I am particularly amazed by the flight of the Arabs. This is a more extraordinary episode in the annals of this country than the establishment of a Jewish state. … Truly astonishing is that the Arabs have disappeared from a whole section of the country.
Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, 16 June 1948
So the idea [of transfer] simmered until 1948, when war, without a Jewish master plan or indeed, without any preplanning whatsoever, brought a Palestinian exodus of itself. With a little nudging in the right direction, the low-key exodus could be turned into a mass flood and a fait accompli.
Benny Morris1
In recent years, a more or less cohesive body of work has emerged that challenges the received wisdom on the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Variously labeled ‘new history’, ‘revisionist history’ or simply ‘history’ (as against the ‘pre’-history of an earlier generation), this scholarship severely qualifies – without, however, roundly dismissing – the standard interpretation of the eve, unfolding and aftermath of the 1948 war. Its authors, mostly Israeli, argue five major points:
1.the Zionist movement did not in principle support the partition of Palestine;
2.the surrounding Arab states did not unite as one to destroy the nascent Jewish state;
3.the war did not pit a relatively defenseless and weak Jewish David against a relatively strong Arab Goliath;
4.Palestine’s Arabs did not take flight at the behest of Arab orders; and
5.Israel was not earnestly seeking peace at the war’s end.
In this essay I want to focus on the work of Benny Morris, a former diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post who received his doctorate from Cambridge University. Morris is the most influential and prolific of the ‘new’ historians.2 The central concern of his research is the most passionately disputed chapter of the 1948 war: the flight into exile of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population. Morris’s first study, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949,3 was near-universally acclaimed as a classic, a model of scholarly rigor and detachment.4 The publication of Morris’s companion volume, 1948 and After,5 is an especially propitious occasion for taking stock of his – and, by extension, the ‘new’ history’s – achievement.
In Birth, Morris definitively shatters one of the most enduring myths about the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict – but only to substitute another scarcely more credible one in its place.
The aim of Morris’s study is to explain why roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes in the wake of the November 1947 United Nations General Assembly Resolution supporting the creation of an Arab and Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine.6 The book’s central thesis is that neither of the standard accounts of the Palestinians’ exodus can withstand close scholarly scrutiny: the Zionists did not expel them with premeditation, as the Arabs allege, and the invading Arab states did not urge them to leave, as the Zionists allege. The truth, as Morris sees it, rather lies ‘in the vast middle ground’ between these two extremes:
The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterised the first Israeli-Arab war; in smaller part, it was the deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians. (1948, p. 88; Birth, p. 286)
Morris further asserts that, under the given circumstances – i.e. mutual fear and hostility, war and so on – the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem was ‘almost inevitable’ (Birth, p. 286).
The results of Morris’s research thus apparently belie the most damaging Arab claims7 and exonerate Israel of any real culpability for the catastrophe that befell Palestine’s indigenous population in 1948.8 While these conclusions will not satisfy those among Israel’s partisans who will accept nothing but Arab culpability, they nevertheless substitute a new version of what occurred in 1948 which as well requires judicious analysis.
In this chapter I will argue that Morris has substituted a new myth, one of the ‘happy median’, for the old. My contention will be that the evidence that Morris adduces does not support his temperate conclusions and that the truth lies very much closer to the Arab view.9 The essay is divided into four sections. In the first section, I discuss Morris’s handling of evidence. I suggest that his uncritical use of Israeli documents skews his conclusions. In the second section, I discuss Morris’s handling of the ‘Arab broadcasts’ argument. I suggest that his qualified dismissal of this argument does not go far enough. In the third section, I discuss Morris’s central thesis that the Arab refugee problem was ‘born of war, not by design’. I suggest that Morris’s own evidence points to the conclusion that Palestine’s Arabs were expelled systematically and with premeditation. In the fourth section, I discuss the general framework in which Morris situates the Arab flight. I suggest that Morris’s singular emphasis on the military factor – what he refers to as Israel’s ‘life-and-death struggle’ – obscures the ideological motivations behind Israel’s decision to expel Palestine’s Arabs.
Evidence
Morris bases his studies on Israeli archival materials, many of which have only recently become available, and the standard semi-official accounts of the war.10 While these sources can provide much valuable information, the uncritical manner in which Morris handles them casts some serious doubts on his conclusions. Indeed, Morris himself has in recent years warned against a naive reliance on such materials. Documenting extensive misrepresentation in official Zionist publications on the matter of transfer (cf. note 52 below), Morris writes:
The speeches, debates, diaries and memoranda that the Zionist bureaucrats issued wholesale passed through the sieve of political censorship on the way to publication; a large portion disappeared or were distorted. … Historians and students using those sources would do well to employ a large measure of caution.11
Consider, however, the following typical examples.
Morris repeatedly warns readers to treat with extreme circumspection the diary entries and public pronouncements of Ben-Gurion, yet uncritically reports certain of his conclusions. Morris notes that Ben-Gurion’s testimony cannot be trusted because he was ‘driven … by concern for his place in history and the image of himself and the image of the new state he wished to project for posterity’ (Birth, p. 165; cf. Birth, pp. 136–7, 218, 292–3, 329–30, note 24, 335, note 40; 1948, p. 113). For example, he ridicules Ben-Gurion’s repeated assertion in 1948 and 1949 that ‘Israel has never expelled a single Arab’ as ‘a lie that even the most gullible journalists and UN officials found hard to swallow’ (Tikkun, p. 82). Indeed, Morris singles out Ben-Gurion’s own ‘histories’ (the quotation marks are Morris’s) of the Yishuv and Israel’s first years as the ‘purest expression’ of the highly tendentious ‘old’ history (1948, p. 5).12 Yet he cites without irony or qualification the ‘major political conclusion’ (Morris’s phrase) Ben-Gurion drew from the Arab exodus from Haifa and elsewhere. Speaking to the People’s Council in early May 1948, Israel’s first prime minister made the claim that no Jewish settlement to date had been abandoned in the war – in contrast with ‘some hundred Arab settlements’. The Arabs, Ben-Gurion asserted, had abandoned ‘cities … with great ease, after the first defeat, even though no danger of destruction or massacre … confronted them. Indeed, it was revealed with overwhelming clarity which people is bound with strong bonds to this land’ (Birth, pp. 94–5)13 In fact, as we shall see presently, virtually every Arab settlement was abandoned precisely because of the ‘danger of destruction or massacre’. What is more, at the exact moment that Ben-Gurion was sounding this ‘major political conclusion’, the Palmah was massacring some seventy Arab prisoners near Ein az Zeitun and several Arabs in the village itself (Birth, pp. 102, 321, note 133).
Morris maintains that ‘Jewish atrocities’, although ‘far more widespread than the old histories have let on’, were nonetheless ‘limited in size, scope and time’ (1948, p. 22; Birth, p. 231). Yet, he also reports that the official Israeli investigation of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) atrocities during the 1948 war ‘remains classified and closed to historians’ (Birth, p. 351, note 45). It is unclear, then, why Morris is so certain about the circumscribed range of ‘Jewish atrocities’. Indeed, I will discuss in Chapter 4 recent evidence casting grave doubts on Morris’s facile assumption.
In any event, Morris’s rendering of ‘Jewish atrocities’ has a distinctly sanitized quality. Morris writes:
At Sabbarin, where IZL met resistance, the villagers fled after 20 died in the firefight, and an IZL armoured car fired at the fleeing villagers. ‘More than one hundred’ old people, women and children, who had not fled from Sabbarin and the other villages, were held for a few days behind barbed wire at an assembly point in Sabbarin, after which they were expelled to Umm al Fahm, a village in Arab-held territory to the southeast. The Jewish troops combed the villages to ascertain that they were empty and to make sure they stayed empty. An IZL officer at Umm al Shauf later recalled searching a column of refugees and finding a pistol and rifle among their possessions. The troops detained seven young adult males and sent the rest of the column on its way to Umm al Fahm. The troops then demanded to know who the weapons belonged to. When the seven Arabs refused to own up, the IZL men threatened to kill them. When no one owned up, the IZL officer held a ‘field court martial … which sentenced the seven to death’. The seven were then executed. (Birth, pp. 117–18)
Morris takes for granted that the IZL ‘met resistance’ at Sabbarin and that the twenty villagers were killed in a ‘firefight’, that the seven refugees were executed because they ‘refused to own up’ to possessing weapons – he takes all this for granted because the Revisionist Zionist14 sources, which are the only ones he cites (Birth, p. 325, note 192), say as much. Given the grossly apologetic Revisionist Zionist accounts of, say, the Deir Yassin massacre,15 one could reasonably expect a historian to treat such sources with a fair amount of skepticism. Morris evidently does not.16
Morris devotes considerable space to the large-scale IDF massacre at Lydda. Somewhere between 250 and 400 Palestinians were killed in the actual massacre and perhaps 350 more died in the subsequent forced march. Basing himself almost entirely on an official history of the Palmah and a book by Elhanan Orren, which he describes (in a footnote) as ‘written under constraints of IDF censorship’ and (in an altogether different context) as typical of the disingenuous ‘old’ history (Birth, p. 344, note 14; Tikkun, p. 20), Morris asserts that the massacre was prompted by ‘sniping by armed Lydda townspeople’ and the fear and confusion that ensued:
The 300–400 Israeli troops in the town, dispersed in semi-isolated pockets in the midst of tens of thousands of hostile townspeople, some still armed, felt threatened, vulnerable and angry: they believed that the town had surrendered. 3rd Battalion OC Moshe Kelman immediately ordered his troops to suppress the sniping … with the utmost severity. The troops were ordered to shoot at ‘any clean target’ or, alternatively, at anyone ‘seen in the streets’. Some townspeople, shut up in their houses, under curfew, took fright at the sounds of shooting outside, perhaps believing that a massacre was in progress. They rushed into the streets – and were cut down by Israeli fire. Some of the soldiers also fired and lobbed grenades into houses from which snipers were suspected to be operating. In the confusion, dozens of unarmed detainees in the mosque and church compounds in the center of the town were shot and killed. Perhaps some of these had attempted to escape, also fearing a massacre. (Birth, pp. 205–6)
Yet, the figures that Morris cites suggest that perhaps not a single Israeli soldier was killed or wounded amid the alleged ‘sniping’ attacks.17 Couldn’t the official account of ‘sniping’, ‘confusion’ and so on simply have been fabricated to conceal a premeditated massacre, the intent of which was to ‘facilitate’ the Palestinians’ flight? Indeed, circumspection is specially warranted in light of Morris’s own finding that a
strong desire to see the population … flee already existed: the [sniping] seemed to offer the justification and opportunity for what the bombings and artillery barrages [which preceded Lydda’s occupation] … had in the main failed to achieve. (Birth, p. 207)
Morris, however, reports without demurral the rendering of his Zionist sources as fact.
