Jewish Palestine Refugees - I Am Corrected

For years I have trying to promote the simple historical fact that Jews were also Palestine refugees.

(For previous posts see here; and here)

As per UNRWA's own definition, that Agency has decided that a refugee is a needy person, who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood. 

Arabs and Jews, both.

How "Palestinian refugee" crept in there I do not fully know.

But how many Jews.

My figure, based on what I read was between 17,000 to 20,000.

I was a minimalist.

Benny Morris’s book "1948 A History of The First Arab Israeli War", puts the number of Jewish refugees at 70,000.

According to a new book mentioned in the JPost, the number is at least 60,000 Jewish refugees.

The book, published in Hebrew, 

is titled "Jewish Refugees in Israel's War of Independence" and is authored by Nurit Cohen-Levinovsky who holds a PhD in history and heads the Educational Department at the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Center in Tel Aviv.

As David Shayne notes,

according to Dr. Levinovsky, some 97 Jewish villages were attacked and damaged: 11 of these were destroyed entirely, 6 were conquered and lost – until after the 1967 Six Day War, when those conquered were re-established...Fully one quarter of Jerusalem’s Jews fled, mostly to the relative safety of the coastal plain.

Jerusalem's Jewish population numbered 100,000 in 1948. 

I stand corrected.

But I correct the record: as a result of the Arab terror ethnic cleansing campaign of 1920-1947, the true number of Jews who became refugees during the Mandate era, even if UNRWA limits the term "refugee" to the 1946-1948 period, is several thousands more, as we need include those who were driven out of Hebron, Gaza, Shchem, Jenin, Jericho, Tul Karem and Jerusalem.

The exodus from the Old City began in 1920, increased after Nov. 1921, after August 1929 and then during 1936-39 all due to Arab rioting and terror.

We know the British forced Jews out too.

At the beginning of the 20th century, 20,000 Jews lived in the Old City. In 1948, 1700 were left.

Thousands of Jaffa's Jews were forced out due to most of the same circumstances (in 1936, 10,000 Jews still lived in Jaffa. In 1920, 8740 Jews lived in Jaffa, by the British count, and that number increased until 1929.

Hundreds of Jews from Hebron.

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