60,000 people, six verbsThree news agencies, ten papers, one Friday · 23 April 1948
23 April 1948
60,000 people, six verbs
Haifa fell overnight. Three news agencies filed by morning, and American papers set the same number of people in motion using whichever verb they chose. Forced out. Fleeing. Set to evacuate. Forced to evacuate. Leaving. Mass exodus. One Friday.
The Associated Press filed from Haifa. Two papers in this archive ran that copy, one of them twice.
The copy underneath never changed. “Arab leaders bowed to a Jewish blitz yesterday and agreed to evacuate Haifa, one of the most important port cities in the Middle East. Zionist militia began a whirlwind attack for control of Haifa Wednesday when the British withdrew from all but the port area… By noon yesterday they had forced the Arabs to sue for peace.”
The dispatch contains both explanations, in order: an attack, a British withdrawal, Arabs forced to sue for peace, leaders agreeing to evacuate. Every one of those three headlines is a defensible reading of it. The editors were not choosing between true and false. They were choosing which half of the sentence went in large type.
One paper did both. The Idaho Statesman printed Forced Out on page one and Set To Evacuate on page three of the same edition, above the continuation of the same story.
International News Service filed from Haifa the same morning, and two more papers ran that.
The copy underneath never changed. “Haifa, April 23 (Friday) (INS) — Jewish forces won complete military control of Haifa last night and today 60,000 Arabs began a mass evacuation from the great port city on Palestine’s…”
United Press filed too, and reached the Daily Report under Report Arabs Fleeing Haifa by Land and Sea. Of the three services it is the only one that says what the Arabs of Haifa were refusing:
The Arab population of Haifa was reported fleeing by land and sea today after refusing a Jewish truce demanding they lay down their arms and submit to search. More than 6,000 fled to sea in small fishing boats across the bay to Acre.
United Press, Haifa · The Daily Report, 23 April 1948
One more sentence begins — It was understood that the British commander, Maj. Gen. H. C. Stockwell, virtually ordered the… — and runs off the edge of the clipping. What survives is enough. A truce was offered on terms, the terms were disarmament and search, and they were refused before the flight.
A third INS story, datelined Jerusalem rather than Haifa, reached the Pasadena Star-News under Militiamen Consolidate Gains in Haifa. Its copy is blunter than any of the headlines: the militiamen consolidated their positions “following a mass exodus of Arabs who fled under attack.”
Four headlines in which the 60,000 do not appear
Of the eleven clippings here from that day, four put the number and the people nowhere in the headline. The story becomes the capture of a city.
And one set the Haifa headline directly beneath an unrelated one in the same column, so the page read PUNISHMENT CONSIDERED OF NO VALUE and then 60,000 Arabs Leaving Haifa In Mass Exodus. That is the Sidney Daily News of Ohio, and it is a layout accident rather than an argument.
What the continuation page carries
The Idaho Statesman’s page three holds what no headline had room for:
Arab men, women and children began leaving the city by boat, truck and other means when the battle began… the only Arabs due to remain in Haifa will be Moslem and Christian clergymen who will watch over religious shrines. British army transport assisted in the evacuation, which will continue today.
The Idaho Statesman, Boise, 23 April 1948, page 3
They left when the battle began. Almost nobody was to remain. And the British army helped carry them out. None of that is in any of the eleven headlines, and the last clause complicates every short version of this story, including the short version this archive would find convenient.