The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (35 page)

Ben-Gurion took the discussion of future plans, including the need to occupy Southern Lebanon, to a committee of five (all veterans of the Consultancy) whom he invited to the Israeli army’s new headquarters, called the ‘Hill’. They met several times through October and November, which must have made Ben-Gurion nostalgic about the cabals of earlier days. Ben-Gurion now consulted this five-man body of decision-makers about a future occupation of the West Bank. His comrades brought to the fore another argument against the occupation of the West Bank. In the words of one of the participants, Yitzhak Greenbaum,
Israel’s Minister of the Interior: ‘It would be impossible to do there what was done in the rest of Palestine,’ i.e., ethnic cleansing. Greenbaum continued: ‘If we take places such as Nablus, the Jewish world will demand of us to keep it’ [and hence we would have not only Nablus but also the Nabulsians].
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Only in 1967 did Ben-Gurion recognise the difficulties of re-enacting the 1948 mass expulsions in the areas Israel occupied in the June war. Ironically, it may have been he who dissuaded the then Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, to refrain from such a massive operation, and be content with the deportation of ‘only’ 200,000 people. Consequently, he recommended withdrawing the Israeli army from the West Bank immediately. Rabin, supported by the rest of the government at that time, insisted instead on annexing the territories to Israel.

Plans to seize southern Lebanon were based on intelligence reports that the Lebanese had no offensive, but only defensive plans. Thirteen villages were captured in southern Lebanon, which left the Israelis with a larger number of what they called ‘prisoners of war’ – a mixture of villagers and regular soldiers – than they could handle. Consequently, executions took place here as well. On 31 October 1948, the Jewish forces executed more than eighty villagers in the village of Hula alone, while in the village of Saliha Israeli troops butchered more than 100 people. One person, Shmuel Lahis, later to become Director-General of the Jewish Agency, was brought before a military court at the time for single-handedly executing thirty-five people. Dov Yirmiya, a commander who had himself participated in ethnic cleansing operations between May and July, was one of the few IDF officers who was genuinely appalled when he realised what the operations were leading to. He began protesting vociferously against any atrocities he witnessed or heard about. It was Yirmiya who brought Lahis to trial. Lahis received a seven-year prison term, but was almost immediately pardoned and exonerated by Israel’s president, and subsequently rose to high positions in government.
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When Israel re-invaded Southern Lebanon in 1978, and again in 1982, the POW ‘problem’ was solved: the IDF built a network of prisons to interrogate and quite often torture the people it held captive there, with the help of the South Lebanese Army. The prison at Khiyam has become a byword for Israeli cruelty.

Back in 1948, another pattern appeared, inevitable in the repertoire of an occupying army, which would reoccur in the 1982–2001 occupation, and this was the exploitative and abusive conduct towards the occupied
population. A complaint from 14 December 1948 by the commander of the Israeli forces in Lebanon to the High Command notes: ‘The soldiers in southern Lebanon order the villagers to provide and prepare food for them.’
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In the light of the Israeli disposition in later years in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, one can only imagine this was just the tip of the iceberg of abuse and humiliation. The Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon in April 1949, but, as happened in 1978 and once more in 1982, their occupation had created a lot of bad blood and stirred up feelings of revenge as it extended the practices of the 1948 ethnic cleansing in Palestine to the south of Lebanon.

The whole of the Galilee was now in Jewish hands. The Red Cross was allowed to go in and examine the conditions of the people who had been left, or rather allowed to remain, in the region, as Israel knew that barring the Red Cross from such inspections would stand in the way of its application to become a full member of the UN. The toll of siege, bombardment and expulsion could be seen everywhere. In November 1948 the organisation’s representatives reported a scene of devastation: in every village they visited, the able men had been imprisoned, leaving behind women and children without their traditional breadwinners and creating total disarray; crops were not harvested and were left to rot in the fields, and diseases were spreading in the rural areas at an alarming pace. The Red Cross reported malaria as being the main problem, but also found numerous cases of typhoid, rickets, diphtheria and scurvy.
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The last front was the southern Negev, which the Israelis reached in November 1948. Driving out the remaining Egyptian forces, they continued south and arrived in March 1949 at a fishing village near the Red Sea, Umm Rashrash, today the city of Eilat.

