Nazareth is the only city with a majority-Palestinian population left in Israel. Though even that comes with a caveat since it is hemmed in by upper Nazareth (which was established as an exclusively Jewish city).
The Toronto Star’s Foreign Affairs correspondent, Mitch Potter published an article recently: The Toronto man who saved Nazareth. It covers the role played by Ben Dunkelman, a Canadian military officer during WW-2 who also served in the IDF after war:
[...] Dunkelman’s ghostwriter, the now-deceased Israeli journalist Peretz Kidron, later produced a previously unpublished page that Dunkelman edited out of his manuscript, in which the Toronto native describes how he was “shocked and horrified” at the order to depopulate Nazareth, telling his commanding officer, Haim Laskov, “I would do nothing of the sort.”
Dunkelman was relieved of command in Nazareth a day after refusing the order. But he ceded control only after extracting his replacement’s “word of honour” that no harm would befall the population. “It seems that my disobedience did have some effect,” Dunkelman writes in Kidron’s lost page.
Incidentally, the success of the IDF’s 1948 campaign was greatly furthered by volunteers like Dunkelman who had fought on various fronts during WW-2 and were familiar with both the new tactics and technology the war produced. Superior numbers did not hurt either. The IDF fielded an army over 115,000 strong at the end of the 1948 war. The Palestinian forces, units from surrounding Arab countries and irregular volunteers numbered 60,000 towards the end, and they were relatively ill-equipped. That is part of the reason the “five Arab armies attacked in 1948” line obscures more than it reveals.
Potter goes on to ask:
But that rare courage raises other questions. If Dunkelman received verbal orders to expel a city, what orders were other Israel commanders under during the 1948 war? One of Israel’s early foundational narratives — the notion that the Arabs of Palestine became refugees of their own volition, fleeing, rather than being forced out, cracks under the saga of Dunkelman in Nazareth.
and then he comes back to the saga of the page withheld from the memoirs.
Kidron leaked the story to the New York Times — along with an explosive account of how Dunkelman’s brother-in-arms Yitzhak Rabin carried out similar orders, dislodging the Arab civilians from the towns of Lod and Ramle within days of the Canadian soldier’s stand in Nazareth. The Times ran with the juicier Rabin exposé in October 1979, ignoring the Dunkelman story altogether.
The NY Times story in question is from October 23, 1979 and describes the orders Rabin received to expel Palestinians from Ramle and Lydda.
Potter’s story highlights an revealing episode in the 1948 war and opens a window to the dynamic that played out in other expulsions during the Nakba. It’s also significant since it hints at how perceptions in the US and Europe were factored into actions on the ground. Nazareth was exceptional because of its association with Jesus, and that is one reason it was eventually treated exceptionally by Dunkelman’s superiors.
But in focusing on Nazareth and specifically on Dunkelman, the article misses some of the broader context. Firstly, Nazareth was meant to be the bulwark of the Northern section of the Palestinian state envisaged in the 1947 “partition plan”. So the attack on Nazareth and the depopulation of surrounding areas contravened the representations Israeli leaders had made to secure the Palestinian populations within the borders of their own state. This was a predictable consequence of Israeli military superiority and the complete absence of a international force to police the “partition plan”. The large territorial gains by the IDF had a huge impact on future events and the size/viability of any two-state solution. In the end though, this is among the least significant issues with the “UN partition plan”, which was passed largely by subterfuge and pressure from the Allies.
It is also clear that Dunkelman’s units exhibited little sympathy for Palestinian Muslims. Troops under his command forced the depopulation of Saffuriya. The JNF has since used children’s contributions to plant trees over the ruins of the village. Troops in the IDF’s 7th Brigade under Dunkelman’s command were also responsible for multiple massacres, at Saliha (60-94 people sheltering in a mosque killed when it was blown up), Safsaf (50-70 villagers and POWs shot and buried in a mass grave), Jish (a number of civilians and 10 POWs killed) as part of Operation Hiram.
Benny Morris highlights the relatively deferential posture towards Palestinian Christians in the Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited:
[...] the army had gone ahead and expelled Muslims and Christians indiscriminately. [...] But as the operation unfolded, input from officers such as Dunkelman and government officials, including Shimoni, and intercession by Christian clerics, gradually tilted Northern Front toward a more benign and discriminating attitude toward the Christians. [...] The guideline had left open the possibility of a return home of Christian (and Druse) villagers transferred inland; no mention was made in them of Muslims.
Part of the calculus was an eye towards how mis-treatment of the Palestinian Christian population would appear in the US and Europe. That concern continues to manifest itself today, which is why price-tag attacks against churches generally result in real investigations.
Uri Averny wrote a column last June that remembers Dunkelman, and David Green wrote an article in Haaretz a couple of years ago covering the events.