by Ilan Pappe
The operation was entrusted to Moshe Kalman, who had already successfully supervised savage attacks on Khisas, Sa‘sa and Husayniyya in the same distinct. His troops encountered very little resistance, as the Syrian volunteers positioned there left hurriedly once the shelling of the village started at dawn: heavy mortar bombardment followed by the systematic throwing of hand grenades. Kalman’s forces entered the village towards noon. Women, children, old people and a few younger men who had not left with the Syrian volunteers came out of hiding waving a white flag. They were immediately herded into the village centre.60
The film then re-enacts the search-and-arrest – in this case the search-and-execute – routine as performed by the special intelligence units of the Hagana. First, they brought in a hooded informer who scrutinised the men lined up in the village square; those whose names appeared on a pre-prepared list the intelligence officers had brought with them were identified. The men selected were then taken to another location and shot dead. When other men rebelled or protested, they were killed as well. In one incident, which the film captured extremely well, one of the villagers, Yusuf Ahmad Hajjar, told his captors that he, like the others, had surrendered and thus ‘expected to be treated humanely’. The Palmach commander slapped him in the face and then ordered him, by way of punishment, to pick thirty-seven teenagers at random. While the rest of the villagers were forced into the storage room of the village mosque, the teenagers were shot with their hands tied behind their backs.
In his book, Hans Lebrecht offers another glimpse of the atrocities, and explains that ‘at the end of May 1948, I was ordered by the military unit in which I served to build a temporary pump station, and to divert the “deserted” village’s stream, Ayn Zaytun, to supply water to the battalion. The village had been totally destroyed, and among the debris there were many bodies. In particular, we found many bodies of women, children and babies near the local mosque. I convinced the army to burn the bodies’.61
These graphic descriptions are also found in the Hagana military reports,62 but how many of Ayn al-Zaytun’s villagers were actually executed is hard to tell. The military documents reported that all in all, including the executions, seventy people had been shot; other sources give a much higher number. Netiva Ben-Yehuda was a member of the Palmach and was in the village when the execution happened, but she preferred to tell the story in a fictionalised way. However, her story offers a chilling detailed description of the way the men of the village were shot while handcuffed, giving the number executed as several hundred:
But Yehonathan continued to yell, and suddenly he turned with his back to Meirke, and walked away furiously, all the time continuing to complain: ‘He is out of his mind! Hundreds of people are lying there tied! Go and kill them! Go and waste hundreds of people! A madman kills people bound like this and only a madman wastes all the ammunition on them! ... I don’t know who they had in mind, who is coming to inspect them, but I understand it’s become urgent, suddenly we have to untie the knots around these POWs’ hands and legs, and then I realized they are all dead, ‘problem solved’.63
According to this account the massacre, as we know from many other mass killings, occurred not only as ‘punishment’ for ‘impertinence’ but also because the Hagana had as yet no POW camps for the large numbers of villagers captured. But even after such camps were set up, massacres occurred when large groups of villagers were captured, as in Tantura and Dawaymeh after 15 May 1948.
Oral histories, which provided Elias Khoury with the material for Bab al-Shams, also reinforce the impression that the archival material does not tell the full story: it is economical about the methods employed and misleading about the number of people killed on that fateful day in May 1948.
As noted, each village served as a precedent that would become part of a pattern and a model that then facilitated more systematic expulsions. In Ayn al-Zaytun, the villagers were taken to the edge of the village where the Jewish troops then started firing shots over their heads as they ordered them to flee. The routine procedures were followed as well: the people were stripped of all their belongings before being banished from their homeland.
The Palmach later seized the nearby village, Biriyya, and, as in Ayn al-Zaytun, ordered all the houses to be burnt in order to demoralize the Arabs of Safad.64 Only two villages remained in the area. The Hagana now faced a more complicated task: how to similarly homogenize, or rather ‘Judaize’, the Marj Ibn Amir region and the vast plains that stretched between the valley and the River Jordan, all the way eastwards to occupied Baysan, and all the way north up to the city of Nazareth, which was still free in those days.
