title: Operation Linebacker II

text: In the wake of Operation Linebacker, the U.S. had a force of 207 B-52 bombers available for use in Southeast Asia. A total of 54 bombers (all B-52Ds) were based at U-Tapao RTAFB, Thailand, while 153 were based at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam (55 B-52Ds and 98 B-52Gs). This deployment comprised nearly half of the Air Force's manned bomber fleet, and Strategic Air Command (SAC) commanders were initially reluctant to risk the expensive aircraft and their highly trained crews in such an operation; the production line for B-52s had long since been shut down, and losses could not be replaced. The use of large numbers of B-52s was unprecedented in the war and the proposed mass attacks on targets within of Hanoi "represented a dynamic change in the employment of air resources".


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The new operation, given the title Linebacker II, was marked by top-down planning by the SAC headquarters at Offutt AFB. Due to the restrictive time frame imposed by President Nixon (only three days) and the experience of Linebacker (in which North Vietnamese fighter aircraft had posed the highest threat to the bombers), SAC's plan called for all of the bombers to approach Hanoi at night in three waves, each using identical approach paths and flying at the same altitude.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: Once the aircraft had dropped their bombs, they were to execute what SAC termed "post-target turns" (PTT) to the west. These turns had two unfortunate consequences for the bombers: the B-52s would be turning into a strong headwind, slowing their ground speed by and prolonging their stay in the target area and the PTT would point the emitter antennas of their Electronic Warfare (EW) systems away from the radars they were attempting to jam, degrading the effectiveness of the cells, as well as showing the largest radar cross-section to the missile guidance radars. The aircraft employed had significantly different EW capabilities; the B-52G carried fewer jammers and put out appreciably less power than the B-52Ds but had more efficient engines and larger fuel tanks, hence they were assigned to longer range mission routes.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: At the start of Linebacker II, the air defense missile forces of the Vietnamese People's Army had 36 air defense missile battalions armed with the S-75M Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) missile system; probably half were involved in this operation. The SA-2 system was first fielded in 1957 and was a fairly obsolete and cumbersome system by 1972 standards. The VPAF had only 71 operational aircraft. Of these, only 47 aircraft (31 MiG-21s and 16 MiG-17s) could be used for air combat. The MiG-19s were made in China and were not used in combat. Only 13 MiG-21 pilots and five MiG-17 pilots were trained for individual night flight in normal and flying in difficult meteorological conditions. Of 194 pilots, 75 (about 40 percent) were young.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The first three missions of the operation were flown as planned by SAC on three consecutive nights beginning on 18 December 1972. On the first night 129 bombers took off, 87 of them from Guam. 39 support aircraft of the Seventh Air Force, the Navy's Task Force 77 and the Marine Corps supported the bombers by providing F-4 fighter escorts, F-105 Wild Weasel SAM-suppression missions, Air Force EB-66 and Navy EA-6 radar-jamming aircraft, chaff drops, KC-135 refueling aircraft and search and rescue aircraft; the skies were dominated by American airpower to ensure the safety of the aircraft involved in the operation. One B-52 bomber pilot flying out of Guam recalled "We took off one airplane a minute out of Guam for hours. Just on time takeoff after on time takeoff."


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The targets of the first wave of bombers were the North Vietnamese airfields at Kép, Phúc Yên and Hòa Lạc and a warehouse complex at Yên Viên while the second and third waves struck targets around Hanoi. Three aircraft were shot down by the 68 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) launched by North Vietnamese batteries, two B-52Gs from Andersen and a B-52D from U-Tapao. Two D models from Andersen with heavy battle damage managed to limp into U-Tapao for repairs. Only one of the three downed crews could be rescued. That same evening, an Air Force F-111 Aardvark was shot down while on a mission to bomb the broadcasting facilities of Radio Hanoi. Unlike Linebacker, which had been launched in response to a North Vietnamese offensive in South Vietnam, President Nixon did not address the nation on television to explain the escalation. Instead, Kissinger held a press conference at which he accused (at Nixon's behest) Le Duc Tho of having "backed off" on some of the October understandings.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: On the second night, 93 sorties were flown by the bombers. Their targets included the Kinh No Railroad and storage area, the Thái Nguyên thermal power plant, and the Yên Viên complex. Although 20 SAMs were launched and a number of the bombers were damaged, none were lost on the mission. SAC expected that the third (and supposedly last) night of the operation would proceed just as well as the previous one. The targets of the 99 bombers sent in on 20 December included the Yên Viên railyards, the Ai Mo warehouse complex, the Thái Nguyên power plant, a transshipment point at Bắc Giang, the Kinh No Railroad complex and the Hanoi petroleum products storage area—all in or near Hanoi. The combination of repetitive tactics, degraded EW systems and limited jamming capability led to dire consequences when, as the official Air Force history of the campaign has stated, "all hell broke loose."


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The repetitious nature of the previous evening's strike profiles had allowed North Vietnamese air defense forces to anticipate strike patterns and to salvo 34 missiles into the target area. Four B-52Gs and three B-52Ds were lost in the first and third waves of the mission. A fourth D model, returning to Thailand, crashed in Laos. Only two of the eight downed crews were recovered by search and rescue aircraft. The repercussions from the mission were fast and furious. SAC headquarters was under pressure from "many external sources" to "stop the carnage ... it has become a blood bath". Of more concern was the position taken by many senior Air Force officers that they "would lose too many bombers and that airpower doctrine would be proven fallacious ... or, if the bombing were stopped, the same thing would occur".


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The main problem seemed to lie within the headquarters of SAC, which had based its tactics on a MiG threat that had not materialized during the three missions. The tactics (flight paths, altitudes, formations, timing, etc.) had not varied. The Air Force explanation for this course of events was that the similarity would be helpful to the B-52 crews, who were inexperienced in flying in such high-threat environments. Air Force historian Earl Tilford offered a differing opinion: "Years of dropping bombs on undefended jungle and the routines of planning for nuclear war had fostered a mind-set within the SAC command that nearly led to disaster ... Poor tactics and a good dose of overconfidence combined to make the first few nights of Linebacker nightmarish for the B-52 crews." During the operation the USAF depended almost entirely on the Ryan Model 147 Buffalo Hunter AQM-34L/M unmanned aerial vehicles for bomb damage assessment due to bad weather.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: It was at this point that President Nixon ordered that the effort be extended past its original three-day deadline. The first change that could be made by local Air Force commanders was divulged by a comparison of the differences between the radar jamming equipment of the B-52 models. The equipment aboard the G models was designed for use in the more sophisticated air defense environment of the Soviet Union, not against the more antiquated SA-2 and Fan Song radar systems used by the North Vietnamese. SAC headquarters stipulated that only the aircraft stationed at U-Tapao (equipped with more powerful and sophisticated ECM gear) be allowed over the North. On the fourth night (21 December) of the operation, 30 of the U-Tapao bombers struck the Hanoi storage area, the Văn Điển storage depot, and Quang Te Airfield. Two more of the D models were lost to Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs). On the following night, the target area shifted away from Hanoi to the port city of Haiphong and its petroleum storage areas. Once again, 30 aircraft participated in the strikes, but this time there were no losses among the bombers. An F-111 was shot down over the Kinh No Railroad complex.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: On the 22nd, a wing of the Bach Mai Hospital, located in the southern suburbs of Hanoi, was struck by a stick of bombs from a B-52. The US military claimed that the hospital "frequently housed anti-aircraft positions." The civilian deaths were criticized by the North Vietnamese and U.S. peace activists. The hospital sat 1 kilometer from the runway of Bach Mai Airfield and a major fuel storage facility was only away. While the patients of the hospital wing had been evacuated from the city, 28 doctors, nurses and pharmacists were killed. Two days before Christmas, SAC added SAM sites and airfields to the target list. Air Force F-111s were sent in before the bombers to strike the airfields and reduce the threat of enemy fighters. The F-111s proved so successful in these operations that their mission for the rest of the campaign was shifted to SAM site suppression.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The bomber missions of the sixth night (23 December) again avoided Hanoi and hit SAM sites northeast of the city and the Lang Dang Railroad yards. There were no losses. On the following night, the run of American good luck (and avoidance of Hanoi) continued. Thirty bombers, supported by 69 tactical aircraft, struck the railyards at Thái Nguyên and Kép and no American aircraft were lost during the mission. Although the B-52s got most of the publicity during the campaign, the tactical aircraft were also hard at work. While the B-52s and F-111s attacked by night, an average of 69 tactical aircraft of the Air Force, Navy and Marines attacked by day (averaging nearly 100 sorties per day). Losses for these aircraft were extremely light, with fewer than a dozen lost during the entire campaign. It was not difficult for their crews to deduce why. The North Vietnamese air defense forces "simply waited for nightfall and the arrival of more lucrative targets."


