When the onslaught of the local Arabs had been in progress for over four months, and a month before the planned invasion by the seven Arab states, about, half the population still remained in the area mapped out by theUnited Nations as the Jewish state. Now began the fantastic phase of the exodus. A large part of the population panicked. Suddenly the countryside was filled with rumors and alleged reports of Jewish "atrocities."

A highly colored report of a battle near Jerusalem became the driving theme. At the village of Dir Yassin, one of the bases-of the Arab forces maintaining pressure on the Jemsalem-Tel Aviv road, an assault by the "dissident" Irgun Zvai Leumi and the FFI (Stern Group) had continued for eight hours before the village was finally captured, and then only with the help of a Palmach armored car, which arrived on the scene unexpectedly. The element of surprise having been lost, the Arab soldiers could turn every house in the village into a fortress. Jewish casualties amounted to one third of the attacking force (40 out of 120). The Arabs, barricading themselves in the houses, had omitted to evacuate women and children, many of whom were thus lolled during the attack.

The Arab leaders seized on the opportunity to tell an utterly fantastic story of a "massacre," which was disseminated throughout the world by all the arms of British propaganda. The accepted "orthodox" version to this day, it has served enemies of Israel and anti-Semites faithfully.

The effect of the story was immediate and electric. The British officer who had done most in the years before 1948 to build up the Transjordanian Army, General Glubb Pasha, wrote in the London Daily Mail on August 12, 1948: "The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war." And the refugee from Dir Yassin, Yunes Ahmed Assad, has soberly recorded that "The Arab exodus from other villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews" (Al Urdun, April 9, 1953).

Another quarter of a million Arabs thus left the area of the State of Israel in the late spring and early summer of 1948.

Where they had the opportunity, the Yews tried to prevent the Arabs’ flight. Bishop Hakim of Galilee confirmed to the Rev. Karl Baehr, Executive Secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, that the Arabs of Haifa "fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel." This episode is described in depth in Days of Fire (New York, 1968). The Zionist establishment of 1948, in its eagerness to blacken the dissident underground, helped the libel along.

Only years later did the Israeli Foreign Office correct the record (in Israel’s Struggle for Peace, Israel Office of Information, New York, 1960) and in an extensive statement entitled "Dir Yassin," published on March 16, 1969. An earlier Arab eyewitness account is a stunning refutation of the libel. On the fifth anniversary of the battle, Yunes Ahmed Assad of Dir Yassin wrote in the Jordan daily Al Urdun (April 9, 1953): "The Jews never intended to hurt the population of the village but were forced to do so after they met hostile fire from the population which killed the Irgun commander."