The roots of the Nakba are traced to the arrival of Zionists and their purchase of land in Ottoman Palestine in the late 19th century. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. By the time the British announced their official support for Zionism in the 1917 Balfour Declaration during World War I, the population of Palestine was about 750,000, approximately 94% Arab and 6% Jewish.
Following World War II and the Holocaust, in February 1947, the British declared they would end the Mandate and submit the future of Palestine to the newly created United Nations for resolution. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created, and in September, submitted a report to the UN General Assembly recommending partition. Palestinians and most of the Arab League were opposed to the partition. Zionists accepted the partition but planned to expand Israel's borders beyond what was allocated to it by the UN. In the autumn of 1947, Israel and Jordan, with British approval, secretly agreed to divide the land allocated to Palestine between them after the end of the British Mandate.
On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly passed Resolution 181 (II) – the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. At the time, Arabs made up about two-thirds of the population and owned about 90% of the land, while Jews made up between a quarter and a third of the population and owned about 7% of the land. The UN partition plan allocated to Israel about 55% of the land, where the population was about 500,000 Jews and 407,000-438,000 Arabs. Palestine was allocated the remaining 45% of the land, where the population was about 725,000-818,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to be an internationally governed corpus separatum with a population of about 100,000 Arabs and 100,000 Jews.
The partition plan was considered by detractors to be pro-Zionist, with 56% of the land allocated to the Jewish state although the Palestinian Arab population numbered twice the Jewish population. The plan was celebrated by most Jews in Palestine, with Zionist leaders, in particular David Ben-Gurion, viewing the plan as a tactical step and a stepping stone to future territorial expansion over all of Palestine. The Arab Higher Committee, the Arab League and other Arab leaders and governments rejected it on the basis that in addition to the Arabs forming a two-thirds majority, they owned a majority of the lands. They also indicated an unwillingness to accept any form of territorial division, arguing that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN Charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny. They announced their intention to take all necessary measures to prevent the implementation of the resolution.
The 1948 Nakba
The central facts of the Nakba during the 1948 Palestine war are not disputed.
About 750,000 Palestinians—over 80% of the population in what would become the State of Israel—were expelled or fled from their homes and became refugees.
Eleven Arab urban neighborhoods and over 500 villages were destroyed or depopulated.
Thousands of Palestinians were killed in dozens of massacres.
About a dozen rapes of Palestinians by regular and irregular Israeli military forces have been documented, and more are suspected.
Israelis used psychological warfare tactics to frighten Palestinians into flight, including targeted violence, whispering campaigns, radio broadcasts, and loudspeaker vans.
Looting by Israeli soldiers and civilians of Palestinian homes, business, farms, artwork, books, and archives was widespread.
Nov 1947 – May 1948
Small-scale local skirmishes began on 30 November and gradually escalated until March 1948.
When the violence started, Palestinians had already begun fleeing, expecting to return after the war.
The massacre and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs and destruction of villages began in December,
including massacres at Al-Khisas (18 December 1947),
and Balad al-Shaykh (31 December).
By March, between 70,000 and 100,000 Palestinians, mostly middle- and upper-class urban elites, were expelled or fled.
In early April 1948, the Israelis launched Plan Dalet, a large-scale offensive to capture land and empty it of Palestinian Arabs.
During the offensive, Israel captured and cleared land that was allocated to the Palestinians by the UN partition resolution.
Over 200 villages were destroyed during this period.
Massacres and expulsions continued,
including at Deir Yassin (9 April 1948).
Arab urban neighborhoods in Tiberias (18 April), Haifa (23 April), West Jerusalem (24 April), Acre (6-18 May), Safed (10 May), and Jaffa (13 May) were depopulated.
Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain towns and villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May.
Under intense public anger over Palestinian losses in April, and seeking to take Palestinian territory for themselves in order to counter the Israeli-Jordanian deal, the remaining Arab League states decided in late April and early May to enter the war after the British left.
However, the armies of the newly independent Arab League states were still weak and unprepared for war,
and none of the Arab League states were interested in the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Amin al-Husseini at its head. Neither the expansionist King Abdullah I of Jordan nor the British wanted the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
On 14 May, the Mandate formally ended, the last British troops left, and Israel declared independence.
By that time, Palestinian society was destroyed and over 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled or fled.
May 1948 – Oct 1948
1948 expulsion of the Tantura women and children to Furaydis
On 15 May, Arab League armies entered the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, beginning the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the second half of the 1948 Palestine war.
Most of the violence up to that point occurred in and around urban centers, in the Israeli portion of the partitioned land, while British troops were still present.
After the end of the Mandate, Israel seized more land allocated to the Palestinians by the UN partition plan, and expulsions, massacres, and the destruction of villages in rural areas increased,
including the Tantura massacre (22-23 May).
The first truce between Israel and the Arab League nations was signed in early June and lasted about a month.
In the summer of 1948, Israel began implementing anti-repatriation policies to prevent the return of Palestinians to their homes.
A Transfer Committee coordinated and supervised efforts to prevent Palestinian return, including the destruction of villages, resettlement of Arab villages with Jewish immigrants, confiscation of land, and the dissemination of propaganda discouraging return.
During the ten days of renewed fighting between Israel and the Arab states after the first truce, over 50,000 Palestinians were expelled from Lydda and Ramle (9-13 July).
A second truce was signed in mid-July and lasted until October.
During the two truces, Palestinians who returned to their homes or crops, labelled "infiltrators" by the Israelis, were killed or expelled.
Oct 1948 – Jul 1949
Expulsions, massacres, and Israeli expansion continued in the autumn of 1948,
including the depopulation of Beersheba (21 October),
the al-Dawayima massacre (29 October),
and the Safsaf massacre (also 29 October).
That month, Israel converted the ad hoc military governates ruling over Palestinian Arabs in Israel into a formal military government that controlled nearly all aspects of their lives, including curfews, travel restrictions, employment and other economic restrictions, arbitrary detention and other punishments, and political control.
Martial law assisted Israeli efforts to find and expel or kill "infiltrators" in order to prevent Palestinians from repopulating their villages.
Most of the fighting between Israel and the Arab states ended by the winter of 1948.
On 11 December 1948, the UN passed Resolution 194, resolving that Palestinians should be permitted to return to their homes and be compensated for lost or damaged property, and establishing the United Nations Conciliation Commission.
Armistices formally ending the war were signed between February and July 1949,
but massacres and expulsions of Palestinians continued in 1949 and beyond.
By the end of the war, Palestine was divided and Palestinians were scattered.
Israel held about 78% of Palestine,
including the 55% allocated to it by the UN partition plan and about half of the land allocated for a Palestinian state.
The West Bank and Gaza Strip comprised the remaining half, and were now held by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.
The internationally governed corpus separatum was divided between an Israeli-held West Jerusalem and a Jordanian-held East Jerusalem.
Israel with its expanded borders was admitted as a member to the United Nations in May 1949.
About 156,000 Palestinians remained under military rule in Israel, including many internally displaced persons.
The approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled from their homes were now living in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
None were allowed to return.
No Palestinian state was created.
The Nakba continued after the end of the war in 1949.
Israel prevented Palestinian refugees outside of Israel from returning.
Palestinians continued to be expelled, and more Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, with new Israeli settlements established in their place.
Palestinian place names and the name "Palestine" itself were removed from maps and books.
Sixty-nine Palestinians were killed in the 1953 Qibya massacre.
A few years later, 49 Palestinians were killed in the Kafr Qasim massacre, on the first day of the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Palestinians in Israel remained under strict martial law until 1966.
Naksa period (1967–1986)
During the 1967 Six-Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees were driven from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Most were driven into Jordan. This has become known as al-Naksa (the "setback").
After the war, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In 2011, Israel passed the Nakba Law, which denies government funding to institutions that commemorate the Nakba.
The 2023 Israel-Hamas War has caused the highest Palestinian casualties since the 1948 war, and has raised fears among Palestinians that history will repeat itself.
These fears were exacerbated when Israeli Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter said that the war would end with "Gaza Nakba 2023." Dichter was rebuked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Components
The Nakba encompasses the violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.
During the 1947–49 Palestine war, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, comprising around 80% of the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of what became Israel. Almost half of this figure (over 300,000 Palestinians) had fled or had been expelled ahead of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a casus belli for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Clause 10.(b) of the cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the UN Secretary-General of 15 May 1948 justifying the intervention by the Arab States, the Secretary-General of the League alleged that "approximately over a quarter of a million of the Arab population have been compelled to leave their homes and emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries." In the period after the war, a large number of Palestinians attempted to return to their homes; between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel during this period, the vast majority being unarmed and intending to return for economic or social reasons.
Other scholars, such as Yoav Gelber, Benny Morris, and Seth J. Frantzman, disagree that the Nakba constitutes an ethnic cleansing. Morris in 2016 rejected the description of "ethnic cleansing" for 1948, while also stating that the label of "partial ethnic cleansing" for 1948 was debatable; in 2004 Morris was responding to the claim of "ethnic cleansing" occurring in 1948 by stating that, given the alternative was "genocide - the annihilation of your people," there were "circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing ... It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland ... ['cleanse' was] the term they used at the time ... there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war"; Morris said this resulted in a "partial" expulsion of Arabs.
Still other scholars use different frameworks than "ethnic cleansing": for example, Richard Bessel and Claudia Haake use "forced removal" and Alon Confino uses "forced migration".
At the same time, many of those Palestinians who remained in Israel became internally displaced. In 1950, UNRWA estimated that 46,000 of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained inside the borders demarcated as Israel by the 1949 Armistice Agreements were internally displaced refugees. As of 2003, some 274,000 Arab citizens of Israel – or one in four in Israel – were internally displaced from the events of 1948.
The UN Partition Plan of 1947 assigned 56% of Palestine to the future Jewish state, while the Palestinian majority, 66%, were to receive 44% of the territory. 80% of the land in the to-be Jewish state was already owned by Palestinians; 11% had a Jewish title. Before, during and after the 1947–1949 war, hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed. Geographic names throughout the country were erased and replaced with Hebrew names, sometimes derivatives of the historical Palestinian nomenclature, and sometimes new inventions. Numerous non-Jewish historical sites were destroyed, not just during the wars, but in a subsequent process over a number of decades. For example, over 80% of Palestinian village mosques have been destroyed, and artefacts have been removed from museums and archives.
The creation of Palestinian statelessness is a central component of the Nakba and continues to be a feature of Palestinian national life to the present day. All Arab Palestinians became immediately stateless as a result of the Nakba, although some took on other nationalities. After 1948, Palestinians ceased to be simply Palestinian, instead divided into Israeli-Palestinians, East Jerusalem Palestinians, UNRWA Palestinians, West Bank-Palestinians, and Gazan-Palestinians, each with different legal statuses and restrictions, in addition to the wider Palestinian diaspora who were able to achieve residency outside of historic Palestine and the refugee camps.
The first Israeli Nationality Law, passed on 14 July 1952, denationalized Palestinians, rendering the former Palestinian citizenship "devoid of substance", "not satisfactory and is inappropriate to the situation following the establishment of Israel".
The Nakba was the primary cause of the Palestinian diaspora; at the same time Israel was created as a Jewish homeland, the Palestinians were turned into a "refugee nation" with a "wandering identity". Today a majority of the 13.7 million Palestinians live in the diaspora, i.e. they live outside of the historical area of Mandatory Palestine, primarily in other countries of the Arab world. Of the 6.2 million people registered by the UN's dedicated Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, about 40% live in the West Bank and Gaza, and 60% in the diaspora. A large number of these diaspora refugees are not integrated into their host countries, as illustrated by the ongoing tension of Palestinians in Lebanon or the 1990–91 Palestinian exodus from Kuwait.
These factors have resulted in a Palestinian identity of "suffering", whilst the deterritorialization of the Palestinians has created a uniting factor and focal point in the desire to return to their lost homeland.
Long-term implications and "ongoing Nakba"
The most important long-term implications of the Nakba for the Palestinian people were the loss of their homeland, the fragmentation and marginalization of their national community, and their transformation into a stateless people.
Since the late 1990s, the phrase "ongoing Nakba" (Arabic: النکبة المستمرة, romanized: al-nakba al-mustamirra) has emerged to describe the "continuous experience of violence and dispossession" experienced by the Palestinian people. This term enjoins the understanding of the Nakba not as an event in 1948, but as an ongoing process that continues through to the present day.
On November 11, 2023, Israeli Agriculture MinisterAvi Dichter remarked in an interview on N12 News on the nature of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war that "From an operational standpoint, you cannot wage a war like the IDF wants to in Gaza while the masses are between the tanks and the soldiers," he said. "It's the 2023 Gaza Nakba."
Terminology
The term Nakba was first applied to the events of 1948 by Constantin Zureiq, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book Manā an-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster). Zureiq wrote that "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history." Prior to 1948, the "Year of the Catastrophe" among Arabs referred to 1920, when European colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire into a series of separate states along lines of their own choosing.
The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet Burhan al-Deen al-Abushi. Zureiq's students subsequently founded the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1952, one of the first post-Nakba Palestinian political movements. In a six-volume encyclopedia Al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis Wal-Firdaws al-Mafqud (The Catastrophe: The Catastrophe of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise) published between 1958 and 1960, Aref al-Aref wrote: "How can I call it but Nakba ["catastrophe"]? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we [were] expelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons." Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari also used the term Nakba in the title of his book Sir al Nakba (The Secret behind the Disaster) written in 1955. The use of the term has evolved over time.
Initially, the use of the term Nakba among Palestinians was not universal. For example, for many years after 1948, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon avoided and even actively resisted using the term, because it lent permanency to a situation they viewed as temporary, and they often insisted on being called "returnees". In the 1950s and 1960s, terms they used to describe the events of 1948 included al-'ightiṣāb ("the rape"), or were more euphemistic, such as al-'aḥdāth ("the events"), al-hijra ("the exodus"), and lammā sharnā wa-tla'nā ("when we blackened our faces and left"). Nakba narratives were avoided by the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon in the 1970s, in favor of a narrative of revolution and renewal. Interest in the Nakba by organizations representing refugees in Lebanon surged in the 1990s due to the perception that the refugees' right of return might be negotiated away in exchange for Palestinian statehood, and the desire was to send a clear message to the international community that this right was non-negotiable.
The Palestinian national narrative regards the repercussions of the Nakba as a formative trauma defining its national, political and moral aspirations and its identity. The Palestinian people developed a victimized national identity in which they had lost their country as a result of the 1948 war. From the Palestinian perspective, they have been forced to pay for the Holocaust perpetrated in Europe with their freedom, properties and bodies instead of those who were truly responsible.
Shmuel Trigano, writing in the Jewish Political Studies Review published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, outlines the evolution of the Nakba narrative through three stages. Initially, it depicted Palestinians as victims displaced by Israel's creation to make way for Jewish immigrants. The next phase recast the Six-Day War as Israel's colonization of Palestinian lands, aligning the Palestinian cause with anti-colonial sentiments. The final stage leverages Holocaust memories, accusing Israel of apartheid, resonating with Western guilt over the Holocaust. He argues these evolving interpretations omit complex historical factors involving failed attempts to eliminate Israel, contested territorial claims, and Jewish refugee displacement from Arab nations.
The Israeli national narrative rejects the Palestinian characterization of 1948 as the Nakba (catastrophe), instead viewing it as the War of Independence that established Israel's statehood and sovereignty. It portrays the events of 1948 as the culmination of the Zionist movement and Jewish national aspirations, resulting in military success against invading Arab armies, armistice agreements, and recognition of Israel's legitimacy by the United Nations. While acknowledging some instances of Israeli responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis, as documented by historians like Benny Morris, the overarching Israeli narrative accommodates this within the context of Israel's emergence as a state under difficult war conditions, without negating Israel's foundational story and identity. It perceives the 1948 war and its outcome as an equally formative and fundamental event – as an act of justice and redemption for the Jewish people after centuries of historical suffering, and the key step in the "negation of the Diaspora".
According to this narrative, the Palestinian Arabs voluntarily fled their homes during the war, encouraged by Arab leaders who told Palestinians to temporarily evacuate so that Arab armies could destroy Israel, and then upon losing the war, refused to integrate them. This viewpoint also contrasts Jewish refugees absorbed by Israel with Palestinian refugees kept stateless by Arab countries as political pawns. In contrast to the Palestinian narrative, claims that Arab villages were depopulated and that Palestinian homes were destroyed are not acknowledged by the mainstream Israeli narrative, typically using terminology such as "abandoned" property and "population exchange" rather than "confiscated" or "expelled."
Israeli legislative measures
Israeli officials have repeatedly described the term as embodying an "Arab lie" or as a justification for terrorism. In 2009, the Israeli Education Ministry banned using the term "nakba" in textbooks for Arab children.
In May 2009, Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. Following public criticism, the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the Minister of Finance would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions found to be "commemorating Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning". The new draft was approved by the Knesset in March 2011, and became known as the Nakba Law. In 2011, the Knesset passed the Nakba Law, forbidding institutions from commemorating the event. According to Neve Gordon, a school ceremony memoralizing the Nakba would, under the 2011 law, have to respond to charges that it incited racism, violence and terrorism, and denied Israel's democratic character, in doing so. In 2023, after the United Nations instituted a commemoration day for the Nakba on 15 May, the Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan remonstrated that the event itself was antisemitic. The implementation of the new law unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society.
According to some historians and academics, there exists a form of historical negationism that pertains to the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight. The denial of the Nakba is central to Zionist narratives of 1948. The term 'Nakba denial' was used in 1998 by Steve Niva, editor of the Middle East Report, in describing how the rise of the early Internet led to competing online narratives of the events of 1948. In the 21st century the term came to be used by activists and scholars to describe narratives that minimized elements of the expulsion and its aftermath, particularly in Israeli and Western historiography before the late 1980s, when Israel's history began to be reviewed and rewritten by the New Historians.
Nakba denial has been described as still prevalent in both Israeli and American discourse and linked to various tropes associated with anti-Arab racism. The 2011 'Nakba Law' authorized the withdrawal of state funds from organizations that commemorate the day on which the Israeli state was established as a day of mourning, or that deny the existence of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state." Israeli grassroots movements, such as Zochrot, aim to commemorate the Nakba through public memorials and events. In May 2023, following the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas made the denial of the 1948 expulsion a crime punishable by two years in jail.
On 17 May 2024, the United Nations commemorated the Palestinian Nakba for a second year, calling on the international community to redouble its efforts to end the Israeli occupation. An event, "1948-2024: The Continuing Palestinian Nakba" was also held.
Historiography
Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish claim that the Palestinian national memory of the Nakba has evolved over time, reconstructing the events of 1948 to serve contemporary Palestinian national demands. They argue that the Palestinian historiography of the Nakba tends to "entirely ignore" the attacks launched by Arab irregular and volunteer forces against the Yishuv, downplaying the role of Palestinian leaders in the events leading to the 1948 war and defeat.
Elias Khoury writes that the works of Edward Said were important for taking a "radically new approach" to the Nakba than those of Zureiq and other early adopters of the term, whose usage had "the connotation of a natural catastrophe" and thus freed "Palestinian leadership and Arab governments from direct responsibility for the defeat."
In films and literature
Farha, a film about the Nakba directed by Jordanian director Darin J. Sallam, was chosen as Jordan's official submission for the 2023 Academy Awards International Feature Film category. In response, Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Finance Minister, ordered the treasury to withdraw government funding for Jaffa's Al Saraya Theater, where the film is scheduled for projection.
^Note: The 6.2 million is composed of 5.55 million registered refugees and 0.63m other registered people; UNRWA's definition of Other Registered Persons refer to "those who, at the time of original registration did not satisfy all of UNRWA's Palestine refugee criteria, but who were determined to have suffered significant loss and/or hardship for reasons related to the 1948 conflict in Palestine; they also include persons who belong to the families of other registered persons."
^ Sayigh 2023, pp. 285 ("Nakba entailed a continuing state of rightlessness"), 288 n. 12 ("the Nakba was not limited to 1948") and 288 n. 13 ("Palestinians were attacked in Jordan in ‘Black September’, 1970, with heavy casualties; in Lebanon during the civil war of 1975–1990, including the massacre of Tal al-Zaater [1976]; during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with the massacre of Sabra/ Shatila; during the Battle of the Camps 1985–1988; and again in 2007 with the Lebanese Army's attack on Nahr al-Bared camp. Palestinians were evicted from Kuwait in 1990, and again in 2003; expelled from Libya in 1994–1995; evicted by landlords in Iraq in 2003. In Syria, 4,027 have been killed and 120,00 displaced so far in the current civil war. Israeli attacks against Gaza have been continuous: 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2019 ... In the Occupied West Bank, attacks by armed Israeli settlers are frequent [Amnesty 2017].");
Pappe 2021, pp. 70-71 ("[p. 70] The incremental colonization, ethnic cleansing, and oppression occurring daily in historical Palestine is usually ignored by the world media.") and 80 ("The Palestinians refer to their current situation quite often as al-Nakba al-Mustamera, the ongoing Nakba. The original Nakba or catastrophe occurred in 1948, when Israel ethnically cleansed half of the Palestinian population and demolished half of their villages and most of their towns. The world ignored that crime and absolved Israel from any responsibility. Since then, the settler-colonial state of Israel has attempted to complete the ethnic cleansing of 1948.");
Khalidi 2020, p. 75, "None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.38 Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.";
Shenhav 2019, p. 49, "To be sure, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine did not begin or end in 1948. It started back in the 1920s, with an aggressive acquisition and takeover of lands that reached a peak in 1948 and again in 1967. The ethnic cleansing continues in the present day by other means: the silent transfer in Jerusalem; the settlements and the expropriation of land in the West Bank; the communal settlements in the Galilee for Jews only; the new Citizenship decree (which bans Palestinian citizens from bringing their Palestinian spouses into Israel, thanks to the emergency laws); the “unrecognized Palestinian villages” constantly under the threat of destruction; the incessant demolition of Bedouin houses in the south; the omission of Arabic on road signs; the prohibition on importing literature from Arab countries, and many others. One telling example is the fact that not one Arab town or village has been established in Israel since 1948.";
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, pp. 7 ("The Nakba is an explicitly continuing present. Its consequences as well as the eliminatory colonial ideas and practices that informed it are still unfolding, being deployed, and affecting contemporary Palestinian life. Its aftermath of suffering and political weakness affects almost every Palestinian and Palestinian family, along with the Palestinian collective, on a near-daily basis.") and 33 n. 4 ("In Palestinian writings the signifier “Nakba” came to designate two central meanings, which will be used in this volume interchangeably: (1) the 1948 disaster and (2) the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestine that reached its peak in the catastrophe of 1948.");
Khoury 2018, pp. xiii–xv, "[p. xiii] The Nakba's initial bloody chapters were written with the forceful ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 ... This proves the error of some Arab historians who considered the Nakba a historic event whose place is set firmly in the past. The everyday reality of life in Palestine clearly indicates that the 1948 war was merely the beginning of the catastrophic event. It did not end when the cease-fire agreements of 1949 were signed. In fact, 1948 was the beginning of a phenomenon that continues to this day ... [p. xiv] The Nakba continues to this day even for those Israeli Palestinians who were denied their label of national identity as “Palestinians” and are now referred to as “Israeli Arabs.” ... While the continuing Nakba is obscured from view in Israel by the laws and legislation approved by the Israeli parliament, the Nakba is very conspicuous in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Those lands occupied in 1967 are subject to military laws, while settlements proliferate in every corner: from Jerusalem, which is being suffocated by Jewish settlements, to the West Bank, through to the Jordan Valley. Repression, administrative detentions, and outright killing have become daily institutionalized practices. Israel, in fact, has built a comprehensive apartheid system shored up by settler-only roads that circumvent Palestinian cities, the wall of separation that tears up and confiscates Palestinian cities and villages, and the many checkpoints that have made moving from one Palestinian Bantustan to the next a daily ordeal. The consequences of the continuing Nakba are nowhere clearer than in Jerusalem and Hebron, where settlers plant their communities among Palestinians, closing roads and turning ordinary chores into a daily nightmare. They reach the peak of inhumanity by transforming Gaza into the biggest open-air prison in the world.";
Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2017, pp. 393 ("We use “Nakba” to refer to an event and a process. The event refers to the dismantlement of Palestine and Palestinian society in 1948 as a result of the establishment of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the part of Palestine on which Israel was established. The process refers to the continuation of what started in 1948 until today in the forms of dispossession, exile, colonization, and occupation."), 405 ("the Palestinian catastrophe that has been continuing for close to seven decades"), 407 ("Israel continued the ethnic cleansing well into the early 1950s"), and 422-423 ("This emerging differentiation between the Nakba as a traumatic and rapturous event and the Nakba as an ongoing process is of utmost importance ... Support for the increasing awareness of the Nakba as an ongoing structural process rather than a memory of a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end, and support for the realization that the Nakba also includes the Palestinians in Israel, can be found in the gradual emergence of certain sentiments ... the continued Nakba is the other side of the colonial project of the Jewish state.");
Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, pp. 1 ([Abstract] "The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of Palestine without its people, comprising massacres, physical destruction of villages, appropriation of land, property and culture, can be seen as an ongoing process and not merely a historical event.") and 12-18 ("[p. 12] The concept of an ‘ongoing’ Nakba is not a new one for Palestinians ...");
Masalha 2012, pp. 5 ("The clearing out and displacement of the Palestinians did not end with the 1948 war, the Israeli authorities continued to ‘transfer’ (a euphemism for the removal of Palestinians from the land), dispossess and colonise Palestinians during the 1950s"), 12-14 ("[p. 12] The Nakba as a continuing trauma occupies a central place in the Palestinian psyche ... [p. 13] With millions still living under Israeli colonialism, occupation or in exile, the Nakba remains at the heart of both Palestinian national identity and political resistance ... [p. 14] the Nakba and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank are continuing"), 75 ("The pattern of Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians established in 1948 has been maintained: for example, the massacres at Qibya in October 1953, the al-Azazme tribes in March 1955, Kafr Qasim on 29 October 1956, Samo‘a in the 1960s, the villages of the Galilee during Land Day on 30 March 1976, Sabra and Shatila on 16–18 September 1982, al-Khalil (Hebron) on 25 February 1994, Kfar Qana in 1999, Wadi Ara in 2000, the Jenin refugee camp on 13 April 2002, the mass killing during the popular Palestinian uprisings (intifadas) against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza (1987–1993 and 2000–2002), Gaza (December 2008–January 2009), the Gaza flotilla raid on 31 May 2010."), 251 ("The processes of ethnic cleansing and transfer in Palestine continue."), and 254 ("While the Holocaust is an event in the past, the Nakba did not end in 1948. For Palestinians, mourning sixty-three years of al-Nakba is not just about remembering the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of 1948, it is also about marking the ongoing dispossession and dislocation. Today the trauma of the Nakba continues: the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians caused by Israeli colonisation of the West Bank, land confiscation, continued closures and invasions, de facto annexation facilitated by Israel's 730-kilometre ‘apartheid wall’ in the occupied West Bank, and the ongoing horrific siege of Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are denied access to land, water and other basic resources. Today the Nakba continues through the ‘politics of denial’. There are millions of Palestinian refugees around the world, all of whom are denied their internationally recognised ‘right of return’ to their homes and land. The memory, history, rights and needs of Palestinian refugees have been excluded not only from recent Middle East peacemaking efforts but also from Palestinian top-down and elite approaches to the refugee issue (Boqai’ and Rempel 2003). The ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Naqab, and the failure of both the Israeli state and the international community to acknowledge 1948 as such, continue to underpin the Palestine–Israel conflict ...");
Lentin 2010, p. 111, "Non-Zionist scholars operate a different timescale and highlight the continuities between wartime policies and post-1948 ethnic cleansing. They treat the Nakba as the beginning of an ongoing policy of expulsion and expropriation, rather than a fait accompli which ended a long time ago.";
Abu-Lughod & Sa'di 2007, pp. 10 ("For Palestinians, still living their dispossession, still struggling or hoping for return, many under military occupation, many still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over ... the Nakba is not over yet; after almost sixty years neither the Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues.") and 18-19 ("One of the most important is that the past represented by the cataclysmic Nakba is not past. What happened in 1948 is not over, either because Palestinians are still living the consequences or because similar processes are at work in the present ... . Their dispersion has continued, their status remains unresolved, and their conditions, especially in the refugee camps, can be miserable. For those with the class backgrounds or good fortune to have rebuilt decent lives elsewhere, whether in the United States, Kuwait, or Lebanon, the pain may be blunted. But for those in the vicinity of Israel, the assaults by the Zionist forces that culminated in the expulsions of the Nakba have not actually ceased. The Palestinians who remained within the borders of the new state were subjected to military rule for the first twenty years. Then in 1967, with the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, there was another dislocating assault. In 1982 Israel bombarded and invaded Lebanon, causing mass destruction, the routing of the PLO, and then a massacre in the refugee camps. With Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories (the two intifadas), the violence escalated. Hardly a week goes by now when Palestinians are not shelled, shot, “assassinated,” arrested, taken to prison, or tortured. Not a day goes by when they are not humiliated at checkpoints or prevented from moving about by the Israeli army. The confrontation continues and with it the funerals, the house demolitions, the deportations, and the exodus. The usurping of water, the confiscation of land, the denial of legal rights, and the harassment also continue.");
Jayyusi 2007, pp. 109-110 ("The unfolding trajectory of continuous dispossession and upheaval experienced at the hands of the Israeli state was to reshape the space of the collective narrative over time. It was to become obvious that the Nakba was not the last collective site of trauma, but what came later to be seen, through the prism of repeated dispossessions and upheavals, as the foundational station in an unfolding and continuing saga of dispossession, negations, and erasure.") and 114-116
^Masalha 2012, p. 3; Dajani 2005, p. 42: "The nakba is the experience that has perhaps most defined Palestinian history. For the Palestinian, it is not merely a political event — the establishment of the state of Israel on 78 percent of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, or even, primarily a humanitarian one — the creation of the modern world's most enduring refugee problem. The nakba is of existential significance to Palestinians, representing both the shattering of the Palestinian community in Palestine and the consolidation of a shared national consciousness."; Abu-Lughod & Sa'di 2007, p. 3: "For Palestinians, the 1948 War led indeed to a "catastrophe." A society disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently. The Nakba has thus become, both in Palestinian memory and history, the demarcation line between two qualitatively opposing periods. After 1948, the lives of the Palestinians at the individual, community, and national level were dramatically and irreversibly changed."
