One enduring talking point often employed when discussing the depopulation of Palestinian villages is that the Palestinians voluntarily evacuated their communities at the request of the invading Arab armies. It is not difficult to see the allure of such a claim for Israel. In one stroke it clears itself completely of any blame for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and transfers that responsibility onto the Palestinians themselves, not to mention the neighboring Arab countries.
Alluring as it may be, unfortunately for Israel, it is a myth with little basis in reality. Let us review the evidence:
First, we must consider the magnitude of the Arab League or the Arab Higher Command evacuating an entire people. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people living in hundreds of communities from the Jalil to the Naqab. This is by no means a simple or brief task. It is very difficult to imagine an order of such scale not leaving behind a trace of some sort. There must have been some mention -even if in passing- of the orders telling the Palestinians to leave. Furthermore, orders such as these do not materialize suddenly, there must have been a preceding process where the decision was taken. These meetings or debates would surely be reflected in some minutes somewhere, right?
The answer is a resounding “no”, because no decision of the sort ever came from these sources. Historian Walid Al-Khalidi reviewed every press release of the Arab league, where every critical announcement was made without a trace of such orders. Not content with official pronouncements, he then examined the minutes of the meetings of the Arab League General Assembly from the relevant periods, there was still no trace of an evacuation order. Determined to be as thorough as possible, he then went through the minutes of the Iraqi Parliamentary Committee which was formed after the 1948 war to report to King Faisal on the causes of the Arab defeat. Once again, zero evidence was found to suggest such orders existed.
However, Khalidi’s research revealed that on the 8th of March 1948, a memo circulated by the Arab Higher Command urged the heads of all Arab governments not to grant entry permits to Palestinians, except for a few exceptions. It also requested that residence permits not be renewed for Palestinians already living in the Arab countries. This was animated by the logic of having as many Palestinians as possible in Palestine to help defend their homeland. This seems to directly contradict Zionist claims on the matter. How could the Arab states order Palestinians to leave their country but at the same time not allow them to?
Further investigation is warranted.
If these orders exist, then I’m confident that the various newspapers across the Arab world would surely mention them in some form. Perhaps in a passing comment, or even an opinion piece somewhere?
Not even once.
But do you know what this foray into these newspaper archives revealed instead? That there were frequent mentions of not allowing Palestinians of military age to enter various Arab countries. There were also some calls for sending back Palestinian refugees fleeing the violence which sometimes bordered on demonization.
For something that supposedly exists -according to Israel- these orders have been incredibly hard to pin down. If anything, the deeper we investigate the matter, the more obvious it becomes that the Arab states did not want Palestinian refugees within their borders, let alone the entirety of the Palestinian people.
Perhaps radio broadcasts could shed some light on this matter, for if such an order existed the radio would be the fastest and most efficient way to broadcast it. Luckily for us, there are ways to investigate this, and British researcher Erskine Childers has already done the investigation for us:
“The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. 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 a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.”
Indeed, there are multiple occasions where not only were Palestinians told to stay put and not leave their lands, but that they would suffer punishment should they abandon their houses and flee.
Furthermore, had the Palestinians chose to voluntarily leave their villages, then the brief first or second truces in the fighting would have been ideal opportunities to do so. It is worthy of attention that during those periods, not only did Palestinians stay put in their villages, those who had been expelled earlier attempted to return to their original communities, and were greeted by Israeli gunfire.
All the empirical evidence lies in stark contradiction to the Israeli talking point. There is absolutely no proof to even begin entertaining this as a main cause for the exodus of the Palestinians. To this day, there has not been a single citation, or a shred of paper pointing to such blanket orders. Not one radio station has been named, or even a date given for when these alleged orders were broadcasted. They are a complete fabrication with little basis in reality. It is not a coincidence that no specificities are given when this talking point is employed.
So where did this myth originate?
There is no definite answer to this, but scholars suspect a certain Dr. Joseph Shechtman being responsible. Shechtman, an American revisionist Zionist, authored multiple pamphlets in 1949 where this myth gained prominence for the first time. These pamphlets were full of quotations and references to such orders from Arab newspapers, however, after inspection these cited news items simply did not exist. Many of these fabricated quotes are still passed around by pro-Israel advocates as “indisputable proof”, even though they are never able to produce the actual primary source, not to mention that most of them wouldn’t be able to read them had they they even existed.
Notwithstanding, this is not to say that there weren’t specific local exceptions to this. In a few select cases, Arab armies deemed the evacuation of civilians to neighboring villages as the best course of action for their safety. This, however, was exceedingly rare. Out of approximately 530 Palestinian communities that were ethnically cleansed, only 5 had their residents leaving due to precautionary evacuations. That is to say, less than 1%. It is therefore incredibly intellectually dishonest to suggest that Arab orders were a main cause of the Palestinian diaspora, or that a blanket evacuation order was ever issued.
Nevertheless, for the sake of argument, had such an evacuation order been issued, and had every single Palestinian chosen to heed them, this would still not justify Israelis blocking refugees from returning home after the war under the threat of death. This would still not justify the methodical destruction of hundreds of villages and covering them with forests to hide these crimes. Although this argument is a blatantly unsubtle attempt to shift responsibility for Zionist war crimes onto the Palestinians and Arabs, it still does not address the main point: Palestinian refugees possess a right of return no matter how they became refugees in the first place.
- Abu-Sitta, Salman H. Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966. Palestine Land Society, 2010.
- Khalidi, Walid. “Why did the Palestinians leave, revisited.” Journal of Palestine Studies 34.2, 2005: 42-54.
- Khalidi, Walid. “Plan Dalet: Master plan for the conquest of Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 18.1, 1988: 4-33.
- Khalidi, Walid, and Sharif S. Elmusa. All that remains: The Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Inst for Palestine Studies, 1992.
- Hadawi, Sami. Bitter harvest: A modern history of Palestine. Interlink Publishing Group, 1991.
- Masalha, Nur. “From Propaganda to Scholarship: Dr Joseph Schechtman and the Origins of Israeli Polemics on the Palestinian Refugees.” Holy Land Studies 2.2, 2004: 188-197.
- Pappe, Ilan. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster, 2007.
- Morris, Benny. The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949. Vol. 1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Flapan, Simha. The birth of Israel: Myths and realities. London: Croom Helm, 1987.