Blood Libel #5 | “Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians in 1948. The Nakba”
Anti-Zionist:
The Nakba was ethnic cleansing. Palestinians were forced out by Zionists.
Pro-Zionist:
The term Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic—but it originally referred to the Arab world’s defeat in 1948 after they rejected partition and launched a genocidal war to destroy the Jewish state.
It’s now weaponized to frame Palestinian attackers as victims and turn Israeli defense into ethnic cleansing—flipping reality on its head.
Anti-Zionist:
That’s semantics. Palestinians were forced out by Zionists in 1948.
Pro-Zionist:
Let’s talk about 1948.
The UN voted for a two-state solution. Jews accepted. Arabs rejected it and 5 Arab nations launched a war to destroy Israel. In the chaos of that war, some Palestinians fled or were expelled—but:
Arab leaders encouraged many to flee temporarily.
Israel begged others to stay—and 150,000 did.
Today, over 2 million Arab Israelis are full citizens.
Meanwhile, 850,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab lands and absorbed by Israel—without international aid.
Anti-Zionist:
Palestinians are still refugees because Israel refuses to let them return. No other people have been treated this way.
Pro-Zionist:
Actually, no other people have been treated this way — but in the opposite direction.
Do you know the difference between these two UN Organizations: UNRWA and UNHCR?
(Let them struggle — most won’t know.)
Pro-Zionist:
UNHCR — the UN High Commissioner for Refugees — is responsible for every refugee population in the world… except one: the Palestinians.
For them, the United Nations1 created a separate agency — UNRWA — with a completely different definition of “refugee.”
Here’s the double standard:
UNHCR works to resettle and resolve refugee status — usually within a generation.2
UNRWA redefines “refugee” as all descendants of Palestinians displaced in 1948 — no matter how many generations pass, no matter if they’re citizens of other countries3.
So while Jewish refugees from Arab lands were resettled and integrated, Palestinians are kept in camps — in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Gaza — often by fellow Arab governments who refuse to absorb them.
Why? Because their suffering is politically useful.
Israel absorbed over 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries without a dime of UNRWA support.
Meanwhile, Palestinian “refugee” numbers have grown from 700,000 to over 5 million, because UNRWA’s mandate is not to solve the issue — but to perpetuate it.4
So when people say, “Why won’t Israel just let the refugees return?”
The real question is:
Why are Palestinian refugees the only ones the world won’t let move on?
Now here’s the part no one talks about:
From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, and Gaza was controlled by Egypt.
If the UN and the Arab leaders truly cared about the Palestinian “refugees”, why didn’t they:
· Create a Palestinian state during that time?
· Offer citizenship to the refugees they hosted?
· Resettle them in Arab lands, where they share language, religion, and culture?
The answer is simple:
They didn’t want to solve the problem. They wanted to preserve it — as a permanent weapon against Israel.
So when people say, “Israel needs to fix the refugee issue,” the real question is:
Why didn’t Arab states lift a finger when they had full control — and why does the world only blame the Jewish state?
BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS
We often hear that if only Israel would accept a “two-state” solution and allow the Palestinian people to have their own sovereign nation there would be peace. But this narrative denies history. Watch this short video for a brief history lesson.
This map depicts the history described in the video.
Now let’s discuss the Nakba.
The Nakba
The term used by the Palestinian’s to define their victimhood is “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic).
But the term “Nakba,” was originally coined to describe the magnitude of the self-inflicted Palestinian and Arab defeat in the 1948 war, but has become, in recent decades, a synonym for Palestinian victimhood, with failed aggressors transformed into hapless victims and vice versa. The term has been weaponized against us and maliciously redefined. So much so that in May 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed a presidential decree that criminalizes denying the Palestinian “Nakba.” The decree states that anyone found guilty of denying the “catastrophe” inflicted upon Palestinians by Zionist forces in 1948 will face up to two years in jail. It defines the “Nakba” as “a crime against humanity” carried out by the “Zionist gangs.”
