Regarding the upcoming Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, there are multiple first hand reliable sources outlined below from Palestinian and Arab leaders outlining how in the 1948 war, Arab states encouraged and/or forced Palestinians to abandon their homes and flee which caused an exodus and led to Palestinians being refugees. But no doubt these sources will not be presented by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in the upcoming Nakba exhibit, which will blame the exodus entirely on the Jews, without acknowledging at all the role of the Arab states. See the first hand sources below:
"The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, THEY ABANDONED THEM, FORCED THEM TO EMIGRATE AND TO LEAVE THEIR HOMELAND, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe, as if we were condemned to change places with them; they moved out of their ghettos and we occupied similar ones. The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the States of the world did so, and this is regrettable".
– by Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the article titled: "What We Have Learned and What We Should Do", published in Falastin el Thawra, the official journal of the PLO, of Beirut, in March 1976
"Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return."
– KHaled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948-49, The Memoirs of Haled al Azm, (Beirut, 1973), Part 1, pp. 386-387
"Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of refugees… while it is we who made them to leave… We brought disaster upon… Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave… We have rendered them dispossessed… We have accustomed them to begging… We have participated in lowering their moral and social level… Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon… men, women and children – all this in service of political purposes…"
– Khaled al Azm, Syria's Prime Minister after the 1948 war [note: same person as above]
"The first group of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere. . . . At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle."
– Ash Shalab (Jaffa newspaper), , 1948
"It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."
– Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, , 1949
"This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country."
– Edward Atiyah (then Secretary of the Arab League Office in London) in The Arabs (London, 1955), p. 183
I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing Partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem, [Daily Telegraph, , 19481
– Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, in the Beirut newspaper, Daily Telegraph, , 1948
The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade. . . . He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean. . . Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.
– Habib Issa, Secretary General of the Arab League (Azzam Pasha's successor), in the newspaper Al Hoda, , 1951
Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals . . . declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestinian Arabs were misled by their declarations…. It was natural for those Palestinian Arabs who felt impelled to leave their country to take refuge in Arab lands . . . and to stay in such adjacent places in order to maintain contact with their country so that to return to it would be easy when, according to the promises of many of those responsible in the Arab countries (promises which were given wastefully), the time was ripe. Many were of the opinion that such an opportunity would come in the hours between sunset and sunrise.
– Arab Higher Committee, in a memorandum to the Arab League, Cairo, 1952, quoted in The Refugee in the World, by Joseph B. Schechtman, 1963
"The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."
– from the Jordan daily Ad Difaa, , 1954
"The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war."
General Glubb Pasha, in the London Daily Mail on , 1948
The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce they rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did."
– Jamal Husseini, Acting Chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, told to the United Nations Security Council, quoted in the UNSC Official Records (N. 62), , 1948, p. 14
In the description below, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights describes the upcoming Nakba exhibit, by indicating that it was "militias and the Israeli military" that expelled Palestinians. There is no acknowledgement anywhere in the description below that Arab States played a role in encouraging/demanding/forcing Palestinians to flee their homes on the basis that the Arab armies would soon defeat the nascent State of Israel in the 1948 war.
Palestinians use the word al-Nakba — Arabic for “the catastrophe” — to describe their forced displacement in 1948. At least 750,000 people were expelled by militias and the Israeli military or fled as the conflicts grew. Most of those who were displaced believed they would return in a few days or weeks.
https://humanrights.ca/exhibition/palestine-uprooted-nakba-past-and-present
