FAIR Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East

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Was Israel Guilty of Ethnic Cleansing in 1948?

In recent years a number of commentators have accused Israel of having attempted to ethnically cleanse the Jewish state of Arabs during the 1948 War. But is this the truth?

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 calling for the partition of Palestine into two sovereign states - one Arab, one Jewish.

• The U.N. partition plan was based on population demographics -- majority Jewish areas would be part of the new Jewish state, majority Arab areas would be part of a new Arab state.

• The Jewish Agency accepted the U.N. partition plan.

• On December 17, the Arab League adopted a resolution rejecting the partition and declaring that it would use armed force, if necessary, to prevent the formation of a Jewish state.

The Arab exodus began immediately following the announcement of the UN partition resolution.

• Violence broke out in the immediate aftermath of the United Nations’ approval of the partition plan. According to the U.N. Special Commission nearly 1,000 people were killed and 2,000 people injured during the period beginning in December 1947 and ending in January 1948 alone.

• The first Arabs to leave were roughly 30,000 wealthy Arabs who anticipated the upcoming war and fled to neighboring Arab countries to await its end. Many less affluent Arabs from the mixed cities of Palestine moved to all-Arab towns to stay with relatives or friends.

After Israel declared Independence the League of Arab States made good on their promise and collectively attacked the new Jewish State.

• The actual war began when the British withdrew and Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948. Over the next few days the Arab States surrounding Israel (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq ) each invaded Israel, vowing to wipe it off the face of the earth. The resulting war lasted from May 1948 until February 1949.

Palestinian Arabs fled from what became the borders of Israel for a variety of reasons.

• Once the war started some Palestinians left to get out of harm’s way. Others left not to appear to be traitors.

• Much evidence exists demonstrating that Palestinians were encouraged to leave their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Many left after being told by the attacking Arab nations that they would destroy the Jewish state and then the Arabs could go back.

• Some Palestinians were without question, forced out by the Israelis -- especially those living in towns known to be used as bases by active armed Arab forces, or along supply routes and borders. There was a war going on -- once the Arabs rejected the partition plan and announced their plan to prevent it by force, this was not a friendly situation on either side.

There was no plan for “ethnic cleansing.”

• Through the use of nothing more than wild conjecture, Plan Dalet (Plan D), the military plan of the Haganah, has been used as a basis for accusations of a Jewish plan for “ethnic cleansing.” But there are just no grounds for this.

• Plan Dalet, which is available for anyone to read, was pretty clearly a defensive plan to counter the expected Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state. There was a war going on, and as Plan Dalet reveals, the Israelis understood that there would be military “resistance” to the formation of the Jewish state coming from Arabs both within and without the new borders of Israel. Plan Dalet was a military plan -- it did not discuss bringing flowers and chocolates to Palestinians. It discussed how the Israeli army would defend itself against what it believed and what in fact turned out to be a major military onslaught once Israel declared independence.

• Plan Dalet allowed for expulsions of Arabs from villages with armed military forces that were actively fighting the Jews or that were strategically vital to the Israeli forces. This is supported by looking at a map of the towns where Palestinian Arabs were actually expelled. For example, the Arabs controlled several strategic vantage points, which overlooked the highway linking Tel Aviv with Jerusalem -- the city’s only supply route -- and enabled them to fire on the convoys trying to reach Jerusalem with supplies. Those towns had few or no Arabs left after the war. The exception was Abu Ghosh, which was known to be friendly to the Jews and the concept of a Jewish state.

• There is no basis whatever to conclude that expulsions were designed to “ethnically cleanse” the Arab population. The Arab villages which were not strategically vital and/or not engaged in fighting Jews -- such as Abu Ghosh -- remained intact.

The Palestinian Refugees were a by-product of the bitter fighting in the first Israeli-Arab war. Not some Machiavellian Jewish plan for ethnic cleansing.