You know when you’re arguing with someone, going in endless circles around the same topic? And then finally, after an hour of frustration and annoyance, you both decide you’re arguing over nothing and someone shuts it down with “ugh, that’s just semantics!”
Like, for a totally theoretical example, when my friends and I argue about whether LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time. (Yeah, we know how to have fun.)
My friend Jared is like, “LeBron is the GOAT. Look at his all-around game, longevity, and how he carried different teams to the Finals.”
But his brother Craig counters, “No way. Michael Jordan never lost in the Finals and has 6 rings. That’s what greatness is.”
Then I am that annoying guy who jumps in and says, “Well, it depends how you define GOAT. Are we talking peak performance? Total career? Cultural impact? Best player in his era, or adjusted over time?”
Eventually, my wife Raizie, who has been suffering patiently through all this, throws up her hands and says, “Oh, you’re just arguing about semantics.”
In most contexts, “semantics” are just that – trivial, unimportant, the domain of pedants and bozos more interested in style than substance. (Yeah, I said it. Come at me!)
But in some contexts, semantics are everything… or they seem to be.
Like, for example, the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
If you’re a longtime listener, you already know that I have lots of Thoughts and Feelings about the words we use to describe said conflict. It’s impossible not to! When it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, every word is loaded, and no one is willing to give an inch, which can feel exhausting at times.
Because our understanding of the conflict isn’t based solely on the facts. It’s also based on the way those facts are described. And, you know, on feelings. For better or worse, feelings are a big part of this debate.
And that’s why even the semantics of this conflict are so hellishly fraught.
Everyone agrees that Israel’s founding was accompanied by war. But what we call that war telegraphs our political and maybe religious leanings. For Israelis, it’s the “The War of Independence” or “The War of Liberation” – the trial by fire through which they earned a homeland. For Palestinians and much of the Arab world, it’s the Nakba, or catastrophe, that robbed the Palestinians of a country.
The battle over words extends to every aspect of this conflict.
- Like, is Palestine a state, recognized by 150 countries at the time of this recording but not the UN…. or is it a territory?
- Like, do Israeli settlers live in Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank?
- For that matter, is settlers a bad word? Or a simple descriptor of the Jewish people who make communities in the West Bank?
And on and on and infinitely on.
Most of the time, we use different words to describe the same things. But sometimes, Israelis and Palestinians adopt the exact same language to discuss entirely different concepts. Like, for example, return.
Maybe you’ve heard of Israel’s Law of Return, adopted in 1950, which reads that every Jew has the right to come to this country as an Oleh – i.e., an immigrant – or returnee as many see it – to Israel. In other words, every Jew in the world has the right to move to Israel, almost no questions asked.
And Jew, in this case, is defined as anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent – the same criteria that the Nazis used to define mischling, or so-called mixed race individuals.
It’s no coincidence that Israel’s Law of Return uses the broadest definition of Jew possible. After all, the Nazis didn’t care how religious or how quote unquote “Jewish” you were, or whether you were Jewish according to Jewish law. Their racial laws had nothing to do with belief, or with how someone identified personally. They imposed a top-down definition on tens of thousands of people who might not have even seen themselves as Jewish.
And so the Jewish state, which was partially established as a safe haven for Jewish people, adopted that same definition. Because there’s an unspoken law that governs Jewish history. It’s irrevocable, immutable, as fundamental as any other law of nature. Eat or be eaten. What goes up must come down. A body in motion will remain in motion. Etc.
I’m gonna sound like a real bummer when I tell you that the Law of the Jews is that we will be persecuted. No matter where we are, someone hates us. Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans, Cossacks, Safavids, Nazis, white supremacists, extreme Columbia students, Kanye, Candace Owens, Hamas… You get it.
After thousands of years of persecution and Jew-hate, Israel’s Law of Return makes sure the Jewish people always have somewhere to go when the mob gets too rowdy, when the wolf is at the door.
It applied when nearly the entire Arab world decided to cleanse itself of its Jews. 80 years ago, there were more than 800,000 Jews in Arab and Muslim countries. Now, there are fewer than 15,000. That is a remarkable stat. These 800,000 Jewish people showed up in the Jewish state shortly after its founding, many of them penniless and pauperized. It applied to the 10,000 Jews who were kicked out of their homes in Judea and Samaria, during the war we’re about to discuss.
And it applies even to the most unexpected people. Like soccer legend—sorry, football legend—David “bend it like” Beckham. And to Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. And to a whole host of other people with hidden Jewish ancestry. At least one Jewish grandparent. That’s the rule.
And for Israelis and Jews the world over, that rule makes sense. Not only because the Jewish people need a place of our own, but because the Jewish people belong to this specific place. Jewish history was developed in Israel. Jewish peoplehood is tied inextricably to this place. The nation of Israel is tethered to the Land of Israel. Or in Hebrew, “Eretz Yisrael La’am Yisrael.” They go hand in hand. And so the Law of Return isn’t just about safety. It’s also about something a bit simpler…indigeneity.
Ok, so that’s my take. But it probably will not surprise you to hear that Palestinians have a huge problem with this law. Because they feel it interferes with their, and I’m quoting their phrasing, right of return.
You see where this is going?
Let’s break it down.
Many Palestinians argue that this law is invalid. After all, they claim, Jews have no legal right to the land. Let’s steel man this. Why should a Jewish person who grew up in Brooklyn, whose grandparents were born in the US and whose great grandparents are from Poland have more of a right to the land than a Palestinian person who grew up in Ramallah, whose parents, grandparents, and great grandparents are from Jaffa? Right, you get the question?
And, some even say the Jewish people have no historical or spiritual claim, either. That we’re all Europeans who converted during the Middle Ages and co-opted an ancient Israelite identity. Or that our historical claim has been erased by the thousands of years we spent in exile. (For more on this insane conspiracy theory, check out the episode of Jewish History Nerds, another Unpacked show, about the Khazar lie, or see the video we did on that over at the Unpacked YT channel.)
Instead, they say, they are the land’s rightful owners. And so the only people with the right to return, they say, is… them.
It’s a long and exhausting argument. Because there’s no real winning, right? It’s just an endless rehashing of the same history.
Both sides have roughly the same numbers – nearly 15 million Palestinians and 16 million Jews, slightly less than half of which live between the river and the sea.
Both sides claim a right to this land.
And both sides say that anyone in a specific but wide-ranging category should have the freedom to exercise that right.
For Jews, it’s anyone with one Jewish grandparent.
For Palestinians, it’s anyone whose father’s family descends from someone who left or was expelled between December 1947 and December 1948.
It’s been a sticking point in every negotiation. An enduring disagreement on the nature of indigeneity. On the question of who has what rights.
For nearly 80 years, the so-called Palestinian right of return has been one of the stickiest wickets preventing a resolution to the conflict.
But there’s nothing we like more here at Unpacking Israeli History than sticky wickets. And there is no term I like to say more than sticky wicket. Sticky wicket. And so that’s what we’re discussing in this two-part episode, this week and next. We’re going to unpack the right of return. Describe the plight of refugees. And think, deeply, about the language we use to describe these issues.
This episode is long overdue. We’ve talked around this question many, many times. Did Palestinians flee, or were they expelled? Do they have a right to come back, or are they spinning their wheels, stuck trying to change the past?
All of which boils down to the real question: Was Israel created at the expense of another nation’s dreams and aspirations?
These are important questions – particularly to young people, who are hearing, over and over, that Israel is illegitimate. That a country built on stolen land has no right to exist.
And the more you hear a narrative, no matter how simplistic or one-sided or just plain wrong, the more you start to believe it. It becomes ingrained in you. This happens to all of us.
And that can tear families apart.
I’m not just being dramatic. Here’s an email from a listener named Jeff, who wrote to me:
Hi Noam, I’m a middle-aged father of a very left-leaning college student. My sense is he is still reachable. For instance, when asked if he thinks Israel is committing genocide, his answer is he’s not sure. But for him, Israel’s origin story is centered on the nakba. As he understands it, it is a story of ethnic cleansing in which 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes.
I, of course, understand that this is a gross oversimplification. However, even I cannot break down the true events of 1947-8. How many Palestinians were truly expelled vs. told by Arab leadership to leave vs. became Israeli citizens? Where can I go to get a sense of what really happened? And how would you respond to a college student with such concerns?
Jeff, thanks for this email. And can I just say, your son sounds awesome. It’s so respectable that he’s trying to understand this. You, and he, are asking a lot of good questions here. Questions that I want to grapple with on this episode.
I’m not gonna lie. Some of the answers to these questions are going to be difficult to hear. They force many of us to reckon with hard truths – no matter which side of the debate we’re on. Because what really happened between November 29, 1947 and July of 1949 isn’t black or white. It isn’t simple.
And I firmly believe that the only way, the ONLY way, that the Israelis and Palestinians will ever arrive at some kind of peace, or accommodation, is for both sides to listen to what the other has to say. To acknowledge each other’s pain and trauma. Because there IS pain and trauma on both sides. Denying that will get us nowhere.
Many Palestinians will tell you that they didn’t just “become” refugees. Instead, they say, they were violently and deliberately driven from their homes by the Jews.
It’s part of their origin story. Part of their national trauma. Just like 2,000 years of expulsion and persecution is part of ours. It’s the sad, ironic symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians. Both of us are traumatized. Both of us are unable to let go of that trauma until the other side recognizes and validates it.
And in the meantime, we keep telling ourselves the same stories. And in some cases, polishing and sharpening the trauma into a weapon.
So as Palestinians recite their narrative of expulsion and dispossession, Israelis will repeat theirs: Arab leaders instructed their people to flee, telling them they’d return once all the Jews had been killed. They started a war of extermination. We just happened to win it.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between these two poles. And that is the bread and butter of this podcast. Welcome to the in-between.
Chapter One: January – November, 1947
We’re gonna dispense with this chapter pretty quickly, because we’ve covered it in detail a few times before. (Yes, ugh, I’m trying to say it less often, buttttt – link in the show notes…)
Here’s the Cliffs Notes/Spark notes/AI version:
It’s 1947, and the British are at their wits’ end trying to mediate between the Jews and Arabs who both claim Palestine as theirs.
Nearly 30 years before, the Brits had assumed control of the region, hoping to usher in some stability as the natives figured out how exactly to run a state. But it’s been a long, exhausting, and unpleasant few decades. Every year seems to bring more problems. Riots, massacres, revolts, illegal immigration, sabotage, chaos, underground militias, bombs going off in crowded places… Frankly, it’s a real mess.
And this isn’t what the British had signed up for when they chose to take over Palestine at the end of World War I.
They feel like they’ve really tried to mediate between Arabs and Jews. But all they’ve succeeded in doing is royally ticking off both sides.
The Arabs had launched a very bloody revolt. The Jews had attacked British infrastructure and officers, and totally disobeyed the immigration restrictions that British officials had imposed on the Jewish community.
But now it’s 1947, and Europe’s Displacement Camps are full to bursting with Holocaust survivors with nowhere to go. World War II had drained British coffers and exhausted their resources. Between the soldiers and the civilians, nearly half a million Brits are dead.
Their country is in ruins. And they have no more patience for the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, who are at each other’s throats.
So they hand the problem over to the UN. After all, that’s why this new organization exists, right? To maintain peace and order after a war that killed more than three percent of the entire globe.
So the UN comes up with an idea as old as the Bible. Remember that story about the wise King Solomon, who is asked to adjudicate a fight between two mothers? Chapter 3 of Kings. Learn your Bible. It’s good for you. Both women are fighting over a baby each claims as theirs. So the king, who is famous for his wisdom and judgment, comes up with an idea. Cut the baby in half, he says. One for each mother. That’ll do the trick.
Well, that’s more or less the UN’s solution, too. Partition the territory. Carve it up into two states.
And I do mean “carve.” Because the borders the UN comes up with are frankly insane. You know those Picasso paintings where he takes someone’s face and puts one eye over there and one eye over here and the nose is sideways? That’s what the Partition Plan borders were like: separate chunks of land connected by VERY tenuous road links. The cubist art version of creating countries. Jews would get 55% of the territory, much of it in the arid Negev desert – a slightly larger parcel of land than the Arabs, to account for the masses of Jewish refugees waiting to get the heck out of their DP camps.
But it gets even weirder.
The new Jewish state of Israel would be home to roughly half a million Jews and a very large minority of 450,000 Arabs. Yes, that means that the Jewish state envisioned by the UN would be nearly 50%, well, not Jewish. At least until all the Jewish refugees showed up. Meanwhile, the remaining 800,000 Arabs would live in Arab Palestine, side by side with 10,000 Jews. And Jerusalem, home to 100,000 Jews and 65,000 Arabs, would be a little island under international control, completely surrounded by Arab Palestine.
Seriously. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
Still, for the Jews fighting for statehood, this offer was better than nothing. Sure, the UN was proposing bonkers borders and a sizable Arab minority… but at least it would be a Jewish state. The last thing they wanted was a binational state where they would be the minority. As the Hebrew expression goes, they’d already seen that movie. Being a minority doesn’t end well for the Jews. The Zionist dream was one of self-determination, of not being a minority. A return to that long-ago time when Jews were in control of their own destiny.
But for the Arabs, it was a different story.
There had once been a moderate Arab voice in Palestine, even in Transjordan. But – as we’ve described in previous episodes – it had been intimidated, or worse, out of existence. The only voices left were those of the extremists, and they were not willing to accept a Jewish state.
So the entire Arab world rejected the partition plan. Not because of the bonkers borders or the weird allocation of territory, but because they saw all of Palestine as theirs, and they were not willing to share. It didn’t matter how much of the land the UN proposed giving to the Jews – any percentage above zero was too high.
They weren’t exactly subtle about their opposition.
An Arab leader named Fawzi al-Qawuqji (FOW‑zee al-kah‑WOO kay‑gee), whose name you might remember from our series on the Great Revolt of 1936, threatened, and I quote, “we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck, and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American, or Jewish.”
He sounds fun.
The Saudi king told American President Harry Truman that, quote, “the Arab will isolate such a state from the world and will lay siege to it until it dies by famine.” Let me repeat that: “Until it dies by famine.” Nice. Tell us how you really feel.
