On March 17, four days before the Jewish offensive, the Irgun made an Arabic-language broadcast, warning urban Arabs that "typhus, cholera and similar diseases would break out heavily among them in April and May".
[7][8] Similarly, Khalidi points to what he describes as the Zionist "psychological offensive" which was highlighted by, though not limited to, radio messages warning the Arabs of diseases, the ineffectiveness of armed resistance and the incompetence of their leaders.
[16] Similarly, Khalidi points to what he describes as the Zionist "psychological offensive" which was highlighted by, though not limited to, radio messages warning the Arabs of diseases, the ineffectiveness of armed resistance and the incompetence of their leaders.
Later, an additional claim was put forth, namely that the Palestinians were ordered to leave, with radio broadcasts instructing them to quit their homes.At that time, Zionist historians generally attributed the Arab leaders' alleged calls for a mass evacuation to the period before the proclamation of Israeli statehood.
[43] In an essay in 1988 Morris wrote that "Jewish atrocities [were] far more widespread than the Old Historians have indicated (there were massacres of Arabs at Dawayima, Eilabun, Jish, Safsaf, Hule, Saliha, and Sasa besides Deir Yassin and Lydda)".
[44] According to Shay Hazkani, 2013: "In the past two decades, following the powerful reverberations (concerning the cause of the Nakba) triggered by the publication of books written by those dubbed the "New Historians," the Israeli archives revoked access to much of the explosive material.
[57] According to the political scientist Norman Finkelstein, population transfer was considered as an acceptable solution to the problems of ethnic conflict until around World War II and even for a time afterward.
In the opinion of the author, that document had not altered Ben-Gurion's overall conception: once the Arab areas he considered vital to the constitution of the new state had been brought under Israeli control, there still remained the problem of their inhabitants.
However, a study of their confidential correspondence, private diaries and minutes of closed meetings, made available to the public under the "thirty year rule", reveals the true feelings of the Zionist leaders on the transfer question.
[101] His reasons remained classified when the cabinet minutes were released, but revealed by Tom Segev in 2013: If war broke out, we would then be able to clear the entire central Galilee with one fell swoop.
'"[104] Historians skeptical of the "Master Plan" emphasize that no central directive has surfaced from the archives and argue that, had such an understanding been widespread, it would have left a mark in the vast documentation produced by the Zionist leadership at the time.
But this accounted for only a small fraction of the total exodus, occurred not within the framework of a premeditated plan but in the heat of battle, and was dictated predominantly by military ad hoc considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them)....
[53] Yoav Gelber notes that documentation exists[109] showing that David Ben-Gurion "regarded the escape as a calculated withdrawal of non-combatant population upon the orders of Arab commanders and out of military considerations", which is contradictory to the hypothesis of a master plan he may have drawn up.
Like Gelber, he points out that Zionist authors at the beginning of the exodus considered it to be part and parcel of a "diabolic British plan" devised to impede the creation of the Jewish state.
Morris gives no numbers regarding the first wave, but says "the spiral of violence precipitated flight by the middle and upper classes of the big towns, especially Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, and their satellite rural communities.
[130] The UN mediator on Palestine Folke Bernadotte reported in September 1948 that Palestinian flight, "resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion".
Before the first truce (11 June – 8 July 1948), it explains the exodus as a result of the crumbling Arab social structure that was not ready to withstand a civil war, and justified Jewish military conduct.
Gelber describes the exodus before July 1948 as being initially mainly due to the inability of the Palestinian social structure to withstand a state of war : Other historians such as Efraim Karsh, Avraham Sela, Moshe Efrat, Ian J. Bickerton, Carla L. Klausner, and Howard Sachar share this analysis.
Palestinian society ... was semifeudal in character, and once the landlords and other leaders had made good their own escape—as they did from Haifa, Jaffa, Safed, and elsewhere—the Arab townspeople, villagers, and peasants were left helpless.
One of the revelations in the book is that on 31 October 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population.
[147]Gelber also underlines that Palestinian Arabs had certainly in mind the opportunity they would have to return their home after the conflict and that this hope must have eased their flight: "When they ran away, the refugees were confident of their eventual repatriation at the end of hostilities.
Historian Christopher Sykes saw the causes of the Arab flight similar to Gelber: It can be said with a high degree of certainty that most of the time in the first half of 1948 the mass-exodus was the natural, thoughtless, pitiful movement of ignorant people who had been badly led and who in the day of trial found themselves forsaken by their leaders.
Terror was the impulse, by hearsay most often, and sometimes through experience as in the Arab port of Jaffa which surrendered on the 12th of May and where the Irgunists, to quote Mr. John Marlowe, "embellished their Deir Yassin battle honours by an orgy of looting".
[148]Karsh views the second stage as being "dictated predominantly by ad hoc military considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them)".
In his book, The Arab–Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948, Karsh wrote that the Arab Higher Committee played a key part in the exoduses from Haifa, Tiberias, and Jaffa.
"[164] A few weeks later, in a letter to the Syrian UN representative, Husseini accused Amman [i.e. Transjordan] of ordering unnecessary military withdrawals, leaving the locals defenceless: "The regular armies did not enable the inhabitants of the country to defend themselves, but merely facilitated their escape from Palestine.
[179] Muhammad Adib al-'Umri, deputy director of the Ramallah broadcasting station, appealed to the Arabs to stop the flight from Janin, Tulkarm, and other towns in the Triangle that were bombed by the Israelis.
[187] Based on his studies of 73 Israeli and foreign archives or other sources, Morris made a judgement as to the main causes for the Arab exodus from each of the 392 settlements that were depopulated during the 1948–1950 conflict (pages xiv to xviii).
Furthermore, in his comprehensive book on the Arab–Israeli conflict, Righteous Victims, Morris wrote: In some areas Arab commanders ordered the villagers to evacuate to clear the ground for military purposes or to prevent surrender.
At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages.