3.
“At first these developments did not seem to touch the fate of Palestine, but with the Balfour Declaration, the third aspect of the colonial strategy for Palestine (became apparent.) . . . the promise made by the British government to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine . . . .The Balfour Declaration was part of a British attempt to revise the earlier proposition to rule Palestine jointly with France. In November 1917, the British forces were already occupying Palestine; there was not a single French soldier in the region. The British therefore became de facto rulers with no intention of sharing it with anyone. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was not applied to Palestine, and the British remained there until 1948.” (Book 1, pg. 67)
“In November 1917, the Zionist movement* was rewarded with the Balfour Declaration. This document promised a benevolent British attitude toward the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, provided it did not clash with the interest of the local population . . . .Finally we should not exclude the possibility that pious Christians, such as the British prime minister David Lloyd George, were motivated by a wish to facilitate the return of the Jews to precipitate the coming of the Messiah.” (Page 68)
ZIONISM GATHERS STEAM
Zionism began as a secular movement in Europe in 1897, led by Theodore Herzl to find a Jewish homeland for persecuted Jews. Not to be equated with Judaism, many observant Jews have opposed the Zionist intention from its beginnings, “a people without a land for a land without a people.”
Zionists, having endured 100 years of pograms particularly in Eastern Europe culminating in the Holocaust, wanted the entire land of Palestine as a Jewish State. Jewish people came in great numbers at first allowed by the UK. Then because of large numbers of immigrants and rising tension from Palestinians, the British colonizers limited immigration. This became “highlighted by the Exodus incident, when a Jewish refugee ship (from France carrying mostly children, Holocaust survivors) was not only refused entry to Palestine, but was also turned back to Germany, an act condemned all over the world.
“ . . . Britain faced the increasing enmity of Zionists continually expanding their take over and displacement of the local people. As with immigration, the continuation of the settlement policy . . . ‘fence’ and ‘guard tower’ was the Zionist method.” (Book 1, pg. 119.)
The local Arab residents resisted displacement from their homes and lands by the intrusion of foreign immigrants mostly from Europe and Arab countries. Trying to balance the two groups while keeping control of their colony, Palestine, became increasingly difficult for the British. Both Jews and Arabs saw their UK overlords as the enemy.
“RULE BRITANNIA” . . . AND THE WAVES COME CRASHING DOWN
The British mandate began in 1917, (though officially proclaimed by the League of Nations in 1923) when General Allenby, commander in chief of the British Expedition Force from Egypt occupied Jerusalem and established a temporary political framework for administering Palestine. It became part of the British colonial empire including Egypt, East Africa, India and elsewhere.
Palestine was rocked with warring factions for the next thirteen years, breaking out in 1936 with an armed revolt led by young Palestinian notables against the British, seen as promoting the Zionist takeover of the land. But the Balfour policy also stated it would be sensitive to the native residents of the land and care for their interests as well. So with escalating numbers of Jewish immigrants, the British tried to slow the immigration. The occupiers succeeded in alienating both the native Palestinians and the Jewish immigrants.
NEITHER SIDE LIKES US; LET’S SAIL HOME
“By February 1947, Britain had had enough. It had more soldiers in Palestine than on the Indian subcontinent, and had been constantly involved in direct clashes with both political leaderships. The number of British casualties had also risen, mainly due to a terror campaign waged by Zionist extremists, the most notorious being the Stern Gang. This terror campaign peaked with the blowing up of British headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946.” (Book 1, pg. 121). (Led by Menachim Begin, later a Prime Minister of Israel, the explosion killed ninety-one and injured forty-six British officials.)
TO THE RESCUE: UNITED NATIONS PARTITION
“The problem of Palestine was entrusted to the United Nations in February 1947. By then the Arab League had already committed the Arab world at large to an independent Arab Palestine. The Hashemites in Transjordan began secret negotiation with the Jewish Agency on the division of Palestine between themselves and the Jewish leadership, which had declared in a convention held in America in 1942 that it would not be satisfied with less than the whole of Mandate Palestine as a Jewish state. The scene was set for a final showdown.” (Book 1, pg. 121.)