This is yet another example of the gaslighting that persists as words are redefined to vilify Israel.
For historical reference, the first person widely credited with popularizing and defining the term “Nakba” in reference to the events of 1948 was Constantin Zureiq, a Syrian intellectual and historian who taught at the American University of Beirut. In 1948, Zureiq published a booklet titled “Ma‘na al-Nakba” (translated as “The Meaning of the Nakba”), in which he described the Arab defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the establishment of the State of Israel as “the most catastrophic disaster to befall the Arabs in modern history.”
Seven Arab countries declare war on Zionism in Palestine…. Seven countries go to war to abolish the partition and to defeat Zionism, and quickly leave the battle after losing much of the land of Palestine—even the part that was given to the Arabs in the Partition Plan.
He further reflects on the internal causes of the defeat:
When the battle broke out, our public diplomacy began to speak of our imaginary victories, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily—until the Nakba happened… We must admit our mistakes… and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot.
He concluded:
We must admit our mistakes…and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot.
He framed the loss not merely as a military defeat, but as a cultural and civilizational crisis for the Arab world. Zureiq attributes the catastrophe not solely to external factors, but emphasizes internal shortcomings within Arab society. He critiques the lack of preparedness, unity, and modernization among Arab nations, contrasting this with the organization and determination of the Zionist movement.
So the term “Nakba” as defined by Zureig, was not a result of external aggression, but a consequence of internal failings within the Arab world and referred to their decision to go to war and their loss. He saw it as a pivotal moment necessitating introspection and reform within Arab societies.
[Author’s Note: For more insights, please read this article entitled “The False ‘Nakba’ Narrative”]
The Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Crisis
According to the Office of the Historian:
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain under international control administered by the United Nations. The Palestinian Arabs refused to recognize this arrangement, which they regarded as favorable to the Jews and unfair to the Arab population that would remain in Jewish territory under the partition.
Fighting began with attacks by irregular bands of Palestinian Arabs attached to local units of the Arab Liberation Army composed of volunteers from Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. These groups launched their attacks against Jewish cities, settlements, and armed forces. The Jewish forces were composed of the Haganah, the underground militia of the Jewish community in Palestine, and two small irregular groups, the Irgun, and LEHI. The goal of the Arabs was initially to block the Partition Resolution and to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state.
After Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the fighting intensified when five Arab nations launched a genocidal war against the Jewish State intent on destroying it at birth.
Yes, some Palestinians were expelled in the chaos of war, yes. But:
In connection with their invasion, the Arab world urged Arabs in many areas to flee to get behind the Arab front lines, promising the move would be temporary and they’d return after victory.
Israel begged many to stay, and 150,000 Arabs remained and became Israeli citizens which now number over 2,000,000 Israeli citizens with full rights and privileges of citizenship! [Authors Note: For more insights, please read this article from the Counsel on Foreign Relations entitled “What to Know about Arab Citizens Of Israel”]
The vast majority of today’s “refugees” are not refugees at all — they are descendants, kept in camps for 75 years by Arab regimes refusing to resettle them to keep the conflict alive.
The real ethnic cleansing is what happened to the 750,000 Jews who were expelled from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Libya. The Arab-Israeli war was a tragedy — but it was not one-sided, and it was not a genocide.
Plan Dalet - Plan D. The Plan to “Ethnically Cleanse” Palestine
In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Arab leadership have rejected the so-called "Two State Solution" every single time it's been offered in the interests of peace.
During the 1948 Palestine war in which the State of Israel was established, around 700,000. Palestinian Arabs or 85% of the total population of the territory Israel captured fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. The causes for this mass displacement is a matter of great controversy among historians, journalists, and commentators.
The Arab view is that the Palestinians were expelled by Zionist forces and that the exodus of 1948 was the fulfillment of a long-held Zionist dream to ethnically cleanse Palestine so that the land could the transformed into a Jewish-majority state.
