The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (29 page)

In those days of June 1948, when Israeli forces were on the whole able to occupy and cleanse Palestinian villages with relative ease, tenacious pockets of resistance sometimes held on for a little longer, though never for too long. These were usually locations where ALA volunteers or Arab regular troops, especially Iraqis, helped in the attempt to repel the attacks. One such village was Qaqun: it was first attacked and occupied in May by the Alexandroni, but had been retaken by Iraqi troops. The Israeli headquarters ordered a special operation codenamed ‘
Kippa’
(‘summit’, ‘dome’, but also ‘skullcap’ in Hebrew) on 3 June in order to re-occupy the village where Israeli military intelligence estimated 200 Iraqis and ALA volunteers were entrenched. Even this proved an exaggeration: when the Alexandroni once again took it over they found a much smaller number of defenders.

The order for Operation Kippa introduces yet another Hebrew synonym for cleansing. We have already encountered
tihur
and
biur,
and now Platoon D of the Alexandroni Brigade was ordered to execute a ‘cleaning’ operation (
nikkuy
),
¹¹
all terms that fit the accepted international definitions of ethnic cleansing.

The assault on Qaqun was also the first in which the new state’s Military Police were ordered to play an integral role in the occupation. Well before the attack, they had set up prison camps nearby for the expelled villagers. This was done to avoid the problem they had encountered in Tantura and before that in Ayn al-Zaytun, where the occupying forces had ended up with too many men of ‘military age’ (between ten and fifty) on their hands, many of whom they therefore killed.

In July the Israeli troops took many of the ‘pockets’ that had been left in the previous two months. Several villages on the coastal road that had held out courageously, Ayn Ghazal, Jaba, Ayn Hawd, Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam
and Ijzim, now fell, as did the city of Nazareth and a number of the villages around it.

By 8 July 1948 the first truce had come to an end. It took the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, ten days to negotiate another one, which came into effect on 18 July. As we have seen, 15 May 1948 may have been a very significant date for the ‘real war’ between Israel and the Arab armies, but it was totally insignificant for the ethnic cleansing operations. The same goes for the two periods of truce – they were notable landmarks for the former but irrelevant for the latter, with one qualification, perhaps: it proved easier during the actual fighting to conduct large-scale cleansing operations as the Israelis did between the two truces, when they expelled the populations of the two towns of Lydd and Ramla, altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, when they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.

From 9 July, the day after the first truce ended, the sporadic fighting between the Israeli army and the Arab units from Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon continued for another ten days. In less than two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from their villages, towns and cities. The UN ‘peace’ plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorised by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped. By July, most of their houses had gone, dynamited by Israeli sappers. There was no international intervention the Palestinians could hope for in 1948, nor could they count on outside concern about the atrocious reality evolving in Palestine. Neither did help come from the UN observers, scores of whom roamed the country at close hand ‘observing’ the barbarisation and killings, but were unwilling, or unable, to do anything about them.

One United Nations emissary was different. Count Folke Bernadotte had arrived in Palestine on 20 May and stayed there until Jewish terrorists murdered him in September for having ‘dared’ to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country in half, and to demand the unconditional return of all
the refugees. He had already called for the refugees’ repatriation during the first truce, which had been ignored, and when he repeated his recommendation in the final report he submitted to the UN, he was assassinated. Still, it is thanks to Bernadotte that in December 1948, the UN General Assembly posthumously adopted his legacy and recommended the unqualified return of all the refugees Israel had expelled, one of a host of UN resolutions Israel has systematically ignored. As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.

Bernadotte succeeded in focusing international pressure of some kind on Israel, or he had at least produced the potential for such pressure. In order to counteract this, the Israeli architects of the ethnic cleansing programme realised they would need to involve the state’s diplomats and the Foreign Ministry more directly. By July the political apparatus, the diplomatic corps and the military organisations within the new State of Israel were already working harmoniously together. Prior to July, it is not clear how much of the ethnic cleansing plan had been shared with Israeli diplomats and senior officials. However, when the results gradually became visible the government needed a public relations campaign to stymie adverse international responses, and began to involve and inform those officials responsible for producing the right image abroad – that of a liberal democracy in the making. Officials in the Foreign Ministry worked closely with the country’s intelligence officers, who would warn them in advance of the next stages in the cleansing operation, so as to ensure they would be kept hidden from the public eye.

Yaacov Shimoni functioned as a liaison between the two branches of the government. As both an Orientalist and a European Jew, Shimoni was pre-eminently suited to help propagate Israel’s case abroad. In July he was eager to see a more accelerated pace on the ground: he believed there was a window of opportunity for completing the uprooting and occupation before the world turned its attention once more to Palestine.
¹²
Shimoni would later become one of the doyens of Orientalism in Israeli academia due to his expertise on Palestine and the Arab world, expertise he and many of his colleagues in Israel’s universities had gained during the ethnic cleansing and de-Arabisation of Palestine.

The first targets of the Israeli forces in the ten days between the two truces were the pockets within the Galilee around Acre, and Nazareth. ‘Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages’ was the order that three brigades received on July 6, two days before the Israeli troops – straining at their leashes to continue the cleansing operations – were ordered to violate the first truce. Jewish soldiers automatically understood that ‘enemy’ meant defenceless Palestinian villagers and their families. The brigades they belonged to were the Carmeli, the Golani and Brigade Seven, the three brigades of the north that would also be responsible for the final cleansing operations in the upper Galilee in October. The inventive people whose job it was to come up with the names for operations of this kind had now switched from ‘cleansing’ synonyms (‘Broom’, ‘Scissors’) to trees: ‘Palm’ (
Dekel
) for the Nazareth area and ‘Cypress’ (
Brosh
) for the Jordan Valley area.
¹³

The operation in and around Nazareth was executed at a fast pace, and large villages not taken in May were now quickly captured: Amqa, Birwa (the village where the famous contemporary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born), Damun, Khirbat Jiddin and Kuwaykat each had more than 1500 inhabitants and yet they were easily forced out.

It was Brigade Seven that supervised the execution of Operation Palm Tree, with auxiliary forces coming from the Carmeli and the Golani. In many of the Palestinian oral histories that have now come to the fore, few brigade names appear. However, Brigade Seven is mentioned again and again, together with such adjectives as ‘terrorists’ and ‘barbarous’.
¹⁴

The first village to be attacked was Amqa, which like so many villages on the coastal plain from south to north had a long history going back to at least the sixth century. Amqa was also typical because it was a mixed Muslim and Druze community who had been living together in harmony before the Israeli policy of divide and rule forced a wedge between them, deporting the Muslims and allowing the Druze to join other Druze villages in the area.
¹⁵

Today some of the remains of Amqa are still visible despite the massive destruction that occurred almost sixty years ago. In the midst of the wild grass that covers the area, one can clearly see the remnants of the school and the village mosque. Though now dilapidated, the mosque reveals even today the exquisite masonry the villagers produced for its construction.
it cannot be entered, as its current Jewish ‘owner’ uses it as a storehouse, but its size and unique structure are visible from the outside.

Operation Palm Tree completed the take-over of the Western Galilee. Some of the villages were left intact: Kfar Yassif, Iblin and the town of Shafa‘Amr. These were mixed villages, with Christians, Muslims and Druze. Still, many of their inhabitants who proved of the ‘wrong’ origin or affiliation were deported. Actually, many families had deserted the villages before the occupation, as they knew what was in store for them. Some villages, in fact, were totally emptied, but they are there today because the Israelis allowed them to be repopulated by refugees from other villages they had destroyed. Such policies created confusion and havoc – as orders were followed by counter-orders, they disoriented even the expellers. In some of the mixed villages the Israelis ordered the frenzied expulsion of half of the population, mostly the Muslims, and then permitted Christian refugees from nearby emptied villages to resettle in the newly evacuated places, as happened in the cases of the villages of Kfar Yassif and Iblin, and the town of Shafa‘Amr.

As a result of these population movements inside the Galilee, Shafa‘Amr became a huge town, swollen by the streams of refugees entering it in the wake of the May-to-July operations in the surrounding area. It was occupied on 16 July but was basically left alone: that is, nobody was expelled. This was an exceptional decision that would recur in Nazareth – in both cases it was local commanders who took the initiative.

Yigael Yadin, the Acting Chief of Staff, visited Shafa‘Amr later that month and was clearly taken aback to find an Arab town with all its inhabitants still there: ‘The people of the town roam about freely,’ he reported in his bewilderment to Ben-Gurion. Yadin immediately ordered the imposition of a curfew and a search-and-arrest campaign, but gave particular instructions to leave the Druze of Shafa‘Amr alone.
¹⁶

One pocket of resistance held out for so long that some of the villages in the area endured ten days of fighting. This happened along the coast south of Haifa. Of the six villages there, three fell before the second truce was announced; the other three succumbed
after
the truce had taken effect.

The first three were Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam and Ayn Hawd. The largest of them was Tirat Haifa, only a few kilometres south of Haifa, with a
population of 5000. Today it is a dismal Jewish development town – with almost the same name, Tirat Hacarmel – clinging to the lower western slopes of the Carmel, at the bottom of Haifa’s wealthiest neighbourhood, Denya, which has gradually been expanding downwards from the crest of Mount Carmel (where Haifa University is located) but with Haifa’s municipality studiously avoiding connecting the two with a road system.

It was the district’s most populous village and the second largest in terms of area. It was called St Yohan de Tire during the time of the Crusaders, when it became a significant site for both Christian pilgrims and the local churches. Since then, with its Muslim majority, Tirat Haifa had always had a small community of Christians, both groups respecting the village’s Christian heritage and its overall Muslim character. In 1596, when it was included in the sub-district of Lajjun, it had no more than 286 inhabitants. Three hundreds years later it was on the way to becoming a town but then fell prey to new centralisation policies in the late Ottoman period and the massive conscription of its younger people into the Ottoman army, most of whom chose not to return.

Tirat Haifa was another village that at the end of the Second World War emerged from tough and difficult times into the dawn of a new era. Signs of recovery were visible everywhere: new stone and mud brick houses were being built and the two village schools, one for boys and one for girls, were renovated. The village’s economy was based on the cultivation of arable crops, vegetables and fruit. It was richer than most villages because it was endowed with an excellent water supply from the nearby springs. Its pride was its almonds, famous throughout the area. Tirat al-Lawz, the ‘Tira of the almonds’, was a household name in Palestine. An additional source of income was tourism, centred mainly around visits to the ruins of the monastery of St Brocardus, still there today.

Throughout my childhood, the remains of the village’s old stone houses lay scattered around the cubic grey apartment blocks of the Jewish development town that had been built on the village site. After 1967 the local municipality demolished most of them, more out of profit-seeking real-estate zeal than as part of the ideological memoricide that had remained a priority for the Israelis.

Like so many other villages in the Greater Haifa area, Tirat Haifa was exposed, prior to its final depopulation, to constant attacks and onslaughts by Jewish forces. The Irgun bombarded it as early as December 1947, killing
thirteen people, mainly children and the elderly. After the shelling a raiding party of twenty Irgun members approached and began firing at an isolated house on the edge of the village. Between 23 April and 3 May every woman and child of Tirat Haifa was taken out of the village as part of the overall British ‘mediation’ effort that enabled the Jewish forces to cleanse the greater Haifa area unhampered by any external pressure. Tirat Haifa’s women and children were transferred by buses to the West Bank while the men stayed behind. A unit of special forces consisting of the combined elite troops from several brigades were brought in to bring Tirat Haifa down on 16 July.