees' flight. They do acknowledge that Arab instigation during December 1947-June 1948 may have caused around 5 percent of total exodus. As regards the overall exodus, they clearly state that the major cause of Palestinian flight was not Arab instigation but rather military actions by the IDF and fear of them. In their view, Arab instigation can only explain a small part of the exodus and not a large part of it. Moreover, Morris and Flapan have been among the authors whose research has disputed the official Israeli version claiming that the refugee flight was in large part instigated by Arab leaders.

Additionally, the secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs:

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 terrorism and eviction followed by the Jewish commanders in the areas they occupied, and reaching its peak of brutality in the massacre of Deir Yassin.
There were two good reasons why the Jews 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 Israel, 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.

According to Glazer (1980, p. 101), not only did Arab radio stations appeal to the inhabitants not to leave, but also Zionist radio stations urged the population to flee, by exaggerating the course of battle, and, in some cases, fabricating complete lies.

More evidence is presented by Walid Khalidi. In his article the author argues that steps were taken by Arab governments to prevent Palestinians from leaving, ensuring that they remain to fight, including the denial by Lebanon and Syria of residency permits to Palestinian males of military age on April 30 and May 6 respectively. He also notes that a number of Arab radio broadcasts urged the inhabitants of Palestine to remain and discussed plans for an Arab administration there.

Glazer (1980, p.102) notes that Schechtman offered quotes from the Lebanese weekly Kul Shay (in the section above), from al-Huda, a Maronite newspaper published in the United States, and several statements made by various Arab officials, among them Emil al-Ghoury, at the time Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, and Msgr. George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Haifa and Galilee. These quotes and statements all imply Arab complicity in, if not initiation of, the exodus. But Glazer then observes that Childers had checked these sources, examining them for the full meaning, and had found that these quotations were taken out of context. According to Childers, on closer examination, these statements were meant to indicate the opposite of what the Zionists tried to imply. According to him, what had in effect happened was that by carefully selecting those words which fit their story, these Zionist historians had edited history.

According to Glazer (1980, p.105), among those who blame Arab news reports for the resulting panic flight are Polk et al. and Gabbay. They maintain that the Arabs overstated the case of Zionist atrocities, made the situation seem worse than it was and thus caused the population to flee, rather than to fight harder, as was hoped. According to Glazer, Gabbay, in particular, has assembled an impressive listing of sources which describe Zionist cruelty and savagery.

In this sense, Glazer (1980, p.105) cites the work done by Childers who maintains that it was the Zionists who disseminated these stories, at the time when the Arab sources were urging calm. He cites carefully composed 'horror recordings' in which a voice calls out in Arabic for the population to escape because 'the Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons'.

In the opinon of Glazer (1980, p.108) one of the greatest weaknesses of the traditional Zionist argument, which attempts to explain the exodus as a careful, calculated and organized plan by various Arab authorities, is that it cannot account for the totally disorganized way in which the exodus occurred. In this sense, Glazer cites John Glubb's observation,

'Voluntary emigrants do not leave their homes with only the clothes they stand up in. People who have decided to move house do not do so in such a hurry that they lose other members of their family - husband losing sight of his wife, or parents of their children. The fact is that the majority left in panic flight'.

As regards the evidence provided supporting the idea that Arab leaders incited the flight of Palestinian population, Glazer (1980, p. 106) states:

I am inclined to prefer Childers [research] because the sources he cites would have reached the masses, who would then react accordingly. Radio was the most widely used form of communication, and the "horror recordings" were broadcast on the scene. Gabbay's evidence, newspapers and UN documents, were designed for outside consumption, by diplomats and politicians abroad and by the educated and influential Arab decision makers. This is not the kind of material which would necessarily have been in the hands of the common Palestinian. Thus I believe that Childers' contention, claiming that Zionist provocation had more to do with causing the exodus than backfiring atrocity propaganda, is borne out.

Flapanfurther maintains that to support their claim that Arab leaders had incited the flight, Israeli and Zionist sources were constantly "quoting" statements by the Arab Higher Committee to the effect that "in a very short time the armies of our Arab sister countries will overrun Palestine, attacking from the land, the sea, and the air, and they will settle accounts with the Jews. He claims that some such statements were actually issued, but they were intended to stop the panic that was causing the masses to abandon their villages. In his opinion, they were also issued as a warning to the increasing number of Arabs who were willing to accept partition as irreversible and cease struggling against it. From his point of view, in practice the AHC statements boomeranged and further increased Arab panic and flight. But there were a great many other statements that could not be so misconstrued. According to Aharon Cohen, head of Mapam's Arab department, the Arab leadership was very critical of the "fifth columnists and rumormongers" behind the flight. When, after April 1948, the flight acquired massive dimensions, Azzam Pasha, secretary of the Arab League, and King 'Abdailah both issued public calls to the Arabs not to leave their homes. Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army, was given instructions to stop the flight by force and to requisition transport for this purpose. Muhammad Adib al-'Umri, deputy director of the Ramallah broadcasting station, appealed to the Arabs to stop the flight from Janin, Tulkarm, and other towns in the Triangle that were bombed by the Israelis. On 10 May Radio Jerusalem broadcast orders on its Arab program from Arab commanders and the AHC to stop the mass flight from Jerusalem and its vicinity. Flapan considers that Palestinian sources offer further evidence that even earlier, in March and April, the Arab Higher Committee broadcasting from Damascus demanded that the population stay put and announced that Palestinians of military age were to return from the Arab countries. All Arab officials in Palestine were also asked to remain at their posts The author claims that such pleas had so little impact because they were outweighed by the cumulative effect of Zionist pressure tactics that ranged from economic and psychological warfare to the systematic ousting of the Arab population by the army.

According to Flapanthe idea that Arab leaders ordered the Arab masses to leave their homes in order to open the way for the invading armies, after which they would return to share in the victory, makes no sense at all. In his opinion, the Arab armies, coming long distances and operating in or from the Arab areas of Palestine, needed the help of the local population for food, fuel, water, transport, manpower, and information. The author cites a report of the Jewish Agency's Arab section from January 3, 1948, at the beginning of the flight, which in his view suggests that the Arabs were already concerned with the possibility of flight, "The Arab exodus from Palestine continues, mainly to the countries of the West. Of late, the Arab Higher Executive has succeeded in imposing close scrutiny on those leaving for Arab countries in the Middle East. Flapan maintains that prior to the declaration of statehood, the Arab League's political committee, meeting in Sofar, Lebanon, recommended that the Arab states "open the doors to […] women and children and old people if events in Palestine make it necessary, but that the AHC vigorously opposed the departure of Palestinians and even the granting of visas to women and children.

