The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  The injustice was as striking then as it appears now, and yet it was hardly commented on at the time by any of the leading Western newspapers then covering Palestine: the Jews, who owned less than six per cent of the total land area of Palestine and constituted no more than one third of the population, were handed more than half of its overall territory. Within the borders of their UN-proposed state, they owned only eleven per cent of the land, and were the minority in every district. In the Negev – admittedly an arid land but still with a considerable rural and Bedouin population, which made up a major chunk of the Jewish state – they constituted one per cent of the total population.

  Other aspects that undermined the legal and moral credibility of the resolution quickly emerged. The Partition Resolution incorporated the most fertile land in the proposed Jewish state as well as almost all the Jewish urban and rural space in Palestine. But it also included 400 (out of more than 1000) Palestinian villages within the designated Jewish state. In hindsight, it may be argued in UNSCOP’s defence that Resolution 181 was based on the assumption that the two new political entities would peacefully coexist and therefore not much attention needed to be paid to balances of demography and geography. If this were the case, as some UNSCOP members were to argue later, then they were guilty of totally misreading Zionism and grossly underestimating its ambitions. Again in the words of Walid Khalidi, Resolution 181 was ‘a hasty act of granting half of Palestine to an ideological movement that declared openly already in the 1930s its wish to de-Arabise Palestine.’6 And thus Resolution 181’s most immoral aspect is that it included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

  Let us look more closely at the final map that the UN proposed in November 1947 (see Map 5). Palestine was actually to be divided into three parts. On forty-two per cent of the land, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state that included 10,000 Jews, while the state for the Jews was to stretch over almost fifty-six per cent of the land which 499,000 Jews were to share with 438,000 Palestinians. The third part was a small enclave around the city of Jerusalem which was to be internationally governed and whose population of 200,000 was equally divided between Palestinians and Jews.7

  The almost equal demographic balance within the allocated Jewish state was such that, had the map actually been implemented, it would have created a political nightmare for the Zionist leadership: Zionism would never have attained any of its principal goals. As Simcha Flapan, one of the first Israeli Jews to challenge the conventional Zionist version of the 1948 events, put it, had the Arabs or the Palestinians decided to go along with the Partition Resolution, the Jewish leadership would have been sure to reject the map UNSCOP offered them.8

  Actually, the UN map was an assured recipe for the tragedy that began to unfold the day after Resolution 181 was adopted. As theoreticians of ethnic cleansing acknowledged later, where an ideology of exclusivity is adopted in a highly charged ethnic reality, there can be only one result: ethnic cleansing. By drawing the map as they did, the UN members who voted in favour of the Partition Resolution contributed directly to the crime that was about to take place.

  THE JEWISH REACTION

  By 1947, David Ben-Gurion presided over a political structure of decision-making that probably constitutes the only complex aspect of the history related in this book, but this is dealt with in depth elsewhere,9 and is beyond the remit of this book. Briefly, it allowed him to determine almost single-handedly the main policies of the Jewish community vis-à-vis the world, the Arab neighbours and the Palestinians. It was Ben-Gurion who now led his associates simultaneously to accept and ignore the UN Partition Resolution on 29 November 1947.

  The categorical rejection of the scheme by the Arab governments and the Palestinian leadership made it undoubtedly easier for Ben-Gurion to believe that he could both accept the plan and work against it. Already in October 1947, before the resolution was adopted, Ben-Gurion clarified to his friends in the leadership that if the map of the partition plan were not satisfactory, the Jewish state would not be obliged to accept it.10

  It is clear, therefore, that the rejection or acceptance of the plan by the Palestinians would not have changed Ben-Gurion’s assessment of the plan’s deficiencies where he was concerned. For him and his friends at the top of the Zionist hierarchy, a valid Jewish state meant a state that stretched over most of Palestine and allowed for no more than a tiny number of Palestinians, if any at all, to be included.11 Similarly, Ben-Gurion was unfazed by the resolution’s call that Jerusalem be turned into an international city. He was determined to make the entire city his Jewish capital. That in the end he failed to do so was only because of complications and disagreements arising in the Jordanian-Jewish negotiations over the future of the country and the city, of which more is said later.

  As unhappy as he was with the UN map, Ben-Gurion realised that under the circumstances – the total rejection of the map by the Arab world and the Palestinians – the delineation of final borders would remain an open question. What mattered was international recognition of the right of the Jews to have a state of their own in Palestine. An observant British official in Jerusalem wrote to his government that the Zionist acceptance of the partition resolution was selective: the Zionists rejoiced in the international recognition of the Jewish State, but then claimed that the UN had offered ‘non-Zionist conditions for maintaining it’.12

  The expected Arab and Palestinian rejection of the plan13 allowed Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership to claim that the UN plan was a dead letter the day it was accepted – apart, of course, from the clauses that recognised the legality of the Jewish state in Palestine. Its borders, given the Palestinian and Arab rejection, said Ben-Gurion, ‘will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution.’14 As would be the fate of the Arabs living in it.

