In sum, it was not what happened at Deir Yassin that caused the flight of tens of thousands of Arabs; it was the lies invented by the Arab High Command and Dr. Hussein Khalidi of the “Voice of Palestine” radio news channel that caused the panic. One can hardly blame Israel for that.
Moreover, we have from an unimpeachable source, Yassir Arafat himself (his authorized biography, by Alan Hart, "Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker") that the Deir Yassin lies were spread "like a red flag in front of a bull" by the Egyptians. Then, having terrorized them with these stories, the Egyptians proceeded to disarm the Arabs of the area and herd them into detention camps in Gaza (today's Gaza refugee camps). Why did the Egyptians do this? According to Arafat, it was to get the Arabs out of the area because the Egyptians wanted a free hand to wage their war. Egypt had every intention of conquering the Negev and southern part of the coastal plain. They wanted no interference from the locals.
So the lies about Deir Yassin were spread in order to shame the Arab armies and cause panic among Arab civilians.
Bottom line, Deir Yassin was not a massacre; nothing even vaguely akin to what the Jews are accused of ever happened. The lies were made up by Arabs, and spread by Arabs. The further flight of refugees after 4/9/48 was caused not by the Deir Yassin battle, but by the Arab lies about the Deir Yassin battle. And this from Yassir himself, and from Beir Zayyit University.
We don't know how many Arabs fled as a result of the “Voice of Palestine” exaggerations. Several hundred thousand is a good estimate. Most of them ended up in the Egyptian detention camps in Gaza.
Six. There were two more incidents (in addition to the actions noted above in #3) of Arab refugees being forced to flee by Israeli army actions: Lydda and Ramle.
Both villages sat astride the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As the siege on Jerusalem tightened, the Israeli forces knew that in order to save the Jews of west Jerusalem from defeat and possible annihilation, they had to keep that road open. So one night they entered both villages and forcibly drove out the Arab residents. They rousted them from bed and sent them walking across the fields to the area that was under Jordanian control (some kilometers away).
Note...none were killed. There was no massacre. But they were driven out. However, they were driven out because their villages sat astride the road to Jerusalem, and the only way to guarantee the survival of 150,000 Jews in Jerusalem was to control this one road.
Seven. By 5/15/48, the British had evacuated their forces from all of British Mandatory Palestine, and the Jews had a free hand in using their Haganah, which now became the IDF. And the Arab countries had a free hand in attacking. And attack they did. Armies from 8 Arab nations poured into the area from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt (volunteers and soldiers from Saudi
Arabia, Yemen and Morocco came too - hence Cool. They outnumbered the Hagana (now IDF) about 5 to one. For the next month or so the Israelis were fighting a terribly difficult defensive war, just barely able to keep the invaders out. There were about 63,000 IDF volunteers, but weapons for only 22,000.
In June of '48 the UN imposed a cease-fire. By July when the Arabs re-initiated hostilities, the Israelis had been able to use the cease-fire to import arms and planes from Russia and Germany via Czechoslovakia. Now better armed, the IDF numbered 65,000 and the odds were reduced to about 2-1. Good odds for the determined Jewish fighters.
When the fighting resumed in July, the IDF went on the offensive and succeeded in driving the Arab armies out of both the Jewish areas and large parts of the areas that the UN had intended to be the Palestinian state (western Galilee, and southern coastal plain north of Gaza). When this offensive began, more Arabs fled. As noted above, the Arabs that stayed were not harmed, and became citizens of Israel.
Contrary to revisionist and mendacious Arab propaganda, there was never any intent to massacre Arabs. Many civilians died in the cross fire, and the overwhelming majority of Arabs who fled did so needlessly, at their own initiative, or because of the Arab leadership that lied and intimidated them. Some Arabs were driven out by the IDF, but as part of a defensive measure. Not as part of any plan to ethnically cleanse the land or massacre/genocide the Arabs. These accusations are all new revisionism aimed at exonerating the Arabs from their heinous and brutal role in creating the Arab Refugee problem, and at transferring the guilt to Israel.
Perhaps the most revealing considerations in the conclusion that Israel NEVER set out to put into action a plan to genocide the Arabs of Palestine or to drive them from their homes are:
The complete absence of any coverage in any world press, including Arab press and western press openly hostile to Israel, about any such actions of which Israel is today accused. The complete absence of these accusations from any Arab spokespersons during this time, even at the very height of the flight (post-Deir Yassin), and for many years thereafter. The fate of the Arabs who stayed. They became Israeli citizens and enjoy more freedom, democracy, political representation, high standard of living, education, and economic opportunities, than any Arabs anywhere in the Arab world today.
Finally, after the 2/49 cease-fire, when the war was over, there was still a continued flight by tens of thousands of Arabs. The Jews did absolutely nothing to encourage or force this flight.
The above are the 7 stages of causation. The next stage recounts on-going Arab obduracy in the maintenance of the refugee problem and refusal to seek any solution.
Eight. As noted above, the Arabs caused the problem by starting the war, and by encouraging Arabs to leave during the war. Even worse, although Israel offered on several occasions to repatriate refugees, the Arab states refused.
During the Rhodes armistice talks in 2/1949, Israel offered to return to the Arabs the lands that the Jews had conquered that were meant to be part of the Palestinian state, in exchange for a peace treaty. This would have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to return to their homes. The Arabs said no, because, as they themselves admitted, they were momentarily going to mount a new offensive. They had lost round one. There would be more and more rounds, until the Arabs won. Their new offensive was the 9000 terrorist attacks mostly from Egypt that the Arabs perpetrated against Israel from 1949-1956 (part of the cause of the '56 war).
At the Lausanne conference in 8-9/49, Israel offered to repatriate 100,000 refugees even without a peace treaty. The Arab states said NO, because that would involve a tacit recognition of the state of Israel.
Thus, despite Israel's offers of repatriation, the Arabs insisted on maintaining the refugees in their squalor and suffering. Arab spokespersons in Syria and Egypt were quoted in their newspapers as saying: we will maintain the refugees in their camps until the flag of Palestine flies over all of the land. They will go back home only as victors, on the graves and corpses of the Jews.
Moreover, as some Arabs were candid enough to announce in public, the refugee problem would serve as "a festering sore on the backside of Europe", as moral leverage to be used against Israel in order to win the emotional support of the West against Israel.