Flapanoffers the following explanation for what he calls the "myth" of Arab-instigated flight. He claims that

...it served to cover the traces of the unsavory methods employed by the authorities (from the confiscation of food, raw materials, medicaments, and land to acts of terror and intimidation, the creation of panic, and, finally, forcible expulsion) and thus to exorcise the feelings of guilt. In many sectors of society, especially the younger generation. Many of them bore the burden of the operations that caused the Arab flight. Their feelings of moral frustration and revulsion were not easily eradicated.

In addition to alleviating guilt feelings, the myth served as a successful weapon in political warfare. It helped strengthen the age-old Zionist thesis that the Palestinians were not a people with national aspirations and rights but simply Arabs who could live anywhere in the vast expanses of the Arab world. On 4 May 1948, Ben-Gurion wrote that "history has proved who is really attached to this country and for whom it is a luxury which can be given up. Until now not a single Jewish settlement, not even the most distant, weak, or isolated, has been abandoned, whereas after the first defeat the Arabs left whole towns like Haifa and Tiberias in spite of the fact that they did not face any danger of destruction or massacre.

This contention ignored the fact that the large majority of the Palestinians who fled their homes did not leave the country. Like many Jews caught in the same circumstances, they evacuated battle areas and moved to safer places. The spontaneous movement of Palestinians back to the country-what was known then (and punished) as "infiltration," and which started even before the end of the war-and the persistent refusal of the majority of the Palestinian refugees to "rehabilitate" themselves in Arab countries must certainly be considered demonstrations of the tenacity of their attachment to their homeland.

The myth of voluntary exodus became Israel's major argument against accepting even partial responsibility for the refugee problem, not to mention consideration of the refugees' right to repatriation.

Arab Evacuation Orders

Although historians agree that explicit Arab orders to evacuate did not cause a major portion of the exodus, they do not agree as to whether or not they played a role altogether.

Morris estimates that Arab orders accounts for at most 5% of the total exodus. He explains these orders as follows:

"Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages in certain areas, lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments. […] There can be no exaggerating the importance of these early Arab-initiated evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual exodus, of the remaining rural and urban populations"

Furthermore, in his comprehensive book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Righteous Victims, Morris wrote:

"In some areas Arab commanders ordered the villagers to evacuate to clear the ground for military purposes or to prevent surrender. More than half a dozen villages—just north of Jerusalem and in the Lower Galilee—were abandonded during these months as a result of such orders. Elsewhere, in East Jerusalem and in many villages around the country, the [Arab] commanders ordered women, old people, and children to be sent away to be out of harm's way. Indeed, psychological preparation for the removal of dependents from the battlefield had begun in 1946-47, when the AHC and the Arab League had periodically endorsed such a move when contemplating the future war in Palestine."

In a 2003 interview with Haaretz, Morris summed up the conclusions of his revised edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem:

In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves. 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.

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 and move to areas 'far away from the dangers. Any opposition to this order […] is an obstacle to the holy war [...] and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.'

But Walid Khalidi says there were no Arab orders to evacuate Palestine. In a 1959 paper, he attributes the "Arab evacuation story" to Joseph Schechtman, who wrote two 1949 pamphlets in which 'the evacuation order first makes an elaborate appearance'.

Erskine Childers, an Irish academic, is another critic of this explanation. He examined the British record of the radio broadcasts by the Arab leaders at the time, and found no 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."

Morris, too, did not find any blanket call for evacuation, such as Weitz claims had existed. On that matter he writes:

Had blanket orders to leave been issued by outside leaders, including the exiled Palestinian leaders - via radio broadcasts or in any other public manner - traces of them would certainly have surfaced in the contemporary documentation produced by the Yishuv's/Israel's military and civilian institutions, the Mandate Government, and British and American diplomatic legations in the area. The Yishuv's intelligence agencies - HIS and its successor organisation, the IDF's Intelligence Service, and the Arab Division of the JA-PD, and its successor bodies, the Middle East Affairs, Research and Political departments of the Israel Foreign Ministry - as well as Western intelligence agencies all monitored Arab radio broadcasts and attended to the announcements of Arab leaders. But no Jewish or British or American intelligence or diplomatic report from the critical period, December 1947 to July 1948, quotes from or even refers to such orders.

The "Transfer idea"

The "transfer idea" became popular in the 1980s when the State of Israel declassified documents pertaining to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War period and the so-called New Historians began publishing articles and books based on those documents. Proponents of this theory say that the driving force of the 1948 Palestinian exodus was the Zionist leaders' belief that a Jewish state could not survive with a strong Arab population and that a population transfer would be most beneficial.

The 'transfer idea' is invoked by authors like Khalidi to support their claim that the Yishuv followed an expulsion policy. Others such as Morris reject the idea that 'transfer' thinking lead to a deliberate expulsion policy but invoke the theory to explain why, when it occurred, transfer was accepted as inevitable and natural by the bulk of the Jewish population. Critics of the "transfer principle" theory cite public addresses by the contemporary Zionist leadership that preach co-existence with the Arabs. However some proponents of the "transfer principle" theory say that the real sentiments were only talked about behind closed doors.

The idea that 'transfer ideology' contributed to the exodus was first brought up by several Palestinian authors, and supported by Erskine Childers in his 1971 article, "The wordless wish". In 1961 Walid Khalidi referred to the transfer idea to support his idea that the Yishuv followed an expulsion policy in April and May 1948. In 1980, historian Benny Morris became in the 1980s the most well-known advocate of the existence of the 'transfer idea'. According to Morris, 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 Haganah and IDF commanders to resort to various means of expelling the Arab population. In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited Morris writes:

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 leadership 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.

He also notes that the attempt to achieve a demographic shift through aliyah (Jewish immigration to the land of Israel) had not been successful. As a result, some Zionist leaders adopted the transfer of a large Arab population as the only viable solution. Morris also points out that "[if] 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).

Origins of the ‘Transfer Idea’

Morris concludes that the idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, a new one. He writes:

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).

Other authors, including Palestinian writers and Israeli New Historians, 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 Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote:

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.

