1948: The Myth of the Voluntary Exodus
There is an old Zionist tale, constantly and indefatigably repeated down the years since 1948. It is the story that the Palestinian people lost their homeland because they followed their leaders’ orders to get out. They left to clear the way for the invading armies of the Arab States. After the Arabs had finished off young Israel, they hoped, all the people could come back and share in the spoils of victory.
We can well understand the attractions of such a theory for its proponents. It shifts the blame for Palestinian dispossession from the Israelis to the refugees themselves. According to the theory, they left their homes as part of the Arab invasion plot, which was genocidal in intent. Who can have much sympathy for those who intended genocide, even if they are shivering in squalid refugee camps? And who can blame Israel for not wanting them to come back again?
In other words, the Zionist conquest of Palestine, violent as it was, and as ruinous as it was to the indigenous population, involved no guilt whatsoever. Israel conquered a national territory out of the purest, most righteous instinct of self-defence.
Unfortunately, the story has not held up well over time.
"It is not at all clear, as maintained by a conventional Israeli myth, that the Palestinian exodus was encouraged by the Arab States and by local (Palestinian) leaders. Benny Morris, (historian, Ben- Gurion University) found no evidence to show ‘that either the leaders of the Arab States or the Mufti ordered or directly encouraged the mass exodus’. Indeed, Morris found evidence to the effect that the local Arab leadership and militia commanders discouraged flight, and Arab radio stations issued calls to the Palestinians to stay put, and even to return to their homes if they had already left. True, there were more than a few cases where the local commanders ordered the evacuation of villages. But these seem to have been tactical decisions taken under very specific military conditions; they did not respond to an overall stategy either of the local Palestinian leaders or of the Arab States."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, SCARS OF WAR, WOUNDS OF PEACE, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 43)
Shlomo Ben-Ami, an Oxford-trained historian, is the former Foreign Minister of Israel. His book is praised by Dennis Ross, US diplomat and lobbyist for Israel.
Zionist debaters can still be found who are always ready to produce a quote from the Mufti or some other demonized Arab leader, suitably bloodcurdling, calling for evacuation. This is a time-honored practice of "hasbara," Israeli propaganda.
"To support their claim that Arab leaders had incited the flight, Israeli and Zionist sources were constantly ‘quoting’ statements by the Arab Higher Committee--NOW SEEN TO BE LARGELY FABRICATED-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"
(Simha Flapan, THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL: MYTHS AND REALITIES, New York: Pantheon, 1987. p, 86. Much of the third section of his book is devoted to debunking the theory.)
Over time the story has largely lost its credibility, except to historical illiterates. Israel’s "new historians," who won access to declassified IDF, Zionist, and Israeli state archives in the 1980’s, are usually credited with refuting it. There was a great outcry but it eventually subsided. Israel had a breeze of glasnost and moved on.
(cf. Shabtai Teveth, "Charging Israel with Original Sin," COMMENTARY Sept. 1989; Benny Morris, "The Eel and History: A Reply to Shabtai Teveth," TIKKUN 5.1 Jan-Feb 1990)
Sophisticated supporters of Israel have moved beyond the myth. Howard M Sachar, author of a highly sympathetic HISTORY OF ISRAEL, not at all a "new historian," discounts the "orders from above" (cf. Benny Morris film, Al-Nakba). Walter Lacquer, conservative historian, author of the standard, HISTORY OF ZIONISM, also declines to endorse it. He admits that Israel springs from a kind of "original sin," but does not think it affects its legitimacy as a nation state. (TLS 4/21/06 p.8). Jean Daniel, editor of LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR and one of France’s top journalists, Jewish and a supporter of Israel, frankly admits that Israel is built on "confiscated land."
(Adam Shatz, "The Jewish Question," NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 9/22/05 p. 53)
In fact, the "orders from above" theory did not have to wait for the Israeli "new historians" in order to be debunked. Two scholars, a Palestinian historian and an Irish journalist, exploded it as long ago as the late 1950’s. The "new historians" only confirmed what others already knew.
Zionist propaganda often claimed that the exiled Mufti and other Arab leaders sent evacuation orders over radio. The problem was that the claim could actually be checked.
Erskine Childers, writing in the 12 May 1961 edition of THE SPECTATOR (London), explained his results:
"I next decided to test the undocumented charge that the Arab evacuation orders were broadcast by radio--which could be done thoroughly because the BBC monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, as companion ones by a U.S. monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum"
(Childers, "The Other Exodus," in Walter Lacquer and Barry Rubin, eds. THE ARAB-ISRAELI READER, Penguin, 1987 p.146).
Childers found only repeated appeals, "even orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put." (loc. cit).
Walid Khalidi, a Palestinian American, working in radio archives, independently confirmed the same finding:
"There are in fact two monitoring collections for 1948: one compiled by the BBC, the other by the CIA, both from Cyprus...Both collections give detailed daily coverage of broadcasts from Arab capitals and of such Zionist radios as Haganah Radio (in Hebrew, English and Arabic), the Free Hebrew Station (Stern) and the Voice of Fighting Zion (Irgun). I was pleased to see that the researches of Mr. Childers in the British Museum confirm my own findings. I can report now that the complete CIA collection here in Princeton also overwelmingly confirms and elaborates the results that Mr. Childers and I have arrived at independently of each other...There are countless broadcasts by Zionist radios which indicate deliberate psychological warfare against the Arabs. There is not one single instance of an Arab evacuation order or hint of such an order. There is an impressive stream of explicit Arab orders to the Palestinian Arab civilians to hold their ground and remain in their towns and villages..."
(Walid Khalidi, ed. "The SPECTATOR Correspondence , 12 May-4 Aug. 1961," reprinted in JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES 18. 1.4 (1988) p. 57)
The story of voluntary flight, though, is not at all plausible to begin with. Why would the Arab leaders order a mass evacuation likely to block the invasion routes? Why would great masses of a conservative rural population leave behind vital possessions and take to the roads at the summons of far away leaders, who had no power on the ground?
In fact, there is no mystery at all about the fact that Palestinians left because of the military pressure that the Zionists brought against them. Israel owes its birth, not to evacuation orders issued by Arab leaders but to an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by the Zionists, led by Ben-Gurion.
Plenty of eyewitnesses saw it at the time. Novelist Arthur Koestler, a committed Zionist living in Haifa in 1948, wrote in PROMISE AND FULFILLMENT that Haganah radio and Haganah loudspeaker vans promised the city’s Arabs escort to ‘Arab territory’, and hinted at terrible consequences if their warning were disregarded."
(Koestler, PROMISE AND FULFILMENT, p. 207. )
We know that Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership had an urge to expel. We even know of actual expulsion orders, directed against unarmed and innocent Palestinian families.
"The Arabs of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," signed Yitzhak Rabin, 12 July 1948.
(Benny Morris, THE BIRTH OF THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE PROBLEM: 1947-9, Cambridge University Press, 1989. p.207)
The Palestinian villagers and town-dwellers were largely unarmed and leaderless, with just a sprinkling of weapons, since the British had kept them disarmed while Israel built the nucleus of an army. In 1948 the IDF attacked villages with shells, etc., or marched people out at gunpoint. Once a village was vacant, the army would demolish all the houses to prevent a return: an early version of "creating facts." They would shoot on sight unarmed peasant refugees trying to go home.This conduct is documented multiple times and is reminiscent of Balkan ethnic cleansing in the 1990’s.
Ethnic cleansing was pursued to create the Israeli "national territory," not to defend Israel against the Arab states. Ben-Gurion expressed support for mass expulsion as early as 1938: "I believe in compulsory transfer. I don’t see in it anything immoral." Israel took the initiative in the 1948 war and was the stronger party. The Arabs states intervened reluctantly, ineffectively, and largely defensively, after the ethnic cleansing was well under way. The strongest Arab state militarily, Jordan, had an army under British command. Britain certainly did not seek Israel’s destruction and its client, the king of Jordan, was all too eager to cut a deal to divide Palestine with the Jewish state, with whose leaders he had long enjoyed secret contacts. The whole story of 1948 is shrouded in myths which manipulate terrible memories of the Nazi Holocaust. They invert the truth about who was the victim and who the victimizer.
(cf. Avi Shlaim, "Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948, " in Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan, eds. THE WAR FOR PALESTINE, Cambridge University Press, 2001 esp. pp.80-81. Also in Shlaim-Rogan ed., Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948’. Ben Gurion quote on p. 44. cf also Flapan, THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL: MYTHS AND REALITIES )
It is ironic that the "orders from above" theory should enjoy a kind of afterlife in the U.S. The Zionist community here is actually rather insulated from the complex public debate about Zionism in Israel. Our U.S. pro-Israel crowd looks a little backward when they keep repeating these myths. They are still digging out the same debating points they used thirty and forty years ago. They are perhaps more an embarrassment than a help to Israel’s cause.
To deny the reality of the ethnic cleansing is an insult to the Palestinian people and morally repugnant, like Holocaust denial. One does not have to equate the two events to see that this erasure of history is wrong. It is a denial of the very humanity of the victims, who did not deserve their suffering. And those who go down this road have no business accusing others of racism.
The very latest professional research does even more to extinguish the myth of Israel’s "innocence." Little by little, the true nature of the injustice done to the native people of Palestine is being brought to light.
(cf. Ilan Pappe, THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE: Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006. Pappe is Professor of History at Haifa University).