So now the UN are spinning narratives are they? Instead of writing all the above you could have just stated I'm sticking by my narrative argument.
You seem confused regarding the term 'narrative' and 'story', you actually used them interchangeably. A 'narrative' is the choice of which events to relate and in what order to relate them, that's the issue people have with the Israeli versions as they put a delicate spin of innocence on them, which is wrong, considering many of the actions were led by commanders, backed by political decision makers.
Narrative is the choice of which events to relate and in what order to relate them – so it is a representation or specific manifestation of the story, rather than the story itself. The story is the Nakba the narrative turns the story into information.
Ok you gave a breakdown why narratives are used, but I've explained to why the Israeli narrative of the event has flaws i.e. parts of events which have been corroborated by multiple agencies are glossed over or at best are dismissed as 'wayward troops'. But you've already dismissed the UN as a source, a case of
genetic fallacy, which shows your will to commit to honest discourse is non-existent.
I'll find anther version of the Washington Times piece.
Well of course there are different narratives here, I didn't post there wasn't. The issue is the Israeli one, which has hazes over key events. You use the word 'consensus', if you mean historians will agree 100% on a course of events in history, then that seldom happens. However the vast majority do state there were atrocities carried by Israel's forces and the Palestinians were forcefully expelled in large numbers. There are differences in terms of motives, how much was threat perception rather than direct action etc. But not on events.
On another forum a gentlemen broke down three narratives from various historians which posters should read. I've highlighted key points.
New Historians: Late 1980s Revision of Accepted Narratives
Simha Flapan's Account
Simha Flapan, a "New Historian", discusses the issue in an article called
The Palestinian Exodus of 1948. In this article, we are automatically notified that
600,000-700,000 Palestinians were evicted, or fled. This number has been backed up among numerous sources. The question, then, is how to see
why they left, and how many left for which reason.
Flapan notes the official Israeli narrative: That Israel wanted to stop the exodus, and was not responsible for it. He notes that the major of Haifa (Shabatai Levy) and the head of the Worker's Council (Abba Hashi)
pleaded with the Arabs to stay and surrender to the Haganah. Ben-Gurion also sent Golda Meir to attempt to convince them to stay. The efforts were unsuccessful.
Flapan believes that these efforts were purely politically calculated, and that Ben-Gurion didn't actually believe in trying to keep the Arabs around, basing this claim on Ben-Gurion biographer Michael Bar-Zohar. Zohar points to what he says are
Ben-Gurion's claims that fewer Arabs left would be better, quoting his diary saying "We must afford civic and human equality to every Arab who remains, but it is not our task to worry about the return of Arabs".
This is, obviously, a little shaky. It's interpreting Ben-Gurion's stance off one diary entry that doesn't even mention
evicting the Arabs. However, in 1950, Ben-Gurion was quoted as saying
"These Arabs should not be living here, just as American Jews should not be living in America". This, however, came after the 1948 War, so we're not sure if it was his belief the whole time! Flapan does provide another quote, however, pointing to Ben-Gurion giving orders to "destroy the Arab islands in Jewish population areas". This cannot, though, explain everything, as Jewish population areas weren't the only places that existed obviously in the new state.
Flapan posits that the idea that the Palestinians were urged to run, part of the official narrative, is bunk. He argues that there's no evidence for it (and notes that thousands of new documents were just released when this was published in 1987). He also notes its improbability, as the local population being urged to run would mean the Arabs didn't want the local population to stick around and help the armies as they approached with supplies; hardly logical. Flapan also says that the declassified trove actuall
y supports the theory that the Arab countries tried to get the Palestinians to stay, not to run.
A report of the Jewish Agency's Arab Section on January 3, 1948 (at the beginning of the flight, which took place in waves, as I'll get into later), mentions that the Arab Higher Executive (AHE) had succeeded in
imposing significant scrutiny on those attempting to flee.
The old, women, and children were allowed to flee, but overall Palestinians were encouraged to stay in place, and even granting visas to those women and children was often opposed.