The Peel Commission's plan and the Yishuv's reaction

The idea of population transfer was briefly placed on the Mandate's political agenda in 1937 by the Peel Commission. 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 David Ben-Gurion, who wrote:

... and [nothing] greater than this has been done for our case in our time [than Peel proposing transfer]. ... And we did not propose this - the Royal Commission ... did ... and we must grab hold of this conclusion [i.e, recommendation] as we grabbed hold of the Balfour Declaration, 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).

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 Moshe Sharett, director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, who said (during a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 7 May 1944 to consider the British Labour Party Executive's resolution supporting transfer):

Transfer could be the crowning achievements, the final stage in the development of [our] policy, but certainly not the point of departure. By [speaking publicly and prematurely] 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).

All of the other members of the JAE present, including Yitzhak Gruenbaum (later Israel's first interior minister), Eliahu Dobkin (director of the immigration department), Eliezer Kaplan (Israel's first finance minister), Dov Joseph (later Israel's justice minister) and Werner David Senator (a Hebrew University executive) spoke favorably of the transfer principle (Morris, 2001, p. 47).

The immediately succeeding Woodhead Commission, called to "examine the Peel Commission plan in detail and to recommend an actual partition plan" effectively removed the idea of transfer from the options under consideration by the British, and the 1939 White Paper proposed a complete end to immigration.

The ‘Transfer Idea’ during 1947 - 1949

In Flapan's view, with the proclamation of the birth of Israel and the Arab governments' invasion into the new state, those Arabs who had remained in Israel after 15 May were viewed as "a security problem," a potential fifth column, even though they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence. In the opinion of the author, that document had not altered Ben-Gurion's overall conception: once the Arab areas he considered vital to the constitution of the new state had been brought under Israeli control, there still remained the problem of their inhabitants.

According to Flapan "Ben-Gurion appointed what became known as the transfer committee, composed of Weitz, Danin, and Zalman Lipshitz, a cartographer. At the basis of its recommendations, presented to Ben-Gurion in October 1948, was the idea that the number of Arabs should not amount to more than 15 percent of Israel's total population, which at that time meant about 100,000".

In the view of Flapan records are available from archives and diaries which while not revealing a specific plan or precise orders for expulsion, they provide overwhelming circumstantial evidence to show that a design was being implemented by the Haganah, and later by the IDF, to reduce the number of Arabs in the Jewish state to a minimum and to make use of most of their lands, properties, and habitats to absorb the masses of Jewish immigrants.

According to Ben-Gurion's biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, "the appeals of the Arabs to stay, Golda's mission, and other similar gestures were the result of political considerations, but they did not reflect [Ben-Gurion's] basic stand. In internal discussions, in instructions to his people, the 'old man' demonstrated a clear stand: it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state".

Flapan quotes Ben-Gurion several times in order to prove this basic stand:

• After the flight of the Arabs began Ben-Gurion himself wrote in his diary, "We must afford civic and human equality to every Arab who remains, [... but, he insisted,] it is not our task to worry about the return of the Arabs".
• A week after he created the transfer-committee, Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency: "I am for compulsory transfer; I don't see anything immoral in it."
• On 11 May Ben-Gurion noted that he had given orders "for the destruction of Arab islands in Jewish population areas".
• During the early years of the state, Ben-Gurion stated that "the Arabs cannot accept the existence of Israel. Those who accept it are not normal. The best solution for the Arabs in Israel is to go and live in the Arab states-in the framework of a peace treaty or transfer.".

Flapan considers that "hand in hand with measures to ensure the continued exodus of Arabs from Israel was a determination not to permit any of the refugees to return. He claims that all of the Zionist leaders (Ben-Gurion, Sharett, and Weizmann) agreed on this point".

Criticisms of the ‘Transfer Idea’

The 'transfer principle' theory was attacked by Efraim Karsh. Karsh argued that transferist thinking was a fringe philosophy within Zionism, and had no significant effect on expulsions. He gives two specific points of criticism:

• Karsh cites evidence supporting the idea that Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) did not agree on transfer of Palestinian Arabs but rather had a much more tolerant vision of Arab-Jewish coexistence:

• Ben-Gurion's at a JAE meeting in 1936: "We do not deny the right of the Arab inhabitants of the country, and we do not see this right as a hindrance to the realization of Zionism."
• Ben-Gurion to his party members:"In our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well."
• in an October 1941 internal policy paper: "Jewish immigration and colonization in Palestine on a large scale can be carried out without displacing Arabs," and: "in a Jewish Palestine the position of the Arabs will not be worse than the position of the Jews themselves."
• explicit instructions of Israel Galili, the Haganah's commander-in-chief: "acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity."

• According to Karsh there was never any Zionist attempt to inculcate the "transfer" idea in the hearts and minds of Jews. He could find no evidence of any press campaign, radio broadcasts, public rallies, or political gatherings, for none existed". Furthermore, in Karsh's opinion the idea of transfer was forced on the Zionist agenda by the British (in the recommendations of the 1937 Peel Royal Commission on Palestine) rather than being self-generated. .

The arguments made by Karsh again came under attack by the New Historians. Morris criticises Karsh for his conclusions on the Jewish tolerant vision towards Palestinian Arabs, he claims that "the author [Karsh] reaches this conclusion by quoting extensively from a number of Ben-Gurion's speeches and memoranda. But Karsh appears unaware of the fact that politicians say different things to different audiences at different times and that what distinguishes good from bad historians is the ability to sort out the (heartfelt) wheat from the (propagandistic) chaff. Karsh also fails to take note of that fundamental rule that what statesmen, politicians, and generals do is far more telling Ben-Gurion was both more than what they say and a more certain indicator of devious and more their real desires and intentions". Morris claims that "it is true that Ben-Gurion did occasionally say that the Zionist movement must be careful not to go on public record in support of transfer, because doing so could cause the movement political harm, and occasionally expressed doubt whether the idea was practicable". Further critics of Karsh thesis include Nur Masalha, David Capitanchik and Husam Mohamad.

To this Katz adds that the "fabrication" that Jews were responsible for the Palestinian exodus "can probably most easily be seen in the simple circumstance that at the time the alleged cruel expulsion of Arabs by Zionists was in progress, it passed unnoticed. Foreign newspapermen who covered the war of 1948 on both sides did, indeed, write about the flight of the Arabs, but even those most hostile to the Jews saw nothing to suggest that it was not voluntary."