Yigal Allon, aware that the best brigades were being used for the ethnic cleansing operations in the populated areas, now wished to redirect them to the occupation of the Negev: ‘I need to replace the Negev Brigade with Brigade Harel and I wish to have Brigade Eight. The enemy is strong, fortified and well equipped and will wage stubborn war but we can win.’
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The main worry, however was a British counter-attack, since the
Israelis wrongly believed this area was coveted by Britain or that His Majesty’s Government would activate its defense treaty with Egypt, as some of the Israeli forces were about to move into Egyptian territories proper. In the event, the British did neither, although they did clash here and there with the Israeli air force that mercilessly and, perhaps, pointlessly bombarded Rafah, Gaza and El-Arish.
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As a result, the Gazans, refugees and veteran population alike, have had the longest history as victims of Israeli air bombardment – from 1948 until the present.

On the ethnic cleansing front, the final operations in the south provided, unsurprisingly, an opportunity for further depopulation and expulsions. The two southern coastal towns of Isdud and Majdal were taken in November 1948 and their populations expelled to the Gaza Strip. Several thousands of people who had remained in Majdal were expelled in December 1949, shocking some left-wing Israelis as this was done during a ‘time of peace’.
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The month of December 1948 was devoted to cleansing the Negev of many of the Bedouin tribes that resided there. A huge tribe, the Tarabins, was expelled to Gaza; the army only allowed 1,000 of its members to remain. Another tribe, the Tayaha, was split into two: half of them were deported to Gaza and the other half forcibly evicted in the direction of Jordan. The al-Hajajre, whose land straddled the railway line, were pushed into Gaza by December. Only the al-Azazmeh succeeded in returning, but they were driven out again between 1950 and 1954, when they became the favourite target of a special Israeli commando force, Unit 101, led by a young ambitious officer called Ariel Sharon. In December the Israeli units also completed the depopulation of the Bersheba district that they had started in the autumn of 1948. When they had finished, ninety per cent of the people who had lived for centuries in this, the most southern inhabited region of Palestine, were gone.
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In November and December, Israeli troops attacked Wadi Ara again, but the presence of volunteers, Iraqi units and local villagers both deterred and in several cases defeated this plan yet again. Villages that are familiar names to Israelis travelling on the busy Route 65 that connects Afula and Hadera succeeded in protecting themselves against a far superior military force: Mushayrifa, Musmus, Mu‘awiya, Arara, Barta’a, Shuweika and many others. The largest of these villages has grown into the town
we know today as Umm al-Fahm. There, with some training from the Iraqi soldiers, the villagers themselves had organised a force that they called the ‘Army of Honour’. This fifth Israeli attempt to occupy these villages was called ‘
Hidush Yameinu ke-Kedem
’, that is ‘Restoring our Glorious Past’, possibly in the hope that such a charged codename would imbue the attacking forces with particular zeal, but it was destined to fail once again.

Another ominous-sounding name was given to the operation in the Beersheba–Hebron area: ‘Python’. Apart from the small town of Beersheba, which with its 5,000 inhabitants was occupied on 21 October, two large villages, Qubayba and Dawaymeh were taken. Habib Jarada, who today lives in the city of Gaza, remembered the people of Beersheba being driven out at gunpoint to Hebron. His most vivid image is that of the town’s mayor beseeching the occupying officer not to deport the people. ‘We need land, not slaves,’ was the blunt answer.
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The town of Beersheba was protected mainly by Egyptian volunteers from the Muslim Brotherhood’s movement under the command of a Libyan officer, Ramadan al-Sanusi. When the fighting was over, the captive soldiers and all local people the Israeli troops suspected of holding arms were rounded up and randomly fired at. Jarada remembers to this day many of the names of the people killed, which included his cousin Yussuf Jarada and his grandfather Ali Jarada. Jarada was taken to a prison camp and was released only in the summer of 1949 in a prisoner exchange following Israel’s armistice with Jordan.