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The strikes of 24 December were followed by a 36-hour Christmas stand-down, during which Air Force planners went to work to revise their plans for the next phase of operations. Due to aircraft losses during the initial phase, they intended to launch an all-out attack on North Vietnam's air defenses when the operation resumed. This course was also necessary since, by Christmas, most of the strategic targets within North Vietnam were a shambles. SAC also belatedly turned over tactical mission planning to its subordinate Eighth Air Force headquarters on Guam, which promptly revised the tactics. Instead of using waves, all of the bombers would be in and out of the target area within 20 minutes and they would approach from different directions and at different altitudes. They would exit by varying routes and the steep PTTs were eliminated. Ten targets, in the Hanoi and Haiphong areas were to be struck by bombers approaching in seven streams, four of which were to come in off the Gulf of Tonkin.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: On 26 December 120 bombers lifted off to strike Thái Nguyên, the Kinh No complex, the Duc Noi, Hanoi, and Haiphong Railroads and a vehicle storage area at Văn Điển. 78 of the bombers took off from Andersen AFB in one time block, the largest single combat launch in SAC history, while 42 others came in from Thailand. The bombers were supported by 113 tactical aircraft which provided chaff corridors, escort fighters, Wild Weasel SAM suppression and electronic countermeasures support. The North Vietnamese air defense system was overwhelmed by the number of aircraft it had to track in such a short time and by a dense blanket of chaff laid down by the fighter-bombers. 250 SAMs had been fired from 18 until 24 December and the strain on the remaining North Vietnamese inventory showed, since only 68 were fired during the mission. One B-52 was shot down near Hanoi and another damaged aircraft made it back to U-Tapao, where it crashed just short of the runway. Only two members of the crew survived.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: On the following night, 60 bombers flew, with some attacking SAM sites while others struck Lang Dang, Duc Noi, the Trung Quang Railroad and Văn Điển. One B-52 was so heavily damaged that its crew ejected over Laos, where it was rescued. A second aircraft was not so lucky. It took a direct hit and went down while attacking the Trung Quang Railroad yards. During the evening's operations two F-4s and an HH-53 search and rescue helicopter were also shot down. Day ten (28 December) called for strikes by 60 B-52s–15 Gs and 15 Ds from Andersen and 30 Ds from U-Tapao, The aircraft formed six waves attacking five targets. Four of the waves struck targets in the Hanoi area (including SAM Support Facility #58), while the fifth hit the Lang Dang Railroad yards southwest of Lạng Sơn, a major choke-point on the supply route from the People's Republic of China. No aircraft were lost on the mission. By the eleventh day (29 December), there were few strategic targets worthy of mention left within North Vietnam. There were two SAM storage areas at Phúc Yên and the Lang Dang yards that could be profitably attacked. A total of 60 aircraft again made the trip North but the mix was altered; U-Tapao again provided 30 D models but the Andersen force was varied, putting 12 G models and 18 Ds over the North. Total bombing was rounded out by sending 30 G models on Arc Light missions in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: On 22 December, Washington asked Hanoi to return to the talks with the terms offered in October. On 26 December, Hanoi notified Washington that it was willing to "impress upon Nixon that the bombing was not the reason for this decision, the VWP Politburo told Nixon that halting the bombing was not a precondition for further talks". Nixon replied that he wanted the technical discussions to resume on 2 January and that he would halt the bombing if Hanoi agreed. They did so and Nixon suspended aerial operations north of the 20th parallel on 30 December. He then informed Kissinger to agree to the terms offered in October, if that was what it took to get the agreement signed. Senator Henry Jackson (D, Wash.), tried to persuade Nixon to make a televised address to explain to the American people that "we bombed them in order to get them back to the table." It would have been extremely difficult to get informed observers in the U.S. to believe that he "had bombed Hanoi in order to force North Vietnamese acceptance of terms they had already agreed to".


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: Now the only stumbling block on the road to an agreement was President Thieu. Nixon tried to placate him by writing on 5 January that "you have my assurance of continued assistance in the post-settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam." By this time, due to congressional opposition, Nixon was in no position to make such a promise, since the possibility of obtaining the requisite congressional appropriations was nil. The South Vietnamese president still refused to agree. On 14 January Nixon made his most serious threat: "I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the agreement on 23 January 1973… I will do so, if necessary, alone".


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: On 9 January, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho returned to Paris. The agreement struck between the U.S. and North Vietnam was basically the same one that had been reached in October. The additional demands that had been made by the U.S. in December were generally discarded or went against the U.S. John Negroponte, one of Kissinger's aides during the negotiations, was more caustic: "[w]e bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions." The DMZ was defined as provided for in the Geneva Accords of 1954, and would in no way be recognized as an international boundary. The demanded withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam was not mentioned at all in the text of the agreement. Kissinger did obtain a "verbal agreement" from Tho for a token withdrawal of 30,000 North Vietnamese troops. One very important point to the negotiations was achieved by the United States. For the entirety of the war, North Vietnam had refused to recognize the South Vietnamese government as legitimate. On this point, the North finally agreed officially to recognize their southern counterpart as a legitimate government.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The demand for an inclusive, Indochina-wide cease-fire was simply discarded in the written agreement. Once again, Kissinger had to be satisfied with a "verbal understanding" that a cease-fire would be instituted in Laos simultaneous with or shortly following that in South Vietnam. An agreement on Cambodia (where the North Vietnamese had no influence over the Khmer Rouge) was out of the question. The size of the ICCS was finally decided by splitting the difference in the number demanded by both parties at 1,160 personnel. The Paris Peace Accords were signed at the Majestic Hotel in Paris on 27 January 1973.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: During Operation Linebacker II, 741 B-52 sorties were dispatched to bomb North Vietnam; 729 completed their missions. B-52s dropped 15,237 tons of ordnance on 18 industrial and 14 military targets (including eight SAM sites) while fighter-bombers added another 5,000 tons of bombs to the tally. Another 212 B-52 missions were flown within South Vietnam in support of ground operations during the campaign. Ten B-52s were shot down over the North and five others were damaged and crashed in Laos or Thailand. Thirty-three B-52 crew members were killed or missing in action, another 33 became prisoners of war, and 26 more were rescued.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: Over 11 days, North Vietnamese air defenses fired 266 SA-2 missiles downing—according to North Vietnam—34 B-52s and four F-111s. While warding off the massive strike by U.S strategic, tactical and carrier aviation, the North Vietnamese missile air defense forces conducted over 180 engagements, two-thirds of which were against B-52s. North Vietnamese claims of aircraft destroyed or shot down differ greatly from US official records. In Marshall Michel's 2002 book "The 11 Days of Christmas: America's Last Vietnam Battle", the author uses mission records to confirm that "15 B-52s were shot down… 10 crashed 'on the spot' in North Vietnam and 5 were able to move out of the Hanoi area and into Laos or Thailand before they crashed". North Vietnam claimed 36 aircraft destroyed (31 B-52s and 5 tactical aircraft) with the expenditure of 244 missiles against the B-52s and 22 missiles against tactical aircraft, or 7.9 missiles for every B-52 aircraft shot down, or 4.4 missiles for every tactical aircraft shot down. During the offensive, they initially overcame various types of interference and obstacles employed by the U.S aircraft to interrupt missile engagement. In the latter stages of the bombing campaign, due to a change in tactics, B-52 losses decreased significantly. By the last night of the campaign, no losses were reported. During the 11 days of Operation Linebacker, the B-52s flew 795 sorties with a loss rate of 2.63 percent (15 were shot down and five others were heavily damaged)


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The Air Force flew 769 sorties and 505 were flown by the Navy and Marine Corps in support of the bombers. Twelve of these aircraft were lost on the missions (two F-111s, three F-4s, two A-7s, two A-6s, an EB-66, an HH-53 rescue helicopter and an RA-5C reconnaissance aircraft). During these operations, ten American aviators were killed, eight captured and 11 rescued. US Air Force losses included fifteen B-52s, two F-4s, two F-111s, one EB-66 and one HH-53 search-and-rescue helicopter. Navy losses included two A-7s, two A-6s, one RA-5 and one F-4. Seventeen of these losses were attributed to SA-2 missiles, three to daytime MiG attacks, three to antiaircraft artillery and four to unknown causes. U.S. forces claimed eight MiGs were shot down during the operation, including two by B-52 tail gunners. The two B-52 tail gunner kills were not confirmed by VPAF, and they admitted to the loss of only three MiGs.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: According to Dana Drenkowski and Lester W. Grau, the number of aircraft lost by the USAF is unconfirmed since the USAF figures are also suspect. If a plane was badly damaged but managed to land, the USAF did not count as a loss, even if it was a write-off. During the operation, the USAF told the press that 17 B-52s were lost but later, the USAF told Congress that only 13 B-52s were lost. Nine B-52s that returned to U-Tapao airfield were too badly damaged to fly again. The number of B-52s that managed to return to Guam but were combat losses remains unknown. The overall B-52 loss is probably between 22 and 27.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: During this operation, the VPAF launched 31 air sorties of which 27 were flown by MiG-21s and four were flown by MiG-17s. They conducted eight aerial engagements and claimed two B-52s, four F-4s and one RA-5C shot down. Their losses were three MiG-21s. Two B-52s were claimed by North Vietnamese MiG-21 fighter pilots; both incidents were attributed to SAMs by the U.S. The raids inflicted severe damage to North Vietnam's infrastructure. The Air Force estimated the bombs caused 500 rail interdictions, destroyed 372 pieces of rolling stock and of petroleum products and eliminated 80 percent of North Vietnam's electrical power production capability. Logistical imports into North Vietnam, assessed by U.S. intelligence at 160,000 tons per month when the operation began, had dropped by January 1973, to 30,000 tons per month. The raids did not break the stalemate in the South, nor halt the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail..


