Causes of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight

Causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus are explanations offered for the refugee flight of Palestinian Arabs during the 1947-1948 Civil War in Palestine and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. No one single explanation stands out and it is possible that all of the explanations for the exodus are partially true in general and perhaps even singularly "true of different places." What makes the discussion about these explanations so critical is that the agreed upon answers 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.

The exodus causes are a matter of great controversy between historians. However, most historians agree that proffered causes need to be grounded in historical evidence. Although there are many ideas regarding this topic, the following have emerged as the predominant explanations of the exodus (in no particular order):

• 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' theory, 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 'Transfer principle' theory, proposed by Childers and developed by 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 'Two-stage explanation' is a theory brought forth by Yoav Gelber, which distinguishes between two phases of the exodus. Before the first truce (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 after as a result of expulsions and massacres performed by the Israeli army during Operation Dani and the campaign in the Galilee and Negev.
• 'Fear Psychosis' is a theory expounded by Joseph B. Schechtman, amongst others, which contends that the atmosphere of fear which ensued in conflict-torn Palestine at the time contributed greatly to the flight.

According to Bernard Lewis, it is possible that all of the explanations are partially true of the exodus in general and perhaps even singularly "true of different places."

The "Arab leaders' endorsement of flight" Theory

Claims by scholars that support the theory that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders

Israeli official sources 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."

In his book Palestine 1948, Yoav Gelber writes, referring to historiographic work of Schechtman, 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)

In a 2003 interview with Haaretz, Benny 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.

Morris estimates that Arab encouragement of this kind accounts for about 5% of the total exodus. He writes:

"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."

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." And 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."

Furthermore Katz says that "as late as 1952, the charge had the official stamp of the Arab Higher Committee."

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."

He does not include in these the village of Ein Karem, where William O. Dougals 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.

Claims by Arab sources that support the theory 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."

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.'

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" theory

In a 1959 paper, Walid Khalidi attributed 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, 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.

Indeed, Morris, as well as the rest of New Historians coincide on the fact that Arab instigation was not the cause of a large part 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 the fear from 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.

An interview frequently cited in Zionist historiography was with Monsignor George Hakim, 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." Erskine Childers investigated these claims, and wrote in the Spectator of 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." (Childers, 197-198.)

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 residence permits to Palestinian males of military age on April 30 and May 6 respectively. He also considers that Arab radio broadcasts were urging the inhabitants of Palestine to remain and were discussing plans for an Arab administration there.

Glazer (1980, p.102) acknowledges that Schectman offers 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. Nevertheless, the author cites the fact that Childers went back to these sources, checking them for the full meaning, and, he found that they 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 weapon".

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 incentivated 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.

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 3 January 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.

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.

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 Uewish] 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.

The "Transfer principle"

The idea that 'transfer ideology' is responsible for the exodus was first brought up by several Palestinian authors, and supported by Erskine Childers in his 1971 article, "The wordless wish". However, historian Benny Morris 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 Zionist 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 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, p. 69)

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).

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.

Flapan cites further evidence which in his opinion supports the idea of an Israeli will towards transfer policy. 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 considers that Ben-Gurion himself wrote in his diary after the flight of the Arabs began, "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". Flapanalso claims that 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.".

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. On 11 May Ben-Gurion noted that he had given orders "for the destruction of Arab islands in Jewish population areas".

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).

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". The author cites that a week after he created the committee, Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency: "I am for compulsory transfer; I don't see anything immoral in it."

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".

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.

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, 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 "[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).

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.

Historian Christopher Sykes saw the causes of the Arab flight differently:

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'.
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)

Criticisms of Morris's 'transfer idea'

The 'transfer principle' theory came under attack from several historians, notably Efraim Karsh, 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" . 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.

Karsh has criticised Morris accusing him to "seek to create an impression that Ben-Gurion endeavored to expel the Arabs out of Palestine when, what he discussed, was resettlement within Palestine". The author cites evidence supporting the idea that Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive did not agree on transfer of Palestinian Arabs but rather had a much more tolerant vision of Arab-Jewish coexistence. For example, at the November 1, 1936 Jewish Agency Executive meeting, Karsh considers that Morris ignores Ben-Gurion's statement, "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." The author accuses Morris of omitting Ben-Gurion's assertions, in an October 1941 internal policy paper, that "Jewish immigration and colonization in Palestine on a large scale can be carried out without displacing Arabs," and that "in a Jewish Palestine the position of the Arabs will not be worse than the position of the Jews themselves."