To summarize, by 1947 and early 1948 the British forces were leaving. The United Nations accepted a partition plan to divide Palestine into a larger Jewish portion, surrounding on three sides a smaller Arab portion to become part of Transjordan, the only surviving kingdom of the Hashemites, now simply “Jordan.” Thus the “West Bank,” became Palestine, controlled by Jordan across the river. The UN accepted the division of land favoring immigrants over native residents, and left the majority of Palestinian Arabs under their third overlords, this time the Jordanian Hashemite king Abdullah I who despite supposed loyalty to the Arab League secretly negotiated with the Jewish leadership to take control of what was left of Palestine. Gaza would be under Egyptian control.
MASSACRES, WAR AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL
Zionists accepted the partition. Palestinians did not and 70,000 of the “social and economic elite” left between September 1947 and March 1948. At that time Israelis implemented Plan D. Prepared by the Hagana militia, meaning “defense” in Hebrew and founded in the 1920s, it became the Israeli Defense Force along with the elite units, the Palmach, and the renegade Irgun and the Stern Gang. Its first objective, take all installations abandoned by the British. “The second, and far more important, objective of the plan was to cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible . . . Each Brigade received a list of villages it was to occupy. Most of the villages were destined to be destroyed . . . In addition, some of the brigades were to engage in the take-over of the mixed Arab-Jewish towns of Palestine . . . this meant occupation and expulsion of the Palestinian population . . . Jaffa, Haifa, Safad and Tiberias.” Book 1, pg. 129)
For example, the well-publicized Deir Yassin massacre terrorized the citizens of Haifa, most of whom left, accentuated by the slaughter of Palestinians in Balad al-Shaykh in retaliation for an attack on Jewish workers in a nearby refinery.
On May 15, 1948, the day the British had finally gone, David Ben Gurion declared Israel a state. President Harry Truman recognized its nationhood immediately. One-third of the Palestinian population had already been evicted. Arab states had prepared a plan to save Palestine with 100,000 troops, equal to the Hagana and Irgun combined. The war began with the overwhelmed Arab forces no match for the highly trained and equipped Israeli militias. The war stopped for a time with two short-lived truces that summer, and petered out later in the year with the defeat of the Arab armies. Subsequent negotiations provided armistice lines in early 1949 that held in the case of Syria, Jordan and Egypt until the 1967 Six-day War.
HUSHED UP, STILL DENIED: THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE, THE NAKBA
“While a conventional war raged in several parts of Palestine, in others it took a very different form. The conventional war occurred on the edges of what was to be the Jewish state and within areas the Jews coveted in the proposed Palestinian state. Within the Jewish state proper, a strange and chilling situation developed around 300 or so Palestinian villages . . .
“I will focus on the chronicles of 64 villages out of the 370 wiped out by Israel . . . These villages lay in the area between the coastal town of Tel-Aviv and Haifa. One of the Hagana’s brigades, the Alexandroni, was entrusted with the mission of Judaizing this part of Palestine. From the end of April until the end of
July 1948, a grim scene was repeated in almost every village. Armed Israeli soldiers surrounded each village on three sides, and put villagers to flight through the fourth side. In many cases, if the people refused to leave, they were forced onto lorries, and driven away to the West Bank. In some villages, there were Arab volunteers who resisted by force, and when these villages were conquered they were immediately blown up and destroyed.
“By 14 May, the day the Jewish state was declared, 58 villages had already been wiped out. Six remained. Three, Jaba’, Ijzim and Ein Ghazal, would be obliterated in July. Two, Fureidis and Jisr al Zarqa, about 35 kilometers south of Haifa, are still there today. These two villages provided cheap labor to the veteran Jewish settlements of Zichron Yaacov and Binyamina, and thus were spared.
“Tantura, the largest of the six remaining villages, was caught in the middle of Jewish territory like a ‘bone in the throat,’ according to the Alexandroni official history of the war. On 23 May, its day came too. Tantura was an old Palestinian village, large by the standards of that period with around 1,500 inhabitants, and dependent on agriculture and fishing. Two or three notables, including the mukhtar, the head of the village, were offered terms of surrender by the Jewish intelligence officers. They rejected them, suspecting quite rightly it seems, that surrender would lead to expulsion. At first, the Jewish commander contemplated sending a van with a loudspeaker calling on people to surrender, but this did not happen. On the night of 22 May, the village was attacked from four sides. This was uncommon, as we have seen. Lack of coordination led to a complete encirclement of the village, a situation that left a large number of villagers in the hand of the occupying force.
