The earliest voluntary refugees were understandably the wealthier Arabs of the towns, who made a comparatively leisurely departure in December 1947 and in early-1948. At that stage, departure had not yet been proclaimed as a policy or recognized as a potential propaganda weapon. The Jaffa newspaper Ash Shalab thus wrote on January 30, 1948: "The […]

Kenneth Bilby, one of the Americans who covered Palestine for several weeks during the war of 1948, wrote soon afterwards on his experience and observations: The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee […]

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 […]

A report by the Haifa District HQ of the British Police sent on April 26, 1948, noted that "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and […]

In 1947, there were approximately one million Arabs in the whole of western Palestine. (British figures, certainly inflated, put the number at 1,200,000; independent calculations claim 800-900,000). Of these, the total number actually living in that part of Palestine which became Israel was, according to the British figure, 561,000. Not all of them left. After […]

Many of the names of Arab refugees on the U.S. relief rolls were those of persons long since dead. Nor were the relief organizations permitted by the host governments to investigate or to take steps to combat the large-scale forging of and trading in ration cards, which had become amajor well-known "racket" throughout the Middle […]

The outline of the refugee problem is sharp and clear-cut. Many of them in the parts of western Palestine annexed by Jordan in 1950, in Syria, and in Lebanon, took affairs into their own hands and became more or less self-supporting though, like many hundreds of thousands of their neighbors who had never been refugees […]

Immediately after the Second World War, some twelve million Germans were physically driven into Germany-West and East-from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania. They left all their property behind. The transfer from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was carried out with the prior approval of the three great powers participating in the Potsdam Conference-the […]

The perpetuation of the Arab refugee problem by the Arab states has the same central purpose as its creation: to bring about the destruction of the State of Israel. No Arab leader has ever tried to hide or obscure this aim. They have repeatedly made it clear that their refusal to absorb refugees into their […]

The Western statesmen have turned a blind eye to the fact that the Arab states, when they failed to destroy the Jewish state at birth, expelled or forced out large numbers of the Jewish citizens of their own countries. Of 900,000 Jews who were so driven out-and whose property was confiscated-Israel took in and absorbed […]