The "Master Plan" explanation

File:WalidKhalidi.jpg

Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, who had proposed the 'Master Plan' Theory

Based on the aforementioned alleged prevalent idea of transfer, and on actual expulsions that took place in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Walid Khalidi, a Palestinian historian, introduced a thesis in 1961 according to which the Palestinian exodus was planned in advance by the Zionist leadership.

Khalidi based his thesis on Plan D, 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 Palestinian Arabs as possible had to be transferred out of the Jewish state, and that this understanding stood behind many of the expulsions that the commanders on the field carried out.

In the opinion of Glazer (1980, p.113), there is evidence that Zionist leaders were already thinking about removal of the indigenous Palestinian population before the actual occurrence. On February 7, 1948, Ben-Gurion told the Central Committee of Mapai (the largest Zionist political party in Palestine) "it is most probable that in the 6, 8 or 10 coming months of the struggle many great changes will take place, very great in this country and not all of them to our disadvantage, and surely a great change in the composition of the population in the country".

Glazer considers that "it is clear that by the 1930's and into the 1940's, calls for the forcible transfer of Arabs out of Palestine were being made by the Zionist Revisionists and may well have been considered by the more moderate factions too".

Glazer (1980, p.113) states that the 1947 Partition Resolution awarded an area to the Jewish state whose population was 46 percent Arab and where much of this land was owned by Arabs. He considers that "it has been argued by the Zionists that they were prepared to make special accommodations for this large population; yet it is difficult to see how such accommodations could have coalesced with their plans for large-scale Jewish immigration; moreover, by August 1, 1948, the Israeli government had already stated that it was "economically unfeasible" to allow the return of the Arabs, at the very time when Jewish refugees were already entering the country and being settled on abandoned Arab property".

According to Pappé the Palestinian exodus can be described as ethnic cleansing. He says: ‘This was not a battlefield, it was a civilian space invaded by military troops. Ethnic ideology, settlement policy, and demographic strategy constituted the decisive factors here, not the military plans.’. In his book ‘The ethnic cleansing of Palestine’ Pappé analyses the causes of the exodus. He describes the aims the Yishuv had, the way it prepared in the years before the war to be able to achieve these aims and the way in which a pragmatic ethnic cleansing policy was devised and implemented.

Yishuv aims

According to Pappé the Yishuv, inspired by Ben-Gurion, had territorial and demographic aims. Territorially it aimed at obtaining as much as possible of Palestine and using the war as an excuse for this. The Yishuv did make some kind of deal with king Abdullah of Jordan, the Yishuv acceding the West Bank to Jordan and Jordan promissing not to interfere when the Yishuv grabbed the rest of Palestine. Demographically the Yishuv aimed at a Jewish state with a large Jewish majority, to be achieved by the ethnic cleansing of a large part of the Palestinians from the Yishuv’s territory under the cover of a war.

Several historians agree with this analysis, including Khalidi and Masalha.

Flapan is more nuanced. He agrees that Ben-Gurion had this aim:

‘[t]hat Ben-Gurion's ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve this purpose: an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of food and raw materials to the urban population; psychological warfare, ranging from "friendly warnings" to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by dissident underground terrorism; and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants by the army.’

but he points out that it was not the aim of the Yishuv's official decision-making bodies:

"it must be understood that official Jewish decision-making bodies (the provisional government, the National Council, and the Jewish Agency Executive) neither discussed nor approved a design for expulsion, and any proposal of the sort would have been opposed and probably rejected. These bodies were heavily influenced by liberal, progressive labor, and socialist Zionist parties.

Preparation: Village files and Military superiority

According to Pappé prior to the war the Yishuv engaged in systematic planning, intelligence gathering and preparation of military forces that would make achieving its aims possible.

In the 1930s the Yishuv set up a detailed registry of Arab villages, referred to as the ‘village files’. According to Pappé in the late 1930s these files contained ‘precise details [...] about the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of its muhktars, its relationship with other villages, the age of individual men (sixteen to fifty)’ , an index of ‘hostility’ based on the level of the village’s participation in the revolt of 1936, and a list of everyone who had been involved in the revolt with particular attention for those who had allegedly killed Jews. In the 1940s the files were updated and much more details of the inhabitants were added. Towards the end of the Mandatory period more military information was added, like the number of guards and the number and quality of arms in a village, next to the already present information on how best to attack a village. The final update in 1947 focussed on creating lists of ‘wanted’ persons in each village.. The main criteria for inclusion were participation in actions against the British and the Zionists, and affiliation with a Palestinian political party or leader. Typically 20 to 30 out of 1500 inhabitants were on the lists. During the war, after the occupation of a village, if possible, the people on the list were identified, usually by an informer wearing a cloth sack over his head, and often shot on the spot.

According to Pappé the Yishuv had a strong military advantage over the Palestinian and Arab forces in Palestine prior to 15 May 1948. ‘All in all at the eve of the 1948 war, the Jewish fighting force stood at around 50,000 troops, out of which 30,000 were fighting troops and the rest auxiliaries who lived in the various settlements.’ ‘Facing them were irregular para-military Palestinian outfits that numbered no more than 7000 troops: a fighting force that lacked all structure and hierarchy and was poorly equipped when compared with the Jewish forces.’ In addition there were about 3000 Arab volunteers. Furthermore the Yishuv forces were better equipped, trained and organised.

According to Khalidi the Yishuv had more arms at its disposal as 'what may be superficially gathered from Zionist sources' and produced a lot of arms itself: 'by March 1948 the local Zionist factories in Palestine were producing 100 sub-machine guns per day (to be increased to 200 per day by the end of the first week of April) and 400,000 rounds of 9 mm ammunition per month. Moreover, these factories were coping with orders of the magnitude of 150,000 Mils grenades and 30,000 shels of 3-inch mortars [...]. Indeed the local Zionist factories were very resourceful, and, in addition to stenguns, 2-inch and 3-inch mortars and their ammunition, also produced flame-throwers (a favorite Zionist weapon), PIATS (antitank guns) and a heavy mortar called Davidka.'

According to Pappé this superiority remained after 15 May, when the Arab countries joined the war. ‘The Yishuv recieved a large shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, while the regular Arab armies brought some heavy weapons of their own.’ Due to efficient Israeli recruitment their army swelled to 80,000 by the end of the summer, while ‘the Arab regular force never crossed the 50,000 treshold, and in addition had stopped recieving arms from Britain, which was its main arms supplier.’

According to Pappé the ‘Zionist leaders were confident they had the upper hand militarily and could drive through most of their ambitious plans.’ ‘In public, the leaders of the Jewish community portrayed doomsday scenarios and warned their audience of an imminent ‘second Holocaust’. In private, however, they never used this discourse. They were fully aware that the Arab war rethoric was in no way matched by any serious preparation on the ground.’

Planning by Ben-Gurion and the ‘Consultancy’

According to Flapan 'the Jewish army [...] under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, planned and executed the expulsion in the wake of the UN Partition Resolution.'

Pappé gives more details of this planning process. According to Pappé Ben-Gurion was the architect of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. ‘His central role in deciding the fate of the Palestinians stemmed from the complete control he exercised over all issues of security and defence in the Jewish community in Palestine.’ ‘[W]hen crucial decisions needed to be made with regard to the fate of the Palestinians, Ben-Gurion began to ignore the official structure and started relying on more clandestine formations.’ In 1947 Ben-Gurion created what Pappé calls the ‘Consultancy’. This was a group of eleven people, a combination of military and security figures and specialists on Arab affairs. From October 1947 this group met weekly to discuss issues of security and strategy towards the Arab world and the Palestinians. .

In a meeting on 10 December the Consultancy decided to follow a strategy of systematic intimidation. They estimated that this would terrify the Palestinians. According to Pappé '[t]he main goal was thus to assure that the population would be at the Zionists' mercy, so their fate could be sealed.' During the 1947-1948 turn of the year the Consultancy held a meeting. According to Pappé the ‘departure point, accepted by all, was that ethnic cleansing was necessary; the remaining questions, or rather problems, were more of a psychological and logistical nature.’ . During this meeting it was decided that the Yishuv would use more initiative towards the Palestinians. At a meeting on 10 March the consultancy put the final touches on Plan Dalet, according to Pappé the blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. According to plan Dalet a Palestinian village was to expelled if it was located on a strategic spot or if it put up some sort of resistance when it was occupied by Yishuv forces. According to Pappé ‘it was clear that occupation would always provoke some resistance and that therefore no village would be immune, either because of its location or because it would not allow itself to be occupied. After 15 May the Consultancy started meeting less frequently because according to Pappé ‘ever since plan Dalet had been put into motion it had been working well, and needed no further coordination and direction.’

Role of the Yishuv's official decision-making bodies

Flapan says that "it must be understood that official Jewish decision-making bodies (the provisional government, the National Council, and the Jewish Agency Executive) neither discussed nor approved a design for expulsion, and any proposal of the sort would have been opposed and probably rejected. These bodies were heavily influenced by liberal, progressive labor, and socialist Zionist parties. The Zionist movement as a whole, both the left and the right, had consistently stressed that the Jewish people, who had always suffered persecution and discrimination as a national and religious minority, would provide a model of fair treatment of minorities in their own state". The author later maintains that "once the flight began, however, Jewish leaders encouraged it. Sharett, for example, immediately declared that no mass return of Palestinians to Israel would be permitted". According to Flapan '[Aharon] Cohen [head of Mapam's Arab department] insisted in October 1948 that "the Arab exodus was not part of a preconceived plan." But, he acknowledged, "a part of the flight was due to official policy... Once it started, the flight received encouragement from the most important Jewish sources, for both military and political reasons."'.

Criticisms of "Master Plan" explanation

Others are skeptical of the 'Master Plan' 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 (29 November 1947) for the north and centre of the country.

The Continuum Poltical Encyclopedia of the Middle East states, "recent studies, based on official Israeli archives, have shown that there was no official policy or instructions to bring about the expulsion." In their book River without Bridges Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat surveyed 37 Palestinian refugee families who fled during this time period and found that 68% of them did not so much as see any Israelis during the conflict. According to Efraim Karsh,

Israeli forces did on occsasion expel Palestinians. But this accounted for only a small fraction of the total exodus, occurred not within the framework of a premeditated plan but in the heat of battle, and was dictated predominantly by military ad hoc considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them). ... Indeed, even the largest expulsions, during the battle for Lydda in July 1948, emanated from a string of unexpected developments on the ground and in no way foreseen in military plans for the capture of the town."

Benny Morris, in particular, disagrees with the "Master Plan" theory. He writes: '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.' and: '[T]he fact [...] that during 1948 Ben-Gurion and most of the Yishuv's leaders wished to see as few Arabs remaining as possible, does not mean that the Yishuv adopted and implemented a policy of expulsion.'

Morris’s ‘Four Waves’ analysis

According to Morris in ‘The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited’ the Palestinian exodus occurred in four waves and an aftermath: Morris analyses the direct causes, as opposed to his proposed indirect cause of the ‘transfer idea’, for each wave separately. The tables below give a summary of the waves of the exodus and the decisive causes of the abandonment of 392 villages and towns according to Morris. Morris concludes that overall Jewish military attacks were the main cause of the exodus, followed by Arab fear due to the fall of a nearby town, Arab fear of impending attack and expulsions.

Wave	Period	Refugees	Main causes according to Morris
First wave	December 1947 – March 1948	about 100,000	attacks and fear of impending attack
Second wave	April – June 1948	250,000 – 300,000	attacks
Third wave	July – October 1948	about 100,000	attacks and expulsions
Fourth wave	October – November 1948	200,000 – 230,000	attacks and expulsions
Border clearings	November 1948 – 1950	30,000-40,000

Decisive causes of abandonment	Occurrences
military assault on settlement	215
influence of nearby town's fall	59
expulsion by Jewish forces	53
fear (of being caught up in fighting)	48
whispering campaigns	15
abandonment on Arab orders	6
unknown	44

Causes of the first wave, December 1947 – March 1948

Morris gives no numbers regarding the first wave, but says ‘the spiral of violence precipitated flight by the middle and upper classes of the big towns, especially Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, and their satellite rural communities. It also prompted the piecemeal, but almost complete, evacuation of the Arab rural population from what was to be the heartland of the Jewish State – the Coastal Plain between Tel Aviv and Hadera – and a small-scale partial evacuation of other rural areas hit by hostilities and containing large Jewish concentrations, namely the Jezreel and Jordan valleys.’ More specific to the causes Morris states: 'The Arab evacuees from the towns and villages left largely because of Jewish ... attacks or fear of impending attack, and from a sense of vulnerability.'. According to Morris expulsions were ‘almost insignificant’ and ‘many more left as a result of orders or advice from Arab military commanders and officials’ to safer areas within the country. The Palestinian leadership struggled against the exodus.

Causes of the second wave, April – June 1948

According to Morris the ‘Haganah and IZL offensives in Haifa, Jaffa and eastern and western Galilee precipitated a mass exodus’. ‘Undoubtedly ... 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 main Haganah/IZL assault.’ Also many villages were abandoned during attacks, but others were evacuated because the inhabitants feared they would be next.. A major factor in the exodus was the undermining of Palestinian morale due to the earlier fall and exodus from other towns and villages. Morris says that the ‘Palestinian leaders and commanders struggled against [the exodus]’ but in many cases encouraged evacuation of women children and old people out of harms way and in some cases ordered villages to evacuate.

Regarding expulsions (Morris defines expulsions as 'when a Haganah/IDF/IZL/LHI unit entered or conquered a town or village and then ordered its inhabitants to leave') Morris says that the Yishuv leaders ‘were reluctant to openly order or endorse expulsions’ in towns but ‘Haganah commanders exercised greater independence and forcefulness in the countryside’: ‘In general Haganah operational orders for attacks on towns did not call for the expulsion or eviction of the civilian population. But from early April, operational orders for attacks on villages and clusters of villages more often than not called for the destruction of villages and, implicitly or explicitly, expulsion.’ Issueing expulsion orders was hardly necesarry though, because ‘most villages were completely or almost completely empty by the time they were conquered’, 'the inhabitants usually fled with the approach of the advancing Jewish column or when the first mortar bombs began to hit their homes'. The Giv’ati Brigade engaged in expulsions near Rehovot.

Causes of the third and fourth wave, July – October 1948 and October – November 1948

In July ‘altogether, the Israeli offensives of the ‘Ten Days’ and the subsequent clearing operations probably send something over 100,000 Arabs into exile’. About half of these were expelled from Lydda and Ramle on 12 through 14 July. Morris says that expulsion orders were given for both towns, the one for Ramle calling for ‘sorting out of the inhabitants, and send the army-age males to a prisoner of war camp.’. ‘the commanders involved understood that what was happening was an expulsion rather than a spontaneous exodus’.

In October and November Operations Yoav in the Negev and Hiram in central Galilee were aimed at destroying enemy formations of respectively the Egyptian army and the Arab Liberation Army, and precipitated the flight of 200,000-230,000 Arabs.. In the Negev the clearing was more complete because ‘the OC, Allon, was known to want ‘Arab-clean’ areas along his line of advance’ and ‘his subordinates usually acted in accordance’ and the inhabitants were almost uniformly Muslim. In the Galilee pocket, for various reasons, about 30-50 per cent of the inhabitants stayed. More specifically regarding the causes of the exodus Morris says: ‘Both commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering’ and ‘Many, perhaps most, [Arabs] expected to be driven out, or worse. Hence, when the offensives were unleashed, there was a ‘coalescence’ of Jewish and Arab expectations, which led, especially in the south, to spontaneous flight by most of the inhabitants. And, on both fronts, IDF units ‘nudged’ Arabs into flight and expelled communities’

Two-stage analysis

The 'Two-stage explanation' brought forth by Yoav Gelber [2] synthetises the events of 1948 in distinguishing two phases in the exodus. Before the first truce (11 June - 8 July 1948), it explains the exodus as a result of the crumbling Arab social structure that was not ready to withstand a civil war, and justified Jewish military conduct. After the truce the IDF launched counter offensives against the invading forces. Gelber explains the exodus in this stage as a result of expulsions and massacres performed by the Israeli army during Operation Dani and the campaign in the Galilee and Negev.

First Stage: The crumbling of Arab Palestinian social structure and justified Jewish military conduct

Gelber describes the exodus before July 1948 as being initially mainly due to the inability of the Palestinian social structure to withstand a state of war and later mainly as a reaction to justified Jewish military conduct:

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.

Early in April, the Haganah launched several large-scale operations across the country.

In the last six weeks of the British mandate, the Jews occupied most of the area that the UN partition plan allotted to their State. They took over five towns and 200 villages; between 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians and other Arabs ran away (so far, they were not driven out) to Palestine's Arab sectors and to neighboring countries.

Unlike the pre-invasion period, certain Israeli Defense Force (IDF) actions on the eve of and after the invasion aimed at driving out the Arab population from villages close to Jewish settlements or adjacent to main roads. These measures appeared necessary in face of the looming military threat by the invading Arab armies. The Israelis held the Palestinians responsible for the distress that the invasion caused and believed they deserved severe punishment. The local deportations of May-June 1948 appeared both militarily vital and morally justified. Confident that their conduct was indispensable, the troops did not attempt to conceal harsh treatment of civilians in their after-action reports.

According to Efraim Karsh in April 1948 "some 100,000 Palestinians, mostly from the main urban centres of Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem and from villages in the coastal plane, had gone. Within a month those numbers had nearly doubled; and by early June, ... some 390,000 Palestinians had left." 30,000 Arabs, mostly intellectuals and members of the social elite, had fled Palestine in the months following the approval of the partition plan, undermining the social infrastructure of Palestine. 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.

A May 10, 1948 Time Magazine article states:

"Said one British official in Jerusalem last week: 'The whole effendi class has gone. It is remarkable how many of the younger ones are suddenly deciding that this might be a good time to resume their studies at Oxford...'"

Other historians such as Efraim Karsh, Avraham Sela, Moshe Efrat, Ian J. Bickerton, Carla L. Klausner, and Howard Sachar share this analysis. In his interpretation of the second wave (Gelber's first stage), as he names Israeli attacks (Operations Nachshon, Yiftah, Ben 'Ami, ...) Sachar considers Israeli attacks only as a secondary reason for flight, with the meltdown of the Palestinian society as the primary:

The most obvious reason for the mass exodus was the collapse of Palestine Arab political institutions that ensued upon the flight of the Arab leadership. ... [O]nce this elite was gone, the Arab peasant was terrified by the likelihood of remaining in an institutional and cultural void. Jewish victories obviously intensified the fear and accelerated departure. In many cases, too ... Jews captured Arab villages, expelled the inhabitants, and blew up houses to prevent them from being used as strongholds against them. In other instances, Qawukji's men used Arab villages for their bases, provoking immediate Jewish retaliation.