“The captives were moved to the beach. There, the men were separated from the women and children, who were expelled to nearby Fureidis. (Some families were reunited eighteen months later.) Two hundred men between the ages of 13 and 30 were massacred by the Alexandroni and other Jewish forces. Both revenge and a calculated wish to kill men of fighting age motivated this bloodshed.” (Book 1, pg. 135-136)
This second phase of the war ended by the winter time in early 1949. “The third phase was to extend beyond the war, until 1954 . . . While in the first phase it was urban Palestine that was subjected to expulsions and massacres, the bulk of the population living in the rural areas become victims of this policy after May 1948. Out of about 850,000 Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only 160,000 remained on or nearby their land and homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres.” (Book 1, pg. 137)
Almost one million Arab Palestinians became refugees, many to camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and others fled to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The majority were farming families, but they became refugees. By the early 1950s nearly one million Arabs still lived in Israel proper. The Jewish population numbered 1.5 million including some settlements in the West Bank.
With 750,000 refugees trying to survive a cold winter of 1948-9 in tented camps of the Middle East, they owed their survival to American welfare organizations and international aid agencies that eventually spawned UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The emphasis was relief with development efforts later. The inability to repatriate the displaced people, led to mud huts and then shantytowns of cinder block crowded multi-story homes that exist today. These camps in Gaza and the West Bank now warehouse three generations of people unable to break free from an oppressive military occupation. Other nearby nations’ camps today keep most in poverty with no right of return to their homes and lands. Six million Palestinians comprise their world-wide diaspora, many in Europe and the Americas.
“Israeli, and in particular American public opinion succeeded in perpetuating the myth of potential destruction or a ‘second Holocaust’ awaiting the future Jewish state. Exploiting this mythology, Israel was later able to secure massive support for the state in Jewish communities around the world, while demonizing the Arabs as a whole, and the Palestinians in particular in the eyes of the general public in the US. The reality on the ground was, of course, almost the complete opposite: Palestinians were facing massive expulsion. The month that Israeli historiography singles out as the ‘toughest’ actually saw the Palestinians simply attempting to be saved from that fate, rather than being preoccupied with the destruction of the Jewish community. When it was over, nothing stood in the way of the cleansing troops of Israel.” (Book 2. pg. 122.)
That dominance continues today in Palestine, a military occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza by a hostile and powerful Israel since 1967, the “Six Day War.” It continues the only settler colonialism still extant in the world. The ethnic cleansing grinds on in Palestinian territory as the historic residents continue to lose land and homes. The US funds it by 3.8 billion dollars per year while the governments of the world, despite UN resolutions, do little to stop the occupation and takeover of the land. Palestinians commemorate the “Nakba” or “catastrophe,” on May 15 every year.
Haifa, Palestine, 1937
Deir Yassin, April 9, 1948
Tantura, 1937
Palmach Attack, Qatamon (in Jerusalem) April, 1948
Evicted from Village Home and Land, May 1948
Refugee Camp, 1948
Acknowledgments
Our dear friend Huda Giddens encouraged us over several years of learning about the events in the Holy Land. She happened to be playing with a friend on the front porch of their home in Jerusalem during 1946 not long before the Nakba. Huda watched the King David Hotel explode and a whole wing crumble killing many British Soldiers.
A young college art student, my grandson, adapted the Palestine map of 1949 to pinpoint and simplify for readers the location of cities and villages as they existed at the armistice in January 1949. Kyol Shorack, you helped us all to not get lost in a jumble of strange places and names.
Careful editing takes much time and thought. I am indebted to Sandra and Dr. Brad Gerrish for their suggestions and corrections, which kept the author from straying too far from common sense and realism in the story. From years of interest and travel, they provided a rich input to the land and people we together love.
And finally to the person who tolerates the odd hours of writing and provides so many ideas. Including letting me know the incorrect ones and particularly how to avoid offending the gentle gender. This, despite her serious medical problems that cropped up during the writing. Marianne is the love of my life, my encourager, my wife of many years. We laugh a lot despite her health problems and thank God for every day. I want to dedicate this book to her with love and profound thanks.
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