The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  When the Consultancy had met again on Wednesday, 17 December, they were joined by Yohanan Ratner and Fritz Eisenshtater (Eshet), two officers who had been designated by Ben-Gurion to formulate a ‘national strategy’ before he devised the Consultancy body. The meeting expanded on the implications of the successful Khisas operation, with some members calling for additional ‘retaliatory’ operations that were to include the destruction of villages, expulsion of people, and resettlement in their stead by Jewish settlers. The following day, in front of the formal larger body of the Jewish community that was responsible for defence affairs, ‘The Defence Committee’, Ben-Gurion summarized the earlier meeting. The operation seemed to thrill everyone, including the representative of the ultra Orthodox Jews, Agudat Israel, who said: ‘We were told that the army had the ability of destroying a whole village and taking out all its inhabitants; indeed, let’s do it!’ The committee also approved the appointment of intelligence officers for each such operation. They would play a crucial role in executing the next stages of the ethnic cleansing.35

  The new policy was also aimed at the urban spaces of Palestine, and Haifa was chosen as the first target. Interestingly, this city is singled out by mainstream Israeli historians and the revisionist historian Benny Morris as an example of genuine Zionist goodwill towards the local population. The reality was very different by the end of 1947. From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them. They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos. A special unit of the Hagana, Hashahar (‘Dawn’), made up of mistarvim – literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians – was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units. On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’36 But worse was to come.

  The early eruption of violence put a sad end to a relatively long history of workers’ cooperation and solidarity in the mixed city of Haifa. This class consciousness was curbed in the 1920s and 1930s by both national leaderships, in particular by the Jewish Trade Union movement, but it continued to motivate joint industrial action against employers of all kinds, and inspired mutual help at times of recession and scarcity.

  The Jewish attacks in the city heightened tensions in one of the major areas where Jews and Arabs worked shoulder to shoulder: the refinery plant of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in the bay area. This began with a gang from the Irgun throwing a bomb into a large group of Palestinians who were waiting to enter the plant. The Irgun claimed it was in retaliation for an earlier attack by Arab workers on their Jewish co-workers, a new phenomenon in an industrial site where Arab and Jewish workers had usually joined forces in trying to secure better labour conditions from their British employers. But the UN Partition Resolution seriously dented that class solidarity and tensions grew high. Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun, who had already done so before 1947. However, this particular attack in the refineries was undertaken in coordination with the Hagana forces as part of the new scheme to terrorise the Palestinians out of Haifa. Within hours, Palestinian workers reacted and rioted, killing a large number of Jewish workers – thirty-nine – in one of the worst but also last Palestinian counterattacks; the last, because there the usual chain of retaliatory skirmishes stopped.

  The next stage introduced a new chapter in the history of Palestine. Eager to test, among other things, British vigilance in the face of their actions, the Hagana’s High Command, as part of the Consultancy, decided to ransack a whole village and massacre a large number of its inhabitants. At the time the British authorities were still responsible for maintaining law and order and were very much present in Palestine. The village the High Command selected was Balad al-Shaykh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, one of Palestine’s most revered and charismatic leaders of the 1930s, who was killed by the British in 1935. His grave is one of the few remains of this village, about ten kilometres east of Haifa, still extant today.37

  A local commander, Haim Avinoam, was ordered to ‘encircle the village, kill the largest possible number of men, damage property, but refrain from attacking women and children.’38 The attack took place on 31 December and lasted three hours. It left over sixty Palestinians dead, not all of them men. But note the distinction still made here between men and women: in their next meeting, the Consultancy decided that such a separation was an unnecessary complication for future operations. At the same time as the attack on Balad al-Shaykh, the Hagana units in Haifa tested the ground with a more drastic action: they went into one of the city’s Arab neigbourhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya, expelled its people and blew up its houses. This act could be regarded as the official beginning of the ethnic cleansing operation in urban Palestine. The British looked the other way while these atrocities were being committed.

  Two weeks later, in January 1948, the Palmach ‘used’ the momentum that had been created to attack and expel the relatively isolated Haifa neighbourhood of Hawassa. This was the poorest quarter of town, originally made up of huts and inhabited by impoverished villagers who had come to seek work there in the 1920s, all living in dismal conditions. At the time there were about 5000 Palestinians in this eastern part of the city. Huts were blown up, and so was the local school, while the ensuing panic caused many people to flee. The school was rebuilt on the ruins of Hawassa, now part of the Tel-Amal neighbourhood, but this building too was recently destroyed to make room for a new Jewish school.39

  JANUARY 1948: FAREWELL TO RETALIATION

  These operations were accompanied by acts of terrorism by the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Their ability to sow fear in Haifa’s Arab neighbourhoods, and in other cities as well, was directly influenced by the gradual but obvious British withdrawal from any responsibility for law and order. In the first week of January alone the Irgun executed more terrorist attacks than in any period before. These included detonating a bomb in the Sarraya house in Jaffa, the seat of the local national committee,40 which collapsed leaving twenty-six people dead. It continued with the bombing of the Samiramis Hotel in Qatamon, in western Jerusalem, in which many people died, including the Spanish consul. This last fact seems to have prompted Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British High Commissioner, to issue a feeble complaint to Ben-Gurion, who refused to condemn the action, either in private or in public. In Haifa such actions were now a daily occurrence.41