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: According to official North Vietnamese sources the bombing campaign killed 1,624 civilians, including 306 in Haiphong and 1,328 in Hanoi. The book "Hanoi – The airial Dien Bien Phu" from the "People's Army Publishing House" gives a death toll of 2,368 civilians killed and 1,355 others injured. The book states that many neighborhoods and villages were destroyed, 5,480 houses and nearly 100 other buildings including factories, schools, hospitals, and stations were destroyed. By December 20, 1972, there were 215 dead and 325 injured in Hanoi. In Hai Phong alone on December 18, 45 people were killed, 131 people were injured. Kham Thien Street, Hanoi was attacked on the night of December 26, 1972, killing 278 people, including 91 women, 40 old people, and 55 children. 178 children were orphaned in Kham Thien Street and 290 people were injured, 2,000 houses, schools, temples, theaters, and clinics collapsed, of which 534 houses were completely destroyed.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: House 51 on Kham Thien Street was completely blown into a crater and the seven people living there were killed. This area has been converted into a memorial with a stele bearing the words "Khâm Thiên forever holds its bitter grievance against American imperialists" and a bronze statue of a woman holding a child who died from an American bomb was based on the owner of the destroyed house. On the anniversary of the bombing each year, people living on the street and other places come to the memorial to burn incense sticks to commemorate those who died from American airstrikes. In the courtyard of Bạch Mai Hospital, there is a stele bearing the word "Hatred" to remember the bombing of the hospital on December 22, which killed 1 patient and 30 nurses and doctors. At the time of the bombing, most doctors and patients had already been evacuated. Each department had only a few people on duty and approximately 300 patients had taken cover in the basement.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The North Vietnamese government reported that the U.S. had "carpet-bombed hospitals, schools, and residential areas, committing barbarous crimes against our people", citing the bombing of Bach Mai Hospital on 22 December and Kham Thien street on 26 December which they claimed had killed 278, wounded 290 and destroyed more than 2,000 homes.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: Both the Soviet Union and China denounced the bombing, while some Western countries also criticized the US operation. In a famous speech, Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, compared the bombings to a number of historical crimes including the bombing of Guernica, the massacres of Oradour-sur-glane, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice and Sharpeville and the extermination of Jews and other groups at Treblinka. He said that "now another name can be added to this list: Hanoi, Christmas 1972". In response to his protests, the U.S. withdrew their ambassador from Sweden and told Stockholm not to send a new ambassador to Washington.


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: The new Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, whose country had pushed America to expand the war, angered the Nixon administration by criticizing the bombings in a letter to the U.S. President, chilling United States–Australia relations until Whitlam's dismissal in 1975. In the U.S., Nixon was criticized as a "madman", and some of the people who supported Operation Linebacker I, questioned the necessity and unusual intensity of Operation Linebacker II. Newspaper headlines included: ""Genocide"", ""Stone-Age Barbarism"" and ""Savage and Senseless"". The USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) made some serious mistakes, suffered serious losses and their campaign came close to failure, yet after the war they launched a massive media and public relations blitz (and internal witch hunt) to prove that Linebacker II was an unqualified success that unfolded as planned. US officials claimed that the operation had succeeded in forcing North Vietnam's Politburo to return to negotiating, citing the Paris Peace Accords signed shortly after the operation. Much of the American public had the impression that North Vietnam had been "bombed into submission".


title: Operation Linebacker II

text: In Paris, the North Vietnamese refused to change the terms they had agreed to in the October 1972 agreement. When South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu objected to the terms, Nixon threatened to depose him like Ngo Dinh Diem. In January 1973, the U.S. signed the agreement as the Paris Peace Accords. The main effect of the accord was to usher the United States out of the war. Journalist Bob Woodward later wrote that Richard Nixon thought, prior to Operation Linebacker II, that previous bombing campaigns against North Vietnam had achieved "zilch". Woodward wrote that in early 1972 Nixon wrote a note to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, which said there was "something wrong" with the way the strategy was being carried out. Other notes, written at the same time, show that Nixon was frustrated with the resistance of the North Vietnamese and wanted to punish them, in an effort to "go for broke". John Negroponte, in the 2017 documentary "The Vietnam War", was disdainful of the attack's value, stating "[w]e bombed them into accepting our concessions."


title: Preta

text: Preta (, "yi dags"), also known as hungry ghost, is the Sanskrit name for a type of supernatural being described in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religion as undergoing suffering greater than that of humans, particularly an extreme level of hunger and thirst. They have their origins in Indian religions and have been adopted into East Asian religions via the spread of Buddhism. Preta is often translated into English as "hungry ghost" from the Chinese and East Asian adaptations. In early sources such as the "Petavatthu", they are much more varied. The descriptions below apply mainly in this narrower context. The development of the concept of the preta started with just thinking that it was the soul and ghost of a person once they died, but later the concept developed into a transient state between death and obtaining karmic reincarnation in accordance with the person's fate. In order to pass into the cycle of karmic reincarnation, the deceased's family must engage in a variety of rituals and offerings to guide the suffering spirit into its next life. If the family does not engage in these funerary rites, which last for one year, the soul could remain suffering as a preta for the rest of eternity.


title: Preta

text: Pretas are believed to have been false, corrupted, compulsive, deceitful, jealous or greedy people in a previous life. As a result of their karma, they are afflicted with an insatiable hunger for a particular substance or object. Traditionally, this is something repugnant or humiliating, such as cadavers or feces, though in more recent stories, it can be anything, however bizarre. In addition to having insatiable hunger for an aversive item, pretas are said to have disturbing visions. Pretas and human beings occupy the same physical space and while humans looking at a river would see clear water, pretas see the same river flowing with an aversive substance, common examples of such visions include pus and filth.


title: Preta

text: Through the belief and influence of Hinduism and Buddhism in much of Asia, "preta" figure appear prominently in the cultures of India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.


title: Preta

text: The Sanskrit term "preta" means "departed, deceased, a dead person", from "pra-ita", literally "gone forth, departed".


title: Preta

text: In Classical Sanskrit, the term refers to the spirit of any dead person, but especially before the obsequial rites are performed,


title: Preta

text: The Chinese term "egui" (), literally "starving ghost", is thus not a literal translation of the Sanskrit term.


title: Preta

text: Pretas are invisible to the human eye, but some believe they can be discerned by humans in certain mental states. They are described as human-like, but with sunken, mummified skin, narrow limbs, enormously distended bellies and long, thin necks. This appearance is a metaphor for their mental situation: they have enormous appetites, signified by their gigantic bellies, but a very limited ability to satisfy those appetites, symbolized by their slender necks.


title: Preta

text: Pretas are often depicted in Japanese art (particularly that from the Heian period) as emaciated human beings with bulging stomachs and inhumanly small mouths and throats. They are frequently shown licking up spilled water in temples or accompanied by demons representing their personal agony. Otherwise they may be shown as balls of smoke or fire.


title: Preta

text: In Cambodia, a special female "preta" is known as a "grák," a malevolent spirit believed to be the spirit of a corrupt old woman named Yey Plang (យាយប្លង់) who was in charge of preparing food for the royal family and for monks in temples near the royal palace during the reign of King Monivong between 1927 and 1941.


title: Preta

text: Pretas dwell in the waste and desert places of the earth, and vary in situation according to their past karma. Some of them can eat a little, but find it very difficult to find food or drink. Others can find food and drink, but find it very difficult to swallow. Others find that the food they eat seems to burst into flames as they swallow it. Others see something edible or drinkable and desire it but it withers or dries up before their eyes. As a result, they are always hungry.


title: Preta

text: In addition to hunger, pretas suffer from immoderate heat and cold; they find that even the moon scorches them in the summer, while the sun freezes them in the winter.


