Another blow to Zionist myth


May 28, 2015
Sarah Benton


Palestinians being marched out of Haifa by Haganah men, April, 1948. Photo by AFP

Ben Gurion ’48 letter barred return to Haifa

By Jonathan Cook, blog
May 27, 2015

Over many decades, Israel’s self-serving deceptions about the Nakba in 1948 have been exposed for the lies Palestinians already knew them to be.

It was long accepted in the west that, as Israel claimed, Palestinians left their homes because they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab leaders. The lie usefully distracted diplomats and scholars from the much more pertinent question of why Israel had refused to allow 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return to their homes after the war finished, as international law demanded.

The myth about the Arab leaders’ order, which had been steadily undermined by the work of the “new historians” of the late 1980s, was decisively punctured two years ago by an Israeli scholar who was given the wrong file by Israeli army archivists. It showed the story of the Arab leaders’ order was concocted by Israeli officials.*

The same files should also have ended an equally diverting and lengthy debate about how many Palestinian villages Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948. Most Palestinian scholars were agreed it was well over 500; Israeli experts variously claimed it was between 300 and 400. Not that hundreds of ethnically cleansed villages was not bad enough, but Israel was happy to engage in a debate designed to make Palestinians look like inveterate exaggerators. Again, Israel’s archives confirmed the Palestinian account, with 530 villages razed.

Now another, related deception has been exposed. For decades Israel’s supporters have been arguing that Haifa, one of Palestine’s most important cities, was not ethnically cleansed of its population. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled under Israeli attack in April 1948 were later urged to return, according to Israel’s supporters, but they chose not to. Further proof, it seemed, that the Palestinians had only themselves to blame for losing their homeland. They chose to stay away.

Strangely, none of Israel’s propagandists ever seriously tried to suggest that the other 700,00 or so Palestinian refugees had been invited back home. It seemed as if the welcome supposedly extended in Haifa was reason enough for all Palestinians in exile to put aside their fears of Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy at its new borders and make the journey home.

But now a letter signed by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the engineer of its ethnic cleansing policy in 1948, shows that, far from Haifa’s doors being thrown open, Ben Gurion ordered that the refugees be barred from returning.

Written on 2 June 1948, the letter was sent to Abba Khoushy, soon to become Haifa’s mayor. It states: “I hear that Mr. Marriot [Cyril Marriot, the British consul in Haifa] is working to return the Arabs to Haifa. I don’t know how it is his business, but until the war is over we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly.”


The letter, signed by Ben-Gurion. Courtesy of the Kedem Auction House.

Of course, that policy was not reversed after the war, as Ben Gurion hinted it might be. And one can wonder how much more specific his orders were to his army commanders if this was what he was telling civilian administrators.

The myth about Haifa was encouraged by Golda Meir, who wrote in her autobiography that Ben Gurion told her: “I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear.”

Meir added: “I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home… I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work.”

Heartbreaking – if only it were true.

How much longer must we wait to explode all the other myths associated with the Nakba, and much of Israel’s history ever since?



A boat of Palestinian refugees from Haifa docking in Port Said, Egypt. Photo credit: Getty Images

After capturing Haifa, Ben-Gurion gave order to stop fleeing Arabs from returning

A letter going to auction reveals that Israel’s first PM tried to thwart British attempts to resettle ‘the enemy’ in Haifa. The letter contradicts a testimony by Golda Meir.

By Ofer Aderet, Ha’aretz
May 26, 2015

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, gave an instruction aimed at preventing Haifa’s Arab residents who have fled the city during the 1948 War of Independence from returning to their homes as long as the fighting continued. This was revealed in a letter bearing Ben-Gurion’s signature, which will go on sale next week at the Kedem auction house in Jerusalem.

The letter was sent by Ben-Gurion on June 2, 1948, a month and a half after Haifa was captured and a few weeks after Israel’s independence was declared. It was addressed to Abba Khoushy, the secretary-general of the Haifa Workers’ Council, and later the city’s mayor.

“I hear that Mr. Marriot (Cyril Marriot, the British Consul in Haifa) is working to return the Arabs to Haifa. I don’t know how it is his business, but until the war is over we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly” instructed Ben-Gurion.

The contents of this letter were published in 2002 in a book about Abba Khoushy that was written by Tzadok Eshel (“Abba Khoushy – Man of Haifa”). As with many of the letters that Ben-Gurion wrote to different people and institutions, this letter fell into private hands and is now up for sale. The opening bidding price is $1,800.

Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the Arab population that fled or was expelled from their homes during the war was not consistent. In Nazareth, he specifically instructed Israeli forces not to expel Arab residents: “Do not remove these residents from Nazareth,” he wrote. In Lod, however, there is one testimony according to which he instructed Yitzhak Rabin and other field commanders to expel the residents.

In her new biography of Ben-Gurion (‘Ben Gurion – Father of Modern Israel,” published in English by Yale University Press) historian Anita Shapira states that Lod is the only case in which there is testimony to an instruction given by Ben-Gurion to deport Arabs. Shapira describes consultations held by field commanders and Ben-Gurion concerning the fate of the city’s Arab inhabitants, after the city’s capture in Operation Danny. “Ben-Gurion listened and did not respond. He had an exceptional capacity to remain silent when he wanted to. Only at the end of the discussion, as the commanders were about to return to the battlefield, he made, according to Rabin’s account, a waving-off gesture with his hand, muttering ‘expel them.'”


David Ben-Gurion and Abba Khoushy (behind him, facing the camera). Photo by Fritz Cohen / GPO

What about Haifa? Here things get more complicated. Out of 70,000 Arabs who lived in the city when the war broke out, tens of thousands left during the first months. On April 22, 1948, when the city was captured by the Haganah (the Yishuv’s military forces), the Grand Mufti instructed Haifa’s Arab residents to leave rather than accept the terms of surrender. Shabtai Levy, the city’s first Jewish mayor, appealed to local leaders, asking them not to leave. The British tried to do the same, but to no avail. Except for a few thousand, the majority of Haifa’s Arabs left after the city was captured.

On May 1, after touring the area, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “An amazing and terrible sight. a dead city… with barns, shops, small and large houses, old and new – with not a living soul except for some wandering cats… how did tens of thousands of people leave behind, in such panic, their houses and wealth?”

“What caused this flight? Was it just orders from above? It’s inconceivable that extremely wealthy people – and there were extremely wealthy people here, those with knowledge say, the richest in the whole land – would leave all their wealth behind just because someone commanded them to. Was it fear?”

Despite the shock felt by Ben-Gurion, the letter that surfaced and is now up for auction indicates that a month later he called for preventing Arab residents from returning to their homes. The letter contradicts the testimony of Golda Meir [above at Tel Aviv airport in 1948] , who wrote in her book “My Life” that Ben-Gurion asked her to try and prevent the flight of Haifa’s Arabs.

“Ben-Gurion called me and said: ‘I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear,’ he said. And so, I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home… I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work,” she wrote.

Meron Aran, one of the directors of the Kedem auction house, believes that Ben-Gurion ultimately preferred to prevent their return out of security considerations, but he also has another theory in mind. “It’s possible that he was already planning to house new immigrants who were already clamouring to get into the new country in the houses abandoned by the city’s Arabs.”

Haganah men walking the streets of Haifa after they captured the city. Photo from Haganah archive.

* See also How the story of Palestinian free flight was made up

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