foxfyre, quoting the Jewish virtual Library wrote:The Palestinians left their homes in 1947-48 for a variety of reasons. . .
The JVL fails to mention the other major and more sinister reason for the Arab flight there: the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Haganah, the Zionists para-military organization which was the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces. The Israeli historian, Benny Morris, talked about some of the facts he brings up in his book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited," in an Ha'aretz interview in January of 2004: "There were twenty-four small scale massacres perpetrated by the Israeli forces in 1948. Morris says, "in some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.
"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."
There was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order in Operation Hiram. "One of the revelations in the book [The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004] 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."
As Rashid Khalidi writes in his book The Iron Cage, "The flight of the Palestinian population from areas conquered by the Haganah and other Jewish forces increased under the impact of the shock of the Deir Yasin massacre, growing to a flood with the fall of Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, and other towns later in April and into May."
One thing is the words expressed by the Zionist leadership about "doing everything in their power to maintain peace, and establish a cooperation gainful to both," quite another is their actions, ethnically cleansing the portion of Palestine that fell under their control during The Catastrophe of 1948 of a majority of its Arab population.
