civilians had become an aim of David Ben-Gurion and his government. After the United Nations had failed so miserably in implementing the partition plan, and the State of Israel had been set up by the sole force of Israeli arms, U.N. opinion could very well be disregarded. Peace with the Arabs seemed out of the question, considering the extreme nature of the Arab propaganda. In this situation, it was easy for people like Ben-Gurion to believe that the capture of uninhabited territory was both necessary for security reasons and desirable for the homogeneity of the new Hebrew state.
How was this objective attained? During this phase of the fighting, real massacres were rare on both sides. Generally, it was sufficient to fire a few rounds into an Arab village to make the inhabitants, who had not fought in a war for generations, take to flight. According to Zionist propaganda, the Arab governments and the Arab armies called upon the Arabs to leave their homes. Unfortunately, this has never been proved. Erskine Childers, a serious, if pro-Arab writer, has assured me that he went over all the monitoi'ed broadcasts of the Arab stations during 1948, copies of which are preserved by the BBC in London, but did not find a single order, or even suggestion, pointing in this direction. On the contrary, it seems that the Arab governments asked the inhabitants not to leave. I am inclined to believe that while local Arab leaders in the first stage of the war requested the Arabs to evacuate their homes rather than stay behind in Israeli-held territory, a different attitude was taken by the Arab governments in the third stage of the war. The exact opposite happened in each phase on the Israeli side.
But even this analysis misses the real point. The main exodus of the Arabs was not at all the result of premeditated policies, of either the Arabs or of the Zionists, but rather a natural result of the war as such. Few people realize nowadays that the Arabs never fled the country. Actually, when an Arab fighting unit retreated from one