User:SlimVirgin/Haifa
The Palestinian-Arab exodus from Haifa began in December 1947, in the wake of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, announced in November that year, which proposed dividing Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The UN decided that Haifa should belong to the proposed Jewish state. The announcement triggered attacks on Arab residents by Jewish militia, and by January 1948, one third of the city's 70,000 Arabs, mostly the wealthy and educated, had left.
The exodus reached its height on April 21 when the city was invaded by the Haganah, the Jewish community's paramilitary force, during what it called Operation Bi'ur Hametz ("cleansing the leaven").[1] Around 15,000 Palestinians fled the city on April 22 in response to the attack, their fears heightened by the Deir Yassin massacre of 107 Arab villagers by two militant Zionist groups, the Irgun and Lehi, just two weeks before.
The Arab flight from Haifa and the Deir Yassin massacre are regarded as two of the pivotal events of the exodus, or what has come to be known as the Nakba.[2]
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Haifa had the second largest Arab community in Palestine. It was viewed as the unofficial north of the country and served as its main seaport. The Haganah had intended to invade the Arab parts of the city located along the seashore and the port—whereas the Jewish neighborhoods were on the slopes of Mount Carmel—once British military forces had left, which they were scheduled to do in mid-May when British rule in Palestine officially ended.[3]
See also
Notes
- ^ Pappe, Ilan (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: OneWorld, p. 60, 94.
- ^ Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press, p. 240.
- ^ Morris, Benny (2008). 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press, p. 140.