Remember, this is 1947, barely two years since the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors were still stranded in DP camps, waiting for anywhere to take them in. They hoped that place would be Palestine. But with the way the Arab world was talking, it wasn’t looking pretty.
The thing is, the Arab world was in a bit of a pickle. Sure, in public they were frothing at the mouth, shouting let me at em. But privately, Arab countries weren’t too keen to go to war while the British still had people on the ground. They had promised their people blood — but if push came to shove, they weren’t all that interested in making good on that promise, if the Partition Plan went through.
So they did what they could to ensure it would fail. Including voting as a bloc: no, no, no. They would not support a partition plan for Palestine. And they believed that few other countries would, either.
They were wrong.
Which brings us to chapter two of our story. But you’ll have to wait until after the break.
[ad break]
Welcome back. When we left off, the world was gearing up for a fateful vote. Would the UN split Palestine in two, creating a Jewish state cheek by jowl with an Arab one? Or would the vote fail, dashing the hopes of the Zionist movement forever?
Chapter Two: November 29, 1947 – April 1948
The vote didn’t fail. It was a close thing, for a while, and the Zionist movement was working overtime until the last second to call in every favor it could.
But the world’s superpowers – the US and the USSR – both had a vested interest in seeing a Jewish state in the Middle East. Each was looking for a sympathetic ally – and a toehold into one of the most strategically valuable pieces of real estate in the world.
Despite this support, there were no guarantees that Partition would ever be more than a pipe dream. So as each country cast its vote on November 29, 1947, Jews around the world held their breath.
And as more and more countries voted yes, yes, yes, the Jews of Palestine thronged the streets, dancing and singing and crying and delirious with joy.
But Palestine’s other population was less than thrilled.
The bloodshed began in earnest the day after the vote.
The days of the British Mandate were numbered, but they weren’t over yet. British officers still patrolled the streets in a futile attempt to keep the peace. So while the neighboring countries weren’t exactly happy about getting a new Jewish neighbor, they kept to themselves as long as the Brits were around. Which meant that the violence against the Jews was mainly home-grown.
On the Palestinian side, three militias – if they can even be called that – led the charge.
First up was the Arab Liberation Army, or the ALA for short. This was the most organized group, made up of trained volunteers from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, and led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji – the same silver-tongued charmer who threatened to initiate total war if Partition passed. He was as good, or as bad, as his word. The ALA mainly led attacks on mixed towns, where Jews and Arabs lived together. And just in case anyone was confused about their mission, their logo helpfully clarified: they fought under a banner that bore a Jewish star, pierced by a sword. Getting strong Houthi vibes from the ALA, not gonna lie. (Seriously. Look up the Houthi flag. No one can accuse these groups of being subtle.)
But the ALA wasn’t the only game in town.
Large bands of armed Palestinians roved the countryside, hundreds of men strong, using local Arab villages as their base – often, without consent from the villagers. Any village that sheltered a fighter was putting a target on its own back.
One of these bands was led by the nephew of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the former mufti of Jerusalem and a frequent character in our episodes. NERD CORNER ALERT: A mufti is primarily a legal scholar who issues fatwas (opinions) on matters of Islamic law. A sheikh (or shaykh) is a title of respect for a religious leader or scholar, particularly in Sufi contexts, and can also be used more broadly for someone knowledgeable in religious matters. An imam is most commonly the leader of prayers in a mosque, but can also refer to a higher religious authority in Shia Islam. So, the former Mufti had fled Palestine during the Great Revolt, but even from his self-imposed exile in Egypt, he had serious sway with local Palestinians. They listened to what he had to say.
And when he told them to flee their homes, they did.
But we’ll get there.
And in case this was all too clear and easy to understand, there were other local militias too, made up of volunteers from the roughly 700 to 800 Arab villages that peppered Mandatory Palestine. Their specialty was ambushes – particularly if they involved attacking Jewish convoys as they carried supplies between isolated Jewish towns.
So those were the three major fighting forces on the Palestinian side – though only one had an official name, and not all the fighters were actually Palestinians.
In a rare example of historical symmetry, the Jews of Palestine also had three paramilitaries, whose names you might remember from previous episodes.
The largest and best-trained of these groups was the Haganah, led by David Ben Gurion. Maybe you remember their policy of havlagah, or restraint. At first, their only goal was defense – that is literally what “haganah” means. But they did have an elite strike force known as the Palmach, made up of the best fighters, for dangerous, high-stakes operations.
The Haganah had once been the only game in town, but you know what they say: two Jews, three opinions. And it was a major difference of opinion that caused the Haganah to splinter in 1931. From this split emerged a new, hardline militia that called itself “HaIrgun HaTzvai HaLeumi B’Eretz Yisrael,” “the national military organization in the Land of Israel.” Sometimes referred to as Etzel or the Irgun – literally, “the organization,” which is much more ominous, if you ask me.
