Joan Peter's work was polemical, and being polemical, she presented a lot of easy targets for her opponents, which they slammed. However, she also based her arguments on a pretty solid demographic research effort, well researched. Those who slam her generally confine themselves to slamming her polemical arguments without undertaking the much harder work of going over her research about demographic figures. I've seen only one researcher do it, in the NY Review of Books (his name escapes at the moment), and even then he only nibbled at the edges. There is certainly tons of anecdotal evidence backing up her main argument, which is Palestine was sparsely populated in the nineteenth century and that lots and lots of the supposedly indigenous Palestinian Arabs came over the border on the heels of Zionist development, drawn by an obvious lure -- jobs. We can sit and argue how many of them really came over the border vs. how many only came from the central hill country down to the coast, but the pattern is clear. Certainly Palestine had a population boom (even counting only Arabs) during the Mandate that was not matched in the rest of Greater Syria.
I think by now it's clear that there were some forced removals in 1948, particularly in strategic areas like Ramle and Lydda on the crucial Tel Aviv - Jerusalem road. But the major remover as far as I can see was panic, sometimes aided by the Jews but more often unintentionally aided by the Arabs' broadcasts, tendency to believe their own rhetoric (read: fantasies), and expectation of slaughter at the hands of the victorious Israelis (as I said, it's what they would have done, so it's what they expected). And since contemporary reports (in the Economist, for example, not a Zionist source) mention Arab broadcasts urging evacuation, I tend to believe them. In any case, it was all part of the Arabs' genuine belief that the war was going to be a cakewalk.
Also you say 200,000 Arabs exited the region, Hitchen quoting IDF sources says about 391,000
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same figures. Estimates for total Arab emigration/refugees in 1947-1949 run about 600,000 - 700,000. The census of 1947 had about 750,000 Arabs in the area that became Israel, and the census of 1949 had about 160,000 Arabs. That leaves 590,000 refugees, not counting illegals, which is what the argument is about. The Arab countries got the special UN agency to feed the refugees and at once began shoving all their poor into the camps to swell the numbers. This has been highly political since day one. My 200,000 figure referred to those who left the country before the end of the Mandate. These were generally the well-to-do who had other homes and relatives to go to. I'm not sure what Hitchens is talking about with his figure.
Two good books:
Sachar's History of Israel
amazon.com
Collins and Lapierre's O Jerusalem! on the fight for Jerusalem in 1947 - 1948
amazon.com |
