The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  That there was still a psychological problem among the troops was indeed evident in the case of Jaffa. In the weekly meeting of 7 January, officials of Tel-Aviv’s municipality wondered why the Hagana, and not just the Irgun, was provoking the Arabs of Jaffa, when they themselves had been successful in ensuring an atmosphere of peace between the two neighbouring cities.53 On 25 January 1948, a delegation of these senior officials came to see Ben-Gurion at home, complaining that they had detected a distinct change in the Hagana’s behaviour towards Jaffa. There was an unwritten agreement between Jaffa and Tel-Aviv that the two towns would be divided by a strip of no-man’s land along the coast, which enabled an uneasy coexistence. Without consulting them, the Hagana troops had entered this area, covered by citrus groves, and had upset this delicate balance. And this was done at a time, remonstrated one of the participants, that the two municipalities were trying to reach a new modus vivendi. He complained that the Hagana seemed to be doing its best to foil such attempts and spoke of them attacking randomly: killing people without provocation, near the water wells, within the no man’s land, robbing the Arabs, abusing them, dismantling wells, confiscating assets, and shooting for the sake of intimidation.54

  Similar complaints, Ben-Gurion noted in his diary, were coming from members of other Jewish municipalities located in proximity to Arab towns or villages. Protests had come in from Rehovot, Nes Ziona, Rishon Le-Zion, and Petah Tikva, the oldest Jewish settlements in the greater Tel-Aviv area, whose members, like their Palestinian neighbours, failed to grasp that the Hagana had adopted a ‘new approach’ against the Palestinian population.

  A month later, however, we already find these very same officials sucked into the more general atmosphere of intransigence as they tell Ben-Gurion: ‘We have to hit Jaffa in every possible way.’ The temptation was indeed great: in February the picking season of the oranges for which Jaffa was famous was in full swing and a greedy Tel-Aviv municipality quickly set aside its earlier inclination to maintain a modus vivendi with the neighbouring Palestinian town.55 There was in fact no need for their pleas: a few days before, the High Command had already decided to attack the citrus groves and picking stations of the Palestinians in Jaffa.56

  In the weekend that followed the Long Seminar, in a meeting with six out of the eleven members of his Consultancy,57 Ben-Gurion hinted to them why he thought the policy of the military High Command had not at first struck a chord with the civilian heads of the municipality, and he suggested to the smaller cabal they start using a new term: ‘aggressive defense’. Yadin liked the idea and said: ‘We have to explain to our commanders that we have the upper hand . . . we should paralyse the Arab transport and their economy, harass them in their villages and the cities and demoralise them.’ Galili concurred but warned: ‘We still cannot destroy places as we do not have the equipment’ and he was also worried about the British reaction.58

  But it was Yigal Allon, and not Tel-Aviv’s senior city clerks, who carried the day. He wanted a clear directive from above to the troops who, he now reported, were full of enthusiasm and eager at any moment to go and assault Arab villages and neighbourhoods. The absence of a clear coordinating hand also troubled the rest of the military men in the Consultancy. Zealous troops, it was reported, sometimes attacked villages in areas where the High Command currently wished to avoid any provocation. One particular case discussed in the Long Seminar was an incident in the western Jerusalemite neighbourhood of Romema. That area of the city had been particularly quiet until a local Hagana commander decided to intimidate the Palestinians in the neighbourhood under the pretext that the owner of a petrol station there encouraged villagers to strike out at passing Jewish traffic. When the troops killed the station owner, his village, Lifta, retaliated by striking at a Jewish bus. Sasson added that the allegation had proved to be false. But the Hagana attack signalled the onset of a series of offensives against Palestinian villages on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains, especially directed at the village of Lifta that, even according to Hagana intelligence, had never attacked any convoys at all.