^Khalidi, Rashid I. (1992). "Observations on the Right of Return". Journal of Palestine Studies. 21 (2): 29–40. doi:10.2307/2537217. JSTOR2537217. Only by understanding the centrality of the catastrophe of politicide and expulsion that befell the Palestinian people – al-nakba in Arabic – is it possible to understand the Palestinians' sense of the right of return
^ Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511, "over 80 per cent";
Pappe 2022, p. 128, "Three-quarters of a million Palestinians ... almost 90 per cent";
Khalidi 2020, p. 60, "Some 80 percent ... At least 720,000 ...";
Slater 2020, pp. 81 ("about 750,000"), 83 ("over 80 percent"), and 350 ("It is no longer a matter of serious dispute that in the 1947–48 period—beginning well before the Arab invasion in May 1948—some 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from or fled their villages and homes in Israel in fear of their lives—an entirely justifiable fear, in light of massacres carried out by Zionist forces.");
Shenhav 2019, p. 49, "750,000";
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 7, "some 750,000";
Bishara 2017, pp. 138 ("expelled close to 750,000") and 148 n. 21 ("number of the refugees displaced ranged between 700,000 and 900,000";
Bäuml 2017, p. 105, "approximately 750,000";
Cohen 2017, p. 87, "approximately 700,000 ... between half a million and a million";
Manna 2013, pp. 93 ("approximately 750,000") and 99 n. 12 ("Recently, both Palestinian and Israeli scholars seem to agree on this estimate of 700,000–750,000 refugees.");
Masalha 2012, pp. 2, "about 90 per cent ... 750,000 refugees";
Wolfe 2012, p. 133, "some three quarters of a million";
Davis 2011, pp. 7 ("more than 750,000") and 237 n. 21 ("Most scholars generally agree with the UN number, which it was somewhere in the vicinity of 750,000");
Lentin 2010, pp. 6 ("at least 80 per cent") and 7 ("more than 700,000");
Ghanim 2009, p. 25, "Around 750,000-900,000";
Kimmerling 2008, p. 280, "700,000 to 900,000";
Morris 2008, p. 407, "some seven hundred thousand";
Sa'di 2007, pp. 297, "at least 780,000 ... more than 80 percent"
^ Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511;
Manna 2022, p. 17;
Pappe 2022, pp. 121 and 128 ("Half of the villages had been destroyed, flattened by Israeli bulldozers ...");
Khalidi 2020, p. 73, "conquest and depopulation ... of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages";
Shenhav 2019, p. 49, "abolition of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages";
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 1, "destruction of hundreds of villages and urban neighborhoods ... evacuation of villages";
Cohen 2017, p. 80;
Pappe 2017, p. 66, "In a matter of seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied."
Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2017, p. 400, "Palestinian cities whose inhabitants were almost completely forced out ... hundreds of evacuated and destroyed towns";
Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, p. 10 (quoting Mark Levene) "With at least 5,000 men, women, and children slaughtered in the massacres, 531 villages and 11 major towns destroyed and up to 800,000 folk uprooted, mostly into exile, the point of Pappe's effort can only be affirmed.";
Manna 2013, p. 91;
Khoury 2012, p. 259;
Masalha 2012, pp. 3 ("over 500 villages and towns and a whole country and its people disappeared from international maps and dictionaries ... Walid Khalidi ... listed 418 depopulated and destroyed villages. However, Salman Abu-Sitta's figure of 531 includes 77 destroyed Bedouin villages in the south"), 7 ("coastal cities of Palestine — Jaffa, Haifa and Acre — were largely depopulated"), 74 ("hundreds of villages had been completely depopulated and their houses blown up or bulldozed"), 90-91 ("Of the 418 depopulated villages documented by Khalidi, 293 (70 per cent) were totally destroyed and 90 (22 per cent) were largely destroyed."), 107 ("nearly 500 destroyed and depopulated villages"), and 115 ("towns and villages of southern Palestine, including the cities of Beer Sheba and al-Majdal, were completely depopulated");
Wolfe 2012, p. 161 n.1, "According to official Israeli estimates, over 85% of Palestinian villages were ‘abandoned’ in the Nakba, 218 villages being listed as destroyed.";
Davis 2011, pp. 7 ("destruction of more than four hundred villages ... depopulation of Palestinians from cities"), 9 ("418 villages that were emptied"), and 237 n. 20 ("The total number of depopulated villages, hamlets, settlements, and towns is estimated to be between 290 and 472. The most comprehensive study and the clearest on its methods for including and eliminating population settlements is the massive All That Remains (W. Khalidi 1992), which estimates the number of villages to be 418. According to this study, Israeli topographical maps chart 290 villages, Benny Morris's 1987 study lists 369, and the Palestinian encyclopedia published by Hay’at al-Mawsu‘a al-Filastiniyya gives 391 (among other sources on the subject).");
Ghanim 2009, p. 25, "about 531 villages were deliberately destroyed";
Kimmerling 2008, p. 280, "Most of their villages, towns, and neighborhoods were destroyed or repopulated by Jewish residents";
Sa'di 2007, pp. 293-297 ("[p. 297] destruction of some 420 Palestinian towns and villages")
^ Partner, Nancy (2008). "The Linguistic Turn along Post-Postmodern Borders: Israeli/Palestinian Narrative Conflict". New Literary History. 39 (4): 823–845. doi:10.1353/nlh.0.0065. JSTOR20533118. S2CID144556954.
^ Golani, Motti; Manna, Adel (2011). Two sides of the coin: independence and Nakba, 1948: two narratives of the 1948 War and its outcome. Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation. p. 14. ISBN978-90-8979-080-4. Retrieved 14 November 2023. The Palestinians regard the Nakba and its repercussions as a formative trauma defining their identity and their national, moral, and political aspirations. As a result of the 1948 war, the Palestinian people, which to a large degree lost their country to the establishment of a Jewish state for the survivors of the Holocaust, developed a victimized national identity. From their perspective, the Palestinians have been forced to pay for the Jewish Holocaust with their bodies, their property, and their freedom instead of those who were truly responsible. Jewish Israelis, in contrast, see the war and its outcome not merely as an act of historical justice that changed the historical course of the Jewish people, which until that point had been filled with suffering and hardship, but also as a birth – the birth of Israel as an independent Jewish state after two thousand years of exile. As such, it must be pure and untainted, because if a person, a nation, or a state is born in sin, its entire essence is tainted. In this sense, discourse on the war is not at all historical but rather current and extremely sensitive. Its power and intensity is directly influenced by present day events. In the Israeli and the Palestinian cases, therefore, the 1948 war plays a pivotal role in two simple, clear, unequivocal, and harmonious narratives, with both peoples continuing to see the war as a formative event in their respective histories.
^Schmemann, Serge (15 May 1998). "MIDEAST TURMOIL: THE OVERVIEW; 9 Palestinians Die in Protests Marking Israel's Anniversary". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on 5 March 2022. Retrieved 7 April 2021. We are not asking for a lot. We are not asking for the moon. We are asking to close the chapter of nakba once and for all, for the refugees to return and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land, our land, our land, just like other peoples. We want to celebrate in our capital, holy Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem.
Manna 2022, pp. 2 ("the principal objective of the Zionist leadership to keep as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish state"), 4 ("in the 1948 war, when it became clear that the objective that enjoyed the unanimous support of Zionists of all inclinations was to establish a Jewish state with the smallest possible number of Palestinians"), and 33 ("The Zionists had two cherished objectives: fewer Arabs in the country and more land in the hands of the settlers.");
Khalidi 2020, p. 76: "The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to dominate the country without the seizures of land.";
Slater 2020, pp. 49 ("There were three arguments for the moral acceptability of some form of transfer. The main one—certainly for the Zionists but not only for them—was the alleged necessity of establishing a secure and stable Jewish state in as much of Palestine as was feasible, which was understood to require a large Jewish majority."), 81 ("From the outset of the Zionist movement all the major leaders wanted as few Arabs as possible in a Jewish state"), 87 ("The Zionist movement in general and David Ben-Gurion in particular had long sought to establish a Jewish state in all of “Palestine,” which in their view included the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria."), and 92 ("As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand wrote: 'During every round of the national conflict over Palestine, which is the longest running conflict of its kind in the modern era, Zionism has tried to appropriate additional territory.'");
Segev 2019, p. 418, "the Zionist dream from the start—maximum territory, minimum Arabs";
Cohen 2017, p. 78, "As was suggested by Masalha (1992), Morris (1987), and other scholars, many preferred a state without Arabs or with as small a minority as possible, and plans for population transfers were considered by Zionist leaders and activists for years.";
Lustick & Berkman 2017, pp. 47–48, "As Ben-Gurion told one Palestinian leader in the early 1930s, 'Our final goal is the independence of the Jewish people in Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan River, not as a minority, but as a community numbering millions" (Teveth 1985:130). Ipso facto, this meant Zionism's success would produce an Arab minority in Palestine, no matter what its geographical dimensions.";
Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2014, p. 6, "It was obvious to most approaches within the Zionist movement—certainly to the mainstream as represented by Labor Zionism and its leadership headed by Ben Gurion, that a Jewish state would entail getting rid of as many of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land as possible ... Following Wolfe, we argue that the logic of demographic elimination is an inherent component of the Zionist project as a settler-colonial project, although it has taken different manifestations since the founding of the Zionist movement.";
Masalha 2012, p. 38, "From the late nineteenth century and throughout the Mandatory period the demographic and land policies of the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine continued to evolve. But its demographic and land battles with the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were always a battle for 'maximum land and minimum Arabs' (Masalha 1992, 1997, 2000).";
Lentin 2010, p. 7, "'the Zionist leadership was always determined to increase the Jewish space ... Both land purchases in and around the villages, and military preparations, were all designed to dispossess the Palestinians from the area of the future Jewish state' (Pappe 2008: 94).";
Shlaim 2009, p. 56, "That most Zionist leaders wanted the largest possible Jewish state in Palestine with as few Arabs inside it as possible is hardly open to question.";
Pappé 2006, p. 250, "In other words, hitkansut is the core of Zionism in a slightly different garb: to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible." harvnb error: no target: CITEREFPappé2006 (help);
Morris 2004, p. 588, "But the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise. The piecemeal eviction of tenant farmers, albeit in relatively small numbers, during the first five decades of Zionist land purchase and settlement naturally stemmed from, and in a sense hinted at, the underlying thrust of the ideology, which was to turn an Arab-populated land into a State with an overwhelming Jewish majority."
^Khalidi 2020, pp. 27 ("around 94 percent [Arabs]"), 28 ("6 percent [Jews]"), and 43; Slater 2020, pp. 39 ("50,000 Jews ... 700,000 Arabs") and 44 ("about 750,000, of whom 50,000–60,000 or less than 9 percent were Jewish"); Masalha 2018, p. 314, "[quoting Balfour in 1919] 700,000 Arabs"; Morris 2008, p. 15, "Jewish numbers had grown under the Ottomans from some twenty-five thousand to sixty to eighty-five thousand between 1881 and 1914. The Arab increase had been less dramatic—from 450,000 (1881) to 650,000 (1918)"; Pappe 2006, p. 11, "no more than five per cent [Jews]"
^Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, p. 53, "around 12 percent [Jews]"; Pappe 2022, p. 79, "They [Palestinians] represented 90 per cent of the inhabitants, but were treated as if they constituted only 50 per cent"; Davis 2011, p. 6, "11 percent [Jews]"
^Sayigh 2023, p. 281, "A more dangerous discursive deformation was the Balfour Declaration's designation of the Palestinians as 'existing non-Jewish communities' contrasted with 'the Jewish people' [Cronin 2017]. The political implications of this distinction are evident: a 'people' was qualified for nation/statehood, whereas disparate 'communities' were not.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 27, "Significantly, the overwhelming Arab majority of the population (around 94 percent at that time) went unmentioned by Balfour, except in a backhanded way as the 'existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'";
Slater 2020, p. 39, "... the Balfour Doctrine and the League Mandate were conditional, stipulating that the 'non-Jewish' communities of Palestine—some 90 percent of the indigenous peoples!—must retain their 'civil and religious rights.'";
Wolfe 2012, p. 146, "The Mandate's preamble included a safeguard clause protecting the rights of ‘existing non-Jewish communities’. This clause is significant on a number of counts, not least the transience implied in the term ‘existing’, whose suggestion of temporariness was reinforced by the designation of 91 per cent of the population as ‘non-Jewish’.";
Shlaim 2009, p. 23, "On the other hand, to refer to 90 per cent of the population as 'the non-Jewish communities in Palestine' was arrogant, dismissive and even racist. It was also the worst kind of imperial double standard, implying that there was one law for the Jews, and one law for everybody else.";
Morris 2008, pp. 9–10
^Manna 2022, p. 31, "However, the Palestinian leadership, which was aware of the unfavorable balance of power, could not accept the unjust partition resolution. Being content to say 'no' without presenting acceptable alternatives put it in the position of the aggressor, and the Jewish side appeared to be the victim who was threatened with annihilation at the hands of neighboring Arab states. Despite their resounding utterances, these states were not prepared for a military battle in Palestine, nor were they united in their opinions as to what needed to be done. The Palestinians found themselves being propelled into battle without preparation and with neither a unified command nor sufficient awareness of what was happening in the corridors of the Arab League.";
Pappe 2022, pp. 116, "Despite this, the Palestinians’ consensual rejection of partition was fully known to UNSCOP. For the Palestinians, leaders and common people alike, partition was totally unacceptable, the equivalent in their eyes of the division of Algeria between the French settlers and the indigenous population.";
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 16, "The Arabs opposed the partition plan—which they justifiably saw as support for Zionist colonialism and imperialist intervention in the Arab Middle East—and especially the fact that it had awarded the Jews, a minority in Palestine, more than half of the territory.";
Cohen 2017, p. 74, "The Palestinian leadership and the Arab states rejected the Partition Plan (for figures and a detailed analysis of the UN Partition Plan and the Arab rejection of it, see Khalidi 1997). Two fundamental reasons are worth mentioning: first, they regarded the area in its entirety as Arab territory and refused to submit any of it to Jewish sovereignty. Secondly, they objected to a move that would render one-third of the Palestinian population a minority in a Jewish state.";
Shlaim 2009, p. 38, "Within the Arab League, however, there was no consensus on the future of Palestine. Most members, at least at the declaratory level, backed an uncompromising policy in the fight against Zionism, and denounced the United Nations partition plan of 29 November 1947 as illegal, impracticable and unjust, as did the AHC. The Arab League was fully behind the Palestinians in opposing partition and, from the time it was founded in March 1945 until Britain confirmed its decision to withdraw from Palestine in the autumn of 1947, there was consistent support for creating a unitary and independent Palestinian state. After that, however, there were conflicting views concerning the positive policy to adopt on the future of Palestine. On the one hand there was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who pursued a maximalist programme for an independent and sovereign Palestinian state over the whole of Palestine. On the other hand there was King Abdullah of Transjordan, whose undeclared aim was to partition Palestine with the Zionists and to annex the Arab part to his kingdom.";
Morris 2008, pp. 63–64, "The Zionists and their supporters rejoiced; the Arab delegations walked out of the plenum after declaring the resolution invalid. The Arabs failed to understand why the international community was awarding the Jews any part of Palestine. Further, as one Palestinian historian later put it, they could not fathom why 37 percent of the population had been given 55 percent of the land (of which they owned only 7 percent). Moreover, the Jews had been given the best agricultural lands (the Coastal Plain and Jezreel and Jordan Valleys) while the Arabs had received the 'bare and hilly' parts, as one Palestinian politician, 'Awni 'Abd al-Hadi, told a Zionist agent.162 More generally, 'the Palestinians failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust. . . . [And] they failed to see why it was not fair for the Jews to be a minority in a unitary Palestinian state, while it was fair for almost half of the Palestinian population—the indigenous majority on its own ancestral soil—to be converted overnight into a minority under alien rule.'".
But see:Slater 2020, pp. 65-66 ("[p. 66] In any case, many Palestinians were prepared to negotiate a compromise settlement with the Zionists. As several of the Israeli 'New Historians' have demonstrated, the failure of the Palestinian revolt of the 1930s and the determination of the British and later the United Nations to enforce a compromise in Palestine resulted in greater moderation and realism among many Palestinians who by the mid-1940s had come to the realization that partition and the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine was unavoidable. As a result, a number of Palestinian proposals were made for a compromise settlement; they were ignored by Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders because of the Zionist determination, as Simha Flapan put it, 'to achieve full sovereignty [in a Palestine] at whatever cost.'") and 212 ("To be sure, the Palestinians and the Arab states also initially rejected a two-state compromise, for example, as it was embodied in the 1947 UN partition plan ...")
^Pappe 2022, p. 116, "In fact, the Yishuv's leaders felt confident enough to contemplate a takeover of fertile areas within the designated Arab state. This could be achieved in the event of an overall war without losing the international legitimacy of their new state.";
Slater 2020, pp. 64-65, 75 ("... the evidence is overwhelming that the Zionist leaders had no intention of accepting partition as a necessary and just compromise with the Palestinians. Rather, their reluctant acceptance of the UN plan was only tactical; their true goals were to gain time, establish the Jewish state, build up its armed forces, and then expand to incorporate into Israel as much of ancient or biblical Palestine as they could.") and 212 ("... while for tactical reasons Ben-Gurion and the other Zionist leaders officially “accepted” it—but their fingers were crossed behind their backs, for they planned to expand from the partition borders once they had the power to do so. Which they did.");
Masalha 2012, p. 58, "[quoting Morris] large sections of Israeli [Yishuv] society — including the Ahdut Ha’avodah party, Herut, and Mapai leaders such as Ben-Gurion — were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state's borders beyond the UN-earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians. Like Jordan's King Abdullah, they too were opposed to the emergence of a Palestinian Arab state and moved to prevent it.";
Morris 2008, p. 101, "... mainstream Zionist leaders, from the first, began to think of expanding the Jewish state beyond the 29 November partition resolution borders.";
Sa'di 2007, p. 291, "According to the Israeli historian Benny Morris (2001: 138) the two leaders of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, 'saw partition as a stepping stone to further expansion and eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine.'".
But see:Cohen 2017, pp. 74–76, "[p. 74] The Zionist leadership, for its part, promoted the proposal and worked with American assistance to secure its adoption by the UN General Assembly ... One of the questions often raised is whether the Zionists were genuine when they accepted it ... [p. 75] though the existence of a large Arab minority in the Jewish state was not seen by the Zionist leadership as the best, ideal situation, they nonetheless decided to adhere to international law and to the UN resolution if the Palestinian Arabs adhered to it."