Moshe Efrat of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote:

"[R]ecent studies, based on official Israeli archives, have shown that there was no official policy or instructions intended to bring about the expulsion and that most of the Palestinians who became refugees had left their homes on their own initiative, before they came face to face with Israeli forces, especially in the period between late 1947 and June 1948. Later on, Israel's civil and military leadership became more decisive about preventing refugees from returning to their homes and more willing to resort to coercion in expelling the Palestine Arabs from their homes. This was not uniformly implemented in every sector and had much to do with decisions of local military commanders and circumstances, which might explain why some 156,000 Palestinians remained in Israel at the end of the war.

In their book, A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Ian J. Bicketon of the University of New South Wales and Carla L. Klausner of the University of Missouri-Kansas City go even further back in history by citing the British military response to the 1936–1939 Arab revolt as the decisive moment when the Palestinian leadership and infrastructure began to crumble, and, in the most extreme cases, were expelled by the British from what was then the British Mandate for Palestine. Bickerton and Klausner conclude:

"Palestinian leadership was absent just at the time when it was most needed. Further collapse occurred during 1947-1949, as many of the local mayors, judges, communal and religious officials fled. Palestinian society ... was semifeudal in character, and once the landlords and other leaders had made good their own escape—as they did from Haifa, Jaffa, Safed, and elsewhere—the Arab townspeople, villagers, and peasants were left helpless."

Second Stage: Israeli army victories and expulsions

After the start of the Israeli counteroffensive, Gelber considers the exodus to have been a result of Israeli army's victory and the expulsion of Palestinians. He writes:

"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."

Morris also reports expulsions during these events. For example, concerning whether in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order he replied:

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 Operation Dani [July 1948]. [3]

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'.

Historian Christopher Sykes saw the causes of the Arab flight similar to Gelber:

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 Deir Yassin battle honours by an orgy of looting'. 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)

Karsh views the second stage as being "dictated predominantly by ad hoc military considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them)."

Descriptions of the exodus as an ethnic cleansing

According to Flapan a variety of means was used to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible: 'an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of food and raw materials to the urban population; psychological warfare, ranging from "friendly warnings" to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by dissident underground terrorism; and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants by the army.’

According to Pappé the events related to the 1948 Palestian exodus can be described as an ethnic cleansing that was executed in several steps.

In the period December 1947 – March 1948 the Haganah executed a campaign of threats and in the latter part of this period started with cleansing operations. The campaign of threats included ‘violent reconnaissance’ into villages, distributing threatening leaflets, shelling of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, and sniping. In January officials of the Tel-Aviv municipality ‘complained that the Haganah seemed to be doing its best to foil such attempts [at a new modus vivendi between Tel-Aviv and Jaffa] and spoke of them attacking randomly: killing people without provocation, near the water wells, within the no man’s land, robbing the Arabs, abusing them, dismantling wells, confiscating assets, and shooting for the sake of intimidation.’ ‘Qisarya was the first village to be expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948. By the end of March the Haganah had perpetrated the massacres of al-Khisas, Balad al-Shaykh and Sa'sa' and ‘thirty villages were already gone’.

According to Pappé, in April 1948 the Yishuv shifted ‘from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population towards the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing. . The orders given the Palmach for operation Nachshon were clear: ‘the principle objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages … [and] the eviction of the villagers…’ . Since the village of Deir Yassin had reached a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, the Haganah decided to send the Irgun and Stern troops to expel the villagers. They perpetrated a massacre. . Only two villages in the Greater Jerusalem area west of Jerusalem were spared, because they had a good relationship with local Stern Gang commanders. According to Pappé ‘between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and there inhabitants expelled.’ In the same period also the Arab parts of the cities of Tiberias, Haifa, Safad, West-Jerusalem, Acre, Baysan and Jaffa were cleansed of all or the majority of their Palestinian inhabitants. . Usually, before a city was attacked the surrounding villages were cleansed. In most cases heavy shelling was used to induce the Palestinian city inhabitants to flee. During the siege of Acre a typhoid epidemic erupted due to an infection in the water supplied by an aquaduct. The Red cross pointed to outside poisoning as the only explanation of the outbreak and according to Pappé its report ‘left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Haganah.’

According to Pappé the date of 15 May was relevant for the war, but not for the ethnic cleansing operations, which went on. ‘The same goes for the two periods of truce – they were notable landmarks for the former but irrelevant for the latter, with one qualification, perhaps: it proved easier during the actual fighting to conduct large-scale cleansing operations as the Israelis did between the two truces, when they expelled the populations of the two towns of Lydda and Ramle, altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, when they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.’ .

Palestinian Arab fears

The idea that Palestinian Arab fear of the Zionists played a role in the exodus is not a new idea, but has evolved over time to include fear stemming from both sides of the conflict; Arab leaders painted the Zionists as blood-thirsty, while the Zionists exaggerated their military accomplishments and capabilities, perhaps even their treatment of the civilian population, to make the Palestinian Arabs fear them.

Schechtman argues in his book The Arab Refugee Problem that a large part of the exodus was caused by a phenomenon which he calls The Fear Psychosis, namely Arab fear of attack, reprisal and the other stresses of war. Schechtman himself attributes this to purely to the perspective of the refugees, but other sources also place responsibility with propaganda put out by both the Jews and the Arabs. He expounds this theory as follows:

In the Western world fighting is carried on by the organized military; the civilian population, even when conquered, is comparatively safe. Arab warfare against the Jews in Palestine, however, had always been marked by indiscriminate killing, mutilating, raping, looting and pillaging. This 1947-48 attack on the Jewish community was more savage than ever. Until the Arab armies invaded Israel on the very day of its birth, May 15, 1948, no quarter whatsoever had ever been given to a Jew who fell into Arab hands. Wounded and dead alike were mutilated. Every member of the Jewish community was regarded as an enemy to be mercilessly destroyed. [...]
[T]he Arab population of Palestine anticipated nothing less than massacres in retaliation if the Jews were victorious. Measuring the Jewish reaction by their own standards, they simply could not imagine that the Jews would not reply in kind what they had suffered at Arab hands. And this fear played a significant role in the Arab flight.

According to Avraham Sela, the Palestinian exodus began with news of the Zionists' military victories in April-May 1948:

"[T]he offensive had a strong psychological effect on Palestinian-Arab villagers, whose tendency to leave under Jewish military pressure became a mass exodus. […] [T]he exodus was a spontaneous movement, caused by an awareness of the Arab weakness and fear of annihilation typical in civil wars. Moreover, an early visible departure of nearly all the leadership was clearly understood as a signal, if not as an outright command."

In his conclusions concerning the second wave of the flight, Morris also cites the atrocity factor as a one of the causes. What happened or allegdly happened and in a more general way the massacre of Deir Yassin and its exaggerated description broadcast on Arab radio stations undermined Arabs morale. Yoav Gelber also considers that the "Haganah, IZL and LHI's retaliations terrified the Arabs and hastened the flight".

Childers, while dismissing the fact that Arab leaders instigated the flight on radio broadcasts, points out that Zionist radio broadcasts were designed to demoralize the Arab audience. The author cites the fact that rumours were spread by the Israeli forces that they possessed the atomic bomb. Similarly, Khalidi points to what he describes as the Zionist "psychological offensive" which was highlighted by, though not limited to, radio messages warning the Arabs of diseases, the ineffectiveness of armed resistance and the incompetence of their leaders.

Yishuv use of psychological warfare

The Yishuv used psychological warfare that initiated, accelerated and increased the Palestinian exodus. In many instances the declared aim was to demoralise the Palestinians or to accelerate their surrender. In many instances however the result was the flight of Palestinians. According to various historians the Yishuv engaged in various types of psychological warfare:

Intimidation

According to Pappé intimidation by various means was used. For instance in Haifa since December 1947 Jewish troops engaged in sniping, shelling, rolling barrels full of explosives and huge steel balls down into Palestionian neighborhoods and pouring oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. Yoav Gelber considers that the "Haganah, IZL and LHI's retaliations terrified the Arabs and hastened the flight".

According to Pappé the Haganah engaged in what it called 'violent reconnaiscance': 'Special units of the Haganah would enter villages looking for 'infiltrators' (read 'Arab volunteers') and distribute leaflets warning the people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers' Khalidi mentions ‘repeated and merciless raids against sleeping villages carried out in conformity with plan C’, i.e. in the period before April 1948.

In some cases threatening leaflets were distributed, containing wordings like: 'if the war will be taken to your place, it will cause massive expulsion of the villagers, with their wives and children'

Whisper campaigns

Various authors give examples of instigation of whisper campaigns. Childers cites the fact that rumours were spread by the Israeli forces that they possessed the atomic bomb. Morris cites Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander, describing such a campaign:"I gathered the Jewish mukhtars, who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that giant Jewish reinforcements had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages of the Hula, [and] to advise them, as friends, to flee while they could. And the rumour spread throughout the Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective

Broadcasts on radio and by loudspeaker vans

Childers points out that Zionist radio broadcasts were designed to demoralize the Arab audience. Similarly, Khalidi points to what he describes as the Zionist "psychological offensive" which was highlighted by, though not limited to, radio messages warning the Arabs of diseases, the ineffectiveness of armed resistance and the incompetence of their leaders. According to Morris during the exodus of Haifa ‘The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to ‘evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven.’’.

During the exodus from Haifa according to Morris the Haganah made effective use of ‘Arab language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans’ and according to Pappé ‘Jewish loudspeakers [urged] the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late’.

According to Morris during April the Haganah 'had prepared and recorded six speeches, which were broadcast time and again by the Haganah's radio station and loudspeaker vans.' They didn't call for Arab flight, but they 'were designed to cause demoralisation - and the HGS\Operations proposed to 'exploit' this demoralisation (it didn't say how)'.

Shelling of civilians

Khalidi illustrates the psychological warfare of the Haganah by the use of the Davidka mortar. He writes that it was a "favorite weapon of the Zionists", which they used against civilians: "the Davidka tossed a shell containing 60 lbs. of TNT usually into crowded built-up civilian quarters where the noise and blast maddened women and children into a frenzy of fear and panic"

Various authors mention specific cases in which the Yishuv engaged in shelling of civilians:

• Morris says that during the battle of Tiberias the Haganah engaged in bombarding the Arab population with mortars
• Morris says that during the exodus of Haifa a primary aim of mortar barrages was demoralisation: "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 mortarring, precipitated the exodus. The three inch mortars ‘opened up on the market square [where there was] 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.
• Nathan Krystall writes: ‘As a precursor to its attack on Qatamon, the Zionist forces subjected the neighborhood to weeks of heavy artillery shelling. On 22 April, the Arab National Committee of Jerusalem ordered its local branches to relocate all women, children, and elderly people from the neighborhood.’
• In his report concerning the fall of Jaffa the local Arab military commander, Michel Issa, writes: 'Continuous shelling with mortars of the city by Jews for four days, beginning 25th April, […] caused inhabitants of city, unaccustomed to such bombardment, to panic and flee.' According to Morris the shelling was done by the Irgun. Their objective was 'to prevent constant military traffic in the city, to break the spirit of the enemy troops [and] to cause chaos among the civilian population in order to create a mass flight'. High Commissioner Cunningham wrote a few days later 'It should be made clear that IZL attack with mortars was indiscriminate and designed to create panic among the civilian inhabitants'.

Use of massacres

Massacres were aimed at frightening Palestinians away. In his memoirs the Palestinian physician Elias Srouji wrote: "Tactics became even more brutal when the Zionists were ready to complete their occupation of the Galilee in October. By that time the Arab villagers, having seen what had happened elsewhere, had become adamant about staying put in their homes and on their lands. To frighten them away, the occupying forces started a strategy of planned massacres, which were carried out in Eilabun, Faradiyya, Safsaf, Sa'sa', and other villages. In places where this was not to their advantage for one reason or another, the army would resort to forceful expulsion. I was to wittnes some of these tactics in Rameh a month or so later."

Massacres were also exploited by Jewish propaganda. For instance Nathan Krystall writes: 'News of the attack [on and massacre in Deir Yassin] spread quickly throughout Palestine. De Reynier observed that the "general terror" was "astutely fostered by the Jews, with Haganah radio incesantly repeating "Remember Deir Yassin" and loudspeaker vans broadcasting messages in Arabic such as: "Unless you leave your homes, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate."'

See also

• 1948 Palestinian exodus

External links

• Glazer, Steven. (Summer 1980) The Palestinian Exodus in 1948. Published by Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4.