title: Preta

text: The types of suffering are specified into two main types of pretas, those that live collectively, and those that travel through space. Of the former, there are three subtypes, the first being pretas who suffer from external obscurations. These pretas suffer constant hunger, thirst or temperature insensitivity. The second type of pretas are those who suffer from internal obscurations, who have small mouths and large stomachs. Often, their mouths are so small that they cannot eat enough food to fill the large space in their stomachs and thus remain constantly hungry. The last of the three subtypes are pretas that suffer from specific obscurations like creatures who live on and eat their bodies. The other broad category of pretas that travel through time and space are always scared and have a tendency to inflict pain on others.


title: Preta

text: The sufferings of the pretas often resemble those of the dwellers in hell, and the two types of being are easily confused. The simplest distinction is that beings in hell are confined to their subterranean world, while pretas are free to move about.


title: Preta

text: Pretas are generally seen as little more than nuisances to mortals unless their longing is directed toward something vital, such as blood or flesh. However, in some traditions, pretas try to prevent others from satisfying their own desires by means of magic, illusions, or disguises. They can also turn invisible or change their faces to frighten mortals.


title: Preta

text: Generally, however, pretas are seen as beings to be pitied. Thus, in some Buddhist monasteries, monks leave offerings of foods, beverages, incenses, lights, fruits or flowers to them before meals.


title: Preta

text: In addition, there are many festivals around Asia that commemorate the importance of hungry ghosts or pretas and such festivals exist in Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well as Chinese Taoist tradition. Countries such as China, Cambodia, Tibet, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia engage in hungry ghost festivals, and in China this is usually on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month according to their calendar. Many rituals involve burning symbolized material possessions, such as joss paper (in the form of money, clothes, gadgets, transportation, estates, accommodation, luxuries, etc) thus linking the concept of the preta with the deceased's materialism in their lifetime. Though many pretas or hungry ghosts cling to their material possessions during their human lifetime, some other ghosts represented in the festivals long for their loved ones during their human life. During the festivals, people give offerings to the spirits and hope for blessings from their ancestors in return. Thus, the hungry ghost festivals commemorating the pretas are a natural part of some Asian cultures and are not limited to only Hindu or Buddhist belief systems.


title: Preta

text: In Hinduism pretas are very real beings. They are a form, a body consisting only of "vāyu" (air) and "akaśa" (aether), two of the five great elements (classical elements) which constitutes a body on Earth (others being "prithvī" [earth], jala [water] and agni [fire]). There are other forms as per the karma or "actions" of previous lives where a soul takes birth in humanoid bodies with the absence of one to three elements. In Hinduism an Atma or soul/spirit is bound to take rebirth after death in a body composed of five or more elements. A soul in transient mode is pure and its existence is comparable to that of a deva (god) but in the last form of physical birth. The elements except "akaśa" as defined is the common constituent throughout the universe and the remaining four are common to the properties of the planets, stars and afterlife places such as the underworld. This is the reason that Pretas cannot eat or drink as the rest of the three elements are missing and no digestion or physical intake is possible for them.


title: Preta

text: Pretas are crucial elements of Hindu culture, and there are a variety of very specific funerary rituals that the mourning family must engage in to guide the deceased spirit into its next cycle of karmic rebirth. Rice balls, which are said to symbolize the body of the deceased, are offered from the mourning family to the preta whose spirit is often symbolized by a clay mound somewhere in the house. These rice balls are offered in three sets of 16 over one year, which is the amount of time it takes for a preta to complete its transformation into its next phase of life. The rice balls are offered to the preta because in this transient state between cremation and rebirth, the preta is said to undergo intense physical suffering. The three stages are the impure sixteen, the middle sixteen and the highest sixteen that occur over the course of the mourning period. After the physical body of the deceased is cremated, the first six rice balls are offered to ghosts in general, while the next ten are offered specifically to the preta or the spirit of the person who just died. These ten rice balls are said to help the preta form its new body which is now the length of a forearm. During the second stage, sixteen rice balls are offered to the preta, as through each stage of grief it is believed that pretas become even hungrier. At the last and final stage, the preta is said to have a new body, four rice balls are offered and five spiritual leaders of Brahmans are fed so that they can symbolize digesting the sins of the deceased during their life.


title: Preta

text: While there are specific steps that guide the preta into its new life, during the mourning process, the deceased's family must undergo a series of restrictions to assist the preta and ease its suffering. In Indian cultures, food and digestion is symbolic as it separates the food essential for digestion from the waste products, and thus the same logic is applied to sins of the deceased in their living relatives eating and digesting the symbolic rice balls. In engaging in these rituals, the chief mourner of the deceased individual is the symbolic representation of the spirit or preta. During the period of mourning, the chief mourner can only eat one meal a day for the first eleven days following the death, and also not sleep on a bed, engage in sexual activity or any personal grooming or hygiene practices.


title: Preta

text: In general in Buddhist tradition, a preta is considered one of the six forms of existence (Gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts and hell beings) once a person dies and is reborn.


title: Preta

text: In Japan, preta is translated as "gaki" (, "hungry ghost"), a borrowing from Middle Chinese "nga kjwɨj" (, "hungry ghost").


title: Preta

text: Since 657, some Japanese Buddhists have observed a special day in mid-August to remember the "gaki". Through such offerings and remembrances ("segaki"), it is believed that the hungry ghosts may be released from their torment.


title: Preta

text: In Thailand, "pret" () are hungry ghosts of the Buddhist tradition that have become part of the Thai folklore, but are described as being abnormally tall, and can emit very high-pitched sound with its tiny mouth, which could be heard only by a monk or a shaman. Many elders often tell their child not to swear or tell bad things at their parents, otherwise they will become Pret afterlife.


title: Preta

text: In Sri Lankan culture, like in other Asian cultures, people are reborn as "preta" ("peréthaya") if they desired too much in their life where their large stomachs can never be fulfilled because they have a small mouth.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In 1948 more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Palestine's Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. The exodus was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba, in which between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed, village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme to prevent Palestinians returning, and other sites subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names, and also refers to the wider period of war itself and the subsequent oppression up to the present day.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The precise number of refugees, many of whom settled in refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes. About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a "casus belli" for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The causes are also a subject of fundamental disagreement among historians. Factors involved in the exodus include Jewish military advances, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare, fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused many to leave out of panic, direct expulsion orders by Israeli authorities, the demoralizing impact of wealthier classes fleeing, the typhoid epidemic in some areas caused by Israeli well-poisoning, collapse in Palestinian leadership and Arab evacuation orders, and an unwillingness to live under Jewish control.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Later, a series of laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees. The expulsion of the Palestinians has since been described by some historians as ethnic cleansing, while others dispute this charge. Nevertheless, the existence of Law of Return allowing for immigration and naturalization of any Jewish person and their family to Israel, while Palestinian right of return has been denied, has been cited as an evidence for the charges of Apartheid against the State of Israel.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The status of the refugees, and in particular whether Israel will allow them the right to return to their homes, or compensate them, are key issues in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The events of 1948 are commemorated by Palestinians both in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere on 15 May, a date known as Nakba Day.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The history of the Palestinian exodus is closely tied to the events of the war in Palestine, which lasted from 1947 to 1949, and to the political events preceding it. In September 1949, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated 711,000 Palestinian refugees existed outside Israel, with about one-quarter of the estimated 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remaining in Israel as "internal refugees".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In the first few months of the civil war, the climate in the Mandate of Palestine became volatile, although throughout this period both Arab and Jewish leaders tried to limit hostilities. According to historian Benny Morris, the period was marked by Palestinian Arab attacks and Jewish defensiveness, increasingly punctuated by Jewish reprisals. Simha Flapan wrote that attacks by the Irgun and Lehi resulted in Palestinian Arab retaliation and condemnation. Jewish reprisal operations were directed against villages and neighborhoods from which attacks against Jews were believed to have originated.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The retaliations were more damaging than the provoking attack and included killing of armed and unarmed men, destruction of houses and sometimes expulsion of inhabitants. The Zionist groups of Irgun and Lehi reverted to their 1937–1939 strategy of indiscriminate attacks by placing bombs and throwing grenades into crowded places such as bus stops, shopping centres and markets. Their attacks on British forces reduced British troops' ability and willingness to protect Jewish traffic. General conditions deteriorated: the economic situation became unstable, and unemployment grew. Rumours spread that the Husaynis were planning to bring in bands of "fellahin" (peasant farmers) to take over the towns. Some Palestinian Arab leaders sent their families abroad.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Yoav Gelber wrote that the Arab Liberation Army embarked on a systematic evacuation of non-combatants from several frontier villages in order to turn them into military strongholds. Arab depopulation occurred most in villages close to Jewish settlements and in vulnerable neighborhoods in Haifa, Jaffa and West Jerusalem. The more impoverished inhabitants of these neighborhoods generally fled to other parts of the city. Those who could afford to fled further away, expecting to return when the troubles were over. By the end of March 1948 thirty villages were depopulated of their Palestinian Arab population. Approximately 100,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled to Arab parts of Palestine, such as Gaza, Beersheba, Haifa, Nazareth, Nablus, Jaffa and Bethlehem.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Some had left the country altogether, to Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Other sources speak of 30,000 Palestinian Arabs. Many of these were Palestinian Arab leaders, middle and upper-class Palestinian Arab families from urban areas. Around 22 March, the Arab governments agreed that their consulates in Palestine would issue entry visas only to old people, women, children and the sick. On 29–30 March the Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) reported that "the AHC was no longer approving exit permits for fear of [causing] panic in the country."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The Haganah was instructed to avoid spreading the conflagration by stopping indiscriminate attacks and provoking British intervention.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: On 18 December 1947 the Haganah approved an aggressive defense strategy, which in practice meant a limited implementation of "Plan May" also known as "Plan Gimel" or "Plan C" ("Tochnit Mai" or "Tochnit Gimel"), which, produced in May 1946, was the Haganah master plan for the defence of the Yishuv in the event of the outbreak of new troubles the moment the British were gone. Plan Gimel included retaliation for assaults on Jewish houses and roads.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In early January the Haganah adopted Operation Zarzir, a scheme to assassinate leaders affiliated to Amin al-Husayni, placing the blame on other Arab leaders, but in practice few resources were devoted to the project and the only attempted killing was of Nimr al Khatib.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The only authorised expulsion at this time took place at Qisarya, south of Haifa, where Palestinian Arabs were evicted and their houses destroyed on 19–20 February 1948. In attacks that were not authorised in advance, several communities were expelled by the Haganah and several others were chased away by the Irgun.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Ilan Pappé, the Zionists organised a campaign of threats, consisting of the distribution of threatening leaflets, "violent reconnaissance" and, after the arrival of mortars, the shelling of Arab villages and neighborhoods. Pappé also wrote that the Haganah shifted its policy from retaliation to offensive initiatives.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: During the "long seminar", a meeting of Ben-Gurion with his chief advisors in January 1948, the main point was that it was desirable to "transfer" as many Arabs as possible out of Jewish territory, and the discussion focussed mainly on the implementation. The experience gained in a number of attacks in February 1948, notably those on Qisarya and Sa'sa', was used in the development of a plan detailing how enemy population centers should be handled. According to Pappé, plan Dalet was the master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians.. However, according to Gelber, Plan Dalet instructions were: In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled outside the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was met, the residents could stay put, under military rule.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Palestinian belligerency in these first few months was "disorganised, sporadic and localised and for months remained chaotic and uncoordinated, if not undirected". Husayni lacked the resources to mount a full-scale assault on the Yishuv, and restricted himself to sanctioning minor attacks and to tightening the economic boycott. The British claimed that Arab rioting might well have subsided had the Jews not retaliated with firearms.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Overall, Morris concludes that during this period the "Arab evacuees from the towns and villages left largely because of Jewish—Haganah, IZL or LHI—attacks or fear of impending attack" but that only "an extremely small, almost insignificant number of the refugees during this early period left because of Haganah or IZL or LHI expulsion orders or forceful 'advice' to that effect." In this sense, Glazer quotes the testimony of Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, who reported that "the exodus of the Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. Almost the whole of the Arab population fled or was expelled from the area under Jewish occupation."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: By 1 May 1948, two weeks before the Israeli Declaration of Independence, nearly 175,000 Palestinians (approximately 25%) had already fled.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The fighting in these months was concentrated in the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv area, On 9 April, the Deir Yassin massacre and the rumours that followed it spread fear among the Palestinians. Next, the Haganah defeated local militia in Tiberias. On 21–22 April in Haifa, after the Haganah waged a day-and-a-half battle including psychological warfare, the Jewish National Committee was unable to offer the Palestinian council assurance that an unconditional surrender would proceed without incident. Finally, Irgun under Menachim Begin fired mortars on the infrastructure in Jaffa. Combined with the fear inspired by Deir Yassin, each of these military actions resulted in panicked Palestinian evacuations.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The significance of the attacks by underground military groups Irgun and Lehi on Deir Yassin is underscored by accounts on all sides. Meron Benvenisti regards Deir Yassin as "a turning point in the annals of the destruction of the Arab landscape".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Palestinians fled the city of Haifa en masse, in one of the most notable flights of this stage. Historian Efraim Karsh writes that not only had half of the Arab community in Haifa community fled the city before the final battle was joined in late April 1948, but another 5,000–15,000 left apparently voluntarily during the fighting while the rest, some 15,000–25,000, were ordered to leave, as was initially claimed by an Israeli source, on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Karsh concludes that there was no Jewish grand design to force this departure, and that in fact the Haifa Jewish leadership tried to convince some Arabs to stay, to no avail. Walid Khalidi disputes this account, saying that two independent studies, which analysed CIA and BBC intercepts of radio broadcasts from the region, concluded that no orders or instructions were given by the Arab Higher Committee.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Morris, "The Haganah mortar attacks of 21–22 April [on Haifa] were primarily designed to break Arab morale in order to bring about a swift collapse of resistance and speedy surrender. [...] But clearly the offensive, and especially the mortaring, precipitated the exodus. The three-inch mortars "opened up on the market square [where there was] a great crowd [...] a great panic took hold. The multitude burst into the port, pushed aside the policemen, charged the boats and began to flee the town", as the official Haganah history later put it". According to Pappé, this mortar barrage was deliberately aimed at civilians to precipitate their flight from Haifa.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The Haganah broadcast a warning to Arabs in Haifa on 21 April: "that unless they sent away 'infiltrated dissidents' they would be advised to evacuate all women and children, because they would be strongly attacked from now on".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Commenting on the use of "psychological warfare broadcasts" and military tactics in Haifa, Benny Morris writes:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Throughout the Haganah made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that "the day of judgement had arrived" and called on inhabitants to "kick out the foreign criminals" and to "move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals". The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to "evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven". Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were "to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered" and to set alight with fire-bombs "all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: By mid-May 4,000 Arabs remained in Haifa. These were concentrated in Wadi Nisnas in accordance with Plan D whilst the systematic destruction of Arab housing in certain areas, which had been planned before the War, was implemented by Haifa's Technical and Urban Development departments in cooperation with the IDF's city commander Ya'akov Lublini.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Glazer (1980, p. 111), from 15 May 1948 onwards, expulsion of Palestinians became a regular practice. Avnery (1971), explaining the Zionist rationale, says, I believe that during this phase, the eviction of Arab civilians had become an aim of David Ben-Gurion and his government... UN 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 the capture of uninhabited territory was both necessary for security reasons and desirable for the homogeneity of the new Hebrew state.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Undoubtedly, as was understood by IDF intelligence, the most important single factor in the exodus of April–June was Jewish attack. This is demonstrated clearly by the fact that each exodus occurred during or in the immediate wake of military assault. No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before the Haganah/IZL assault... The closer drew the 15 May British withdrawal deadline and the prospect of invasion by Arab states, the readier became commanders to resort to "cleansing" operations and expulsions to rid their rear areas.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: [R]elatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually fled their homes before or during battle... though (Haganah commanders) almost invariably prevented inhabitants, who had initially fled, from returning home...


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Edgar O'Ballance, a military historian, adds, Israeli vans with loudspeakers drove through the streets ordering all the inhabitants to evacuate immediately, and such as were reluctant to leave were forcibly ejected from their homes by the triumphant Israelis whose policy was now openly one of clearing out all the Arab civil population before them... From the surrounding villages and hamlets, during the next two or three days, all the inhabitants were uprooted and set off on the road to Ramallah... No longer was there any "reasonable persuasion". Bluntly, the Arab inhabitants were ejected and forced to flee into Arab territory... Wherever the Israeli troops advanced into Arab country the Arab population was bulldozed out in front of them.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: After the fall of Haifa the villages on the slopes of Mount Carmel had been harassing the Jewish traffic on the main road to Haifa. A decision was made on 9 May 1948 to expel or subdue the villages of Kafr Saba, al-Tira, Qaqun, Qalansuwa and Tantura. On 11 May 1948 Ben-Gurion convened the "Consultancy"; the outcome of the meeting is confirmed in a letter to commanders of the Haganah Brigades telling them that the Arab legion's offensive should not distract their troops from the principal tasks: "the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The attention of the commanders of the Alexandroni Brigade was turned to reducing the Mount Carmel pocket. Tantura, being on the coast, gave the Carmel villages access to the outside world and so was chosen as the point to surround the Carmel villages as a part of the Coastal Clearing offensive operation in the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: On the night of 22–23 May 1948, one week and one day after the declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, the coastal village of Tantura was attacked and occupied by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah. The village of Tantura was not given the option of surrender and the initial report spoke of dozens of villagers killed, with 300 adult male prisoners and 200 women and children. Many of the villagers fled to Fureidis (previously captured) and to Arab-held territory. The captured women of Tantura were moved to Fureidis, and on 31 May Brechor Shitrit, Minister of Minority Affairs of the provisional Government of Israel, sought permission to expel the refugee women of Tantura from Fureidis as the number of refugees in Fureidis was causing problems of overcrowding and sanitation.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: A report from the military intelligence SHAI of the Haganah titled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948", dated 30 June 1948, affirms that:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Morris's estimates, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians left Israel during this stage. "Keesing's Contemporary Archives" in London place the total number of refugees before Israel's independence at 300,000.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In Clause 10.(b) of the from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the UN Secretary-General of 15 May 1948 justifying the intervention by the Arab States, the Secretary-General of the League alleged that "approximately over a quarter of a million of the Arab population have been compelled to leave their homes and emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Israeli operations labeled Dani and Dekel that broke the truce were the start of the third phase of expulsions. The largest single expulsion of the war began in Lydda and Ramla 14 July when 60,000 inhabitants (nearly 10% of the whole exodus) of the two cities were forcibly expelled on the orders of Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin in events that came to be known as the "Lydda Death March".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Flapan (1987, pp. 13–14) in Ben-Gurion's view Ramlah and Lydda constituted a special danger because their proximity might encourage co-operation between the Egyptian army, which had started its attack on Kibbutz Negbah, near Ramlah, and the Arab Legion, which had taken the Lydda police station. However, the author considers that Operation Dani, under which the two towns were seized, revealed that no such co-operation existed.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In Flapan's opinion, "in Lydda, the exodus took place on foot. In Ramlah, the IDF provided buses and trucks. Originally, all males had been rounded up and enclosed in a compound, but after some shooting was heard, and construed by Ben-Gurion to be the beginning of an Arab Legion counteroffensive, he stopped the arrests and ordered the speedy eviction of all the Arabs, including women, children, and the elderly." In explanation, Flapan cites that Ben-Gurion said that "those who made war on us bear responsibility after their defeat."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Flapan maintains that events in Nazareth, although ending differently, point to the existence of a definite pattern of expulsion. On 16 July, three days after the Lydda and Ramlah evictions, the city of Nazareth surrendered to the IDF. The officer in command, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, had signed the surrender agreement on behalf of the Israeli army along with Chaim Laskov (then a brigadier general, later IDF chief of staff). The agreement assured the civilians that they would not be harmed, but the next day, Laskov handed Dunkelman an order to evacuate the population, which Dunkelman refused.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Additionally, widespread looting and several cases of rape took place during the evacuation. In total, about 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in this stage according to Morris.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: On 26 September Yosef Weitz alerted Ben-Gurion to the problem of masses of Palestinians endeavouring to return to their land in Israel or to lands Israel was about to take control of. On being asked how to deal with the problem, Weitz advocated a policy of endless 'harassment' ("[hatrada]"). Later on the same day, his cabinet turned down his proposal that Israel launch an invasion against the Arab Legion in order to wrest control over part, or all, of the West Bank where the latter was entrenched. It was in this context that Ben-Gurion then ordered Yigael Yadin extend Israel's biological warfare operations abroad, beginning with the poisoning of Cairo's water network with toxic bacteria. Both this and other projects to take similar measures in Syria and Lebanon, for a variety of reasons, were never activated.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: This period of the exodus was characterized by Israeli military accomplishments; Operation Yoav, in October, this cleared the road to the Negev, culminating in the capture of Beersheba; Operation Ha-Har that same month which cleared the Jerusalem Corridor from pockets of resistance; Operation Hiram, at the end of October, resulted in the capture of the Upper Galilee; Operation Horev in December 1948 and Operation Uvda in March 1949, completed the capture of the Negev (the Negev had been allotted to the Jewish State by the United Nations) these operations were met with resistance from the Palestinian Arabs who were to become refugees. The Israeli military activities were confined to the Galilee and the sparsely populated Negev desert. It was clear to the villages in the Galilee, that if they left, return was far from imminent. Therefore, far fewer villages spontaneously depopulated than previously. Most of the Palestinian exodus was due to a clear, direct cause: expulsion and deliberate harassment, as Morris writes "commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: During Operation Hiram in the upper Galilee, Israeli military commanders received the order: "Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered." (31 October 1948, Moshe Carmel) The UN's acting Mediator, Ralph Bunche, reported that United Nations Observers had recorded extensive looting of villages in Galilee by Israeli forces, who carried away goats, sheep and mules. This looting, United Nations Observers reported, appeared to have been systematic as army trucks were used for transportation. The situation, states the report, created a new influx of refugees into Lebanon. Israeli forces, he stated, have occupied the area in Galilee formerly occupied by Kaukji's forces, and have crossed the Lebanese frontier. Bunche goes on to say "that Israeli forces now hold positions inside the south-east corner of Lebanon, involving some fifteen Lebanese villages which are occupied by small Israeli detachments."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Morris altogether 200,000–230,000 Palestinians left in this stage. According to Ilan Pappé, "In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied [...] The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape and [the] imprisonment of men [...] in labor camps for periods [of] over a year."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The United Nations, using the offices of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization and the Mixed Armistice Commissions, was involved in the conflict from the very beginning. In the autumn of 1948 the refugee problem was a fact and possible solutions were discussed. Count Folke Bernadotte said on 16 September:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948 and reaffirmed every year since, was the first resolution that called for Israel to let the refugees return:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: At the start of the Lausanne Conference of 1949, on 12 May 1949, Israel agreed in principle to allow the return of all Palestinian refugees. At the same time, Israel became a member of the U.N. upon the passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 on 11 May 1949, which read, in part,


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Instead Israel made an offer of allowing 100,000 of the refugees to return to the area, though not necessarily to their homes, including 25,000 who had returned surreptitiously and 10,000 family-reunion cases. The proposal was conditional on a peace treaty that would allow Israel to retain the territory it had captured which had been allocated to the Arab state by the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, and, contrary to Israel's UN acceptance promise, on the Arab states absorbing the remaining 550,000–650,000 refugees. The Arab states rejected the proposal on both legal, moral and political grounds, and Israel quickly withdrew its limited offer.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Benny Morris, in his 2004 book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited", summarizes it from his perspective:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In the first decades after the exodus, two diametrically opposed schools of analysis could be distinguished. "Israel claims that the Arabs left because they were ordered to, and deliberately incited into panic, by their own leaders who wanted the field cleared for the 1948 war," while "The Arabs charge that their people were evicted at bayonet-point and by panic deliberately incited by the Zionists." Alternative explanations had also been offered. For instance Peretz and Gabbay emphasize the psychological component: panic or hysteria swept the Palestinians and caused the exodus.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The dominant Israeli narrative was presented in the publications of various Israeli state institutions such as the national Information Center, the Ministry of Education (history and civic textbooks) and the army (IDF), as well as in Israeli-Jewish societal institutions: newspapers, memoirs of 1948 war veterans, and in the studies of the research community. However, a number of Jewish scholars living outside of Israel – including Gabbay and Peretz – since the late 1950s presented a different narrative. According to this narrative, some Palestinians left willingly while others were expelled by the Jewish and later Israeli fighting forces.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The dominance in Israel of the willing-flight Zionist narrative of the exodus began to be challenged by Israeli-Jewish societal institutions beginning mainly in the late 1970s. Many scholarly studies and daily newspaper essays, as well as some 1948 Jewish war veterans' memoirs have begun presenting the more balanced narrative (at times called onwards a "post-Zionist"). According to this narrative, some Palestinians left willingly (due to calls of Arab or their leadership to partially leave, fear, and societal collapse), while others were expelled by the Jewish/Israeli fighting forces.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The Israeli-Jewish societal change intensified in the late 1980s. The publication of balanced/critical newspaper essays increased, the vast majority, along with balanced 1948 war veterans' memoirs, about a third. At the same time, Israeli NGOs began more significantly to present the balanced and the Palestinian narratives more significantly in their publications.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Moreover, Israel opened up part of its archives in the 1980s for investigation by historians. This coincided with the emergence of various Israeli historians, called New Historians, who favored a more critical analysis of Israel's history. The Arab/Palestinian official and historiographical versions hardly changed, and received support from some of the New Historians. Pappé calls the exodus an ethnic cleansing and points at Zionist preparations in the preceding years and provides more details on the planning process by a group he calls the "Consultancy." Morris also says that ethnic cleansing took place during the Palestinian exodus, and that "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing... when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Ian Black, Middle East editor for The Guardian newspaper, the Palestinian exodus is "widely described" as having involved ethnic cleansing. Not all historians accept the characterization of the exodus as ethnic cleansing. Israeli documents from 1948 use the term "to cleanse" when referring to uprooting Arabs. Efraim Karsh is among the few historians who still consider that most of the Arabs who fled left of their own accord or were pressured to leave by their fellow Arabs, despite Israeli attempts to convince them to stay. He says that the expulsions in Lod and Ramle were driven by military necessity. When an Israeli NGO Akevot managed to lift the censorship governing sections of Ben-Gurion's diary in 2021, it emerged that in 1949, responding to attempts by the Palestinians driven out of Lod and Ramle to return, Ben-Gurion advised that they be pushed towards Jordan: “We have to ‘pester’ them relentlessly...We need to pester and motivate the refugees in the south to move eastward as well, since they won't go towards the sea and Egypt won't let them in.'


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Pappé's scholarship on the issue has been subject to severe criticism. Benny Morris says that Pappé's research is flecked with inaccuracies and characterized by distortions.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Ephraim Karsh refers to Pappé's assertion of a master plan by Jews to expel Arabs, as contrived. On his part, Avi Shlaim — who has been described by "The Economist" as "the most classical" and "the most mainstream" of the New Historians — has been critical of Benny Morris, saying that, since the beginning of the Second Intifada, Morris's scholarship has "veered from the leftwing to the rightwing end" and that "racist undertones" against Arabs and Palestinians has become a characteristic of his work. Of Karsh, Shlaim has written that he gives "a selective and tendentious account designed to exonerate the Jewish side of any responsibility" for some of the events that took place in 1948 and that he engages in "distort[ion] and misrepresent[ation of] the work of his opponents".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: As towns and villages were either conquered or abandoned in the conflict, looting by Jewish forces and residents was so widespread that, in the aftermath, David Ben-Gurion remarked on 24 July 1948: 'It turns out that most of the Jews are thieves.' Netiva Ben-Yehuda, a Palmach commander likened the pillaging she observed in Tiberias to the classic behavior seen by their oppressors during anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: “Such pictures were known to us. It was the way things had always been done to us, in the Holocaust, throughout the world war, and all the pogroms. Oy, how well we knew those pictures. And here – here, we were doing these awful things to others. We loaded everything onto the van – with a terrible trembling of the hands. And that wasn’t because of the weight. Even now my hands are shaking, just from writing about it.'


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Several authors have conducted studies on the number of Palestinian localities that were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed during the 1947–1949 period. Based on their respective calculations, the table below summarises their information.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) and BADIL, Morris's list of affected localities, the shortest of the three, includes towns but excludes other localities cited by Khalidi or Abu Sitta. The six sources compared in Khalidi's study have in common 296 of the villages listed as destroyed or depopulated. Sixty other villages are cited in all but one source. Of the total of 418 localities cited in Khalidi, 292 (70 percent) were completely destroyed and 90 (22 percent) "largely destroyed". COHRE and BADIL also note that other sources refer to an additional 151 localities that are omitted from Khalidi's study for various reasons (for example, major cities and towns that were depopulated, as well as some Bedouin encampments and villages "vacated" before the start of hostilities). Abu Sitta's list includes tribes in Beersheba that lost lands; most of these were omitted from Khalidi's work.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Another study, involving field research and comparisons with British and other documents, concludes that 472 Palestinian habitations (including towns and villages) were destroyed in 1948. It notes that the devastation was virtually complete in some sub-districts. For example, it points out that 96.0% of the villages in the Jaffa area were totally destroyed, as were 90.0% of those in Tiberias, 90.3% of those in Safad, and 95.9% of those in Beisan. It also extrapolates from 1931 British census data to estimate that over 70,280 Palestinian houses were destroyed in this period.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In another study, Abu Sitta shows the following findings in eight distinct phases of the depopulation of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. His findings are summarized in the table below:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: On 11 December 1948, 12 months prior to UNRWA's establishment, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 was adopted. The resolution accepted the definition of Palestinian refugees as "persons of Arab origin who, after 29 November 1947, left territory at present under the control of the Israel authorities and who were Palestinian citizens at that date" and; "Persons of Arab origin who left the said territory after 6 August 1924 and before 29 November 1947 and who at that latter date were Palestinian citizens; 2. Persons of Arab origin who left the territory in question before 6 August 1924 and who, having opted for Palestinian citizenship, retained that citizenship up to 29 November 1947"


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: UNRWA was established under UNGA resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949. It defines refugees qualifying for UNRWA's services as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli conflict" and also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The UNRWA mandate does not extend to final status.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The final 1949 UNRWA estimate of the refugee count was 726,000, but the number of registered refugees was 914,000. The U.N. Conciliation Commission explained that the number was inflated by "duplication of ration cards, addition of persons who have been displaced from area other than Israel-held areas and of persons who, although not displaced, are destitute," and the UNWRA additionally noted that "all births are eagerly announced, the deaths wherever possible are passed over in silence," as well as the fact that "the birthrate is high in any case, a net addition of 30,000 names a year." By June 1951, UNWRA had reduced the number of registered refugees to 876,000 after many false and duplicate registrations had been weeded out.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Today the number who qualify for UNRWA's services has grown to over 4 million, one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon (Bowker, 2003, p. 72) and around 15% in other Arab and Western countries. Approximately 1 million refugees have no form of identification other than an UNRWA identification card.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Following the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem after the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, many Palestinians tried, in one way or another, to return to their homes. For some time these practices continued to embarrass the Israeli authorities until they passed the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which defines offenses of armed and non-armed infiltration to Israel and from Israel to hostile neighboring countries. According to Arab Israeli writer Sabri Jiryis, the purpose of the law was to prevent Palestinians from returning to Israel, those who did so being regarded as infiltrators.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Kirshbaum, over the years the Israeli Government has continued to cancel and modify some of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, but mostly it has added more as it has continued to extend its declared state of emergency. For example, even though the Prevention of Infiltration Law of 1954 is not labelled as an official "Emergency Regulation", it extends the applicability of the "Defence (Emergency) Regulation 112" of 1945 giving the Minister of Defence extraordinary powers of deportation for accused infiltrators even before they are convicted (Articles 30 & 32), and makes itself subject to cancellation when the Knesset ends the State of Emergency upon which all of the Emergency Regulations are dependent.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Following its establishment, Israel designed a system of law that legitimised both a continuation and a consolidation of the nationalisation of land and property, a process that it had begun decades earlier. For the first few years of Israel's existence, many of the new laws continued to be rooted in earlier Ottoman and British law. These laws were later amended or replaced altogether.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The first challenge facing Israel was to transform its control over land into legal ownership. This was the motivation underlying the passing of several of the first group of land laws.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to Kirshbaum, the Law has as effect that "no one is allowed in or out without permission from the Israeli Military." "This regulation has been used to exclude a land owner from his own land so that it could be judged as unoccupied, and then expropriated under the 'Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law (1953)'. Closures need not be published in the Official Gazette."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The Absentees' Property Laws were several laws, first introduced as emergency ordinances issued by the Jewish leadership but which after the war were incorporated into the laws of Israel. As examples of the first type of laws are the "Emergency Regulations (Absentees' Property) Law, 5709-1948 (December)", which according to article 37 of the "Absentees Property Law, 5710-1950" was replaced by the latter; the "Emergency Regulations (Requisition of Property) Law, 5709-1949", and other related laws.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: According to COHRE and BADIL (p. 41), unlike other laws that were designed to establish Israel's "legal" control over lands, this body of law focused on formulating a "legal" definition for the people (mostly Arabs) who had left or been forced to flee from these lands.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954, more than one third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The absentee property law is directly linked to the controversy of parallelism between the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries and the Palestinian exodus, as advocacy groups have suggested that there are strong ties between the two processes and some of them even claim that decoupling the two issues is unjust.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: However, al-Husseini, Palestinian governor of East Jerusalem in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), has said that the Israeli law "is racist and imperialistic, which aims at seizing thousands of acres and properties of lands".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: A number of Israeli laws were enacted that enabled the further acquisition of depopulated lands. Among these laws were:


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The Israeli government has systematically scoured Israeli archives to remove documents evidencing Israeli massacres of Palestinian villagers in 1947 and 1948 that led to the Palestinian exodus.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Following the Six-Day War, Israel gained control over a substantial number of refugee camps in the territories it captured from Egypt and Jordan. The Israeli government attempted to resettle them permanently by initiating a subsidized "build-your-own home" program. Israel provided land for refugees who chose to participate; the Palestinians bought building materials on credit and built their own houses, usually with friends. Israel provided the new neighborhoods with necessary services, such as schools and sewers.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolutions 31/15 and 34/52, which condemned the program as a violation of the refugees' "inalienable right of return", and called upon Israel to stop the program. Thousands of refugees were resettled into various neighborhoods, but the program was suspended due to pressure from the PLO.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The term "Nakba" was first applied to the events of 1948 by Constantin Zureiq, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book "Ma'na al-Nakba" (The Meaning of the Disaster) he wrote "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history." The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet Burhan al-Deen al-Abushi.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In his encyclopedia published in the late 1950s, Aref al-Aref wrote: "How Can I call it but Nakba? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we [were] expelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons." Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari also used the term Nakba in the title of his book "Sir al Nakba" (The Secret behind the Disaster) written in 1955. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Zureiq wrote another book, "The New Meaning of the Disaster", but the term Nakba is reserved for the 1948 war.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Together with Naji al-Ali's "Handala" (the barefoot child always drawn from behind), and the symbolic key for the house in Palestine carried by so many Palestinian refugees, the "collective memory of that experience [the Nakba] has shaped the identity of the Palestinian refugees as a people".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The events of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War greatly influenced the Palestinian culture. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba. The exodus is usually described in strongly emotional terms. For example, at the controversial 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, prominent Palestinian scholar and activist Hanan Ashrawi referred to the Palestinians as "a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, "apartheid, racism, and victimization" (original emphasis).


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In the Palestinian calendar, the day after Israel declared independence (15 May) is observed as Nakba Day. It is traditionally observed as an important day of remembrance. In May 2009 the political party headed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. Following public criticism the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the Minister of Finance would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions that hold the commemorations. The new draft was approved by the Knesset in March 2011.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Ghada Karmi writes that the Israeli version of history is that the "Palestinians left voluntarily or under orders from their leaders and that Israelis had no responsibility, material or moral, for their plight." She also finds a form of denial among Israelis that Palestinians bear the blame for the Nakba by not accepting the UN's proposed partition of Palestine into separate ethnic states.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Perry Anderson writes that "the Nakba was so swift and catastrophic that no Palestinian political organization of any kind existed for over a decade after it."


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The approach of the State of Israel and of Israeli-Jews to the causes of the exodus are divided into two main periods: 1949-late 1970s, late 1970s-nowadays. In the first period, state institutions (the national Information Center, IDF and the Ministry of Education) and societal ones (the research community, newspapers, and 1948 war veterans' memoirs) presented for the most part only the Zionist narrative of willing flight. There were some exceptions: the independent weekly "Haolam Hazeh", the Communist Party's daily/weekly "Kol HaAm" and the socialist organisation Matzpen presented the Palestinian and the balanced/critical narratives.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In the second period there was a split. Regarding Israeli state institutions, at least until 2004, the IDF and the Information Center continued to present the Zionist narrative. The situation in the Ministry of Education, though, was somewhat different. While until 1999 its approved history and civics textbooks presented, by and large, the Zionist narrative, since 2000, however, they have presented the Critical one (at least until 2004). Similarly, in 2005, the Israeli National Archive published a book describing the expulsion of Palestinians from the cities of Lydda and Ramla in 1948. In other words, in the second period, the state institutions continued to present the Zionist narrative: some until the early 2000s, and some even afterwards.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: From the late 1970s onwards, many newspaper articles and scholarly studies, as well as some 1948 war veterans' memoirs, began to present the balanced/critical narrative. This has become more common since the late 1980s, to the point that since then the vast majority of newspaper articles and studies, and a third of the veterans' memoirs, have presented a more balanced narrative. Since the 1990s, also textbooks used in the educational system, some without approval of the Ministry of Education, began to present the balanced narrative.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: In March 2015, Shai Piron, Yesh Atid party MK, and former education minister of Israel, called for Israel to have all schools include the Nakba in their curriculum. "I'm for teaching the Nakba to all students in Israel. I do not think that a student can go through the Israeli educational system, while 20% of students have an ethos, a story, and he does not know that story." He added that covering the topic in schools could address some of the racial tensions that exist in Israeli society. His comments broke a taboo in the traditional Israeli narrative, and conflicts with efforts on the part of some Israeli lawmakers to defund schools that mark Nakba.


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: The 1948 Palestinian exodus has also drawn comparisons with the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, which involved the departure, flight, migration, and expulsion of 800,000–1,000,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the 1970s. In three resolutions between 2007 and 2012 (, , ), the US Congress called on the Barack Obama administration to "pair any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees with a similar reference to Jewish or other refugee populations".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath has rejected the comparison, arguing that the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are totally different and that any similarity is superficial. Porath says that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was from a Jewish-Zionist perspective the fulfilment of "a national dream" and of Israeli national policy in the form of the One Million Plan. He notes the efforts of Israeli agents working in Arab countries, including those of the Jewish Agency in various Arab countries since the 1930s, to assist a Jewish "aliyah". Porath contrasts this with what he calls the "national calamity" and "unending personal tragedies" suffered by the Palestinians that resulted in "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic".


title: 1948 Palestinian exodus

text: Israeli academic Yehouda Shenhav has written in an article entitled "Hitching A Ride on the Magic Carpet" published in the Israeli daily "Haaretz" regarding this issue. "Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq, adamantly opposed the analogy: "I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists." In a Knesset hearing, Ran Cohen stated emphatically: "I have this to say: I am not a refugee." He added: "I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee."


title: University of Pretoria

text: The University of Pretoria (, ) is a multi-campus public research university in Pretoria, the administrative and de facto capital of South Africa. The university was established in 1908 as the Pretoria campus of the Johannesburg-based Transvaal University College and is the fourth South African institution in continuous operation to be awarded university status. The university has grown from the original 32 students in a single late Victorian house to approximately 53,000 in 2019. The university was built on seven suburban campuses on .


title: University of Pretoria

text: The university is organised into nine faculties and a business school. Established in 1920, the University of Pretoria Faculty of Veterinary Science is the second oldest veterinary school in Africa and the only veterinary school in South Africa. In 1949, the university launched the first MBA programme outside North America, and the university's Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) has consistently been ranked the top business school in Africa for executive education, as well as being placed in the top 50 in the world. In 2012, the Financial Times ranked the GIBS Executive MBA 1st in Africa and 60th in the world.


title: University of Pretoria

text: Since 1997, the university has produced more research outputs every year than any other institution of higher learning in South Africa, as measured by the Department of Education's accreditation benchmark. In 2008, the university awarded 15.8% of all masters and doctorate degrees in South Africa, the highest percentage in the country. The DHET report, released in March 2019, shows that UP achieved the highest percentage (10,93%) of the total research output units of all South African universities for 2017. Fifty-three UP researchers are in the top 1% according to the Web of Science Index of 2019.


title: University of Pretoria

text: The university is commonly referred to as UP, Tuks, or Tukkies and in post-nominals the university is typically abbreviated as Pret or UP, although Pretoria is also used in official publications.


title: University of Pretoria

text: The proposal for a university for the capital, first mooted in the Volksraad in 1889, was interrupted by the outbreak of the Anglo–Boer War in 1899. In 1896, the South African School of Mines was founded in Kimberley. Eight years later, in 1904, the school was moved to Johannesburg and was renamed the Transvaal Technical Institute. The school's name changed yet again in 1906 to Transvaal University College. In 1902, after the signing of the Peace of Vereeniging, the Normal College for teacher training was established in Groenkloof, Pretoria. On 4 March 1908, when the Transvaal University College (TUC) transferred its arts and science courses to its newly established Pretoria campus, the precursor to the university was established, initially offering courses in languages, sciences, and law.


title: University of Pretoria

text: Instruction commenced with 32 students, 4 professors and 3 lecturers in the Kya Rosa, 270 Skinner Street a late Victorian residence purchased from Leo Weinthal the then owner of "The Press" (forerunner to the "Pretoria News" newspaper). The first four professors were Prof H. Th. Reinink (Dutch), J. Purves (Scottish), D.F. du Toit Malherbe (South African) and A.C. Paterson (Scottish), who would also become the first vice-chancellor.


title: University of Pretoria

text: In 1910, the colonial secretary, General Jan Smuts tabled the act constituting the university as a separate entity before the Transvaal Parliament, the "Transvaalse and Universiteits-Inlijvingswet" Law 1 of 1910. On 17 May 1910, the Johannesburg and Pretoria campuses separated, each becoming an independent institution. The Johannesburg campus being reincorporated as the South African School of Mines and Technology, while the Pretoria campus retained the name of Transvaal University College until 1930. The South African School of Mines and Technology would later go on to become the University of the Witwatersrand in 1922. In 1910, the TUC acquired its own campus in the east of Pretoria, what is now the western part of the university's main campus in Hatfield. On 3 August 1910, Governor-General Herbert John Gladstone, 1st Viscount Gladstone laid the cornerstone of the Old Arts Building, the first building to be built on the newly established Hatfield campus. The building's striking Cape Dutch and Neo-Romanesque architectural style was recognised in 1968 when it was declared a provincial heritage site. During this time the colloquial name for the university, Tukkies or Tuks, was derived from the Afrikaans acronym for the college, i.e. Transvaalse Universiteitskollege (TUK).


title: University of Pretoria

text: The late 1910s and early 1920s saw the establishment of several faculties as the academic activities were expanded. Courses in agriculture (1917), theology (1918), economics and political science (1919), veterinary science (1920), and music (1923) were established as the institution grew.