^Manna 2022, p. 88, "Under the partition resolution, the Arab state included three basic areas: the Galilee mountains in the north, the mountains of central Palestine (subsequently called the West Bank), and a coastal strip which extends from north of Isdud (Ashdod) to Rafah. The presence of the Egyptian army in the south explains why the Gaza Strip remained under Arab rule, and the presence of the Jordanian Arab Legion in the center, and the prior agreement between King Abdullah and the Zionist leadership, explains what became of the West Bank.";
Pappe 2022, pp. 123 ("The Legion paused near the city of Jerusalem, the fate of which remained undecided despite the tacit understanding before the war between the Hashemites and the Jews on the partitioning of post-Mandate Palestine between them.") and 129 ("The tacit understanding reached between Israel and Jordan during the war over the partitioning of post-Mandate Palestine neutralized the Arab Legion, Jordan's efficient, British-led army, which confined its activity to the area around Jerusalem. This was a strategic decision that determined the balance of power in the 1948 war.");
Khalidi 2020, pp. 77–78, "Thereafter he sought to expand his territory through a variety of means. The most obvious direction was westward, into Palestine, whence the king's lengthy secret negotiations with the Zionists to reach an accommodation that would give him control of part of the country ... Both the king and the British opposed allowing the Palestinians to benefit from the 1947 partition or the war that followed, and neither wanted an independent Arab state in Palestine. They had come to a secret agreement to prevent this, via sending “the Arab Legion across the Jordan River as soon as the Mandate ended to occupy the part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs.” This goal meshed with that of the Zionist movement, which negotiated with ‘Abdullah to achieve the same end.";
Slater 2020, pp. 79 ("In fall 1947, a number of meetings occurred between King Abdullah of Jordan and high Zionist leaders. These resulted in a secret agreement under which Abdullah would keep the Arab Legion out of any Arab invasion into the lands designated to Israel by the UN, and Israel would stay out of the West Bank, designated for an Arab state, and East Jerusalem, which was to be internationalized. Because of his ambitions to extend Hashemite rule into the West Bank, Abdullah had no interest in destroying a Jewish state within the UN boundaries; in fact, he preferred a friendly Jewish neighbor to a hostile Palestinian one.") and 88 ("Before the war, the Zionists and King Abdullah of Jordan had secretly reached an agreement to avoid war with each other: the Israelis would not oppose a Jordanian takeover of the West Bank as long as Abdullah kept the Arab Legion out of an Israel within its UN-designated boundaries.");
Manna 2013, pp. 90-93 ("[p. 90] They failed also to consider the effects of factionalized Arab world and the clear interest of King Abdullah of Jordan in preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, even if it meant colluding with Britain and the Jewish Yishuv.");
Masalha 2012, p. 150, "The picture that emerges from the 1948 war, for example, as historian Avi Shlaim has shown, is not the fictional one (still repeated by Israeli spokespersons) of Israel standing alone against the combined might of the Arab world. It is rather one of convergence between the interests of Israel and those of Hashemite Transjordan and the ‘tacit alliance’ between the Zionists and Hashemites (backed by the British) against other members of the divided Arab ‘war coalition’ (Shlaim 2001: 79–103) and especially against the creation of an independent state for the Palestinians, within the UN Partition Plan.";
Shlaim 2009, pp. 38 ("King Abdullah of Transjordan, whose undeclared aim was to partition Palestine with the Zionists and to annex the Arab part to his kingdom"), 80 ("Greater tactical flexibility but a similar reluctance to pay a significant price emerge from the survey of Israel's negotiations with Jordan. That King Abdullah, the grandfather of King Hussein, dealt with the Jewish Agency was an open secret. These contacts were maintained from the establishment of the emirate of Transjordan in 1921 until Abdullahs assassination in 1951."), 169-170 ("In 1947 its leaders reached an agreement with King Abdullah of Jordan to partition Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians."), and 256 ("Britain's secret objective was partition between the Zionists and King Abdullah of Jordan, their loyal ally - which was the precise outcome of the 1948 war.");
Morris 2008, pp. 189–195, "[p. 191] So partition it would have to be. This was agreed in principle in two secret meetings in August 1946 in Transjordan between 'Abdullah and Jewish Agency emissary Eliahu (Elias) Sasson. (Incidentally, 'Abdullah and his prime minister, Ibrahim Hashim, believed—as had the Peel Commission—that such a partition, in order to be viable and lasting, should be accompanied by a transfer of the Arab inhabitants out of the area of the Jewish state–to-be.) There matters stood until UNSCOP proposed partition—but between Palestine's Arabs and Palestine's Jews—as the preferred solution. Neither 'Abdullah nor the Jewish Agency wanted a Husseini-led Palestinian Arab state as their neighbor; both preferred an alternative partition, between themselves. On 17 November 1947, twelve days before the passage of the partition resolution, Golda Myerson (Meir), acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department, secretly met 'Abdullah at Naharayim (Jisr al-Majami), to reaffirm the agreement in principle of August 1946. 'Abdullah at first vaguely reiterated his preference for incorporating all of Palestine in his kingdom, with the Jews enjoying autonomy. Meir countered that the Jews wanted peaceful partition between two sovereign “states.” The Jews would accept a Jordanian takeover of the West Bank as a fait accompli and would not oppose it—though, formally, the Jewish Agency remained bound by the prospective UN decision to establish two states. 'Abdullah said that he, too, wanted a compromise, not war. In effect, 'Abdullah agreed to the establishment of a Jewish state in part of Palestine and Meir agreed to a Jordanian takeover of the West Bank (albeit while formally adhering to whatever partition resolution the General Assembly would adopt). Both sides agreed not to attack each other. The subject of Jerusalem was not discussed or resolved ... [p. 193] Thus it was that when Golda Meir, disguised in an Arab robe, arrived on the night of 10–11 May in Amman for her second secret meeting with 'Abdullah, the previous months’ understanding about a peaceful Jewish-Hashemite partition was not reaffirmed ... There was a green light. Jordan had won British consent to occupy of the West Bank with the termination of the Mandate—so 'Abdullah, Abul Huda, and Glubb believed—and nothing the British did or said thereafter was to contradict this impression ... [p. 194] But 'Abdullah's bellicose tone and Meir's gloomy report notwithstanding, the king had decided—as became clear from the Legion's subsequent actions—to move into Arab Palestine while trying to avoid war with the Yishuv and refraining from attacking the territory of the UN-defined Jewish state.";
Sa'di 2007, p. 291, "Not content with the 56 percent of the country offered to them by the un plan, the Zionists colluded with ‘Abdallah, the Emir of Trans-Jordan, to partition the remaining 43 percent proposed for a Palestinian Arab State (Shlaim 1988; 2001; Rogan 2001) and ended up with more than three quarters of the country. Even this was not enough. Zionist leaders have always refused to accept a final demarcation of the Jewish State's borders."
^Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511, "67 per cent";
Manna 2022, pp. 30 ("two-thirds of the population") and 90 ("more than two thirds (about 1,350,000) of the country's two million people");
Natour 2016, p. 89, "around 70 %";
Morris 2008, p. 15, "1.3 million";
Pappe 2006, p. 29, "The indigenous Palestinians made up the two-third majority, down from ninety per cent at the start of the Mandate."
^Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511, "the ‘Arabs’, who in 1948 owned 90 per cent of the land";
Rogan 2017, ch. 9, "By 1947 the Arabs of Palestine constituted a two-thirds majority with over 1.2 million people, compared to 600,000 Jews in Palestine ... Arabs owned 94 percent of the total land area of Palestine and some 80 percent of the arable farmland of the country.";
Natour 2016, p. 89, "Arabs with an ownership of ... around 94 %;
Manna 2013, p. 90, "At the end of 1947 the Arabs of Palestine ... possessed about 90% of Palestine's privately-owned land.";
Sa'di 2007, p. 291, "Furthermore, in terms of land ownership, the Jewish holdings in the proposed Jewish State were about 11 percent as compared to the 80 percent of land then owned by Palestinians. In the proposed Arab Palestinian state, Jews owned a mere 1 percent of the land."
^Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, pp. 119 ("about 7 percent of the total territory of Mandatory Palestine by May 15, 1948") and 262 ("just over 1.5 million dunams, or only about 7 percent");
Khalidi 2020, p. 83, "about 6 percent of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948";
Natour 2016, p. 89 (6%);
Masalha 2012, p. 58, "6.6 per cent of the land area of Palestine";
Wolfe 2012, pp. 133–134, "around 7%";
Davis 2011, p. 6, "nearly 8 percent of the land";
Morris 2008, p. 65, "7 percent";
Sa'di 2007, p. 290, "between 5.6 percent and 7 percent";
Pappe 2006, pp. 24 ("by the end of the Mandate ... around six per cent of the land") and 34 ("less than six per cent of the total land area of Palestine")
^Manna 2022, pp. 30 ("It was expected that the Palestinians would not accept this unjust resolution, which gave 54 percent of their homeland to the Jews and gave them, who constituted two-thirds of the population, only 45 percent.") and 294 n. 41 ("According to estimates, up to the end of 1947 about 450,000 Palestinians lived in the area allocated for the Jewish state under the partition resolution; 95 percent of them became refugees, and only about 5 percent remained in Israel and became citizens.");
Khalidi 2020, p. 72, "The postwar realignment of international power was apparent in the workings of UNSCOP and in its majority report in favor of partitioning the country in a manner that was exceedingly favorable to the Jewish minority, giving them over 56 percent of Palestine, against the much smaller 17 percent for the Jewish state envisioned by the 1937 Peel partition plan.";
Slater 2020, pp. 62 ("One problem with this solution was that the Jews were only one-third of the population of mandatory Palestine, so that to create a viable state with a Jewish majority, the UN engaged in a kind of gerrymandering, creating the proposed state on some 57 percent of the land, almost twice as large as that proposed by the Peel Commission ..."), 84 ("in December 1947, the area designated by the UN for a Jewish state was estimated to contain about 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs"), and 86 ("Recall Ben-Gurion's assessment that on the eve of the UN partition there were 500,000 Jews and 400,000 non-Jews (mostly Arab Muslims) in the area allotted for a Jewish state. Other estimates differ only slightly; for example, in his history of Israel, Sachar gives the figures as 538,000 Jews, 397,000 Arabs. Using those figures, then, Jews comprised about 58 percent of the population of the coming Jewish state.");
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 16, "... awarded the Jews, a minority in Palestine, more than half of the territory.";
Bishara 2017, pp. 149–150, "The partition plan of 1947 stipulates clearly the partition of Palestine into 'a Jewish state' and an 'Arab state.' But in the context of the partition plan, 45% of the population of the Jewish state is Arab. It seems a Jewish state that was 45% Arab could be imagined at that time. The partition plan did not exhort, 'Deport these Arabs out of the Jewish state' but rather took the existing demographic structure of the country at the time for granted and accepted it as it was. It just drew a line, saying that in particular areas a Jewish state will emerge although it will include up to 45% Arabs, and in other areas an Arab state will emerge that has 10% Jews. The partition plan actually emphasizes that Arabs and Jews have to live together. In that plan, the Arabs were expected to be about half the population in the Jewish state and a big majority in the Arab state.";
Cohen 2017, p. 74, "... two states – one Jewish and one Arab – in the area of Mandate Palestine and proposed that Jerusalem in its entirety would be administered by an international regime. Approximately 800,000 Arabs and 9,000 Jews lived in the area earmarked for the Arab state. Half a million Jews and about 400,000 Arabs lived in the area designated as the Jewish state, where the Arabs constituted 40% (a proportion slated to decrease with expected waves of Jewish immigration). The estimated number of Jews and Arabs living in the greater area of Jerusalem was more or less equal (around 100,000 each).";
Natour 2016, p. 89, "This plan proposed to divide the country between Jews, whose landownership would increase from 6 to 54 % (they made up for around 35 % of the population) and the Arabs with an ownership of 46 % instead of around 94 % (who made up for around 70 % of the population) ...";
Masalha 2012, p. 68, "55 per cent";
Davis 2011, p. 7, "On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which contained a plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with an international zone (called a corpus separatum) for the 'holy areas' in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, to be administered by the UN (see Map 1). The Arab state, which never came to fruition, was to have a population of 725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews on some 43 percent of the land of Palestine. The Jewish state was to have a Jewish population of 498,000 and an Arab population of 407,000 on 56 percent of the land. The population of the International Zone was to be 105,000 Arabs and 100,000 Jewish inhabitants.";
Morris 2008, pp. 63–64, "Resolution 181[II] called for the partition of Palestine into two sovereign states, one Jewish, the other Arab ... The Jewish state, on about 55 percent of Palestine's territory ... The Arab state, on about 42 percent of Palestine ... The Jerusalem area—including the city itself, outlying villages ('Ein Karim and Abu Dis), and Bethlehem—was designated a corpus separatum";
Sa'di 2007, pp. 290–291, "Although Jews by then constituted only about one-third of the population, the proposed Jewish State was to be established on 56 percent of Palestine's territory and was to have included only a slight Jewish majority of 499,000 Jews versus 438,000 Palestinians. The Arab state was to have been composed of 43 percent of the country reflections and would include 818,000 Palestinians and fewer than 10,000 Jews (Khalidi 1997: 11).";
Pappe 2006, pp. 34 ("the Jews, who owned less than six per cent of the total land area of Palestine and constituted no more than one third of the population, were handed more than half of its overall territory.") and 35 ("On forty-two per cent of the land, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state that included 10,000 Jews, while the state for the Jews was to stretch over almost fifty-six per cent of the land which 499,000 Jews were to share with 438,000 Palestinians. The third part was a small enclave around the city of Jerusalem which was to be internationally governed and whose population of 200,000 was equally divided between Palestinians and Jews.")
^"BBC News". news.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2023.
^Ben-Dror 2007, pp. 259–7260: "The Arabs overwhelmingly rejected UNSCOP's recommendations. The Arabs’ list of arguments against the majority's conclusions was indeed a long one. A Palestinian historian summarized it by saying ‘Everything about it was Zionist’. When one takes into consideration the majority's recommendations and the enthusiasm with which these recommendations were accepted by the Zionist leadership, then one can indeed affirm that claim. UNSCOP recommended an independent Jewish state, although the Arabs firmly objected to the principle of independence for the Jews, and did so in a way very generous to the Jews. More than half of the area of Palestine (62 percent) was allocated to be a Jewish state and the Arab state was supposed to make do with the remaining area, although the Palestinian Arab population numbered as much as twice the Jewish population in the land. The pro-Zionist results from UNSCOP confirmed the Arabs’ basic suspicions towards the committee. Even before the onset of its inquiry in Palestine, argued the Arabs, most of its members took a pro-Zionist stand. In addition, according to the Arabs, the committee's final object – the partition – was pre-decided by the Americans. According to this opinion, the outcome of the UNSCOP inquiry was a foregone conclusion. This perception, which led the Palestinian Arabs to boycott the committee, is shared by some modern studies as well."
^"U.N.O. PASSES PALESTINE PARTITION PLAN". Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (NSW : 1876 – 1954). NSW: National Library of Australia. 1 December 1947. p. 1. Retrieved 24 October 2014. Semi-hysterical Jewish crowds in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were still celebrating the U.N.O. partition vote at dawn to-day. Great bonfires at Jewish collective farms in the north were still blazing. Many big cafes in Tel Aviv served free champagne. A brewery threw open its doors to the crowd. Jews jeered some British troops who were patrolling Tel Aviv streets but others handed them wine. In Jerusalem crowds mobbed armoured cars and drove through the streets on them. The Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem (Dr Isaac Herzog) said: "After the darkness of 2000 years, the dawn of redemption has broken. The decision marks at epoch not only in Jewish history, but in world history." The Jewish terrorist organisation, Irgun Zvai Leumi, announced from its headquarters that it would "cease to exist in the new Jewish state.
^David McDowall (1990). Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond. I.B. Tauris. p. 193. ISBN9780755612581. Although the Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan, it did not accept the proposed borders as final and Israel's declaration of independence avoided the mention of any boundaries. A state in part of Palestine was seen as a stage towards a larger state when opportunity allowed. Although the borders were 'bad from a military and political point of view,' Ben Gurion urged fellow Jews to accept the UN Partition Plan, pointing out that arrangements are never final, 'not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements'. The idea of partition being a temporary expedient dated back to the Peel Partition proposal of 1937. When the Zionist Congress had rejected partition on the grounds that the Jews had an inalienable right to settle anywhere in Palestine, Ben Gurion had argued in favour of acceptance, 'I see in the realisation of this plan practically the decisive stage in the beginning of full redemption and the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine.
^Sean F. McMahon, The Discourse of Palestinian-Israeli Relations, Routledge 2010 p. 40.
"The Zionist movement also accepted the UN partition plan of 1947 tactically. Palumbo notes that “[t]he Zionists accepted this scheme [the UN partition plan] since they hoped to use their state as a base to conquer the whole country.” Similarly, Flapan states that “[Zionist] acceptance of the resolution in no way diminished the belief of all the Zionist parties in their right to the whole of the country [Palestine]”; and that “acceptance of the UN Partition Resolution was an example of Zionist pragmatism par excellence. It was a tactical acceptance, a vital step in the right direction – a springboard for expansion when circumstances proved more judicious.”
^Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, Pantheon, 1988, ISBN978-0-679-72098-0, Ch. 1 Myth One : Zionists Accepted the UN Partition and Planned for Peace, pages 13-53 "Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement— not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements. History, like nature, is full of alterations and change. David Ben-Gurion, War Diaries, Dec. 3, 1947"
^Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 73. ISBN978-0-300-12696-9. Retrieved 13 July 2013. Bevin regarded the UNSCOP majority report of 1 September 1947 as unjust and immoral. He promptly decided that Britain would not attempt to im- pose it on the Arabs; indeed, he expected them to resist its implementation… The British cabinet...: in the meeting on 4 December 1947... It decided, in a sop to the Arabs, to refrain from aiding the enforcement of the UN resolution, meaning the partition of Palestine. And in an important secret corollary... it agreed that Britain would do all in its power to delay until early May the arrival in Palestine of the UN (Implementation) Commission. The Foreign Office immediately informed the commission "that it would be intolerable for the Commission to begin to exercise its authority while the [Mandate] Palestine Government was still administratively responsible for Palestine"... This... nullified any possibility of an orderly implementation of the partition resolution.
^Live by the Sword: Israel's Struggle for Existence in the Holy Land, James Rothrock, p. 14
^Lenczowski, G. (1962). The Middle East in World Affairs (3rd Edition). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. p. 723
^Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511, "In light of the ever-growing historiography, serious scholarship has left little debate about what happened in 1948."; Khalidi 2020, p. 60, "What happened is, of course, now well known."; Slater 2020, p. 406 n.44, "There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba."; Khoury 2012, pp. 258 ("The realities of the nakba as an ethnic cleansing can no more be neglected or negated ... The ethnic cleansing as incarnated by Plan Dalet is no longer a matter of debate among historians ... The facts about 1948 are no longer contested, but the meaning of what happened is still a big question.") and 263 ("We don't need to prove what is now considered a historical fact. What two generations of Palestinian historians and their chronicles tried to prove became an accepted reality after the emergence of the Israeli new historians."); Wolfe 2012, p. 133, "The bare statistics of the Nakba are well enough established."; Lentin 2010, p. 6, "That the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel resulted in the devastation of Palestinian society and the expulsion of at least 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the parts of Palestine upon which Israel was established is by now a recognised fact by all but diehard Zionist apologists."; Sa'di 2007, pp. 290 ("Although the hard facts regarding the developments during 1947–48 that led to the Nakba are well known and documented, the obfuscation by the dominant Israeli story has made recovering the facts, presenting a sensible narrative, and putting them across to the world a formidable task.") and 294 ("Today, there is little or no academic controversy about the basic course of events that led to the Zionist victory and the almost complete destruction of Palestinian society.")
^Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511;
Pappe 2022, p. 128, "a few thousand died in massacres";
Manna 2022, pp. 16–17,"There is now a general consensus among the parties to the historical discussion that there were dozens of massacres and acts of expulsion of Palestinians from their country prior to and after May 1948. The debate revolves essentially around the extent to which the top Israeli leadership was responsible for these acts and gave the orders to carry them out.";
Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 100, "[According to Saleh Abdel Jawad:] between December of 1947 and January of 1949 ... 'nearly 70 massacres' had been committed, and he was adamant that this was a conservative count";
Khalidi 2020, p. 93, "civilian massacres at Dayr Yasin and at least twenty other locations";
Slater 2020, pp. 77 ("Zionist massacres and forced expulsion of the Palestinians, which began well before the invasion") and 81-82 ("the massacres and expulsions of the Palestinians—today widely known as the Nakba");
Shenhav 2019, p. 49, "It is now clear that expulsions and massacres took place all over Palestine, not only in Dir Yasin, al-Lod, and al-Tantura.";
Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, p. 11, "The ‘standard operating procedure’ of Zionist troops was to surround a village, and even though the villagers might surrender, ‘able men and boys were lined up, and sometimes shot’, and in the worst cases ‘a more general massacre ensued’ ... following Pappé, Levene summarises that ‘at least 5,000 men, women, and children [were] slaughtered in the massacres’";
Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2014, p. 6, "Throughout the extensive deliberations about the future of the Arabs (what was known as the ‘Arab Question’ in the Zionist vernacular until 1948) and in particular the issue of their expulsion, physical elimination was not considered an option, as it was for some other settler-colonial projects. Many massacres against Palestinians took place, some of which were discussed in the Zionist narrative. We agree with the historians who argue that the goal of many of these massacres was not the physical elimination of the Palestinians but rather their evacuation from Palestine.38 Massacres were strategically used to terrorize Palestinians into leaving their towns. One can call this ‘demographic elimination’ to distinguish it from ‘physical elimination’.";
Docker 2012, p. 19, "There were further ‘atrocities’ including mutilation, cruelty, and weapons of terror.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 76 and 84–87, "[p. 76] scores of massacres carried out in 1948";
Lentin 2010, pp. 109–111;
Morris 2008, p. 405, pp. 405 ("In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948.") and 406 ("In the yearlong war, Yishuv troops probably murdered some eight hundred civilians and prisoners of war all told—most of them in several clusters of massacres in captured villages during April–May, July, and October–November 1948. The round of massacres, during Operation Hiram and its immediate aftermath in the Galilee and southern Lebanon, at the end of October and the first week of November 1948 is noteworthy in having occurred so late in the war, when the IDF was generally well disciplined and clearly victorious. This series of killings—at 'Eilabun, Jish, 'Arab al-Mawasi, Saliha, Majd al-Kurum, and so on—was apparently related to a general vengefulness and a desire by local commanders to precipitate a civilian exodus.";
Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 104 n. 7, "sixty-eight massacres of Palestinians conducted in 1948 by Zionist and Israeli forces";
Sa'di 2007, pp. 293 and 300, "Morris (2004a) also mentions twenty-four cases of massacre, while Palestinian scholars using oral historical methods have documented more than sixty";
Slyomovics 2007, pp. 29–31 and 37;
Pappe 2006, pp. 258, "Palestinian sources, combining Israeli military archives with oral histories, list thirty-one confirmed massacres - beginning with the massacre in Tirat Haifa on 11 December 1947 and ending with Khirbat Ilin in the Hebron area on 19 January 1949 - and there may have been at least another six. We still do not have a systematic Nakba memorial archive that would allow one to trace the names of all those who died in the massacres - an act of painful commemoration that is gradually getting underway as this book goes to press."
^Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, pp. 185–186;
Sayigh 2023, p. 282;
Manna 2022, pp. 75-77 ("[p. 75] The Israeli army carried out killings (including massacres), pillaged, and raped in a number of border villages, including Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Hula, and Sa‘sa‘, on the day the villages were occupied or shortly thereafter."), 202, and 301 nn. 79-81 ("[n. 79] It seems likely that cases of rape during and after the 1948 war were underreported in the historical literature. With time, it becomes more difficult to investigate those events.");
Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 84, "Palestinian researchers, archivists, interviewers, and others who help chronicle these events now have transcontinental allies who collect oral histories that are filled with tales of the rape of women and the killing of innocent children during the involuntary transfers of the 1940s.";
Natour 2016, p. 94;
Khoury 2012, p. 263, "Many stories of massacres, rape, and expulsion are known, and many other stories are still to be revealed: Tantura, Safsaf, Ein al-Zeitun, Sa’sa’, Sha’ab, Kabri, Abou Shousha, Ai’laboun, and so on.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 82–84, "[p. 82] The use of rape and other forms of sexual violence by Jewish forces in 1948 as weapons of war and instruments of ethnic cleansing has yet to be studied. In 1948 the rape of Arab women and girls was not a rare or isolated act committed by individual forces, but rather was used deliberately as an instrument to terrorise the civilian population and push people into fleeing their homes.";
Knopf-Newman 2011, p. 183;
Lentin 2010, p. 31;
Ram 2009, p. 373;
Morris 2008, pp. 406–407, "The Israelis’ collective memory of fighters characterized by 'purity of arms' is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases—in Jaffa, Acre, and so on—are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the (understandable) silence of the perpetrators, and IDFA censorship of many documents, more, and perhaps many more, cases probably occurred. Arabs appear to have committed few acts of rape.";
Humphries & Khalili 2007, pp. 209, 211-213 ("[p. 211-212] As Benny Morris writes, the regular and irregular military forces of the Yishuv had employed rape in 'several dozen cases' (Morris 2004a: 592) and the news of the rape, though subsequently silenced by both perpetrators and victims, spread as quickly as the news of massacres, aided by the fear and horror of the Palestinians and the 'whispering campaign' of the Yishuv military commanders ... these rapes were one of the more devastating components of Hagana assaults and perhaps the primary explanation behind the decision of many of the refugees to flee."), and 223-226;
Sa'di 2007, pp. 293 ("On numerous occasions in the execution of Plan D, the Zionist forces expelled people from their towns and villages, committed rape and other acts of violence, massacred civilians, and executed prisoners of war."), 299-300 ("Morris (2004a) reports that there were 'about a dozen' cases of documented rape, often followed by murder. As he notes, 'We have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported . . . are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg' (Morris, 2004b: 39)."), and 303-304;
Slyomovics 2007, pp. 31 ("Morris documents statistics of a dozen cases of rapes and twenty-four instances of massacres as supporting evidence for a pattern") and 33-38 ("[p. 37] It has been a major achievement by historians of 1948 that the conditions and numbers of actual rape and civilian massacre of the Palestinian population are finally recognized.");
Pappe 2006, pp. 90, 132, 156, 184, 196, and 208-211 ("[p. 209] David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: 'Rape Cases'.");
Schulz 2003, pp. 28 and 136 ("According to [Kitty] Warnock [Land Before Honor: Palestinian Women in the Occupied Territories, Monthly Review Press 1990], honour was an ingredient in the exodus as fear and concern to save women from being raped was a reason for flight.")
