The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (38 page)

Oral recollection also exposed cases of rape throughout the occupation of Palestine’s villages: from the village of Tantura in May, through the village of Qula in June, and ending with one story after another of abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram. Many of the cases were corroborated by UN officials who interviewed a number of women from the villages who were willing to come forward and talk about their experiences. When, many years later, some of these people were interviewed, it was obvious how difficult it still proved for the men and women from the village to talk about names and details in these cases, and the interviewers came away with the impression that they all knew more than they wished or were able to tell.

Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewellery, to the very last item. The same
women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape. Here is how Najiah Ayyub described it: ‘I saw that the troops who encircled us tried to touch the women but were rejected by them. When they saw that the women would not surrender, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and tried to undress them, claiming they had to search the bodies.’
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Tradition, shame, and trauma are the cultural and psychological barriers that prevent us from gaining the fuller picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked with such ferocity in both rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949. Perhaps in the fulness of time someone will be able to complete this chapter of the chronicle of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Once the winds of war had subsided and the newly established State of Israel had signed armistice agreements with its neighbours, the Israeli government relaxed its occupation regime somewhat and gradually put a halt to the looting and ghettoisation of the small groups of urban Palestinians left behind. In August 1948, a new structure was put in place to deal with the consequences of the ethnic cleansing, called ‘The Committee for Arab Affairs’. As before, Bechor Shitrit’s proved to be the more humane voice among his colleagues on this committee, together with that of Israel’s first Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, but it also included some former members of the Consultancy. The presence of Yaacov Shimoni, Gad Machnes, Ezra Danin and Yossef Weitz, all people who had helped devise the expulsions, would have been quite alarming for those Palestinians who had remained, had they known.

In August, the new outfit mainly dealt with the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the repatriation of the refugees. The tactic it decided upon was to try to push through a resettlement programme that they envisaged would pre-empt all confrontation on the subject, either because the principal players in the international community would agree to endorse it or, even better, it would persuade them to abandon the issue altogether. The Israeli offer suggested that all Palestinian refugees should be resettled in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. This is not surprising, since it was
discussed at a meeting of the Jewish Agency as early as 1944. Ben-Gurion argued: ‘The transfer of Arabs is easier than the transfer of any other [people]. There are Arab states around . . . And it is clear that if the [Palestinian] Arabs are transferred this would improve their situation and not the opposite.’ While Moshe Sharett noted: [W]hen the Jewish state is established – it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.’
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Although the USA and Britain at the time responded favourably to this policy – which has remained the accepted line of argument for all successive Israeli governments – neither they nor the rest of the world seemed interested in investing too much effort in pushing it forward, or in arguing for the implementation of UN Resolution 194, which called for the unconditional repatriation of Palestinian refugees. As Israel had hoped, the fate of the refugees, not to mention their rights, soon dropped out of sight.

But return or resettlement was not the only issue. There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the Israeli authorities after May 1948. Neither did Israel’s proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in Israeli hands. A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, and he estimated the combined value of property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds. To avoid becoming embroiled in international investigations and scrutiny, he suggested as a solution: ‘Maybe we can sell it to American Jews?’
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An additional problem was the cultivated land the Palestinians had been forced to abandon, and in the Arab Affairs Committee meeting it was again Bechor Shitrit who naïvely pondered aloud its possible fate: ‘The cultivated land is probably 1 million dunam. According to international law, we cannot sell anything, so maybe we should buy from those Arabs who do not want to come back.’ Without ceremony, Yossef Weitz cut him short: ‘The fate of the cultivated land will be no different from the overall territory on which the villages existed.’ The solution, recommended Weitz, had to cover all the territory: all village land, whether cultivated or residential, and the urban areas.
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Unlike Shitrit, Weitz was in the know. His official position as the head of the JNF settlement department and his de facto leadership of the ad-hoc ‘transfer committee’ fused into one once the ethnic cleansing had started. Weitz closely followed every single takeover within the rural areas, either
personally or through loyal officials such as his close aide Yossef Nachmani. While the Jewish troops were responsible for the expulsion of the people and the demolition of their homes, Weitz went to work to make sure the villages passed into JNF custody.

This proposal frightened Shitrit even more, as it meant the number of dunam Israel would take possession of, illegally in his mind, was triple the figure of 1 million dunam he had originally thought. Weitz’s next suggestion was even more alarming for anyone sensitive to international law or legality: ‘All we need’, declared the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund, ‘is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam – cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands. Land of lesser quality should be sold to private or public sectors.’

Shitrit tried one more time, ‘At least, let us say that this confiscation is an exchange for the property the Jews from the Arab world lost when they immigrated to Palestine.’ Jewish immigration was quite limited at the time, but the concept of ‘exchange’ would later appeal to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, whose propaganda machine has frequently used it in abortive attempts to silence the debate on the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return. Shitrit’s idea was dropped in August 1948 because it risked implicating Israel in the commission of forced transfer. Yaacov Shimoni warned that such a declaration of mutual expropriation would inevitably direct attention to the expulsions – he termed them ‘transfer’ – Israel had carried out in Palestine.

By now Ben-Gurion had grown impatient. He realised that sensitive subjects such as creating
faits accomplis
so as to pre-empt the threat of international sanctions – for instance the destruction of houses so that nobody could force Israel to allow their Palestinian owners to return to them – was no job for such a cumbersome body as the Committee for Arab Affairs. Thus he decided to appoint Danin and Weitz to a committee of two that from then on would take all final decisions on Palestinian property and land, the main features of which were destruction and confiscation.