The Irgun had emerged mostly to fight against the British in the 1930s, whose restrictions on Jewish immigration kept hundreds of thousands of Jews trapped in Europe, fodder for the Nazi war machine. By 1940, though, it was clear that the Jews and the Brits had a common enemy: the Nazis. For most of WWII, the Irgun maintained an uneasy truce with the British, targeting local Arabs instead.
But – like I said – two Jews, three opinions.
So by 1940, a third splinter group had peeled off from the Irgun. Lehi, which stands for Lohamei Herut Israel, or Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, was absolutely not ready to call off its war on the Brits. Though this third militia never counted more than a few hundred members, they were nonetheless responsible for some of the worst attacks on both the Brits and the Arabs in the years leading up to Partition.
Historically, these three groups didn’t always have the coziest relationship. But by December of 1947, they’d mostly put aside their ideological differences. The Yishuv was under continuous attack. Snipers fired at Jewish homes and pedestrians. Arab militias planted landmines along the roads and hit vehicles protected by Haganah convoys. They attacked Jewish neighborhoods in mixed cities and targeted isolated, rural Jewish communities too. Every single Jew was a target. Women. Men. Children. The ALA and the Arab militias made no distinction between combatants and civilians.
It was really, really bad.
The Jewish militias had to do something, or else their dream of a state would be over before it began. If they wanted their own country, they’d have to defend it.
And so they adopted a strategy they called tochnit bet, or Plan B, which they’d hastily assembled in the weeks before the Partition vote. (By the way, if you’re thinking that “you can’t have a Plan B without a Plan A, so what in the heck was Plan A?” you’re asking a great question. Plan A was a defensive plan developed in 1937, after the Arab revolt broke out in 1936, in case the British Mandate would fail. Nerd corner alert: It was also called the “Elimelech Plan” after its author, Elimelech Avner, and it was never actually put into practice.)
Like Plan A, Plan B was defensive in nature – which meant that it was reactive, rather than proactive. If and when an Arab militia attacked, the Yishuv would retaliate – either by attacking the Arab village where the militias were sheltering, or by taking down an Arab convoy. But even these reprisals followed strict rules. No attacking civilians. No attacking uninvolved villages. No attacking women or children, or hospitals, or schools.
It was a nice plan, in theory. But nice doesn’t win wars.
Within days of the first Arab attacks in November of 1947, it became very apparent that Plan B wasn’t working. It was too passive, too reactive. The Yishuv was constantly on the back foot, responding to attacks that had already happened instead of preventing them. If they wanted to win this war and come out with an actual country – and a population to live in it – they’d need to step up their defensive posture.
So in the second week of December, they quickly shifted to Plan C, or tochnit gimmel, which had actually been developed back in May 1946.
Plan C was still more or less a defensive strategy – just a more aggressive one. I know, sounds totally contradictory, but what this meant was that the Yishuv would conduct more raids against hostile villages and convoys. And if they had to, they would blow up houses used by terrorists and even expel the inhabitants of their villages.
It wasn’t a nice plan. War is rarely nice.
But underpinning this plan was a fundamental principle. Anyone who wanted peace would be left alone.
And there were plenty of villages who had no interest in attacking Jews. More than two dozen villages asked nearby Jewish communities for mutual nonaggression pacts. Including the village of Deir Yassin, located outside Jerusalem, which signed a treaty with neighboring Givat Shaul promising that neither side would attack the other.
Remember that name. You’ll be hearing it again.
But there was a third Arab response to the spiraling violence. Within days of the Partition vote, some Arab communities were getting the hell out of dodge. They could read the writing on the wall. War was coming, and they weren’t going to just sit there while the entire world went to hell. So those who could afford to leave… did. By the end of March 1948, roughly 100,000 Palestinians had fled their homes, heading to safer ground until all the madness was over.
They had good reason to run.
Remember, just a decade before, Palestinian society had been decimated by the Great Arab Revolt – an uprising that had backfired spectacularly, leaving Palestinians traumatized and scarred. (We did a three-part series on that, in case you want to hear more. Kind of an important time period.) They weren’t interested in reliving that miserable period. Especially not when the Jewish fighters had a reputation for being organized, methodical, and fierce. No one fights harder than a man with his back against the wall.
Aside from all of those very good reasons to cut and run, war makes everything more expensive. The cost of food and basic necessities was spiraling. Every day, the Palestinian social fabric frayed just a little bit more. Between the violence, the economy, and the flight of the upper class, Palestinian civil society was collapsing like a house of cards.
And so at least 100,000 fled, more or less of their own volition. These were the elites, the people with the means to leave, who could afford to hang out in Beirut or Damascus for a while, until all the unpleasantness was over.
True, they left under very unpleasant circumstances. True, they probably wouldn’t have left if a civil war wasn’t ravaging their home. But all in all, they made a choice to go, not realizing that they would never return.
After all, many of them genuinely believed that this was temporary. As soon as the British left, the neighboring Arab countries would invade, dispose of these pesky Jews with their mad ideas of a Jewish state, and clear a path for Palestinians to go back to their homes.
But you and I know that’s not what happened. And so we’re left with the tantalizing WHAT IF:
What if they knew they would not be able to come back? If they could see the future – if they knew what was about to happen – would they have chosen to leave their homes?
We will never know the answer to the “What if”s. We can speculate, but we just don’t know. All we know is that it was a heart-wrenching choice – and that local Arab leaders weren’t making it any easier.
On the one hand, local leaders called for everyone to remain in their homes. But at the same time, the leaders of nearby Arab states – not to mention the Mufti in exile – encouraged women, children, and old people to flee.
Where exactly were they supposed to go? The Arab states weren’t jazzed about the prospect of absorbing tens of thousands of refugees. So they instructed people to leave their homes, if they were in harm’s way – but to stay within the borders of Palestine.
Meanwhile, the Jews of the Yishuv stuck to the land like superglue. They refused to leave their homes – even after repeated attacks on the isolated settlements clustered around Jerusalem. But as the civil war dragged on, the situation in the Yishuv grew increasingly dire.
Arab militias dominated the roads, ambushing Haganah troops as they drove. By March of 1948, the attacks had worn down much of the Haganah’s forces. Over just a few days that spring, the Arab militias killed about 150 Haganah troops and obliterated most of its armored trucks.
The Yishuv was desperate. 1,000 Jews were dead. Jerusalem was starving – and not for the first time. Every Jew was familiar with Jerusalem’s tortured history. The siege and starvation that accompanied the Assyrian and Babylonian and Roman conquests. The Biblical stories of desperate mothers cooking their own dead babies.
And every Jew knew how those stories ended.
In exile. In dispossession. In slavery. In a wide-ranging diaspora that lasted nearly 2,000 years.
So Jerusalem was in a sorry state, as Jewish convoy after Jewish convoy fell to the Arab militias that controlled the war.
And the situation would only get worse.
As the end of the British mandate inched ever closer, the Arab countries would mobilize for total regional war. Unless something changed, the Jewish state would be squeezed out of existence before it was even born.
It was time to go on the offense. It was time for Plan D.
But before I explain Plan D, or Tochnit Dalet, let’s just recap why the Yishuv adopted it.
The Arab armies were coming. And unless the Jews of the Yishuv figured out how to beat the homegrown Palestinian militias, they’d be dead in the water when the neighbors came knocking.
They had to retake the roads. They had to unify the isolated Jewish communities cut off from one another by Palestinian villages – which meant they had to establish contiguity. No more of these Swiss cheese borders, pocked with hostile forces that could squeeze an isolated Jewish village to death. And they had to shore up their defenses at the borders for then the neighbors finally showed up.
The Partition Plan had THEORETICALLY tried to divide Jewish-dominated areas from Arab-dominated areas. But the borders of the proposed Jewish state were dotted with Arab villages. And almost all of these villages were near a road or located near where the Arab armies might force their way into Jewish territory.
For the Yishuv to survive, they needed to take over the villages. It doesn’t sound nice. It doesn’t sound fun. But they’d tried Plans A, Plan B, Plan C. They’d tried defense, and reacting, and not going on the offense. And all they had to show for it was a spiraling death toll.
So they would give these Arab villages a choice: Surrender and be permanently occupied, or resist, and be expelled and destroyed. And they’d do the same in the mixed cities. They had to. Any Arab neighborhood in the future State of Israel was in danger of becoming a base for Arab armed forces. This is how they saw it.
And thus: Plan D.
The first war plan that put the Yishuv on the offense, rather than leaving them on the defensive.
It was a relatively simple plan, as far as these things go.
Surround the strategically placed Arab villages. Search for weapons and fighters. If the villagers resist, kill the fighters and expel the people – all of them. And if the village is especially hostile, destroy its homes and shops and infrastructure, too.
If the villagers didn’t resist, they would be disarmed and the town turned into a garrison for Jewish fighters. Tochnit Dalet included instructions for managing civilian affairs in a conquered village. But if the inhabitants decided to flee on their own accord, all the better.
Maybe you’re thinking, wow Noam, Tochnit Daled sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing. I mean, targeting a specific population? Doing your best to systematically remove them from a given area? Encouraging, subtly and not so subtly, a given population to flee? How is any of that okay? Good questions? You gotta ask these questions. Keep that moral background, it’s good. And let’s also explore some answers to that. Let’s explore.
The first is unpleasant, but also true. Remember those natural laws we talked about at the top of this episode? A body in motion will always remain in motion? What goes up must come down? Eat or be eaten?
Well, that last rule was in effect. This was war. War. War. War stinks. And it was the Arabs, or it was the Jews. The Yishuv knew which side they were on.
But there’s another answer here, too.
