The same files\u00a0should\u00a0also have\u00a0ended an\u00a0equally diverting and lengthy debate about how many Palestinian villages Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948. Most Palestinian scholars were agreed it was well over 500; Israeli experts variously claimed it was between 300 and 400. Not that hundreds of ethnically cleansed villages was not bad enough, but Israel was happy to engage in a debate designed to make Palestinians look like inveterate exaggerators. Again, Israel’s\u00a0archives confirmed the Palestinian account, with\u00a0530 villages razed.<\/p>\n
Now another, related deception has been exposed. For decades Israel’s supporters have been arguing\u00a0that Haifa, one of Palestine’s most important cities, was not ethnically cleansed of its population. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled under Israeli attack in April 1948 were later urged to return, according to Israel’s supporters, but they chose not to. Further proof, it seemed, that the Palestinians had only themselves to blame for losing their homeland. They chose to stay away.<\/p>\n
Strangely, none of Israel’s propagandists ever seriously tried to suggest that the other 700,00 or so Palestinian refugees had been invited back home. It seemed as if the welcome supposedly extended\u00a0in Haifa was reason enough for all Palestinians in exile to put aside their fears of Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy at\u00a0its new borders and make the journey\u00a0home.<\/p>\n
But now a letter signed by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the engineer of its ethnic cleansing policy in 1948, shows that, far from Haifa’s\u00a0doors being thrown open, Ben Gurion ordered that the refugees be barred from returning.<\/p>\n
Written on 2 June 1948, the letter\u00a0was sent\u00a0to\u00a0Abba Khoushy, soon\u00a0to become Haifa’s\u00a0mayor. It states:\u00a0\u201cI hear that Mr. Marriot [Cyril Marriot, the British consul in Haifa] is working to return the Arabs to Haifa. I don\u2019t know how it is his business, but until the war is over we don\u2019t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, that policy was not reversed after the war, as Ben Gurion hinted it might be. And one can wonder how much\u00a0more specific\u00a0his\u00a0orders were to\u00a0his army commanders if this was what he was telling civilian administrators.<\/p>\n The myth about Haifa was\u00a0encouraged\u00a0by Golda Meir, who wrote in her autobiography that Ben Gurion told her: “I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear.”<\/p>\n Meir added: “I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home\u2026 I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n Heartbreaking – if only it were true.<\/p>\n How much longer must we wait to explode all the other myths associated with the Nakba, and much of Israel’s history ever since?<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/BG-letter.jpg\")
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