Indeed, Morris makes no effort to reconcile the manifest untrustworthiness of his sources with his uncritical reliance on them. For instance, after describing in some detail the massacre and expulsion in the village of Eilabun, he cites the self-serving account of one Major Sulz that ‘[t]he village was captured after a fierce fight and its inhabitants had fled’ (Birth, pp. 229–30). Thus, by Morris’s own reckoning, Sulz’s testimony is evidently not to be credited. Yet, the equally self-serving testimony of this same Major Sulz is cited by Morris to justify the expulsions from Khisas and Qeitiya (Birth, p. 242). Similarly, Morris documents that, contrary to the self-serving accounts of a local IDF officer and an official of a neighboring kibbutz, the villagers of Beit Naqquba did not flee at the behest of Arab orders but were ordered to leave by the IDF (1948, pp. 195–7). Yet, he then goes on to conclude that the ‘villagers of Beit Naqquba were apparently – simultaneously – ordered by local Arab commanders to evacuate’ (1948, p. 214).
Revealingly, Morris is much more cautious in his handling of the few Arab sources he cites. The testimony of an Arab witness to a massacre is parenthetically qualified with the phrase ‘he alleged’ (Birth, p. 228). Actually, if we are to believe Morris, Arab sources are generally not to be trusted, given the ‘Arab penchant for exaggeration’ (Birth, pp. 230–1). Illustrating this generic ‘penchant’, Morris cites the ‘wildly inaccurate charge’ of the ‘Arab media … that “Men, women and children have been murdered in Faluja”’ (Birth, p. 354, note 27). According to a UN source cited by Morris, civilian villagers at Faluja had been ‘beaten and robbed by Israeli soldiers and … there ha[d] been some cases of rape’, and Israeli troops had ‘fir[ed] promiscuously’ (Birth, p. 244). Evidently, the Arabs did exaggerate. Yet, was their exaggeration really more egregious than Ben-Gurion’s when he ‘emphatically’ denied in April 1949 ‘that Israel had expelled the Arabs. … The State of Israel expelled nobody and will never do it’ (Birth, p. 260)? Than Menachem Begin’s when he averred that his men sought ‘to avoid a single unnecessary casualty’ at Deir Yassin? Than the Israeli government’s when it claimed for forty years that the Arabs fled Palestine on orders from the invading Arab armies? Why, then, does Morris speak only of an Arab ‘penchant for exaggeration’? Ironically, Morris faults ‘old’ historian Shabtai Teveth for using the phrase ‘that quickest of Arab telegraphs: the rumor’ – which, however racist, is rather less offensive than his own.
Arab Broadcasts
Since the birth of the refugee question, Israeli propaganda has steadfastly held that, in response to Arab radio broadcasts urging flight to clear the field for the invading Arab armies, the Palestinians departed of their own volition – indeed, despite Zionist entreaties that they remain in place. This claim was conclusively demolished by British scholar Erskine Childers and Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi as far back as the early 1960s. They reported that the back files of the Near East monitoring stations of the British and American governments (both of which covered not only all the radio stations in the Near East but the local newspapers as well) contained no evidence of such Arab orders. This finding, however, had little, if any, impact on mainstream scholarship.18 Benny Morris has now lent his Israeli imprimatur to the finding, making it far more difficult to ignore. As Walid Khalidi pungently observed, ‘Morris … unequivocally and commendably confirms the death of the (albeit long-deceased) Arab evacuation orders’.19 The relevant passages of Birth read as follows:
I have found no contemporary evidence to show that either the leaders of the Arab states or the Mufti ordered or directly encouraged the mass exodus during April. It may be worth noting that for decades the policy of the Palestinian Arab leaders had been to hold fast to the soil of Palestine and to resist the eviction and displacement of the Arab communities. (p. 66)
There is no evidence that the Arab states and the AHC [Arab Higher Committee] wanted a mass exodus or issued blanket orders or appeals to the Palestinians to flee their homes (though in certain areas the inhabitants of specific villages were ordered by Arab commanders of the AHC to leave, mainly for strategic reasons). (p. 129)20
Yet in Birth’s conclusion, Morris rather revises his finding. Though he introduces no new evidence beyond what was in the body of the book, he puts a new spin on what happened, saying that:
The Arab leadership inside and outside Palestine probably helped precipitate the exodus in the sense that it was disunited, had decided on no fixed, uniform policy vis-a-vis the civilian evacuation and gave the Palestinians no consistent, hard-and-fast guidelines and instructions about how to act and what to do, especially during the crucial month of April. The records are incomplete, but they show overwhelming confusion and disparate purpose, ‘policy’ changing from week to week and area to area. No guiding hand or central control is evident. …
As to April and the start of the main exodus, I have found no evidence to show that the AHC issued blanket instructions, by radio or otherwise, to Palestine’s Arabs to flee. However, AHC and Husayni supporters in certain areas may have done so, on occasion, in the belief that they were doing what the AHC wanted or would have wanted them to do. Haifa affords illustration of this. While it is unlikely that Husayni or the AHC from outside instructed the Haifa Arab leadership of 22 April to opt for evacuation rather than surrender, Husayni’s local supporters, led by Sheikh Murad, did so. The lack of AHC and Husayni orders, appeals or broadcasts against the departure during the following week-long Haifa exodus indicates that Husayni and the AHC did not dissent from their supporters’ decision. Silence was consent. The absence of clear, public instructions and broadcasts for or against the Haifa exodus over 23–30 April is supremely instructive concerning the ambivalence of Husayni and the AHC at this stage towards the exodus. The Arab states, apart from appealing to the British to halt the Haganah offensives and charging that the Haganah was expelling Palestine’s Arabs, seem to have taken weeks to digest and understand what was happening. They did not appeal to the Palestinian masses to leave, but neither, in April, did they demand that the Palestinians stay put. Perhaps, the politicians in Damascus, Cairo and Amman, like Husayni, understood that they would need a good reason to justify armed intervention in Palestine on the morrow of the British departure – and the mass exodus, presented as a planned Zionist expulsion, afforded such a reason. (pp. 289–90)
Morris thus clearly suggests that the historical record on this point is rather more ambiguous than he stated in the body of Birth.
Such equivocation is not warranted by the evidence, however. Throughout March and April 1948, the broadcasts of the AHC and neighboring Arab countries were consistently urging the Palestinians to remain in place.21 Indeed, Morris himself observes that, as early as December 1947, these broadcasts were instructing Palestinians to ‘stay put and fight’. Furthermore, ‘by and large, the local leaderships and militia commanders, whether in obedience to the AHC or independently, discouraged flight, even to the extent of issuing formal threats and imposing penalties, but it all proved to no avail’ (Birth, pp. 57–8). This conclusion receives confirmation in the official IDF intelligence report covering the period December 1947-June 1948 which states that ‘the AHC decided … to adopt measures to weaken the exodus by imposing restrictions, penalties, threats, propaganda in the press [and] on the radio. … The AHC tried to obtain the help of neighboring countries in this context’ (Birth, p. 60). Khalidi reports that, as late as 22 April, in the midst of the massive exodus from Haifa, the AHC, far from encouraging the Arabs to leave, fervently urged them to be patient and to bear up and hold their ground. ‘The duty of the defence of the Holy Land rests upon us,’ one such AHC statement read, ‘the people of Palestine, first and foremost’ (Khalidi, ‘Why Did the Palestinians Leave?’). Morris further notes that the same theme was being sounded by Palestinian and non-Palestinian leaders at the end of April and in early May (Birth, pp. 68–9). In fact, all of Morris’s speculations about Arab ambivalence to and silent complicity with the exodus are apparently based on the absence of any explicit broadcasts urging the Palestinians to stay put during exactly one week of the twenty-month-long period encompassed by the Palestinian exodus.
Notice, incidentally, that Morris abandons the standard Zionist claim that the Arab leaders urged the Palestinians to flee in order to clear the field for the invading Arab armies. Indeed, he has done so with good reason. Simha Flapan highlights the absurdity of this pretense in Birth of Israel:
From the point of view of military logistics, the contention that the Palestinian Arab leadership appealed to the Arab masses to leave their homes in order to open the way for the invading armies, after which they would return to share in the victory, makes no sense at all. The Arab armies, coming long distances and operating in or from the Arab areas of Palestine, needed the help of the local population for food, fuel, water, transport, manpower, and information. (p. 85)
Unfortunately, Morris has contrived an equally untenable theory – namely, that the Arab leaders ‘perhaps’ encouraged the Palestinian exodus to justify an invasion of the nascent Jewish state. Yet, as Mary C. Wilson observes in King Abdullah: Britain and the Making of Jordan, the massive flight of Palestinian Arabs came as a very unwelcome surprise to the Arab states, which had hitherto sought to ‘shield their inactivity behind the ineffectual Arab Liberation Army’ but were now subjected to intense popular pressure to ‘move towards direct involvement’. She notes that while the ‘rush of Palestinians to Amman seeking [King Abdullah’s] help and protection’ did serve to legitimize Jordan’s secret intention to occupy Arab Palestine, it ‘threatened to throw Abdullah off course’ as well since the exodus prompted the direct involvement of the other Arab states (pp. 168–9).22
Interestingly, Morris himself undercuts his novel theory, reporting that (1) ‘already in’ February 1948 King Abdullah was – in the words of the British High Commissioner for Palestine – ‘complain[ing] about the exodus of Palestine Arabs into Transjordan [saying] … they were all arriving thoroughly anti-British and, hence, might give him trouble’ (1948, pp. 225–6); (2) the Arab exodus beginning in April ‘propelled the [Arab] states closer to the brink of an invasion about which they were largely unenthusiastic’ (Birth, p. 129); and (3) ‘in early May 1948 when, according to Israeli propaganda and some of the old histories such a campaign of broadcasts urging or ordering the Arabs to leave should have been at its height, in preparation for the pan-Arab invasion, Arab radio stations and leaders … all issued calls, in repeated broadcasts, to the Palestinians to stay put or, if already in exile, to return to their homes’ (1948, p. 18).
One may, finally, observe that Morris never explains his divination that the ‘silence’ of the Arab leadership in the course of the Haifa exodus signalled ‘consent’. It may just as well have signalled despair, helplessness, embarrassment, confusion – as with the Zionist leadership’s reaction to the Nazi holocaust. Or did the ‘silence’ in the latter case also equal ‘consent’?
‘Born of War, Not by Design’?
We have seen that Morris maintains that the Palestinian Arab refugee question was ‘largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterised the first Israeli-Arab war’. Simply put, it was ‘born of war, not by design’. Yet, in a note to Birth, Morris suggests a rather significant qualification of this view:
The word ‘expelled’ was often used rather loosely by Israelis in 1948. It was quite often assumed by non-witnesses that a given community had been expelled when in fact it had left before Israeli forces arrived. The desire to see the Arabs leave often triggered the assumption that commanders – who it was presumed shared this desire – had to act overtly and directly to obtain this result, when this had not been the case. But if denial of the right to return was a form of ‘expulsion’, then a great many villagers … who had waited near their villages for the battle to die down before trying to return home – can be considered ‘expellees’. (p. 343, note 7; my emphasis)
Thus, Morris agrees that, in at least one crucial sense, ‘a great many’ Palestinian refugees were systematically expelled from their homes.23 This then raises the questions of whether the Zionists intended that the Arabs flee from their homes and whether they acted in a manner consonant with this intention. If the answer to these two questions is also in the affirmative, then it becomes impossible to sustain Morris’s thesis that the refugee problem was ‘born of war, not by design’. One could maintain that, given the armed hostilities, the Zionists had no alternative except to expel the indigenous Arab population; but one could not still maintain that the Arab flight was an unintended or unanticipated ‘by-product’ of the war.
Before turning to the evidence in this regard, it is not without interest to consider the Arab estimate of Zionist intentions on the eve of the war. Morris cites a British report on the conference of Arab prime ministers in December 1947, in which the Arab view of Zionist ambitions was summarized as follows:
The ultimate aim of all the Zionists was ‘the acquisition of all of Palestine, all Transjordan and possibly some tracts in Southern Lebanon and Southern Syria’. The Zionist ‘politicians’, after taking control of the country, would at first treat the Arabs ‘nicely’. But then, once feeling ‘strong enough’, they would begin ‘squeezing the Arab population off their lands … [and] if necessary out of the State’. Later, they would expand the Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinian Arab state. However, the more militant Haganah commanders wished to move more quickly. … Exploiting the weakness and disorganization of the Arabs, they would first render them – especially in Jaffa and Haifa – ‘completely powerless’ and then frighten or force them into leaving, ‘their places being taken by Jewish immigrants’. The Arab leaders … thought that there existed a still more extreme Jewish plan, of the Revisionists, calling for more immediate expansion. (Birth, p. 24)
For all the monumental corruption and incompetence of the Arab leaders, one cannot but be impressed by the prescience of their analyses. Curiously, Morris virtually admits as much but, in a peculiar turn of phrase, describes these Arab ‘prognoses’ as ‘in the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies’ (Birth, p. 24). If he means that the Arabs, by electing to wage war, facilitated the expulsion, he is no doubt correct. Yet, this in no way belies the fact that it was an expulsion.
The Arab flight from Palestine divides into basically two stages, the first covering the period from the 29 November 1947 UN General Assembly resolution to the Israeli independence declaration in May 1948, and the second covering the period from June 1948 to the signing of the armistice agreements in mid-1949. I will deal with each of these stages in turn.
November 1947–May 1948
For the period preceding Israel’s birth, Morris focuses primarily on the months April–May. Morris’s central conclusion reads as follows:
The main wave of the Arab exodus, encompassing 200,000–300,000 refugees, was not the result of a general, predetermined Yishuv policy. The Arab exodus of April-May caught the Yishuv leadership, including the authors of Plan D, by surprise, though it was immediately seen as a phenomenon to be exploited. (Birth, p. 128)
This conclusion incorporates three claims, none of which, in my opinion, can sustain close scrutiny: (1) April–May 1948 witnessed ‘the main wave of the Arab exodus’; (2) the Arab exodus was ‘not the result of a general, predetermined Yishuv policy’; and (3) the Arab exodus during these months ‘caught the Yishuv leadership, including the authors of Plan D, by surprise’.
April—May 1948 witnessed ‘the main wave of the Arab exodus’. Morris divides the Arab flight from Palestine into five waves: December 1947–March 1948, April–May 1948, July–October 1948, October–November 1948, and December 1948–September 1949. Of these five waves, he reports that the ‘main wave’ unfolded April—May 1948, as ‘the bulk of the Palestinian refugees – some 250,000–300,000 … went into exile’. Morris devotes by far the largest chapter of his study (‘The Second Wave: The Mass Exodus, April–June 1948’) to the Arab exodus during these months.24 The unmistakable inference is that this wave is somehow typical. Indeed, Morris describes the events in Haifa during April and May as ‘illustrative of the complexity of the exodus’ (1948, p. 18).
Yet, Morris’s periodization obscures the fact that Israel’s statehood declaration was actually the watershed date. In the weeks immediately preceding 14 May, the Zionist leadership was especially sensitive to international pressure because of threats (emanating particularly from the United States) to rescind or modify the Partition Resolution. This concern for world public opinion acted to some extent as a brake on Zionist policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arabs. As Avi Shlaim puts it in Collusion Across the Jordan:
The flight of the Palestinian Arabs [in April 1948] served the military needs of the Yishuv but endangered its international position. A major contention of official Zionist propaganda was that peaceful relations between Arabs and Jews were possible, and Ben-Gurion himself repeatedly declared a Jewish-Arab alliance to be one of the three main objectives of his policy. Any sign of deterioration, any incident liable to plunge Palestine into a bloodbath, naturally encouraged the opponents of partition. (pp. 164–5)
In the wake of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, however, this constraint was to a large extent (but not altogether) lifted. Coupled with a new military context (the invasion and subsequent rout of the Arab armies), this diplomatic breakthrough enabled the Zionists to pursue with virtual impunity a policy that, as we shall see presently, was openly and relentlessly bent on expulsion. At least as many, and probably more, Arabs fled after Israel’s statehood declaration as before (for the various estimates, cf. Birth, p. 292; 1948, pp. 30, 72, 88; Flapan, p. 89). What happened in, say, April is thus not exactly ‘illustrative of the complexity of the exodus’. Morris himself concedes this point in another context, observing that the ‘circumstances of the second half of the [Arab] exodus’ from June onward were ‘a different story’ (1948, p. 88). In effect, the overt expulsion of Lydda s Arabs in July was no less typical of Zionist policy than the covert expulsion of Haifa’s Arabs in April. One can also easily miss this crucial point inasmuch as Morris devotes one hundred pages to the first half of the exodus before May (chs 2–3) as against only about half as many pages to the second half after May (chs 6–8).
The Arab exodus was ‘not the result of a general, predetermined Yishuv policy’. Morris’s argument is that no single factor can explain the flight of the Palestinian Arabs during this period:
There is probably no accounting for the mass exodus … without understanding the prevalence and depth of the general sense of collapse, of ‘falling apart’, that permeated Arab Palestine, especially the towns, by April 1948. In many places, it would take very little to induce the inhabitants to pack up and flee. Come the Haganah (and IZL–LHI) offensives of April–May, the cumulative effect of the fears, deprivations, abandonment and depredations of the previous months, in both towns and villages, overcame the natural, basic reluctance to abandon home and property and go into exile. As Palestinian military power was swiftly and dramatically demolished and the Haganah demonstrated almost unchallenged superiority in successive conquests, Arab morale cracked, giving way to general blind panic or a ‘psychosis of flight’, as one IDF intelligence report put it. (Birth, p. 287)
The correlative of this argument is that the Arab exodus did not result from a systematic policy of expulsion. Yet the evidence that Morris brings to bear in support of his thesis points to a different conclusion. I will first look at general Zionist policy and then focus on two key architects of Zionist policy during these months.
According to Morris, the Yishuv military leadership formulated in early March and began implementing in April Plan Dalet to cope with the anticipated Arab offensives. The ‘essence’ of Plan D
was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State. … As the Arab irregulars were based and quartered in the villages, and as the militias of many villages were participating in the anti-Yishuv hostilities, the Haganah regarded most of the villages as actively or potentially hostile. (Birth, p. 62, my emphasis; cf. Birth, pp. 113, 128–9)
In short, Plan D constituted – and here I am quoting Morris – ‘a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders … and it gave commanders, post facto, a formal, persuasive covering note to explain their actions’ (Birth, p. 63; cf. Birth: pp. 113, 157).25
I do not see how the above admissions can be reconciled with Morris’s claim that there existed no General Staff ‘“plan” or policy decision’ to ‘expel “the Arabs” from the Jewish State’s areas’ (Birth, p. 289). One can argue that Plan D was neither discussed, nor would it likely have been approved, by the official Jewish decision-making bodies – the provisional government, the National Council and the Jewish Agency Executive (cf. Flapan, p. 89). One can also argue, and I will return to this question, that Plan D was ‘not a political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs’ but, rather, ‘was governed by military considerations and was geared to achieving military ends’ (Birth, pp. 62–3). The fact still remains, however, that such an expulsion policy was formulated.
Furthermore, Plan D was the operative policy in the field. According to Morris, ‘during the first half of April, Ben-Gurion and the Haganah General Staff approved a series of offensives … embodying [Plan D’s] guidelines’ (Birth, p. 129). And again: ‘The doctrinal underpinning of Plan D was taken for granted by the majority of the Haganah commanders. … The gloves had to be, and were, taken off’ (Birth, p. 113). And yet again:
It was understood by all concerned that, militarily, in the struggle to survive, the less Arabs remaining behind and along the front lines, the better and, politically, the less Arabs remaining in the Jewish State, the better. At each level of command and execution, Haganah officers in those April-May days when the fate of the State hung in balance, simply ‘understood’ what the military and political exigencies of survival required. (Birth, p. 289)
That is, expulsion.26
In accordance with Plan D, the Haganah and dissident Zionist groups launched a series of military offensives, the fully anticipated result of which was the Arabs’ flight from Palestine. The attacks themselves were
the most important single factor in the exodus of April-June from both the cities and from the villages. … This is demonstrated clearly by the fact that each exodus occurred during and in the immediate wake of each military assault. No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before Jewish attack. (Birth, pp. 130–1, emphasis in original; cf. 1948, pp. 74–7)
The widely publicized slaughter at Deir Yassin, the massacres in Khirbet Nasr ad Din near Tiberias and Ein az Zeitun near Safad, the indiscriminate and protracted mortarings in Haifa27 and Acre, the use of loudspeakers broadcasting ‘black propaganda’ (i.e. terrifying) messages in Arabic, crop burnings, and so on, spurred into exile those Palestinians not sufficiently impressed by the lightning assaults of the Zionist forces (1948, pp. 71, 75–6, 173–90 passim). Especially outside the major urban centers, ‘it was standard Haganah and IDF policy to round up and expel the remaining villagers (usually old people, widows, cripples) from sites already evacuated by most of their inhabitants’ (Birth, p. 288). Finally, Morris reports that the Arab exodus during these months was ‘certainly viewed favorably’ and ‘with satisfaction’ by ‘the bulk of the Yishuv’s leadership’ (1948, p. 87).
Given that the expressed aim of the wartime Zionist leadership was to expel the Arabs, given that its intention became operative policy in the field, given that the tactics of the Jewish commanders had the predictable result of inducing a mass flight, and given that Palestinians who fled the scene of battle were blocked from returning to their homes once hostilities were suspended, not too much significance would seem to attach to Morris’s observation – itself questionable, as we shall see below – that expulsion orders were rarely issued ‘since most of the villages were completely or almost completely empty by the time they were occupied’. (Birth, p. 131).
