Summary
The widely believed but untrue story, as Perceptions of Palestine presents it, that Palestinian civilians left their homes in 1948 because the Palestinian leadership broadcast radio instructions that they leave in order to give Arab military forces a clear field to drive the Jews out of Palestine (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 179-189).
Details
- The story began to be circulated in the midst of the 1948 war and quickly became an enduring staple of Israeli lore and U.S. perceptions; in fact, no broadcast orders from any Arab authority were ever issued to the Palestinian populace, and, except in a few local instances, no Arab military commanders gave orders to clear areas of Palestine of civilians (lines 179-189).
- Dan Kurzman, in Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (1970), searched Israeli military archives and the BBC’s radio monitoring files and found no record of either Arab military communications ordering a civilian evacuation or any broadcast radio instructions; his findings, the first refutation to appear in a popular medium in the United States, were virtually ignored (lines 179-189).
- Benny Morris concluded in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, from declassified Israeli archival material, that no Arab authority issued “blanket instructions, by radio or otherwise, to Palestine’s Arabs to flee”, that flight was induced to a great extent by a “general sense of collapse” that permeated Arab Palestine, and that a “small but significant proportion” of the flight resulted from explicit expulsion orders issued by Jewish forces (lines 179-189).
- The myth was used to demonstrate that the Palestinians’ attachment to their land was weak, that they were bent on Israel’s destruction, and that Israel bore no responsibility for their displacement and homelessness; although discredited in most scholarly circles, it remains widely believed outside academia (lines 179-189).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Frame of reference, Benny Morris, Nakba