How much of the 1948 Palestinian exodus was flight, and how much expulsion?

Around 700,000 Arabs left or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, in four distinct waves with different causes. Some fled a war zone before any soldier arrived, some left after their own leadership ordered evacuation, and some were expelled by Israeli forces, above all at Lydda and Ramle in July 1948. Two things are settled: the war was begun by the Arab side, and there was no prior master plan that the war merely executed. What remains genuinely open is the locality-by-locality mix of flight, panic, evacuation and expulsion, and how to weigh it morally. This page lays out what the archives actually show.

The four waves

The exodus was not one event. The serious scholarship, led by Benny Morris’s archive work, divides it into phases, and the phases behave differently.

December 1947 to March 1948: the elite leaves first. After the UN partition vote of 29 November 1947, Arab irregulars opened a civil war inside Mandatory Palestine. In those months roughly 75,000 to 100,000 Arabs left, disproportionately the urban upper and middle classes of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem: families with somewhere else to go, closing houses and businesses expecting to return after an Arab victory. Nobody expelled them. Their departure decapitated Arab urban society and helped trigger what followed.

April to June 1948: the cities collapse. Facing the expected invasion, the Haganah went on the offensive. Tiberias fell on 18 April, Haifa on 21 to 22 April, Jaffa by mid May, Safed on 10 May. Around a quarter of a million people left in this wave, most of it mass flight amid combat, accelerated by fear after the Deir Yassin massacre of 9 April 1948, an Irgun and Lehi atrocity that killed around 100 villagers and that Arab radio then amplified into something even worse, spreading panic far beyond the village.

July 1948: Lydda and Ramle. During Operation Dani, on 12 to 13 July, Israeli forces expelled the populations of Lydda and neighboring Ramle, some 50,000 to 70,000 people marched east in summer heat, with deaths on the road that Morris puts in the hundreds. This is the largest and clearest documented expulsion of the war, ordered at the top, and an honest account states it plainly.

October to November 1948: Galilee and the Negev. Operations Hiram and Yoav closed the war with a mixed record that resists any single story: expulsions and documented atrocities in some villages, populations left in place in others. Nazareth’s inhabitants stayed under explicit orders protecting the city; much of the central Galilee’s Arab population, heavily Christian and Druze, remained where it was and is there today.

What Morris documents, and what Pappe claims

The historiographical fight is between two Israeli historians who read the same archives and tell opposite stories. Benny Morris, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2004), concluded the refugee problem was “born of war, not by design”: no cabinet decision to expel, no blanket policy, but a war in which local commanders sometimes expelled, sometimes did not, and in which flight, fear, evacuation orders and expulsion all operated at once. Morris is no whitewasher: he is the historian who documented the expulsions, the roughly two dozen massacres, and the Tantura allegations’ evidentiary record. He also published the Israeli army intelligence analysis of 30 June 1948, which attributed the great bulk of the early exodus to military operations and fear of them, a small fraction to direct expulsion orders, and about five percent to instructions from Arab leaders.

Ilan Pappe claims instead, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), that Zionist leaders adopted a deliberate blueprint for expulsion in March 1948 and executed it. His evidence is Plan Dalet, the Haganah’s master plan of 10 March 1948. Read the document: it is a military plan for holding continuous territory against the invasion everyone knew was coming, and it gave brigade commanders discretion to occupy, and in case of resistance to destroy or depopulate, villages that sat on supply roads or served irregular forces. That discretion produced real expulsions. What the text does not contain is a political decision to remove the Arab population as such, and Morris, who knows the archive better than anyone, has said flatly that no such decision existed and has publicly rejected Pappe’s scholarship as unreliable. The master-plan claim is the version that dominates activist discourse; it is not what the documents show.

Haifa, the counter-case

Any theory of a systematic expulsion has to explain Haifa. When the Haganah took the city on 21 to 22 April 1948, the Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, personally pleaded with Arab notables to stay, the Haganah broadcast appeals to remain, and the British commander, Major General Hugh Stockwell, witnessed the truce terms offered. The Arab Emergency Committee, on instructions traced to the Arab Higher Committee of the exiled Mufti Amin al-Husseini, rejected the truce and ordered evacuation. Of roughly 65,000 Arab residents, only about 5,000 to 6,000 stayed. A British police report from Haifa that week recorded that “every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay.” The Economist’s correspondent reported on 2 October 1948 that the Arab Higher Executive’s broadcast urgings to quit were among the most potent factors in the flight.

One honest caution cuts the other way: the old Israeli talking point that Arab governments broadcast general evacuation orders across the whole country was challenged in 1961 by researcher Erskine Childers, who found no such blanket orders in the BBC’s radio monitoring archive. The documented evacuation calls are real but local: Haifa, the AHC’s early removal of women and children from various towns, specific village orders. Neither side’s clean story survives the record.

What is settled, what is open

Settled: the war’s authorship. The Jewish leadership accepted partition; the Arab side rejected it, opened hostilities in December 1947, and five Arab armies invaded on 15 May 1948. The Nakba happened inside a war launched to destroy the new state, not before it. Settled too: there was no prior master plan, and no one was removed for being Arab as such. About 156,000 Arabs stayed, kept their homes, and became citizens; their descendants are today roughly two million people, about a fifth of Israel, voting, sitting in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court. A planned ethnic cleansing does not leave a fifth of the country in place. In the same years, some 850,000 Jews were driven from the Arab world, and Israel absorbed them.

Open: the proportions and the weight. Nobody can honestly assign percentages between flight, evacuation and expulsion across 400-plus localities, and scholars who try disagree in good faith. Open also is the moral question that outlasts the war: Israel barred mass return afterward (a 1949 offer to readmit 100,000 was rejected at Lausanne), and whether the refusal of return changes the character of what happened is a genuine argument, not a settled one. The claim this page does reject is the one told most loudly: that 1948 was a premeditated ethnic cleansing executed on schedule. The record shows a war the losers started, a flight with many causes, real expulsions an honest history names, and a question historians are still arguing about honestly. The hardest case →

Was the creation of Israel in 1948 ethnic cleansing? · Who attacked first in the 1948 war · 1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle · Plan Dalet · Why are there still Palestinian refugee camps after 75 years? · The History They Skip

Sources

From Asked & answered on the main site.