Morris does acknowledge that the ‘atrocity factor’ (his phrase) played a major role in certain areas of the country in encouraging Arab flight (Birth, pp. 130, 288; 1948, pp. 75–6). Nonetheless, there are several curious twists in his account. In the first place, he rightly points to the pivotal role of the Deir Yassin massacre, but accuses the Arab radio stations of ‘luridly and repeatedly’ broadcasting accounts of it ‘for weeks’ (Birth, p. 130; cf. Birth, p. 114 where he refers to the ‘Arab media atrocity campaign’). Yet, according to an authoritative (if controversial) Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, Uri Milstein, the reports on Deir Yassin that spurred the Arabs into exile were ‘mostly fabricated or exaggerated by various elements on the Jewish side’ (‘No Deportations, Evacuations’, Hadashot, 1 January 1988). Furthermore, in Birth’s conclusion, Morris revises the meaning of the ‘atrocity factor’. There it mainly refers not to Zionist brutalities but to Arab premonitions of Jewish retribution: ‘Arab villagers and townspeople, prompted by the fear that the Jews, if victorious, would do to them what, in the reverse circumstances victorious Arab fighters would have done (and did, occasionally, as in the Etzion Bloc in May), to defeated Jews, took to their heels’; the ‘actual atrocities committed by the Jewish forces’ serve, in this reckoning, only to ‘reinforce such fears considerably’ (Birth, p. 288). In any event, Morris provides only the flimsiest of evidence – for example, a hearsay account of an American reporter’s conversation with an English sergeant in which the latter surmised what the Arabs must have ‘imagined to themselves’ as they fled (Birth, pp. 363–4, note 2) – to support his tendentious redefinition of the ‘atrocity factor’.28
Much ink has been spilled on the mass Arab exodus from Haifa in late April.29 There is no need to rehearse all the specific arguments here. For our purposes, the important point is that events in Haifa generally conformed to the pattern of terror, assault and expulsion described above. Intercommunal strife in Haifa first peaked in December 1947 with an unprovoked attack by Irgun members on a crowd of Arab refinery workers. By April, some 15,000–20,000 of Haifa’s 70,000-strong Palestinian community had already fled the city, as hostilities continued to escalate. In accordance with Plan D, the Haganah launched its major offensive against Haifa on 21 April. Attacking Jewish forces made liberal use of psychological warfare and terror tactics. We have already noted the ghastly scene near the port area. Jeeps were also brought in broadcasting recorded ‘horror sounds’ – including ‘shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of sirens and the clang of fire-alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic: Save your souls, all ye faithful! Flee for your lives!’, according to the eyewitness account of a Haganah officer – and threats to use poison gas and atomic weapons against the Arabs (Palumbo, p. 64). The Carmeli Brigade was ordered to ‘kill every [adult] male encountered’ and to attack with firebombs ‘all objectives that can be set alight’ (Birth, pp. 76–7). According to Morris, ‘clearly th[e] offensive, and especially the mortaring which took place during the morning of 22 April, precipitated the mass exodus’ (Birth, p. 85; 1948, p. 21).
Amid the wrack of Haifa, negotiations convened between the local British, Zionist and Arab civilian authorities. By this time probably half and perhaps more of Haifa’s Arabs had already fled in terror, many fearing a repetition of the Deir Yassin massacre. For reasons that still remain obscure, the Arabs refused to accept the surrender terms, choosing instead to evacuate the city. Haifa was the only place in April or later where civilian Zionist leaders asked the Arabs to stay put and one of only a handful of places where the local Arab leadership made an organized, considered decision to leave (1948, p. 20). But the pleas on one side and the demurrals on the other were largely irrelevant to the actual unfolding of events. For the atrocities continued unabated, with ‘the civilian [Zionist] authorities … saying one thing and the Haganah … doing something else altogether’ (Birth, p. 90). With only several thousand Arabs remaining, certain Zionist authorities did finally make a serious effort to halt the exodus, apparently for fear of diplomatic repercussions and the serious strains in the Haifa economy that the flight of Arab workers would cause.30
Watching the Arabs flee, Ben-Gurion, who visited the city on 1 May, reportedly exclaimed, ‘What a beautiful sight!’ (Palumbo, p. 76). Learning that one Zionist official in the city was trying to persuade the Arabs to stay, Ben-Gurion remarked, ‘Doesn’t he have anything more important to do?’ (Birth, p. 328, note 4). The policy he announced was to treat the remaining Arabs ‘with civil and human equality’ but ‘it is not our job to worry about the return of the Arabs [who had fled]’ (Birth, p. 133). In July, Haifa’s remaining Arab inhabitants, some 3,500, were packed into a ghetto in the downtown Wadi Nisnas neighborhood (1948, pp. 149–71).
Morris maintains that ‘there is no evidence that the architects of, and commanders involved in, the offensive of 21–2 April hoped that it would lead to an Arab evacuation of Haifa’. He goes on to observe that ‘at the level of Carmeli Brigade headquarters, no orders were ever issued to the troops dispersed in the Arab districts to act in a manner that would precipitate flight’ (Birth: pp. 85, 92; cf. 1948, p. 84). Yet Morris himself so qualifies these claims as to render them at best trivial. First, we are told that ‘clearly the Haganah was not averse to seeing the Arabs evacuate’ Haifa (Birth, p. 86). We next learn that, notwithstanding Carmeli headquarters orders issued ‘somewhat belatedly’ – that forbade looting and urged the Arabs to remain calm and return to work, ‘if not explicitly to stay in the city’, there was ‘certainly an undercurrent of more militant thinking akin to the IZL approach’.
At the company and platoon levels, officers and men cannot but have been struck by the thought that the steady Arab exodus was ‘good for the Jews’ and must be encouraged to assure the security of ‘Jewish’ Haifa. A trace of such thinking in Carmeli Brigade headquarters can be discerned in the diary entries of Yosef Weitz for 22–24 April, which the JNF executive spent in Haifa. ‘I think that this [flight-prone] state of mind [among the Arabs] should be exploited, and [we should] press the other inhabitants not to surrender [but to leave]. We must establish our state,’ he jotted down on 22 April. On 24 April, Weitz went to see Carmel’s adjutant, who informed Weitz that the nearby Arab villages … were being evacuated by their inhabitants and that Acre had been ‘shaken’. ‘I was happy to hear from him that this line was being adopted by the [Haganah] command, [that is] to frighten the Arabs so long as flight-inducing fear was upon them’. … Weitz, it appears found a responsive echo in Carmeli Brigade headquarters. It made simple military as well as political sense: Haifa without Arabs was a more easily defensible, less problematic city for the Haganah than Haifa with a large Arab minority. (Birth, pp. 92–3)
In short, de facto Zionist policy, even at the level of the Carmeli Brigade headquarters, was to press the Arab exodus from Haifa. Thus, Milstein observes that, notwithstanding the Zionists’ claim that they ‘wanted the Arabs to stay in Haifa, but the Arabs refused’, the
truth was different: The commander of the Carmeli Brigade, Moshe Carmel, feared that many Arabs would remain in the city. Hence, he ordered that three-inch mortars be used to shell the Arab crowds on the market square. The crowd broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate, stormed the boats and fled the city. The whole day mortars continued to shell the city, even though the Arabs did not fight. (‘No Deportation, Evacuation’)
Indeed, the ‘great efficacy’ of these ‘indirect methods’ (among others) in Haifa is singled out by the above-cited IDF intelligence report of June 1948 in its recommendations for precipitating Arab flight (1948, p. 71).31
Recall, finally, that Morris described Haifa as ‘illustrative of the complexity’ of the Arab flight. Accordingly, Birth analyzes in uniquely exhaustive detail the unfolding drama there. No phase of the Arab exodus is better known than Haifa. Every Zionist account of the 1948 war seizes with desperate zeal on the story of the gentle Jewish mayor, Shabtei Levi, tearfully begging the Arabs to remain and the perfidious Arab leadership opting for flight. Likewise, this episode figures very prominently in Morris’s account. Yet, as noted above, Haifa was the only place that witnessed such a turn of events. Simply put, in crucial respects, Haifa was ‘illustrative’ of – nothing. Morris’s focus, in fact, is the most equivocal case of the most equivocal period of the Arab flight.
The other Arab cities and the Arab villages besieged during the months April–May suffered roughly the same fate as Haifa – and for roughly the same reasons. The aim of Operation Yiftah, commanded by Yigal Allon, was to ‘clear’ the Eastern Galilee border area ‘completely of all Arab forces and inhabitants’. Thus were Safad and the villages of Fir’im and Mughr at Kheit emptied of their inhabitants (Birth, pp. 101–2, 121–2). The aim of Operation Ben-Ami, commanded by Moshe Carmel, was ‘the conquest and evacuation by the Arabs’ of the Western Galilee. Carmel’s operational order of 19 May to his battalion commanders read: ‘To attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy and burn the villages of Al Kabri, Umm al Faraj and An Nahr’ (Birth, pp. 124–5). The aim of Operation Lightning, commanded by Shimon Avidan, was to cause a ‘general panic’ and ‘the wandering [i.e. exodus]’ of the Arabs in the south, bordering Egypt (Birth, p. 126). The villagers of Kaufakha in the Negev had, according to Morris, ‘earlier repeatedly asked to surrender, accept Jewish rule and be allowed to stay, all to no avail. The Haganah always regarded such requests as either insincere or unreliable’ (Birth, p. 128; my emphasis). Even villages that had ‘traditionally been friendly towards the Yishuv’ – for example, Huj, whose inhabitants had hidden Haganah men from a British dragnet in 1946 and whose mukhtar was shot dead by a mob in Gaza because of his ‘collaboration with the Jews’ – were depopulated and destroyed (Birth, p. 128).
The record that Morris has assembled evidently belies his central thesis that the vicissitudes of war, not an expulsion policy, accounted for the flight of Palestine’s Arabs during these months. Yet it is not only Morris’s evidence that works against his thesis; his own arguments work against it as well.
Morris asserts that, although right-wing Revisionist Zionists like Menachem Begin and the Irgun leadership did not ‘openly espouse a policy of expulsion’ during April and May, the goal was ‘manifest’ in the nature of the attacks they led. He elaborates on this point in a revealing footnote worth quoting at length:
While Begin and the IZL leadership were careful not to openly espouse a policy of expulsion, it is clear that the IZL’s military operations were designed with the aim of clearing out the Arab inhabitants of the areas they conquered. Following the massacre at Deir Yassin, the IZL fighters trucked out the remaining villagers to East Jerusalem. In May in the Hills of Ephraim the IZL assault ended in the flight of the majority of the villagers; and those who remained in place were, within days, swiftly sent packing. … In their post-operational reports, … the IZL commanders emphasized their satisfaction with the fact that the assaults had precipitated mass civilian-Arab flight. (1948, p. 37)
Terror, the flight of most Arabs as an assault unfolded and the dispatch of those who remained behind, the satisfaction of the Jewish commanders with the Arab flight – this is Morris’s description of the ‘main wave of the Arab exodus’ during April and May. But then, by Morris’s own reckoning, it was not only the right-wing Revisionists who de facto pursued an expulsion policy.
The Arab exodus during the months April–May ‘caught the Yishuv leadership, including the authors of Plan D, by surprise’. Morris maintains not only that the Palestinian exodus was an unintended ‘by-product’ of the war but that it ‘surprised’ – indeed, ‘shocked’, ‘flustered’ and ‘astonished’ (Birth, p. 81; 1948, pp. 70, 90) – the Yishuv. He frequently sounds this theme, for example, in the following representative passage:
[There is] no evidence, with the exception of one or two important but isolated statements by Ben-Gurion, of any general expectation in the Yishuv of a mass exodus of the Arab population from the Jewish or any other part of Palestine. Such an exodus may have been regarded by most Yishuv leaders as desirable; but in late March and early April, it was not regarded as necessarily likely or imminent. When it occurred, it surprised even the most optimistic and hardline Yishuv executives, including the leading advocate of the transfer policy, Yosef Weitz. (Birth, pp. 63–4)
Inasmuch as Morris specifically names Ben-Gurion and Yosef Weitz, let us look at what the actual record reveals about them.