Flapan also contends that the
AHE statements which were purported to show how the Arabs encouraged the flight are now seen to be largely fabricated. Parts of them that weren't fabricated, however, did contribute to the panic and the flight. Things like "...in a very short time the armies of our Arab sister countries will overrun Palestine, attacking from the land, the sea, the air, and they will settle accounts with the Jews" were intended to deter Arabs from collaborating or surrendering to the Israelis
. However, Flapan believes they had the opposite effect, increasing Arab panic and flight due to the impending disastrous effects of war. There are command records, however, that show Arab forces being commanded to return Palestinians to their homes by force if they were caught trying to flee.
Once the flight began, however, it wasn't that
Jews necessarily looked to expel the Palestinians (again, working off Flapan here, I'm going to go more into it later).
Flapan believes that Jewish leaders merely encouraged it (while there were some expulsions, again, get into that later). Chaim Weizmann, prominent in the Zionism community, had declared that "Jews are not going to encroach upon the rights and territory of the Arabs." However, that didn't mean the Jews didn't encourage the Arabs to abandon their territory. Moshe Sharett (foreign minister of Israel's provisional government
) immediately declared that no mass return of Palestinians to Israel would be allowed, and Aharon Cohen (prominent political Zionist) insisted that "the Arab exodus was not part of a preconceived plan, but a part of the flight was due to official policy...Once it started, the flight received encouragement from the most important Jewish sources, for both military and political reasons."
But now that you've got a good idea of the narrative up to here, and you've understood that the argument of flight and expulsion is the main narrative Flapan argues for, let's see what Flapan tallies it all up to. Keep in mind, Flapan believes there were far more expulsions, making the "encouragement" claim insufficient to explain the exodus.
Flapan notes that according to IDF intelligence estimates, as of June 1, 1948 (in the next 6 months a similar sized exodus would occur again),
370,000 Arabs had left. 84% were due to direct Israeli actions (55% due to attacks, 15% due to terrorism, 2% due to whispering campaigns, 2% due to evacuations by the IDF, and 10% due to general fear). About 5% left on orders from Arab bands. And finally, another 11% left voluntarily.
I'd like to categorize those numbers slightly differently, if I might. I'd say the general fear is hard to pin on either side (as Flapan noted the fears compounded by Arabs), so it ought be separated. Also, we must note that attacks by Israelis are military attacks (since they are described as separate from the terrorist attacks of Irgun and Lehi, two prominently radical fighting groups), and likely resulted in
some expulsions and
some running from the people now in control.
Flapan goes further into the issue of how they were encouraged to leave, what methods were used, what expulsions were like, etc. However, these are details that don't detract or add to the point above for the most part, so I'll move on to the next portion of my post: Ilan Pappé.
Simha Flapan. The Palestinian Exodus of 1948 Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Summer, 1987
Ilan Pappé's Account
Ilan Pappé is yet another New Historian. I will discuss Pappé, then get into Morris' account, so if you think I'm never gonna get to what you might've been told growing up, then worry not!
Pappé is, to put it lightly, one of the more radical of the New Historians. His article, titled
The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is a
little controversial to say the least.
I would like to note that it's basically his attempt to sum up his new book through the early chapters, not the full book (which has the same title). Please feel free to read his book, if you wish to know more about his stance or sources. Unfortunately, I don't have his book on me, and can't find it online, so we'll have to make do with this!
Obviously, Pappé takes the controversial stance that most, if not all, of the Arabs running were due to ethnic cleansing. He begins the article by defining ethnic cleansing, and noting that it is a crime against humanity. There is a distinction I'd like to make, briefly, before I get into the writings of Pappé. Pappé mentions that ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity, and points to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia) and its prosecutions of people for ethnic cleansing (among other things). A similar court was convened in Rwanda. He then goes on to describe the definitions used there, which mostly sum up to "systematic and forced removal of the members of an ethnic group from communities in order to change the ethnic composition of a given region."
