Mouin Rabbani@MouinRabbani
Claims that the Palestinians were in 1948 ordered to evacuate their homes and homeland by Arab leaders in a series of radio broadcasts has been a perennial Hasbara Symphony Orchestra favourite since the Nakba, and continues to be widely promoted to this day.
The BBC journalist and United Nations official Erskine Barton Childers (not to be confused with his father, Ireland's fourth president, Erskine Hamilton Childers) thoroughly debunked this claim more than half a century ago in his article, "The Other Exodus" published in The Spectator on 12 May 1961.
Childers reviewed the comprehensive archives of Arab radio broadcasts compiled during that period by both the BBC monitoring station in Cyprus and its US counterpart, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) run by the CIA, and found nothing.
I have posted a link to Childers's article in the comments, which is worth reading because it includes details of additional fabrications concocted by Israeli officials to further this foundational hasbara myth.
Abba Eban, then Israel's permanent representative to the UN and later foreign minister, and easily its most celebrated diplomat, for example claimed that the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Haifa, George Hakim, "fully confirmed" that Palestinians were encouraged to flee by their leaders.
Yet, according to Childers: "I wrote to His Grace [Hakim], asking for his evidence of such orders. I hold signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he has categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years; and that the Arabs fled through panic and forcible eviction by Jewish troops."
This is the same Abba Eban who on 6 June 1967 falsely informed the UN Security Council that Israel had launched the June War the previous day in response to a series of non-existent attacks on Israel on the morning of 5 June by the Egyptian air force and artillery units.
I was previously unaware that the Israeli archives also include records of these radio broadcasts. As the British-Israeli historian Benny Morris reports below, he went through these records and also found that such broadcasts, whether by local Palestinian or Arab leaders, simply do not exist.
While the research conducted by Childers and more recently Morris is of course useful in providing official confirmation that such broadcasts are a figment of the Zionist imagination, logic alone should suffice to debunk this myth.
In May 1948, the Arab states intervened in Palestine to put an end to the mass expulsions of Palestinians, which since November 1947 already numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and to defeat the Israeli forces responsible for this monumental crime.
Does it make any sense that prior to their intervention they would have ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to clog every road they hoped to use to enter Palestine, for miles and days on end? Of course not.
As for the silly claim that the objective of the Arab intervention was genocide, there is no evidence for it, and the conduct of the Arab militaries during the Palestine War supports this conclusion.
Nor was it the case that the Arab intervention was a coordinated military campaign to eradicate the nascent Israeli state. Some of the participating Arab states, Syria and Iraq, did have this as an objective.
Transjordan clearly did not. Its leadership had already cut a deal with the Zionist leadership to partition Palestine between them and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Armed conflict between Israel and Transjordan in fact ensued only after Israeli forces reneged on their agreement and initiated seizures of territory beyond the partition boundary.
Egypt's position was more ambiguous. It seemed to be primarily motivated by rivalry with Jordan, and ensuring Jordan did not become the main Arab power in Palestine. In short, no Arab state wanted to see the emergence of the Israeli state, but in most cases Arab leaders had more pressing priorities. Coordination between them was primarily notable for its absence.
Arab public opinion, by contrast, considered the failure of their leaders to successfully confront the Zionist project nothing short of treason, and it served as a catalyst for more than a decade of revolutions, coups, and uprisings throughout the region.