  Cunningham appealed again to Ben-Gurion when in the weeks that followed he noticed the shift in the Hagana’s policy from retaliation to offensive initiatives, but his protestations were ignored. In the last meeting he had with Ben-Gurion in March 1948, he told the Zionist leader that to his mind, while the Palestinians were trying to maintain calm in the country, the Hagana did all it could to escalate the situation.42 This did not contradict Ben-Gurion’s assessment. He told the Jewish Agency Executive, shortly after he met Cunningham: ‘I believe the majority of the Palestinian masses accept the partition as a fait accompli and do not believe it is possible to overcome or reject it ... The decisive majority of them do no
t want to fight us.’43 From Paris, the Jewish Agency representative there, Emile Najjar, wondered how he could pursue an effective propaganda policy given the present reality.44

  The national committee of the Palestinians in Haifa appealed again and again to the British, assuming, wrongly, that since Haifa was to be the last station in the British evacuation, they would be able to rely on their protection at least until then. When this failed to materialise, they started sending numerous desperate letters to members of the Arab Higher Committee inside and outside Palestine asking for guidance and help. A small group of volunteers reached the city in January, but by then some of the notables and community leaders had realised that the moment the UN had adopted the Partition Resolution, they were doomed to be dispossessed by their Jewish neighbours. These were people whom they themselves had first invited to come and stay with them back in the late Ottoman period, who had arrived wretched and penniless from Europe, and with whom they had shared a thriving cosmopolitan city – until that fateful decision by the UN.

  Against this background one should recall the exodus at this time of about 15,000 of Haifa’s Palestinian elite – many of them prosperous merchants whose departure ruined local trade and commerce, thus putting an extra burden on the more impoverished parts of the city.

  The picture would not be complete without mentioning here the overall nature of the Arab activity up to the beginning of January 1948. During December 1947, Arab irregulars had attacked Jewish convoys but refrained from attacking Jewish settlements.45 In November the Consultancy had already defined its policy of retaliating for each such attack. But the feeling among the Zionist leaders was that they needed to move on to more drastic actions.

  THE LONG SEMINAR: 31 DECEMBER-2 JANUARY46

  ‘This is not enough,’ exclaimed Yossef Weitz when the Consultancy met on Wednesday, 31 December 1947, only a few hours before the people of Balad al-Shaykh were massacred. And he now suggested openly what he had been privately writing in his diary back in the early 1940s: ‘Is it not now the time to get rid of them? Why continue to keep in our midst those thorns at a time when they pose a danger to us?’47 Retaliation seemed to him an old-fashioned way of doing things, as it missed the main purpose of attacks on and subsequent occupation of villages. Weitz had been added to the Consultancy because he was the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund, having already played a crucial role in translating for his friends the vague notions of transfer into a concrete policy. He felt the present discussion of what lay ahead lacked a sense of purpose, an orientation he had outlined in the 1930s and ’40s.

  ‘Transfer’, he had written in 1940, ‘does not serve only one aim – to reduce the Arab population – it also serves a second purpose by no means less important, which is: to evict land now cultivated by Arabs and to free it for Jewish settlement.’ Therefore, he concluded: ‘The only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be let off.’48

  Weitz was a particularly valuable addition to the Consultancy because of his prior involvement in the village files project. Now, more than any other member of the Consultancy, Weitz deeply involved himself in the practicalities of the ethnic cleansing, jotting down details about every location and village for future reference, and entering his own surveys into those of the village files. His most trusted colleague in those days was Yossef Nachmani, a kindred soul, who shared Weitz’s dismay at what they both saw as the lacklustre performance of the Jewish leadership on this issue. Weitz wrote to Nachmani that the takeover of all Arab land was a ‘sacred duty’. Nachmani concurred and added that a kind of jihad (he used the term ‘milhement kibush’, a war of occupation) was required, but that the Jewish leadership failed to see its necessity. Weitz’s alter ego wrote: ‘The current leadership is characterised by impotent and weak people.’ Weitz was equally disappointed by the leadership’s inability, as he saw it, to rise to the historical occasion. His invitation to the Consultancy, and especially to their first meeting in January, made Weitz privy for the first time to the plans for ethnic cleansing as they evolved at the leadership level.49

  Weitz’s chance to display his ideas more widely came immediately, as that first Wednesday in January was turned into a long seminar, for which the participants moved into Ben-Gurion’s home nearby. It was Ben-Gurion’s idea to have a longer meeting as he sensed opportunities were opening up to make his dream of a Greater Israel come true. In this more comfortable setting, Weitz and others could make extended speeches and elaborate their views at leisure. This was also the only meeting of the Consultancy for which we have a protocol, found in the archives of the Hagana. For this ‘Long Seminar’ Weitz had prepared a memo, personally addressed to Ben-Gurion, in which he urged the leader to endorse his plans for transferring the Palestinian population out of areas the Jews wanted to occupy, and to make such actions the ‘cornerstone of Zionist policy’. He obviously felt that the ‘theoretical’ stage of transfer plans was over. The time to start implementing the ideas had come. In fact, Weitz left the Long Seminar with a permit to create his own small cabal under the title of a ‘transfer committee’, and by the next meeting showed up with concrete plans, about which more will be said below.

