One quote 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 above quote has often been used as an evidence of Arab responsibility for the Palestinian exodus in 1948 . In the June 16 , 1961 , '' The Spectator '' , 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 , Edward Atiyah came forward to contest this interpretation . In a letter in '' The Spectator '' of 23 June 1961 , he wrote in a first comment that the passage quoted by Kohn omitted the next sentence : " But it was also , and in many parts of the country , largely due to a policy of deliberate terrorism and eviction followed by Jewish commanders in the area they occupied , and reaching its peak of brutality in the massacre of Deir Yassin . ” Having thus referred back to what in his book he considered to be two partial reasons for the exodus , Atiyah then continued , however , in his second comment , to state that there is ' " 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 , ... " '' Atiyah died in 1964 at the age of 61 while taking part in a debate on Arab-Israeli relations at the Oxford Union
Deir Yassin
Deir Yassin massacre
Edward Atiyah