The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (36 page)

Nor did any contrition such as Alterman’s stop the forces from completing their mission of cleansing Palestine, a job to which they now applied increasing levels of ruthlessness and cruelty. Hence, starting in November 1948 and all the way up to the final agreement with Syria and Lebanon in the summer of 1949, another eighty-seven villages were occupied; thirty-six of these were emptied by force, while from the rest a selective number of
people were deported. As 1950 began, the energy and purposefulness of the expellers finally began to wane and those Palestinians who were still living in Palestine – by then divided into the State of Israel, a Jordanian West Bank and an Egyptian Gaza Strip – were largely safe from further expulsions. True, they were placed under military rule both in Israel and Egypt, and as such remained vulnerable. But, whatever the hardships they incurred, it was a better fate than they had suffered throughout that year of horrors we now call the Nakba.

Refugees have claimed that Serb forces have been systematically separating ‘military aged’ ethnic Albanian men – those ranging from as young as age 14 up to 59 years old – from the population as they expel the Kosovar Albanians from their homes. The Serbs use the Ferro-Nickel factory in Glogovac as a detention centre for a large number of Kosovar Albanians.

State Department Report on Kosovo 1999

The order is to take captive any suspicious Arab of military age, between the ages of 10 and 50.

IDF Orders, IDF Archives, 5943/49/114, 13 April 1948 General Orders for how to treat POWs.

Since the beginning of the Intifada in September 2000 over 2,500 children have been arrested. Currently there are at least 340 Palestinian children being held in Israeli prisons.

The People’s Voice, 15 December 2005

Since 1967, Israel has detained 670,000 Palestinians.

Official Declaration by the Arab League, 9 January 2006

A Child: Every human being under the age of 18.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child. UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty.

A
lthough Israel had essentially completed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by now, the hardships did not end for the Palestinians. About 8,000 spent the whole of 1949 in the prison camps, others suffered physical abuse in the towns, and large numbers of Palestinians were harassed in numerous ways under the military rule that Israel now exerted over them. Their houses continued to be looted, their fields confiscated, their holy places desecrated, and Israel violated such basic rights as their freedom of movement and expression, and of equality before the law.

A common sight in rural Palestine in the wake of the cleansing operations were huge pens in which male villagers, ranging from children from the age of ten to older men up to the age of fifty, were being held after the Israelis had picked them out in the ‘search-and-arrest’ operations that had now become routine. They were later moved to centralized prison camps. The Israeli search-and-arrest operations were quite systematic, took place all over the countryside, and usually carried similar generic codenames, such as ‘Operation Comb’ or even ‘Distillation’ (
ziquq
).
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The first of these operations took place in Haifa, a few weeks after the city was occupied. The Israeli intelligence units were after ‘returnees’: refugees who, understandably, wanted to come back to their homes after the fighting had subsided and calm and normality seemed to have returned to the cities of Palestine. However, others were also targeted under the category of ‘suspicious Arab’. In fact, the order went out to find as many such ‘suspicious Arabs’ as possible, without actually bothering to define the nature of the suspicion.
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In a procedure familiar to most Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today, Israeli troops would first put a place – a city or a village – under a closure order. Then intelligence units would start searching from house to house, pulling people out whom they suspected of being present ‘illegally’ in that particular location as well as any other ‘suspicious Arabs’. Often these would be people residing in their own homes. All people picked up in these raids were then brought to a special headquarters.

In the city of Haifa this headquarters quickly became the dread of the Palestinians in the city. It was located in the Hadar neighbourhood, the quarter above the harbour, higher up the mountainside. The house is still there today at 11 Daniel Street, its grey exterior betraying little of the terrible scenes that took place inside in 1948. All those people picked up and brought in for interrogation in this way were according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel. The worst offence was not being in possession of one of the newly-issued identity cards, which could result in a prison term for as long as a year and a half and immediate transfer to one of the pens to join other ‘unauthorised’ and ‘suspicious’ Arabs found in now Jewish-occupied areas. From time to time, even the High Command expressed reservations about the brutality the intelligence people displayed towards the interned Palestinians at the Haifa interrogation centre.
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The rural areas were subjected to the same treatment. Often the operations reminded the villagers there of the original attack launched against them just a few months or even weeks earlier. The Israelis now introduced a novel feature, also well known among present-day Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories: roadblocks, where they carried out surprise checks to catch those who did not have the new ID card. But the granting of such an ID card, which allowed people limited freedom of movement in the area where they lived, itself became a means of intimidation: only people vetted and approved by the Israeli Secret Service were given such a card.

Most areas were out of bounds anyway, even if you had the required identification. For these areas you needed another special permit. This included a specific authorisation, for example, for people living in the Galilee to travel along their most common and natural routes to work or to see family and friends, such as the road between Haifa and Nazareth. Here, permits were hardest to get.
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Thousands of Palestinians languished throughout 1949 in the prison camps where they had been transferred from the temporary pens. There were five such camps, the largest being the one in Jalil (near today’s Herzliya) and a second one in Atlit, south of Haifa. According to Ben-Gurion’s diary there were 9,000 prisoners.
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Initially, the jailing system was quite chaotic. ‘Our problem,’ complained one officer towards the end of June 1948, ‘is the concentration of large numbers of Arab POWs and civilian prisoners. We need to transfer
them to safer places.’
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By October 1948, under the direct supervision of Yigael Yadin, a network of prison camps had been institutionalised and the disarray was over.

As early as February 1948 we find Hagana guidelines concerning the treatment of POWs stating the following: ‘Releasing a captive or eliminating him needs an approval of the intelligence officer.’
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In other words, there was already a selection process in operation, and summary executions took place. The Israeli intelligence officers who orchestrated them hounded the people continuously from the moment they arrived in these camps. This is why, even after captured Palestinians were moved to ‘safer’ places, as the army put it, they felt anything but safe in these lockups. To begin with, it was decided to employ mainly ex-Irgun and Stern Gang troops as camp guards,
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but they were not the only tormentors of the camp inmates. At one point, senior ex-Hagana officer Yisca Shadmi was found guilty of murdering two Palestinian prisoners. His is a familiar name in the history of the Palestinians in Israel: in October 1956 Shadmi was one of the principal perpetrators of the Kfar Qassim massacre in which forty-nine Palestinians lost their lives. He escaped punishment for his part in the massacre, and went on to become a high-ranking official in the governmment apparatus that managed the state’s relations with its Palestinian minority. He was acquitted eventually in 1958. His case reveals two features of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens that continue up to the present day: the first is that people indicted for crimes against Arabs are likely to remain in positions in which they continue to affect the lives of Palestinians and, secondly, that they will never be brought to justice. The most recent illustration of this is the case of the policemen who murdered thirteen unarmed Palestinian citizens in October 2000 and another seventeen since then.

One concerned army officer who happened to visit such a prison camp wrote: ‘In recent times there were some very grave cases in the treatment of prisoners. The barbaric and cruel behaviour these cases reveal undermines the army’s discipline.’
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The concern voiced here for the army rather than for the victims will also sound familiar by now in the history of military ‘selfcriticism’ in Israel.

Worse still were the labour camps. The idea of using Palestinian prisoners as forced labour came from the Israeli military command and was endorsed by the politicians. Three special labour camps were built for the purpose, one in Sarafand, another in Tel-Litwinski (today Tel-Hashomer
Hospital) and a third in Umm Khalid (near Netanya). The authorities used the prisoners in any job that could help strengthen both the Israeli economy and the army’s capabilities.
¹⁰

One survivor from Tantura, on his eventual release from such a camp, recalled what he had gone through in an interview with one of Haifa’s former notables who, in 1950, published a book on those days. Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib transcribed the following testimony:

The survivors of the Tantura massacre were imprisoned in a nearby pen; for three days without food, then pushed into lorries, ordered to sit in impossible space, but threatened with being shot. They did not shoot but clubbed them on the head, and blood gushed everywhere, finally taken to Umm Khalid (Netanya).
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The witness then describes the routine of forced labour in the camp: working in the quarries and carrying heavy stones; living on one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at noon. There was no point in complaining as disobedience was punished with severe beatings. After fifteen days, 150 men were moved to a second camp in Jalil, where they were exposed to similar treatment: ‘We had to remove rubble from destroyed Arab houses.’ But then, one day, ‘an officer with good English told us that “from now on” we would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. And indeed, conditions improved.’

Five months later, al-Khatib’s witness told him, he was back at Umm Khalid where he recalled scenes that could have come straight from another place and time. When the guards discovered that twenty people had escaped, ‘We, the people of Tantura, were put in a cage, oil was poured on our clothes and our blankets were taken away.’
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After one of their early visits, on 11 November 1948, Red Cross officials reported dryly that POWs were exploited in the general local effort to ‘strengthen the Israeli economy’.
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This guarded language was not accidental. Given its deplorable behaviour during the Holocaust, when it failed to report on what went on in Nazi concentration camps, on which it was well informed, the Red Cross was careful in its reproach and criticism of the Jewish state. But at least their documents do shed some light on the experiences of the Palestinian inmates, some of whom were kept in these camps until 1955.

As previously noted, there was a stark contrast between the Israeli conduct towards Palestinian civilians they had imprisoned and the treatment Israelis received who had been captured by the Arab Legion of Jordan.
Ben-Gurion was angry when the Israeli press reported how well Israeli POWs were treated by the Legion. His diary entry for 18 June 1948 reads: ‘It is true but it could encourage surrender of isolated spots.’

In 1948 and 1949 life outside prison or the labour camps was not much easier. Here, too, Red Cross representatives crossing the country sent back disturbing reports to their headquarters in Geneva about life under occupation. These depict a collective abuse of basic rights, which began in April 1948 during the Jewish attacks on the mixed towns, and continued well into 1949, the worst of which seemed to be taking place in Jaffa.

Two months after the Israelis had occupied Jaffa, Red Cross representatives discovered a pile of dead bodies. They asked for an urgent meeting with Jaffa’s military governor, who admitted to the Red Cross’s Mr Gouy that they had probably been shot by Israeli soldiers for not complying with their orders. A curfew was imposed every night between 5 pm and 6 am, he explained, and anyone found outside, the orders stated clearly, ‘will be shot’.
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Under the cover of curfews and closures the Israelis also committed other crimes in Jaffa, which were representative of much that went on elsewhere. The most common crime was looting, of both the systematic official kind and the sporadic private one. The systematic and official kind was ordered by the Israeli government itself and targeted the wholesale stores of sugar, flour, barley, wheat and rice that the British government kept for the Arab population. The booty taken was sent to Jewish settlements. Such actions had frequently taken place even before 15 May 1948, under the eyes of British soldiers who simply looked away as Jewish troops barged into areas under their legal authority and responsibility. Reporting in July to Ben-Gurion on how the organised confiscation was progressing, the military governor of Jaffa wrote: