The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (16 page)

The three villages were chosen because they were easy prey: they had no defence force of any kind, neither local nor volunteers from the outside. The order came on 5 February to occupy, expel and destroy them.
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Qisarya was the first village to be expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948. The expulsion took only a few hours and was carried out so systematically that the Jewish troops were able to evacuate and destroy another four villages on the same day, all under the watchful eyes of the British troops stationed in police stations nearby.
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The second village was Barrat Qisarya (‘outside Qaysariyya’), which had a population of about 1000. There are a number of photographs from the 1930s of this village showing its picturesque location on the sandy beach close to the ruins of the Roman city. It was wiped out in February in an attack so sudden and fierce that both Israeli and Palestinian historians refer to its disappearance as quite enigmatic. Today a Jewish development town, Or Akiva, stretches out over every square metre of this destroyed village. Some old houses were still standing in the town in the 1970s, but they were quickly demolished when Palestinian research teams tried to document them as part of an overall attempt to reconstruct the Palestinian heritage in this part of the country.

Similarly, only vague information exists about the nearby village of Khirbat al-Burj. This village was smaller than the other two and its remains are still visible to the observant eye if one travels through the area east of the veteran Jewish settlement of Binyamina (relatively ‘veteran’, as it dates from 1922). The major building in the village was an Ottoman inn, a khan, and it is the only building still standing. Called the Burj, the plaque nearby will tell you that once this was a historic castle – not a word is said about the village. Today the building is a popular Israeli venue for exhibitions, fairs and family celebrations.
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North of these three villages, but not very far away, lies another ancient monument, the Crusader’s castle of Atlit. This castle had impressively withstood both the passage of time and the various invading armies that had come down upon the region since the medieval era. The village of Atlit was built next to it and was unique for the rare example it presented of Arab-Jewish cooperation in Mandatory Palestine in the salt industry along its beaches. For ages, the village’s topography had made it a source of salt extraction from the sea, and Jews and Palestinians jointly worked in the evaporation pans southwest of the village that produced quality sea salt. A Palestinian employer, the Atlit Salt company, had invited 500 Jews to live and work alongside the 1000 Arab inhabitants of the village. However, in the 1940s the Hagana turned the Jewish part of the village into a training ground for its members, whose intimidating presence soon reduced the number of Palestinians to 200. No wonder that with the operation in nearby Qisariya, the Jewish troops in the training base did not hesitate to expel their Palestinian co-workers from the joint village. Today the castle is closed to the public as it is now a major training base for Israel’s Naval Commando elite units.

In February, the Jewish troops also reached the village of Daliyat al-Rawha, on the plain overlooking the Milq valley connecting the coast with the Marj Ibn Amir in northeast Palestine. In Arabic the name means ‘the fragrant vine’, a testimony to the scents and sights that still characterise this scenic part of the country. This, too, was a village where Jews lived among Arabs and owned land. The initiative for the attack had come from Yossef Weitz, who wanted to use the new phase of operations to get rid of the village. He had set his eyes on the rich soil, generously supplied by an extremely abundant source of natural water, which was responsible for the village’s fertile fields and vineyards.
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Then came the raid on Sa‘sa, on the night between 14 and 15 February. You cannot miss Sa‘sa today. The Arabic pronunciation uses two laryngeal ‘A’s, but the sign to the entrance of the kibbutz built on the ruins of the Palestinian village points to ‘Sasa’, Hebraization having done away with the throaty pronunciation of the Arabic (difficult for Europeans to master) in favour of the obviously more European soft-sounding ‘A’s. Some of the original Palestinian houses have survived and now lie inside the kibbutz, on the way to Palestine’s highest mountain, Jabel Jermak (Har Meron in Hebrew), 1208 metres above sea level. Beautifully located in the only evergreen part of the country, with its hewn-stone houses, Sa‘sa is one of those Palestinian villages that appears quite often in Israeli official tourist guides.

The order to attack Sa‘sa came from Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach in the north, and was entrusted to Moshe Kalman, the deputy commander of the third battalion that had committed the atrocities in Khisas. Allon explained that the village had to be attacked because of its location. ‘We have to prove to ourselves that we can take the initiative,’ he wrote to Kalman. The order was very clear: ‘You have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many “warriors” [read: “villagers”] as possible’. Sa‘sa was attacked at midnight – all the villages attacked under the ‘
Lamed-Heh
’ order were assaulted around midnight, recalled Moshe Kalman. The
New York Times
(16 April 1948) reported that the large unit of Jewish troops encountered no resistance from the residents as they entered the village and began attaching TNT to the houses. ‘We ran into an Arab guard,’ Kalman recounted later. ‘He was so surprised that he did not ask “
min hada?
”, “who is it?”, but “
eish hada?
”, “what is it?” One of our troops who knew Arabic responded humorously [
sic
] “
hada esh!
” (“this is [in Arabic] fire [in
Hebrew]”) and shot a volley into him.’ Kalman’s troops took the main street of the village and systematically blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside. ‘In the end the sky prised open,’ recalled Kalman poetically, as a third of the village was blasted into the air. ‘We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60–80 dead bodies’ (quite a few of them were children).
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He commended the British army for helping the troops to transfer the two wounded soldiers – hurt by debris flying through the air – to the Safad hospital.
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The Long Seminar participants were called in for another meeting on 19 February 1948, four days after the attack on Sa‘sa. It was a Thursday morning, they met once again in Ben-Gurion’s home, and the Zionist leader recorded the discussion almost verbatim in his diary. The purpose was to examine the impact of the
Lamed Heh
operations on the Palestinians.

Josh Palmon brought the ‘Orientalist’ point of view: the Palestinians still showed no inclination to fight. He was supported by Ezra Danin who reported: ‘The villagers show no wish to fight.’ Moreover, the ALA was clearly confining its activities to the areas the UN resolution had allocated to a future Palestinian state. Ben-Gurion was unimpressed. His thoughts were already somewhere else. He was unhappy with the limited scope of the operations: ‘A small reaction [to Arab hostility] does not impress anyone. A destroyed house – nothing. Destroy a neighborhood, and you begin to make an impression!’ He liked the Sa‘sa operation for the way it had ‘caused the Arabs to flee’.

Danin thought the operation had sent shock waves through the nearby villages, which would serve to dissuade other villagers from taking part in the fighting. The conclusion was therefore to retaliate with force for every single Arab act, and not pay too much attention to whether particular villages or Arabs were neutral.
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This feedback process between response and further planning would continue until March 1948. After that, ethnic cleansing stopped being part of retaliation, but was codifed into a welldefined plan that aimed to uproot the Palestinians en masse from their homeland.

Allon continued to expand on the lessons learned from the
Lamed-Heh
operations in the Consultancy’s mid-February meeting: ‘If we destroy whole neighbourhoods or many houses in the village, as we did in Sa‘sa, we make an impression.’ More people than usual were invited to this
particular meeting. ‘Experts’ on Arab affairs from all over the country had been summoned, among them Giyora Zayd, from the western Galilee, and David Qaron from the Negev. The meeting spelled out the wish to prepare for an all-out operation. All of those present, without exception, reported that rural Palestine showed no desire to fight or attack, and was defenseless. Ben-Gurion concluded by saying he preferred to move more cautiously for the time being and see how events developed. In the meantime, the best thing to do was ‘to continue to terrorize the rural areas . . . through a series of offensives . . . so that the same mood of passivity reported . . . would prevail.’
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Passivity, on the one hand, prevented actions in some areas, but led to many others elsewhere, on the other.

The month ended with the occupation and the expulsion of another village in the district of Haifa, the village of Qira. It too had a mixed Jewish and Arab population, and here, too, as in Daliyat al-Rawha, the presence of Jewish settlers on the village’s land essentially sealed its fate. Again it was Yossef Weitz who urged the army commanders not to delay the operation in the village too long. ‘Get rid of them now,’
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he suggested. Qira was close to another village, Qamun, and Jewish settlers had built their homes strategically between the two.

