The "Arab leaders' endorsement of flight" explanation
The first explanation published of what caused the 1948 Palestinian exodus was that the Arab political and military leaders within Palestine and in surrounding countries actually told Arab civilians in Palestine to leave their homes so as to avoid any casualties of war with the expectation that they would return to their homes once the Arab armies destroyed the
Yishuv. In subsequent studies of radio broadcasts and Arab newspapers no such orders have been found. To the contrary orders were issued for the Palestinians to stay in their homes.
[132]
[edit] Claims that support that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders
Israeli official sources, foreign press, and officials present at the time, and historians have claimed that the refugee flight was instigated by Arab leaders.[
citation needed] For example,
Yosef Weitz wrote in October 1948: "The migration of the Arabs from the
Land of Israel was not caused by persecution, violence, expulsion [but was] deliberately organised by the Arab leaders in order to arouse Arab feelings of revenge, to artificially create an Arab refugee problem."[
citation needed] Israeli historian Efraim Karsh wrote, "The logic behind this policy was apparently that 'the absence of women and children from Palestine would free the men for fighting', as the Secretary-General of the Arab League,
Abd al-Rahman Azzam put it." In his book,
The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948, Karsh cited the substantial, active role the
Arab Higher Committee played in the exoduses from
Haifa,
Tiberias, and
Jaffa as an important part of understanding what he called the "birth of the Palestinian refugee problem."
[66]
Morris
[133][134] concludes that this support extended still farther:
"During the early 1940s, against the backdrop of the Holocaust and official British deliberations about a postwar solution to the Palestine problem based on partition, all understood (as had the Peel Commission) that any partition not accompanied by a transfer of Arabs out of the territory of the Jewish-state-to-be would be unstable or pointless, as the large Arab minority, if left in place, would be disloyal and rebellious, and would inevitably enjoy the support of the surrounding Arab world. ... British officials and Arab heads of state (who, of course, feared to state these views in public) shared this view. That is why the British Labour Party Executive in 1944 supported partition accompanied by transfer, and that is why
Jordan's Emir Abdullah and
Iraq's prime minister Nuri Said, among other Arab statesmen, supported such a population transfer if Palestine was to be partitioned.
Morris also documented that the Arab Higher Committee ordered the evacuation of "several dozen villages, as well as the removal of dependents from dozens more in April-July 1948. "The invading Arab armies also occasionally ordered whole villages to depart, so as not to be in their way."
[135] The Near East Broadcasting Station in Cyprus declared that "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem."
[136] Evidence such as this led
Shmuel Katz to conclude in his book
Battleground "that the Arab refugees were not driven from Palestine by anyone. The vast majority left, whether of their own free will or at the orders or exhortations of their leaders."
[137] He explains, "The Arabs are the only declared refugee group who became refugees ... by the initiative of their own leaders."
[138]
[edit] Claims by Arab sources that support that the flight was instigated by Arab leaders
Former
Prime Minister of Syria Khalid al-Azm recalled in his
memoirs, "We brought disaster upon one million Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave their land, their homes, their work and their industry."
[139] Abu Iyad made similar observations in his own memoirs.
[140]
After the war, a few Arab leaders tried to present the Palestinian exodus as a victory by claiming to have planned it.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Said was later quoted as saying: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their
wives and
children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."
[141]
Contemporary Jordanian politician
Anwar Nusseibeh believed that the fault for the exodus and military loss was with the Arab commanders: "the commanders of the local army thought in terms of the revolt against the British in the 1930s. The rebels had often retreated to the mountains .... But the Jews were fighting for complete domination, so the fighters had erred in withdrawing from the villages instead of defending them […]."
[142]
The Arab National Committee of Haifa, the Arab leadership in Haifa in 1948, wrote and delivered a report on the flight of roughly 60,000 Arabs from Haifa. The report said, "[T]he removal of the Arab inhabitants from the town was voluntary and carried out at our request."
[143]
"Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring, brotherly states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down," wrote Habab Issa of
Al-Hoda, the leading newspaper for Lebanese Maronites in the United States.
[144] A Muslim weekly newspaper in Beirut similarly reported, "Who brought the Palestinians to
Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders […]? The Arab States
[sp], and Lebanon amongst them, did it!"
[145]
Mahmoud Abbas, at the time
Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, would later recall: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."
[146]
Jamal Husseini, the brother of Palestinian military and religious leader
Hajj Amin Husseini, wrote to the Syrian UN representative, "The regular [Arab] aremies did not enable the [Arab] inhabitants of [Palestine] to defend themselves, but merely facilitated their escape from Palestine."
[147] Palestinian military leader
Emile Ghoury expressed similar views. Furthermore, Palestinian Arab protesters in the West Bank took to the streets on the occasion of "the first anniversary of Israel's establishment" to place blame on "the Arab states for the creation of the refugee problem."
[148]
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