In 1961, Walid Khalidi (a "Palestinian" historian) argued that "Plan Dalet" or Plan D, the Zionists' military plan executed in April and May 1948, aimed at expelling the Palestinians.
According to Israeli historian and politician Simha Flapan "the Jewish army ... under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, planned and executed the expulsion in the wake of the UN Partition Resolution."
Further, according to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, Ben-Gurion headed a group of eleven people, a combination of military and security figures and specialists on Arab affairs. From October 1947 this group met weekly to discuss issues of security and strategy towards the Arab world and the Palestinians. At a meeting on 10 March 1947, this group put the final touches on Plan Dalet, which, according to Pappé, was the blueprint for what he called the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestine.
According to Plan Dalet, a Palestinian village was to be expelled if it was located on a strategic spot or if it put up some sort of resistance when it was occupied by Yishuv forces. According to Pappé "it was clear that occupation would always provoke some resistance and that therefore no village would be immune, either because of its location or because it would not allow itself to be occupied."
Ben-Gurion's group met less frequently after Israel declared independence because, according to Pappé, "Plan Dalet ... had been working well, and needed no further coordination and direction."
However, according to Yoav Gelber, a professor of history at University of Haifa and visiting professor at The University of Texas at Austin, Plan Dalet instructions were: In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled outside the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was met, the residents could stay put.
During a September 1948 meeting of the Israeli cabinet, Ben-Gurion proposed ending the current ceasefire. His reasons remained classified when the cabinet minutes were released, but were revealed by an Israeli historian, author and journalist, Tom Segev in 2013: If war broke out, we would then be able to clear the entire central Galilee with one fell swoop. But we cannot empty the central Galilee - that is, including the [Arab] refugees - without a war going on. The Galilee is full of [Arab] residents; it is not an empty region. If war breaks out throughout the entire country, this would be advantageous for us as far as the Galilee is concerned because, without having to make any major effort - we could use just enough of the force required for the purpose without weakening our military efforts in other parts of the country - we could empty the Galilee completely.
However, the important point, is not whether it was discussed but whether it was policy or law. And, the proposal was not passed by the cabinet! So it was not law.
For example, Yosef Weitz, who was strongly in favor of expulsion, had explicitly asked Ben-Gurion for such a directive and was turned down!
I constantly see people using an expressed point of view that they can cite by one politician or another but that does not make it a government policy! We have plenty of politicians within the US Government that espouse a lot of policies. But that is irrelevant. What matters is what becomes law!
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The "Master Plan" concept falls apart upon deeper inspection because no central directive has surfaced from the archives! Historians argue that, had such an understanding been widespread, it would have left a mark in the vast documentation produced by the Zionist leadership.
Settlement policy guidelines drawn up between December 1947 and February 1948, designed to handle the absorption of the anticipated first million immigrants, planned for some 150 new settlements, of which about half were located in the Negev, while the remainder were sited along the lines of the UN partition map (29 November 1947) in the north and centre of the country.
The Continuum Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East states that "recent studies, based on official Israeli archives, have shown that there was no official policy or instructions to bring about the expulsion."
There was no Zionist "plan" or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of "ethnic cleansing". Plan Dalet (Plan D), of 10 March 1948, (it is open and available for all to read in the IDF Archive and in various publications), was the master plan of the Haganah—the Jewish military force that became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state.
In his 2004 book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited", Benny Morris wrote:
"My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 War, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan for expulsion."
Morris also states that he could not find anything in the Israeli archives that would prove the existence of a Zionist plan to expel Palestinians in 1948. Elsewhere Morris has said that the expulsion of the Palestinians did amount to ethnic cleansing, and that the action was justifiable considering the circumstances. I've included a link to a letter from Morris in 2008 regarding this issue.
Yoav Gelber notes that documentation exists showing that David Ben-Gurion "regarded the escape as a calculated withdrawal of non-combatant population upon the orders of Arab commanders and out of military considerations", which is contradictory to the hypothesis of a master plan he may have drawn up.
