Benny Morris, a highly respected Israeli historian has written these books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight#
Initial positions and criticisms
In the first decades after the exodus two diametrically opposed schools of analysis emerged; Israel claimed that the Palestinians left because they were ordered to by their own leaders, who deliberately incited them into panic, to clear the field for the war, while the Arabs claimed that they were expelled at gunpoint by Zionist forces who deliberately incited them into panic.[2]
Arab view
The Arab view is that the Palestinians were expelled by Zionist forces and that the exodus of 1948 was the fulfillment of a long-held Zionist dream to ethnically cleanse Palestine so that the land could the transformed into a Jewish-majority state.[3] Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi notes that ideas of transferring the Palestinian Arab population to other Arab countries were prevalent among Zionists in the years prior to the exodus. In 1961, Khalidi argued that Plan Dalet, the Zionists' military plan executed in April and May 1948, aimed at expelling the Palestinians.[4]
Israeli view
Rabbi Chaim Simons demonstrated in 1988 that Zionist leaders in Mandatory Palestine viewed "transfer" (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing) of Arabs from the land as being crucial. He concluded that it was, in fact, a policy and that the Zionist leadership has no viable alternative.[5]
Glazer in 1980 summarized the view of Zionist historians, notably Joseph Schechtman, Hans Kohn, Jon Kimche, and Marie Syrkin, as being:[3]
According to Zionist historians, the Arabs in Palestine were asked to stay and live as citizens in the Jewish state. Instead, they chose to leave, either because they were unwilling to live with the Jews, or because they expected an Arab military victory which would annihilate the Zionists. They thought they could leave temporarily and return at their leisure. Later, an additional claim was put forth, namely that the Palestinians were ordered to leave, with radio broadcasts instructing them to quit their homes.
At that time, Zionist historians generally attributed the Arab leaders' alleged calls for a mass evacuation to the period before the proclamation of Israeli statehood.[3] They generally believed that, after that period, expulsion became standard policy and was carried out systematically.[3] As described below, the narratives presented have been influenced by the release of previously unseen documents in the 1980s.
In a review in 2000, Philip Mendes pointed to the prevailing Jewish view being that "... it was an absolute fact that the Palestinian Arabs departed in 1948 at the behest of their own leaders, and that Israel desperately attempted to persuade them to stay." Mendes then examines the work of new historian Benny Morris, based on these newly released documents, and his influence on the debate, concluding that, whilst such Zionist writers add to the traditional understanding of the Palestinian exodus, their arguments do not disprove Morris' multi-causal explanation.[6]
Criticism of traditional positions
Glazer also says, "Israeli public opinion has maintained that as the Arabs planned to massacre the Jews, when the Jews began winning the war the Arabs fled, fearing the same treatment would be suffered on them."
Globally, in his paper of 1981, Glazer wrote, "Both Palestinians and Israeli spokesmen and adherents have sought to link the events of 1948 with their claims to the land today." He claims that one "fundamental [problem of the subject is to deal] with historians who are overtly biased" and try to identify the factors that influence this.[3]
Opening of archives
In the 1980s Israel and United Kingdom opened up part of their archives for investigation by historians. This favored a more critical and factual analysis of the 1948 events. As a result more detailed and comprehensive description of the Palestinian exodus was published, notably Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.[7] Morris distinguishes four waves of refugees, the second, third and fourth of them coinciding with Israeli military offensives, when Arab Palestinians fled the fighting, were frightened away, or were expelled.
A document produced by the Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence Service entitled "The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine in the Period 1/12/1947 – 1/6/1948" was dated 30 June 1948 and became widely known around 1985.[8]
The document details 11 factors which caused the exodus, and lists them "in order of importance":
Direct, hostile Jewish [ Haganah/IDF ] operations against Arab settlements.
The effect of our [Haganah/IDF] hostile operations against nearby [Arab] settlements... (... especially the fall of large neighbouring centers).
Operation of [Jewish] dissidents [ Irgun Tzvai Leumi and Lohamei Herut Yisrael]
Orders and decrees by Arab institutions and gangs [irregulars].
Jewish whispering operations [psychological warfare], aimed at frightening away Arab inhabitants.