^Hasian Jr. 2020, pp. 101 ("Israeli-sponsored radio messages that were used to 'wage psychological warfare'") and 103 ("Walid Khalidi, who wrote some of the first Palestinian summaries of what happened during the fall of Haifa in 1959, has recently revisited these issues and concluded that the British colluded with the Haganah in ways that made sure that the use of “psychological warfare tactics” would be used in ruthless ways so that the Plan Dalet could be carried out against unarmed civilians who needed to be moved out of these lands.");
Slater 2020, p. 81;
Cohen 2017, p. 79;
Masalha 2012, pp. 2 and 68, "From the territory occupied by the Israelis in 1948, about 90 per cent of the Palestinians were driven out — many by psychological warfare and/or military pressure and a very large number at gunpoint.";
Lentin 2010, p. 109;
Shlaim 2009, p. 55, "Morris describes the flight of the Palestinians wave after wave, town by town, and village by village. He gives numerous specific examples of psychological warfare, of intimidation, of expulsion by force and of atrocities committed by the armed forces of the infant Jewish state.";
Morris 2008, pp. 160 ("To reinforce this “whispering,” or psychological warfare, campaign, Allon's men distributed fliers, advising those who wished to avoid harm to leave “with their women and children.”") and 332 ("employing 'psychological warfare by means of flyers and ‘treatment’ of civilian inhabitants'");
Sa'di 2007, p. 308, "Morris's (2004a) research confirms what Palestinians have argued all along; he shows definitively that active expulsion by the Jewish forces, the flight of civilians from the battle zones following the attacks of Jewish forces, psychological warfare, and fear of atrocities and random killing by the advancing Jewish forces were the main causes for the Palestinian refugee problem.";
Pappe 2006, pp. 156 ("The UN 'peace' plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorised by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped."), 197 ("... from the Chief of Staff, Yigael Yadin: 'Your preparations should include psychological warfare and "treatment" (tipul) of citizens as an integral part of the operation.'"), and 278 n. 27 ("A range of strategies that could only be described as psychological warfare was used by the Jewish forces to terrorize and demoralize the Arab population in a deliberate attempt to provoke a mass exodus. Radio broadcasts in Arabic warned of traitors in the Arabs' midst, describing the Palestinians as having been deserted by their leaders, and accusing Arab militias of committing crimes against Arab civilians. They also spread fears of disease. Another, less subtle, tactic involved the use of loudspeaker trucks. These would be used in the villages and towns to urge the Palestinians to flee before they were all killed, to warn that the Jews were using poison gas and atomic weapons, or to play recorded 'horror sounds' - shrieking and moaning, the wail of sirens, and the clang of fire-alarm bells.");
Morris 2004, pp. 129, 168-169 ("Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were ‘to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered’ and to set alight with firebombs ‘all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route.’"), 230, 246, 250, 252, 468 ("He also ordered the launching of ‘psychological warfare operations’ and instructed the units ‘to deal with the civilian [populations]’. Yadin did not elaborate but presumably the intention was to frighten civilian communities into flight."), 522 (Israel agreed that 'those of the civilian population who may wish to remain in Al Faluja and ‘Iraq al Manshiya are to be permitted to do so ...' But within days Israel went back on its word. Southern Front's soldiers mounted a short, sharp, well-orchestrated campaign of low-key violence and psychological warfare designed to intimidate the inhabitants into flight. According to one villager's recollection, the Jews ‘created a situation of terror, entered the houses and beat the people with rifle butts’.128 Contemporary United Nations and Quakers documents support this description. The UN Mediator, Ralph Bunche, quoting UN observers on the spot, complained that ‘Arab civilians . . . at Al Faluja have been beaten and robbed by Israeli soldiers and . . . there have been some cases of attempted rape’."), and 591 ("If Jewish attack directly and indirectly triggered most of the exodus up to June 1948, a small but significant proportion was due to direct expulsion orders and to psychological warfare ploys (‘whispering propaganda’) designed to intimidate people into flight.");
Masalha 2003, pp. 26–27
^Manna 2022, p. 293 n. 18, "Some researchers, particularly on the Israeli side, describe the events of the war in its first months as a “civil war.” This description is inaccurate and controversial; it is preferable to divide the war into two stages without describing the first stage as a civil war.";
Pappe 2022, pp. 118–120, "[p. 118] The next day brought the first outburst of intra-communal violence, activated by hot-headed youth on both sides ... A slow deterioration into a widespread civil war in the next few months generated second thoughts in the UN, and in Washington, about the desirability, indeed, the feasibility, of the partition plan. But it was too late for a large number of Palestinians, evicted from their houses after their leaders lost the early battles with the Jewish forces ... [p. 120] Until March 1948, clashes between the two communities, beginning the day after the UN partition plan was accepted by the General Assembly, were scattered, random and uncontrolled.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 73, "Like a slow, seemingly endless train wreck, the Nakba unfolded over a period of many months. Its first stage, from November 30, 1947, until the final withdrawal of British forces and the establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948, witnessed successive defeats by Zionist paramilitary groups, including the Haganah and the Irgun, of the poorly armed and organized Palestinians and the Arab volunteers who had come to help them.";
Cohen 2017, p. 78, "The outbreak of hostilities immediately after the UN vote in favor of the Partition Plan ...";
Davis 2011, p. 235 n. 1, "The fighting began in late 1947, following the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, and continued until Israel reached separate truce agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in Rhodes between February and July of 1949 (Shlaim 2000, pp. 41–47).";
Morris 2008, pp. 75–78, "[p. 77] This stage was characterized by gradually expanding, continuous, small-scale, small-unit fighting. There was terrorism, and counterterrorist strikes, in the towns and ambushes along the roads. Arab armed bands attacked Jewish settlements, and Haganah units occasionally retaliated. It was formless—there were no front lines (except along the seams between the two communities in the main, mixed towns), no armies moving back and forth, no pitched battles, and no conquests of territory.";
Sa'di 2007, p. 292, "Soon after the announcement of the UN partition resolution in November 1947, local skirmishes erupted between the two communities. Attacks and retributions escalated into civil strife.";
Masalha 2003, p. 26, "Within weeks of the UN partition resolution, the country was plunged in what soon became a full-scale civil war. By mid-December 1947, ‘spontaneous and unorganised’ Palestinian outbreaks of violence were being met with the full weight of Yishuv's armed forces, the Haganah, in what the British High Commissioner for Palestine called ‘indiscriminate action against the Arabs’ ..."
^Pappe 2022, pp. 119 ("... the hasty departure of many members of the local Palestinian elite, who left in fear of the oncoming conflict and in the hope of returning to a calmer Palestine (70,000 left between September 1947 and March 1948). This exodus produced a collective sense of insecurity and terror among many segments of the Palestinian urban population.") and 121 ("the first wave of about 70,000 Palestinians belonging to the social and economic elite of the country, who had fled Palestine by January 1948");
Morris 2008, pp. 93 ("But the disintegration of Arab Palestine, which underlay the military collapse, began well before the Haganah went on the offensive in early April 1948; indeed, there were telling signs even before the UN partition vote and the start of the accelerated British evacuation. The trigger appears to have been the UNSCOP partition proposals and Britain's announced intention to leave. Already in early November 1947, an official reported chaos in the largely Arab-staffed Nazareth District administration; the offices had ceased to function."), 94 ("Flight was the earliest and most concrete expression of Palestinian demoralization. Within twenty-four hours of the start of the (still low-key) hostilities, Arab families began to abandon their homes in mixed or border neighborhoods in the big towns."), and 411 ("Most of the displaced likely expected to return to their homes within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies or on the back of a UN decision or Great Power intervention. Few expected that their refugeedom would last a lifetime or encompass their children and grandchildren. But it did.");
Morris 2004, p. 6, "The Arab exodus from the areas that became the Jewish State at the end of the war occurred over the space of 20 months, from the end of November 1947 to July 1949, with several small appendages during the following months and years."
^Pappe 2022, pp. 118–119, "Twelve days after the adoption of the UN resolution, the expulsion of Palestinians began. A month later, the first Palestinian village was wiped out by Jewish retaliation to a Palestinian attack on convoys and Jewish settlements. This action was transformed into an ethnic cleansing operation in March, which resulted in the loss to Palestine of much of its indigenous population.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 72, "The expulsion of enough Arabs to make possible a Jewish majority state necessarily and inevitably followed [partition].";
Slater 2020, p. 81, "In fact, the forced transfer of the Palestinians began not as a response to the Arab invasion in the spring of 1948, but nearly six months earlier in December 1947, following the proclamation of the UN partition plan.";
Docker 2012, p. 19, "In Jaffa in February 1948 ‘houses were randomly selected and then dynamited with people still in them’.";
Masalha 2012, p. 79, "Ilan Pappé, commenting on the massacres carried out by Jewish forces during the Nakba, writes: 'Palestinian sources, combining Israeli military archives with oral histories, list thirty-one confirmed massacres — beginning with the massacre in Tirat Haifa on 11 December 1947 and ending with Khirbat Illin in the Hebron area on 19 January 1949 — and there may have been at least another six. We still do not have a systematic Nakba memorial archive that would allow one to trace the names of all those who died in the massacres.' (Pappé 2006: 258)";
Morris 2008, pp. 117–118, "Until the end of March ... no territory was conquered and no village—with two exceptions over December 1947–March 1948 ('Arab Suqreir and Qisariya)—was destroyed.";
Pappe 2006, p. 40, "Coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February 1948 when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day.";
Morris 2004, pp. 76–77
^Manna 2022, p. 32, "One of the first operations was directed at the village of Khisas, north of Hula Lake, and was conducted by the Palmach on 18 December 1947. A dozen residents of the village were killed, including some children. The blowing up of houses and the killings caused panic to spread among the villagers and the inhabitants of neighboring villages as well, so that hundreds took flight and went about searching for a refuge for their families in Syria.";
Morris 2008, pp. 103, "In Khisas, the Palmahniks stormed a house, killing three men, a woman, and four children, and then blew it up, also damaging an adjacent building; at the mansion, they killed four men ... Much of Khisas's population fled—and those who remained sued for peace ... No one was punished.";
Pappe 2006, p. 57, "Jewish troops attacked the village on 18 December 1947, and randomly started blowing up houses at the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack.";
Masalha 2003, pp. 35, 47 ("12 Arab villagers were murdered in cold blood in a Haganah raid."), 144, and 152
^Manna 2022, p. 34, "After midnight of the new year, the Palmach unit carried out an attack on the village from the east, using firearms and grenades, which resulted in dozens of dead and wounded among the residents who were asleep in their homes.";
Pappe 2022, p. 121, "Their fear for their lives was accentuated by massacres committed in Balad al-Shaykh, where on the last day of 1947, scores of Palestinians were slaughtered in retaliation for a terrorist attack on Jewish workers in the nearby refinery.";
Confino 2018, p. 151 n.13, "The Haganah occupation of Balad al-Sheikh came next, leaving several dozen civilians dead, including men, women, and children.";
Masalha 2012, p. 85, "Balad al-Shaykh, 11 December 1947 and 31 December–1 January 1948: 14 civilians, of whom 10 were women and children were killed in the second attack by the Haganah";
Lentin 2010, p. 74, "In December 1947 the Hagana killed many of the inhabitants of Balad al-Shaysh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, one of Palestine's most revered leaders of the 1930s, killing over sixty Palestinians, including women and children.";
Morris 2008, p. 103, "On the night of 31 December–1 January, the Haganah sent in a Palmah company and several independent platoons. The orders were to 'kill as many men as possible'—or, alternatively, '100' men—and 'destroy furniture, etc.,' but to avoid killing women and children. The raiders moved from house to house, pulling out men and executing them. Sometimes they threw grenades into houses and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire. There were several dozen dead, including some women and children."
^Pappe 2022, p. 119, "70,000 left between September 1947 and March 1948";
Morris 2008, pp. 94–95, "Despite the haphazard efforts of some Arab local authorities, the following months were marked by increasing flight from the main towns and certain rural areas. By the end of March 1948 most of the wealthy and middle class families had fled Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and most Arab rural communities had evacuated the heavily Jewish Coastal Plain; a few had also left the Upper Jordan Valley. Most were propelled by fear of being caught up, and harmed, in the fighting; some may have feared life under Jewish rule. It is probable that most thought of a short, temporary displacement with a return within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies or international diktats. Thus, although some (the wealthier) moved as far away as Beirut, Damascus, and Amman, most initially moved a short distance, to their villages of origin or towns in the West Bank or Gaza area, inside Palestine, where they could lodge with family or friends. During this period Jewish troops expelled the inhabitants of only one village—Qisariya, in the Coastal Plain, in mid-February (for reasons connected to Jewish illegal immigration rather than the ongoing civil war)—though other villages were harassed and a few specifically intimidated by IZL, LHI, and Haganah actions (much as during this period Jewish settlements were being harassed and intimidated by Arab irregulars). Altogether some seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand Arabs fled or were displaced from their homes during the first stage of the civil war, marking the first wave of the exodus.";
Pappe 2006, p. 40, "Though sporadic, these early Jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people (almost 75,000).";
Morris 2004, p. 67, "By then, the Arab exodus from Palestine was well under way. By the end of March 1948, some 100,000 Arabs, mostly from the urban upper and middle classes of Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and from villages in Jewish-dominated areas such as the Jordan Valley and the Coastal Plain, had fled to Arab centres to the east, including Nazareth, Nablus, and Bethlehem, or out of the country altogether."
^Manna 2022, pp. 106 ("Simultaneously with the arrival of quality weapons from Prague, Ben-Gurion began implementing Plan Dalet which caused hundreds of casualties among the Palestinians.") and 107 ("the ethnic cleansing policy, which had entered a decisive phase in April");
Pappe 2022, p. 120, "In March 1948, the military campaign began in earnest. It was driven by Plan D, a military blueprint prepared by the Hagana in anticipation of combating the Arab forces in Palestine and facing the Arab armies after 14 May 1948 ... Plan D was put into full operation in April and May. It had two very clear objectives, the first being to take swiftly and systematically any installation, military or civilian, evacuated by the British ... The second, and far more important, objective of the plan was to cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 73, "This first stage saw a bitterly fought campaign that culminated in a country-wide Zionist offensive dubbed Plan Dalet in the spring of 1948.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 71–72, "First, there was Plan Dalet. This Haganah plan, a straightforward document, of early March 1948, was in many ways a blueprint for the expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible. It constituted an ideological-strategic anchor and basis for the destruction of Arab localities and expulsion of their inhabitants by Jewish commanders. In conformity with Plan Dalet, the Haganah cleared various areas completely of Arab villages.";
Lentin 2010, pp. 109–111, "[p. 109] Dealing first with responsibility: while the ‘new historians’, especially Morris, uncovered individual cases of expulsions and massacres as well as plans – notably Plan Dalet – for the removal of Palestinians, they were unwilling to accept the Palestinian contention that Plan Dalet was a Zionist master plan for ethnic cleansing.";
Morris 2008, pp. 93 ("Haganah went on the offensive in early April 1948") and 118-121 ("[p. 118] Plan D, formulated in early March and signed and dispatched to the Haganah brigade commanders on 10 March, was Yadin's blueprint for concerted operations on the eve of the final British departure and the pan-Arab invasion that was expected to follow hard on its heels ... But by the end of the period it was clear that a dramatic conceptual change had taken place and that the Yishuv had gone over to the offensive and was now engaged in a war of conquest. That war of conquest was prefigured in Plan D.");
Sa'di 2007, p. 292, "However the conflict was abruptly changed at the beginning of April 1948. The Zionist leadership feared an alteration in the U.S. position, abandoning its support for partition in favor of a plan to place Palestine under international trusteeship (Pappé 2004: 130; Morris, 2001b: 204–5). In response, the Hagana, the main Jewish military force, opened a large-scale offensive.
^Morris 2008, p. 179, "The Haganah, after holding its own on the defensive for four months while it transformed from a militia into an army, launched a series of offensives—most precipitated by Arab attacks—that, within six weeks, routed the Arab militias and their ALA reinforcements. Important pieces of territory assigned in the UN Partition Resolution to Palestinian Arab or international control—including Jaffa and West Jerusalem—fell under Zionist sway as hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were driven out.";
Sa'di 2007, p. 292, "The aim of Plan D, as the offensive was known, was to capture the territories allocated to the Jewish state, as well as areas in Galilee and on the highway between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem that were part of the proposed Palestinian state (Flapan 1987: 42)."
^Masalha 2012, pp. 12–13, "Hundreds of villages would be destroyed, urban life in Palestine's most populous Arab communities would disappear, and almost a million Palestinians would be rendered homeless and/or stateless.'";
Morris 2008, pp. 118-121 ("[p. 118] But henceforward, Haganah policy would be permanently to secure roads, border areas, and Jewish settlements by crushing minatory irregular forces and destroying or permanently occupying the villages and towns from which they operated ... [p. 120] To achieve these objectives, swathes of Arab villages, either hostile or potentially hostile, were to be conquered, and brigade commanders were given the option of “destruction of villages (arson, demolition, and mining of the ruins)” or “cleansing [of militiamen] and taking control of [the villages]” and leaving a garrison in place. The commanders were given discretion whether to evict the inhabitants of villages and urban neighborhoods sitting on vital access roads. The individual brigades were instructed in detail about which British police stations and army camps they were to occupy, the particular roads they were to secure, and the specific villages and towns they were to conquer and either depopulate, destroy, and mine or garrison ... The plan gave the brigades carte blanche to conquer the Arab villages and, in effect, to decide on each village's fate—destruction and expulsion or occupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. In the main towns, the brigades were tasked with evicting the inhabitants of resisting neighborhoods to the core Arab neighborhoods (not expulsion from the country). The plan stated: “[The villages] in your area, which have to be taken, cleansed or destroyed—you decide [on their fate], in consultation with your Arab affairs advisers and HIS officers.” Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel “the Arab inhabitants” of Palestine or of any of its constituent regions; nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out “the Arabs.”""), 126-138, and 303-305 ("[p. 304] During the following weeks, Haganah/IDF units as a matter of routine destroyed—when they had sufficient explosives or caterpillars—captured villages, partially or wholly.");
Sa'di 2007, pp. 292 ("The plan, as quoted in Morris (2004a: 164) called for “operations against enemy settlements which are in the rear of, within or near our defense lines, with the aim of preventing their use as bases for an active armed force.” However, as Morris points out, given the size of the country, most Palestinians towns and villages within and beyond the proposed Jewish state fell within this category. According to Plan D, the brigade commanders were given “discretion” in what to do with the villages they occupied—that is, to destroy them or leave them standing (Morris 2004a.: 165). On numerous occasions in the execution of Plan D, the Zionist forces expelled people from their towns and villages, committed rape and other acts of violence, massacred civilians, and executed prisoners of war. As we will see, these acts have been widely documented, most forcefully by Israeli historians using military and state archives.") and 294 ("In the coastal area between Haifa and Tel-Aviv, for example, fifty-eight out of the sixty-four villages that had existed were wiped out (Pappé 2004: 137). By the end of the war only two remained. In the course of this campaign even villages that maintained good relations with nearby Jewish settlements and refrained from resorting to violence, such as Deir Yassin, were not spared.");
Pappe 2006, p. 104, "Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled. This is a fact that must be repeated, as it undermines the Israeli myth that the 'Arabs' ran away once the 'Arab invasion' began. Almost half of the Arab villages had already been attacked by the time the Arab governments eventually and, as we know, reluctantly decided to send in their troops.";
Morris 2004, p. 34, "But in the end, the Palestinians and the ALA failed to capture a single Jewish settlement, while the Jews, by mid-May, conquered close to 200 Arab villages and towns, including Jaffa, Beisan, Safad, Arab Haifa and Arab Tiberias."
^Cohen 2017, pp. 79–80, "At this stage of the clashes, the gap between the Zionist discourse and Zionist practices widened. The change in the conduct of the Jewish forces – above all the expulsion of Arab communities – was not accompanied by a change in the discourse.";
Morris 2008, p. 100, pp. 100 ("As late as 24 March 1948, Galili instructed all Haganah units to abide by standing Zionist policy, which was to respect the “rights, needs and freedom,” “without discrimination,” of the Arabs living in the Jewish State areas. The policy changed only in early April, as reflected in the deliberations of the Arab affairs advisers in the Coastal Plain. At their meeting of 31 March, the advisers acted to protect Arab property and deferred a decision about expelling Arabs or disallowing Arabs to cultivate their fields. But a week later the advisers ruled that “the intention [policy] was, generally, to evict the Arabs living in the brigade's area.”"), 161 ("Together, the Yiftah and Golani Brigades, over late April–mid-May, had conquered Eastern Galilee and largely cleared out its Arab inhabitants."), and 410-411 ("And it was that war that propelled most of those displaced out of their houses and into refugeedom. Most fled when their villages and towns came under Jewish attack or out of fear of future attack. They wished [p. 411] to move out of harm's way. At first, during December 1947–March 1948, it was the middle- and upper-class families who fled, abandoning the towns; later, from April on, after the Yishuv shifted to the offensive, it was the urban and rural masses who fled, in a sense emulating their betters.");
Sa'di 2007, p. 293, "By then, many acts of expulsion and massacre had occurred, including the widely publicized massacre of Deir Yassin (April 9, 1948) ...";
Pappe 2006, pp. 40 ("About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable ofwhich was the Deir Yassin massacre."), 104 ("Villages near urban centres were taken and expelled, and sometimes subjected to massacres, in a campaign of terror designed to prepare the ground for a more successful takeover of the cities.");
Morris 2004, p. 593, "In general, the Jewish commanders preferred to completely clear the vital roads and border areas of Arab communities – Allon in Eastern Galilee, Carmel around Haifa and in Western Galilee, Avidan in the south. Most villagers fled before or during the fighting. Those who stayed put were almost invariably expelled."
^Manna 2022, pp. 37-38 ("killing and wounding hundreds of men, women, and children ... mutilation and burning of corpses and the humiliation and torture of hundreds of prisoners"), 75 ("The massacre at Dayr Yasin holds a central symbolic position in the Palestinian memory of the Nakba ..."), and 295 n. 51 ("For several years Haganah sources were relied on, which the British and others adopted, and which indicated that over 250 people were killed in the Dayr Yasin massacre. However, recent Palestinian research indicates that the number of those killed was 104, less than half the original Haganah estimate.");
Pappe 2022, p. 121, "a well-publicized bloodbath";
Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 83, "For more than 70 years many Israeli researchers, journalists, military planners, and others have admitted that incidents like the killings of between 100 and 250 civilians at Deir Yassin in April of 1948 can be documented from materials that can be found in Israel Defense Force archives, but this is contextualized as an atypical incident that proves the rule of Jewish avoidance of civilian casualties during wartime.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 74, "People fled as news spread of massacres like that on April 9, 1948, in the village of Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem, where one hundred residents, sixty-seven of them women, children, and old people, were slaughtered when the village was stormed by Irgun and Haganah assailants.";
Slater 2020, p. 82, "In addition to the forced expulsions, Zionist forces carried out several massacres, some of them even before the May 1948 Arab state invasion. The most notorious of them was the April 8–9 killing of over one hundred Palestinian civilians in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. There is a lively debate among Israeli historians over whether Deir Yassin and other massacres reflected deliberate Zionist policy or rather was perpetrated by individual military units, particularly by the Irgun and fanatical “Stern Gang” terrorists who operated independently of the Haganah, the military arm of the Zionist leadership. However, from the point of view of terrorized Palestinians who learned of the massacres, it was entirely irrelevant whether the killings represented official policy or not—either way, they had very good reasons to flee.";
Shenhav 2019, p. 49;
Ghanim 2018, pp. 104–107, "Deir Yassin witnessed a horrific massacre in 1948 in which tens of civilians were killed, including women and children, after which the entire village, excepting a few buildings, was demolished, and Kfar Shaul was established upon its ruins.";
Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, p. 11, "the ‘infamous massacre’ of Dayr Yasin in April 1948";
Docker 2012, p. 19, "When the Jewish soldiers burst into Deir Yassin, the bodies of the men killed were ‘abused’.";
Khoury 2012, p. 261;
Masalha 2012, pp. 79–83, "[p. 80] Although not the bloodiest massacre of the war, Dayr Yasin was the site of the most notorious mass murder of Palestinian civilians in 1948 — an event which became the single most important contributory factor to the 1948 exodus, a powerful marker of the violence at the foundation of the State of Israel. On 9 April, between 120 and 254 unarmed villagers were murdered, including women, the elderly and children.56 There were also instances of rape and mutilation. Most Israeli writers today have no difficulty in acknowledging the occurrence of the Dayr Yasin massacre and its effect, if not its intention, of precipitating the exodus.";
Wolfe 2012, p. 160;
Knopf-Newman 2011, pp. 182–183, "Dayr Yasin was one of numerous massacres that Jewish militias enacted as part of Plan Dalet, the Zionists’ blueprint to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population.";
Lentin 2010, p. 139, "between 93 and 254 Palestinians, including 30 babies, were massacred";
Kimmerling 2008, p. 313 ("about 120 villagers killed") and 410 n. 17 ("the massacre of about 125 villagers");
Morris 2008, pp. 125–129, "[p. 126] The IZL and LHI troopers moved from house to house, lobbing in grenades and spraying the interiors with small arms fire. They blew up houses and sometimes cut down those fleeing into the alley-ways, including one or two families. ... It quickly emerged that the fighting had been accompanied, and followed, by atrocities. ... Some militiamen and unarmed civilians were shot on the spot. A few villagers may have been trucked into Jerusalem and then taken back to Deir Yassin and executed; a group of male prisoners were shot in a nearby quarry; several of those captured were shot ... [p. 127] The IZL and LHI troopers systematically pillaged the village and stripped the inhabitants of jewelry and money. Altogether, 100–120 villagers (including combatants) died that day —though the IZL, Haganah, Arab officials, and the British almost immediately inflated the number to “254” (or “245”), each for their own propagandistic reasons. Most of the villagers either fled or were trucked through West Jerusalem and dumped at Musrara, outside the Old City walls. ... But the real significance of Deir Yassin lay, not in what had actually happened on 9 April, or in the diplomatic exchanges that followed, but in its political and demographic repercussions. ... The most important immediate effect of the media atrocity campaign, however, was to spark fear and further panic flight from Palestine's villages and towns.";
Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 104 n. 7, "by conservative estimates slaughtered about 115 men, women, and children and stuffed their bodies down wells";
Humphries & Khalili 2007, p. 211;
Jayyusi 2007, p. 132 n. 12, "The massacre at Deir Yassin was frequently cited in the Lifta accounts as having been a landmark, a focal point in the events of the Nakba itself.";
Sa'di 2007, pp. 293 ("By then [May 15], many acts of expulsion and massacre had occurred, including the widely publicized massacre of Deir Yassin (April 9, 1948)") and 304;
Slyomovics 2007, p. 35, "the most famous atrocity of the 1948 war, which was carried out on April 9 in Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. Approximately 105 Palestinian villagers were massacred by Jewish forces.";
Schulz 2003, p. 28, "The most stark example is Deir Yasin, carved into the memory of Palestinian suffering. The Deir Yasin massacre, conducted by a joint IZL—LHI operation with the reluctant, but nevertheless given, consent of the Haganah, was the one event that had the most immediate effect upon flight. The attack was connected to an operation intended to secure the western entrance to Jerusalem (ibid.: 113). The atrocities that were committed in the event, in which 250 villagers were massacred and scores of others subject to rape, torture and mutilation, contributed to the spread of panic among Palestine's Arabs (ibid.: 113f.). Deir Yasin came to serve as a representation of what Jewish forces (irregular or not) might be capable of. Deir Yasin continues to stand out as a symbol of the nakba and the main focal point in remembering the catastrophe."