For a short and unique period the American administration showed an interest in the subject. Officials in the State Department, in an atypical move, dominated the policy on the refugee issues, while the White House seemed to stand aloof. The inevitable result was a growing dissatisfaction with the basic Israeli position. The US experts saw no legal alternative to the return of
the refugees, and were considerably irritated by Israel’s refusal to even discuss the possibility. In May 1949, the State Department conveyed a strong message to the Israeli government that it considered the repatriation of the refugees as a precondition for peace. When the Israeli rejection arrived, the US administration threatened Israel with sanctions, and withheld a promised loan. In response, the Israelis at first suggested taking in 75,000 refugees and allowing the reunification of families for another 25,000. When this was deemed insufficient by Washington, the government suggested taking in the Gaza strip, with its 90,000 indigenous inhabitants and its refugee community of 200,000. Both proposals seemed niggardly but by then, the spring of 1949, a personnel reshuffle in the American State Department reoriented America’s Palestine policy onto a different course that completely sidelined, if not altogether ignored, the refugee question.

During this short-lived period of US pressure (April–May 1949), Ben-Gurion’s basic response was to intensify the settlement of Jewish immigrants on the confiscated land and in the evicted houses. When Sharett and Kaplan objected, apprehensive of international condemnation of such acts, Ben-Gurion again appointed a more cabal-like body that soon encouraged hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world to seize the Palestinian homes left in the towns and cities and to build settlements on the ruins of the expelled villages.

The appropriation of Palestinian property was supposed to follow a systematic national programme, but by the end of September Ben-Gurion gave up the idea of an orderly takeover in the major cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. Similarly, it proved impossible to coordinate the onslaught of covetous farmers and governmental agencies on the dispossessed villages and lands. The distribution of land was the responsibility of the Jewish National Fund. After the 1948 war other bodies were given similar authority, the most important of which was the Custodian, mentioned below. The JNF found it had to compete for the job of principal divider of the spoils of war. In the final analysis the JNF came out on top, but it took time. All in all, Israel had taken over 3.5 million dunam of land in rural Palestine. This estimate from 1948 included all houses and fields of the destroyed villages. It took a while before a clear centralised policy emerged of how best to use this land. Ben-Gurion deferred a total takeover by private or public Jewish agencies while the UN was still discussing the fate of the refugees, first in Lausanne in 1949, and after that in a series of futile
committees set up to deal with the refugee issue. He knew that in the wake of the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194, 11 December 1948, which demanded the unconditional repatriation of all Palestinian refugees, a formal and legal Israeli takeover would cause problems.

In order to forestall international indignation over collective dispossession, the Israeli government appointed a ‘custodian’ for the newly acquired properties, pending a final decision over their fate. Typical of previous Zionist conduct, this ‘pragmatic’ solution became policy until a ‘strategic’ decision would follow to change it (i.e., by redefining the status of the dispossessed assets). The Custodian was thus a function the Israeli government created in order to fend off any possible fallout from UN Resolution 194 that insisted that all refugees be allowed to return and/or be compensated. By putting all private and collective possessions of the expelled Palestinians under its custody, the government could, and in effect did, sell these properties to public and private Jewish groups and individuals later under the spurious pretext that no claimants had come forward. Moreover, the moment the confiscated lands from Palestinian owners were put under government custodianship they became state lands, which by law belonged to the Jewish nation, which, in turn, meant that none of it could be sold to Arabs.
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This legal sleight of hand meant that as long as no final strategic decision on how to divide the lands had been made, ‘tactical’ interim resolutions could be adopted in order to hand over part of the lands to the IDF, for instance, or to new immigrants or (at cheap rates) to the kibbutzim movements. The JNF faced fierce competition from all these ‘clients’ in the scramble over the spoils. It did well to begin with, and bought up almost every destroyed village together with all its houses and lands. The Custodian had sold a million dunam out of the total 3.5 million directly to the JNF at a bargain price in December 1948. Another quarter of a million was passed on to the JNF in 1949.

Then lack of funds put a halt to the JNF’s seemingly insatiable greed. And what the JNF failed to purchase, the three kibbutzim movements, the moshavim movement and private real-estate dealers were happy to divide among themselves. The most avaricious of these proved to be the leftist kibbutz movement, Hashomer Ha-Tza‘ir, that belonged to Mapam, the party to the left of Mapai, Israel’s ruling party. Hashomer Ha-Tza‘ir members were not content only with lands from which the people had already been
expelled, but also wanted the lands whose Palestinian owners had survived the onslaught and who were still clinging onto them. Consequently, they now wanted these people to be driven out too, even though the official ethnic cleansing had come to an end. All these contenders had to make way for the Israeli army’s demands to have large tracts of land set aside as training grounds and camps. And yet, by 1950, half of the dispossessed rural lands were still in the hands of the JNF.

In the first week of January 1949, Jewish settlers colonised the villages of Kuwaykat, Ras al-Naqura, Birwa, Safsaf, Sa‘sa and Lajjun. On the lands of other villages, such as Malul and Jalama in the north, the IDF built military bases. In many ways, the new settlements did not look much different from the army bases – new fortified bastions where once villagers had led their pastoral and agricultural lives.