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In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine's predominantly Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes, at first by Zionist paramilitaries,[a] and after the establishment of Israel, by its military.[b] The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba.[1] Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme codenamed Operation Cast Thy Bread and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.[2][3] Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.[4]
The precise number of Palestinian refugees, many of whom settled in Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute,[5] although the number is around 700,000, being approximately 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total population of Mandatory Palestine).[6][7] About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the termination of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948. The desire to prevent the collapse of the Palestinians and to avoid more refugees were some of the reasons for the entry of the Arab League into the country, which began the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.[8][9]
Although the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus remain a significantly controversial topic in public and political discourse, with a prominent amount of denialism regarding the responsibility of Israeli/Yishuv forces, most scholarship today agrees that expulsions and violence, and the fear thereof, were the primary causes.[10][11][12] Scholars widely describe the event as ethnic cleansing,[13][3][14] although some disagree.[15][16][17] Factors involved in the exodus include direct expulsions by Israeli forces, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare including terrorism, massacres such as the widely publicized Deir Yassin massacre[18]: 239–240 which caused many to flee out of fear, crop burning,[19][20] typhoid epidemics in some areas caused by Israeli well-poisoning,[21] and the collapse of Palestinian leadership including the demoralizing impact of wealthier classes fleeing.[22]
Later, a series of land and property laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees.[23][24] The existence of the so-called Law of Return allowing for immigration and naturalization of any Jewish person and their family to Israel, while a Palestinian right of return has been denied, has been cited as evidence for the charge that Israel practices apartheid.[25][26] The status of the refugees, and in particular whether Israel will allow them the right to return to their homes, or compensate them, are key issues in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
- ^ Honaida Ghanim, Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba, Archived 6 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society March 2009 Vol. 22, No. 1 pp.23-39 p.37 Stern, Yoav (13 May 2008). "Palestinian refugees, Israeli left-wingers mark Nakba" Archived 17 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine. Haaretz. Nakba 60 Archived 12 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights; Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004, p. 270. ISBN 978-0-8133-4047-0Ghanim, Honaida (March 2009). "Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 22 (1): 23–39 [25–26]. doi:10.1007/s10767-009-9049-9. ISSN 0891-4486. JSTOR 40608203. S2CID 144148068.
- ^ Morris, Benny; Kedar, Benjamin Z. (19 September 2022). "'Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War". Middle Eastern Studies. 59 (5): 1–25 [2–3]. doi:10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448. S2CID 252389726.
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
Pappe2006was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Bardi, Ariel Sophia (March 2016). "The "Architectural Cleansing" of Palestine". American Anthropologist. 118 (1): 165–171. doi:10.1111/aman.12520.
- ^ Pedahzur, Ami; Perliger, Arie (2010). "The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Israel". In Crenshaw, Martha (ed.). The Consequences of Counterterrorism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. p. 356. ISBN 978-0-87154-073-7.
- ^ Masalha, Nur (1992). Expulsion of the Palestinians. Institute for Palestine Studies, this edition 2001, p. 175.
- ^ Khalidi, Rashid (September 1998). Palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness. Columbia University Press. pp. 21–. ISBN 978-0-231-10515-6. Archived from the original on 14 January 2023. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
In 1948 half of Palestine's ... Arabs were uprooted from their homes and became refugees
- ^ Gelber 2006, p. 137: "Drawn into the war by the collapse of the Palestinians and the ALA, the Arab governments' primary goal was preventing the Palestinians' total ruin and the flooding of their own countries by more refugees."
- ^ Matthew Hogan (2001). The 1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin Revisited: "Meanwhile, the subsequent May 1948 outbreak of regional war between the newly declared state of Israel and the Arab states, beginning the prolonged Arab-Israeli conflict, was contemporaneously explained by Arab League chief Azzam Pasha in terms of the Deir Yassin incident: "The massacre of Deir Yassin was to a great extent the cause of the wrath of the Arab nations and the most important factor for sending [in] the Arab armies."
- ^ Slater, Jerome (2020). Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-19-045908-6. "There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba. All of the leading Israeli New Historians—particularly Morris, Shlaim, Pappé, and Flapan—extensively examined the issue and revealed the facts. Other accounts have reached the same conclusions. For example, see Ben-Ami, "A War to Start All Wars"; Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948"; Walid Khalidi, "Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited"; Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Raz, Bride and the Dowry. Reviewing the evidence marshaled by Morris and others, Tom Segev concluded that "most of the Arabs in the country, approximately 400,000, were chased out and expelled during the first stage of the war. In other words, before the Arab armies invaded the country" (Haaretz, 18 July 2010). Other estimates have varied concerning the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled before the May 1948 Arab state attack; Morris estimated the number to be 250,000–300,000 (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 262); Tessler puts it at 300,000 (A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 279); Pappé's estimate is 380,000 (The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 96). In another recent review of the evidence, the Israeli historian Daniel Blatman estimates the number to be about 500,000 (Blatman, "Netanyahu, This Is What Ethnic Cleansing Really Looks Like"). Whatever the exact number, even Israeli "Old Historians" now admit that during the 1948 war, the Israeli armed forces drove out many of the Palestinians, though they emphasized the action as a military "necessity." For example, see Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, 167–68. In July 2019, the Israeli government sought to cover up the extensive documentary evidence in its state archives that revealed detailed evidence about the extent of the Nakba—even the evidence that had already been published by newspapers and Israeli historians. A Haaretz investigation of the attempted cover-up concluded: "Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba, including Israeli eyewitness reports at the time" (Shezaf, "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs").”
- ^ Abu-Laban, Yasmeen; Bakan, Abigail B. (July 2022). "Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting". The Political Quarterly, Vol. 93, Issue 3, p. 511: "Palestinians have long known what happened to them in 1948 and its very human costs. However, the work of the 'new' (or revisionist) Israeli historians from the late 1970s also challenged the official state narrative of a miraculous wartime victory through access to material in the Israeli archives. This has established what Ilan Pappé has summarised as the 'ethnic cleansing of Palestine', a process involving massacres and expulsions at gunpoint. In light of the ever-growing historiography, serious scholarship has left little debate about what happened in 1948. [...] However, Nakba denial remains a political issue of the highest order.
- ^ Laila Parsons, McGill University, 2009, Review of Ilan Pappé's 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', "Ilan Pappe has added another work to the many that have already been written in English on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. These include works by Walid Khalidi, Simha Flapan, Nafez Nazzal, Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, and Norman Finkelstein, among others. All but one of these authors (Morris) would probably agree with Pappe’s position that what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 fits the definition of ethnic cleansing, and it certainly is not news to Palestinians themselves, who have always known what happened to them." [1]
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Ian Black-2010was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Shavit, Ari. "Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris" Archived 5 September 2021 at the Wayback Machine. Logos. Winter 2004
- ^ Matas, David (2005). Aftershock: anti-zionism and anti-semitism. Dundurn Press Ltd. pp. 555–558. ISBN 978-1-55002-553-8. Archived from the original on 3 July 2024. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
- ^ Benvenis'tî, Mêrôn (2002). Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948. University of California Press. pp. 124–127. ISBN 978-0-520-23422-2. Archived from the original on 3 July 2024. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
- ^ Benny Morris (21 February 2008). "Benny Morris on fact, fiction, & propaganda about 1948". The Irish Times, reported by Jeff Weintraub Archived 7 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81120-0.
- ^ Pappe, I. (1999). Were they expelled?: The history, historiography and relevance of the Palestinian refugee problem. In G. Karmi & E. Cotran (Eds.), The Palestinian exodus, 1948–1988(pp. 37–61). London: Ithaca Press – "Where expulsion failed, transfer was encouraged, by every possible means (even by setting fire to the fields of Palestinian villages considered wealthy or by cutting water supply to city neighborhoods). Weitz convinced the Israeli government in May 1948 to confiscate any looted Arab harvest for the needs of the newly born state. This policy of burning fields or confiscating them continued throughout the summer of 1948."
- ^ Morris 2004 "While before May, burning Arab crops was mainly a Haganah means of retaliation for Arab attacks, during May–June the destruction of the fields hardened into a set policy designed to demoralise the villagers, hurt them economically and, perhaps, precipitate their exodus."
- ^ Benny Morris, Benjamin Z. Kedar, 'Cast thy bread': Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War Archived 5 March 2023 at the Wayback Machine Middle Eastern Studies 19 September 2022, pages =1-25 p.8:'The SHAI, in its report from the end of June 1948 on the causes of the Arab flight from Palestine, mentioned 'the typhus epidemic' as 'an exacerbating factor in the evacuation' in certain areas. 'More than the disease itself, it was the panic induced by the rumours of the spread of the disease in the area that was a factor in the evacuation', stated the report. In its site-by-site breakdown of the Arab flight, the report mentioned 'harassment [by the Haganah] and the typhus epidemic' as the causes of the partial exodus of the population from Acre on 6 May.'
- ^ J.P.D. Dunbabin, The Post-Imperial Age: The Great Powers and the Wider World, Archived 8 October 2022 at the Wayback Machine Routledge 2014 ISBN 978-1-317-89293-9 pp.256-258.
- ^ Kodmani-Darwish, p. 126; Féron, Féron, p. 94.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
UNRWAwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Human Rights Watch. "A Threshold Crossed," 27 April 2021. A Threshold Crossed Archived 28 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Amnesty International. "Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime against Humanity," 1 February 2022. Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians Archived 20 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine.