The Review - Were the Palestinians expelled?

By Efraim Karsh

Since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, there have been two Arab-Israeli conflicts. The first one was, and is, military in nature. Played out on the battlefield, it has had more than its share of heroes, villains, martyrs, and victims. The second, less bloody but no less incendiary, has been the battle over the historical culpability for the 1948 war and the accompanying dispersion of large numbers of Palestinian Arabs.

The Israeli "narrative" of this episode sees the Palestinian tragedy as primarily self-inflicted, a direct result of the vehement Palestinian/Arab rejection of the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947 calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and the violent attempt by the Arab nations of the region to abort the Jewish state at birth. By contrast, Palestinians view themselves as the hapless victims of a Zionist grand design to dispossess them for their patrimony.

As the possibility looms of some political resolution to the century-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the latter have adamantly insisted on reintroducing into debate the events surrounding the 1948 war and the birth of Israel. In the words of the prominent Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi:

Ashrawi is not invoking history for history’s sake. Hers is a clear and far-reaching political agenda: first, to rewrite the history of the 1948 war in a manner that stains Israel politically and morally; then to force Israel to measure up to its "original sin" — the allegedly forcible dispossession of native Palestinians — both by permitting the return of refugees to parts of the territory that is now Israel and by compensating them monetarily for their sufferings.

The city of Haifa, on Israel’s northwest coast, has come to epitomise this demand for "rectification" (to use Ashrawi’s term). It is not difficult to understand why. In 1948, Haifa’s Arab population was second in size only to that of Jaffa. No less significantly, Haifa then constituted the main socio-economic and administrative center in northern Palestine for both Arab and Jews.

When hostilities between Arab and Jews broke out in 1947, there were 62,500 Arabs in Haifa; by May 1948, all but a few were gone, accounting for fully a tenth of the total Palestinian dispersion. Little wonder, then, that Haifa has acquired a mythical place in Palestinian collective memory, on a par with Jaffa’s and greater than Jerusalem’s. As the prominent Palestinian author and political activist, Fawaz Turki, himself a native of Haifa, has put it,

But what exactly happened in Haifa? Was there "an act of expulsion," as the Palestinians and Israeli "new historians" have argued? Or was the older Israeli contention correct — namely, that the Arabs who fled the city in 1947-8 did so of their own volition, and/or at the behest of their leaders? During the past decade, as it happens, Israeli and Western state archives have declassified millions of records, including invaluable contemporary Arab and Palestinian documents, relating to the 1948 war and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. These make it possible to establish the truth about what happened in Haifa — and by extension, elsewhere in Palestine.

As the British Mandate in Palestine neared its end in 1947-8, the city of Haifa became engulfed in intermittent violence that pitted Arab fighters, recruited locally as well as from neighboring Arab countries, against the Jewish underground organization known as the Hagana. The hostilities would reach their peak on April 21-22, 1948, when the British suddenly decided to evacuate most of the town and each of the two parties moved in quickly to try to fill the vacuum and assert control. But the first thing the documents show is that Arab flight from Haifa began well before the outbreak of these hostilities.

On October 23 1947, a British intelligence brief was already noting that "leading Arab personalities are acting on the assumption that disturbances are near at hand, and have already evacuated their families to neighboring Arab countries." By November 21, not just "leading Arab personalities", but "many Arabs of Haifa" were reported to be removing their families.

Thus it was, that by mid-December 1947, some 15,000-20,000 people, almost a third of the city’s Arab population, had fled, creating severe adversity for those remaining. Economic and commercial activity ground to a halt as the wealthier classes converted their assets to gold or US dollars and transferred them abroad. Merchants and industrialists moved their businesses to Egypt, Syria or Lebanon, causing both unemployment and shortages in basic necessities. Added to this was a growing lawlessness, including pandemic looting of deserted properties.

At the time, the official leadership of Haifa Arabs was a fifteen-member body called the National Committee. Although the Committee strove to curb the mass flight, urging Haifa’s Arabs to stay put and castigating those who fled — occasionally, these warnings were backed by the torching of escapees’ belongings — its remonstrations proved of no avail.

Haj Amin al-Husseini

Even when the Committee did try to deal with the cycle of violence in which the town was embroiled, its efforts were repeatedly undermined by the sheer number of armed groups operating in defiance of its authority, by infighting between its own pragmatists and militants, and by the total lack of coordination, if not outright hostility, between the Committee and its parent body, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). The latter, effective government of all the Arabs in Palestine, was headed by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, now resident in Cairo. Giving his own fighters free rein in Haifa, the Mufti turned a deaf ear to the Committee’s requests and recommendations. Not even the dispatch of an emergency delegation to Cairo in late January, warning that, if terrorist activity did not cease, the result would be the eventual disappearance of the entire Haifa community, had any effect.

Against this background, the National Committee apparently gave up the hope of stemming further flight. Shortly after the return of the delegation from Cairo, a proposal was passed urging improvements in the condition of Palestinian refugees in the states where they now found themselves, and requesting help in settling them there. This was momentous indeed: the official leadership of the second largest Arab community in Mandate Palestine was not only condoning mass flight but suggesting that Arab refugee status be, however temporarily, institutionalized.

Even the Mufti, who had warned that "the flight of…families abroad will weaken the morale of our noble, struggling nation," was not averse to the evacuation of the nonfighting populace. In March 1948, the AHC evidently ordered the removal of women and children from Haifa; a special committee was established in Syria and Lebanon to oversee the operation, and preparations began in earnest with the chartering of a ship from an Egyptian company.

By early April 1948, according to Rashid Hajj Ibrahim, the head of the National Committee, the city’s Arab populace had dwindled to some 35,000-40,000. By the time the final battle for the city was joined a few weeks later, the number had fallen still further, and only about half the town’s original community remained.

Not for long: disheartened by the desertion of their local military leaders, and petrified by wildly exaggerated accounts of a Zionist atrocity at the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, the remnant now took to the road. In the early morning of April 22, as Hagana forces battled their way to the downtown market area, thousands streamed into the port, still held by the British army. Within hours, many of these had fled by trains and buses, while the rest awaited evacuation by sea.

What was left of the local Arab leadership now asked the British military to stop the fighting. When this failed, a delegation requested a meeting with the British commander, Major-General Hugh Stockwell, "with a view to obtaining a truce with the Jews." Having learned from Stockwell the Hagana’s terms for such a truce, the delegates then left to consult with their peers, in particular asking the Syrian consul in Haifa to inform his government and the Arab League.

No instructions from Damascus seem to have reached the Haifa truce delegation by four in the afternoon, when it met its Jewish counterpart at city hall.

There, after an impassioned plea for peace and reconciliation by the town’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, the assembled delegates went through the truce terms point by point, modifying a number of them to meet Arab objections. Then the Arabs requested a 24-hour recess "to give them the opportunity to contact their brothers in the Arab states." Although this was deemed unacceptable, a briefer break was approved and the meeting adjourned at 5:20.

When the Arabs returned that evening they had a surprise in store: as Stockwell would later put it in his official report, they stated "that they were not in a position to sign the truce, as they had no control over the Arab military elements in the town and that, in all sincerity, they could not fulfill the terms of the truce, even if they were to sign." Then they offered, "as an alternative, that the Arab population wished to evacuate Haifa and that they would be grateful for military assistance."

This came as a bombshell. With tears in his eyes, the elderly Levy pleaded with the Arabs, most of whom were his personal acquaintances, to reconsider, saying that they were committing "a cruel crime against their own people." Yaacov Salomon, a prominent Haifa lawyer and the Hagana’s chief liaison officer in the city, followed suit, assuring the Arab delegates that he "had the instructions of the commander of the zone…that if they stayed on they would enjoy equality and peace, and that we, the Jews, were interested in their staying and the maintenance of harmonious relations." Even the stoic Stockwell was shaken. "You have made a foolish decision," he thundered at the Arabs. "Think it over, as you’ll regret it afterward. You must accept the conditions of the Jews. They are fair enough. Don’t permit life to be destroyed senselessly. After all, it was you who began fighting, and the Jews have won."

But the Arabs were unmoved. The next morning, they met with Stockwell and his advisers to discuss the practicalities of the evacuation. Of the 30,000-plus Arabs still in Haifa, only a handful, they said, wished to stay. Perhaps the British could provide 80 trucks a day, and in the meantime ensure an orderly supply of foodstuffs in the city and its environs? At this, a senior British officer at the meeting erupted:"If you sign your truce you would automatically get all your food worries over. You are merely starving your own people." We will not sign," the Arabs retorted. "All is already lost, and it does not matter if everyone is killed so long as we do not sign the document."

Within a matter of days, only about 3,000 of Haifa’s Arab residents remained in the city.

As it was: The port city of Haifa

What had produced the seemingly instantaneous sea change from explicit interest in a truce to its rejection only a few hours later? In an address to the UN Security Council on April 23, Jamal Husseini of the AHC contended that the Arabs in Haifa had been "presented with humiliating conditions and preferred to abandon all their possessions and leave." But this was not so: not only had the Arab leadership in Haifa and elsewhere been apprised of the Hagana’s terms several hours before the meeting on April 22, but, as we have seen, the Arab delegates to the meeting had proceeded to negotiate on the basis of those terms and had succeeded in modifying several key elements.

Later writers have spoken of "a Jewish propaganda blitz" aimed at frightening the Arabs into fleeing. Yet the only evidence offered for this "blitz" is a single sentence from a book by the Jewish writer Arthur Koestler, who was not even in Palestine at the time. As against this isolated second-hand account, there is an overwhelming body of evidence from contemporary Arab, Jewish, British and American sources to prove that, far from seeking to drive the Arabs out of Haifa, the Jewish authorities went to considerable lengths to convince them to stay.

This effort was hardly confined to Levy’s and Salomon’s impassioned pleas at city hall. The Hagana’s truce terms stipulated that Arabs were expected to "carry on their work as equal and free citizens of Haifa." In its Arabic-language broadcasts and communications, the Hagana consistently articulated the same message. On April 23, a Hagana broadcast asserted that "the Jews did and do still believe that it is in the real interests of Haifa for its citizens to go on with their work and to ensure that normal conditions are restored to the city."

On April 24, a Hagana radio broadcast declared: "Arabs, we do not wish to harm you. Like you, we only want to live in peace… If the Jews and (the) Arabs cooperated, no power in the world will ever attack our country or ignore our rights." Two days later, informing its Arab listeners that "Haifa has returned to normal," the Hagana reported that "between 15,000 and 20,000 Arabs had expressed their willingness to remain in the city," that "Arab employees had been appointed to key posts," and that Arabs had been given "part of the corn, flour and rice intended for the Jews in Haifa." And on April 27, the Hagana distributed a leaflet urging the fleeing Arab populace to return home: "Peace and order reign supreme across the town and every resident can return to his free life and resume his regular work in peace and security."

That these were not hollow words was evidenced by, inter alia, the special dispensation given to Jewish bakers by the Haifa rabbinate to bake bread during the Passover holiday for distribution among the Arabs, and by the April 23 decision of the joint Jewish-Arab Committee for the Restoration of Life to Normalcy to dispatch two of its members to inform women, children, and the elderly that they could return home.

The sincerity of the Jewish position is attested as well by reports from the US consulate in Haifa. Thus, on April 25, after the fighting was over, Vice Consul Aubrey Lippincott cabled Washington that the "Jews hope poverty will cause laborers (to) return (to) Haifa as many are already doing despite Arab attempts (to) persuade them (to) keep out." On April 29, according to Lippincott, even Farid Saad of the National Committee was saying that Jewish leaders had "organized a large propaganda campaign to persuade (the) Arabs to return." Similarly, the British district superintendent of police reported on April 26 that "every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open, and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe." Several more reports in the same vein were sent by British authorities in Palestine to their superiors in London.

Meanwhile, however, as the Jews were attempting to keep the Arabs in Haifa, an adhoc body, the Arab Emergency Committee, was doing its best to get them out. Scaremongering was a major weapon in its arsenal. Some Arab residents received written threats that, unless they left town, they would be branded as traitors deserving of death. Others were told they could expect no mercy from the Jews.

The Emergency Committee was not a random collection of self-appointed vigilantes. Rather, it was the successor to the Haifa National Committee and involved two National Committee members: Farid Saad and Sheikh Murad. In other words, the evacuation of the Haifa Arab community was ordered, and executed, by the Arab Higher Committee’s official local representatives. The only question is whether those representatives did what they did on their own, or under specific instructions from above.

As indicated earlier, the Haifa leaders had been extremely reluctant to accept or reject the Hagana’s truce terms on their own recognizance: hence the initial appeal to their peers, and hence the request for a 24-hour recess to seek the advice of the Arab states. When this was not granted, and the Committee had to make do with the brief respite granted to it, its delegates proceeded to telephone the AHC office in Beirut for instructions. They were then told explicitly not to sign, but rather to evacuate. Astonished, the Haifa delegates protested, but were assured that "it is only a matter of days" before Arab retaliatory action would commence, and "since there will be a lot of casualties following our intended action, …you (would) be held responsible for the casualties among the Arab population left in the town."

The entire conversation was secretly recorded by the Hagana, and its substance was passed on to some of the Jewish negotiators at city hall. From Yaacov Salomon, one of the Jewish negotiators, we also learn of certain emotions experienced by his Arab interlocutors:

In any case, what the Hagana had learned by covert means became public knowledge within days. Already on April 25, the American consulate in Haifa was reporting that the "local Mufti-dominated Arab leaders urge all Arabs (to) leave (the) city and large numbers (are) going." Three days later it pointed a clear finger: "Reportedly Arab Higher Committee ordering all Arabs (to) leave." Writing on the same day to the colonial secretary in London, Sir Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner for Palestine, was equally forthright: "British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it." Finally, a British intelligence report summing up the events of the week judged that, had it not been for the incitement and scaremongering of the Haifa Arab leadership, most Arab residents might well have stayed.

Without a past there can be no future. Today, as the saga of Israel’s birth is being turned upside down, with aggressors portrayed as hapless victims and victims as aggressors, it can be only a matter of time before the Jewish state is presented with the bill for its alleged crimes against the Palestinian refugees. Indeed, this past May, as part of the commemoration of the 52nd anniversary of the 1948 war (in Palestine parlance, al-Nakba, the catastrophe), Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority attempted to link any final-status settlement with Israel to the return of refugees to their homes in Haifa and Jaffa. Organized tours brought scores of Palestinians to locations in Israel abandoned in 1948, and the Arab-language Jerusalem newspaper al-Quds bemoaned "the uprooting of the Palestinian people in one of the worst crimes of modern history."

But were they uprooted, and if so by whom? In Haifa, one of the largest and most dramatic locales of the Palestinian exodus, not only had half the Arab community fled the city before the final battle was joined, but another 5,000-15,000 apparently left voluntarily during the fighting while the rest, some 15,000-25,000 souls, were ordered or bullied into leaving against their wishes, almost certainly on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee. There was no Jewish grand design to force this departure, nor was there a psychological "blitz." To the contrary, both the Haifa Jewish leadership and the Hagana went to great lengths to convince the Arabs to stay.

These efforts, indeed, reflected the wider Jewish attitude in Palestine. All deliberations of the Jewish leadership regarding the transition to statehood were based on the assumption that, in the Jewish state that would arise with the termination of the British Mandate, Palestine’s Arabs would remain as equal citizens.

And just there, no doubt, lay the reason why the Arab leadership preferred the evacuation of Haifa’s Arabs to any truce with the Hagana. For according to the UN partition resolution, Haifa was to be one of the foremost towns of the new Jewish state; hence any agreement by its Arab community to live under Jewish rule would have amounted to acquiescence in Jewish statehood in a part of Palestine. This, to both the Palestine leadership and the Arab world at large, was anathema.

Shortly after the fall of Haifa to the Hagana, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, the secretary general of the Arab League, declared: "The Zionists are seizing the opportunity to establish a Zionist state against the will of the Arabs. The Arab peoples have accepted the challenge and soon they will close their account with them." At the time, the cost of this fiery determination by the Arab peoples to "close their account" with the Zionists included the driving of tens of thousands of their hapless fellow-Arabs from their homes. This simple, incontrovertible fact has never been acknowledged in the Arab world.