⚫ Nakba explained:

With rare exceptions, the Arabs that fled the fighting or were ‘expelled’ in ‘48 were fleeing from retribution from their own invading Arab armies. The understanding was that any Arab that remained in the areas under attack was a traitor that was cooperating with the local Jews.

The Arabs nakba’d themselves! Which also explains the initial reluctance to settle Nakba Arabs within the surrounding states - absorbing these populations would have involved an admission of culpability for their plight, and scapegoating the Jews became an irresistible option…

On the last day of November 1947, three days before hostilities broke out, the Higher Arab Committee reiterated its established policy on ties with Jews:

“The Arab nation is called on to remain steadfast in an absolute boycott of the Jews and to consider any connection with them a severe crime and great betrayal of religion and the homeland.”

It called on the Arabs of Palestine to enlist in the struggle… It quickly became clear, however, that Arabs were in no hurry to heed the Committee’s call. Only a few thousand enlisted in the combat forces… Nor was severing ties with the Jews accepted by the public at large. What the Higher Arab Committee called “a great betrayal” did not appear that way to many Arabs. Furthermore, not only were they passive, but some resisted (at various levels) the fighters and military activities.

This unwillingness to do battle pervaded the country. In December 1947 the inhabitants of Tulkarem refused to attack Jewish towns to their west, to the chagrin of the local Holy Jihad commander, Hasan Salameh. Sources in Ramallah reported at the same time that many were refusing to enlist, and reports from Beit Jibrin indicated that ‘Abd al-Rahman al-‘Azzi was doing all he could to keep his region quiet. The villagers of the Bani-Hasan nahiya southwest of Jerusalem decided not to carry out military actions within their territory, and the people of al-Maliha refused a request from ‘Abd al-Qader al-Husseini to attack the Jewish neighborhoods of Mekor Hayyim and Bayyit va-Gan. That same month, at the end of January, the inhabitants of ‘Ayn Ghazal, on the coast below Mt. Carmel, refused to blow up Jewish-owned lime kilns adjacent to the village. Three weeks later the residents of Ramla and Lydda were told to take part in an attack on Jews; they ignored the order. At the end of March men under the command of Hussein Hassouna of Lydda disarmed mines near the Jewish agricultural school of Ben Shemen laid by volunteers from the Arab Liberation Army. Similar incidents occurred in villages in the Lower Galilee.
(…)

The fighters from Arab countries were, of course, witnesses to this conduct, which became the origin of the charge that the Palestinians were traitors to the Arab cause. The foreign volunteers could not but be cognizant that, while they had come from afar to save Palestine and fight for its Arabs, some of the Palestinian Arabs themselves were making alliances and maintaining social and economic ties with Jews. Some were even seeking to negotiate a peace agreement (1)

Old Palestine was a traditional society where—though the Arabs might not have liked the Jews on a communal level—peace was valued more than modern ideas of national glory or the pan-Arab state.

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