Myth of Palestinian flight fading

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LONDON — As the Palestinian death toll in the present uprising in the occupied territories rises inexorably past the hundred mark, an Israeli journalist and scholar has thrown a harsh new light on the origins of the problem. He is understandably not a popular man in Israel. “People's minds have been warped by 40 years of nonsense,” said Dr.

Benny Morris ruefully after he appeared on a television chat show in Israel two years ago to explain his conclusions about the Palestinian exodus of 1948. Warped or not, people's minds were certainly made up: the switchboard of the state-run television network was jammed with protest calls.

Morris, the diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, has bluntly asserted that the Palestinians did not leave Israel voluntarily in 1948. Nor did they just flee out of a misplaced fear that they would be massacred by Jewish terrorist groups like Irgun Zvai Leumi, which slaughtered 250 Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, 40 years ago.

Their fears were real. Most of the Palestinians, said Morris, were driven out — and he had the documents to prove it.

The key source he quoted was a secret Israeli army intelligence report, dated June 30, 1948, which concluded that Jewish military action accounted for 70 percent of the Arab refugees who fled their homes between the UN resolution partitioning Palestine in November 1947 and the beginning of June 1948.

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"Myth of Palestinian flight fading," The Morning Call, 29 March 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-096. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-096