@always_philistinie: In 1975 Golda Meir wrote that in 1948 she had begged Haifa's Palestinians to stay. Haifa's Palestinian committee left a written record of what actually happened. In April 1948 Haganah forces attacked Haifa's Arab neighbourhoods. The city was bombarded. Families fled. Before the war about 70,000 Palestinian Arabs lived in Haifa. By May 1948 about 4,000 remained. On 23 April the committee asked the mayor and the Jewish authorities for written guarantees: that those who stayed could live and work without harassment, that the property of those leaving would be protected, that religious sites would be safeguarded. The same day it asked the British for protection, and recorded the British commander's refusal to protect residents' lives and property, which it called a major reason for its evacuation request. Two days later it described homes and shops stripped of belongings, families left with only the clothes they wore, the Arab hospital's equipment stolen, and Palestinians barred from their own neighbourhoods. Its appeals to end the looting and the restrictions had proved futile. A search of archives, from the Ben-Gurion Archive and the British National Archives to Red Cross, UN and Palestinian Museum records, found no written response granting the protection guarantees the committee asked for. Twenty-seven years later Golda Meir said she had begged them to stay. Her account does not describe providing the written protection the committee asked for. It does describe one aim: persuading the world that Arabs and Jews could live together. What was happening on the ground was the ethnic cleansing of Haifa's Palestinians. Sources: the Haifa National Committee's letters of 23 and 25 April 1948; Golda Meir, My Life, 1975; population figures: IMEU Nakba timeline; interpretation after Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; search scope in the source register. Photographs: LIFE, Palestine Remembered, Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress; licensed library footage. The opening cinema scene is AI-generated design, not a historical image; every photograph is real. Narration: synthetic voice. #Palestine #Apartheid #SettlerColonialism #Nakba #IsraelLobby

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Monday 07 September 2026 12:44:53 GMT