On 17 August 1950 the remaining Palestinian Arab population of Majdal were served with an expulsion order (The Palestinians had been held in a confined area since 1948) and the first group of them were taken on trucks to the Gaza Strip. Majdal was then renamed Ashkelon by the Israelis in an ongoing process of de-Arabisation of the topography as described by Meron Benvenisti.1 Egypt accepted the expelled civilian Palestinian Arabs from Majdal on humanitarian grounds as they would otherwise have been exposed to “torture and death”. Furthermore, testimony of the expelled Arabs and reports of the Mixed Armistice Commission clearly showed that the refugees had been forcibly expelled.2
Ilan Pappé reports that the last gun-point expulsion occurred in 1953 where the residents of Umm al-Faraj were driven out and the village destroyed by the IDF. “3
- Benvenisti, Meron (2000). Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. University of California Press. ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20110323124244/http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/FFEACEABB01E7A04852562CB00569DAE ↩︎
- Morris, B. (1993). Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956; Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Karmi, Ghada; Cotran, Eugene, eds. (28 January 1999). The Palestinian Exodus: 1948-1998. Ithaca Press.
Morris, Benny (1993). Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956; Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War. Oxford Clarendon Press.
Morris, Benny (2004). Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Pappé, Ilan (2006). The Ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.
Segev, Tom (1998). 1949; The first Israelis. Henry Holt and Company
Shlaim, Avi (2000). The Iron Wall; Israel and the Arab World. Penguin Books.
Shlaim, Avi (2004). The Politics of Partition; King Abdullah, The Zionists, and Palestine 1921-1951. Oxford University Press. ↩︎