Between 1947 and 1949 a large part of the Arab inhabitants of the territories included in the new state of Israel left their homes and took refuge on the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, and in the neighboring countries. The Israelis claim that they left at the instigation of their own leaders, who told them to go so as not to interfere with the movements of troops, and promised them that they would return in the wake of the triumphant Arab armies very shortly. The Arabs maintain that they were driven out by the Israelis. Both arguments are true; both are false. Some were undoubtedly told to go by their own leaders; some, notably in the strategically vital corridor between Jerusalem and the coast, were ordered to leave by the advancing Israeli troops. The great majority, like countless millions of refugees elsewhere, left their homes amid the confusion and panic of invasion and warone more unhappy part of the vast movement of populations which occurred in the aftermath of World War II. As the Poles fled from the eastern areas seized by the Russians, as the Germans fled from East German territories annexed by the Poles, as millions of Muslims and Hindus fled from India to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India, so too did great numbers of Arabs flee from Palestine to the neighboring Arab states while large numbers of Jews, most of them previously unaffected by Zionist ideology, fled from the tensions which had arisen in the Arab states to the relative safety of Israel. At the time it was hoped that this problem would be resolved, like the refugee problems in Eastern Europe and in the Indian subcontinent, and that the Arab refugees would be partly resettled in the Arab countries, partly returned to their homes. This did not happen, and with the exception of Jordan, the Arab governments made a point of not according citizenship to the refugees and of opposing their resettlement.