The "transfer principle" theory was attacked by Efraim Karsh. Karsh argued that transferist thinking was a fringe philosophy within Zionism, and had no significant effect on expulsions. He gives two specific points of criticism:
Karsh cites evidence supporting the idea that Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) did not agree on transfer of Palestinian Arabs but rather had a much more tolerant vision of Arab-Jewish coexistence: (a) Ben-Gurion's at a JAE meeting in 1936: "We do not deny the right of the Arab inhabitants of the country, and we do not see this right as a hindrance to the realization of Zionism". (b) Ben-Gurion to his party members: "In our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well". (c) In an October 1941 internal policy paper: "Jewish immigration and colonization in Palestine on a large scale can be carried out without displacing Arabs", and: "in a Jewish Palestine the position of the Arabs will not be worse than the position of the Jews themselves". (d) Explicit instructions of Israel Galili, the Haganah's commander-in-chief: "acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity". and
According to Karsh there was never any Zionist attempt to inculcate the "transfer" idea in the hearts and minds of Jews.
He could find no evidence of any press campaign, radio broadcasts, public rallies, or political gatherings, for none existed.
Furthermore, in Karsh's opinion the idea of transfer was forced on the Zionist agenda by the British (in the recommendations of the 1937 Peel Royal Commission on Palestine) rather than being self-generated.
Footnotes:
Allow me to quote Researchgate.net which published a report in 2006:
... the UN, in contravention of its own charter, is rapidly evolving into a predatory, undemocratic, unaccountable, and self-serving vehicle for global government. The UN is unweildy, gross, inefficient, and incompetent. In addition, it is configured as to reach deep into the national politics of its member states and, by sheer weight and persistance, to force at least some of the worst of its agenda upon them all. Only a handful are brave enough to counter all of this. Indeed, with notable exceptions, generations of American officials and policy-makers have been content to look away from the UN's multiform deficiencies and derelictions while occassionaly indulging in minor punitive measures. For many others in public life, and for many ordinary citizens as well, the institution itself is still held in nearly sacred regard.
UNHCR also known as the "UN Refugee Agency" which emerged in the wake of WWII to help Europeans displaced by that conflict. Despite the fact that the organization was founded with a three year mission, the organization still exists today to address the more than 108 million people around the world that have been forcibly displaced as a result of conflict or persecution. UNHCR's budget was $10.7B in 2022. That's $99 per refugee. You can find more statistics here: https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/figures-glance
UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) which is solely dedicated to responding to the needs of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees. And did you know that Western Countries contribute the lion's share of UNRWA's $1.6 Billion-dollar annual Budget. I love when people say that Israel has committed genocide or ethnic cleansing when there are now 5 million people characterized as Palestinian Refugees because, under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found. So let's see $10B for the World's 100M+ refugees and $1B for the Palestinian's 5M refugees. Note that means the UN spends nearly 4x the amount spent per refugee when compared to every other refugee in the world. On its face that should make you question why the Palestinian Refugees have such status amongst the world's refugees.
[Author’s Note: For more insights, please read this article entitled “What to Know about UNRWA and Its Controversial Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”]
Especially when you consider the fact that they have rejected multiple internationally brokered arrangements that Israel approved that would have resulted in Israel giving up land for peace that would have created statehood for the Palestinian people ending their refugee status. But here is a report from March of 2023, UN Watch found that UNRWA has been indoctrinating Palestinian children, teaching them a false narrative about the history of Palestine and worse, teaching them to hate Israel and calling for the murder of jews. The report noted:
“With a budget of $1.6 billion, nearly 60% of which goes to education, and a staff of 30,000, the UN agency might be the most heavily funded educational undertaking in the history of international aid. And yet our report today demonstrates how UNRWA has consistently breached its duty of care to the children attending its schools,” said Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se. “UNRWA is obsessed by PR spin and fundraising, but disinterested in the extremism of its educational network. If it had wanted to stop the hate-teaching, UNRWA would have done so years ago.”
If you haven't heard this UN address by Hillel Neuer from UN Watch... it's a must listen!