Ultimate expulsion orders [by Jewish forces]
Fear of Jewish [retaliatory] response [following] major Arab attack on Jews.
The appearance of gangs [irregular Arab forces] and non-local fighters in the vicinity of a village.
Fear of Arab invasion and its consequences [mainly near the borders].
Isolated Arab villages in purely [predominantly] Jewish areas.
Various local factors and general fear of the future.[9][10]
According to Shay Hazkani, "In the past two decades, following the powerful reverberations (concerning the cause of the Nakba) triggered by the publication of books written by those dubbed the "New Historians," the Israeli archives revoked access to much of the explosive material. Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as "top secret."[11]
Political and sociological influences on the historical debate
Several Israeli sociologists have studied the influence on the historical debate of the political and sociological situations in Israel. Referring to modern sociological schools and commenting historians methodology in the context of the 1948 war and the Palestinian exodus, Uri Ram considers that "contemporary historical revision and debates should be interpreted ... against the backdrop of specific crises in national identities and as an indication of crisis in national identity in the global era."[12]
According to him, "the three leading schools writing Israeli history reflect and articulate [the] political-cultural divisions [in the Israeli society]. Traditional mainstream history is national, mostly the labor movement version. On its fringe, a critical school of history emerged in the 1980s associated with post-Zionism (even if some of its protagonists identify as Zionists) [and] finally, in the 1990s efforts have been made to create a counterschool of neo-Zionist history...."[12]
"Concept of transfer in Zionism"
Discussion of the "idea of transfer" in political Zionism became popular beginning in the 1980s when Israel declassified documents pertaining to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War period and the so-called New Historians began publishing articles and books based on these documents. The Zionist "concept of transfer" was cited by Palestinian authors such as Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi to support their argument that the Zionist Yishuv followed an expulsion policy, and echoed by a range of Israeli authors including Simons [13] and Simha Flapan.[14] Other Israeli historians, such as Morris,[7] reject the idea that "transfer" thinking led to a political expulsion policy as such, but they explain that the idea of transfer was endorsed in practice by mainstream Zionist leaders, particularly David Ben-Gurion.[15] Critics of the "transfer principle" theory cite addresses by the Zionist leadership that publicly preached co-existence with the Arabs, but in private put forward their own plans, or gave support to plans involving the transfer of Arabs from Palestine.[16]
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.[4] In the 1980s, historian Benny Morris became the most well-known advocate of the existence of the "transfer idea".[17] 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 the Jewish population to accept it and for local Haganah and IDF commanders to resort to various means of expelling the Arab 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.[18] 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)
To this he adds that "From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."[19]
Origins of the "Transfer Idea"
Benny Morris identifies two major strands of historiography on this question. On the one hand, anti-Zionists such as Nur Masala and Norman Finkelstein claim that "what happened in 1948 was simply a systematic implementation of Zionist ideology and of a Zionist ‘master-plan’ of expulsion"; on the other, Zionists such as Anita Shapira and Shabtai Teveth claim that "the sporadic talk among Zionist leaders of ‘transfer’ was mere pipe-dreaming and was never undertaken systematically or seriously".[20]
Morris himself suggests that, on the one hand, the idea of a population transfer was "in-built into Zionism" to the extent that it involved "transform[ing] a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population"; but that, on the other, "there was no pre-war Zionist plan to expel ‘the Arabs’ from Palestine or the areas of the emergent Jewish State; and the Yishuv did not enter the war with a plan or policy of expulsion. Nor was the pre-war ‘transfer’ thinking ever translated, in the course of the war, into an agreed, systematic policy of expulsion."[21]
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.[22]
Peel Commission's plan and 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,[23] along the lines of the mutual population exchange between the Turkish and Greek populations after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. According to the plan "in the last resort" the transfer of Arabs from the Jewish part would be compulsory.[24] The transfer would be voluntary in as far as Arab leaders were required to agree with it, but after that it would be almost inevitable that it would have to be forced upon the population.[25]
According to Nur Masalha, heavy Zionist lobbying had been necessary for the Peel commission to propose this "in the last resort" compulsory transfer. Shertok, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion had travelled to London to talk it over, not only with members of the commission, but also with numerous politicians and officials whom the commission would be likely to consult.[26] This solution was embraced by Zionist leaders.[27] Masalha also says that Ben-Gurion saw partition only as an intermediate stage in the establishment of Israel, before the Jewish state could expand to all of Palestine using force.[28]
According to Morris, Arab leaders, such as Emir Abdullah of Transjordan and Nuri as-Said of Iraq, supported the idea of a population transfer.[29] 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 (JAE) on 7 May 1944) to consider the British Labour Party Executive's resolution supporting transfer:[30]
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.
All of the other members of the JAE present, including several individuals who would later become Israeli ministers, spoke favorably of the transfer principle.[31] Morris summarises the attitude of the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938 as: "all preferred a 'voluntary' transfer; but most were also agreeable to a compulsory transfer."[32]
At the Zionist Congress, held in Zurich, the Peel Commission's plan was discussed and rejected on the ground that a larger share of Palestine should be assigned to the Jewish state. According to Masalha, forced transfer was accepted as morally just by a majority, although many doubted its feasibility.[33] Partition, however, was not acceptable for Ussishkin, head of the Jewish National Fund, who said:[34]
The Arab people have immense areas of land at their disposal; our people have nothing except a grave's plot. We demand that our inheritance, Palestine, be returned to us, and if there is no room for Arabs, they have the opportunity of going to Iraq.
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.
According to Masalha "the defeat of the partition plan in no way diminished the determination of the Ben-Gurion camp ... to continue working for the removal of the native population."[35] In November 1937 a Population Transfer Committee was appointed to investigate the practicalities of transfer. It discussed details of the costs, specific places for relocation of the Palestinians, and the order in which they should be transferred. In view of the need for land it concluded that the rural population should be transferred before the townspeople, and that a village by village manner would be best.[36] In June 1938 Ben-Gurion summed up the mood in the JAE: "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it." Regarding the unwillingness of the British to implement it, land expropriation was seen as a major mechanism to precipitate a Palestinian exodus. Also the remaining Palestinians should not be left with substantial landholdings.[37]
"Transfer Idea" during 1947–1949
Further information: Transfer Committee
In early November 1947, some weeks before the UN partition resolution, the Jewish Agency Executive decided that it would be best to deny Israeli citizenship to as many Arabs as possible. As Ben-Gurion explained, in the event of hostilities, if the Arabs also held citizenship of the Arab state it would be possible to expel them as resident aliens, which was better than imprisoning them.[38]
In Flapan's[39] 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[14] "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."[40]
In the view of Flapan[41] 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.[42] According to Michael Bar-Zohar, appeals to "the Arabs to stay" were political gestures for external audiences whereas "
n internal discussions", Ben-Gurion communicated that "it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state."[43]
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."[44]
On 11 May Ben-Gurion noted that he had given orders "for the destruction of Arab islands in Jewish population areas".[45]
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."[46]
Nur Masalha also gives several quotes of Ben-Gurion supporting it:
On 7 February 1948, commenting on the de-Arabisation of parts of Western Jerusalem he told the Mapai Council: "What happened in Jerusalem ... is likely to happen in many parts of the country ... in six, eight or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country."[47]
On 6 April he told the Zionist Actions Committee: "We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area.... I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of the Arab population."[48]
Flapan[49] 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."
Rabbi Chaim Simons (Ph.D) made an exhaustive survey of references to the Transfer of Arabs by Zionists and others over half a century.[13] In the introduction he writes: "I soon discovered that it was not just "a few stray statements" but that the transfer of Arabs from Palestine was definite policy not only of the Zionist leaders, but also of many leading individual non-Jews". He concludes (page 298):
"Most leaders of the Zionist movement publicly opposed such transfers. However, a study of their confidential correspondence, private diaries and minutes of closed meetings, made available to the public under the "thirty year rule", reveals the true feelings of the Zionist leaders on the transfer question. We see from this classified material that Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Sharett and Ben-Zvi, to mention just a few, were really in favour of transferring the Arabs from Palestine. Attempts to hide transfer proposals made by past Zionist leaders has led to a "rewriting of history" and the censoring and amending of official documents!"