The Yishuv’s leaders were hoping that the Arabs would just… get up and leave, sparing them massive headaches later down the line.
But at the time, population transfer was actually… kinda popular. When it came down to it, moving a population elsewhere – or having them move themselves – was vastly preferable to, say, mass murder. Population transfer had worked, with varying levels of success, in other high-stakes conflicts.
Like, for example, the conflict between Greece and Turkey.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire had really, really messed things up for a lot of people. After all, it was a multinational, multiethnic empire, a mix of different religions and languages. So as the empire crumbled after WWI, Greece moved in, eager to take over a part of western Turkey that had been home to ethnic Greeks for centuries.
The Turks didn’t like that. After three years of war and massacres and ethnic cleansing and atrocities on both sides, the Turks won. Which was not good news for the 1.5 million Greeks still living in Turkey, or for the half a million Muslims who lived in Greece.
So the two countries made a deal. They’d simply swap those populations. Greece would take the 1.5 million Greeks who had lived in Turkey for generations. Turkey would take the half-million Muslims who made Greece their home.
It would suck.
It would involve losing homes, property, assets, generations of memories, and starting over in a new and unfamiliar place. But it was also a practical alternative to letting ethnic tensions simmer. Letting bad blood poison everything.
And it worked, more or less.
True, Greece and Turkey aren’t friends. They say nasty things to each other all the time. They argue about Cyprus and the Aegean Sea and migrants and who owns certain Greek islands.
But they’ve never fought another full-scale war. And in times of tension, Greeks aren’t worried about being slaughtered by the Turks living next door, and vice versa. Not like they were in 1919.
So that’s the basic theory behind population exchange. Short term suckiness for long-term peace. And it’s been used all over the world, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.
In India and Pakistan. Not going great right now in Kashmir.
In Bulgaria and Romania, and Bulgaria and Greece, and Bulgaria and Turkey.
In Cyprus. In Germany after WWII, as 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
In the Soviet Union.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
Today, we call this ethnic cleansing. Back then, though, population transfer was theoretically a decent alternative to the endless war that resulted when two hostile populations ended up side by side.
Tochnit Dalet was effective, prompting between 250,000–300,000 Palestinians to flee. This was the second major wave of refugees: three times as many people as had fled in the previous four months. And this time, they had much less of a choice.
Sure, they could stay… and watch their homes be turned into a military garrison for the Jewish people. Their lives, as they knew it, would be over. They’d be under someone else’s control – and they weren’t keen to take their chances with the Jews. Or they could leave, and hope that the surrounding Arab countries would eventually clear a path for them to return. And so 300,000 people became refugees. Women, children, the elderly, many of whom had been living in their homes for generations.
But there are worse things than losing your home. Worse fates than being a refugee.
By early April of 1948, Tochnit Dalet was in full swing. But Jerusalem’s 100,000 Jews were starving, cut off from the rest of the Yishuv by a total blockade. It was horrific to be Jewish in Jerusalem at this time. Horrific. The Haganah’s attempts to penetrate the blockade and break the siege had resulted only in death.
They needed a new strategy, a new facet of Tochnit Dalet. So they turned to the other two Jewish militias for help.
And the Irgun and Lechi agreed. Together, they launched Operation Nachshon – named after Nachshon Ben Aminadav, the Biblical figure who was first to wade into the Red Sea as Moses was leading the Israelites to freedom.
For Jews, Nachshon is a symbol of bravery and faith. Our tradition tells us that he was chest-deep in the ocean before God parted the waters of the Red Sea – a testament to his ironclad belief that God hadn’t led him out of Egypt just to let him drown.
But Operation Nachson was no triumph.
The Haganah had instructed the Irgun and Lehi to capture a strategically located Arab village near Jerusalem. They chose the hilltop community of Deir Yassin.
You might remember that name from earlier in the episode. That’s one of the dozen or so villages that had offered nearby Jewish communities a mutual nonaggression pact.
Deir Yassin was not interested in being home to the violent Arab militias that would almost CERTAINLY turn the village into a target. They agreed to hang specially marked laundry on the line to secretly alert the Haganah if any Arab militias entered the village.
Which makes what happened next all the more tragic. For the full story, check out our episode on this really terrible moment, linked in the show notes. But the summary is awful enough.
April 9, 1948.
4:30am.
Irgun and Lehi fighters sent a truck with a loudspeaker into the town to warn its inhabitants to leave.
But the truck overturned in a ditch, its message lost.
The villagers knew something was up, but they didn’t know what.
But their country was at war.
So they started to fire.
Dawud Assad was 18 years old in 1948. He lived through the attack on Deir Yassin, but not everyone in his family was so fortunate.
Dawud escaped through a trench and walked for four hours to Jerusalem, where he was eventually reunited with his sister and mother. But it was not a happy reunion.
