The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2 page)

6. 1949 Armistice Agreement

7. Palestinian villages depopulated, 1947–1949

Table 1: Jewish and Palestinian land ownership, 1945

Table 2: Jewish and Palestinian population distribution, 1946

Over the years, the theme of this book was discussed with many friends, all of whom, in one way or another, have contributed to this book with their encouragement and support; many also provided me with documents, testimonies and evidence. There were so many of them that I do not dare compose a list, but wish to thank them collectively. The military material was collected by Oshri Neta-Av, and I thank him for what was, in hindsight, a very difficult task, not only because of the voluminous material, but also due to a murky political atmosphere.

Uri Davis, Nur Masalha and Charles Smith read the manuscript, and I hope that, at least in part, the end result reflects their industrious work. Needless to say, the final version is mine and they share no responsibility for the text. Nonetheless, I owe them a great deal and wish to thank them very much for their cooperation.

Walid Khalidi and Anton Shamas, who read the manuscript, provided moral support and empowerment, which made the writing of the book a valuable and meaningful project, even prior to publication.

My dear old friend Dick Bruggeman, as always, was there editing meticulously and painstakingly. This project could not have been completed without him.

Novin Doostdar, Drummond Moir, Kate Kirkpatrick, and above all Juliet Mabey at Oneworld lost sleep and time over this manuscript. I hope the end result is a fine reward for their immense efforts.

Revital, Ido and Yonatan, as always, suffered for the fact that their husband and father did not choose a far-away country in the distant past as a specialist subject, hobby and obsession. This book is another attempt to tell them, as much as anyone else, why our beloved country is devastated, hopeless and torn by hatred and bloodshed.

And finally, this book is not formally dedicated to anyone, but it is written first and foremost for the Palestinian victims of the 1948 ethnic
cleansing. Many of them are friends and comrades, many others are nameless to me, and yet ever since I learned about the Nakba I have carried with me their suffering, their loss and their hopes. Only when they return will I feel that this chapter of the catastrophe has finally reached the closure we all covet, enabling all of us to live in peace and harmony in Palestine.

‘I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’

David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938
¹

The ‘Red House’ was a typical early Tel-Avivian building. The pride of the Jewish builders and craftsmen who toiled over it in the 1920s, it had been designed to house the head office of the local workers’ council. It remained such until, towards the end of 1947, it became the headquarters of the Hagana, the main Zionist underground militia in Palestine. Located near the sea on Yarkon Street in the northern part of Tel-Aviv, the building formed another fine addition to the first ‘Hebrew’ city on the Mediterranean, the ‘White City’ as its literati and pundits affectionately called it. For in those days, unlike today, the immaculate whiteness of its houses still bathed the town as a whole in the opulent brightness so typical of Mediterranean port cities of the era and the region. It was a sight for sore eyes, elegantly fusing Bauhaus motifs with native Palestinian architecture in an admixture that was called Levantine, in the least derogatory sense of the term. Such, too, was the ‘Red House’, its simple rectangular features graced with frontal arches that framed the entrance and supported the balconies on its two upper storeys. It was either its association with a workers’ movement
that had inspired the adjective ‘red’, or a pinkish tinge it acquired during sunset that had given the house its name.
²
The former was more fitting, as the building continued to be associated with the Zionist version of socialism when, in the 1970s, it became the main office for Israel’s kibbutzim movement. Houses like this, important historical remnants of the Mandatory period, prompted UNESCO in 2003 to designate Tel-Aviv as a World Heritage site.

Today the house is no longer there, a victim of development, which has razed this architectural relic to the ground to make room for a car park next to the new Sheraton Hotel. Thus, in this street, too, no trace is left of the ‘White City’, which it has slowly transmogrified into the sprawling, polluted, extravagant metropolis that is modern Tel-Aviv.

In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
³
The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D (
Dalet
in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.
⁴
In the words of one of the first historians to note the significance of that plan, Simcha Flapan, ‘The military campaign against the Arabs, including the “conquest and destruction of the rural areas” was set forth in the Hagana’s Plan Dalet’.
⁵
The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine.

As the first chapters of this book will attempt to show, this plan was both the inevitable product of the Zionist ideological impulse to have an
exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine, and a response to developments on the ground once the British cabinet had decided to end the mandate. Clashes with local Palestinian militias provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948.
⁶

Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants. The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity.

After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.

Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity, and the people who perpetrate it today are considered criminals to be brought before special tribunals. It may be difficult to decide how one ought to refer to or deal with, in the legal sphere, those who initiated and perpetrated ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1948, but it is possible to reconstruct their crimes and to arrive at both an historiographical account that will prove more accurate than the ones achieved so far, and a moral position of greater integrity.

We know the names of the people who sat in that room on the top floor of the Red House, beneath Marxist-style posters that carried such slogans as ‘Brothers in Arms’ and ‘The Fist of Steel’, and showed ‘new’ Jews – muscular, healthy and tanned – aiming their rifles from behind protective barriers in the ‘brave fight’ against ‘hostile Arab invaders’. We also know the names
of the senior officers who executed the orders on the ground. All are familiar figures in the pantheon of Israeli heroism.
⁷
Not so long ago many of them were still alive, playing major roles in Israeli politics and society; very few are still with us today.

For Palestinians, and anyone else who refused to buy into the Zionist narrative, it was clear long before this book was written that these people were perpetrators of crimes, but that they had successfully evaded justice and would probably never be brought to trial for what they had done. Besides their trauma, the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied, and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948.

Approximately thirty years ago, the victims of the ethnic cleansing started reassembling the historical picture that the official Israeli narrative of 1948 had done everything to conceal and distort. The tale Israeli historiography had concocted spoke of a massive ‘voluntary transfer’ of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had decided temporarily to leave their homes and villages so as to make way for the invading Arab armies bent on destroying the fledgling Jewish state. By collecting authentic memories and documents about what had happened to their people, Palestinian historians in the 1970s, Walid Khalidi foremost among them, were able to retrieve a significant part of the picture Israel had tried to erase. But they were quickly overshadowed by publications such as Dan Kurzman’s
Genesis 1948
which appeared in 1970 and again in 1992 (now with an introduction by one of the executors of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister). However, there were also some who came out in support of the Palestinian endeavour, like Michael Palumbo whose
The Palestinian Catastrophe
, published in 1987, validated the Palestinian version of the 1948 events with the help of UN documents and interviews with Palestinian refugees and exiles, whose memories of what they had gone through during the Nakba still proved to be hauntingly vivid.
⁸

We could have had a political breakthrough in the battle over memory in Palestine with the appearance on the scene in the 1980s of the so-called ‘new history’ in Israel. This was an attempt by a small group of Israeli historians to revise the Zionist narrative of the 1948 war.
⁹
I was one of them. But we, the new historians, never contributed significantly to the struggle against the Nakba denial as we sidestepped the question of ethnic cleansing
and, typically of diplomatic historians, focused on details. Nonetheless, using primarily Israeli military archives, the revisionist Israeli historians did succeed in showing how false and absurd was the Israeli claim that the Palestinians had left ‘of their own accord’. They were able to confirm many cases of massive expulsions from villages and towns and revealed that the Jewish forces had committed a considerable number of atrocities, including massacres.

One of the best-known figures writing on the subject was the Israeli historian Benny Morris.
¹⁰
As he exclusively relied on documents from Israeli military archives, Morris ended up with a very partial picture of what happened on the ground. Still, this was enough for some of his Israeli readers to realise that the ‘voluntary flight’ of the Palestinians had been a myth and that the Israeli self-image of having waged a ‘moral’ war in 1948 against a ‘primitive’ and hostile Arab world was considerably flawed and possibly already bankrupt.

The picture was partial because Morris took the Israeli military reports he found in the archives at face value or even as absolute truth. Thus, he ignored such atrocities as the poisoning of the water supply into Acre with typhoid, numerous cases of rape and the dozens of massacres the Jews perpetrated. He also kept insisting – wrongly – that before 15 May 1948 there had been no forced evictions.
¹¹
Palestinian sources show clearly how months before the entry of Arab forces into Palestine, and while the British were still responsible for law and order in the country – namely before 15 May – the Jewish forces had already succeeded in forcibly expelling almost a quarter of a million Palestinians.
¹²
Had Morris and others used Arab sources or turned to oral history, they might have been able to get a better grasp of the systematic planning behind the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and provide a more truthful description of the enormity of the crimes the Israeli soldiers committed.