Lifta, Jerusalem · 4 December 1947 - early February 1948 · ~2,550-3,000 people driven from their homes · 6-7 killed · through armed attacks, house demolitions and threats by Zionist forces (Lehi, Irgun, Haganah) - months before the State of Israel existed and before any Arab army entered Palestine.

Since 1948, an average of roughly one hundred Palestinians per day have lost their life or their home. I did the arithmetic expecting to be wrong. The documented record says the estimate is conservative.

This is the first post in a series that goes through the record event by event. Two rules apply throughout. Every event carries at least one source that a pro-Israel skeptic would accept: Israeli state records, Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli mainstream press, official UN documents, or Wikipedia as a neutral aggregator. And where the sources contradict each other, I report the contradiction instead of picking the convenient number.

The series starts where the displacement started: a stone village at the western entrance of Jerusalem.

The village

Lifta sat on the slope below the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road. It had been inhabited, under different names, for some three thousand years; its spring is identified with the biblical waters of Nephtoah. In the 1940s it was prosperous: a clinic, schools, two coffeehouses, a mosque, olive presses, and around 450 stone houses. The 1945 British census counted about 2,550 inhabitants; Golan, Orr and Ershied give 2,958 at the village’s 1940s peak. The true number of displaced lies somewhere in that range.

What happened

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine. Fighting between the communities in Jerusalem began within days, and the villages at the city’s western entrance - Lifta, Romema, Shaykh Badr - controlled the road to Tel Aviv. Nathan Krystall’s study of West Jerusalem concludes that clearing them “was given top priority” and that the Haganah’s Jerusalem commander, Israel Amir, had decided to drive the Arabs out of West Jerusalem entirely, using threats by poster and phone, raids, and the demolition of buildings.

Lifta’s families began evacuating women and children on 4 December 1947. On 28 December 1947 the village coffeehouse was machine-gunned. Here the sources diverge, and honesty requires showing it:

The discrepancy - six or seven dead, one attack or several, which militia - is real and I will not paper over it. What no source disputes: armed attacks in December 1947 turned a gradual evacuation into flight, further raids and demolitions in January drove out the rest, and the village stood empty by early February 1948. Benny Morris, the Israeli historian whose archive work underpins most of what we know about 1948, classifies Lifta’s depopulation as caused by “military assault on the settlement.” Ilan Pappe reads the clearing of western Jerusalem as early, deliberate ethnic cleansing; Morris attributes the winter exodus to attack-driven insecurity rather than a plan. On the facts - the attacks, the dates, the emptying - they do not disagree.

There is also a contemporary voice. On 7 February 1948, David Ben-Gurion reported to his party’s council, as quoted in Krystall’s study:

“From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema … there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. … What has happened in Jerusalem … is likely to happen in many parts of the country … in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population of the country.”

That is the leader of the Yishuv, three months before Israel’s declaration and the Arab states’ intervention, describing the emptying of Lifta as a preview of the country. Whatever caused the flight, the argument that Palestinians left because Arab armies invaded runs five months in the wrong direction: Lifta was empty in February; the armies came in May.

What happened afterwards

The residents of Lifta were never permitted to return. The state expropriated the village lands as “absentee property,” and between 1948 and 1953 the Jewish Agency settled Jewish immigrants from Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan in the houses. In December 2010 the Israel Land Administration issued a tender to sell plots for 268 luxury homes and a hotel - and simultaneously served eviction notices on the remaining Jewish families, claiming they had “broken into” their houses. A coalition of Palestinian refugees from Lifta and Jewish activists fought the plan; the village became a nature reserve in 2017 and sits on Israel’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage.

About 55 of the 450 houses still stand. You can walk through them today. The people who lived there, and their descendants - in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Jordan - cannot return.

Lifta was one village. Between December 1947 and 1949, more than 400 villages and towns followed, and roughly 710,000-780,000 people lost their homes; the UN’s Clapp Mission put it at 726,000 in December 1949. Per Benny Morris, some 250,000-300,000 of them were displaced before a single Arab soldier crossed the border.

One hundred per day is not a rhetorical figure. It is what the sources add up to.

Sources