^Manna 2022, p. 17, "Palestinian cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, and Tiberias were depopulated";
Pappe 2022, p. 121, "This meant occupation and the expulsion of the Palestinian population. This was the fate of Jaffa, Haifa, Safad and Tiberias.";
Khalidi 2020, pp. 73–74, "Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948 ... Jaffa was besieged and ceaselessly bombarded with mortars and harassed by snipers. Once finally overrun by Zionist forces during the first weeks of May, it was systematically emptied of most of its sixty thousand Arab residents. Although Jaffa was meant to be part of the stillborn Arab state designated by the 1947 Partition Plan, no international actor attempted to stop this major violation of the UN resolution ... [p. 74] Subjected to similar bombardments and attacks on poorly defended civilian neighborhoods, the sixty thousand Palestinian inhabitants of Haifa, the thirty thousand living in West Jerusalem, the twelve thousand in Safad, six thousand in Beisan, and 5,500 in Tiberias suffered the same fate. Most of Palestine's Arab urban population thus became refugees and lost their homes and livelihoods.";
Cohen 2017, p. 80, "On May 14, Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence at the founding of the state ceremony which included the following widely quoted appeal: “We appeal – in the very midst of an onslaught that has been raging against us for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” At that time, the Arabs of Tiberias, Safed, and most of the Arabs of Haifa (who were supposed to be citizens of the Jewish state, according to the Partition Plan) as well as those of Jaffa (in the planned Arab state) had already been uprooted from their cities (on the occupation of these cities, see Morris 1987). They were not to enjoy the promised equality of the Jewish state.";
Khoury 2012, p. 259, "They also lost their cities. The three major coastal cities—Jaffa, Haifa, and Aka [Acre]—were occupied and their citizens evacuated.";
Masalha 2012, p. 7, "coastal cities of Palestine — Jaffa, Haifa and Acre — were largely depopulated";;
Davis 2011, p. 7, "the depopulation of Palestinians from cities—Acre, Haifa, Safad, Tiberius, Beersheba, Jaffa, and Baysan";
Morris 2008, pp. 138 ("During the following weeks, the Jewish forces assaulted and conquered key urban areas ... Arab Tiberias and Arab Haifa, Manshiya in Jaffa, and the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem all fell in quick succession."), 138-139 (Tiberias), 140-147 (Haifa), 155-159 (Safed), 147-155 (Jaffa), and 164-167 (Acre);
Sa'di 2007, pp. 293–294, "occupation of cities and the expulsion of their inhabitants in Tiberias (April 18), Haifa [p. 294] (April 22), Safad (May 11) and Jaffa (May 13)";
Pappe 2006, pp. 91-92 (Tiberias), 92-96 (Haifa), 97-98 (Safed), 98-99 (Jerusalem), 100-101 (Acre), and 102-103 (Jaffa)
^Morris & Kedar 2023, pp. 752–776, "[p. 752] Taken together, these documents revealed that the Acre and Gaza episodes were merely the tip of the iceberg in a prolonged campaign ... But bulldozing or blowing up houses and wells was deemed insufficient. With its back to the wall, the Haganah upped the ante and unleashed a clandestine campaign of poisoning certain captured village wells with bacteria – in violation of the Geneva Protocol ... The aim of Cast Thy Bread ... like the demolitions, was to hamper an Arab return. Over the weeks, the well-poisoning campaign was expanded to regions beyond the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and included Jewish settlements captured or about to be captured by Arab troops, and then to inhabited Arab towns, to facilitate their prospective conquest by the Haganah or to hinder the progress of the invading Arab armies ... [p. 768] The Yishuv's decision to use the bacteriological weapons was taken at the highest level of the government and military and was, indeed, steered by these officers, with Ben-Gurion's authorization, through the campaign ... [p. 769] The use of the bacteria was apparently fairly limited in Israel/Palestine during April–December 1948, and apart from Acre, seems to have caused no epidemic and few casualties. At least, that is what emerges from the available documentation.";
Nashef 2018, p. 143 n. 4 (quoting Pappe 2006);
Carus 2017, p. 145, "Some BW programs relied on extremely crude methods, about as sophisticated as those employed by some terrorist groups or criminals ... The same was true of the reported activities associated with the early Israeli program in 1948.";
Docker 2012, pp. 19–20, "The urbicide of May 1948 directed against the old Crusader city of Acre involved biological warfare, including poisoning of water, Pappé writing that it seems clear from Red Cross reports that the Zionist forces besieging the city injected ‘typhoid germs’ into the water supply, which led to a ‘sudden typhoid epidemic’. There was a similar attempt to ‘poison the water supply in Gaza’ on 27 May 1948 by injecting typhoid and dysentery viruses into wells; this attempt was fortunately foiled.";
Martin 2010, p. 7, "Israeli biological warfare activities included Operation Shalach, which was an attempt to contaminate the water supplies of Egyptian Army. Egypt reports capture of four ‘Zionists’ trying to infect wells with dysentery and typhoid. There are also allegations that a typhoid outbreak in Acre in 1948 resulted from a biological attack and that there were attacks in Egypt in 1947 and in Syria in 1948.";
Sayigh 2009, "A unit had been formed to develop biological weapons, and there is evidence that these were used during 1948 to poison the water supplies of Akka and Gaza with typhoid bacteria.";
Ackerman & Asal 2008, p. 191, "Egyptian Ministry of Defense and, later, Israeli historians, contend that Israeli soldiers contaminated Acre's water supply.";
Pappe 2006, pp. 73–4 ("The flame-thrower project was part of a larger unit engaged in developing biological warfare under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir ... The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February [1948]. Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people.") and 100–101 ("During the siege [of Acre] typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak ... A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled.");
Abu Sitta 2003, "The Zionists injected typhoid in the aqueduct at some intermediate point which passes through Zionist settlements ... The city of Acre, now burdened by the epidemic, fell easy prey to the Zionists. ... Two weeks later, after their "success" in Acre, the Zionists struck again. This time in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had gathered after their villages in southern Palestine were occupied. The end however was different. ... The biological crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians in Acre and Gaza in 1948 are still being enacted today.";
Leitenberg 2001, p. 289, "As early as April 1948, Ben Gurion directed one of his operatives in Europe (Ehud Avriel) to seek out surviving East European Jewish scientists who could “either increase the capacity to kill masses or to cure masses: both things are important.” At that time, that ‘capacity’ meant chemical and biological weapons ... These were ultimate weapons that could be used either for offense or defense (and the context of the immediate military operations, as well as those that had preceded it, would be the critical factors in that categorization).";
Cohen 2001, p. 31, "It is believed that one of the largest operations in this campaign was in the Arab coastal town of Acre, north of Haifa, shortly before it was conquered by the IDF on May 17, 1948. According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread in Acre in the days before the town fell to the Israeli forces was not the result of wartime chaos but rather a deliberate covert action by the IDF—the contamination of Acre's water supply ... The success of the Acre operation may have persuaded Israeli decisionmakers to continue with these activities. On May 23, 1948, Egyptian soldiers in the Gaza area caught four Israeli soldiers disguised as Arabs near water wells ... It seems that many people knew something about these operations, but both the participants and later historians chose to avoid the issue, which gradually became a national taboo ... Despite the official silence, it appears there is little doubt now about the mission of the failed Gaza operation."
^Pappe 2022, p. 122, "Only at the end of April 1948 did the politicians in the Arab world prepare a plan to save Palestine, which in practice was a scheme to annex as much of it as possible to the Arab countries participating in the war.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 75, "The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine's cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals.";
Slater 2020, pp. 77–78, "[p. 77] Moreover, there had been no Arab state intervention in the six months preceding the war—the civil war period between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, as it is often termed—during which the Zionist forces mainly seized only the areas that the UN had allocated to Israel. The intervention came only after the Zionists began seizing land allocated to the Arabs ... [p. 78] In any case, the Israeli New Historians agree that the primary cause of the Arab invasion was less that of sympathy for the Palestinians than the result of inter-Arab monarchical and territorial rivalries, especially the fears of other Arab monarchs that King Abdullah of Jordan would seize the West Bank and then use it as a springboard for his long dream of creating a Hashemite kingdom extending over parts of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq.";
Morris 2008, pp. 155 ("The mass flight from the towns and villages of Palestine at the end of April triggered anxiety and opposition among the Arab leaders."), 180-183 ("[p. 180] As the months passed and the Palestinian Arabs, beefed up by contingents of foreign volunteers, proved incapable of defeating the Yishuv, the Arab leaders began more seriously to contemplate sending in their armies. The events of April 1948—Deir Yassin, Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa—rattled and focused their minds, and the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees drove home the urgency of direct intervention. By the end of April, they decided to invade ... [p. 183] The decision to invade was finally taken on 29–30 April, at the simultaneous meetings of the Arab heads of state in Amman and the military chiefs of staff in Zarka. Egypt still held back. But the die was cast. And on 11–12 May Egypt would also commit itself to invasion ... For all their bluster from Bludan through Cairo, the Arab leaders—except Jordan's—did almost nothing to prepare their armies for war."), 194-195 ("[p. 194] 'Abdullah's aim was to take over the West Bank rather than destroy the Jewish state—though, to be sure, many Legionnaires may have believed that they were embarked on a holy war to “liberate” all of Palestine. Yet down to the wire, his fellow leaders suspected 'Abdullah of perfidy (collusion with Britain and/or the Zionists) ... But once he had radically restricted the planned Jordanian (or Jordanian-Iraqi) contribution to the war effort, the other invasion participants had felt compelled to downgrade their own armies’ objectives ... [p. 195] The altered Hashemite dispositions and intentions posed a dilemma for King Farouk: he was not about to allow his archrival, 'Abdullah, to make off with the West Bank (and possibly East Jerusalem) while completely avoiding war with the Israelis (something, incidentally, that all along he had suspected 'Abdullah intended) ... Thus, in the days before and after 15 May the war plan had changed in essence from a united effort to conquer large parts of the nascent Jewish state, and perhaps destroy it, into an uncoordinated, multilateral land grab. As a collective, the Arab states still wished and hoped to destroy Israel—and, had their armies encountered no serious resistance, would, without doubt, have proceeded to take all of Palestine, including Tel Aviv and Haifa. But, in the circumstances, their invasion now aimed at seriously injuring the Yishuv and conquering some of its territory while occupying all or most of the areas earmarked for Palestinian Arab statehood."), and 396-397, "[p. 396] The Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception. The Arab states hoped to accomplish this by conquering all or large parts of the territory allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. And some Arab leaders spoke of driving the Jews into the sea and ridding Palestine “of the Zionist plague.” The struggle, as the Arabs saw it, was about the fate of Palestine/the Land of Israel, all of it, not over this or that part of the country. But, in public, official Arab spokesmen often said that the aim of the May 1948 invasion was to “save” Palestine or “save the Palestinians,” definitions more agreeable to Western ears. The picture of Arab aims was always more complex than Zionist historiography subsequently made out. The chief cause of this complexity was that fly-in-the-ointment, King 'Abdullah. Jordan's ruler, a pragmatist, was generally skeptical of the Arabs’ ability to defeat, let alone destroy, the Yishuv, and fashioned his war aim accordingly: to seize the Arab-populated West Bank, preferably including East Jerusalem ... [p. 397] Other Arab leaders were generally more optimistic. But they, too, had ulterior motives, beyond driving the Jews into the sea or, at the least, aborting the Jewish state. Chief among them was to prevent their fellow leaders (especially 'Abdullah) from conquering and annexing all or too much of Palestine and to seize as much of Palestine as they could for themselves.";
Sa'di 2007, pp. 293–294, "It was not until May 15, a month and a half after the implementation of Plan D, that neighboring Arab states sent in armed forces in an attempt to halt the Zionist seizure of territory and the ethnic cleansing of the population ... The physical and psychological condition of the refugees as well as the horror stories they carried intensified the pressures on Arab leaders to commit their regular armies to the battle ... Their intervention came too late, when their ability to tip the balance of power had already been lost. The Zionist forces were able to repel the attacks of the Arab armies, to pursue the campaign of conquest, and to continue expelling Palestinians and destroying their villages ... Moreover, because of political rivalries between Arab leaders, there was a failure to coordinate operations (Flapan 1987; Gerges 2001: 151–158; Shlaim 2001)."
^Morris 2008, pp. 181 ("In general, in private they appreciated and admitted their military weakness and unpreparedness. But in public, militant bluster was the norm.") and 401 ("Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan had all achieved independence (or semi-independence) a few years before, and most had new armies with inadequate training and no experience of combat. Their populations consisted largely of illiterate peasants for whom religion, family, clan, and village were the cores of identity and loyalty. They were relatively untouched by the passions of modern nationalism (though were easily swayed by Islamic rhetoric) and lacked technological skills, which bore heavily on the functioning of air and naval forces, artillery, intelligence, and communications. The states themselves were all poor and poorly organized and led by self-serving politicians of varied abilities and ethics; all, except Lebanon, were governed by shambling autocracies, and none, except perhaps Jordan's, enjoyed popular legitimacy or support.");
Sa'di 2007, p. 294, "Although Arab military commanders and some politicians were well aware of the weakness of their armies, they bent to public pressure and tried to salvage what they could. The newly independent Arab states, most of which were still to some degree under the military control of Western powers, were unable to conduct a military campaign. Their national armies were unprepared for war. They were small, poorly equipped and inexperienced."
^Khalidi 2020, pp. 77–78, "Thereafter he sought to expand his territory through a variety of means. The most obvious direction was westward, into Palestine, whence the king's lengthy secret negotiations with the Zionists to reach an accommodation that would give him control of part of the country ... Both the king and the British opposed allowing the Palestinians to benefit from the 1947 partition or the war that followed, and neither wanted an independent Arab state in Palestine. They had come to a secret agreement to prevent this, via sending “the Arab Legion across the Jordan River as soon as the Mandate ended to occupy the part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs.” This goal meshed with that of the Zionist movement, which negotiated with ‘Abdullah to achieve the same end.";
Slater 2020, p. 77, "First, while none of the Arab states were interested in the establishment of a Palestinian state—that would interfere with their own territorial ambitions in the area—there is no reason to doubt what they said at the time, namely, that they were furious at Zionist massacres and forced expulsion of the Palestinians, which began well before the invasion.";
Morris 2008, p. 195, "From the start, the invasion plans had failed to assign any task whatsoever to the Palestinian Arabs or to take account of their political aspirations. Although the Arab leaders vaguely alluded to a duty to “save the Palestinians,” none of them seriously contemplated the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state with Husseini at its head. All the leaders loathed Husseini; all, to one degree or another, cared little about Palestinian goals, their rhetoric notwithstanding. It was with this in mind that Jordan, on the eve of the invasion, ordered the ALA out of the West Bank and subsequently disarmed the local Arab militias. The Arab states’ marginalization of the Palestinian Arabs was in some measure a consequence of their military defeats of April and the first half of May. These had also rendered them politically insignificant."
^ Manna 2022, p. 41, "Most of the four hundred thousand Palestinians who lived in those areas had become refugees before the intervention of the Arab armies began";
Pappe 2022, p. 121, "By the time the British left in the middle of May, one-third of the Palestinian population had already been evicted";
Khalidi 2020, p. 75, "In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority's key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers.";
Slater 2020, pp. 81 ("While a number of studies have found no evidence to support the Israeli claim of an Arab propaganda campaign to induce the Palestinians to flee, well before the Arab invasion some 300,000 to 400,000 Palestinians (out of a population of about 900,000 at the time of the UN partition) were either forcibly expelled—sometimes by forced marches with only the clothes on their backs—or fled as a result of Israeli psychological warfare, economic pressures, and violence, designed to empty the area that would become Israel of most of its Arab inhabitants.") and 406 n.44 ("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, July 18, 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) ... 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.");
Cohen 2017, p. 80, "On May 14, Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence ... At that time, the Arabs of Tiberias, Safed, and most of the Arabs of Haifa (who were supposed to be citizens of the Jewish state, according to the Partition Plan) as well as those of Jaffa (in the planned Arab state) had already been uprooted from their cities (on the occupation of these cities, see Morris 1987). They were not to enjoy the promised equality of the Jewish state.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 12–13, "‘Between the last month of 1947 and the four and a half months of 1948, the Palestinian Arab community would cease to exist as a social and political entity.’ Hundreds of villages would be destroyed, urban life in Palestine's most populous Arab communities would disappear, and almost a million Palestinians would be rendered homeless and/or stateless.'";
Morris 2008, pp. 78 ("Then, in early April, the Haganah went over to the offensive, by mid-May crushing the Palestinians. This second stage involved major campaigns and battles and resulted in the conquest of territory, mainly by the Jews."), 93 ("The civil war half of the 1948 War, which ended with the complete destruction of Palestinian Arab military power and the shattering of Palestinian society, began on 30 November 1947 and ended on 14 May 1948, by which time hundreds of thousands of townspeople and villagers had fled or been forcibly displaced from their homes."), 118 ("The moment the Haganah switched to the offense and launched large-scale, highly organized, and sustained operations, the Arab weaknesses came to the fore—and their militias, much like Palestinian society as a whole, swiftly collapsed, like a house of cards."), 138 ("in effect delivering a death-blow to Palestine Arab military power and political aspirations"), 171, 179 ("Palestinian Arab military power was crushed, and Palestinian Arab society, never robust, fell apart, much of the population fleeing to the inland areas or out of the country altogether."), and 400;
Sa'di 2007, p. 294, "This campaign led to the expulsion of some 380,000 Palestinians, about one-half of the total Palestinian refugees who would soon be created."
^Manna 2022, p. 32, "In the first stage of the war the gap in preparedness between Palestinians and Jews was not apparent due to the defensive policy adopted by the Haganah. The presence of British forces in parts of the country during that period played a role in the adoption of that tactic, as did the desire not to provoke a comprehensive reaction on the part of the Arabs. Despite that, when the Haganah chose to mount military operations, it became apparent that the Palestinian citizens were exposed and had no effective protection.";
Pappe 2022, p. 127, "in the first phase, it was urban Palestine that was subjected to expulsions and massacres";
Morris 2008, pp. 78 ("In describing the first, civil war half of the war, it is necessary to take account of three important facts. One, most of the fighting between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 occurred in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood (the main exception being Jerusalem, earmarked for international control, and the largely Arab-populated “Corridor” to it from Tel Aviv) and where the Jews enjoyed demographic superiority ... Two, the Jewish and Arab communities in western and northern Palestine were thoroughly intermingled ... And three, the civil war took place while Britain ruled the country and while its military forces were deployed in the various regions. The British willingness and ability to intervene in the hostilities progressively diminished as their withdrawal progressed, and by the second half of April 1948 they rarely interfered, except to secure their withdrawal routes.") and 101 ("Much of the fighting in the first months of the war took place in and on the edges of the main towns—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, and Haifa.")
^Manna 2022, pp. 109–111, "[p. 109] The war that Israel continued to wage since the summer of 1948 was to expand the territory of the Jewish state at the expense of the contemplated Arab state under the partition resolution ... [p. 111] months of ceasefire in the wake of the occupation of Nazareth and lower Galilee (July to October) ...";
Pappe 2022, pp. 125–128, "[p. 125] Israel's leaders, furnished with new weapons but apprehensive lest the international community impose an unfavourable solution on them, made an effort to complete a takeover of most of Palestine. In August, the successful Israeli campaigns continued, leading to their complete control of Palestine, apart from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip ... [p. 126] The conventional war occurred on the edges of what was to be the Jewish state, and within areas the Jews coveted in the proposed Palestinian state. Within the Jewish state proper, a strange and chilling situation developed around 300 or so Palestinian villages ... 370 [villages] wiped out by Israel ... From the end of April until the end of July 1948, a grim scene was repeated in almost every village. Armed Israeli soldiers surrounded each village on three sides and put the villagers to flight through the fourth side. In many cases, if the people refused to leave, they were forced onto lorries and driven away to the West Bank. In some villages, there were Arab volunteers who resisted by force, and when these villages were conquered, they were immediately blown up and destroyed ... [p. 127] The systematic aspect was in the methods employed, first terrorizing the population, executing a few to induce others to leave and then inviting an official committee to assess the value of land and property in the deserted villages or neighbourhoods ... While, in the first phase, it was urban Palestine that was subjected to expulsions and massacres, the bulk of the population living in the rural areas became victims of this policy after May 1948 ... [p. 128] Half of the villages had been destroyed, flattened by Israeli bulldozers that had been at work since August 1948 when the government had decided either to turn them into cultivated land or to build new Jewish settlements on their remains.";
Ghanim 2018, pp. 106–108, "[p. 106] The “ten-day series” refers to a series of operations undertaken by the Zionist forces lasting from the eight until the eighteenth of July, 1948, during which many operations to expel inhabitants and seize villages took place ... [p. 107] During the “ten days,” the Etzioni Brigade attacked the villages located south of Jerusalem alongside forces from the Lehi and Etzel brigades, who had already committed the massacre of Deir Yassin in April 1948 ... Operation Danny, which took place between the ninth and seventeenth of July, 1948 was one of the most significant operations of the “ten days,” during which both Lydda and Ramla fell on the twelfth and thirteenth of July as well as villages south of Jerusalem. The fall of Lydda and Ramla (and the implications of these events), whereby the residents were systematically expelled and prevented by armed force from returning to their villages and cities, constituted one of the most tragic moments of the war for Palestinians ... Lydda also witnessed the Dahmash Massacre, during which tens of Palestinians who were gathered in the Dahmash mosque were terminated ... [p. 108] fifty thousand residents of Lydda and Ramla were expelled after being terrorized.";
Cohen 2017, pp. 81-83 ps=, "[p. 81] As the war progressed, and the Arabs of Palestine continued to be uprooted from their homes, the position that the refugees should not be allowed to return was gaining momentum. An official decision sealing this trend was taken in a government session on June 16 ... [p. 82] The policy that emerged in the weeks following the Arab armies’ invasion was that of preventing the Palestinian refugees’ return and also encouraging the expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages ... [p. 83] The conquest of Nazareth and its surrounding area, in addition to Lydda and Ramleh during the 10-day battle, confirmed the military capabilities of the newly established Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and expanded the territory under Israeli control beyond the boundaries stipulated by the Partition Plan. While most of the Palestinian population in these areas fled or were expelled, tens of thousands of Palestinian residents remained under Israeli rule.";
Morris 2008, pp. 309-310 ("The condition of many of the four hundred thousand Arabs displaced by midsummer 1948 was 'appalling.'") and 405 ("When the civil war gave way to the conventional war, as the Jewish militias—the Haganah, IZL, and LHI—changed into the IDF and as the Arab militias were replaced by more or less disciplined regular armies, the killing of civilians and prisoners of war almost stopped, except for the series of atrocities committed by IDF troops in Lydda in July and in the Galilee at the end of October and beginning of November 1948.");
Pappe 2006, pp. 148–156, "[p. 148] All in all, the level of preparation the military command was engaged in during June for the next stages showed a growing confidence in the Israeli Army's ability to continue not only its ethnic cleansing operations, but also its extension of the Jewish state beyond the seventy-eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine it had already occupied ... [p. 150] As they progressed, the Israeli troops were more determined than ever to resort to summary executions and any other means that might speed up the expulsions ... The pace of occupying and cleansing villages in the lower and eastern Galilee was faster than in any phase of the operations that had gone before ... [p. 156] From 9 July, the day after the first truce ended, the sporadic fighting between the Israeli army and the Arab units from Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon continued for another ten days. In less than two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from their villages, towns and cities. The UN 'peace' plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorised by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped. By July, most of their houses had gone, dynamited by Israeli sappers.";
Morris 2004, p. 171, pp. 171 ("But ultimately, the atmosphere of transfer, as we shall see, prevailed through April–June: Most communities attacked were evacuated and where no spontaneous evacuation occurred, communities more often than not were expelled. Throughout, Arabs who had fled were prevented from returning to their homes. In some areas, villages that surrendered were disarmed – and then expelled; in others, Haganah (and IZL and LHI) units refused to accept surrender, triggering departure. But, still, because of the absence of a clear, central expulsive policy order, different units behaved differently."), 355 ("Through the second half of 1948, the IDF, under Ben-Gurion's tutelage, continued to destroy Arab villages, usually during or just after battle, occasionally, weeks and months after. The ministerial committee was not usually approached for permission. The destruction stemmed from immediate military needs, as in Operation Dani, and from long-term political considerations ... During the Second Truce, from 19 July until 15 October, the army continued to destroy abandoned villages in piecemeal fashion, usually for reasons that were described as military."), and 597 ("But while there was no ‘expulsion policy,’ the July offensives were characterised by far more expulsions and, indeed, brutality than the first half of the war.")
^Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, pp. 258–260;
Pappe 2022, p. 127, "Two hundred men between the ages of thirteen and thirty were massacred";
Khoury 2012, p. 263;
Masalha 2012, p. 85, "between 70 and 200 Palestinian civilians were killed ... in a large-scale, well-planned massacre";
Lentin 2010, pp. 69–71, 140;
Slyomovics 2007, p. 35;
Esmeir 2007, pp. 229–250.