  Until five years ago, when a new road connected the main Jerusalem–Tel-Aviv highway to the northern Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem was built – illegally on territory occupied after 1967 – upon entering the city you could see on your left a number of attractive old houses, still almost wholly intact, clinging to the mountain. They are gone now, but for many years these were the remnants of the picturesque village of Lifta, one of the very first to be ethnically cleansed in Palestine. It had been the residence of Qasim Ahmad, the leader of the 1834 rebellion against the Egyptian rule of Ibrahim Pasha, which some historians view as the first national revolt in Palestine. The village was a fine example of rural architecture, with its narrow street running parallel to the slopes of the mountains. The relative prosperity it enjoyed, like many other villages, especially during and after the Second World War, manifested itself in the construction of new houses, the improvement of roads and pavements, as well as in an overall higher standard of living. Lifta was a large village, home to 2500 people, most of them Muslims with a small number of Christians. Another sign of the recent prosperity was the girls’ school a number of the villages had combined forces to build in 1945, investing their joint capital.

  Social life in Lifta revolved around a small shopping centre, which included a club and two coffee houses. It attracted Jerusalemites as well, as no doubt it would today were it still there. One of the coffee houses was the target of the Hagana when it attacked on 28 December 1947. Armed with machine guns the Jews sprayed the coffee house, while members of the Stern Gang stopped a bus nearby and began firing into it randomly. This was the first Stern Gang operation in rural Palestine; prior to the attack, the gang had issued pamphlets to its activists: ‘Destroy Arab neighbourhoods and punish Arab villages.’59

  The involvement of the Stern Gang in the attack on Lifta may have been outside the overall scheme of the Hagana in Jerusalem, according to the Consultancy, but once it had occurred it was incorporated into the plan. In a pattern that would repeat itself, creating faits accomplis became part of the overall strategy. The Hagana High Command at first condemned the Stern Gang attack at the end of December, but when they realised that the assault had caused villagers to flee, they ordered another operation against the same village on 11 January in order to complete the expulsion. The Hagana blew up most of the houses in the village and drove out all the people who were still there.

  This was the ultimate outcome of the Long Seminar: although the Zionist leadership acknowledged the need for a coordinated and supervised campaign, they decided to turn every unauthorised initiative into an integral part of the plan, giving it their blessing retrospectively. Such was the case in Jerusalem, where sporadic retaliatory actions were systemised into an offensive initiative of occupation and expulsion. On 31 January, Ben-Gurion gave direct orders to David Shaltiel, the city’s military commander, to assure Jewish contiguity and expansion through the destruction of Shaykh Jarrah, the occupation of other neighborhoods, and the immediate settlement of Jews in the evicted places. His mission was ‘to settle Jews in every house of an evicted semi-Arab neighbourhood, such as Romema.’60

  The mission was successfully accomplished. On 7 February 1948, which happened to fall on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, Ben-Gurion came up from Tel-Aviv to see the emptied and destroyed village of Lifta with his own eyes. That same evening he reported jubilantly to the Mapai Council in Jerusalem what he had seen:

  When I come now to Jerusalem, I feel I am in a Jewish (Ivrit) city. This is a feeling I only had in Tel-Aviv or in an agricultural farm. It is true that not all of Jerusalem is Jewish, but it has in it already a huge Jewish bloc: when you enter the city through Lifta and Romema, through Mahaneh Yehuda, King George Street and Mea Shearim – there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Ever since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans – the city was not as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighbourhoods in the West you do not see e
ven one Arab. I do not suppose it will change. And what happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa – can happen in large parts of the country. If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country.61

  Ben-Gurion’s diary also reveals how eager he was in January to move ahead with building a more effective assault force. He was particularly worried that the Irgun and the Stern Gang continued their terror attacks against the Palestinian population without any coordination from the Hagana command. David Shaltiel, the Jerusalem Hagana commander, reported to him that in his city, and actually all over the country, the Irgun often acted in areas where the other forces were not yet fully prepared. For example, troops belonging to the Irgun had murdered Arab drivers in Tiberias and were torturing captured villagers everywhere. Shaltiel was mainly fretting about the repercussions for the isolated Jewish quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. All the Jewish attempts then and later to occupy that part of the city failed because of the resistance the Jordanian Legion put up to ensure it remained part of Jordan. In the end, the people of the Jewish quarter themselves decided to surrender.