Qira is very close to where I live today. Now called Yoqneam, Dutch Jews had bought some land here in 1935 before ‘incorporating’ the two evicted Palestinian villages into their settlement in 1948. Nearby Kibbutz Hazorea took over some of the land as well. Yoqneam is an attractive spot because it has one of the last clean water rivers in the Marj Ibn Amir area. In spring, the water gushes through a beautiful canyon down to the valley, as it did in the early days when it reached the stone houses of the village. The inhabitants of Qira called it the Muqata River; Israelis call it ‘the river of peace’. Like so many other scenic sites in this area set aside for recreation and tourism, this one too hides the ruins of a 1948 village. To my shame it took me years to discover this.

Qira and Qamun were not the only places where Weitz could vent his expulsion impulses. He was eager to act wherever he could. In January, soon after he had been invited to join the Consultancy, his diary shows how he contemplated using the ‘retaliation’ policy for getting rid of Palestinian tenants on land already bought by Jews: ‘Is it not time to get rid of them? Why should we continue to keep these thorns in our flesh?’
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In another entry, for 20 January, he recommended that these tenants be treated according to
‘our original plan’, i.e., the ideas he had put forward in the 1930s for transferring the Palestinians.
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Benny Morris lists a number of operations that Weitz directed in February and March for which, Morris adds, no authorization had been given by what Morris euphemistically calls ‘the political leadership’. This is impossible. The centralised Hagana command authorised all actions of expulsion; it is true that, before 10 March 1948, it did not always want to know about them in advance, but it always granted authorization in retrospect. Weitz was never rebuked for the expulsions he was responsible for in Qamun and Qira, Arab al-Ghawarina in the Naman valley, Qumya, Mansurat al-Khayt, Husayniyya, Ulmaniyya, Kirad al-Ghannama and Ubaydiyya, all villages he had selected either for the quality of their land or because Jewish settlers resided in or nearby them.
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The Consultancy had first discussed a draft of Plan Dalet in the second half of February 1948. According to Ben-Gurion’s diary this was on Sunday, 29 February, though one Israeli military historian put the date as 14 February.
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Plan Dalet was finalised in the early days of March. Based on the recollections of the army generals from that period, Israeli historiography generally claims that March 1948 was the most difficult month in the history of the war. But this assessment is only based on one aspect of the unfolding conflict: the ALA attacks on the Jewish convoys to the isolated Jewish settlements that in early March briefly proved relatively effective. Moreover, some of the ALA officers at the time tried to fend off or retaliate for the ongoing Jewish offensives in the mixed cities by terrorizing the Jewish areas through a series of mini raids. Two such attacks gave the public the (false) impression that the ALA might after all be able to show some resistance in the face of a Jewish takeover.

In fact, March 1948 began with this final and short-lived Palestinian military effort to protect its community. The Jewish forces were not yet sufficiently well organised to be able to react immediately and successfully to every counterattack, which explains the sense of distress in some sections of
the Jewish community. However, the Consultancy did not lose its grip on reality for a moment. When they met again at the beginning of March, they did not even discuss the ALA counterattack, nor did they seem to regard the overall situation as particularly troubling. Instead, under the guidance of Ben-Gurion, they were busy preparing a final master plan.

Some members of the Consultancy proposed to continue with the ethnic cleansing operations as the most effective means of protecting the routes to isolated settlements. Their main concern was the Tel-Aviv road to Jerusalem, but Ben-Gurion had already set his mind on something more comprehensive. The conclusion he had drawn from the period between late November 1947 and early March 1948 was that, despite all the efforts from above, a competent guiding hand on the ground was still missing. He also felt that three previous plans the Hagana had prepared for the takeover of the Mandatory state – one in 1937 and two more in 1946 – now needed updating. He therefore ordered a revision of these plans, the two recent ones being code-named Plans B and C.