Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948
Facts are subjected to interpretation and the events that took place in Palestine between 1947 and 1949 have long been a contested debate amongst intellectuals and historians. The fact of the matter is, roughly 750,000 Palestinians became refugees during this time and were not granted the right of return. Benny Morris’s argument meddles with the truth by justifying the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by stating there was no master plan or blanket policy. This is a facade created by Morris to pardon the Zionist agenda and place blame on the Palestinians and Arab leadership at the time; to refute the claims made by Benny Morris, I will be using the work of Nur Masalha and Ilan Pappe to lay Morris’s primary claim to fame to rest. The purpose this essay serves is to dissect Morris’s inherently flawed argument and breakdown the relationship between the Zionist leaders and the exodus of the Palestinians.
In Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948, Benny Morris makes a number of unsettling claims about the nature of Zionism, transfer thinking and Palestinian refugees. To begin we must understand what the Zionist agenda in Palestine was, “From the start, the Zionist wished to make the area of Palestine a Jewish state” (Morris, 39). The bride was undoubtedly beautiful, but she as many Zionists understood at the time, was married to another man. An Arab majority did not stop the early Zionist leaders from reevaluating their plans, in fact, they came up with several solutions to deal with the native Arab population to pave the way for a Jewish state. According to Morris, the first solution was to further Jewish immigration and gradually outnumber the Arab population; this plan, however, was not successful due to the restriction of immigration at the time. The second solution, which is rather sinister in nature, was to establish an apartheid state with a settler minority exploiting a large native majority; an apartheid state was shot down for obvious reasons. The third solution was a partition plan, in which the Zionists would forfeit the entirety of Mandatory Palestine, to settle for a division of the state with a Jewish majority. The problem that arose from the partition plan was that regardless of how the lines were drawn, a large Arab minority would have to be accepted in the State of Israel. As Morris states, “The last, and let me say…