  Allon, Yadin, Sadeh and Dayan, the military professionals in the Consultancy, understood the ‘Old Man’, as they affectionately called Ben-Gurion, better than anyone else. Any military action, authorised or not, helped contribute to the expulsion of the ‘strangers’. When he confided his thoughts to them privately, he added another reason for simultaneously encouraging an official coordinated policy and local ‘unauthorised’ initiatives: the new intimidation policy had to be connected to the question of Jewish settlements. There happened to be thirty settlements in the UN-designated Arab state. One of the most effective ways to incorporate them into the Jewish state was to build new settlement belts between them and the Jewish designated areas. These were the same tactics Israel would use again in the occupied West Bank during the years of the Oslo accord and again in the early years of the twenty-first century.

  The person who understood Ben-Gurion the least was Eliahu Sasson. He reported to the Long Seminar another case of what he thought was an unprovoked and ‘barbaric’ Jewish attack on peaceful villagers. This was the case of Khisas, mentioned earlier. He complained in the seminar: ‘Actions such as the one in Khisas will prompt quiet Arabs to act against us. In all the areas where we committed no provocative actions – in the coastal plain and the Negev – the atmosphere is calm, but not in the Galilee.’ As before, no one listened to him. All participants concurred with Moshe Dayan when he told Sasson: ‘Our action against Khisas ignited the Galilee and this was a good thing.’ There appears to be no trace of Ben-Gurion’s earlier reaction to the Khisas operation, when he had gone so far as to publish an apology. In the Long Seminar he sided with those who welcomed the act, but suggested that actions like this should not be done officially in the name of the Hagana: ‘We need to involve the Mossad [the special branch that would become Israel’s secret service] in such actions.’ In his diary he laconically summarised the meeting by repeating Allon’s words:

  There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.62

  Eliahu Sasson left the Long Seminar still believing that he had persuaded Ben-Gurion to continue with a selective policy directed against ‘hostile’ Arabs that would allow ‘friendly’ areas, most of the country in fact, to remain calm and peaceful. But in the following meetings, we soon find him toeing the general line, and he no longer mentions the divide-and-rule tactics he had championed before, realising that none of his associates was interested any longer in exploiting distinctions between political forces, but only in expelling as many Palestinians as possible.

  Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, on the other hand, left the meeting with the impression that they had been given a free rein to start massive attacks against the Palestinian towns and villages within the coveted Jewish state. The military men appeared to grasp Ben-Gurion’s wishes better, or at least assumed that he would not object to more aggressive initiatives on their part. They were right.

  Ben-Gurion’s shift at this point to systematic operations of take-over, occupation and expulsion had much to do with his keen understanding of the fluctuations in the global mood. In the Long Seminar we find him stressing the need for further swift operations as he sensed a possible change in the international political will regarding the Palestine crisis. UN officials had begun to realise that the peace resolution their organisation had adopted was not a solution at all, but actually fostered war, as had American diplomats and British officials. True, the presence of the ALA on the whole served to restrain Palestinian actions and postponed any significant general Arab invasion, but the danger of a shift in UN and American policies remained, and establishing facts, Ben-Gurion believed, was the best means to thwart any such potential change of policy.