In his Epilogue, Simons makes it clear that he has sympathy for the transfer concept:[50]
In conclusion, we can say that in general, the various proposals for the transfer of the Arabs from Palestine were intended to remove the friction, either present or future, resulting from an Arab minority in a Jewish State and to enable each nation to live amongst its own people. It was considered, that after the initial trauma of transfer, both Arabs and Jews would live unmolested by each other in their own States
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".[51]
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".[52]
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".[53]
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".[54]
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.[55]
"Master Plan" explanation
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.[4]
Khalidi based his thesis on Plan Dalet, 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.[4] Plan Dalet 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 in the field carried out.
Glazer argued that evidence showed that Zionist leaders were already thinking about removal of the Palestinian population before it actually occurred.[56] On 7 February 1948, Ben-Gurion told the Central Committee of Mapai (the largest Zionist political party in Palestine):[57]
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 stated 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.[56] He considers that[56]
... 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 1 August 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.
Planning by Ben-Gurion
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."[58] According to Ilan Pappé,[59] Ben-Gurion headed 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.[60] At a meeting on 10 March 1947, this group put the final touches on Plan Dalet,[61] which, according to Pappé, was the blueprint for what he called the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestine. According to Plan Dalet, a Palestinian village was to be 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."[62] Ben-Gurion's group met less frequently after Israel declared independence because, according to Pappé, "Plan Dalet ... had been working well, and needed no further coordination and direction."[63]
However, according to Gelber, Plan Dalet instructions were: In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled outside the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was met, the residents could stay put, under military rule.[64]
During a September 1948 meeting of the Israeli cabinet, Ben-Gurion proposed ending the current ceasefire.[65] His reasons remained classified when the cabinet minutes were released, but revealed by Tom Segev in 2013:
If war broke out, we would then be able to clear the entire central Galilee with one fell swoop. But we cannot empty the central Galilee - that is, including the [Arab] refugees - without a war going on. The Galilee is full of [Arab] residents; it is not an empty region. If war breaks out throughout the entire country, this would be advantageous for us as far as the Galilee is concerned because, without having to make any major effort - we could use just enough of the force required for the purpose without weakening our military efforts in other parts of the country - we could empty the Galilee completely.[65]
However, the proposal was not passed by the cabinet.[65]
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."[66] 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."[67] 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.'"[68]
Criticisms of "Master Plan" explanation
Historians skeptical of the "Master Plan" emphasize that no central directive has surfaced from the archives and argue that, had such an understanding been widespread, it would have left a mark in the vast documentation produced by the Zionist leadership 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, designed to handle the absorption of the anticipated first million immigrants, planned for some 150 new settlements, of which about half were located in the Negev, while the remainder were sited along the lines of the UN partition map (29 November 1947) in the north and centre of the country.
The Continuum Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East states that "recent studies, based on official Israeli archives, have shown that there was no official policy or instructions to bring about the expulsion."[69] 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.[70]
New historian Avi Shlaim considers that the Plan Dalet is not a policy of expulsion but is a military plan dedicated to secure areas allocated to Jewish state.[71]
Benny Morris considers that there was no master plan nor ethnic cleansing.[72] Morris wrote, "[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."[73] He later expounded:
There was no Zionist "plan" or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of "ethnic cleansing". Plan Dalet (Plan D), of 10 March 1948, (it is open and available for all to read in the IDF Archive and in various publications), was the master plan of the Haganah—the Jewish military force that became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state.[74]
In his 2004 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris wrote, "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."[21] Morris also states that he could not find anything in the Israeli archives that would prove the existence of a Zionist plan to expel Palestinians in 1948. Elsewhere Morris has said that the expulsion of the Palestinians did amount to ethnic cleansing, and that the action was justifiable considering the circumstances.[19]
Yoav Gelber notes that documentation exists[75] showing that David Ben-Gurion "regarded the escape as a calculated withdrawal of non-combatant population upon the orders of Arab commanders and out of military considerations", which is contradictory to the hypothesis of a master plan he may have drawn up.[76]