But see:Morris 2008, p. 164, "Documentary evidence indicates that the Alexandroni troops murdered a handful of POWs—and expelled the inhabitants—but provides no grounds for believing that a large-scale massacre occurred."))
^Pappe 2022, p. 136, "To avert this, the Israeli government began, in August 1948, to execute an anti-repatriation policy, which resulted in either the total destruction or full Jewish takeover of every deserted Palestinian house and dwelling, both in the villages and the urban neighbourhoods.";
Cohen 2017, p. 81, "As the war progressed, and the Arabs of Palestine continued to be uprooted from their homes, the position that the refugees should not be allowed to return was gaining momentum. An official decision sealing this trend was taken in a government session on June 16.";
Davis 2011, p. 9, "The state's policy during and after the 1948 War was to destroy the houses in the villages so that people would not be encouraged to return.31 In the process, some 70 percent of these villages were completely destroyed, and another 22 percent were left with only a few houses or religious places standing.";
Morris 2008, pp. 298–309 and 411, "[p. 298] During the truce, the Arabs and Bernadotte pressed Israel to agree to a return of all or some of the refugees. But the Zionist leaders had decided against this. By late summer 1948 a consensus had formed that the refugees were not to be allowed back during the war, and a majority—led by Ben-Gurion and Shertok—believed that it was best that they not return after the war either. The Israelis argued that a discussion of refugee repatriation must await the end of hostilities: in wartime, returnees would constitute a fifth column. But, in private, they added that after the war, too, if allowed back, returnees would constitute a demographic and political time bomb, with the potential to destabilize the Jewish state ... The Israeli decision to bar a refugee return had consolidated between April and August.";
Pappe 2006, pp. 187–190, "[p. 187] The major activities towards the end of the 1948 ethnic cleansing operation now focused on implementing Israel's anti-repatriation policy on two levels. The first level was national, introduced in August 1948 by an Israeli governmental decision to destroy all the evicted villages and transform them into new Jewish settlements or 'natural' forests. The second level was diplomatic, whereby strenuous efforts were made to avert the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the return of the refugees. The two were closely interconnected: the pace of demolition was deliberately accelerated with the specific aim of invalidating any discussion on the subject of refugees returning to their houses, since those houses would no longer be there ... There was a third anti-repatriation effort, and that was to control the demographic distribution of Palestinians both within the villages that had not been cleansed and in the previously mixed towns of Palestine, at that point already totally'de-Arabised'. For this purpose, the Israeli army established, on 12 January 1949, a new unit, the Minority Unit. It was made up of Druze, Circassians and Bedouin who were recruited to it for one specific job only: to prevent Palestinian villagers and town dwellers from returning to their original homes.";
Morris 2004, p. 589, "But if a measure of ambivalence and confusion attended Haganah\IDF treatment of Arab communities during and immediately after conquest, there was nothing ambiguous about Israeli policy, from summer 1948, toward those who had been displaced and had become refugees and toward those who were yet to be displaced, in future operations: Generally applied with resolution and, often, with brutality, the policy was to prevent a refugee return at all costs. And if, somehow, refugees succeeded in infiltrating back, they were routinely rounded up and expelled (though tens of thousands of ‘infiltrators’ ultimately succeeded in resettling and becoming Israeli citizens). In this sense, it may fairly be said that all 700,000 or so who ended up as refugees were compulsorily displaced or ‘expelled’."
^Masalha 2012, pp. 73–74, "In 1948 more than half of the Palestinians were driven from their towns and villages, mainly by a deliberate Israeli policy of ‘transfer’ and ethnic cleansing. The name ‘Palestine’ disappeared from the map. To complete this transformation of the country, in August 1948 a de facto ‘Transfer Committee’ was officially (though secretly) appointed by the Israeli cabinet to plan the Palestinian refugees’ organised resettlement in the Arab states. The three-member committee was composed of ‘Ezra Danin, a former senior Haganah intelligence officer and a senior Foreign Ministry adviser on Arab affairs since July 1948; Zalman Lifschitz, the prime minister's adviser on land matters; and Yosef Weitz (born in Russia in 1890, emigrated to Palestine in 1908), head of the Jewish National Fund's land settlement department, as head of the Committee. The main Israeli propaganda lines regarding the Palestinian refugees and some of the myths of 1948 were cooked up by members of this official Transfer Committee. Besides doing everything possible to reduce the Palestinian population in Israel, Weitz and his colleagues sought in October 1948 to amplify and consolidate the demographic transformation of Palestine by: preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes and villages; destroying Arab villages; settling Jews in Arab villages and towns and distributing Arab lands among Jewish settlements; extricating Jews from Iraq and Syria; seeking ways to ensure the absorption of Palestinian refugees in Arab countries and launching a propaganda campaign to discourage Arab return.";
Morris 2008, pp. 300 and 308;
Pappe 2006, p. 212, "Thus he decided to appoint Danin and Weitz to a committee of two that from then on would take all final decisions on Palestinian property and land, the main features of which were destruction and confiscation.";
Morris 2004, pp. 312–329, "[p. 312] From May, Weitz pressed Ben-Gurion and Shertok to set up a ‘Transfer Committee’, preferably with himself at its head, to oversee ‘transfer policy’, which in the main was to focus on measures that would assure that there would be no return. More guardedly, the committee was also to advise the political leadership and the Haganah on further population displacements. The first unofficial Transfer Committee – composed of Weitz, Danin and Sasson, now head of the Middle East Affairs Department of the Foreign Ministry – came into being at the end of May, following Danin's agreement to join and Shertok's 28 May unofficial sanction of the committee's existence and goals ... [p. 313] from the beginning of June, with JNF funds and personnel, the committee set about razing villages in various areas ... [p. 329] Although no formal decision was reached, a committee – the second and official Transfer Committee – with far narrower terms of reference than Weitz had originally sought, was at last appointed by Ben-Gurion. The 18 August gathering at the Prime Minister's Office had been defined as ‘consultative’. The participants had been united on the need to bar a return and there was general, if not complete, agreement as to the means to be used to attain this end – destruction of villages, settlement in other sites and on abandoned lands, cultivation of Arab fields, purchase and expropriation of Arab lands, and the use of propaganda to persuade the refugees that they would not be allowed back. The same day, orders went out to all IDF units to prevent ‘with all means’ the return of refugees.";
Schulz 2003, pp. 33–34, "Initially a number of measures were taken in order to prevent refugees from returning. At the end of May a Transfer Committee was set up, proposing that return be barred and that the Arab Palestinian population be assisted in being absorbed elsewhere. In this plan, villages were to be destroyed during military operations, cultivation was to be hindered and Jews were to be settled in towns and villages (Morris 1987:136). The plan became official policy during the latter part of the war ... In June the Israeli government decided officially to bar a return, in order to maintain what had, from a Zionist perspective, been achieved. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had received an order to halt any movement of refugees back to Israel by the use of fire."
^Pappe 2022, p. 128, "The people of Lydda, Ramleh and Majdal were evicted by force, suffering massacres and humiliation in the process.";
Manna 2022, p. 48 ("The murder of dozens in the Dahmash mosque massacre in Lydda, and the subsequent expulsion of tens of thousands of the inhabitants of the city and of neighboring Ramla on a blistering hot Ramadan day") and 96 n. 72 ("Just as the Dayr Yasin massacre is the most famous operation in the killings of defenseless Palestinian civilians, the expulsion of tens of thousands of the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramla became the most famous ethnic cleansing operation carried out by the Israeli army with orders from the top leadership.");
Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 93;
Slater 2020, p. 82, "During the 1948 war Rabin was a leading Haganah general and commander of a force that violently expelled 50,000 inhabitants of the Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramle.";
Shenhav 2019, p. 49;
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 13, "the Nakba in Lydda and the massacre that took place there";
Ghanim 2018, pp. 107–108, "the Dahmash Massacre, during which tens of Palestinians who were gathered in the Dahmash mosque were terminated ... That is how fifty thousand residents of Lydda and Ramla were expelled after being terrorized.";
Cohen 2017, p. 82, "... the 10-day battle (July 9–18, 1948) when almost all the residents of Ramleh and Lydda – two towns that were designated to become part of the Arab state but were considered by Ben-Gurion as a strategic threat to the Jewish state – were expelled (for an eyewitness account of the events in Lydda and Ramleh, see Busailah (1981); for a basic account, see Morris (1986); for interviews with the Palmach commanders who expelled the inhabitants, see Shavit 2013:99–115). Their expulsion was carried out on an order, or at least with the approval of Ben-Gurion (Morris 1986:91) ... Ben-Gurion issued a second, milder order, according to which the Arab inhabitants were to be encouraged, but not forced, to leave, but by then the expulsion had already been carried out.";
Masalha 2012, p. 86, "one of the bloodiest atrocities of 1948. According to Israeli historian Yoav Gelber, Dayr Yasin 'was not the worst of the war's atrocities ... the massacre of approximately 250 Arabs in Lydda ... took place following capitulation and not in the midst of combat’ ... Dozens of unarmed civilians who were detained in the Dahmash Mosque and church premises of the town were gunned down and murdered. One official Israeli source put the casualty figures at 250 dead and many injured. It is likely, however, that somewhere between 250 and 400 Arabs were killed in this IDF massacre; and an estimated 350 more died in the subsequent expulsion and forced march of the townspeople ... A group of between twenty and fifty Arab civilians was brought to clean up the mosque and bury the remains. After they had finished their work, they were shot into the graves they had dug.";
Knopf-Newman 2011, p. 183, "... al-Ramla and Lydda also experienced massacre, rape, and forced migration, but as Hammad's poem indicates 400 Palestinians out of 17,000 remained. Before the expulsion, in July 1948 Hagana, in collusion with Irgun, encircled the area and attacked its inhabitants ...";
Morris 2008, pp. 287–292;
Slyomovics 2007, p. 30, "The largest single expulsion of Palestinians, some 50,000 urban-dwellers";
Pappe 2006, p. 156, "As we have seen, 15 May 1948 may have been a very significant date for the 'real war' between Israel and the Arab armies, but it was totally insignificant for the ethnic cleansing operations. The same goes for the two periods of truce - they were notable landmarks for the former but irrelevant for the latter, with one qualification, perhaps: it proved easier during the actual fighting to conduct large-scale cleansing operations as the Israelis did between the two truces, when they expelled the populations of the two towns of Lydd and Ramla, altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, when they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.";
Schulz 2003, p. 28, "Serious atrocities were committed in several instances, for example in Lydda, accelerating flight."
^Khoury 2012, p. 262, "As the infiltrators were limited by Israelis, Palestinian peasants tried to return across the borders in order to rejoin their households or to collect their harvest.";
Morris 2008, pp. 296 ("large numbers of Arab refugees continuously tried to infiltrate through Israeli lines to return to their homes or reap crops") and 300 ("Already on 1 June, a group of senior officials, including Shertok, Cabinet Secretary Zehev Sharef, and Minority Affairs Minister Bechor Shitrit, had resolved that the Arabs “were not to be helped to return” and that IDF commanders “were to be issued with the appropriate orders.” It was feared that the refugees would try to exploit the impending truce beginning 11 June to infiltrate back to their homes. Front-line units were instructed to bar a refugee return. Oded Brigade HQ instructed its battalions “to take every possible measure to prevent” a return; this would “prevent tactical and political complications down the road.” The army, too, appears to have been thinking of both the military and political advantages of barring a return ... No vote was taken on 16 June—though orders immediately went out to all front-line units to bar refugee infiltration “also with live fire.”");
Morris 2004, pp. 442-446 ("[p. 442] The institution of the Second Truce and the relative quiet that descended on the front lines tempted the refugees to try to return to their homes or, at least, to reap their crops along and behind the lines. Immediately after the start of the truce, IDF units on all the fronts were instructed to bar the way, including by use of live fire, to Arabs seeking to cross into Israeli territory, be it for resettlement, theft, smuggling, harvesting, sabotage or espionage. Such instructions were periodically reissued. The units were also instructed to scour the now-empty villages for infiltrators, to kill or expel them, and to patrol still-populated villages where illegal residents were to be identified, detained and expelled. Different units implemented these orders with varying degrees of efficiency, severity and consistency. Pressure on the national-level leadership to act firmly against Arab infiltration was applied by settlements, especially in hard-hit areas like the Coastal Plain, which feared terrorism and theft; by officials who feared for the future of the new settlements; by IDF units deployed along the front lines, who saw the infiltrators as a security threat; and by the police ... [p. 443] the army had been dealing with the problem – albeit without decisive success – since the end of the 'Ten Days'. ... [p. 445] During the Second Truce, IDF outposts and patrols regularly harassed harvesters between front line positions, behind the lines and in no man's land, to a depth of 500–600 metres – though the phenomenon was not as widespread as during the First Truce, when the harvest had been at its height. The policy often involved destroying structures used by harvesters for storage or sleep.") and 529 ("Few Arab villagers were left on the Israeli side of the ceasefire lines separating the new State and the areas held by Jordan and the Iraqi forces in the Triangle when the major bouts of fighting ended in central Palestine in mid-1948. Most of the empty pre-1948 villages were demolished by the IDF to render the sites unattractive to would-be returnees. Along the front lines, the army continuously harassed Arab cultivators and barred infiltrators; Israel, for both military and political reasons, wanted as few Arabs inside the country, behind the lines, as possible, and feared saboteurs and spies. The purpose of most of the infiltrations was agricultural or to return home or theft; very few were terroristic. But there was sporadic terrorism.")
^Manna 2022, pp. 60-92 ("[p. 60] The dominant understanding that the population of the Galilee escaped the Nakba is not accurate, since of the 220 cities and villages in the Galilee populated by Arabs, only 70 remained after the Nakba. Over two-thirds of the Palestinian towns and villages had been destroyed and their populations expelled; 100,000 Arabs or fewer escaped this fate, representing about half of those who were living in the Galilee until the end of 1947. It is true that more Palestinian residents remained in the Galilee than in any other area occupied by Israel in 1948; nevertheless, ethnic cleansing in some parts of the Galilee was almost total ... [p. 75] In the villages of upper Galilee closer to the Lebanese border, however, the war crimes and expulsions were more severe and cruel. The Israeli army carried out killings (including massacres), pillaged, and raped in a number of border villages, including Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Hula, and Sa‘sa‘, on the day the villages were occupied or shortly thereafter. The killings and expulsions were carried out in villages that had put up no resistance to the occupiers. The inhabitants of some villages (Saliha, for example) even resisted the presence of the ARA in their village, but this did not save them when the soldiers of the Israeli army entered their village."), 301 n. 83 ("The Israeli army carried out massacres in ‘Ilabun, against al-Mawasi Arabs, in Kufr ‘Inan, Farradiyya, Majd al-Krum, al-Bi‘na, Dayr al-Asad, Nahaf, Tarshiha, Safsaf, Jish, Sa‘sa‘, Hula, and Saliha. In the massacres of upper Galilee alone hundreds of defenseless civilians and prisoners were executed by the soldiers."), and 308 n. 96 ("The murder and expulsion of defenseless civilians involved the residents of the villages of ‘Ilabun, al-Mawasi Arabs, Kufr ‘Inan, Majd al-Krum, al-Bi‘na, Dayr al-Asad, Nahf, Sha‘b, Mirun, Jish, al-Safsaf, Sa‘sa‘, Tarshiha, Salha, Hula, and others.");
Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 93, "In that 1988 Tikkun essay Benny Morris once argued that “Jewish atrocities” were “far more widespread than the old historians” had indicated, and he went on to mention the massacres of Arabs at places like Al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Safsaf, Hule, Saliha, Sasa, and Lydda.";
Slater 2020, p. 90, "On October 15, Rabin continued, after Egypt fired a few shots at the convoy, “we had our pretext” and Israel implemented its plan, succeeding not only in expelling the Egyptian forces from the Negev but also seizing a large section of the western Negev region that had previously been allocated to the Arab state.";
Cohen 2017, p. 87, "Even before the government was discussing the census and the elections, it had decided on resuming the fighting. In late October of 1948, the IDF launched offensives in the south and north of the country and completed its conquest of the Galilee, the Negev, and the southern coastal line to Gaza. During these conquests, dozens of thousands of Palestinians were once again uprooted from their homes. Some were expelled by Jewish forces; others fled, fearing revenge. Some left with the retreating Egyptian army (in the south) and al-Qawuqji's Arab Liberation Army (in the north). In the south, none of the Arab settlements remained standing, but some of the Bedouin communities did. In the Galilee, many managed to remain steadfastly in their villages despite efforts to expel them.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 73–74;
Morris 2008, pp. 313 ("...the IDF offensive against the Egyptian expeditionary force that began on 15 October and the offensive against the ALA in the Galilee two weeks later.") and 344-348;
Pappe 2006, p. 190, "Under the watchful eyes of UN observers who were patrolling the skies of the Galilee, the final stage of the ethnic cleansing operation, begun in October 1948, continued until the summer of 1949. Whether from the sky or on the ground, no one could fail to spot the hordes of men, women and children streaming north every day. Ragged women and children were conspicuously dominant in these human convoys: the young men were gone-executed, arrested or missing. By this time UN observers from above and Jewish eyewitnesses on the ground must have become desensitised towards the plight of the people passing by in front of them: how else to explain the silent acquiescence in the face of the massive deportation unfolding before their eyes?"
^Pappe 2022, p. 126, "The Israelis occupied Beersheba in October 1948, and the Israeli army even threatened to enter Sinai and the West Bank, that is, to enter Egypt proper and ignore the tacit understanding with Jordan.";
Masalha 2012, p. 115, "towns and villages of southern Palestine, including the cities of Beer Sheba and al-Majdal, were completely depopulated";
Davis 2011, p. 7, "the depopulation of Palestinians from cities—Acre, Haifa, Safad, Tiberius, Beersheba, Jaffa, and Baysan"
^Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 93; Pappe 2020, pp. 33–34, "a soldier's eyewitness report ... enumerates details of the massacre at al-Dawayima as told to the author of the letter by a soldier who participated in the operation ... 'There was no battle and no resistance (and no Egyptians). The first conquerors [to enter the village] killed from 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women and children. They killed the children by smashing their skulls with sticks. There was not a home without its dead.'"; Masalha 2012, p. 86, "80–100 were killed by the IDF"; Morris 2008, p. 333; Sa'di 2007, p. 293, "According to a report on the testimony of one Israeli soldier ... 'The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.'"; Slyomovics 2007, pp. 29–30, "an Israeli army massacre of more than eighty villagers"
^Sayigh 2023, p. 282, "61 bodies";
Manna 2022, pp. 75–77 and 80, "[p. 76] The soldiers gathered all those who remained in their homes and shot and killed twelve young men. Then they took dozens of men (some of whom had fought with the ARA) to a well where they executed them.76 Not satisfied with killing the men in cold blood, the soldiers picked several women and asked them to fetch water to the village. After they had moved away some distance, the soldiers followed and raped them, killing two in the process.";
Hasian Jr. 2020, p. 93;
Pappe 2020, p. 34, "The document states that, in Safsaf, 'They caught fifty-two men, tied them to one another, dug a hole and shot them. Ten were still alive [when thrown into the pit] the women came and asked for mercy. They found the bodies of six old men, all in all sixty-one bodies, three [reported] cases of rape . . . one, a child aged fourteen ...'";
Docker 2012, p. 19, "Survivors of the Safsaf massacre witnessed ‘how one pregnant woman was bayoneted’.";
Khoury 2012, p. 263;
Masalha 2012, p. 86, pp. 78-79 ("[quoting Morris] About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was an unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion."), 84, and 86 ("50–70 were killed by the IDF");
Morris 2008, pp. 341 ("The order made no mention of the prospective fate of the civilian inhabitants of, and refugees in, the “pocket.” But an earlier order, produced six weeks before the start of Hiram by Haifa District HQ, one of Northern Front's units, spoke of “evicting” the inhabitants from the conquered villages. This would have been in line with Ben-Gurion's stated expectation that the “pocket” would be “empty [reik]” of Arab villagers after conquest."), and 345 ("fifty to seventy civilians and POWs were murdered ... by the Seventh Brigade");
Humphries & Khalili 2007, p. 211;
Pappe 2006, pp. 180–185, "[p. 185] By 31 October, the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army."
^Manna 2022, pp. 199–200, "Isolating the Arabs from the rest of the citizens of Israel and imposing military rule over them had abrogated their political rights. The military government resorted to the 1945 defense (emergency) regulations to legitimize the policy of repression, theft, and the expulsion of thousands of those who remained in the Galilee and elsewhere. The government's policy made Arab residents accused of being perpetual violators of those unjust laws. The imposition of permanent curfews at night, limiting the mobility of citizens, and the system of permits which were granted to those with close connections and denied to the rest, deprived people of a dignified life and basic rights. Even within Arab towns and villages the army declared large tracts of land “military zones” which the owners of the land were prohibited from entering or cultivating. In this way the system of military rule strangled the economy of Arab citizens and prohibited the development of their towns and villages so as to make it easier to control them. Ian Lustick well described and analyzed Israeli policy towards the Palestinian minority, which relied on control through a system of isolation under tight military rule.";
Pappe 2022, pp. 145–146, "While other Palestinians were confined in camps or became citizens of Jordan or non-citizens in the Gaza Strip, 160,000 Palestinians within the new Jewish state were put under military rule in October 1948. This was to last eighteen years, and the memory of those dark times has played a formative role in the construction of Palestinian identity in Israel to today and strained to breaking point the relationship between the minority and the majority ... The legal status of the military rule that was imposed on the Palestinian minority in October 1948 was grounded in the mandatory emergency regulations the British had issued in 1945 against the Jewish underground, which gave military governors extended authority over the people under their rule. These same regulations now became a pernicious tool in the hands of callous and sometimes sadistic military rulers, who generally were drawn from non-combatant units just before their retirement. Their cruel behaviour consisted mainly of harassing the population with a range of abuses, not unlike those to which new army recruits were subjected. There were other aspects to Israeli military rule. Under its umbrella, the official land confiscation policy was able to continue in the name of ‘security’ and ‘public interest’. Political activists even vaguely suspected of identifying with Palestinian nationalism were expelled or imprisoned.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 83, "Until 1966, most Palestinians lived under strict martial law and much of their land was seized (along with that of those who had been forced from the country and were now refugees).";
Bäuml 2017, pp. 103–124, "[p. 103] The military rule was forced upon the Arabs through a special military unit called “the military government,” which was the main Israeli official mechanism governing the Arabs remaining in Israel. As the Arabs within the state of Israel had become a minority and were no longer a threat to the Zionists, the overall aim of the military government was to secure the continued traditional segregation and exclusion of Arabs from the Zionist project, which started with the beginning of Zionism. This included expropriation of large areas of Arab land that had been given over to Jewish settlement, as well as the Arabs being defined as security threats that had to be withstood ... [p. 108] Thus, during the 1948 war, the Temporary State Council decided to place the Galilee, the Triangle area, the Naqab and the cities of Ramleh, Lydda, Jaffa, and Majdal Asqalan – areas with an Arab majority population at the end of the battles – under special military rule. From that time until the end of this rule in 1968, the military government was the central Israeli official body administering the affairs of the Arab minority in Israel ... The aim of the military government's actions was to minimize and almost abolish the civil equality that the Arabs should have enjoyed as Israeli citizens. The military government resulted in the exclusion of the Arabs from all the Jewish state systems, their discrimination in every domain, the deepening of their internal divides or the creation of new ones, the erasure of their identity, and the hindering of their sense as a national collective ... [p. 115] Contemporaneous testimonies describe the raison d’etre of the military government: This was the government's way of preventing the Arabs from working in the Jewish sector, or of regulating their employment in various ways, such as time, numbers, and areas of employment – for its own convenience (Ben-Porat 1966). The military government prevented the Arabs from taking over government land and major transportation routes (this fact was determined by the Retner Committee, which examined the necessity of the military government; Kafkafi 1998). It also prevented them from taking over abandoned Arab villages, establishing new ones, or moving their homes to other places at will, especially to Jewish cities (Schiff 1962; see also Ozacky-Lazar 1998 for testimony by Colonel Shacham before the Rosen Committee in 1959). Through movement and living restrictions, the Israeli government used the military government over the Arabs to keep Arabs away from their lands, thus making it easier for the government to confiscate them (Amitai 1963b; Jiryis 1976; LA, 2-926-1957-148, January 30, 1958). The government averts modernization, industrialization, and urbanization among the Arab citizens, leaving the Arab sector at a very low level of employment and material comfort, creating very large villages with no local employment opportunities (Falah 1991b; Kafkafi 1988).31";
Lustick & Berkman 2017, pp. 42–46, "[p. 42] For almost two decades, from 1948 through 1966, suffrage rights for Arab citizens coexisted with severe and systematic restrictions on the Arab population's civil liberties, economic and cultural rights, and freedom of movement. This regime of pass laws, permits, curfews, harassment, isolation, and petty punishments was enforced by poorly trained army units and administered by Jewish bureaucrats and military officers thought by the rest of the military to be incapable of performing serious military functions. The military government controlled Arabs by isolating them from Jews, fragmenting them into disconnected villages and regions, enforcing divisions among religious communities, stoking interclan rivalries among kinship groups, enlisting networks of informers, and co-opting traditionalist elites. Overall, the objective was to render the presence of Arabs – a sizable non-Jewish minority in the country – as irrelevant as possible to the life of the Jewish state (Lustick 1980). Officially established in October 1948, the military government's legal authority was rooted in emergency mandatory legislation absorbed by Israeli cabinet decree following the declaration of statehood in mid-May. The Defense Emergency Regulations “delegated effective sovereignty to the military within a specified territory and authorized its commander to suspend all basic constitutional liberties, including the property and habeas corpus rights, of its inhabitants” (Robinson 2013:33).3 Armed with these and other emergency laws, Ben-Gurion appointed Haganah commander Elimelekh Avner to oversee the military regime that replaced the ad hoc administrations set up by the army in majority Arab areas ... [p. 43] Although loosened gradually between its establishment in 1948 and its abolition in 1966, in its first decade the military government controlled nearly every aspect of daily life in Arab areas. Formal military permits were required for opening a shop, harvesting crops, seeking medical treatment, finding a job in a Jewish city, traveling to work, or simply moving between villages for visitation. To turn the spigots of cheap Arab labor on and off when and where it was necessary for the Jewish economy, only a fraction of all Arab requests for work permits were granted. Arab farmers were not allowed to independently market their produce but rather were forced to sell it at below-market prices to state-created monopolistic marketing firms. Blacklists were used to deny politically affiliated Arabs development loans and travel authorization (Lustick 1980:184) ... [p. 45] For nearly two decades, the military government was instrumental in stripping the Arab minority of its remaining physical assets and depriving it of an independent political base from which it could promote its national, cultural, and economic interests. This was not only its effect but its raison d’être.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 5 ("After 1948 the Palestinians inside Israel had to endure eighteen years of military administration, which restricted their movements, controlled almost every aspect of their life and acted as an instrument for the expropriation of the bulk of their lands (Sa’di 2005: 7–26; Jiryis 1976; Lustick 1982; Kamen 1987: 484–9, 1988: 68–109; Falah 1996: 256–85; Benziman and Mansour 1992; Kretzmer 1987). The military government (1948–66) declared Palestinian villages ‘closed military zones’ to prevent displaced Palestinians from returning." and 230-231 ("After its establishment, Israel treated the Palestinians remaining within its frontiers almost as foreigners. It swiftly imposed a military government in the areas inhabited by the Palestinian minority, expropriated over half of the lands of this ‘non-Jewish’ population, and pursued various policies of demographic containment, political control, exclusionary domination, and systematic discrimination in all spheres of life. The military government, imposed by prime minister and defence minister David Ben-Gurion, became closely associated with both his hostile attitude towards the Palestinian minority and his authoritarian style and almost unchallenged leadership of the ruling Labour Party ... Officially the purpose of imposing martial law and military government on Israel's Arab minority was security. However, its establishment, which lasted until 1966, was intended to serve a number of both stated and concealed objectives. The first was to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees — ‘infiltrators’ in Israeli terminology — to their homes. In the process, others who had not ‘infiltrated’ the country were sometimes driven out as well — the second objective. The third purpose of the military government was to maintain control and supervision over the Israeli Arabs, who were separated and isolated from the Jewish population. ho were separated and isolated from the Jewish population. The use of force and coercion formed an important element in Israel's policy towards its Arab citizens in the post-1948 period. The institution of the military government, together with the imposition of the Defence Emergency Regulations, promulgated by the British Mandatory authorities in 1945, empowered the military governors to close off the Arab localities and to restrict entry or exit only to those who had been issued permits by the military authorities. These regulations also enabled the Israeli authorities to evict and deport people from their villages and towns; to place individuals under administrative detention for indefinite periods without trial; and to impose fines and penalties without due process. The military governors also were authorised to close Arab areas in order to prevent internal Arab refugees (also referred to as ‘present absentees’, they were estimated at 30,000, or one-fifth of those remaining) from returning to their homes and lands that had been confiscated by the state and taken over by new and old Jewish settlements.");
Morris 2008, p. 349, "As was its wont in occupied Arab-populated areas, Israel imposed military government on the core of the Galilee.144 The inhabitants, mostly deemed hostile or of doubtful loyalty, were subjected to a strict regimen of curfews and travel restrictions, which lasted, with a gradual easing of the strictures, until 1966.";
Morris 2004, pp. 421–422, "[p. 422] With the help of attached IDF units, the governors ruled the communities, imposing curfews, handing out residency and travel permits, organising municipal services, dispensing food and health care to the needy, establishing schools and kindergartens, and organising search operations for infiltrating refugees and their expulsion."