  THE CONSULTANCY BEGINS ITS WORK

  A formula now emerges. The less important the body Ben-Gurion appeared in front of, the more supportive the leader was of the Partition Resolution; the more significant the forum, the more adamant he proved in his scornful rejection of it. In the special body that advised him on security issues, the Defence Committee, he dismissed the Partition Resolution out of hand, and already on 7 October 1947 – before UN Resolution 181 was even adopted – we find him telling the inner circle of his colleagues in the Consultancy that in the light of the Arab refusal to cooperate with the UN, there ‘are no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish State.’15

  In October and November 1947 the Consultancy became Ben-Gurion’s most important reference group. It was only among them that he discussed openly what the implications would be of his decision to disregard the partition map and to use force in order to ensure Jewish majority and exclusivity in the country. In such ‘sensitive’ matters he could confide only in this highly select coterie of politicians and military men.

  It was precisely because he understood that these questions could not be aired in public that Ben-Gurion had created the ‘Consultancy’ in the first place. As explained above, this was not an official outfit, and we have no proper minutes from most of their meetings.16 It is doubtful whether notes were taken at all – apart from at one or two very crucial meetings that did get transcribed and to which I will come back later. However, Ben-Gurion recorded summaries of many of the meetings in his diary, an important historical source for those years. Moreover, some of the Consultancy’s members would be interviewed in later years, and others wrote autobiographies and memoirs. In the following pages I take my cues from Ben-Gurion’s diary, archival correspondence and the private archive of Israel Galili, who was present in all the meetings (all sources included in the Ben-Gurion Archives in Sdeh Boker). In addition, an intensive correspondence surrounded these meetings, which can be found in various Israeli archives. The meetings took place partly in Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel-Aviv and partly in the Red House. As on 10 March 1948, some meetings were convened on Wednesdays in the Red House, within the official weekly meeting of the High Command,
the Matkal (the formal parts of these meetings are recorded in the IDF archives). Other, more private, consultations took place in Ben-Gurion’s house, a day after the more formal Wednesday meeting. The latter meetings were referred to, very cautiously, in Ben-Gurion’s diary, but can be reconstructed with the help of sources such as Yossef Weitz’s diary, Israel Galili’s archives and the letters of Ben-Gurion to various colleagues, most notable of whom was his second in command, Moshe Sharett (who was abroad for most of this period).17 On 15 May 1948, the meetings moved to a new place east of Tel-Aviv, which became the headquarters of the Israeli Army.

  The Consultancy, as we saw, was a combination of security figures and specialists on ‘Arab affairs’, a formula that was to serve as the core for most of the bodies entrusted with advising future governments of Israel throughout the years on issues of state security, strategies and policy planning towards the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular.18 This entourage around Ben-Gurion began to hold regular meetings in February 1947, from the moment the British decided to leave Palestine, and more frequently in October 1947, when it transpired that the Palestinians would reject the UN Partition Plan. Once the Palestinian and general Arab positions were clear, the members of the Consultancy knew not only that they were to decide the fate of the Palestinians in the UN-designated Jewish state, but that their policies were also about to affect the Palestinians living in areas the UN had accorded to the Arab state in Palestine. In the next chapter we shall see how the thinking of the Consultancy evolved until it devised a final plan for the dispossession of one million Palestinians, no matter where they happened to be in the country.

  The first documented meeting of the Consultancy is that of 18 June 1947, during the regular Wednesday afternoon meeting of the High Command. Ben-Gurion reported the meeting both in his diary and in his published memoirs. He told those present that the Jewish community would need to ‘defend not only our settlements, but the country as a whole and Our National Future’. Later on, in a speech he gave on 3 December 1947, he would repeat the term ‘our national future’ and use it as a code for the demographic balance in the country.19

  Chapter 4

  Finalising a Master Plan

  NATO Spokesman Jamie Shea said all reports reaching NATO indicated that what was happening in Kosovo was a well-organized master plan by Belgrade. He said the reported pattern of violence was that Serb tanks were surrounding villages, then paramilitaries are going in rounding up civilians at gunpoint, separating young men from women and children. The women and children are then expelled from their homes and then sent forward towards the border. After they have left the villages, the homes are looted and then systematically torched.

  CNN, 30 March 1999

  These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.

  Plan Dalet, 10 March, 1948

  THE METHODOLOGY OF CLEANSING

  The chronology of key events between February 1947 and May 1948 is worth recapping at this point. Hence, I will present an initial overview of the period I wish to focus on in detail in this chapter. First, in February 1947, the decision was made by the British Cabinet to pull out of Mandatory Palestine and leave it to the UN to solve the question of its future. The UN took nine months to deliberate the issue, and then adopted the idea of partitioning the country. This was accepted by the Zionist leadership who, after all, championed partition, but was rejected by the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership, who instead suggested keeping Palestine a unitary state and who wanted to solve the situation through a much longer process of negotiation. The Partition Resolution was adopted on 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centres that had been vandalised in the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution during the first few days after its adoption.1 Though sporadic, these early Jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people (almost 75,000).

  On 9 January, units of the first all-Arab volunteer army entered Palestine and engaged with the Jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated Jewish settlements. Easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes, the Jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations. Coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February 1948 when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day. On 10 March 1948, Plan Dalet was adopted. The first targets were the urban centres of Palestine, which had all been occupied by the end of April. About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable of which was the Deir Yassin massacre. Aware of these developments, the Arab League took the decision, on the last day of April, to intervene militarily, but not until the British Mandate had come to an end.

  The British left on 15 May 1948, and the Jewish Agency immediately declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, officially recognised by the two superpowers of the day, the USA and the USSR. That same day, regular Arab forces entered Palestine.

  By February 1948, the American administration had already concluded that the UN Partition Resolution, far from being a peace plan, was proving a recipe for continued bloodshed and hostility. Therefore, it twice offered alternative schemes to halt the escalation of the conflict: a trusteeship plan for five years, in February 1948, and a three-month cease-fire, on 12 May. The Zionist leadership rejected both peace proposals out of hand.2

  The official Zionist strategy was fed throughout this period by two impulses. The first consisted of ad-hoc reactions to two startling developments on the ground. One was the fragmentation, if not total disintegration, of the Palestinian political and military power systems, and the other the growing disarray and confusion within the Arab world in the face of the aggressive Jewish initiatives and the simultaneous international endorsement of the Zionist project and the future Jewish state.

  The second impulse to propel Zionist strategic thinking was the drive to exploit to the full the unique historical opportunity they saw opening up to make their dream of an exclusively Jewish state come true. As we saw in the previous chapters, this vision of a purely Jewish nation-state had been at the heart of Zionist ideology from the moment the movement emerged in the late nineteenth century. By the mid 1930s, a handful of Zionist leaders recognised the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabisation of Palestine, i.e., making Palestine free of Arabs. By the end of November 1947, most of those in the inner circle of the leadership appeared to have grasped this nexus as well, and under Ben-Gurion’s guidance they now turned all their attention to the question of how to make the most of the opportunity that this connection appeared to have given them.

  Before 1947, there had been other, more urgent, agendas: the primary mission had been to build a political, economic and cultural Zionist enclave within the country, and to ensure Jewish immigration to the area. As mentioned previously, ideas of how best to deal with the local Palestinian population had remained vague. But the impending end of the British Mandate, the Arab rejection of the partition resolution, and Ben-Gurion’s keen realization of how much of Palestine he would need to the make the Jewish state viable now helped translate past ideologies and nebulous scenarios into a specific master plan.

  Prior to March 1948, the activities the Zionist leadership carried out to implement their vision could still be portrayed as retaliation for hostile Palestinian or Arab actions. However, after March this was no
longer the case: the Zionist leadership openly declared – two months before the end of the Mandate – it would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force: Plan Dalet.

  Defining the Space

  The first step towards the Zionist goal of obtaining as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as feasible was to decide what constituted a viable state in geographical terms. The UN Partition Plan, formalised in Resolution 181, designated the Negev, the coast, the eastern valleys (Marj Ibn Amir and the Baysan Valley) and lower Galilee for the Jews, but this was not enough. Ben-Gurion had the habit of regularly meeting with, what he called his ‘war cabinet’, which was an ad-hoc group of Jewish officers who had served in the British army (under pressure from other Hagana members, he later had to disband it). He now set out to impress on these officers the idea that they should start preparing for the occupation of the country as a whole. In October 1947, Ben-Gurion wrote to General Ephraim Ben-Artzi, the most senior officer among them, explaining that he wanted to create a military force able both to repel a potential attack from neighbouring Arab states and to occupy as much of the country as possible, and hopefully all of it.3

  For the time being the Zionist leadership decided to determine the territory of their future state according to the location of the most remote and isolated Jewish settlements. All the land between these colonies, isolated at the extreme ends of the Mandatory state, had to become Jewish, and preferably enveloped by additional ‘security zones’ as buffer areas between them and Palestinian habitations.4