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<blockquote>
<blockquote>
"For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible."</blockquote>
"For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible."</blockquote>
All the while, there was no ethnic cleansing of Arabs.
<ref>[https://rotter.net/forum/scoops1/351986.shtml Haaretz: There was no ethnic cleansing in 1948], (Haaretz), Rotter, 10/08/16.<blockquote><font size=1>
At the bottom of his article - which was published here last Friday under the heading "Ethnic cleansing? ..." - Prof. Daniel Blatman is described as a "historian". If so, Blatman excelled in his role when he attributed to me in an article things I had never claimed, and distorted the history of the 1948 war.
First, Prof. Blatman ignores throughout the article the basic fact that it was the Palestinians who started the war, when they rejected the UN compromise plan, and began hostilities in which 1,800 Jews were killed between November 1947 and mid-May 1948. In the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s, and indeed carried out ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and elsewhere).
In the context of the second phase of the 1948 war, Blatman claims that Arab states invaded Israel and most attacked the State of Israel, in order to save their Palestinian brethren from the ethnic cleansing that the Jews had begun to carry out. During this purge, "more than 400,000" Arabs were smuggled out and deported from their homes, which, according to Beltman, made up more than half of the Arab population in Palestine, until May 14 (in fact, there were about 1.2-1.3 million Arabs in the country at the time).
The real number of those who fled and were smuggled was probably smaller than that, but more importantly - Arab states attacked the State of Israel mainly to harm it, if not to exterminate it. It is a fact that their leaders threatened the invasion even before the UN resolution was passed on November 29, 1947, and before one Arab was displaced from his home; And they continued to threaten the invasion in the months that followed, until May 1948. It was not the tragedy of the Palestinians that motivated the Arab states in their invasion.
It is true that the flight and smuggling of Arabs from their places in Israel, especially from early April to May 14, 1948 (in this context the conquest of Jaffa, Tiberias and Haifa and the... in Deir Yassin were always mentioned), caused extremism among Arab populations around Israel, and was one of the factors that pushed Arab leaders to decide in favor of an invasion on the eve of May 15th. But other, more important factors influenced Arab leaders in their decision: King Abdullah of Jordan wanted to expand the borders of his country; The king of Egypt wanted to prevent the king of Jordan from great territorial achievements; The leaders of Syria, Iraq and Egypt feared their "street" reaction if they refrained from invading, and more. Concern for the peace of Arab Arabs was not the main motive for the invasion of Arab countries.
Blatman states that I argued that "more than half a year before the Arab invasion began," the Yishuv leaders sought to expand the state's borders beyond those set out in the UN General Assembly resolution, "and reduce to a minimum" the number of Arabs left in the Jewish state. My words and of history.
Of course, leaders at the beginning of a country's path are interested in increasing their country's territory, but there is a big difference between personal aspirations and policies. In terms of policy, the leaders of the settlement aspired to expand the territory of the country on the way only around March-April 1948, and not from November 1947; And only after four months of Arab fighting against the settlement - which stood on strategic defense; And only after the Arab leaders made it clear, early in the morning and in the evening, that they intended to attack the Jewish state with the departure of the British from Israel.
As for the reduction of the number of Arabs, at no stage of the 1948 war was the decision of the Yishuv or the state - neither the management of the Jewish Agency nor the Israeli government, nor the General Staff of the Defense or the IDF General Staff - made a decision to "expel the Arabs." It is true that David Ben-Gurion and Haim Weizmann supported the transfer of an Arab population from the territory of the Jewish state that would be established in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 400,000 Arabs and more.
During the war, at one point, Ben-Gurion made his officers understand that it was better for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the country, but he never instructed them to "expel the Arabs" (and in July 1948 he even decided against the expulsion of Arabs from Nazareth, Lod and Ramla). The atmosphere of transfer that has prevailed in the country since April 1948 has never been translated into official policy - so there were officers who expelled Arabs and there were those who refrained from deportation. Neither these nor those were reprimanded for it or punished. Finally, in 1949, there were about 160,000 Arabs left in the country - a fifth of its population - who swelled to 1.6 million over the decades (and now their leaders have refrained from attending the funeral of Shimon Peres, who among other things tried to promote a two-state solution). ).
If Blatman reads my book, he will realize that on March 24, 1948, Ben-Gurion's deputy in the Ministry of Defense, Israel Galili, the head of the national defense staff, ordered all defense brigades not to displace Arab populations from the designated Jewish state. Things did change in early April, due to the dilapidated condition of the settlement and due to the anticipation of the impending Arab invasion. But a general policy of deportation has not yet been adopted - here they were deported, there they were not deported, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.
It is true that from the middle of 1948 the State of Israel adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees - those refugees who months and weeks earlier tried to destroy the country on the way. But this policy still seems to me logical and just.
I do not accept the definition of "ethnic cleansing" for what was done by the Jews in Israel in 1948 (if one thinks of Lod and Ramla, one can perhaps speak of a partial ethnic cleansing); According to Blatman, the opposite is true. Many were deported, and many were somehow left behind, and became citizens of the Jewish state.
By the way, the Arab states did carry out ethnic cleansing and displaced all the Jews, to the last of them, from any territory they occupied in 1948 - the Jordanians in Gush Etzion and the Old City of Jerusalem; The Syrians in Masada, the Golan Heights and the Jordan Guard, etc. The Jews, on the other hand, left behind Arabs in Haifa and Jaffa, and in the villages along the country's main transportation arteries - the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road and the Tel Aviv-Haifa road - a fact that is inconsistent with the claim of "successful" ethnic cleansing.
As for the current preoccupation with the subject, it is ridiculous, to say the least, to claim that the displacement of Jewish settlements from the West Bank is "ethnic cleansing," but it makes sense to have Jews in the Arab territories, just as Arabs live in the Jewish state. In today's circumstances, the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria is an obstacle to possible peace between us and the Palestinians. I have always opposed this enterprise, because a division into two states into two peoples is the just and logical solution. However, Benjamin Netanyahu is right, unfortunately, in saying that the main obstacle to peace is the unwillingness of Israeli Arabs to agree to a compromise based on two states for the two peoples, and the denial of the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel by them.
Prof. Morris is a historian.</font></blockquote></ref>
==Ethnic cleansing: Jews from Arab Muslim lands==
==Ethnic cleansing: Jews from Arab Muslim lands==