Dawud’s mother went to find his brother, Omar. But – as Dawud tells it – a Jewish soldier blocked her from rescuing her son, and she died years later without ever knowing what had happened to her boy, a haunted woman.
730 of Deir Yassin’s villagers managed to escape. At least 100 didn’t. Among them were noncombatants. Old people. Women. Children. People who got caught in the crossfire, or were deliberately shot. When the fighting was over, the remaining Irgun and Lehi troops looted the city, even ripping jewelry from women. Within days, Arabic headlines were screaming about the massacre. The papers claimed that in addition to killing innocent Palestinians, the Jews had committed atrocities, including indiscriminate slaughter, rape, and particularly gruesome acts of torture.
Were all these accusations true?
Well, like almost everything else to do with this conflict, it depends who you ask. Some scholars will tell you yes. Others believe that many of these accusations were fabricated by an Arab official, Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi (hoo‑SAYN FAKH‑ree al‑kha‑LEE‑dee), who told Arab publications to publish the most sensationalist propaganda they could. Al-Khalidi even advised Deir Yassin’s refugees to accuse the Jews of rape.
Al-Khalidi thought the sickening stories of Deir Yassin would galvanize the Arab countries to help the Palestinians in their war against the Yishuv and inspire local Palestinians to rise up.
But the plan backfired.
The stories, especially the rumor about rape, ignited fear and terror in neighboring Arab villages. Terrified, and fiercely protective of their women, they gathered what they had and fled. And so the war entered a new phase, with Deir Yassin as a turning point for both sides.
Tochnit Dalet was working. Palestianians were fleeing in the tens of thousands – helped along by the sensationalist stories of the atrocities of Deir Yassin.
In fact, in his 1951 memoir, The Revolt, Irgun commander Menachem Begin reflected, quote:
“Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery,’ were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrolled stampede. Of the almost 800,000 who lived in the present territory of the State of Israel, only some 165,000 are still there. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”
It’s a pretty stark way to describe something so awful. But it’s also a potent illustration of something we talk about a lot on this podcast: the power of a story and the power of storytelling.
And when I say story, I don’t mean fiction. Stories can be real, or they can be exaggerated and embroidered, or they can be utterly made up. And while I believe facts matter, I also believe that for most people, what really happened is secondary to what we want to believe. Stories that animate and guide, inspire and shape. What we’ve grown up hearing about and telling and re-telling.
Nearly eighty years later, the story of Deir Yassin remains a rallying cry. For some, it’s an argument for the inherent evils of Zionism. For others, it’s a deep and abiding tragedy – the way the 1929 Hebron massacre is for the Jewish people and Israelis.
And all these tragedies came with far-reaching consequences.
Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of Palestinians simply packed up and left – some in response to the psychological effects of Deir Yassin, others because Tochnit Dalet had commandeered their villages. To this day, no one can say for certain why people left. In his book The Root of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, the historian Benny Morris painstakingly lists every depopulated Arab village, even listing why it was depopulated. But as to how many thousands left because of fear or because they were forcibly expelled — we just don’t know.
All we know is this.
There is no evidence that Arab leadership ordered Palestinians to leave Palestine en masse. Yes, in some cases, local Arab leaders ordered villages to evacuate completely, or to send their women, children, and elderly somewhere safe within Palestine’s borders.
But there’s no evidence of radio broadcasts or pamphlets instructing them to leave Palestine. Palestinian leadership was just too disorganized. In fact, as Benny Morris writes, quote:
“The Arab leadership inside and outside Palestine probably helped precipitate flight in the sense that, while doctrinally opposed to the exodus, it was disunited and ineffectual, and had decided, from the start, on no fixed, uniform policy and gave the masses no consistent guidelines for behaviour, especially during the crucial month of April. The records are incomplete, but they show overwhelming confusion and disparate purpose, ‘policy’ and implementation changing from week to week and area to area. No guiding hand or central control is evident; no overarching ‘policy’ was manifest.”
In fact, Arab leadership even criticized the elites and middle class who read the writing on the wall and chose to leave before the war even really got started. (Ironically, many of the critics were themselves already in exile.)
But it’s also true that these refugees wouldn’t have left if their home wasn’t at war. So it is more or less accurate to say that most of these refugees were displaced, directly or indirectly, by the Jewish militias. Meanwhile, it is more or less inaccurate to say that Arab leadership encouraged a mass exodus. But both of these statements come with qualifiers and nuances.
We also know that all of these refugees expected to return to their homes. The Arab invasion was imminent. They thought it would change everything.
And it did. Just not in the way that anyone expected.
But for that, you’ll have to wait for Part II. Join us next week for the conclusion of our two-part series on the Palestinian refugee crisis.
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Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, a brand of OpenDor Media. Follow Unpacking Israeli History on Instagram, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out unpacked.media for everything Unpacked-related, and subscribe to our other podcasts. And for the millionth time, write to me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Adi Elbaz, Esther Baruh, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for joining us, see you next week!