Karsh has also criticised the fact that while Morris concedes that "the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 war, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan of expulsion," he argues that lack of an official policy made little difference, since "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." In Karsh view, "Morris cites no evidence to support this claim nor could he, for 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 his opinion, Morris virtually ignores that 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 author considers that Morris downplays the commission's recommendation of transfer, creates the false impression that the Zionists thrust this idea on a reluctant British Mandatory power (rather than vice versa), and misleadingly suggests that Zionist interest in transfer long outlived the Peel Commission.

In contrast to Morris's thesis Karsh cites what Ben-Gurion told 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." Further, the author cites the explicit instructions of Israel Galili, the Haganah's commander-in-chief, on the "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."

Karsh considers that the "mass of documentation also proves beyond any reasonable doubt that, far from being an act of expulsion, the mass Arab flight was a direct result of the fragmentation and lack of cohesiveness of Palestinian society, which led to its collapse under the weight of the war it had initiated and whose enormity it had failed to predict". Further, the author considers that a number of scholars have already done outstanding work showing the faults of the new history. In his opinion, Itamar Rabinovich (of Tel Aviv University, currently Israel's ambassador to the United States) has debunked the claim by Shlaim and Pappé that Israel's recalcitrance explains the failure to make peace at the end of the 1947-49 war. Again, he claims that Avraham Sela (of the Hebrew University) has discredited Shlaim's allegation that Israel and Transjordan agreed in advance of that war to limit their war operations so as to avoid an all-out confrontation between their forces. The author claims that Shabtai Teveth (David Ben-Gurion's foremost biographer) has challenged Morris's account of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. In his opinion, Robert Satloff (of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) has shown, on the basis of his own research in the Jordanian national archives in Amman, the existence of hundreds of relevant government files readily available to foreign scholars, thereby demolishing the new historians' claim that "the archives of the Arab Governments are closed to researchers, and that historians interested in writing about the Israeli-Arab conflict perforce must rely mainly on Israeli and Western archives" and with it, the justification for their almost exclusive reliance on Israeli and Western sources.

The arguments made by Karsh again came under attack by the New Historians. Morris admits that "Karsh has a point, but it is not the one he makes. It is true that my treatment in Birth of pre-1948 "transfer thinking" among the Zionist leaders was superficial and restrictive. The subject requires a full-scale inquiry, covering the period from the 1880s until 1947, to determine the importance of the transfer idea in evolving Zionist thought at different points in time. Birth does not undertake such an inquiry, mainly because that was not the book's subject. Perhaps I erred in not attributing enough weight to the Zionists' "transfer" predisposition in explaining what actually happened in Palestine in 1948". Nevertheless the author still 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.

Morris has also been attacked from the opposite pole, by Norman Finkelstein in chapter three of his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2001), in which he argues that Morris repeatedly bent his interpretation of evidence to find Israeli government officials and the IDF innocent of crimes against Palestinians, by juxtaposing quotes from Morris' book, with full quotations from the source Morris cited.

The "Master Plan" Theory

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. He based that 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 that 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".

Khalidi and Ilan Pappé (A History of Modern Palestine, p. 131) are among those 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 (29 November 1947) for the north and centre of the country.

Criticisms of "Master Plan" theory

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."

Benny Morris, in particular, disagrees with the "Master Plan" theory but argues transfer was inevitable. 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. 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)

Flapan coincides with Morris in that the Israeli tactics were not part of a deliberate Zionist plan, as the Arabs contended. He claims 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 latter 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". In Flapan's view Cohen 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.".

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.

Opponents assert that Israel did not compel Arabs to leave. Shmuel Katz, wrote 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."

The Two-Stage Theory

Yoav Gelber has a different approach.[1] He 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.'

Gelber distinguishes two main phases during the exodus: before and after the intervention of Arab armies in May 1948.

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:

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.

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 \u2014 doctors, nurses, civil servants, lawyers, clerks, etc. \u2014 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.

Other historians share this analysis, such as Efraim Karsh or Howard Sachar. 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.

Second Stage: Israeli army victories and expulsions (after first truce)

During the second phase of the war, after the Arab armies intervention, 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]. [2]

Other historians, such as Karsh, deny the expulsion [3], but they refer only to the first phase of the war, which is not contested by Gelber or Morris.

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'.

Fear Psychosis Theory

Schechtman explains 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.

Contribution of Yishuv Propaganda

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.

Contribution of Arab Propaganda

Morris and other historians agree that Arab radio-propaganda which inflated casualty figures and atrocities (real and alleged alike) contributed to this flight. Although intended to arouse hatred against the Jewish state, it caused a good deal of fear and flight on the part of Arabs during the war.

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.