ABSTRACT
The refugee problem was created in 1948 when, during the war with the Zionists, nearly one million Arabs fled from their homes. The massacre of Deir Yassin, the latest link in a chain of terror, had struck fear into the hearts of those civilians whose homes lay in the path of the Zionist forces. Just as, in 1940, Frenchmen in their thousands fled before the advancing Nazis, so, in 1948, before the Zionists, thousands of Arabs did the same, and for the same reason. As General Spears has put it in a letter published in the Daily Telegraph of November 16, 1955: ‘That an honest person should be expected to believe that anything but force or fear for their lives would drive peasants from their age-long holdings is an affront to common sense.’ I have talked to many refugees during the past four years. They all support General Spears’s view. And I think they should know.
