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"Ethnic Cleansing" and Pro-Arab Propaganda

(Ha'aretz) Benny Morris - After the publication of my article, "Israel Conducted No Ethnic Cleansing in 1948" (Ha'aretz, 10 Oct. 1948), critics again claimed that Israel perpetuated ethnic cleansing. In 1948, some Palestinians were expelled (from Lod and Ramle, for example), some were ordered or encouraged by their leaders to flee (from Haifa, for example), and most fled for fear of the hostilities and apparently in the belief that they would return to their homes after the expected Arab victory. My opinions about the history of 1948 haven't changed at all. My opinion changed during the 1990s about only one thing - the Palestinians' willingness to make peace with us. In 2000, after Yasser Arafat's "no" at Camp David (which was backed by his successor Mahmoud Abbas), and in light of the second intifada and the nature of that intifada, I realized they weren't interested in peace. Unfortunately, the situation hasn't changed since. In 1947-1948 there was no a priori intention to expel the Arabs, and during the war there was no policy of expulsion. Moreover, it's well known that tens of thousands of Arabs remained in the territory of the Jewish state - in Haifa and Jaffa, in Jisr al-Zarqa and Fureidis, in Abu Ghosh and Ein Nakuba, in the Galilee and the Negev. The writer is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University.
2016-10-25 00:00:00
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