In April 1948, the Arab leadership of Haifa announced they wanted to evacuate the city. Not that they were being forced out. Not that they had no choice. They announced it as a decision. The Jewish mayor broke down in tears and begged them not to go. The British commander told them they were making a serious mistake. The Haganah’s chief officer promised full equality and peace to every Arab who stayed. The answer from the Arab Higher Committee in Beirut was evacuation anyway. This is one of the most documented moments of 1948. It is also one of the least told. Before any major military offensive in Haifa, between 25,000 and 30,000 Arabs had already left voluntarily. The fighting hadn’t reached most of their neighborhoods. What had happened was simpler and more damaging: the leadership had left first. British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham documented it in an April 26 telegram, describing the abandonment by Arab municipal officials, military leaders, and the chief Arab magistrate as probably the greatest factor in the collapse of Arab morale in the city. When the people who are supposed to lead a community disappear, the community follows. On April 22, a meeting was held at city hall to discuss a truce. The terms guaranteed full safety and civil rights to any Arab who stayed. Shabtai Levy, the Jewish mayor, broke down and pleaded personally with the Arab delegates, calling evacuation a cruel crime against their own people. The British commander urged them to reconsider. The Haganah promised equality and peace to anyone who remained. The Arab Higher Committee in Beirut said go. What Arab leaders said publicly in the months that followed tells the rest of the story. The Economist reported in October 1948 that the departure was driven primarily by orders from the Higher Arab Executive, and that Arabs who stayed and accepted Jewish protection were being called renegades by their own leadership. Time magazine reported in May 1948 that the evacuation was partly driven by Arab leaders who hoped withdrawing Arab workers would paralyze the city economically. Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, told the Beirut Telegraph in September 1948 that the Arab states had agreed unanimously on the policy that created the refugees and must share in solving the problem. The Jordanian newspaper Falastin wrote in February 1949 that Arab states had encouraged Palestinians to leave temporarily to clear the way for the Arab invasion armies and then failed to help them return. Monsignor George Hakim, the Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, told the New York Herald Tribune in June 1949 that the Arabs of Haifa had fled despite the fact that Jewish authorities had guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens. These aren’t Israeli sources. These are Arab leaders and Arab newspapers, in their own words, from 1948 & 1949. The word Nakba was coined in August 1948 by a Syrian historian named Constantin Zureiq, a professor at the American University of Beirut. He used it to describe the catastrophic failure of seven Arab armies to defeat the newly declared State of Israel. In his own words, he wrote that seven Arab states declared war on Zionism in Palestine, stopped impotent before it, and then turned on their heels. He described Arab leaders whose declarations fell like bombs from their mouths but whose bombs were hollow and empty, causing no damage and killing no one. Zureiq made no mention of Palestinians as victims. He defined the Nakba as a self-inflicted Arab disaster, a failure of Arab leadership, Arab unity & Arab will. That is what the word originally meant. A Syrian intellectual criticizing Arab governments for launching a war they were unprepared to win. Somewhere between 1948 and the 1980s, that meaning was inverted entirely. The word that began as Arab self-criticism became the centerpiece of a narrative in which Arabs were passive victims & Israel was the aggressor Edite. via: Melissa Steinberg Brodsky