Despite the widespread belief in transfer among leading Zionists before the war, the
Yishuv began the war on the defensive and did not have a master plan calling for the expulsion
of the Palestinian Arab population from within the boundaries of the UNSCOP-designated
Jewish state. This defensive strategy, however, grew unsustainable in March 1948 as Arab
militias ambushed Jewish convoys on the roads and threatened to isolate and dismember the
Yishuv’s separate pieces. In the face of this overwhelming military threat, Jewish leaders shifted
from defense to offense by adopting Plan D, which sought to eliminate Arab enclaves within
Jewish-inhabited areas and solder these districts together by purging Arabs from the territory in
between. Haganah forces used indiscriminate artillery and aerial bombardment to terrorize Arab
townspeople and villagers to flee, and tolerated and exploited massacres perpetrated by allied
Jewish militias at places like Deir Yassin. A few thousand Arabs were killed, but hundreds of
thousands fled to neighboring Arab states and Israel’s minority problem was reduced to a
manageable level.
*
This is by no means definitive evidence—and there are clearly exceptions (none of my causal
mechanisms accounts very well for Italian brutality against Ethiopia in 1935, for example)—but
it suggests that cause preceded effect in several historical cases of civilian victimization, and that
the causal mechanisms hypothesized in this paper appear to be operating. There is no doubt that
once the choice to target noncombatants is prompted by rising costs, desperation, or the desire to
annex territory, the longer the war continues, the higher the death toll is likely to be (assuming
belligerents have access to enemy civilians). But targeting civilians is not what causes wars to
become protracted in the first place. The British blockade of the Central Powers in the First
World War, for example, did not prolong the conflict: the difficulty of solving the problems that
led to trench warfare did. The Germans did not fail to capture Moscow and perhaps knock out
39
Convention