🇵🇸|The “right of return” was never a slogan invented in 1948. It was carved into the bones of a people who were bombed out of their homes, and then told they were trespassers for trying to come back.
July 6, 1938. Haifa market. A bomb hidden inside a milk can. 21 dead. 52 wounded. The Irgun claimed it. Menachem Begin, one of its commanders, became Prime Minister of Israel. His legacy is the same bomb, different century.
July 25, 1938. Another bomb in the Haifa vegetable market. 35 dead. 70 wounded. The “climax,” as historian Benny Morris calls it, of a campaign of terrorism aimed at Palestinian civilians.
Then April 1948. Haifa’s 75,000 Palestinians were subjected to eight hours of mortar shelling by the Haganah, aimed at the market square. Jeeps with loudspeakers broadcast screams of Arab women and threatened poison gas. The Carmeli Brigade was ordered to “kill every [adult] male encountered.” British observers reported “indiscriminate and wanton machine gun fire and sniping on women and children” trying to flee through the docks.
By June 23, 1948, the American Consul in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott, was reporting back to Washington: “Arabs who return Haifa are considered illegals. Of these Jews are permitting only those to remain whom they consider satisfactory after thorough investigation.”
Read that again. Families that fled under fire, from bombs and mortars, were reclassified as “illegal entrants” in their own city. Their homes were seized. Their properties were transferred. Their very existence in the place they were born became a crime.
Leaving under fire was not consent to permanent dispossession. Fleeing a massacre is not a legal waiver of your home. But the new “authorities” decided otherwise. And the world, as it did with the milk-can bombs in 1938, did nothing.
The same playbook. The same lies. The same impunity. The same “approval” required to return to a home that was never theirs to give.
Sources: Falastin, 7 July 1938; Institute for Palestine Studies / Arab Women's Information Committee, Who Are the Terrorists? (1972), pp. 5–6; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (2001), p. 147 (Irgun attribution), and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), Haifa chapter; Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, ch. 3 (transfer planning).
US diplomatic records:
history.state.gov/historical…
history.state.gov/historical…