Concerning Plan Dalet, Gelber argues that Khalidi and Pappe's interpretation relies only on a single paragraph in a document of 75 pages, that has been taken out of its context.[77] Describing the plan in reference to the announced intervention of the Arab armies, he argues that "it was a practical response to an emerging threat."[78] Gelber also argues that the occupation and destruction of Arab villages described in the paragraph quoted in Khalidi's paper had the military purpose of preventing Arabs from cutting roads facilitating incursions by Arab armies, while eliminating villages that might have served as bases for attacking Jewish settlements.[79] He also remarks that if Master Plan had been one dedicated to resolving the Arab question, it would have been written by Ben-Gurion's advisors on Arab affairs and by military officers under the supervision of the chief-of-staff Yigael Yadin.[80]
Henry Laurens raises several objections to the views of those he calls the "intentionalists". Like Morris and Gelber he says that Plan Dalet obeyed a military logic, arguing that if it had not been followed, the strategic situation, particularly around Tel Aviv would have been as critical as that which existed around Jerusalem during the war.[81]
Laurens cites some examples of events that indicate a contradiction in the "intentionalist" analysis. Like Gelber, he points out that Zionist authors at the beginning of the exodus considered it to be part and parcel of a "diabolic British plan" devised to impede the creation of the Jewish state.[82] He also emphasizes that even those who had always advocated the Arab expulsion, like e.g. Yosef Weitz, had done nothing to prepare for it in advance, and thus found it necessary to improvise the "other transfer", the one dealing with transfer of Arab properties to Jewish institutions.[83]
Globally Laurens also considers that the "intentionalism" thesis is untenable in the global context of the events and lacks historical methodology. He insists that, were the events the "intentionalists" put forward true, they are so only in terms of a priori reading of those events. To comply with such an analysis, the protagonists should have had a global consciousness of all the consequences of the project they promoted. Laurens considers that a "complot theory", on such a long time period, could not have been planned, even by a Ben-Gurion. In an "intentionalist" approach, he claims, events must be read without a priori and each action must be considered without assuming it will lead to where we know a posteriori it led but it must be considered in its context and in taking into account where the actors thought it would lead.
Laurens considers that with an appropriate approach the documentation gathered by Morris shows that the exodus was caused by mutual fears of the
other side's intentions, Arabs fearing to be expelled by Zionists and in reaction Zionists fearing Arabs would prevent them by force to build their own state, and the fact that Palestine was not able to absorb both populations (he describes the situation as a zero-sum conflict).[84]
Morris's Four Waves analysis
In The Irish Times of February 2008, Benny Morris summarized his analysis as follows: "Most of Palestine's 700,000 "refugees" fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops."[74] In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris divided the Palestinian exodus in four waves and an aftermath:[85] Morris analyses the direct causes, as opposed to his proposed indirect cause of the "transfer idea", for each wave separately.
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."[86] 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."[86] 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.[87]
Decisive causes of abandonment of Palestinian villages and towns according to Benny Morris Decisive causes of abandonment
Occurrences[88]
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 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."[89] "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."[90] Also many villages were abandoned during attacks, but others were evacuated because the inhabitants feared they would be next.[90] A major factor in the exodus was the undermining of Palestinian morale due to the earlier fall and exodus from other towns and villages.[89] 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.[89]
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")[91] 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." Issuing expulsion orders was hardly necessary though, because "most villages were completely or almost completely empty by the time they were conquered",[90] "the inhabitants usually fled with the approach of the advancing Jewish column or when the first mortar bombs began to hit their homes."[92]
Causes of the third and fourth waves, July–October 1948 and October–November 1948
Further information: 1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle
In July "altogether, the Israeli offensives of the Ten Days and the subsequent clearing operations probably send something over 100,000 Arabs into exile."[93] 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".[94] "The commanders involved understood that what was happening was an expulsion rather than a spontaneous exodus."[95]
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.[96] The UN mediator on Palestine Folke Bernadotte reported in September 1948 that Palestinian flight, "resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion".[97] United Nations observers reported in October that Israeli policy was that of "uprooting Arabs from their native villages in Palestine by force or threat".[98] 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"[99] and the inhabitants were almost uniformly Muslim. In the Galilee pocket, for various reasons, about 30–50 per cent of the inhabitants stayed.[100] 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."[99]