^Manna 2022, p. 87, "During the last few months of 1948, many of those who had been forced to migrate during or after Operation Hiram tried to return to their villages on their own; the army, on the other hand, was persistent in using various ways to prevent this from happening, particularly in those villages where most of the residents had been forced out. The army also conducted “combing” operations in the remaining villages to arrest “infiltrators” and expel them across the border once again.";
Masalha 2012, pp. 230–231, "Officially the purpose of imposing martial law and military government on Israel's Arab minority was security. However, its establishment, which lasted until 1966, was intended to serve a number of both stated and concealed objectives. The first was to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees — ‘infiltrators’ in Israeli terminology — to their homes. In the process, others who had not ‘infiltrated’ the country were sometimes driven out as well — the second objective. The third purpose of the military government was to maintain control and supervision over the Israeli Arabs, who were separated and isolated from the Jewish population.";
Pappe 2006, p. 189, "Those who were arrested were deported to Lebanon; but if they found refuge in the area Israel continued to occupy until the spring of 1949, they were likely to be expelled again. Only on 16 January 1949 did the order came to stop the selective deportations from southern Lebanon, and the Minority Unit was instructed to confine its activity solely to the Galilee and the former mixed towns and cities. The mission there was clear: to prevent any attempt - and there were quite a few - by refugees to try to smuggle their way back home, no matter whether they tried to return to a village or a house to live, or just wanted to retrieve some of their personal possessions. The 'infiltrators', as the Israeli army called them, were in many cases farmers who sought surreptitiously to harvest their fields or pick the fruit from their now unattended trees. Refugees who tried to slip past the army lines quite often met their death at the hands of Israeli army patrols. In the language of Israeli intelligence reports, they were 'successfully shot at'. A quote from such a report dated 4 December 1948 records: 'successful shooting at Palestinians trying to return to the village of Blahmiyya and who attempted to retrieve their belongings.'";
Morris 2004, pp. 508-510 ("[p. 508] During the last months of 1948 and the first months of 1949 there was constant infiltration of refugees from Lebanon back to the villages ... [p. 509] The case of Bir‘im, Iqrit and Mansura illustrates how deep was the IDF's determination from November 1948 onward to create and maintain a northern border ‘security belt’ clear of Arabs ... [p. 510] But for months, IDF and GSS attention focused on Tarshiha, the largest village in the area ... Most of its original 4,000–5,000 inhabitants (4/5 Muslims) had fled during Hiram. By December 1948, the village had some 700 inhabitants, 600 of them Christians, a minority of them infiltrees (inhabitants who had fled the country and then infiltrated back). The settlement authorities wanted the abandoned housing for immigrants; the military viewed settlement in the village as ‘very important’, as only 12 per cent of the Galilee's population at this time was Jewish. Their main fear was that, if left partially empty, the village would fill up with returnees. The villagers, for their part, lived in continuous fear of expulsion, and periodically sent delegations to plead with Israeli officials. Shitrit repeatedly interceded with Ben-Gurion and ‘saved’ them."), 513-514 ("Immediately after Hiram, the Israeli authorities, parallel to the start of the border-clearing operations, put their minds to the problem of the populated, semi-populated and empty Arab villages in the interior of the Galilee, to all of which refugees were returning. The fear was that with the worsening winter weather and the refugees’ steady pauperisation, the influx would increase and empty and semi-populated villages would fill up anew, ultimately increasing the State's Arab minority and the security problems thus engendered ... [p. 514] From mid-December 1948 onward, the IDF periodically mounted massive sweeps in the Galilee villages to root out returnees and expel them ... But infiltrators continued to return."), 518 ("Southern Front was successful in preventing refugees from returning to the villages. In contrast with Northern Front, Yigal Allon, OC Southern Front, had completely driven out the local population during Operation Yoav and no fully or semi-populated villages were left behind his front lines (save for Majdal and Egyptian-held Faluja and ‘Iraq al Manshiya in the Faluja Pocket). There were no recurrent, large-scale cat-and-mouse games as occurred in the north. So, while large-scale infiltration continued, aimed at retrieving possessions, [p. 519] smuggling, theft, harvest and the like, the infiltrators found it almost impossible to resettle or gain permanent footholds in the villages; there was no local population to assist them or among which they could disappear."), and 534-536 ("[p. 534] The clearing of the borders of Arab communities following the hostilities was initiated by the IDF but, like the expulsions of the months before, was curbed by limitations imposed by the civilian leadership and was never carried out consistently or comprehensively. Even the initial border-clearing operation in the north in November 1948, which set as its goal an Arab-free strip at least five kilometres deep, was carried out without consistency or political logic. ... In terms of the army's independence in expelling or evicting Arab communities, November 1948 marked a watershed ... Thereafter, the IDF almost never acted alone and independently; it sought and had to obtain approval and decisions from the supreme civilian authorities ... The IDF's opinions and needs, which defined in great measure Israel's security requirements, continued to carry great weight in decision-making [p. 535] councils. But they were not always decisive and the army ceased to act alone ... [p. 536] Side by side with the border-clearing operations Israel also mounted recurrent sweeps in the villages in the interior designed to root out illegal returnees and to ‘shut down’ minimally inhabited villages ... The aim was to keep down the Arab population as well as to curtail various types of trouble that infiltrators augured. In a narrow sense, political, demographic, agricultural and economic considerations rather than military needs seem to have been decisive. The presence of Arabs in a half-empty village, given the circumstances, meant that the village would probably soon fill out with returnees. Completely depopulating the village and levelling it or filling the houses with Jewish settlers meant that infiltrators would have that many less sites to return to. In complementary fashion, filling out half-empty Arab villages (as happened at Tur‘an, Mazra‘a and Sha‘b) with the evicted population of other villages meant that these host villages would be ‘full up’ and unable to accommodate many infiltrees.")
^Pappe 2022, pp. 126–127, "[p. 126] The UN tried to deter the Israelis with sanctions; the USA sent a sharp warning; and the British gave an ultimatum that the Israeli operations were a casus bello in London's view. These moves succeeded in keeping the Israelis within the ceasefire lines ... By the winter of 1949, the guns were silent. The second phase of the war had ended, and with it, the second, but not the last, stage of the ‘cleansing’ of Palestine was over. The third phase was to extend beyond the war until 1954 and will be dealt with in the next chapter.";
Slater 2020, p. 90, "Two months later Rabin's forces were poised to push beyond the Negev into Egypt itself (the western Sinai peninsula); however, facing a British threat that it would militarily intervene if Israel continued attacking the Egyptian army, Ben-Gurion accepted a final ceasefire.";
Morris 2008, p. 350, "The fronts remained under truce and largely quiet during the second half of November and most of December."
^Manna 2022, pp. 121 ("The communist bloc states opposed United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 concerning the right of Palestinian refugees to return or receive compensation for their property. Arab countries also opposed this resolution, but for different reasons than the states of the communist bloc, whose opposition was based on unconditional support for Israel.") and 128 ("It was therefore expected that Israel would heed the December 1948 declaration of the United Nations concerning human rights and Resolution 194 which gave the Palestinian refugees the right of return and compensation for the property they had lost. Yet events contradicted the expectations of the fate-stricken people inside and outside their homeland.");
Pappe 2022, pp. 128 and 134–137, "[p. 136] The government in Jerusalem was constantly on the alert lest the international community insist on implementing the commitment it had made to the refugees in Resolution 194.";
Khalidi 2020, pp. 105 and 176;
Slater 2020, pp. 97–98, 263 and 272–273;
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 37 n. 36;
Bishara 2017, p. 149;
Docker 2012, p. 27, "Resolution 194 was passed by the United Nations General Assembly only two days after it adopted the UN Convention on genocide";
Sayigh 2009, p. 165, "In September 1948, towards the end of formal conflict, Count Bernadotte, the UN Mediator for Palestine, proposed that the refugees should return to their homes as part of an overall peace settlement. His proposal was subsequently formalized in UNGA Resolution 194 (December 11, 1948). Resolution 194 has consistently been invoked by Palestinian negotiators, and as consistently rejected by Israelis. Yet Israel was admitted to membership of the UN on the basis of agreeing to cooperate with the UN on the issues of Jerusalem and the refugees, an agreement forged when the UN formed the Conciliation Commission for Palestine in December 1948 to work on a peace settlement. At that time President Truman put pressure on Israel to allow back at least a token 100,000 refugees. Israel refused. It also rejected two other proposals made by the Conciliation Commission: the delimitation of Israel's boundaries, and the internationalization of Jerusalem. These early settlement negotiations show how a pattern was set of Israeli non-compliance with UN resolutions.";
Morris 2008, p. 338, "On 11 December, the assembly, in Resolution 194, formally adopted a number of Bernadotte's proposals, including recognition of the refugees’ right of return and the establishment of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC).";
Pappe 2006, p. 188, "The major international endeavour to facilitate the return of the refugees was led by the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission (the PCC). This was a small committee with only three members, one each from France, Turkey and the United States. The PCC called for the unconditional return of the refugees to their homes, which the assassinated UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, had demanded. They turned their position into a UN General Assembly resolution that was overwhelmingly supported by most of the member states and adopted on 11 December 1948. This resolution, UN Resolution 194, gave the refugees the option to decide between unconditional return to their homes and/or accepting compensation.";
Masalha 2003, p. 1 and 40 ("At the United Nations Israel denied the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and villages, opposing in particular UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948.");
Schulz 2003, p. 139, "Part and parcel of Resolution 194 is thus the right to return and the right to compensation for those choosing not to return and for lost property."
^Manna 2022, p. 128, "Shortly after the fighting between Egypt and Israel ended in early 1949, the two states began talks on an armistice and the drawing of borders between them. Israel's signing of an armistice agreement on 24 February 1949 with the biggest Arab state consolidated its military victory. Egypt was the first Arab state to sign an agreement, followed by Lebanon on 23 March, and Jordan on 3 April. According to the agreement with Jordan signed at Rhodes, the “little triangle” area, with a population of 31,000, was transferred to Israel. Syria was the last to sign an armistice agreement, on 20 July 1949, and the uncertain period between the end of military battles and the drawing of actual borders ended. Some historians regard these agreements as the real and official end of the 1948 war in Palestine.";
Pappe 2022, p. 126, "negotiations produced armistice lines that held in the case of Syria, Jordan and Egypt until 1967 and in the case of Lebanon until 1978";
Slater 2020, pp. 88 and 93–95, "[p. 95] in 1949 it negotiated separate military truces or armistice agreements with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt";
Davis 2011, pp. 7 and 235 n. 1, "[p. 235 n.1] Israel reached separate truce agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in Rhodes between February and July of 1949";
Morris 2008, p. 375, "The war of 1948 formally ended with the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and four of the Arab belligerents: Egypt (on 24 February 1949), Lebanon (23 March 1949), Jordan (3 April 1949), and Syria (20 July 1949). The Iraqis refused to enter into armistice negotiations."
^Khalidi 2020, p. 75, "Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.";
Pappe 2006, pp. 179–198, "[p. 187] "The 'mopping-up' operations actually continued well into April 1949, and sometimes resulted in further massacres ... [p. 197] Nor did any contrition such as Alterman's stop the forces from completing their mission of cleansing Palestine, a job to which they now applied increasing levels of ruthlessness and cruelty. Hence, starting in November 1948 and all the way up to the final agreement with Syria and Lebanon in the summer of 1949, another eighty-seven villages were occupied; thirty-six of these were emptied by force, while from the rest a selective number of people were deported.";
Morris 2004, pp. 505–536, "[p. 505] In the weeks and months after the termination of hostilities, the Israeli authorities adopted a policy of clearing the new borders of Arab Communities. Some were transferred inland, to Israeli Arab villages in the interior; others were expelled across the border ... In general, throughout this period, the political desire to have as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish State and the need for empty villages to house new immigrants meshed with the strategic desire to achieve ‘Arab-clear’ frontiers and secure internal lines of communication. It was the IDF that set the policy in motion, with the civil and political authorities often giving approval after the fact ... [p. 535] The period November 1948 – March 1949 saw a gradual shift of emphasis from expulsion out of the country to eviction from one site to another inside Israel: What could be done without penalty during hostilities became increasingly more difficult to engineer in the following months of truce and armistice. There was still a desire to see Arabs leave the country and occasionally this was achieved (as at Faluja and Majdal), albeit through persuasion, selective intimidation, psychological pressure and financial inducement. The expulsion of the Baqa al Gharbiya refugees was a classic of the genre, with the order being channeled through the local mukhtar. But generally, political circumstances ruled out brute expulsions. Eviction and transfer of communities from one site to another inside Israel was seen as more palatable and more easily achieved."
^Slater 2020, p. 90;
Bäuml 2017, p. 105;
Manna 2013, p. 91, "The largest portion of it was occupied by Israel, which annexed approximately half of the proposed Arab state which was to be established according to the UN partition plan of 1947.";
Masalha 2012, p. 68, "The ‘War of Liberation’, which led to the creation of the State of Israel on 78 per cent of historic Palestine (not the 55 per cent according to the UN partition resolution)";
Wolfe 2012, pp. 133–134;
Davis 2011, p. 7, "Communal fighting through this period until the armistice agreements were signed in late 1949 resulted in the expanded borders of the Jewish state, declared to be the state of Israel on May 15, 1948, and the expulsion or flight of the majority of the Arabs living within its borders. From this point until 1967, Israel existed in some 78 percent of historic Palestine ...";
Shlaim 2009, pp. 29 ("As a result of the war, Israel acquired considerably more territory and more contiguity than had been given to it by the UN cartographers.") and 39 ("By the time the first truce was declared on 11 June, the Israel Defence Force was in control of areas beyond what had been assigned to the Jewish state under the partition plan ...");
Morris 2008, pp. 375–376;
Sa'di 2007, p. 294;
Pappe 2006, p. 175
^Manna 2022, pp. 7 ("The consensus among studies that trace the history of this Arab minority in the Jewish state is that those who remained totaled 156,000."), 88 ("in January 1949, the number of Arabs in the Jewish state stood at 125,000 ... Based on these numbers, it is clear that the official figure of 156,000 quoted by historians and researchers prior to the transfer of the villages of the Triangle to Israeli control is inaccurate."), and 304 n. 131 ("Most researchers use this figure from official Israeli statistics without scrutiny or reference to the fact that it may be inaccurate.");
Pappe 2022, p. 128, "160,000";
Khalidi 2020, p. 60, "160,000";
Slater 2020, p. 81, "about 150,000 to 160,000";
Confino 2018, p. 151 n. 10, "150,000";
Bäuml 2017, p. 106, "about 160,000";
Bishara 2017, p. 138, "about 150,000";
Cohen 2017, p. 87, "in late 1948 ... About 130,000 ... In the summer of 1949, the total number of the Arab citizens in Israel was 156,000.";
Rouhana 2017, p. 5 n. 6, "approximately 156,000";
Masalha 2012, pp. 5–6, "160,000";
Davis 2011, p. 9, "125,000";
Lentin 2010, p. 6, "between 60,000 and 156,000 Palestinians (depending on the source)";
Ghanim 2009, p. 25, "About 170,000";
Abu-Lughod & Sa'di 2007, p. 3, "from 60,000 to 156,000, depending on the sources"
^Manna 2022, pp. 128–129, "Israel opened its doors to the Jewish diaspora of the world so that they could 'return' and live in Israel, but slammed them shut in the face of Palestinians who had been forced to migrate from their homes only yesterday.";
Khalidi 2020, p. 75, "None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.";
Slater 2020, p. 94, "For that reason, as well as its “transfer” ideology and security concerns, the Israeli government decided to block the return of the Palestinian refugees—the survivors of the Nakba who had fled into neighboring Arab states—by any means necessary. As Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in the summer of 1948: the return of the refugees 'must be prevented . . . at all costs.'";
Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 7, "And it is the State of Israel that has prevented the return of the refugees since the end of the war.";
Sayigh 2009, p. 165, "A central aspect of Al-Nakba, and the one that has prevented any solution up to now, is Israel's steadfast refusal to allow the victims of expulsion to return.";
Morris 2008, p. 411, "Few expected that their refugeedom would last a lifetime or encompass their children and grandchildren. But it did. The permanence of the refugee problem owed much to Israel's almost instant decision, taken in the summer of 1948, not to allow back those who had fled or been expelled. The Zionist national and local leaderships almost instantly understood that a refugee return would destabilize the new state, demographically and politically. And the army understood that a refugee return would introduce a militarily subversive fifth column. Again, it was Shertok who explained: “We are resolute not to allow anyone under any circumstances to return. . . . [At best] the return can only be partial and small; the solution [to the problem] lies in the resettlement of the refugees in other countries.”";
Pappe 2006, p. 224, "The dispossession of Palestinian lands did not only entail the expulsion of their legal owners and the prevention of their repatriation and regaining ownership. It was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or 'Ancient' Hebrew places.";
Masalha 2003, p. 41, "The official Israeli position has always been that there can be no return of the refugees to Israeli territories, and that the only solution to the problem is their resettlement in the Arab states or elsewhere. Since 1949 Israel has consistently rejected a return of the 1948 refugees to their homes and villages; it has always refused to accept responsibility for the refugees and views them as the responsibility of the Arab countries in which they reside.";
Schulz 2003, pp. 33 ("What is beyond any doubt is the Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return after the war.") and 139 ("International diplomacy attempting to deal with the refugee issue has since the 1950s focused on resettlement somewhere else, as Israel would not admit any process of return, due to the sensitive demographic nature of Israel.")
^Manna 2022, p. 195; Khalidi 2020, pp. 90–91, "In October 1953, Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Qibya carried out a massacre following an attack by feda’iyin that killed three Israeli civilians, a woman and her two children, in the town of Yehud. Israeli special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians."; Masalha 2012, p. 75, "the massacres at Qibya in October 1953 ... Israeli troops of the notorious Unit 101 of the Israeli army, under the command of Ariel Sharon, attacked the West Bank village of Qibya, killing 69 Palestinians, many while hiding in houses blown up over their heads; 45 houses, a school, and a mosque were also destroyed (Shlaim 2000: 90–93; Morris 1997: 257–76; Chomsky 1983: 383–5)."; Pappe 2006, p. 258.
^Manna 2022, p. 11 ("On the Jordanian front, which remained quiet during the Sinai War, Border Guard troops carried out a massacre in Kafr Qasim on the evening of 29 October 1956. The killing by Israeli troops of forty-nine Arab citizens in cold blood, eight years after the Nakba, signals clearly how they were viewed by the ruling majority and its representatives in the security agencies."), 19 ("the army declared a curfew on the villages of the Triangle hours before the war began on 29 October 1956—and announced it only after villagers had left to tend their fields. This sudden movement restriction resulted in the killing of forty-nine people from the village of Kafr Qasim by Border Guards as they returned from their fields that evening, unaware of the curfew", 193-196, and 267-273; Ghanim 2018, pp. 96 ("This state of affairs began to change gradually with the passage of time and the waning of the prospect of expulsion, especially after the massacre of Kafr Qasim in 1956 on the eve of the Tripartite Aggression and the subsequent reconciliation in Kafr Qasim.") and 112 n.16 ("The massacre took place on the October 29, 1956, in the village Kafr Qasim. The Israel Border Police shot dead forty-nine Palestinian Arab civilians, all of whom were citizens of Israel."); Masalha 2012, p. 75, "Israeli-Palestinian village of Kafr Qasim, where on 29 October 1956 Israeli border guards murdered in cold blood forty-nine villagers (mostly women and children) returning from their fields"; Kimmerling 2008, p. 315, "1956 Forty-seven Israeli Arabs massacred in Kafr Qasim village after violating curfew."; Pappe 2006, p. 197 ("forty-nine villagers of Kfar Qassim, a village transferred to Israel in the armistice agreement with Jordan, were butchered") and 258 ("Israeli troops massacred forty-nine villagers returning from their fields")
^Sayigh 2023, p. 288 n. 13, "Palestinians were attacked ... in Lebanon during the civil war of 1975–1990, including the massacre of Tal al-Zaater"; Pappe 2022, p. 204, "The Syrians slaughtered Palestinians in Tel-Zaatar in 1976"; Khalidi 2020, pp. 125–126, "Tal al-Za‘tar ... Palestinians in all these places suffered such atrocities ... the camp was overrun in August 1976 and its entire population was expelled. Perhaps two thousand people were killed in what was probably the largest single massacre during the entire war ... The LF carried out the Tal al-Za‘tar massacre with Israel's covert support"; Khoury 2012, p. 263, "The massacres in Palestinian camps ... Tal Al Zaatar camp (1976) ... are a continuation of the massacres of 1948."; Kimmerling 2008, p. 319, "Christian right-wing militias in Lebanon, supported by Syria, enforce a siege on Tal al-Zaatar, a Palestinian refugee camp; the siege ends with a massacre of the camp inhabitants."
^Sayigh 2023, p. 288 n. 13, "Palestinians were attacked ... during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with the massacre of Sabra/Shatila"; Khalidi 2020, pp. 125-126, 140, 154-163 ("[p. 154] Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children."), and 279 n. 42 ("The most complete analysis of the number of victims of the massacre, based on extensive interviews and painstaking research, is by the distinguished Palestinian historian Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hout, who in Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 (Ann Arbor: Pluto, 2004), established a minimum of close to 1,400 killed. She notes, however, that as many victims were abducted and never found, the actual number was undoubtedly larger, and is unknowable."); Manna 2013, p. 96, "[During the 1982 Lebanese War] the Palestinians suffered again from massacres and destruction in the refugee camps."; Khoury 2012, p. 263, "The massacres in Palestinian camps ... Shatila and Sabra (1982)—are a continuation of the massacres of 1948"; Masalha 2012, p. 75 ("The large-scale massacre of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli-allied Kataib Lebanese militia; estimates of those killed are between 800 and 3,500."), 137, 141–143, and 226-227; Lentin 2010, pp. 88 ("The 1982—2000 Lebanon war, the first not to be perceived as a 'no-choice' war, led to the Sabra and Shatila massacre in which the IDF allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen to enter two Palestinian refugee camps and massacre civilians inside, leading to mass protests by Israeli Jews throughout Israel.") and 169-170 ("2,000 civilians were brutally murdered under the watchful eyes of the IDF"); Kimmerling 2008, p. 319, "Christian-Maronite militias, under Israeli protection, massacre Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps."; Abu-Lughod & Sa'di 2007, p. 5 ("Landmark events in Palestinian history such as ... the massacre at Sabra and Shatila") and 19 ("In 1982 Israel bombarded and invaded Lebanon, causing mass destruction, the routing of the PLO, and then a massacre in the refugee camps."); Pappe 2006, p. 258.
