The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (8 page)

Ben-Gurion had already realised by the end of 1946 that the British were on their way out, and with his aides began working on a general strategy that could be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone. This strategy became Plan C, or
Gimel
in Hebrew.

Plan C was a revised version of two earlier plans, A and B. Plan A was also named the ‘Elimelech plan’, after Elimelech Avnir, the Hagana commander in Tel-Aviv who in 1937, at Ben-Gurion’s request, had already set out possible guidelines for the takeover of Palestine in the event of a British withdrawal. Plan B had been devised in 1946 and both plans were now fused into one to form Plan C.

Like Plans A and B, Plan C aimed to prepare the military forces of the Jewish community in Palestine for the offensive campaigns they would be engaged in against rural and urban Palestine the moment the British were gone. The purpose of such actions would be to ‘deter’ the Palestinian population from attacking Jewish settlements, and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses, roads and traffic. Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions of this kind would entail:

Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the village files: lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on.
⁴⁸

However, within a few months, yet another plan was drawn up: Plan D (
Dalet
).
⁴⁹
It was this plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist Leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. Indifferent as to whether these Palestinians might decide to collaborate with or oppose their Jewish State, Plan Dalet called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland.

The most brutal element of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia was the ‘ethnic cleansing’, designed to force minority groups out of areas occupied by a different majority.

Previously, different peoples had lived together in the same village and there had been no division into ethnic groups and no ethnic cleansing. Thus, the causes of the situation were clearly political.

Summary record of the UN Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 6 March 1995
with regard to the former Yugoslavia.

When the Zionist movement started its ethnic cleansing operations in Palestine, in early December 1947, the country had a ‘mixed’ population of Palestinians and Jews. The indigenous Palestinians made up the two-third majority, down from ninety per cent at the start of the Mandate. One third were Jewish newcomers, i.e., Zionist settlers and refugees from war torn
Europe, most of whom had arrived in Palestine since the 1920s.
¹
As of the late nineteenth century, the indigenous Palestinians had been seeking the right of self-determination, at first within a pan-Arab identity, but then, soon after the First World War, through the Mandate system that promised to lead the new nation-states it had created in the Middle East to independence and towards a future based on principles of democracy. But Britain’s Mandate charter for Palestine also incorporated, wholesale, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and, with it, Britain’s promise to the Zionist movement to secure a ‘homeland’ for the Jews in Palestine.

Despite Britain’s pro-Zionist policies and the presence of a growing Jewish minority, Palestine was still very much an Arab country by the end of the Mandate. Almost all of the cultivated land in Palestine was held by the indigenous population – only 5.8% was in Jewish ownership in 1947 – which makes the use here of the adjective ‘mixed’ somewhat misleading, to say the least. Although the Zionist leaders had tried to persuade Jewish immigrants, ever since the movement had set foot in Palestine, to settle in the countryside, they had failed to do so: Jewish newcomers overwhelmingly preferred the cities and towns. As a result, most of the Zionist settler colonies in the rural areas lay far apart from each other; in some areas, such as the Galilee in the north and the Naqab (the Negev) in the south, they were effectively isolated islands amidst the surrounding Palestinian countryside.

This isolation meant these colonies were built like military garrisons rather than villages: what inspired their layout and design were security considerations rather than human habitation. Their introverted seclusion contrasted bizarrely with the open spaces of the traditional Palestinian villages with their natural stone houses and their accessible, unhindered, approaches to the nearby fields and the orchards and olive groves around them.

That so few Jews had settled in the Palestinian countryside proved to be a serious problem for those who wanted to base their solution to the growing conflict between the two communities on the principle of partition. On the one hand, logic and common sense dictated that the countryside as a whole – more than three quarters of the territory – should remain Palestinian. The towns, on the other hand, were almost equally inhabited. The question was, how to devise two distinct Palestinian and Jewish entities with homogenous populations when this was the reality on the ground? Partitioning Palestine was originally a British solution, but it became a
centrepiece of Zionist policy from 1937. Earlier, the British had put forward several other options, notably the creation of a bi-national state, which the Jews had rejected, and a cantonised Palestine (following the Swiss model), which both sides had refused to consider. In the end, London gave up the attempt to find a solution for the looming conflict and, in February 1947, transferred the question of Palestine to the United Nations. Favoured by the Zionist leadership, and now backed by Britain, partition became the name of the game. The interests of the Palestinians were soon almost totally excised from the process.

An inexperienced UN, just two years old in 1947, entrusted the question of the future of Palestine’s fate into the hands of a Special Committee for Palestine, UNSCOP, none of whose members turned out to have any prior experience in solving conflicts or knew much about Palestine’s history.

UNSCOP too decided to sponsor partition as the guiding principle for a future solution. True, its members deliberated for a while over the possibility of making all of Palestine one democratic state – whose future would then be decided by the majority vote of the population – but they eventually abandoned the idea. Instead, UNSCOP recommended to the UN General Assembly to partition Palestine into two states, bound together federation-like by economic unity. It further recommended that the City of Jerusalem would be established as
corpus separatum
under an international regime administrated by the UN. The report UNSCOP came up with in the end envisaged that the two future states would be identical except for their internal demographic balance, and it therefore stressed the need for both entities to adhere to liberal democratic precepts. On 29 November 1947 this became General Assembly Resolution 181.
²

It is clear that by accepting the Partition Resolution, the UN totally ignored the ethnic composition of the country’s population. Had the UN decided to make the territory the Jews had settled on in Palestine correspond with the size of their future state, they would have entitled them to no more than ten per cent of the land. But the UN accepted the nationalist claims the Zionist movement was making for Palestine and, furthermore, sought to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.

As a result, the Zionist movement was ‘given’ a state that stretched over more than half of the country. That the members of UNSCOP veered towards the Zionist point of view was also because the Palestinian leadership had been opposed since 1918 to the partitioning of their land. Throughout its history this leadership, made up mainly of urban notables, quite often failed to truly represent the native population of Palestine; however, this time they got it right and fully backed the popular resentment among Palestine’s society towards the idea of ‘sharing’ their homeland with European settlers who had come to colonise it.

The Arab League, the regional inter-Arab Organisation, and the Arab Higher Committee (the embryonic Palestinian government) decided to boycott the negotiations with UNSCOP prior to the UN resolution, and did not take part in the deliberations on how best to implement it after November 1947. Into this vacuum the Zionist leadership stepped with ease and confidence, quickly setting up a bilateral dialogue with the UN on how to work out a scheme for the future of Palestine. This is a pattern we will see recur frequently in the history of peacemaking in Palestine, especially after the Americans became involved in 1967: up to the present day, ‘bringing peace to Palestine’ has always meant following a concept exclusively worked out between the US and Israel, without any serious consultation with, let alone regard for, the Palestinians.

The Zionist movement so quickly dominated the diplomatic game in 1947 that the leadership of the Jewish community felt confident enough to demand UNSCOP allocate them a state comprising over eighty per cent of the land. The Zionist emissaries to the negotiations with the UN actually produced a map showing the state they wanted, which incorporated all the land Israel would occupy a year later, that is, Mandatory Palestine without the West Bank. However, most of the UNSCOP members felt this was a bit too much, and convinced the Jews to be satisfied with fifty-six per cent of the land. Moreover, Catholic countries persuaded the UN to make Jerusalem an international city given its religious significance, and therefore UNSCOP also rejected the Zionist claim for the Holy City to be part of the future Jewish State.
³

Partitioning the country – overwhelmingly Palestinian – into two equal parts has proven so disastrous because it was carried out against the will of the indigenous majority population. By broadcasting its intent to create equal Jewish and Arab political entities in Palestine, the UN violated the
basic rights of the Palestinians, and totally ignored the concern for Palestine in the wider Arab world at the very height of the anti-colonialist struggle in the Middle East.

Far worse was the impact the decision had on the country itself and its people. Instead of calming the atmosphere, as it was meant to do, the resolution only heightened tensions and directly caused the country to deteriorate into one of the most violent phases in its history. Already in February 1947, when the British first announced their intention to leave Palestine, the two communities had seemed closer to a total clash than ever before. Although no significant outbursts of violence were reported before the UN adopted its Partition Resolution on 29 November 1947, anxiety was particularly high in the mixed towns. So long as it was unclear which way the UN would go, life continued more or less as normal, but the moment the die was cast and people learned that the UN had voted overwhelmingly in favour of partitioning Palestine, law and order collapsed and a sense of foreboding descended of the final showdown that partition spelled. The chaos that followed produced the first Arab-Israeli war: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians had started.

As I explained above, the Palestinian leadership decided from the start to boycott the UN proceedings. This decision features often in contemporary Israeli propaganda as proof that the Palestinians themselves – not Israel – should be held responsible for the fate that befell them in 1948. Palestinian historiography has successfully fended off such accusations by exposing the extent to which the procedures the UN opted to follow were unjust and illegal, and by exploring the raison d’être behind the establishment of UNSCOP. Before we proceed I want to summarise these arguments and examine them in more detail.

By opting for partition as its primary objective, the UN ignored a basic principled objection the Palestinians were voicing against the plan, with which mediators had been familiar since Britain made the Balfour Declaration thirty years earlier. Walid Khalidi succinctly articulated the Palestinian position as follows: ‘The native people of Palestine, like the native people of every other country in the Arab world, Asia,
Africa, America and Europe, refused to divide the land with a settler community.’
⁴

Within a few weeks of UNSCOP starting its work, the Palestinians realised the cards had been stacked against them: the final result of this process would be a UN resolution on partitioning the country between the Palestinians, as the indigenous population, and a settler colony of newcomers, many of whom had arrived only recently. When Resolution 181 was adopted in November 1947, their worst nightmare began to unfold in front of their eyes: nine months after the British had announced their decision to leave, the Palestinians were at the mercy of an international organisation that appeared ready to ignore all the rules of international mediation, which its own Charter endorsed, and was willing to declare a solution that in Palestinian eyes was both illegal and immoral. Several leading Palestinians at the time demanded that its legality be tested in the International Court of Justice (founded in 1946), but this was never to happen.
⁵
One does not have to be a great jurist or legal mind to predict how the international court would have ruled on forcing a solution on a country to which the majority of its people were vehemently opposed.