  Moreover, the sense that an opportune moment for action towards cleansing the country was developing was reinforced by the fact that the Zionist leadership knew how weak the Palestinian and Arab military opposition actually was. The intelligence unit of the Hagana was well aware, through telegrams it intercepted, that the ALA failed to cooperate with the paramilitary groups led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni in Jerusalem and Hassan Salameh in Jaffa. This lack of cooperation resulted in the ALA deciding, in January 1948, not to operate in the cities but rather to try and attack isolated Jewish settlements.63 The acting commander of the ALA was Fawzi Al-Qawqji, a Syrian officer, who had led a group of volunteers, mainly from Iraq, into Palestine in the 1936 Revolt. Ever since then he had been at loggerheads with the Husayni family, and gave his loyalty instead to the governments of Syria and Iraq, who had authorised his move into Palestine both in 1936 and in 1948. The Iraqi government saw al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni as a rival to its Hashemite sister-country Jordan, while the Syrian government of the time was apprehensive of his pan-Arabist ambitions. Hence, an Arab League decision to divide Palestine between the three commanders, al-Qawqji in the north, Abd al-Qadir in Jerusalem and Salameh in Jaffa, was a farce, and what little military power the Palestinians themselves possessed was made wholly ineffective by the way it was being employed.

  In a way, the hesitations in the global community about the way things were going and the highly limited nature of the pan-Arab military activity could have restored calm to Palestine and opened the way for a renewed attempt to solve the problem. However, the new Zionist policy of an aggressive offensive that the Consultancy hastened to adopt blocked all possible moves towards a more reconciliatory reality.

  On 9 January 1948, the first significant unit of the ALA volunteer army crossed into Palestine, mainly into the areas the UN had allotted to the future Arab state; quite often they camped along the boundaries of this imaginary state. In general, they adopted a defensive policy and focused on organising the people’s fortification lines in cooperation with the national committees – bodies of local notables that had been established in 1937, which acted as an emergency leadership in the cities – and with the village mukhtars. However, in several limited cases, especially after just crossing the border, they assaulted Jewish convoys and settlements. The first settlements that came under attack were Kefar Sold (9 January 1948) and Kefar Etzion (14 January 1948). Thirty-five Jewish troops, who were part of a convoy that was sent to help Kefar Etzion (south west of Jerusalem), were ambushed and killed. Long after these Hagana troops were killed, ‘35’, ‘Lamed-Heh’ in Hebrew (which substitutes letters for numbers), continued to serve as a codename for operations carried out supposedly in retaliation for this attack. Ben-Gurion’s biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, commented rightly that these operations had already been contemplat
ed during the Long Seminar and all were aimed at inflicting the kind of collateral damage Ben-Gurion had envisaged there as desirable. The attack on the Lamed-Heh convoy proved to be just one more pretext for the new offensive initiative, the final plan for which would be implemented in March 1948.64

  After the Long Seminar, Jewish military operations began more systematically to transcend retaliation and punitive action, moving to cleansing initiatives within the UN-designated area of the Jewish state. The word cleansing, ‘tihur’, was used economically in the Consultancy’s meetings, but appears on every order the High Command passed down to the units on the ground. It means in Hebrew what it means in any other language: the expulsion of entire populations from their villages and towns. This determination overshadowed all other political consideration. There were crossroads ahead where the Zionist leadership was offered a chance to take a different course of action, both by the United States and by Arab actors on the scene. Ben-Gurion and his Consultancy had decided to blaze a clear road ahead, and they rejected these offers one after the other.

  FEBRUARY 1948: SHOCK AND AWE

  Nothing of the atmosphere that pervaded the first meetings of the Consultancy was reflected in the fiery speeches Ben-Gurion delivered to the wider public. Melodramatic and full of pathos, he told his audience: ‘This is a war aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community,’ never referring to the passivity of the Palestinians or the provocative nature of Zionist actions.

  These speeches, one should add, were not just rhetoric. The Jewish forces did suffer casualties in their attempts to keep the lines open to all the isolated settlements the Zionists had planted in the heart of the Palestinian areas. By the end of January, 400 Jewish settlers had died in these attacks – a high number for a community of 660,000 (but still a much lower number than the 1500 Palestinians who had so far been killed by the random bombardment and shelling of their villages and neighbourhoods). These casualties Ben-Gurion now depicted as ‘victims of a second Holocaust’.