Then there was the village of Dawaymeh, between Beersheba and Hebron. The events that unfolded in Dawaymeh are probably the worst in the annals of Nakba atrocities. The village was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight.

The UN’s Palestine Conciliation Commission, mentioned before as replacing Count Bernadotte in the UN mediation efforts, convened a special session to investigate what happened in this village on 28 October 1948, less than three miles west of the city of Hebron. The original population was 2,000, but an additional 4,000 refugees had tripled that.

The UN report from 14 June 1949 (accessible today on the Internet by simply searching for the village name) says the following:

The reason why so little is known about this massacre which, in many respects, was more brutal than the Deir Yassin massacre, is because the Arab Legion (the army in control of that area) feared that if the news was allowed to spread, it would have the same effect on the moral of the peasantry that Deir Yassin had, namely to cause another flow of Arab refugees.

More likely, the Jordanians feared accusations being rightly leveled against them for their impotence and lack of action. The report to the PCC was based mainly on the mukhtar’s testimony. He was Hassan Mahmoud Ihdeib and much of what he says was corroborated by the reports that lie in the Israeli military archives. A well-known Israeli writer, Amos Keinan, who participated in the massacre, confirmed its existence in an interview he gave in the late 1990s to the Palestinian actor and film maker Muhammad Bakri, for Bakri’s documentary ‘1948’.

Half an hour after the midday prayer on 28 October, recalled the mukhtar, twenty armoured cars entered the village from Qubayba while soldiers attacked simultaneously from the opposite flank. The twenty people guarding the village were immediately paralysed with fear. The soldiers on the armoured cars opened fire with automatic weapons and mortars, making their way into the village in a semi-circular movement. Following the established routine, they surrounded the village from three flanks, leaving open the eastern flank with the aim of driving out 6,000 people in one hour. When this failed to happen, the troops jumped out of their vehicles and started shooting at the people indiscriminately, many of whom ran to the mosque to seek shelter or fled to a nearby holy cave, called Iraq al-Zagh. Venturing back into the village the next day, the mukhtar beheld with horror the piles of dead bodies in the mosque – with many more strewn about in the street – men, women and children, among them his own father. When he went to the cave, he found the entrance blocked by dozens of corpses. The count the mukhtar carried out told him that 455 people were missing, among them around 170 children and women.

The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death. These were not reports delivered
years later, but eye-witness accounts sent to the High Command within a few days of the event.
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The brutality they describe reinforces my faith in the accuracy of the descriptions, mentioned earlier on, of the hideous crimes Israeli soldiers committed in Tantura, Safsaf and Sa‘sa, all reconstructed mainly with the help of Palestinian testimonies and oral histories.

This was the end result of the order that the commander of Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight had received from the Chief of Staff, Yigael Yadin: ‘Your preparations should include psychological warfare and “treatment” (
tipul
) of citizens as an integral part of the operation.’
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The massacre at Dawaymeh was the last large massacre Israeli troops perpetrated until 1956, when forty-nine villagers of Kfar Qassim, a village transferred to Israel in the armistice agreement with Jordan, were butchered.

Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchering. Thousands of Palestinians were killed ruthlessly and savagely by Israeli troops of all backgrounds, ranks and ages. None of these Israelis was ever tried for war crimes, in spite of the overwhelming evidence.

And if, here and there, in 1948, some remorse was to be found, as in a poem by Natan Alterman – the same Alterman who had in 1945 compared the Palestinians to the Nazis – it was no more than another show of ‘shoot and cry’, a typically righteous Israeli way of seeking self-absolution. When he first heard of the brutal slaughtering of innocent civilians in the north in Operation Hiram, Alterman wrote: