Is it true that Palestinians left their homes because of Arab orders during the 1948 war ?
The foundational Israeli myth about Palestinian refugees is also the most pernicious. From the outset, Israeli leaders have contended that the Palestinians’ mass flight in 1948 was caused by broadcasted evacuation orders from the Arab regimes at war with the new state.
Palestinians from Tantura are expelled to Jordan, June 1948. (Benno Rothenberg/Meitar Collection/National Library of Israel/The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection/CC BY 4.0)
The motivation for spreading this myth is clear: if the Palestinians’ mass flight was a response to Arab regimes’ orders, Israel avoids culpability for the forced displacement of 750,000 people and their descendants. Moreover, in speaking euphemistically of Palestinians “leaving,” the myth de-emphasizes the forced nature of their migration.
Golda Meir, an early Zionist leader who served as Israeli prime minister for five years, was one of the most influential advocates of this myth. She famously told a British journalist in 1969:
“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out.”
In so doing, she denied both the Nakba and the Palestinians’ national identity and political rights. In a sign of the myth’s continuing potency, the same line was propagated earlier this year by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, saying:
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.”
Yet the evidence clearly belies it. Over the last 75 years, research by countless historians — not to mention the testimonies of refugees themselves — has consistently shown that Palestinians “left” their homeland because they were expelled by newly arriving Zionist militias and later the Israeli army. Historians have also uncovered substantial documentary evidence verifying that the large-scale “transfer” of the Palestinian population was carefully planned by the Zionist movement and the nascent Israeli state.
By contrast, no evidence has ever been found of the Arab leaders’ alleged evacuation broadcast in 1948. In the matter of fact, it was the complete opposite.
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?
Original letter sent by the Arab Higher Committee to the Egyptian government urging it to refuse entry for refugees unless in emergency situations
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, there are ways to investigate this, and British researcher Erskine Childers has already done the investigation:
“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 as of what is seen in some of the Zionist answers here on Quora, while other answers have nothing to do with the question, and the rest are based on Joan peters, debunked historical fraud : A Hoax immemorial.
Some of the Palestinian refugees who were not directly expelled fled in order to escape the violence, especially after hearing of massacres happening nearby — in other words, as the indirect but no-less-intended result of Zionist militancy.
Zionist forces walk the streets during the Battle of Haifa, April 22,1948. (The Archive of the IDF and the Defense Establishment)
Even the lowest estimates find that Zionist-Israeli forces carried out at least 20 village massacres in 1948, with the biggest taking place at Lydd, Saliha, and most infamously Deir Yassin. To this day, historians and other researchers continue to discover further evidence backing Palestinian testimonies of massacres and mass violence, such as at Tantura, that accompanied Israel’s establishment and forced Palestinians to become refugees.