(p. 51:) On 13 May LHI declared: A strong attack on the centres of the Arab population will intensify the movement of refugees and all the roads in the direction of Transjordan and the neighbouring countries will be filled with panic-stricken masses and [this] will hamper the [enemy's] military movement, as happened during the collapse of France [in World War II] ... A great opportunity has been given us....

(p. 57–58:) Avraham Katznelson endorsed the view: there is nothing "more moral, from the viewpoint of universal human ethics, than the emptying of the Jewish State of the Arabs and their transfer elsewhere....

In his notes for the memorandum, penned 6 May 1948, he wrote: "a deliberate eviction [of the Arabs] is taking place.... Others may rejoice—I, as a socialist, am ashamed and afraid.... To win the war and lose the peace ... the state [of Israel], when it arises, will live on its sword."

"In practice, a ... "transfer" of the Arabs out of the area of the Jewish state was being carried out', and this would eventually redound against the Yishuv, both militarily (by increasing pan-Arab anger) and politically.

[1] Much of this article deals with Morris' explication and interpretation of a document found in 1985 in the papers of Aharon Cohen called "The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine in the Period 1/12/1947 – 1/6/1948" that had been produced by Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence Service sometime during the first truce.

Morris notes that the report points out that where there was a "strong Arab military force" the villagers did not evacuate "readily."

He notes that the report says that the "Arab institutions attempted to struggle against the phenomenon of flight and evacuation, and to curb the waves of emigration....

... from it [the report] emerges a very definite impression that the depopulation of the villages and towns was an unexpected outcome of operations the purpose of which was wholly or primarily the conquest of military positions and strategic sites in the course of a life-and-death struggle.

There, amid the frightening, threatening boom of guns, the loss of confidence in Arab might, the flight of relatives and friends, the abandonment of nearby towns, and a general, vast fear of the uncharted future, one will find the bulk of the pre-June Palestinian refugees.

In the second half of 1949, the IDF and police started to descend on Abu Ghosh in a series of more or less brutal search-and-expel operations, where they rounded up the most recent "infiltrators" and pushed them over the border into Jordan.

(p. 267–268): Following one such round-up, in early 1950, the inhabitants of Abu Gosh sent off an "open letter", to Knesset members and journalists, writing that the Israelis had repeatedly "surrounded our village, and taken our women, children and old folk, and thrown them over the border and into the Negev Desert, and many of them died in consequence, when they were shot [trying to make their way back across] the borders".So far, the inhabitants had held their peace.

"But we cannot remain silent in face of the latest incident last Friday, when we woke up to the shouts blaring over the loudspeaker announcing that the village was surrounded and anyone trying to get out would be shot....

Morris writes (p. 269): In the end only several dozen Abu Gosh families remained in exile, as refugees, in the Ramallah area in the West Bank.

Between 1948 and 1964 the (by then former) inhabitants of Bayt Naqquba at first lived at Sataf, "under trees, because the Arabs had not allowed them to come over their lines, out of distrust and revenge" (quoted in Morris, p. 264).

However, Kiryat Anavim's opposition to the return of Beit Naqquba refugees to their village was only in part based on "security" considerations.

The problem was that the handful of Beit Naqquba refugees now living in Abu Gosh continued to cultivate their lands, "and it is to be assumed that they look forward to the day on which they will be able to return to their homes.

Reporting this, (on 16 March 1949), the Interior Ministry official responsible for the Jerusalem District recommended that the Beit Naqquba villagers residing in Abu Ghosh be moved "somewhere ... far away".

(p. 337–338): "At the beginning of September, Major V. H. Loriaux, a UN truce-observer and sometime acting chairman of the Israel–Egypt MAC (=Mixed Armistice Commission), interviewed some of the evacuees shortly after they reached the Gaza strip.

F. Many Arabs wished to stay, but found living conditions impossible through continuous vexations' (see UN Archives, New York), (DAG-1/2.2.5.2.0-1, 13 Sept. 1950) (p. 441): UNTSO chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General William Riley, United States Marine Corps, on 21 September issued an unusual public condemnation of the ongoing expulsion of Majdals Arabs and the simultaneous expulsion of members (4000 according to the UN) of the Azazme beduin tribe from the Negev into Sinai.

The UN calls for a return 1950 was never heeded and the Majdal transferees were fated to linger on, for decades, indefinitely, in Gaza's grim, grimy refugee camps.

What is clear is that after a year and a half of bureaucratic foot-dragging, the IDF in 1950 wanted this last concentration of Arabs in the southern coastal plain to leave, and engineered their departure..

The Majdal Arabs' own uneasiness at life as a ghettoized minority, under military rule, hemmed in by barbed wire and a pass system, dependent on Israeli handouts, largely unemployed and destitute, cut off from their relatives in Gaza and from the Arab world in general, served as a preparatory background.

[...] When these [methods] proved insufficient with the remaining hard-core Histadrut-protected inhabitants, the army availed itself, in September and early October, of cruder methods—shooting in the night, threatening behaviour by the soldiery, unpleasant early-hour-of-the-morning visitations, frequent summons, and occasional arrests.

To sweeten the pill, the military government offered some fulsome carrots in the form of financial incentives [...] Until Israel's Defence Ministry and Cabinet records are opened, the exact decision-making processes behind the Majdal transfer will remain unclear.