It's clear, here, that Pappé is taking one of the most controversial stances he can. Ethnic cleansing as a
systematic action taken willingly and intentionally is a big leap from Flapan's earlier argument that encouragement and expulsion were used in large amount, but that the whole situation was less a forced and intentional expulsion as opposed to a mixture of many factors. Furthermore, because it's nigh impossible to make the assertion and prove it without doubt, this is a hugely important difference from other accounts. When comparing the Nakba (which translates to the "catastrophe", and refers to the exodus post-war) to the case of Yugoslavia, I personally only see mild similarities and in more isolated cases. Whereas Milosevic in Yugoslavia and the military leadership in Rwanda actively pursued (throughout
all levels) the ethnic cleansing and genocide of all those that weren't of their ethnic group (in Kosovo, the Serbs expelled Albanians, and in Rwanda, the Hutus expelled Tutsis, for example). I don't think this applies nearly as strongly to the case of the Nakba, and I want to preface Pappé's belief with this so you understand the gravity of what he's comparing it to
. He specifically says that if we didn't know about Yugoslavia, but heard the definition (which was partially formulated to deal with Yugoslavia) and knew about Palestine, we'd apply the definition to Palestine immediately. That's a tall assumption, to say the least. Personally, I prefer the following Morris account. However, I'll give Pappé his fair share now that I've underlined how drastically he differs from the majority consensus (which is important to understanding the conflict).
Pappé argues that from the start, the idea of the Zionist organizations was to ethnically cleanse Arabs, and that they had been gearing up for war from the start. He points to Ben-Gurion calling for "a large chunk of Palestine" for a viable state. The Jewish Agency, a few months later, took that statement and made a map from it which would be larger than the 1947 UN Partition Plan. However, after the war, the map would largely be accurate for the new state.
He points to this as evidence that the Jews were preparing from the start to seize so large an area. As a reference, this plan, which was outlined in Plan Dalet (this plan was drawn up in
March of 1948, when the civil war had already begun and after the UN partition was approved), called for (his quote):
He notes that this was the plan for the expulsion of rural villages in Palestine (something which Flapan argues was done less deliberately) and that similar instructions were given for urban centers, but he doesn't provide any quotes on the latter.
Pappé also argues that the orders were not given as guidelines, but as hard-cut directives; which runs contrary to what Morris argued. He draws this conclusion from documents released in the late 1990s by Israeli security, but Morris covers those as well and remains unconvinced.
Pappé goes on to accuse Ben-Gurion, along with all of his top commanders and generals and associates, of being responsible for the ethnic cleansing. Whereas Flapan and Morris think that Ben-Gurion and co. were amenable to the expulsion paradigm, but viewed it as something they didn't want to encourage, Pappé argues that they planned, executed,
and wanted ethnic cleansing to occur.
As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of Pappé. I feel he speculates and is
far too revisionist, making claims that are far wider than the source literature actually supports. Most of what he writes is along the lines of the above, and he hardly provides more real evidence in the article, so I suggest reading the book if you wish to judge for yourself what else he says. However, with that, I'd like to transition into my favorite account (personally) of it all: Benny Morris' account.
Ilan Pappé. The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1
Benny Morris' Account
Benny Morris is the last New Historian I'll talk about. After this, I'll go into criticisms of their narratives.
u/gingerkid1234 actually mentions Benny Morris, noting the difficulty of ascribing numbers. I'm going to be quoting from Benny Morris' book called
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. I don't want to bias you on the basis of source numbers, but you should get an idea of how much research Morris had done by 2004 (when he wrote this), so you can understand how complex the work of historians studying this is (and why I can't give a concise account).
He had over 800 citations per section. That translates to citations of around 3,200 throughout the 4 sections. While some citations came from the same sources, can you imagine having to go through even 200 pieces of source material? Oh, and that's just the discussion of the 4 waves; he had other source material to confront in the forms of other things he talks about (like blocking the return of refugees, the decisions leading up to that, etc.). Tracking them down, citing them consistently, having to consult with them whenever you do...it's a nightmare, and it's a wonder Morris could keep it all together and form such a comprehensive narrative. And because he wrote it after Flapan, when new documents had been released in the late 1990s, I feel it's likely he had a better grasp of the issue than Flapan.
It's important to note that Morris today refuses to write more histories of the conflict, saying there's "no point" since the Palestinians "don't want a two-state solution". Now, I mention this because I want you to get an idea of his background.
He's a Zionist, by most accounts, so even while he addresses Israeli war atrocities that might've been skipped over in history, and even while he presents these points of view on the Palestinian exodus, he still argues that the overall Zionist position (and some of the actions) were justified.
That said, let's launch into an examination of Morris' arguments.
Morris begins by noting that the amount of fleeing Arabs reached approximately 390,000 by June 1st. This is fairly consistent with Flapan's estimate, and they appear to be drawing from the same place.
Morris makes it very clear he blames the Palestinians for the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. He points to the Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan and initiation of hostilities as the cause for everything that followed.
He also argues that the war, not the design of Jews or Arabs, caused the refugee problem.
However, he argues, "...the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise." Praxis means practice, in case you had to look that up like me!
He also argues that the exodus was inevitable, because of the intermixing of Jewish and Arab populations that led to the difficulty in making the partition plan in the first place.
Violence, discontent, and anger was inevitable, as was fear. He goes into very great detail, and I'd highly recommend the book. But back to the narrative he provides...what exactly is it?
Well, Morris splits the exodus into 4 waves. The first, taking place between December 1947-March 1948, was characterized mostly by voluntary flight. He argues that an insignificantly small amount of refugees left because of Haganah or other forces (like Irgun and Lehi) expulsions or "forceful advice" to that effect. More, especially women, children, and the elderly, left as a result of orders or advice from Arab military commanders and officials. As he puts it, "Fears for their safety rather than a grand strategy of evacuation underlay these steps. And few were ordered or advised to leave Palestine; generally the orders or advice were merely to move to safer areas within the country, where Arabs were demographically predominant." In general, though, he believes the Arab leadership very much struggled against the exodus at this early stage. Unfortunately, he doesn't give any numbers I've found regarding how many people left during that first wave, so I couldn't tell you what he estimates.
The second wave, from April to June of 1948, took on a slightly different character. In this wave, Morris argues that expulsions really began, but were not the main focus of the Haganah forces. In general, he notes, Haganah orders were not explicitly calling for expulsion...however, they called in many cases for the destruction of a village or implicitly for expulsion, and that's what occurred. He furthers that Haganah forces did this because they knew that a flight had begun, and that with some nudging in that direction, the exodus would balloon to much larger proportions, serving the interests of the Jewish State. T
he expulsions were much more common in the countryside than the cities/towns, because it was further from headquarters where officers might object and because orders provided for the expulsion and leveling of villages, but not of towns.
Morris also does well to note the basic collapse of Palestinian society around the April point, which I talk about in my FAQ post. Civilian and military morale among the Palestinians, as well as the flight of almost all Palestinian communities (or expulsion) meant that during this period
Jews didn't really have to worry about the dilemma of expelling; the job was mostly done for them by the fleeing villagers before the villages were conquered. He posits that the second wave, during which
250,000-300,000 Palestinians fled was not the result of a general, pre-determined policy by the Jewish leadership. While they were happy to exploit it, it actually caught the Jewish leadership by surprise. Yisrael Galili (chief of staff for the Haganah) he said:
The Morris account is continued in the next post, it was too long for one comment.
With that, we enter the third wave that Morris discusses. He separates it into two subsections: the Ten Days (9-18 July) and the Second Truce (18 July-15 October).
During the Ten Days, which followed the end of the First Truce (which ended when the Egyptian army initiated hostilities in the south pre-emptively before the 30-day ceasefire expired), the IDF undertook a massive offensive on the northern and central fronts. In the south, it also undertook a counter-offensive, called "Mivtza An-Far" (Operation Anti-Farouq). Together with the Negev Brigade, the IDF failed the main objective of establishing a corridor from the Coastal Plains to the isolated Negev settlements, but did manage to conquer areas in the Galilee and some of the northern settlements of the Negev. Just prior to the Ten Days, Ben-Gurion put out what Morris describes as a grudging order put out through General Ayalon. It said this:
This would pose an obstacle to those who were attempting to undertake forced expulsion, no matter how grudgingly it came out, and it would reach all major formations and headquarters. Smaller groups might not have gotten the order, however, and it was still only a
formal obstacle; that's not to say it stopped
everyone necessarily, or that it wasn't circumvented.
During the Ten Days, the policy on how to handle Arab communities (as Morris argues) was mostly up to Ben-Gurion and the IDF, without the interference of the Cabinet or other organizations. During this time, it seems the policy was mostly contradictory, very circumstantial, and haphazard. This led to different results in different places, as Morris puts it. Between the period after the Ten Days and the Second Truce (in October),
Morris argues that the IDF carried out many operations to clear active or potentially hostile Arab populations from its rear and frontline areas. These included areas mostly the Little Triangle, as it was called. Morris says this:
Here we do find examples of IDF teams expelling or otherwise killing many civilians who were unwilling to surrender.
The villages mentioned in that quote were given an ultimatum: surrender or evacuate. They chose neither, and that was the result.
At the end of the Third Wave, Morris estimates that Israeli offensives and the subsequent clearing operations sent somewhere around 100,000 Arabs into exile in neighboring Jordanian-held eastern Palestine (Jordan would occupy the West Bank until 1967), the Gaza Strip (which Egypt would occupy until 1967), Lebanon, and the Upper-Galilee pocket held by the Arab Liberation Army.
So thus far we have what is likely roughly 350,000-400,000 Palestinians who have left Israel. Roughly 100,000 of them were expelled or left directly due to attacks (or were killed), while another 250,000-300,000 fled at the rising violence and in fear.
The Fourth Wave would contain the rest of the refugees. This wave took place within the exodus of October-November of 1948.
During this wave, Morris notes that Operations Yoav and Hiram were meant to conquer additional territory and give Israel more strategic depth.
He also notes that nowhere in the operational planning were there orders with how to deal with the Arab civilian population. Colonels and generals probably assumed there would be a flight similar to that of the first wave, but brigade, battalion, and company commanders were happy to expel many Arabs because they felt they would be better off with fewer Arabs in Israel after the war. Arabs, for their part, feared the impending Israeli onslaught, and thought there would be expulsions and horrible treatment if they
didn't flee, since they were likely to fall into Israeli hands after the war ended.
In this wave, there was a mixture of both IDF nudging and expulsion with spontaneous flight due to fear that led to the exodus. Both operations would precipitate the flight of between 200,000 and 230,000 Arabs, he estimated. Again, Morris claims there was no clear IDF policy, but he doesn't explain how many left for which reasons during this period. Even if all of them were expelled, and none ran out of fear,
we raise a tally of roughly 55% of those who left as leaving due to Israeli expulsions and military actions; largely consistent with the IDF intelligence estimates.
However, Morris points out that there's another portion after this, and rightly so. Between November of 1948 and 1950 (note that the war ended at different times: Israel signed separate armistices with Egypt on 24 February, 1949, Lebanon on 23 March, Jordan on 3 April, and Syria on 20 July),
there were still more expulsions. He argues that in the weeks and months after the end of hostilities
, Israeli authorities did their best to clear the new borders of Arab communities.
They also scoured other areas within the new state to find refugees and other illegal entrants, to try and weed out any Arabs they could. During this time, Morris attributes another roughly 30,000-40,000 Arab refugees leaving to Israeli expulsions.
Through this, we can do a little add-up of Morris' estimates, which I largely think are reasonable representations. I would like to note, however, that while I agree with his estimates, that the numbers are far from concrete.
We will likely never know what happened, how, or anything along those lines. Those responsible are largely either keeping quiet or dead by now, and it's hard to prove anything no matter how many documents you look at. I think Morris' description that the policy was circumstantial, haphazard, and rather contradictory is the best way to look at it.
That said, here's the tally, roughly:
First Wave:
Uncertain amount. Mostly done at the behest of Arab authorities trying to get elderly, women, and children out of the areas, and out of fear.
Second Wave:
250,000-300,000, mostly fleeing of their own accord out of fear of hostilities. There was no policy to get rid of them explicitly, though it was provided for if it had to happen, and the policy didn't have to be dealt with because of a lack of Palestinians to expel.
Third Wave:
There were many more expulsions undertaken, more as a result of the choices of lower commanders. The official policy was to avoid expulsions. Roughly 100,000 left, mostly due to expulsions or deaths.
Fourth Wave:
Another 200,000-230,000 would leave, due to a mixture of expulsions, nudging/encouragement, and fear. How much due to each is hard to say, but it's likely more expulsions and nudging than fear at this point.
Post-Fourth Wave and Post-War:
Another 30,000-40,000 roughly are expelled for various reasons, like arguments that it was necessary for border security or to prevent people returning/trying to stay in after infiltrating the new state.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
From the above yes some of the migrations can be put down to fear and non-direct action. But much of the fear was created by incidents such as 'Dar Yasin massacre' and thereafter many of the expulsions were undertaken by people in an officials capacity.
academic.oup.com
