Edward Atiyah

One passage from his 1955 book, The Arabs, is widely quoted in whole or in part: This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could only be a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country. But it was also, and in many parts of the country, largely due to a policy of deliberate terrorism and eviction followed by the Jewish commanders in the areas they occupied, and reaching its peak of brutality in the massacre of Deir Yassin. (p. 183) Part of the quote has been used as evidence of Arab responsibility for the Palestinian exodus in 1948. In The Spectator of 16 June 1961, Leo Kohn, professor of political science at Hebrew University and an ambassador-rank adviser to the Israeli Foreign Office, used it to support his contention that: There is also a wealth of evidence from Arab sources to show that the Arab League at an early stage of the campaign adopted a policy of evacuating the Arab population to the neighbouring countries, being convinced that their absence would be of short duration and would facilitate the impending military operations. However, Atiyah contested this interpretation. In a letter to The Spectator of 23 June 1961, he said that Kohn had omitted the "policy of deliberate terrorism and eviction followed by the Jewish commanders" and that there was: ... no suggestion whatever in what I wrote that the exodus of the Arab refugees was a result of a policy of evacuating the Arab population. What I said is something quite different from the Zionist allegation that the Arab refugees were ordered or even told by their leaders to evacuate ... ==Death==