- In 1948, Israel's Jews were forced into a fight
for survival when the hours-old country was invaded
by its neighboring Arab states immediately
after declaring independence.
Spoiler alert, the Jews won.
And Israel's existence was secured...
for the time being.
But as a result of the war
700,000 Palestinians were suddenly made homeless.
Descendants remember it as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
The prevailing Palestinian narrative of the Nakba
is that Jews, who had no right to Arab land in Palestine
to begin with, expelled Palestinian Arabs using force,
in a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing.
What's the real story?
(gentle serene music)
- I think a lot of the misconception is that Jews decided
after the Holocaust,
"okay, time to all just go to Palestine
"and kick everyone else out."
And that's not what was happening before '48,
there were families like mine
who couldn't go to the United States,
who couldn't go to other places
where, other refugees from Europe had gone
and where they went,
the only place that was safe for them
was the Mandate of Palestine.
That's where Jews had been living.
- Though the long-held dream of Zionism
was jump started by Jewish persecution
in the late 19th century, for Israel's Jews in 1948,
their fight was inseparable
from the shadow of the Holocaust
which ended only three years earlier.
In 1947, the United Nations came up
with the Partition Plan for Palestine.
This was a solution to transition Mandatory Palestine
under British rule into two separate states,
after the withdrawal of British troops.
Partition was hardly ideal for either people,
as both states were left with vulnerabilities,
separated territories, and Jerusalem sacred to Jews,
Muslims and Christians designated as an international zone,
for 10 years.
On the upside, the Jewish people's historical connection
to much of the land would be preserved
and growing nationalism among Palestinian Arabs
would be validated with a Palestinian Arab state.
Revisionist Zionists led by Menachem Begin
were fiercely opposed to a plan they felt diminished
the Biblical Jewish claim of the entirety of the land.
Labor Zionists, led by David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann,
accepted the partition plan, seeing an opportunity
to secure a small piece of the larger Zionist dream.
Arab leadership was outraged.
After two world wars, geopolitics was being reshaped
by the rapid decolonization of the Middle East,
Africa and Asia.
Nationalist Arab leaders rejected the plan,
stating the international community had no right
to distribute any land Arabs considered rightfully theirs.
Arabs launched a new wave of terror attacks on Jews,
attempting to undermine the hope for stability promised
by the partition plan.
Pan-Arabism reached a fever pitch,
and the head of the Arab League,
a coalition of surrounding Arab states,
warned that partition would lead
to a war of annihilation.
- A lot of people here don't know the stories
of Mizrahim as much, because
they haven't been exposedto it in the same way.
My family, my mother's side of the family is,
as I had said before is Israeli,
and I have family who are ethnically cleansed from Yemen
and from Iraq and from Spain as said earlier on.
And they left and went to Israel and a lot of families
came after my family came even as well,
in particularly there comes a huge Moroccan population
in Israel, a huge Syrian population.
- Even in face of these threats, on May 14, 1948,
Israel's provisional government declared
an independent Jewish state,
in line with the U.N. Partition Plan.
The very next morning, seven surrounding armies
invaded newborn Israel.
The remarkable turn of events is still talked about today.
Jews successfully repelled the onslaught
from the jaws of imminent destruction,
but the repercussions of the invasion
on both sides were devastating.
The chaos of war,
along with the scramble to keep civilians safe,
resulted in about 700,000 Arab refugees.
There is scholarly debate over what exactly happened.
Some argue that Arab refugees left out
of intense fear of fighting,
and some argue that they left on orders
from Arab leaders to make way
for strategic military operations.
It is clear, Israelis were directly responsible
for the expulsion of tens of thousands of Arabs.
It was a wartime decision to ensure Arab armies
didn't gain a foothold, in areas where some locals
had provided Arab fighters a base,
to launch attacks on Jewish communities,
since the partition plan was announced six months earlier.
A number of towns and villages were evacuated.
But most notably, between 50 to 60,000 Arab residents
of Lydda and Ramle,
two towns just south of the heart
of Israel's population center in Tel Aviv,
were bused or walked toward the Arab Legions' front lines.
In nearly every neighboring Arab country,
civilian mobs directed their rage at local Jews
committing waves of violence
against Middle Eastern Jewish communities,
some who'd been there for thousands of years.
850,000 Jews were forced out or relocated,
and Israel absorbed nearly 700,000 of them.
- And those families walked by foot.
My family walked by foot to Jerusalem.
There was no we were walking by foot and swimming
across an ocean and going to America,
there was no place for us to go.
And unfortunately I think that
the fact is if Israel
did not exist in the future
and the anti-Zionist succeed and Israel doesn't exist,
there will be no place for a lot of Jews to go
there was no place for all of us to go.
- Israel, whose total population
doubled after the war,
refused to allow back the 700,00 Arabs,
either for demographic reasons or because many supported
the invading Arab armies.
Adding to the tragedy, Palestinian Arabs were denied
absorption into the surrounding Arab states
that now hosted them, becoming forced refugees,
a legal status still in effect for their descendants today.
Israeli leaders believed, that had those Arabs
been allowed to return, Israel would not be able
to be both a Jewish and democratic state,
and it might have a hostile population within its boarders.
The 150,000 Arabs who stayed
now make up 20% of the Israeli population.
For Palestinian Arabs, refugee status,
the inability to return to their homes,
and rejection by their host Arab nations stoked the flames
for bitterness toward the new Jewish state.
In our next episode, we'll see how the Arab situation
fused into a generational hatred 20 years later,
when Israel was threatened with annihilation
by Arab states once again.