David Ben-Gurion was without question the major architect of the 1948 war. His thinking and actions informed, as no other Zionist leader’s did, the unfolding of events. A review of his record thus provides special insight into the Zionist approach to Palestine’s Arab population during that fateful year.
Morris reports that, as far back as the late 1930s, Ben-Gurion repeatedly and forthrightly expressed his support – at meetings as well as in private correspondence and diary entries – for the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs. For instance, at a Zionist meeting in June 1938 he affirmed that ‘I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see in it anything immoral’ (Tikkun, p. 83; cf. Birth, p. 25).
The ‘idea of a transfer as a solution to the prospective Jewish state’s major problem’, Morris continues, ‘never left the Zionist leaders’ minds’; it ‘simmered’ until the outbreak of hostilities in 1948. Indeed, ‘already in November 1947, a few days before the UN partition resolution, Ben-Gurion was thinking in terms of a “transfer” solution to the prospective Jewish state’s Arab problem’. Hence, he advised giving the Arabs of the future Jewish state citizenship in the future Arab state so as to facilitate their expulsion in the likely event of war. Then, as the Palestinians first began to flee before the Zionist assaults during the early days of the war in December 1947, Ben-Gurion grasped that the moment was at hand to implement transfer. Morris writes:
With a little nudging, with a limited expulsion here and the razing of a village there, and with a policy of military conquest usually preceded by mortar barrages, this trickle of an exodus, he realized, could be turned into a massive outflow. (Tikkun, p. 82)32
On 7 February 1948, Ben-Gurion spoke approvingly at a Mapai council meeting of the Arab flight from West Jerusalem and anticipated its generalization. He was delighted that not ‘since the days of the Roman destruction’ was Jerusalem ‘so completely Jewish as today. … There are no strangers [i.e. Arabs]. One hundred percent Jews.’ He added that
what happened in Jerusalem and what happened in Haifa could well happen in great parts of the country – if we [the Yishuv] hold on. … It is very possible that in the coming six or eight or ten months of the war there will take place great changes … and not all of them to our detriment. Certainly there will be great changes in the composition of the population of the country. (Birth, p. 52; Tikkun, p. 83; 1948, pp. 40, 90; Milstein, ‘No Deportations, Evacuation’)
When asked at this same Mapai meeting about the absence of Jewish-owned land in strategic areas of Palestine, Ben-Gurion replied: ‘The war will give us the land. The concepts of “ours” and “not ours” are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning’ (Birth, p. 170). Indeed, throughout this month, he repeatedly expressed his intention to appropriate Arab lands in the course of the upcoming war; for example, he suggested to Weitz on 10 February that Weitz divest himself of ‘conventional notions. … In the Negev we will not buy land. We will conquer it. You are forgetting that we are at war’ (Birth, p. 170). Morris comments on this latter exchange:
Of course, Ben-Gurion was thinking ahead – and not only about the Negev. The White Paper of 1939 had almost completely blocked Jewish land purchases, asphyxiating the kibbutzim and blocking Jewish regional development. … The Partition resolution had earmarked some 60% of Palestine for the Jewish State; most of it was not Jewish-owned land. But war was war and, if won, as Ben-Gurion saw things, it would at last solve the Jewish State’s land problem. (Birth, p. 170)
Morris evidently fails to draw the obvious inference that, ‘as Ben-Gurion saw things’ already in early February, resolving the Jewish state’s massive and seemingly intractable ‘land problem’ would have to entail the dispossession and displacement of the indigenous Arab peasants. Thus, on the eve of the Haganah offensive resulting in that Arab exodus which allegedly ‘surprised’ Ben-Gurion, the latter anticipated that the Zionists would ‘enter the empty [Arab] villages and settle in them’ (Birth, p. 180; my emphasis). Morris observes that Ben-Gurion then outlined ‘two major characteristics of the settlement drive of the following months: settlement of the abandoned Arab villages and settlement in areas thinly populated by Jews’ (Birth, pp. 180–1; my emphasis). Two days later, on 6 April, Ben-Gurion added:
We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate Upper and Lower, Eastern and Western Galilee, the Negev and the Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way. … I believe the war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of the Arab population. (Birth, p. 181)
With the implementation of Plan D, Ben-Gurion presided over the intensification and generalization of precisely those policies that, already in December 1947, he knew would result in a mass flight of the Palestinian Arabs. As Morris himself tersely puts it,
Outwardly, he continued until very late in the day to pay the requisite lip service to the grand humanist-socialist ideals. … On the ground, however, he made sure that what he wanted done got done, and he carefully avoided leaving tracks; his name rarely adorns an actual expulsion directive. (Tikkun, p. 82; emphasis added)
In a speech to the provisional government on 16 June 1948, Israel’s first prime minister observed that
three things have happened up to now: a) the invasion of the regular armies of the Arab states, b) our ability to withstand these regular armies, and c) the flight of the Arabs. I was not surprised by any of them. (Flapan, p. 88)
The weight of the evidence overwhelmingly points to the conclusion that, at least so far as the ‘flight of the Arabs’ is concerned, this was not an idle boast. (Curiously, Morris does not report Ben-Gurion’s claim that the Arab flight didn’t come as a surprise to him.)33
After citing Ben-Gurion’s eager anticipation in February 1948 that ‘there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the country’, Morris asks rhetorically: ‘Are these the words of man who wishes to see the Arabs remain “citizens of a future Jewish State”? Or are these, rather, the words of leader who has long entertained … a concept of “transfer” as the solution to the prospective Jewish state’s Arab problem?’ One may just as well ask rhetorically: Are these the words – is the record that Morris has assembled – of a man who was ‘shocked’ by the Arab flight?
Let us now turn to Yosef Weitz. Weitz was the Jewish National Fund executive responsible for land acquisition and its allocation to Jewish settlements, and the Jewish National Fund representative on the Committee of Directorates of the National Institutions and on the Settlement Committee of the National Institutions. As Morris comments, he ‘was well placed to shape and influence decision-making regarding the Arab population on the national level and to oversee implementation of policy on the local level’ (1948, p. 91).34
As far back as 1940, the idea of a massive Arab transfer from Palestine had ‘gripped the imagination’ of Weitz (Birth, p. 27; cf. Palumbo, p. 4). And, already in early 1948, Weitz – like Ben-Gurion – grasped that the ‘state of anarchy created by the hostilities’ could and should be used to solve the ‘Arab problem’ in Palestine (1948, pp. 91, 120). In an 11 January diary entry, he wrote: ‘Is it not now the time to be rid of them? Why continue to keep in our midst these thorns at a time when they pose a danger to us? Our people are weighing up [solutions]’ (Birth, p. 55). A little over a month later he returned to this theme: ‘It is possible that now is the time to implement our original plan: To transfer them [to Transjordan]’ (Birth, p. 55). Weitz personally organized numerous ‘local eviction and expulsion operations’ during these months preceding the major Haganah offensive, sometimes with the assistance of local Haganah units. In January-March, he oversaw the expulsion of Arabs from Ramot-Menashe, Beit Shean Valley and Western Galilee (Birth, p. 26; 1948, pp. 92–7). Throughout March and April, Weitz ‘desperately sought political backing and help to implement the transfer’ (Birth, p. 135; cf. Flapan, pp. 96–7).
With the implementation of Plan D in April, the Zionist leadership in effect undertook to accomplish exactly what Weitz had, in the preceding months, repeatedly urged and already by himself attempted … i.e. to exploit the conditions of ‘war and anarchy’ to expel the Arabs. Given Weitz’s critical place in the Zionist apparatus and his personal foreknowledge of the likely consequences of a massive and bloody assault on the Arab population, it is hard to believe that the ensuing mass exodus came as much of a ‘surprise’ to him.
Indeed, consider the following suggestive incident reported by Morris. On 13 April, Israel Galili, the Haganah chief, wrote Weitz: ‘We regard as important to security new settlements being established in the following places … : Beit Mahsir, Saris, Ghuweir, Abu Shusha, Kafr Misr, Khirbet Manshiya, Tantura, Bureir.’ Galili asked that the establishment of the settlements at these sites be carried out ‘as soon as possible’ (Birth, p. 181). We learn in the corresponding note that: ‘Most of the sites had not yet been abandoned by their inhabitants’ (Birth, p. 339, note 105; my emphasis).
Morris’s only pieces of evidence to support his claim that the mass flight beginning in April took Weitz by ‘surprise’ are two diary entries. In his diary entry for 22 April 1948, Weitz, having just arrived in Haifa, muses about the reason behind the Arab flight from there: ‘Eating away at my innards are fears … that perhaps a plot is being hatched [between the British and the Arabs] against us. … Maybe the evacuation will facilitate the war against us.’ Morris next quotes the diary entry for the following day to clinch his argument: ‘Something in my unconscious is frightened by this flight’ (Birth, p. 64).
In the first place, the fact that Weitz was not at first privy to the specific unfolding of events in Haifa scarcely proves that the overall Arab flight came as a surprise to him. Furthermore, Weitz quickly recovered his bearings. The very same day that his ‘innards’ were being eaten away by ‘fears’ and the day before his ‘unconscious’ was being ‘frightened’ by the Arab exodus, Weitz was already urging that the flight-prone ‘state of mind’ of Haifa’s Arabs be ‘exploited’ in order to ‘hound the rest of the inhabitants so that they should not surrender [and then stay put]. We must establish our state.’ So reads the remainder of Weitz’s diary entry for 22 April 1948, which Morris inexplicably only reports some thirty pages later in another context in Birth (Birth, pp. 92–3; cf. 1948, p. 100). By 24 April, Weitz is gleefully recording that his ‘line was being adopted by the [Haganah] command’, that is, ‘to frighten the Arabs [in Haifa] so long as flight-inducing fear was upon them’ (Birth, p. 93; cf. 1948, p. 100). Within a few more days, ‘impressed by the [Arab] flight and encouraged by Ben-Gurion’, Weitz ‘visited the areas conquered by the Jewish forces in order to plan the creation of new Jewish settlements on the ruins of the Arab villages’ (Flapan, p. 97).
Weitz, whose cynicism apparently knew no limits,35 could still enter into his diary on 2 May, after observing first-hand the results of the Haganah’s depredations in the Jezreel Valley – ‘the Arab villages [are] in ruins. … the houses and huts are completely destroyed’ – that the Arabs there left ‘in a psychosis of fear. … Village after village was abandoned in a panic that cannot be explained’ (Birth, p. 111; my emphasis). And Morris, whose credulity apparently also knows no limits, credits these remarks without even the slightest demurral.36
Thanks in no small part to Weitz’s lobbying efforts, the Arab flight from Palestine was fast becoming a fait accompli by the summer of 1948. In mid-June, the ‘decision against a return’ had more or less ‘crystallized’ (1948, p. 186). Weitz now spearheaded an unofficial and then in August an official ‘transfer committee’ to prevent the repatriation of the Arab refugees. In this capacity, he supervised the destruction of, or resettlement of Jews in, the abandoned Arab villages. (For details, see chs 4–5 of Birth and ch. 4 of 1948) Morris observes that the ‘great majority’ of the Jewish settlements (including the kibbutzim) and officials supported these policies (Birth, pp. 167–8).
