On both sides, everybody knew that this was an existential struggle.
On the Jewish side, the immediate task was to remove the Arab villages along the roads. That was the beginning of the Naqba.
From the start, atrocities cast a sinister shadow. We saw photos of Arabs parading in Jerusalem with the severed heads of our comrades. There were atrocities committed on our side, reaching a climax in the infamous Deir Yassin massacre. Deir Yassin, a neighborhood near Jerusalem, was attacked by an Irgun-Stern force, many of its male inhabitants were massacred, the women were paraded in Jewish Jerusalem. Incidents like these formed part of the atmosphere of existential struggle.
Throughout, this was a total ethnic struggle between two sides, each of which claimed the entire country as its exclusive homeland, denying the claims of the other side. Long before the term "ethnic cleansing" was widely used, it was practiced throughout this war. Only a few Arabs remained in the territory conquered by the Jews, no Jews at all remained in the few areas conquered by the Arabs (the Etzion Bloc, the Old City of Jerusalem.)
With the approach of May and the expectation that the Arab armies would enter the conflict, the Jewish side tried to create a zone from which all non-Jewish inhabitants were removed.
It must be understood that the Arab refugees did not "leave the country." When their village was shot at (generally at night), they took their families and escaped to the next village, which then came under fire, and so on. In the end they found an armistice border between them and their home.
THE PALESTINIAN exodus was not a straightforward process. It changed from month to month, from place to place and from situation to situation.
For example: the population of Lod was induced to flee by shooting at them indiscriminately. When Safed was conquered, according to the commander "we did not drive them out, we only opened a corridor for them to flee."
Before Nazareth was occupied, the local leaders signed a surrender document and the townspeople were guaranteed life and property. The Jewish commander, a Canadian officer named Dunkelman, was then verbally ordered to drive them out. He refused and demanded a written order, which never came. Because of that, Nazareth is an Arab town today.
When Jaffa was conquered, most inhabitants fled by sea to Gaza. Those who remained after the surrender were loaded onto trucks and sent on their way to Gaza, too.
While much of the expulsion was dictated by military necessity, there certainly was an unconscious, semi-conscious or conscious wish to get the Arab population out. It was "in the blood" of the Zionist movement. Indeed, long before the founder, Theodor Herzl, even thought about Palestine, when writing the initial draft of his ground-breaking book "Der Judenstaat," he proposed founding his Jewish State in Patagonia (Argentina), and proposed inducing all the native inhabitants to leave.
After the Arab armies entered the war in May, the Egyptians were stopped 22 km from Tel Aviv. A month-long cease-fire was decreed by the UN, and used by the Israeli side to equip itself for the first time with heavy arms (artillery, tanks, air force) sold to them by Stalin. In the very heavy fighting in July, the balance shifted and the Israeli side slowly gained the upper hand.
From then on, a political -- as distinguished from military -- decision was taken to remove the Arab population. Units were ordered to shoot on sight every Arab who tried to return to their village.
The decisive moment came at the end of the war, when it was decided not to allow the refugees to return to their homes. There was no official decision. The idea did not even come up. Masses of Jewish refugees from Europe, survivors of the Holocaust, flooded the country and filled the places left by the Arabs.
The Zionist leadership was certain that within a generation or two the refugees would be forgotten. That did not happen.
IT should be remembered that all this happened only a few years after the mass expulsion of the Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, which was accepted as natural.
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