  Even the most liberal participant invited to the Long Seminar, Dr Yaacov Tahon, seemed to concur, dropping the more hesitant position he had previously taken. Tahon was a German Jew who, together with Arthur Rupin, had developed the first plans for the Jewish colonization of Palestine in the early decades of the twentieth century. As a true colonialist, at first he saw no need to expel the ‘natives’; all he wanted was to exploit them. But in the Long Seminar he also appeared taken by Weitz’s notion that ‘without transfer there will be no Jewish State’.

  Indeed, there was hardly a dissenting voice, which is why the Long Seminar is such a pivotal meeting in this story. Its departure point, accepted by all, was that ethnic cleansing was necessary; the remaining questions, or rather problems, were more of a psychological and logistical nature. Ideologues such as Weitz, Orientalists such as Machnes, and army generals such as Allon complained that their troops had not yet properly absorbed the previous orders they had been given to expand operations beyond the usual selective actions. The main problem, as they saw it, was that they seemed unable to put behind them the old methods of retaliation. ‘They are still blowing up a house here and house there,’ complained Gad Machnes, a colleague of Danin and Palmon, who ironically was to become the director general of the Israeli ministry for minorities in 1949 (where at least, one might add in his favour, he appeared to have shown some remorse about his conduct in 1948, admitting candidly in the 1960s that: ‘If it had not been for the open [Zionist military] preparations which had a provocative nature, the drift into war [in 1948] could have been averted.’). But back then, in January 1948, he seemed impatient that the Jewish troops were still engaged in searching for ‘guilty individuals’ in each location, instead of actively inflicting damage.

  Allon and Palmon now set out to explain the new orientation to their colleagues: there was a need for a more aggressive policy in areas that had been ‘quiet for too long’.50 There was no need to persuade Ben-Gurion. By the end of the Long Seminar he had given the green light to a whole series of provocative and lethal attacks on Arab villages, some as retaliation, some not, the intention of which was to cause optimal damage and kill as many villagers as possible. And when he heard that the first targets proposed for the new policy were all in the north, he demanded a trial action in the south as well, but it had to be specific, not general. In this he suddenly revealed himself as a vindictive book-keeper. He pushed for an attack on the town of Beersheba (Beer Sheva today), particularly targeting the heads of al-Hajj Salameh Ibn Said, the deputy mayor and his brother, who in the past had both refused to collaborate with the Zionist plans for settlement in the area. There was no need, stressed Ben-Gurion, to distinguish any more between the ‘innocent’ and the ‘guilty’ – t
he time had come for inflicting collateral damage. Danin recalled years later that Ben-Gurion spelled out what collateral damage meant: ‘Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.’51 Danin even claimed that some specific villages were discussed.52

  As for the ‘conservative’ mood among the Hagana troops, and Wingate’s training of them as a retaliatory force, Yigael Yadin, the acting chief of staff of the Hagana – and as of 15 May 1948 of the Israeli army – suggested that the way forward lay in adopting a new, more straightforward terminology and a tougher form of indoctrination. He recommended abandoning the term ‘retaliation’: ‘This is not what we are doing; this is an offensive and we need to initiate preemptive strikes, no need for a village to attack us [first]. We have not used properly our ability to strangulate the economy of the Palestinians.’ The, for many Israelis, legendary head of the Palmach, Yitzhak Sadeh, agreed with Yadin and added, ‘We were wrong to initiate only retaliations.’ What was needed was instilling in the troops that aggression ‘is the mood and mode now’.

  His second in command, Yigal Allon, was even more critical. He criticised the Consultancy indirectly for not having issued explicit orders for a comprehensive attack at the beginning of December. ‘We could have taken Jaffa by now easily and should have attacked the villages around Tel-Aviv. We have to go for a series of “collective punishments” even if there are children living in the [attacked] houses’. When Eliyahu Sasson, helped by Reuven Shiloah, one of his aides (later a leading figure in Israeli Orientalism), tried to draw attention to the fact that provocation was liable to alienate friendly or peaceful Palestinians, as he would throughout the seminar, Allon impatiently sidelined him by declaring: ‘A call for peace will be weakness!’ Moshe Dayan expressed similar views, and Ben-Gurion ruled out any attempt to reach an agreement in Jaffa or anywhere else.