The decision to block repatriation of the Arab refugees coincided with Israel’s embarkment on a headlong expulsion policy, to which I will return presently. Before doing so, however, I want to take note of a curiosity in Morris’s argument.
We have seen that there is precious little evidence that the Arab flight from Palestine came as a ‘shock’ to the wartime Zionist leadership. Yet there is ample evidence that a crucial component of the Yishuv believed that the wartime Zionist leadership was engaged in a policy of mass expulsion. This was Mapam, the United Workers Party.
Mapam was unusually well placed to follow the unfolding of events in 1948. Much of the Haganah/IDF’s officer corps was recruited from Mapam – e.g. Galili, Carmel, Rabin and Allon. Moreover, committed as it was to achieving a modus vivendi with the Arab world, Mapam enjoyed atypically close relations with the Palestinian Arabs. Finally, Hashomer Hatzair, which together with Ahdut Ha’avodah formed Mapam in January 1948, managed to accumulate an extensive archive on the Arab flight.
Now, according to Morris, the ‘majority opinion’ in Mapam throughout 1948 was that Ben-Gurion’s policy was ‘tending toward expulsion’. A debate did ensue in Mapam on the Arab exodus, but this debate generally assumed that the Arabs were being expelled: the only real question was whether politics or the exigencies of combat inspired Ben-Gurion’s ‘war of expulsion’ (1948, pp. 184, 71).
In early May, Aharon Cohen, director of Mapam’s Arab Department, wrote that ‘a deliberate eviction [of the Arabs] is taking place. … Others may rejoice – I, as a socialist, am ashamed and afraid’. A few days later he repeated that the Arabs were being expelled – a ‘“transfer” of the Arabs from the area of the Jewish state’ was being executed – ‘out of certain political goals and not only out of military necessity’. And at a Mapam meeting in June, Cohen charged that ‘it had depended on us whether the Arabs stayed or fled. … [They had fled] and this was [the implementation of] Ben-Gurion’s line in which our comrades are [also] active’. At a late May Mapam Political Committee meeting, Eliezer Prai, the editor of the party’s daily paper, accused elements of the Yishuv – e.g. Weitz – of carrying out a ‘transfer policy’ by ‘blood and fire’, aimed at emptying the Jewish state of its Arab inhabitants. In July, Mapam leader Ya’acov Hazan threatened that ‘the robbery, killing, expulsion, and rape of the Arabs could reach such proportions that we would [no longer] be able to stand’ belonging to a coalition with Ben-Gurion’s Mapai. (In May 1948, Mapam had joined the newly formed government as a junior partner.) At a meeting in December 1948, Mapam leader Meir Ya’ari charged that, while the party officially repudiated a policy of expulsion, ‘its’ generals had helped implement it. And so on (1948, pp. 46–7, 52, 53, 63, 71, 113; Birth, pp. 159–60).
Morris dutifully reports all this without comment. He impeaches neither the motives nor the testimony of the Mapam leaders. Yet Morris never once confronts the question begging to be asked: If the Arab flight was ‘born of war, not by design’, where did the Mapam leaders get such strange ideas from?
June 1948–July 1949
Until the end of April, the Zionist leadership was very sensitive to diplomatic opinion. The international consensus that favored partition in November 1947 seemed on the brink of collapsing. If the Zionists embarked on a course too openly hostile to the indigenous Arab population, it would have supplied the perfect pretext for those parties eager to preempt the founding of a Jewish state. As 14 May approached, however, these fears abated and the Zionists’ anti-Arab policies became more pronounced. The state was now an irrevocable fact. Furthermore, the Arab invasion could justify an expulsion policy; and, as the IDF went from strategic offensive to rout beginning in early July, such a policy could be relentlessly pursued with total impunity. Within the next eleven months, fully half of the total Palestinian population that ultimately found itself in exile took flight.
According to Morris, although ‘there was no Cabinet or IDF General Staff-level decision to expel’ the Arabs, ‘from July onward, there was a growing readiness in the IDF units’ to do exactly that (Birth, p. 292; cf. Birth, p. 218). Ben-Gurion himself left no doubt during these months that he ‘wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish State. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October’ (Birth, pp. 292–3). Indeed, already in July he was openly complaining to the Northern Front chief of operations that too many Arabs had remained in newly conquered Nazareth: ‘Why did you not expel them?’ (Tikkun, p. 82). On 26 September, Israel’s first prime minister assured his Cabinet that, during the next offensive, the Galilee would become ‘clean’ and ‘empty’ of Arabs. On 21 October, he declared that ‘[t]he Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them – to run away’. Describing the Arab exodus from Galilee ten days later, Ben-Gurion commented ‘and many more still will flee’ – to which Morris adds ‘It was an assessment – and, perhaps, hope – shared … at the time by many key figures in the Israeli military and civil bureaucracies’ (Birth, p. 218).
Certain exceptions were made to this now overt expulsion policy – notably, Druse and Christian Arabs were for varying reasons not forced into flight (Birth, pp. 198–202)37 – but, generally, it was executed with ruthless efficiency. For example, in Operation Yoav (as in all IDF offensives during these months), ‘bombers and fighter bombers, battalions of field artillery and mortars, and tanks’ were ‘deployed with telling effect’. The Arabs who failed to flee before the Zionist juggernaut were expelled outright (Birth, pp. 219–22).
Atrocities escalated, ‘no doubt precipitat[ing] the flight of communities on the path of the IDF advance’ (Birth, p. 230). Consider the massacre at Ad Dawayima in late October. A soldier eyewitness described how the IDF, capturing the village ‘without a fight’, first ‘killed about 80–100 [male] Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead’. The remaining Arabs were then closed off in houses ‘without food and water’, as the village was systematically razed.
One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house … and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused. … The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clear the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.
The soldier eyewitness concluded that ‘cultured officers … had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of battle … but out of a system of expulsion and destruction. The less Arabs remained – the better. This principle is the political motor for the expulsions and the atrocities’ (Birth, pp. 222–3; my emphasis).38
Morris reports the following (very partial) inventory of IDF atrocities committed in the October fighting, as presented to the Political Committee of Mapam:
SAFSAF – ‘52 men tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape. … A girl aged 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed.’
JISH – ‘a woman and her baby were killed. Another 11 [were killed?].’
SA’SA – cases of ‘mass murder [though] a thousand [?] lifted white flags [and] a sacrifice was offered [to welcome] the army. The whole village was expelled.’
SALIHA – ‘94 … were blown up with a house.’
At a Mapam meeting in November, IDF atrocities – or, as Morris sometimes calls them, ‘excesses’ and ‘nudging’ – in the Galilee were described as ‘Nazi acts’ (Birth, p. 350, note 37). Probably thinking about the Ad Dawayima massacre, Aharon Zisling of Mapam remarked at another meeting in November that ‘I couldn’t sleep all night. … Jews too have committed Nazi acts’ (Birth, p. 233). A respected Zionist official, Yosef Nahmani, similarly observed in a November diary entry regarding the atrocities: ‘Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? They [i.e. the Jewish troops] had learnt from them [i.e. the Nazis]. One officer told me that those who had ‘excelled’ had come from [the Nazi concentration/extermination] camps’ (1948, revised, p. 192). In December, Mapam party co-leader Meir Ya’ari declared that ‘many of us are losing their [human] image’ (Birth, p. 211).39 To be sure, Ben-Gurion, who believed that ‘the Haganah and the IDF had … to be allowed to get on with the war’ and hence resisted any censure of the attacking forces, was apparently not shocked by the reported atrocities (Birth, p. 232).40
We have seen that, already during the first weeks of hostilities, Ben-Gurion and his lieutanants were intent on expelling the Arabs from Palestine. The tactics deployed in the successive offensives by the Zionist military forces were tailor-made to achieve this end. As 14 May approached, and with the majority of the Arabs who eventually became refugees still in situ, the full fury of the Zionist military machine was unleashed. Palestinians who fled the field of attack, even if lingering right outside their villages or towns until the terror abated, were blocked from returning. Palestinians who lagged behind or failed to ‘get the message’ were generally expelled outright. The villages that were home to these Palestinians were systematically razed.41
Thus, to distinguish between the Palestinian refugees who fled before the attacking (or approaching) Zionist forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinian refugees who were expelled outright, on the other, is, to put it most charitably, an exercise in sophistry. Occasionally, Morris comes close to conceding this point,42 but I do not think he goes nearly far enough. Indeed he could not without abandoning his central thesis in the same breath.
Yet even if, for the sake of argument, we were to credit this disingenuous distinction, Morris’s account of the Arab flight is still highly misleading – or, at best, inconsistent. Consider the incongruity between his text and sources, on the one hand, and the tables he assembles at the front of Birth, on the other.
These tables purport to give a synoptic view of the Arab flight from Palestine. Each of the roughly 370 Palestinian villages and towns ultimately depopulated is labeled mainly according to whether the inhabitants fled because of Arab orders (‘A’), Zionist military assault (‘M’) or Zionist expulsion (‘E’). Although noting that tabulations are restricted to the ‘decisive causes of abandonment’ (Birth, p. xiv), Morris still apparently strives to achieve a high degree of precision. Thus, the infamous mass expulsions at Lydda, Ramie and Deir Yassin are each tabulated as an ‘E’ (expulsion) and ‘M’ (military assault), presumably because Arabs also fled as the IDF was approaching.43 The reasonable inference is that, wherever more than one factor contributed importantly to the flight, all the factors are tabulated.
In accordance with Morris’s central thesis, flight from the overwhelming number of Arab villages and towns listed is attributed solely to Zionist military assault (or fear of such an assault), with flight from only a sprinkling of towns and villages being explained by Arab orders or Zionist expulsions. Morris’s tables thus conform with his preference for the ‘happy median’.
The inspiration for Morris’s tables was apparently the above-cited June 1948 IDF intelligence report, ‘The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine’, which included a similar breakdown. Morris faults this IDF report mainly for ‘minimiz[ing] the role direct expulsion orders played in bringing about the Palestinian exodus’ (1948, p. 84). Ironically, Morris’s tables are in this respect identically flawed. In effect, Morris’s tables may conform with his preference for the ‘happy median’, but they do not conform even with his own findings or the sources he lists. Here I can only sample the record.44
Morris reports that the IDF document erred in not also assigning an ‘E’ classification to Khirbet Lid (al-Awadim), Fajja, Al Khalisa, As Salihiya and Beisan (Beit Shean), since expulsion did play a part in the Arab flight from these sites (1948, pp. 83–4). Yet in Morris’s own tables, not one of them is listed with an ‘E’ classification.
Morris reports that in early 1948 Yosef Weitz first ‘initiated or prompted the expulsion’ of Arabs from Jewish-owned land, and then shifted his focus to ‘large areas, such as the Beit Shean Valley, Western Galilee, and Ramot-Menashe’, where he was again ‘instrumental in emptying [them] of their Arab population’ (1948, pp. 141–2). Yet of the roughly one hundred Arab villages and towns that Morris lists for these areas, only four are given an ‘E’ classification.
Morris reports that the Arab villagers of Beit Naqquba were given ‘strong advice’ by the IDF to leave. Subsequently, a ‘handful’ were allowed back to live in a neighboring Arab village (1948, pp. 192ff). Yet in his tables Beit Naqquba is listed with an ‘M’. (Even more curiously, Morris includes Beit Naqquba in a chapter of 1948 devoted to Arab villages that remained in situ.) Likewise, Morris reports that the Arab villagers of Jaba, Ein Ghazal, and Ijzim ‘fled and/or [were] driven out’. (The official Israeli account of Arab flight was disputed by UN observers who found evidence of expulsion; 1948, p. 212; Birth, pp. 213–14). Yet in Morris’s charts, not one of these villages receives an ‘E’ classification. And again, Morris reports that the IDF ‘carried out a full-scale clearing operation in the Kaufakha-Al Muharraqa area’ during which ‘the villages’ inhabitants and [bedouin] concentrations in the area were dispersed and expelled’ (Birth, p. 215; the second quote is from an official Israeli source). Yet in the text, Al Muharraqa-Kaufakha receives only an ‘M’ classification.
Morris reports that Palmah units entering Abu Zureiq ‘took some 15 adult males and some 200 women and children’ captive and ‘sent’ the women and children towards Jenin (Birth, p. 117). Yet in Morris’s tables, Abu Zureiq receives only an ‘M’ classification. Likewise Morris reports that at As Sindiyana, ‘the mukhtar and his family and some 300 inhabitants stayed put and raised a white flag. They were apparently expelled eastwards’ (Birth, p. 117). Yet, in Morris’s tables, As Sindiyana receives only an ‘M’ classification. And again, Morris reports that the IDF ‘arrested some of the villagers’ in Qatra, and ‘within a few days, either intimidated the rest of the villagers into leaving or ordered them to leave’ (Birth, p. 126). Yet in Morris’s tables, Qatra receives only an ‘M’ classification. And still again, Morris reports that the ‘last major wave of evictions’ in the Galilee in mid-1949 caused a public scandal as the remaining inhabitants of three formerly cooperative Arab villages – Khisas, Qeitiya, Ja’auna – were brutally expelled south of Safad (Birth, p. 242). Yet not one of these villages receives an ‘E’ classification in Morris’s tables.
Morris reports that a Haganah raid ‘precipitated the evacuation of … Al Manara’ (Birth, p. 70). In the tables, the village is listed with an ‘M’. The only source that Morris cites is Naffez Nazzal, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1947–1949.45 Turning to Nazzal, we read that ‘Zionist soldiers attacked … El Manara (a village of 490 Arab inhabitants), chased its inhabitants out, destroyed some houses, and left leaflets behind warning the inhabitants not to return because the village had been mined’ (pp. 28–9). Morris reports that a Haganah force ‘captured the village of Khirbet Nasir ad Din. … Some non-combatants were apparently killed and some houses destroyed. Most of the population fled to Lubiya or to Tiberias. … Several dozen villagers remained in situ’ (Birth, p. 71). In the tables, Nasir ad Din receives three classifications, none of which is an ‘E’. The main source cited by Morris is Nazzal. Turning to Nazzal, we read that ‘Zionists attacked the … village of Nasr-ed-Din (with 90 Arab inhabitants) and destroyed all its houses, killing some of its inhabitants, including women and children, and expelling all the rest’ (p. 29). Morris reports that ‘[w]hile most of Ein az Zeitun’s young adult males fled …, some of the village women, children and old men stayed put. These were apparently rounded up … and expelled’ (Birth, p. 102). In the tables, Ein az Zeitun is listed only with an ‘M’. The only source that Morris cites is Nazzal. Turning to Nazzal, we read that, although the armed villagers fled, ‘[a]lmost all the old men, women and children remained in the village because the villagers had previously agreed among themselves not to leave’. They were all subsequently expelled (pp. 33–7).
Morris concludes his discussion of the IDF report with the observation that ‘only a small proportion’ of the Arab exodus can be accounted for by direct or even indirect expulsion (1948, p. 88). This reckoning perhaps has less to do with the facts than with Morris’s idiosyncratic bookkeeping.
Behind the Expulsion
To account for the unfolding strategy of the Zionist movement in 1948, Morris repeatedly invokes the contingencies of the armed conflict – i.e. the ‘life-and-death struggle’ with the Arabs. Even when Morris does grant that political factors informed the Zionist decision-making process, he nonetheless grounds these factors mainly in the concern with security.46 As Morris puts it in the first pages of Birth:
It cannot be stressed too strongly that, while this is not a military history, the events it describes … occurred in wartime and were a product, direct and indirect, of that war. Throughout, when examining what happened in each area at different points in the war, the reader must recall the nature of the backdrop – the continuing clash of arms between Palestinian militiamen and, later, regular Arab armies and the Yishuv … ; the intention of the Palestinian leadership and irregulars and, later, of most of the Arab states’ leaders and armies in launching the hostilities in November–December 1947 and the May 1948 invasion to destroy the Jewish state and possibly the Yishuv … ; and the extremely small dimensions (geographical and numerical) of the Yishuv in comparison with the Palestinian Arab community and the infinitely larger surrounding Arab hinterland. At the same time, it is well to recall that, from July 1948, it was clear to the Yishuv (and the Arab leaders) that Israel had won its war for survival, at least in the short term, and that the subsequent Israel Defense Forces’ offensives were geared to securing the political-military future of the Jewish state in what continued to be a hostile geopolitical environment and to rounding out its borders, (p. 3)
Accordingly, each escalation in the Zionist movement’s onslaught against the Palestinians is seen as a defensive reaction to Arab aggression. The Palestinian leadership and irregulars ‘launch[ed] the hostilities in November—December 1947’. The Haganah implemented Plan D and ‘switched to the offensive’ in April because of ‘a sense of imminent logistical asphyxiation … and the expected Arab invasion of Palestine by the armies of the Arab states’ (Birth, p. 7; cf. Birth: pp. 30, 61–2, 288). The Israeli government barred the return of the Arab refugees in June 1948 ‘against the backdrop of the invasion of the new born State by the Arab armies’ (Birth, p. 132; cf. Birth, pp. 153, 291). The ‘destruction of the abandoned Arab villages, the cultivation and/or destruction of Arab fields and the share-out of the Arab lands to Jewish settlements, the establishment of new settlements on abandoned lands and sites and the settlement of Jewish immigrants in empty Arab housing in the countryside and in urban neighborhoods’ occurred ‘naturally and were integral, major elements in the overall consolidation of the State of Israel in wartime’ (Birth, p. 155). Efforts were made to establish Jewish settlements outside the UN-designated boundaries between August and December 1948 (e.g. in the Western Galilee, the Jerusalem corridor and the Lydda-Ramle district) mainly because of security and ‘military–political’ reasons (Birth, pp. 185–8). The IDF launched assaults well after ‘it was clear to the Yishuv (and to the Arab leaders) that Israel had won its war for survival’ – e.g. operations Yoav and Hiram in October-December – in order to ‘conquer additional territory, giving the Jewish state greater strategic depth and pushing back hostile armies from the Jewish population centers’ (Birth, p. 235). Even the multiple atrocities committed by the Haganah and the IDF must be seen within the context that ‘the fate of the State had hung in the balance’ (Birth, p. 232).
The obvious, if unstated, upshot of Morris’s argument is that the Arabs – who, after all, were the aggressors – must bear the brunt of political (if not moral) responsibility for the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem.47 Recall that this is the explicit conclusion of ‘old’ historians like Meir Pa’il and Shabtei Teveth, who are much more ready than Morris to acknowledge the systematic and premeditated character of the Arab flight.48
Yet, Morris’s analysis is flawed in at least three crucial respects: (1) it simplifies the origins and dynamics of the first Arab–Israeli war, (2) it woefully understates the ideological–political motivations (apart from any security considerations) to expel the Arabs and enlarge the Jewish state’s borders, and (3) it inverts the relationship between politics and security. All of these are common to the vast body of scholarly myth surrounding Israel’s creation.
Morris suggests that primary responsibility for the original escalation of intercommunal hostilities in Palestine belongs to the Palestinian Arabs who ‘intended to destroy the Jewish State and possibly also the Yishuv’ (Birth, p. 3). The Haganah’s national strategy until March 1948 was one that ‘restrict[ed] as far as possible the scope of the conflagration and … [did] not strike in areas so far free of hostilities’ (Birth, p. 33). Where it did attack, the General Staff sought ‘to keep operations as “clean” as possible’ (Birth, p. 34). Yet Morris’s account of this phase in the war is belied by the actual record.
The British officials stationed in Palestine did not believe that the Palestinians initially intended any serious resistance to the Partition Resolution, if for no other reason than because, even taking into account the assistance of the 5,000 or so Arab volunteers who reached Palestine in March 1948, they were utterly unprepared militarily for such an undertaking (Birth, pp. 16, 20, 34–5; Palumbo, pp. 35–6). As Morris himself puts it, ‘in general, the Palestinian Arabs by the end of 1947 had a healthy and demoralising respect for the Yishuv’s military power’ (Birth, p. 21). Indeed, a Jewish intelligence source cited by Morris reported in late 1947 that, in the countryside, ‘the fellah is afraid of the Jewish terrorists … who might bomb his village and destroy his property. … The town-dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish forces and hopes for salvation from the outside’. At the same time, the ‘moderate majority’ of Palestine’s Arabs ‘are confused, frightened. … They are stockpiling provisions … and are being coerced and pressured by extremists. … But all they want is peace, quiet’ (Birth, p. 21). According to Elias Sasson, the director of the Arab division of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, in early January Arab morale was low in all the main towns and in the hinterlands (Birth, p. 30).
What then accounted for the spiraling violence in Palestine? Flapan points to a ‘clear pattern’ in Arab-Jewish relations between December 1947 and March 1948, in which lethal terrorist attacks by the Irgun or LEHI resulted in Arab retaliations and then ‘the Haganah – while always condemning the actions of the Irgun and LEHI – joined in with an inflaming counterretaliation’ (Flapan, p. 95).49 Already in December 1947, Ben-Gurion ordered adoption of ‘the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place’. And again: ‘When in action … we … must fight strongly and cruelly, letting nothing stop us’ (Flapan, p. 90). According to the British High Commissioner, Alan Cunningham, had the Haganah not launched these (in effect) counter-reprisals – some of which he deemed an ‘offence to civilisation’ – the situation would not have so drastically deteriorated (Birth, p. 32; cf. Palumbo, p. 36).
