Jewish mortars and loudspeaker trucks shook Arab neighborhoods in early 1948 as sectarian fighting consumed the newly partitioned land that would soon become Israel. Amid the prolonged shelling, the trucks would broadcast the threatening sounds of wailing sirens, fake screams and evacuation warnings.
By Kyle Rempfer
“The element of surprise, long stints of shelling with extremely loud blasts, and loudspeakers in Arabic proved very effective when properly used,” reads an Israel Defense Forces intelligence report from June 1948 that called Jewish combatants “the main factor” in the exodus.
“Each and every district underwent a wave of migration as our actions in that area intensified and expanded,” the report stated, adding later that sometimes Arabs would attempt to return home shortly after fleeing, “which forced us to engage, on more than one occasion, in expelling residents.”
Descendants of Arabs who fled during these events ultimately formed the Palestinian refugee population — 70 percent of today’s Gaza Strip residents are considered refugees. The event, known as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic, remains a heated topic on both sides.
“There’s academic quibbling about the details — to what degree was it planned, to what degree was it the circumstances of war, to what extent was it ideologically central to Zionism — but nobody denies that huge numbers were driven out,” said Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”
In recent days, U.N. experts and Palestinian leaders have invoked concerns of a second Nakba. They point to Israel’s directive urging 1.1 million Gaza residents to flee south as the IDF bombards the enclave in retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestinian territories. “The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again.”
The 1948 expulsion remains an animating force in Palestinian identity, and it changed the demographics of Israel.
“Huge numbers of people were driven out, and you wouldn’t have had a Jewish state otherwise,” Khalidi said. “I mean, the area allotted to the Jewish state under partition would have had a large Arab population.”
In November 1947, the United Nations partitioned British-controlled Palestine into two states — one Arab and one Jewish.
While Jewish immigration had increased under decades of British authority, the Arab population remained roughly twice that of the Jewish inhabitants by the time of partition. So when the United Nations carved the territory in two, the Jewish state still contained a substantial minority of Arabs.
“As soon as the partition resolution is adopted, fighting begins all along the lines on this map,” Khalidi said, with the better established Jewish forces gaining the upper hand over Arab militias and many Arab civilians fleeing or being expelled during the fighting. “Hundreds of people were shot down as infiltrators when they tried to come back. They were rigorously prevented from coming back.”
For many years, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the official history of these events argued that Palestinians left on the orders of local and foreign Arab leaders who sought to justify an invasion by neighboring Arab armies in May 1948, months after fighting between local Arab and Jewish forces had already been underway.
The IDF intelligence report from June 1948 “thoroughly undermines” that version of events, Morris wrote in 1986.
“Not only is the ‘Arab orders’ explanation seen to be limited in the numbers it affected and extremely restricted geographically; but the report goes out of its way to stress that the exodus was contrary to the political-strategic desires of both [local Arab leaders] and the governments of the neighbouring Arab states,” Morris wrote.
Morris argued that the report showed the Palestinian expulsion was “favourably regarded” by Jewish leadership, but it wasn’t engineered “with premeditation” and “in centralized fashion.” However, some of his contemporaries saw it differently.
In his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Ilan Pappe points to Plan Dalet — the fourth in a series of Israeli military plans executed during fighting in 1948 — as evidence of intent.
“This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go,” Pappe wrote. “When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.”
It’s understandable, Khalidi said, for Palestinians to fear a repeat of these events amid Israel’s current campaign in Gaza. He pointed to recent calls from Israeli military leaders for Egypt to allow Palestinian civilians to flee into the Sinai, raising concerns that they wouldn’t be allowed to return. But Egyptian leaders, mindful of instability, are unlikely to allow that, Khalidi added.
For now, Israel has instead told Gaza civilians to shelter in the southern part of their enclave to avoid bombardment.
“It’s not going to work, because they’re bombing the southern part of the Gaza Strip, too. Nobody’s safe there either,” Khalidi said. “Why would you leave? They’re killing you in the north or they’re killing in the South. Why not stay where your food and your home is?”
