By: Dr. Rudolf T. ZarZar
Why Palestinian Arabs fled many of the sites listed in this booklet has been hotly debated. Zionists say it is because they were encouraged by their leaders who wanted to arouse the Arab world into a holy war against the Jews. Subsequent research, much of it by Israeli scholars, has shown that the Arab exodus from Palestine in 1947- 48 resulted from a deliberate Zionist policy to expel, through a policy of coercion, threat, intimidation, violence and terror, as many Palestinian Arabs as possible so as to create territorial vacuums which, in turn, would expedite Jewish settlements in the cleansed areas.
Recently, Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who presently teaches at Oxford University, has documented the decision of the two Zionist groups lrgun (led by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang (led by Yizhak Shamir) to use a massacre in the village of Deir Yaasin as a scare tactic. These terrorist groups , write Shlaim:
fell upon the village with the purported intention of forcing its inhabitants to flee. When the inhabitants offered resistance, the attackers opened fire indiscriminately, and savagely massacred 245 men, women, and children. Some of the villagers were driven in a lorry through the streets of Jerusalem in a "victory parade" before they were taken back to the village and shot against the wall. News of the massacre spread like a whirlwind through the land, striking terror in Arab hearts. More than any other single event, it was responsible for breaking the spirit of the civilian population and setting in motion the mass exodus of Arabs from Palestine - The Politics of Partition, p.136.
This policy of forced expulsion (which the Israelis and before them the Zionists, call transfer) continues today. Its practice most recently has been condemned in the U.S. Department of State's 1992 Human Rights Report. [See B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987]
In addition to the sources cited above, I would also recommend: Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., The Transformation
of Palestine, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1971; W. T. and Sally V. Mallison, The Palestine Problem in International
Law and World Order, Longman, 1986; J. Quigley, Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice, Duke Univ. Press,
1990; Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, Times Books, 1980; and Tom Segev, The First Israelis, The Free Press,
1986.
"We Palestinians, old and young, will not forget Palestine" - Dr. Jamil Fayez
Jabalia Refugee Camp. United Nations Photo. .