By late March, Haganah intelligence was reporting that relations between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine had reached a nadir: ‘There is almost no area of the country where we can talk with the Arabs, even on local matters, to pacify them and calm things down.’ According to two senior Haganah intelligence officers, ‘in large measure the situation was a product of ill-conceived Jewish military actions and over-reactions’. Morris quotes one of these two officers, Yehoshua Palmon, to the effect that, in the future, the Yishuv would generally find it difficult ‘to prove that we weren’t the aggressors’ (Birth, p. 40).50
One reason that Morris is unable to perceive the Yishuv’s large measure of responsibility for the slide into full-scale war is his predilection for casting it in a strictly defensive, reactive posture vis-à-vis the Arabs. In his reckoning, the Haganah, especially, was engaged during these months only in ‘reprisals’, in a ‘strategy of forceful retaliation’ (Birth, p. 56), in ‘cautionary and punitive raids’ (Birth, p. 156), in ‘retaliatory strikes’ (Birth, p. 156), in a ‘retaliatory policy’ (1948, p. 188), and so on – albeit ‘sometimes misdirected, sometimes excessive’ (Birth, p. 36). The result of Morris’s wishful reading of the historical record is a gross distortion of it. Consider the following examples.
1. Morris reports on page 41 of Birth that the intercommunal strife in Haifa in December 1947 ‘culminated in an IZL bombing at the gates of the Haifa oil refinery, the vengeful Arab massacre of Jewish refinery workers and the Haganah reprisal of 31 December at Balad ash Sheikh, a large satellite village southeast of Haifa’. The IZL bombing does not count as a ‘vengeful massacre’ and the Arab attack does not count as a ‘reprisal’; rather, the Arabs are guilty of the ‘vengeful massacre’ and the Haganah is merely held accountable for a ‘reprisal’. On page 44 of Birth, we learn that ‘the exodus from Arab Haifa was fairly closely linked to Haganah retaliatory strikes, Arab attacks and Arab fears of subsequent Jewish retaliations’. Again, on page 93 of Birth, Morris reports that ‘Balad ash Sheikh … had been partially evacuated on 7 January 1948, following the Haganah’s retaliatory strike on the night of 31 December 1947, which was triggered by the massacre by Arabs of the 70 Jewish oil refinery workers on 30 December 1947’. Finally, we are told on page 156 of Birth that ‘several dozen’ Arab homes were ‘destroyed at Balad ash Sheikh on 31 December in the revenge attack following the Arab massacre of Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refinery’. The initial IZL atrocity has completely dropped from sight.51
2. According to Morris, the Haganah attack on Khisas in December 1947 – in which a dozen civilians, including four children, were killed – was severely criticized by the Arab Division of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department for ‘unnecessarily spread[ing] the fighting to a hitherto quiet area’ (Birth, p. 33). In a note at the back of Birth, Morris presents this description of the events at Khisas:
An Arab had killed a Jew in a months-old vendetta. The local Palmah commander believed that the crime had been ‘political’ and decided to retaliate. Local Haganah intelligence service officers and civil leaders appealed against the intended operation, which was also to have included attacks on nearby Al Khalisa and two other villages, and obtained a postponement from the Haganah General Staff. But the local commanders, who (according to Danin) wanted to ‘keep up [their troops’] morale’, asked for and obtained permission from Palmah OC Allon, and attacked Khisas on 18 December. The General Staff in Tel Aviv subsequently denied advance knowledge of the operation. The attacking troops mistakenly blew up a house with civilians in it. (p. 306, note 12)
In Morris’s bookkeeping, the Haganah attack on Khisas counts, not as a ‘vengeful massacre’ but rather, first, as ‘a tale of Haganah inefficiency and trigger-happiness’ (ibid.), then, as a ‘mistaken attack’ (Birth, p. 34) and, finally, as a ‘Haganah retaliatory strike’ (Birth, p. 156). Notice Morris’s certainty, based entirely on official Zionist sources, that the demolition of the house with civilians in it was ‘mistaken’.
3. Morris reports that
The Arabs living in the prosperous western Jerusalem district of Qatamon began evacuating their homes after the Haganah bombing of the Semiramis Hotel on the night of 4–5 January 1948. The Haganah suspected, mistakenly, that the hotel served as the headquarters of the local irregulars. Several Arab families … died in the explosion, and a sharp dispute broke out inside the Haganah and with the British authorities. The action was carried out without Haganah General Staff instruction or consent. (Birth, p. 50)
Morris is certain that the ‘Haganah suspected, mistakenly,’ because it says so in … Ben-Gurion’s diary. He begins the paragraph following the description of this atrocity with the words: ‘Other [Haganah] retaliatory strikes hit Arab …’ (my emphasis)
Morris includes in his first chapter a lucid, if brief, discussion of ‘the notion of transfer in Yishuv thinking’. He points out that ‘the idea of a “voluntary” or “compulsory” transfer of all or the bulk of the Arabs inhabiting the Jewish State areas had been in the air since the mid-1930s’ (Birth, p. 25).52 Yet Morris’s treatment of this crucial topic is deficient in at least two respects. In the first place, it barely figures in the explanatory framework he uses to account for the origins of the refugee problem. Second, on the rare occasion that this factor is introduced, it is grounded in the concern with security – e.g. the Arabs were barred from returning to their homes because they were seen as a potentially subversive element. The reality is rather more complicated.
The aim of the Zionist enterprise was to create a Jewish state in Palestine, a state that ‘belonged’ to the Jewish people.53 The sine qua non of such a Jewish state was seen to be a permanent Jewish majority; the ideal was a homogeneously Jewish constituency. These beliefs were anchored in a theoretical discourse that went well beyond – indeed, was entirely distinct from – security concerns. The ‘compulsory transfer’ of the nascent Jewish state’s Arab population was thus prefigured in the ideology of Zionism. This was especially the case inasmuch as the Jewish state anticipated in the UN Partition plan yielded not a Jewish majority – let alone a stable Jewish majority – but, rather, an Arab majority (507,780 Arabs as against 499,020 Jews). The escalating hostilities and, eventually, the Arab invasion surely contributed to the Zionists’ preference for expulsion; but they also served as a convenient pretext for executing it.
Furthermore, Arab opposition and resistance to the Zionist movement was rooted preeminently in the latter’s intent to create a state that would, at best, marginalize – and, more than likely, expel – them. The ‘security’ threat posed by the Arabs thus resulted from Zionism’s ideological–political agenda. Yet, in Morris’s reckoning, this relationship is inverted: the Zionist leadership’s ideological-political disposition for expulsion resulted from the ‘security’ threat the Arabs posed to the Jewish state.
Morris’s failure to give real weight to the animating impulses of the Zionist enterprise also disfigures his account of the Arab invasion and its aftermath. Morris concedes that, from July onward, ‘it was clear that Israel had won its war for survival’ (Birth, p. 3) and that, henceforth, the IDF was on the ‘strategic offensive’ (Birth, p. 197). Indeed, there was never too much doubt that the Zionists would prevail in the field of battle. Save for a brief three-week period (15 May-11 June), the Haganah/IDF generally had the edge in the ‘traditional indices of [military] strength’. As Morris himself succinctly puts it, ‘the truth … is that the stronger side won’ (1948, pp. 13–16, 33–4).
Nonetheless, Morris takes at face value the claims in official Zionist documents that the assaults from July onward were strictly defensive in nature.54 Consider his account of Operation Dani which resulted in the sacking of Lydda and Ramle.
While the Arab Legion had in fact only one, defensively-oriented company (about 120–150 soldiers) in Lydda and Ramle together, and a second-line company at Beit Nabala to the north, the IDF intelligence and Operation Dani OC General Yigal Allon believed at the start of the offensive that they faced a far stronger Legion force and one whose deployment was potentially aggressive, posing a standing threat to Tel Aviv itself. (Birth, p. 203)
Morris knows that Allon attacked Lydda and Ramle because he ‘believed’ – incorrectly, as it turned out – that the Arab Legion posed a ‘standing threat to Tel Aviv’, for so it is written in Ben-Gurion’s diary and in a book ‘written under constraints of IDF censorship’ (Birth, p. 344, note 14; cf. Tikkun, p. 20). Surely, an equally plausible explanation is that the Zionist movement was pursuing for its own sake the expansion of the Jewish state’s borders, in accordance with its enduring objective – never renounced – to create a Jewish state in all of Palestine. As Morris himself puts it early on, whereas Ben-Gurion ‘was generally willing to accept Partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in part of the country, … he remained committed to a vision of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine as the ultimate goal of Zionism’ (Birth, p. 3). Yet, in Morris’s account, this ideological concern figures not at all as a causal factor for the Zionists’ land-grab in 1948, which resulted in Jewish sovereignty over 37 per cent more of Palestine than was allotted to the Jewish state by the United Nations.
Yet, even leaving the ideological mainsprings of the Zionist project aside, the massive immigration of Jews anticipated by the Zionist movement, too, presupposed the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population. As early as 20 December 1940, Weitz wrote in his diary:
it must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples. … If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us. … The only solution is a Land of Israel … without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises. … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. The transfer must be directed at Iraq, Syria and even Transjordan. For this goal funds will be found. … And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution. (Birth, p. 27)
The same point was made by Dr Yakov Thon, a founding member of the pacifist Brit-Shalom, in 1937:
Without transferring the Arab peasants to neighboring lands, we will not be able to bring into our future state a large new population. In short, without transfer there can be no Jewish immigration. (Palumbo, p. 4)
The dimensions of this problem are suggested by the fact that, of the 20,418,023 dunums held by the Israeli state at the war’s end, only 1,475,766 were owned by Jews.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by putting Morris’s achievement in perspective. Morris has indisputably produced landmark studies. He has permanently redefined the parameters of legitimate scholarly debate on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, dispatching to oblivion the standard Israeli claims about ‘Arab broadcasts’.55 Indeed, Morris’s devastating reply to Shabtai Teveth’s recent defense of these claims can only be described as a virtuoso performance (cf. the Commentary and Tikkun articles cited above). Morris has tapped a wealth of archival material which no serious student of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict can afford to ignore. In effect, Morris’s research will serve as the benchmark for all future scholarship on the topic.
Yet Morris’s achievement falls well short of the estimable standard he has set himself. In Tikkun, Morris distances himself from ‘propagandists’ such as Professor Edward Said. He rather locates his calling as a scholar above the realm of crass political partisanship in the pristine heights of truth and objectivity. Said’s sin was to have cited Morris for the claim that ‘a sequence of Zionist terror and Israeli expulsion … were behind the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem’. Surely, as I think I have shown, this is a legitimate interpretation of Morris’s evidence – if not of his thesis. According to Morris, however, his research shows that ‘war, without a Jewish masterplan or indeed, without any preplanning whatsoever, brought a Palestinian exodus of itself’, and that ‘with a little nudging in the right direction, the low-key exodus … turned into a mass flood and a fait accompli’. What is this if not official Zionism’s ‘astonishing’ flight of Palestine’s Arabs now graced with Morris’s imprimatur?
In the same Tikkun article, Morris cautions that ‘the moment the historian looks over his shoulder, begins to calculate how others might utilize his work, and allows this to influence his findings and conclusions, he is well on his way down that slippery slope leading to official history and propaganda’. Morris would have done well to heed this caveat as he prepared the results of his research for publication.