ABSTRACT
THE official Israeli position contends that more than half a million 2 Palestinians left their towns and villages in 1947-1948 upon the command of the Arab leaders and armies. The Arabs, however, are adamant that refugees were ousted according to a deliberate, premeditated plan by the Zionist movement. This paper will confront those two positions with the responses of Palestinian refugees, especially those who lived through the war and the expulsion/flight of 1947-1950. It will examine their validity in the light of new oral data from in-depth interviews with the first generation of Palestinian refugees from different parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It should be borne in mind that the Palestinian refugees did not leave all at once, but rather in several waves, the first of which began in December 1947 and ending in March 1948. There were at least three more waves, the last of which occurred towards the end of 1950 when the Palestinians of al-Majdal were transferred to the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defense Forces 3 .
