by Peter A. Belmont / 2012-04-06
© 2012 Peter Belmont

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Rashid Khalidi has a long and useful essay on Ben Gurion and the expulsion of the Palestinians
in the Journal of Palestine Studies..

This includes a translation of a 1937 letter from Ben Gurion to his son.

An interesting part of this essay is a long 2004 interview with Benny Morris which unequivocally elaborates on Ben-Gurion’s “transferist” aims. The context of the interview is Morris’s 2004 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited” (Oxford University Press, 2004), which looks at (then) newly available information about the causes of the refugee problem.

Morris:

The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them

from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves. At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages.

So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself.

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