Context: Violence Against Jews Before 1948 — anti-Jewish pogroms & riots for centuries before 1948, countering the “it all began with the Nakba” framing.
Prewar threat context — Azzam Pasha, October 1947
Azzam’s reported interview anticipated massacre and plunder while predicting eventual Arab victory and framing the fight as defensive. Preserve his opening wish to avoid war. Corrected excerpts and attribution · interpretive dispute.
This helps explain the threat context before Jewish statehood; it does not establish how every Palestinian refugee left, assign collective intent to Arab civilians, or remove the need to investigate expulsions and unlawful attacks separately. See argument context and chronology.
Comparative case — a Rohingya “Nakba-like” catastrophe
Rohingya Parallel - Selective Attention and the Nakba Analogy compares the Palestinian displacement with the Rohingya mass expulsions without claiming that the histories are identical. Both defining waves displaced roughly three-quarters of a million people and produced lost property and protracted exile. Major differences include the wars’ origins, the role of Myanmar’s prior citizenship exclusion, and the legal evidence surrounding the 2017 clearance operations. Use the comparison to demand universal standards—not to minimize either population’s suffering.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.21 (file not included in this release)
The Israeli historian Benny Morris, a leading expert on the 1948 war and widely respected by both sides for his studies on the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis, separates the flight of Palestinians from their homes into several stages In the first stage, from November 1947, following the passage of the UN partition plan, until March 1948, some 100,000 Palestinians left their homes. During this stage, the fighting took place primarily on the roads and in mixed Arab/Jewish towns, and largely at the Palestinians’ initiative. Their objective was to isolate and conquer outlying Jewish towns. The response of the Jewish fighting force, the Haganah, was limited to repelling these attacks and preserving contact with the outlying towns. No Palestinian Arab areas or villages were conquered at this point, and Palestinians who left their homes did so mostly driven by their fear of being caught up in violent clashes, but without being expelled. Most of those leaving were upper-middle-class Palestinian families—doctors, lawyers, community notables, and teachers—whose departure seriously harmed Palestinian morale and paved the way for later departures. The masses were left effectively leaderless: by March 1948, almost all the members of the Arab Higher Committee had already left the country. The second stage took place in April 1948 to May, following a decision by the leaders of the Yishuv to change strategy. Until that point the Arab militias had gained the upper hand and succeeded in cutting off the entire Negev— iPad Pro 11-inch (M4) 5/5/2025, 2:22:16 AM the southern part of the country that was allotted to the Jews by the UN—from the coastal plain, as well as most of western Galilee and the Jerusalem area. They also succeeded in isolating many of the Jewish towns within these regions from one another.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.23 (file not included in this release)
the plan instructed the local commanders to differentiate between hostile and non-hostile Arabs. Since the considerations were military, the Arabs were not assumed hostile a priori. Those who were not hostile and did not endanger the Jewish fighting forces could remain in place, according to the plan, and many did. A prime example was the villages on the road to Jerusalem, such as Abu Ghosh. Villages that proved hostile and were either involved in the fighting or provided aid to the Arab militias were to be surrounded, their arms confiscated, the militias destroyed, and the local population sent beyond the border. Many decades later, Plan Dalet is repeatedly mentioned by anti-Israel activists as providing a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from the country But it was no such thing. The plan, which is readily available for anyone to read, was very clear in its military purpose, and the differentiating factor was not whether the people were Arabs or not, but whether they were hostile or not The success of the Jewish forces was greater than expected: the local Palestinian fighting forces were defeated within weeks, and almost all the areas designated for the Jewish state were secured. At this stage, between 200,000 and 300,000 Palestinians abandoned their homes, including the Arab populations of Galilee; the Arab towns overlooking the narrow strip of land connecting Tel Aviv through the hills up to Jerusalem; and the mixed towns of Tiberias, Safed, and Jaffa. While the flight of many Arabs did not involve expulsions, and unfolded when the bombs began to fall, or when the Haganah forces drew near, there were also some forced expulsions. Arab Palestinian militia were mixed in with the non-fighting populations of many of these towns and, in the heat of battle, the Jewish forces had neither the time nor the ability to distinguish between the two.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.27 (file not included in this release)
In 1949 the UN Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East estimated the number at 726,000.39 Of these, some two-thirds remained within the borders of Mandatory Palestine, in what became either the Jordanian-occupied West Bank or Egyptianoccupied Gaza Strip. One-third, probably around 250,000 people, left Palestine for neighboring Arab countries, namely Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Egypt
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.29 (file not included in this release)
“I couldn’t understand,” wrote David Ben-Gurion in his diary, visiting Jaffa a few days after tens of thousands of Arabs had fled. “Why did the inhabitants leave?”
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.30 (file not included in this release)
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett attested at the end of the war, for example, that if the Arabs had reconciled themselves with the UN partition decision, “the State of Israel would have arisen with a large Arab minority, which would have left its impress on the state, on its manner of governance, and on its economic life, and [this Arab minority] would have constituted an organic part of the state.”46 At the height of the war, when Israel’s victory was far from assured and battles were raging with maximum ferocity across the land, Ben-Gurion read out the Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, calling on the Arabs “to participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” Indeed, some 150,000 Arabs, then a fifth of the young state’s population, remained within Israel’s borders and became its citizens.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.31 (file not included in this release)
In some places, Palestinians obeyed the orders of the Arab leadership to leave as part of the overall fighting; in others, such as the Galilee Panhandle, the Yishuv’s psychological warfare campaign was key in causing the Arabs to flee their homes.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.31 (file not included in this release)
false reports in Arabic media of alleged atrocities by Jews. The story of Deir Yassin stands out in this context.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.31 (file not included in this release)
But there were also cases—most notably in Haifa—where the leaders of the Jewish Yishuv implored the Arabs to remain, but they opted to flee out of fear or lest they be considered traitors.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.33 (file not included in this release)
The leader of Ahdut HaAvoda (a socialist Zionist faction), Yitzhak Tabenkin, described this feeling well in October 1948 in saying, “We argued amongst ourselves whether to expel [the Arabs] or not. The Arabs never even asked those of ours they captured and brutally killed [whether or not to expel them] … If we are faced with the choice: the expulsion [of Arabs] or murder [of Jews], everyone would choose expulsion.”
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.33 (file not included in this release)
Expulsions and population exchanges, both voluntary and forced, were actually quite common throughout the twentieth century. Until the end of the Cold War, not only were population exchanges considered legitimate under international law, but the separation of warring parties, in order to minimize the presence of national minorities, was considered key to peacemaking between different ethnic groups. In the Greco–Bulgarian peace treaty of 1919, for example, it was agreed to transfer 46,000 ethnic Greek citizens of Bulgaria to Greece, while 96,000 ethnic Bulgarian citizens of Greece would move to Bulgaria. Four years later, when Greece and Turkey signed a peace treaty, they agreed on a forced population exchange of 1.2 million ethnic Greek citizens of Turkey for 600,000 ethnic Turkish citizens of Greece.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.34 (file not included in this release)
No fewer than twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from what became western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states. They were not treated as individuals but as a collective ethnic group. Three hundred thousand Italians were forced out of Yugoslavia.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.35 (file not included in this release)
these population exchanges resulted from border changes: this is why half a million Poles left western Ukraine and western Belarus when these areas were annexed to the Soviet Union after the war. Western leaders supported expulsions in the framework of the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had earlier supported the creation of ethnically homogeneous states, and British prime minister Winston Churchill had said that the “expulsion [of the Germans] is the method which … will be the most satisfactory and lasting” for the creation of peace.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.35 (file not included in this release)
Asia also witnessed mass expulsions and population exchanges: toward the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent, with the establishment of India and Pakistan, religiously mixed areas of the subcontinent were caught up in a wave of violence, with an estimated 3.5 million people killed, and some fourteen million people fleeing their homes and becoming refugees. Muslims fled India to Pakistan; Hindus and Sikhs made the opposite journey.
The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.44 (file not included in this release)
One of the leading Arab intellectual figures of the time, Constantine Zurayk, who coined the termNakba for the Arab defeat in the war, wrote already in 1948, amid the war and the Palestinians’ collapse, that “the aim of Zionist imperialism … is to exchange one country for another and to annihilate one people … This is imperialism, naked and fearful, in its truest color and worst form.”13 According to him, the Arab defeat was “only one battle in a long war. If we have lost this battle,” he continued, “that does not mean that we have lost the whole war or that we have been finally routed with no possibility of a later revival. This battle is decisive … for on it depends the establishment or extinction of the Zionist state.”
References
Nakba.pdf (file not included in this release)
What is Deir Yassin and the Nakba - Unpacked
Deconstructing_the_Three_Stages_of_the_Nakba_Myth.pdf (file not included in this release)
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Explained (Nakba and the Arab narrative) - travelingisrael.com
Benny Morris- Israel-Palestine, Genocide, Apartheid, Hamas, Muscular Judaism, and the Nakba