Completing the mission in the East
It was Yigael Yadin who in April demanded a more determined effort to depopulate this vast area. He seemed to suspect the troops of not being enthusiastic enough, and wrote directly to several members of the kibbutzim in the vicinity to check if the troops had indeed occupied and destroyed the villages they had been ordered to eliminate.65
However, the soldiers’ hesitations were not for lack of motivation or zeal. It was, in fact, the intelligence officers who restricted the operations. In part of the area, especially close to the city of Nazareth, all the way down to Afula, there were large clans who had cooperated – read: ‘collaborated’ – with them for years. Should they be expelled as well?
Local intelligence officers, such as Palti Sela, were particularly concerned about the fate of one huge clan: the Zu’bis. Palti Sela wanted them to be exempted. In an interview he gave in 2002 he explained that he was not sure how, in the haste of the operation, they would be able to select the right people. It all depended, he remembered, on his ability to tell the difference between them and the others: ‘The Zu’bis were always different in their external look from the other villagers. The men, not the females. You could not tell the difference with the females, neither among the old males.’ In any case, he later regretted the effort as the Zu’bis in the end proved not that cooperative and after 1948 had reinforced their Palestinian identity. ‘Today they are “cholera”,’ (Hebrew colloquial for scum) he told his interviewer, adding that they ‘spit into the plate that fed them.’66
Eventually, it was decided to leave intact those villages that had a large share of the Zu’biyya clan. The most ‘difficult’ decision concerned the village of Sirin as it had only a few members of the clan; as we saw, the whole village was eventually expelled. Palti Sela wrote a letter to the heads of the families: ‘Although you are part of the seven villages that were allowed to stay, we cannot protect you. I suggest you all leave for Jordan,’67 which they did.
For many years, his fellow kibbutzniks refused to forgive him for one village that he had ‘saved’: the village of Zarain. ‘Behind my back, people call me traitor, but I am proud,’ he told his interviewer many years later.68
SUCCUMBING TO A SUPERIOR POWER
One of the major indications that the Jewish forces had the upper hand in 1948, and that the Jewish community in Palestine as a whole was far from facing the fate of extinction and destruction the official Zionist myth paints for us, was the decision of several ethnic minorities in the country to leave the Palestinian camp and join the Jewish forces.
The first and most important of these were the Druze, a religious sect that regards itself as Muslim although Islamic orthodoxy does not accept their claim. The Druze emerged as an offshoot of the Ismailis, themselves a splinter group of Shia Islam. Particularly important in this context are the Druze who had joined the ALA when it entered the country. In the beginning of April 1948, 500 of them deserted the ALA to join the Jewish forces. How this took place forms one of the more curious chapters in the 1948 war. The deserters first pleaded with the Jewish commanders in the Galilee that before they changed sides, they would participate in a phony battle and be taken captive, and only then would they declare their loyalty to Zionism. Such a battle was duly staged near the town of Shafa‘Amr, between the villages of Khirbat al-Kasayir and Hawsha –
both later destroyed – and the Druze then signed a pompous-sounding ‘treaty of blood’.69
Khirbat al-Kasayir and Hawsha were the first two villages Jewish troops attacked and occupied within the area the UN partition resolution had allocated to a Palestinian state. These attacks highlight the determination of the Zionist movement to occupy as much of Palestine as possible, even before the end of the Mandate.
One of the more tragic consequences of their defection was that the Druze troops became the main vehicle for the Jews to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Galilee. Their alliance with the Zionist movement has inexorably alienated the Druzes from the rest of the Palestinians. Only recently do we find a younger generation seemingly beginning to rebel against this isolation, but also discovering how difficult this proves in a patriarchal society ruled firmly by its elders and spiritual leaders.
Another sect, the Circassians, who had several villages in the north of the country, also decided to show allegiance to the powerful Jewish military presence, and 350 of them joined the Jewish forces in April. This mixture of Druze and Circassians would form the nucleus for the future Border Police of Israel, the main military unit policing, first, the Arab areas in pre-1967 Israel, and then enforcing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after 1967.
ARAB REACTIONS
When the Jewish forces occupied and destroyed the first villages in December 1947, it seemed that Galilee was the only area where there was a chance of stopping these assaults, with the help of Fawzi al-Qawqji. He commanded an army of 2000 men and impressed the local population with a series of attacks he conducted against isolated Jewish settlements (as have other units coming in via today’s West Bank). But these were ultimately unsuccessful attempts and never caused any significant change in the balance of power. Al-Qawqji was limited in his ability because of the strategy he followed of dividing his troops into small units and sending them to as many cities, towns and villages as possible, where they then formed inadequate defence forces.
The presence of such an army of volunteers could have caused the situation to deteriorate further, pushing Palestine into a direct confrontation, but this did not happen. On the contrary, having attacked a series of isolated settlements as well as the Jewish convoys that came to assist them, al-Qawqji began seeking a truce in January, and continued this all through February and March 1948. Realising that the Jews enjoyed superiority in every military parameter, he tried to negotiate directly with the Consultancy, some of whose members he knew from the 1930s. At the end of March, he met Yehoshua Palmon, apparently with the blessing of Transjordan’s King Abdullah. He offered Palmon a non-aggression pact that would keep the Jewish forces within the designated Jewish state, and would eventually allow negotiations over a cantonised Palestine. His proposals, needless to say, were rejected. Still, al-Qawqji never conducted a significant offensive, nor could he wage one, until the Jewish forces pushed into the areas the UN had allocated to the Arab state.
Al-Qawqji offered not only a cease-fire but also to bring the issue of a Jewish presence in Palestine back to the Arab League to discuss its future. However, Palmon was sent more as a spy than a delegate for negotiations: he was struck by the poor equipment and lack of motivation to fight among the ALA. This was the main piece of information the Consultancy wanted to hear.70
Al-Qawqji’s appearance was accompanied by the arrival in the southern coastal plain of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers from Egypt. They were full of enthusiasm, but totally ineffective as soldiers or troops, as was quickly proven when the villages they were supposed to defend were occupied, emptied and destroyed in quick succession.
In January 1948, the level of war rhetoric in the Arab world had reached new heights, but the Arab governments by and large never moved beyond talking about the need to salvage Palestine, at the same time that both the local media and dailies, such as Filastin, and the foreign press, especially The New York Times, were methodically reporting Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods.
The Arab League’s general secretary, Azzam Pasha, an Egyptian politician, hoped at that point that the UN would re-intervene and absolve the Arab states from direct confrontation in Palestine.71 But the international organisation was at a loss. Intriguingly, the UN had never posed the question of how it should act if the Palestinians were to decide to reject the partition plan. The UN had left the issue open while its officials, through the good services of countries such as Britain and France, inquired only whether neighbouring Arab countries might annex the areas allocated to the Palestinians, and were basically satisfied to learn that one such neighbour, Jordan, was already negotiating with the Jews a possible takeover of ‘Arab’ Palestine. The Jordanians eventually did gain control over that area, which became known as the West Bank, most of it annexed without a shot being fired. The other Arab leaders were unwilling to play the game as yet, so they kept up the rhetoric that their intervention was for the sake of helping the Palestinians liberate Palestine, or at least salvage parts of it.
The Arab decision as to how much to intervene and assist was directly affected by developments on the ground. And on the ground they watched – politicians with growing dismay, intellectuals and journalists with horror – the beginning of a depopulation process unfolding in front of their eyes. They had enough representatives in the area to be fully aware of the intent and scope of the Jewish operations. Few of them were in any doubt at that early stage, in the beginning of 1948, of the potential disaster awaiting the Palestinian people. But they procrastinated, and postponed, for as long as they could, the inevitable military intervention, and then were only too happy to terminate it sooner rather than later: they knew full well not only that the Palestinians were defeated, but also that their armies stood no chance against the superior Jewish forces. In fact, they sent troops into a war they knew they had little or no chance of winning.
Many of the Arab leaders were cynical about the looming catastrophe in Palestine, and few were genuinely concerned. But even the latter needed time to assess, not so much the situation as the possible implications of any involvement on their precarious positions back home. Egypt and Iraq were embroiled in the final stages of their own wars of liberation, and Syria and Lebanon were young countries that had just won independence.72 Only when the Jewish forces intensified their actions and their true intentions became fully exposed did Arab governments design some sort of a coordinated reaction. In order not to be sucked into a whirlwind that could undermine their already shaky standing in their own societies, they transferred the decision to their regional outfit, the Arab League Council, made up, as mentioned above, of the Arab states’ foreign ministers. This was an ineffective body as its decisions could be rejected, freely misinterpreted or, if accepted, only partly implemented. This body dragged out its discussions even after the reality in rural and urban Palestine had become too painfully clear to be ignored, and only at the end of April 1948 was it decided that they would send troops into Palestine. By then a quarter of a million Palestinians had already been expelled, two hundred villages destroyed and scores of towns emptied.
It was in many ways al-Qawqji’s defeat in Marj Ibn Amir that convinced the Arab leaders they would have to send regular forces. Al-Qawqji had failed to occupy Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emeq after ten days of fighting which had begun on April 4, the only Arab offensive action before May 1948.
Before the final decision to enter was taken, on 30 April, responses from the Arab states varied. All were asked by the Council to send arms and volunteers, but not all complied with the request. Saudi Arabia and Egypt pledged small-scale financial help, Lebanon promised a limited number of guns, and it seems that only Syria was willing to engage in proper military preparations, also persuading its Iraqi neighbour to train and send volunteers into Palestine.73
There was no lack of volunteers. Many people in the surrounding Arab countries came out and demonstrated against their governments’ inaction; thousands of young men were willing to sacrifi
ce their life for the Palestinians. Much has been written about this strong outpouring of sentiment but it remains an enigma – classifying it as pan-Arabism hardly does it justice. Perhaps the best explanation one can offer is that Palestine and Algeria became models for a fierce and bold anti-colonialist struggle, a confrontation that inflamed the national fervour of young Arabs around the Middle East, whereas in the rest of the Arab world national liberation came about through drawn-out diplomatic negotiations, always far less exciting. But I stress again, this is only a partial analysis of the willingness of young Baghdadis or Damascenes to leave everything behind for the sake of what they must have regarded as a sacred, though by no means a religious, mission.
The odd man out in this matrix was King Abdullah of Transjordan. He used the new situation to intensify his negotiations with the Jewish Agency over a joint agreement in post-Mandatory Palestine. While his army had units inside Palestine, and some of them were, here and there, willing to help the villagers protect their houses and lands, they were largely restrained by their commanders. Fawzi al-Qawqji’s diary reveals the ALA commander’s growing frustration with the unwillingness of the Arab Legion units stationed in Palestine to cooperate with his troops.74
During the Jewish operations between January and May 1948, when around 250,000 Palestinians were driven by force from their homes, the Legion stood idly by. In fact, it was in January that the Jordanians and the Jews had cemented their unwritten agreement. In early February 1948 the Jordanian prime minister had flown to London to report on the conclusion of their tacit alliance with the Jewish leadership over the partition of post-Mandatory Palestine between the Jordanians and the Jewish state: the Jordanians were to annex most of the areas allocated to the Arabs in the partition resolution, and in return would not join the military operations against the Jewish state. The British gave the scheme their blessing.75 The Arab Legion, the Jordanian army, was the best trained in the whole Arab world. It matched, and in some areas was even superior to, the Jewish troops. But it was confined by the King and his British General Chief of Staff, John Glubb Pasha, to act only in those areas the Jordanians deemed theirs: East Jerusalem and the area now known as the West Bank.