^Morris, Benny (1997). Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. Clarendon Press. p. 432. ISBN978-0-19-829262-3. The available documentation suggests that Israeli security forces and civilian guards, and their mines and booby-traps, killed somewhere between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators during 1949–56. The evidence suggests that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed. The overwhelming majority had infiltrated for economic or social reasons. The majority of the infiltrators killed died during 1949–51; there was a drop to some 300–500 a year in 1952–4. Available statistics indicate a further drop in fatalities during 1955–6, despite the relative increase in terrorist infiltration.
^Auron 2017, pp. xxxv-xxxvii and 1–12;
Al-Hardan 2016, pp. 47–48;
Hasian Jr. 2020, pp. 77–109;
Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, pp. 3–4, 8–12, 13 ("The University of Oxford's first professor of Israel Studies Derek Penslar recently stated that pro-Israelis needed to catch up with the past 30 years of academic scholarship that has accepted the ‘vast bulk of findings’ by the New Historians regarding the Nakba. He said: ‘what happened to the Palestinians, the Nakba, was not a genocide. It was horrible, but it was not a genocide. Genocide means that you wipe out a people. It wasn't a genocide. It was ethnic cleansing.' That Penslar mistakenly interprets the concept of genocide is perhaps not surprising."), and 14-18;
Lentin 2010, p. 111, "Non-Zionist scholars operate a different timescale and highlight the continuities between wartime policies and post-1948 ethnic cleansing. They treat the Nakba as the beginning of an ongoing policy of expulsion and expropriation, rather than a fait accompli which ended a long time ago (e.g., Karmi and Cotran 1999; Pappe 2004a; Abu Lughod and Sa’di 2007).";
Milshtein 2009, p. 50 ("The majority of Palestinian writers");
Ram 2009, pp. 387–388 (Israeli historians);
Shlaim 2009, pp. 55, 288 (New Historians)
^Slyomovics 2007, p. 28, "[quoting Abd al-Jawad 2004, p. 627] Israeli historiography has adopted a denial of the Nakba, a negation of the breadth of ethnic cleansing perpetrated in Palestine."
^Manna 2022, p. viii, "[foreword by series editor Doumani] ... by managing to stay in their homes and on their land, they resisted the wave of ethnic cleansing that transformed Palestine in 1948 and that persists to this day."
^Khalidi 2020, pp. 12 ("This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948."), 73 ("Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948."), 76 ("The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel."), and 231 ("Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past.")
^Manna 2022, pp. 3 ("The policy of ethnic cleansing during the 1948 war was more complex and expansive than a specific plan such as Plan Dalet."), 10 ("At the other end of the spectrum were Muslims who suffered from the iron-fist implementation of the policy of ethnic cleansing that included massacres, demolition of houses, and expulsion of the population of the Galilee and other areas."), 83 ("Although hundreds of villages were destroyed and their inhabitants expelled following massacres which were part of the ethnic cleansing policy to empty the country of its original inhabitants, little has been written about the atrocities—despite these having been witnessed by those who remained, whose testimonies no historian, including the revisionists, bothered to listen to."), and 98 ("The leaders of the Jewish state had their own regional motivations which prompted them to exclude members of that sect from the ethnic cleansing plan of the Nakba.")
^Masalha 2018, pp. 44 ("In view of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine in 1948 and the current reality of coloniser/colonised in the country, the liberal Zionist slogan that the history of modern Palestine centres on the idea of ‘one land, two peoples’ rings hollow ... . Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the ruptures of the Nakba, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 per cent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide."), 319 ("On the other hand, since the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba and the creation of the Israeli state, a large number of Palestinian Arabic place names have been Judaised, Hebraicised."), and 376 ("But this ‘natural landscape’ is a carefully constructed scene to camouflage the systematically expropriated land of Palestinian villages, the destruction of cultivated olive groves and the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba."); Masalha 2012, p. 254, "While the Holocaust is an event in the past, the Nakba did not end in 1948. For Palestinians, mourning sixty-three years of al-Nakba is not just about remembering the “ethnic cleansing” of 1948, it is also about marking the ongoing dispossession and dislocation.
^Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2017, p. 393, "We examine how Palestinian history, particularly the history of the dismantlement of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the majority of Palestinians from their homeland – known in Palestinian historiography as the Nakba – has gradually started to occupy the center of the present political and cultural experience and discourse of the Palestinians in Israel."
^Sa'di 2007, pp. 291–293 ("[p. 291] It also enabled them to incorporate into its implementation the transfer (a euphemism for what we now call ethnic cleansing) of the Palestinians residing within the boundaries of the Jewish state ... [p. 293] It was not until May 15, a month and a half after the implementation of Plan D, that neighboring Arab states sent in armed forces in an attempt to halt the Zionist seizure of territory and the ethnic cleansing of the population."), 298 ("As to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba and its aftermath, it was represented by Israeli and Zionist scholars as a deceitful act of the natives themselves."), and 308 ("What is the real reason for Morris’s refusal to accept Palestinian testimony and memory? That it might be part of something unrelated to the historian’s craft is given some credence by his later statement on the ethnic cleansing he documented in his book. In an interview in Ha’aretz (also discussed by Slyomovics), he expresses the ultimate form of denial of moral responsibility for the Nakba: he deplores the fact that the job was not completed.")
^Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, pp. 5 ("But these lands became free only after the ethnic cleansing and eventual decimation of indigenous populations in North America and after the displacement of the peasants through aggressive land purchase in Palestine and the expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian population during the 1948 Nakba"), 11, 30, 65, 71, 81, 182, and 193–194
^Confino 2018, pp. 136 ("Few Jews resisted the Nakba, and fewer still rejected an offer to receive an abandoned Palestinian home; there is no list of righteous among the Jews when it comes to the ethnic cleansing that was the Nakba."), 138 ("The Holocaust and the Nakba, it should be emphasized, are completely different in their magnitude and historical character; one is a genocide geared toward total extermination, while the other is an ethnic cleansing geared toward removing, not annihilating, an ethnic group.") and 146 ("The Holocaust should be placed within a history of Nazi war and occupation, empire building, and comparative genocide, much as the Nakba should be placed within a global history of decolonization, the breakup of the British Empire, partitions, and comparative modern ethnic cleansing, as well as within comparative settler colonialism.")
^Bashir & Goldberg 2018, pp. 20 ("In this sense, the Nakba, although a unique event in its own right, belongs to the same modern and global history of genocide and ethnic cleansing of which the Holocaust (also a unique event) is a part—perhaps the most extreme and cruelest part.") and 32 n.2
^Kimmerling 2008, pp. 280–281, "Thus, a de facto ethnic cleansing was carried out ... Palestinians refer to the 1948 war and their subsequent exile as a nakba, a catastrophe; Israeli Jews regard the same period as a war of independence that has become a fundamental component of their identity and a symbolic compensation for the Holocaust. Both peoples have their own cosmic catastrophes, and both have strong collective memories of being the victims of a colossal injustice—either the Jewish experience of Nazi genocide or the Palestinian experience of politicide and ethnic cleansing."
^Lentin 2010, pp. 8, 20-23 ("[p. 21] Even though it is not the only act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in modem history, the Nakba is unique in many ways ... [p. 23] Some may argue that the Holocaust, horrible as it was, is indeed a historical event, while the Nakba – not genocide but rather ‘ethnic cleansing’, or ‘spaciocide’ – continues in the shape of ongoing denial of access, land confiscations and oppression of the Palestinian population."), 69 ("Collecting Palestinian victims’ testimonies, as is practiced by Zochrot (see Chapter 7), offers Israeli Nakba co-memorators a certain feel-good factor. However, the testimonies of Israeli perpetrators are much harder to collect ... little serious attempt was made to excavate the personal stories of Jewish pre-state soldiers who carried out the expulsions, expropriations, massacres, rapes and ethnic cleansing."), 89-90 ("By now, many, though definitely not all, Israeli Jews have accepted that the Nakba did happen ... Despite this gradual recognition, my sense is that the majority of Israeli Jews prefer to accept Morris’s contention in the 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, that while the ethnic cleansing of Palestine did happen, it was a necessary evil: ‘there are historical circumstances in which ethnic cleansing can be justified ... when the alternative is between ethnic cleansing and genocide, the genocide of your own nation, I prefer ethnic cleansing’"), 110-111 ("In recent years, however, Israeli Jews have been somewhat more willing to accept the centrality of the expulsions, glibly termed ‘transfer’ (Morris 2002) and the fact that their state did indeed conduct systematic ethnic cleansing ... Non-Zionist scholars operate a different timescale and highlight the continuities between wartime policies and post-1948 ethnic cleansing. They treat the Nakba as the beginning of an ongoing policy of expulsion and expropriation, rather than a fait accompli which ended a long time ago (e.g., Karmi and Cotran 1999; Pappe 2004a; Abu Lughod and Sa’di 2007). Though hardly anti-Zionist, Morris is explicit in linking what he does admit was ethnic cleansing with the 1948 war."), 114 ("In contrast to the Israeli Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, ‘there is no Nakba museum, no Nakba Hall of Names, no Central Database of Nakba victims’ names, no tombstones or monuments for the hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns ethnically cleansed and destroyed in 1948’."), 150 ("We must ask, however, what the co-memoration of the Nakba facilitates ... Does it enable the Israeli resistance movement to concentrate on ‘the [1967] occupation’, ignoring the fact that Israel’s Palestinian citizens are also the victims of the ongoing occupation and ethnic cleansing (Yiftachel 2009)?") and 155 ("Thus, despite the unquestionable importance of remembering and telling the Nakba, and side by side with insisting on the Palestinian right of return, many in the Israeli ‘peace camp’ continue to deny both the racialisation of Palestinians, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, as was evidenced by the Zionist left during the Gaza war which it supported in the spirit of the (Foucauldian) imperative that (Israeli) society must be defended (Foucault 2003).")
^Shenhav 2019, pp. 49-50 ("But now, following the adoption of a reckless but useful piece of legislation known as the Nakba Law (March 2011)—which imposes sanctions on organizations that mention the Palestinian tragedy—almost every household in Israel has become acquainted with the Arabic word: al-Nakba ... The ethnic cleansing of Palestine included the abolition of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, some immediately repopulated by Jews (and sometimes even other Palestinians) to prevent return. Add to that the confiscation of lands, houses, and property by the state, and the looting of removable objects by Jewish citizens—without any shame or disgrace. To be sure, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine did not begin or end in 1948. It started back in the 1920s, with an aggressive acquisition and takeover of lands that reached a peak in 1948 and again in 1967. The ethnic cleansing continues in the present day by other means: the silent transfer in Jerusalem; the settlements and the expropriation of land in the West Bank; the communal settlements in the Galilee for Jews only; the new Citizenship decree (which bans Palestinian citizens from bringing their Palestinian spouses into Israel, thanks to the emergency laws); the “unrecognized Palestinian villages” constantly under the threat of destruction; the incessant demolition of Bedouin houses in the south; the omission of Arabic on road signs; the prohibition on importing literature from Arab countries, and many others. One telling example is the fact that not one Arab town or village has been established in Israel since 1948."), and 61 ("Today many historians, Jews and Palestinians, provide a revisionist formulation in which the Nakba is not just the expulsion and displacement of 1948, but especially the ban on return to homes and families immediately after the war and in fact to this date. According to this interpretation, the sovereign decision of the Israeli government to prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of people to their homes after the war is a formal act of ethnic cleansing.")
^Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, 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. In fact, scholars are currently fruitfully addressing issues such as the intersection of the Holocaust with its roots in European racism, and the Nakba with its roots in European colonisation."
^Khoury 2018, pp. xii–xiii, "The Nakba’s initial bloody chapters were written with the forceful ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948."; Khoury 2012, pp. 258 and 263–265.
^Levene 2018, pp. 45–65, "[p. 59] It is within this framework that the contours of the ethnic cleansing not only in Palestine but also, almost simultaneously, in India (albeit within a rather different colonial frame of reference and with much larger death and displacement tolls) need to be set. The fact that in terms of the act of tihur (cleansing) what a nascent Israel did to Palestinians was not exceptional hardly makes it any less egregious, not least given that somewhere in that reckoning is the knowledge of what had happened to Jews just two or three years earlier."
^Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, p. 13, "[quoting Penslar] He said: 'what happened to the Palestinians, the Nakba, was not a genocide. It was horrible, but it was not a genocide. Genocide means that you wipe out a people. It wasn’t a genocide. It was ethnic cleansing.'"
^Wolfe 2012, pp. 153–154 ("The relative restraint that Zionists displayed in the Ottoman and Mandate periods did not mean that they had yet to formulate the goal of replacing Palestinians in Palestine. The initial restraint was pragmatic – the eventual Nakba, to adapt Carl von Clausewitz, being a continuation of purchase by other means ... When we observe this remarkably disciplined and systematic programme of settler-state formation, the complementarity between the creation of the Jewish state and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine emerges with particular clarity, the two being inseparable features of a unified programme."), and 159–161 ("In the absence of that context, the Nakba would make no sense. We might even agree with Benny Morris that ethnic cleansing was a spontaneous aberration that took place in the heat of warfare ... To understand the Nakba, therefore, we have to keep in mind the crucial fact that it was Zionism’s first opportunity. The fact that the emergent Jewish state seized this opportunity with such devastating effectiveness was both a testament to and a legacy of its preparedness. As we have seen, the creation of the Jewish state and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine were two sides of the same coin. The conquest of economics was a Nakba-in-waiting.")
^Hever 2018, p. 285, "Once again, the question of comparison and analogy alongside distinction and disconnection between the Holocaust and the Nakba arises. It is greatly exacerbated by the fact there is a causal connection between the importation of the failure to resolve the “Jewish Question” (or to escape its horrifying “success” in the form of the “Final Solution”) to Palestine and the attempt to achieve a resolution there by creating a Jewish space without Palestinians—a euphemistic way of referring to ethnic cleansing by means of the Nakba.";
Ghanim 2018, p. 110, "The meeting between the Palestinian and the Holocaust survivor in a settler colonial context is intertwined with the enterprise of the establishment of Israel in 1948 upon the obliterated Palestinian landscape. The relationship between the two events was formed on the basis of an exclusionist prototype, deadly for the Palestinian due to its contextualization within the Zionist national enterprise, whereby the State of Israel was established using measures of violence against and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians; this is especially evident when taking into account that, as some have noted, almost half of the participants in the war of 1948/Palestinian Nakba were Holocaust survivors.";
Khoury 2018, p. 123, "Second, Holocaust/Nakba deliberations unsettle the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust, reading the latter outside of mainstream Zionism, even situating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine within the larger historical trajectory that led to the Holocaust.";
Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, p. 18, "When reviewing the Palestinian case, it would be too easy to focus solely on whether or not the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of 1948 constituted a genocide and whether the massacres that took place during this time can be construed as genocidal. Yet it is apparent to Palestinians in different contexts experiencing discriminatory policies intended to drive them away from their land that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948 did not end in that era and is an ongoing process.";
Slater 2020, pp. 81–85 ("[pp. 84-85] "Was Ethnic Cleansing 'Necessary'? ... There were two other possible Israeli policies that would have met the need for a Jewish state but avoided the Nakba ... Even if one accepts those assumptions—shaky as they are—it hardly follows that the only way to have done so was by violent ethnic cleansing.") and 350 ("Finally, the legitimate goal of self-defense cannot possibly justify the Nakba ... While Israeli historians still argue about whether the Nakba was the intended or explicit “policy” of the Israeli government, no one doubts that the indisputable desire of Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders to ensure a large Jewish majority in Israel had a great deal to do with it. To be sure, a strong case can be made that a heavily Jewish majority in the state of Israel was a historically justifiable goal, but it by no means follows that ethnic cleansing—as we would call it today—was the only way to bring that about.");
Nashef 2018, pp. 5–6, "Unfortunately, the Nakba is unending. It was born in a red house in Tel Aviv, in which the architects of Plan Dalet (Plan D) finalized the strategy for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in March 1947.";
Natour 2016, p. 82, "The Nakba as the flight and expulsion is a disaster for the Palestinian people. It is a matter of fact and is a direct result of the events that took place in Palestine shortly before and during the establishment of the state of Israel. That the expulsion was planned and was one of the preconditions for the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine has been described by several authors who provide convincing evidence from analysis of documents and testimonies that it was a systematic ethnic cleansing of the country.";
Knopf-Newman 2011, pp 4–5 ("In contemporary discourse the word transfer is better known as ethnic cleansing, a term I employ in this book to illustrate the reality of the nakba (Arabic for the catastrophe and descriptive of Palestinians expelled by Zionists in 1948) when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes and land, and exiled as refugees ... The phrase ongoing nakba refers to the processes begun in 1948, to claim land for Jews and forcibly displace Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which continues unabated until now—most visibly in Lydda, Jaffa, and the Negev ... Judaization refers to the process by which Israelis have covered up their crimes of ethnic cleansing not only by destroying homes and foresting over the land, but also by renaming cities and villages with those that sound more biblical, thus mythologizing a Jewish history that predates an Arab one ... Technically, European Jews who participated in the initial and ongoing ethnic cleansing since the nakba in 1948 are settlers. But the term settler colonialism is more apt."), 25–32 ("[p. 25] Established in 1901, the JNF has been the main agent of colonization in Palestine, first by purchase, then by ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, later by destroying Palestinian villages, by foresting over those villages, and Judaizing areas by renaming them. After the nakba the JNF continued its confiscation of land, helped to create new colonies, and after 1967 began its project of Judaizing Jerusalem ... [p. 32] Information about elaborate plans by Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, to ethnically cleanse Palestine, known as Plan Dalet, devised before United Nations Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine, is suppressed."), 69 ("Jerusalem is the setting of heightened tension due to the ongoing nakba (continuing the process of ethnic cleansing that began before 1948) in the city, making it an example of the failures of coexistence."), and 180–182 ("[p. 182] The massacre of Dayr Yasin signifies not only a particular massacre on April 9, 1948, but also emblematizes all massacres that took place throughout Palestine during the nakba ... Confronting the fact that survivors of European genocide enacted their own systematic ethnic cleansing project, known as Plan Dalet, reveals some of the questions that unravel Palestinian history.");
Esmeir 2007, pp. 232 ("This legal strategy would have enabled them to turn the trial into a case about the denial of the Nakba. They wanted to transform the courtroom into a stage for a dramatization of historical pain and a public telling of the story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—a story, in their view, that the institutions of the Israeli state have suppressed."), 242 ("Katz, in short, attempted to retrieve all possible details that could enable him to present a picture of the past that was as accurate as possible, for otherwise, he could not refute the official Zionist narrative that denies the bloody ethnic cleansing of Palestinians."), and 249-250 ("Incoherence, contradictions, and absences should then be understood as signifiers of something that is still present—the death of human relationships, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the destruction of an entire society.");
Schulz 2003, pp. 24, 31–32 ("[p. 32] However, from the founding of the state until mid-June 1948 there was expulsion on a grand scale, reminiscent of an ‘ethnic-cleansing’ project ... [quoting Benvenisti 2000] After the ‘miraculous exodus’ had taken place and it had become evident that the establishment of a Jewish state without Arabs—a possibility that the leaders of the Yishuv had not previously envisioned—was indeed achievable, ‘ethnic cleansing’ became an acceptable, or even a desirable, means of achieving it.")
^Morris, Benny (10 October 2016). "Israel Conducted No Ethnic Cleansing in 1948". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 16 June 2022. Retrieved 25 October 2023. I don't accept the definition "ethnic cleansing" for what the Jews in prestate Israel did in 1948. (If you consider Lod and Ramle, maybe we can talk about partial ethnic cleansing.)
^Sa'di 2002, pp. 175–198: "Al-Nakbah is associated with a rapid de-Arabization of the country. This process has included the destruction of Palestinian villages. About 418 villages were erased, and out of twelve Palestinian or mixed towns, a Palestinian population continued to exist in only seven. This swift transformation of the physical and cultural environment was accompanied, at the symbolic level, by the changing of the names of streets, neighborhoods, cities, and regions. Arabic names were replaced by Zionist, Jewish, or European names. This renaming continues to convey to the Palestinians the message that the country has seen only two historical periods which attest to its "true" nature: the ancient Jewish past, and the period that began with the creation of Israel."
^Williams 2009, p. 98: "Just as the land of Palestine was to be cleared of the unwanted presence of its inhabitants, so the period after 1948 witnessed the ‘clearing’ of evidence of non-Jewish cultures: in the shape of their historical and archaeological remains, from the landscape as well as the looting of their artefacts from museums and archives. Part of this was sanctioned – if secret – Israeli government policy; part of it unattributable (military) vandalism – again. Astonishingly, as well as the ‘primitive’ cultural relics of the Palestinian past – with something like eighty per cent of village mosques demolished in this period – the destruction also included remarkable Roman remains, as in the city of Tiberias, which happened even when Israeli officials had specifically asked for them to be spared (see Rapaport 2007). Once again, just as the Nakba contrived to be both punctual historical event and persistent catastrophic condition, so the obliteration of historic non-Jewish sites in Palestine proved to be not simply a product of the destructive ecstasy of the moment of victory in 1948, but much more of a calculated, consistent approach, a policy that is still being carried out today, in pointless demolition, bulldozing and dynamiting in cities such as Nablus and Hebron."
^Forman, Geremy; Kedar, Alexandre (December 2004). "From Arab Land to 'Israel Lands': The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 22 (6): 809–830. Bibcode:2004EnPlD..22..809F. doi:10.1068/d402. S2CID140598791.
^Lauterpacht, H. (ed.). "International Law Reports 1950" (London: Butterworth & Co., 1956), p.111
^Kattan, Victor (1 January 2005). "The Nationality of Denationalized Palestinians". Nordic Journal of International Law. 74 (1): 67–102. doi:10.1163/1571810054301004. ISSN0902-7351.
^Schulz 2003, pp. 1–2: "One of the grim paradoxes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that the foundation of the state of Israel, intended to create a safe haven for the 'archetypical' Jewish diaspora, spelt the immediate diasporisation of the Arab Palestinians. The territorialisation of the Jewish diaspora spurred a new 'wandering identity' and the Palestinians became a 'refugee nation'. To the Palestinians, the birth of Israel is thus remembered as the catastrophe, al-nakba, to imprint the suffering caused by dispersal, exile, alienation and denial ... The nakba is the root cause of the Palestinian diaspora."
^Schulz 2003, p. 2: "Although the PLO has officially continued to demand fulfilment of UN resolution 194 and a return to homes lost and compensation, there is not substantial international support for such a solution. Yet it is around the hope of return that millions of Palestinian refugees have formed their lives. This hope has historically been nurtured by PLO politics and its tireless repetition of the 'right of return'—a mantra in PLO discourse. In addition, for hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of Palestinian refugees, there are no prospects (or desires) for integration into host societies. In Lebanon, the Palestinians have been regarded as 'human garbage' (Nasrallah 1997), indeed as 'matters out of place' (cf. Douglas 1976), and as unwanted."
^Schulz 2003, pp. 2–3: "Fragmentation, loss of homeland and denial have prompted an identity of ’suffering', an identification created by the anxieties and injustices happening to the Palestinians because of external forces. In this process, a homeland discourse, a process of remembering what has been lost, is an important component ... Therefore the dispersal (shatat in Arabic) and fragmentation of the Arab population of Palestine have served as uniting factors behind a modern Palestinian national identity, illuminating the facet of absence of territory as a weighty component in creations and recreations of ethnic and national identities in exile. Deterritorialised communities seek their identity in the territory, the Homeland Lost, which they can only see from a distance, if at all. The focal point of identity and politics is a place lost."
^Antonius, George (1979) [1946], The Arab awakening: the story of the Arab national movement, Putnam, p. 312, ISBN978-0-399-50024-4, retrieved 22 April 2021, The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Ām al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq
^Webman 2009, p. 30: Quoting Azmi Bishara in 2004: "This is our stone of Sisyphus, and the task of pushing it has been passed on from one movement to another, and in each case no sooner has a movement's ideologues exclaimed, 'I found it!' than the stone comes rolling down with a resounding crash... Our definition of the nakba has changed with every new ideology and every new definition that necessitated a change in means."
Webman, Esther (2009). "The Evolution of a Founding Myth: The Nakba and Its Fluctuating Meaning". Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity. pp. 27–45. doi:10.1057/9780230621633_2. ISBN978-1-349-37755-8.
Williams, Patrick (2009). "'Naturally, I reject the term "diaspora"': Said and Palestinian Dispossession". Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas. pp. 83–103. doi:10.1057/9780230232785_5. ISBN978-1-349-36142-7.
Articles
Abu-Laban, Yasmeen; Bakan, Abigail B. (July 2022). "Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting". The Political Quarterly. 93 (3): 508–516. doi:10.1111/1467-923X.13166. S2CID250507449.
Ram, Uri (September 2009). "Ways of Forgetting: Israel and the Obliterated Memory of the Palestinian Nakba". Journal of Historical Sociology. 22 (3): 366–395. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01354.x.
Rashed, Haifa; Short, Damien; Docker, John (May 2014). "Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine". Holy Land Studies. 13 (1): 1–23. doi:10.3366/hls.2014.0076.
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