The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  Fawzi Muhammad Tanj, Abu Khalid, also witnessed the executions. In the account he gives the village men were separated from the women, and then groups of seven to ten were taken and executed. He witnessed the killing of ninety people.

  Mahmud Abu Salih of Tantura also reported the killing of ninety people. He was seventeen at the time and his most vivid memory is the killing of a father in front of his children. Abu Salih kept in touch with one of the sons, who went out of his mind seeing his father executed and never recovered. Abu Salih saw the execution of seven male members of his own family.

  Mustafa Abu Masri, known as Abu Jamil, was thirteen at the time, but was probably mistaken for being around ten during the selection and thus was sent to the group of women and children, which saved him. A dozen members of his family, aged between ten and thirty, were less fortunate and he witnessed them being shot. The sequence of events he relates makes for chilling reading. His father ran into a Jewish officer whom the family knew and trusted, and so he sent his family away with that officer: he himself was later shot. Abu Jamil recalled 125 people being killed in summary executions. He saw Shimson Mashvitz walking among the people who had been collected on the beach, carrying a whip, lashing out at them ‘just for the fun of it’. Anis Ali Jarban told similar horror stories about Mashvitz. He came from the nearby village of Jisr al-Zarqa and had fled with his family to Tantura, thinking the larger village would be safer.

  When the rampage in the village was over and the executions had come to an end, two Palestinians were ordered to dig mass graves under the supervision of Mordechai Sokoler, of Zikhron Yaacov, who owned the tractors that had been brought in for the gruesome job. In 1999, he said he remembered burying 230 bodies; the exact number was clear in his mind: ‘I lay them one by one in the grave.’

  Several more Palestinians who took part in the digging of the mass graves told of the horrific moment when they realised they were about to be killed themselves. They were only saved because Yaacov Epstein, who had intervened in the frenzy of violence in the village, arrived and also stopped the killing on the beach. Abu Fihmi, one of the eldest and most respected members of the village, was one of those recruited to first identify the bodies and then help carry them to the graves: Shimon Mashvitz ordered him to list the bodies, and he counted ninety-five. Jamila Ihsan Shura Khalil saw how these bodies were then put on carts and pushed by the villagers to the burial place.

  Most of the interviews with the survivors were done in 1999 by an Israeli research student, Teddy Katz, who ‘stumbled upon’ the massacre while doing his MA dissertation for Haifa University. When this became public, the University retroactively disqualified his thesis and Alexandroni veterans dragged Katz himself into court, suing him for libel. Katz’s most senior interviewee was Shlomo Ambar, later a general in the IDF. Ambar refused to give him details of what he had seen, saying: ‘I want to forget what happened there.’ When Katz pressed him, all he was willing to say was:

  I connect this to the fact that I went to fight the Germans [he had served with the Jewish Brigade in the Second World War]. The Germans were the worst enemy the Jewish people has had, but when we fought we fought according to the laws of war dictated by the international community. The Germans did not kill Prisoners of War, they killed Slav Prisoners of War, but not British, not even [when they were] Jewish.

  Ambar admitted to hiding things: ‘I did not talk then, why should I talk now?’ Understandable, given the images that came to his mind when Katz asked him what his comrades had done in Tantura.

  In fact the story of Tantura had already been told before, as early as 1950, but then it failed to attract the same attention as the Deir Yassin massacre. It appears in the memoirs of a Haifa notable, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who, a few days after the battle, recorded the testimony of a Palestinian who had told him about summary executions on the beach of dozens of Palestinians. Here it is in full:

  On the night of 22/23 May the Jews attacked from 3 sides and landed in boats from the seaside. We resisted in the streets and houses and in the morning the corpses were seen everywhere. I shall never forget this day all my life. The Jews gathered all women and children in a place, where they dumped all bodies, for them to see their dead husbands, fathers and brothers and terrorize them, but they remained calm.

  They gathered men in another place, took them in groups and shot them dead. When women heard this shooting, they asked their Jewish guard about it. He replied: ‘We are taking revenge for our dead.’ One officer selected 40 men and took them to the village square. Each four were taken aside. They shot one, and ordered the other three to dump his body in a big pit. Then they shot another and the other two carried his body to the pit and so on.16

  When they had completed their cleansing operations along the coast, the Alexandroni were instructed to move towards the Upper Galilee:

  You are asked to occupy Qadas, Mayrun, Nabi Yehoshua and Malkiyye; Qadas has to be destroyed; the other two should be given to the Golani Brigade and its commander will decide what to do with them. Mayrun should be occupied and handed over to Golani.17

  The geographical distance between the various locations is quite considerable, revealing again the ambitious pace the troops were expected to maintain on their journey of destruction.

  THE BRIGADES’ TRAIL OF BLOOD

  The above formed part of the bloody trail the Alexandroni left behind along Palestine’s coast. More massacres by other brigades would follow, the worst of which was in the autumn of 1948 when the Palestinians finally succeeded in putting up some resistance against the ethnic cleansing in certain places, and in response the Jewish expellers revealed an ever-increasing callousness in the atrocities they perpetrated.

  Meanwhile, the Golani Brigade followed in the footsteps of the Alexandroni. It attacked pockets the other brigades had missed or enclaves that for whatever reason had not yet been taken. One such destination was the village of Umm al-Zinat, which had been spared in the February cleansing operation in the Haifa district. Another was Lajjun near the ruins of ancient Meggido. Controlling the area between Lajjun and Umm al-Zinat meant that the whole western flank of Marj Ibn Amir and Wadi Milk, the canyon leading to the valley from the coastal road, were now in Jewish hands.

  By the end of May 1948, some Palestinan enclaves still remaining inside the Jewish state proved harder to occupy than normal and it would take another few months to complete the job. For example, attempts to extend control over the remoter areas of the Upper Galilee that month failed, mainly because Lebanese and local volunteers courageously defended villages such as Sa‘sa, which was the primary target of the Jewish forces.

  In the order to the Golani Brigade for the second attack on Sa‘sa it says: ‘The occupation is not for permanent stay but for the destruction of the village, mining of the rubble and the junctures nearby.’ Sa‘sa, however, was spared for a few more months. Even for the efficient and zealous Golani troops the plan had proved to be too ambitious. Towards the end of May came the following clarification: ‘If there is a shortage of soldiers, you are entitled to limit (temporarily) the cleansing operation, take-over and destruction of the enemy’s villages in your district.’18

  The orders the brigades now received were phrased in more explicit language than the vague oral instructions they had been given before. The fate of a village was sealed when the order said either to ‘le-taher’, to cleanse, meaning leaving the houses intact but expelling the people, or ‘le-hashmid’, to destroy, meaning to dynamite the houses after the expulsion of the people and lay mines in the rubble to prevent their return. There were no direct orders for massacres, but neither were these fully and genuinely condemned when they took place.

  Sometimes the decision to ‘cleanse’ or ‘destroy’ was left in the hands of the local commanders: ‘The villages in your district you have either to cleanse or destroy, decide for yourself according to consultation with the Arab advisors and the Shai [military intelligence] officers.’19

  While these two b
rigades, the Alexandroni and the Golani, applied the methods described in Plan Dalet almost religiously to the coastal area, another brigade, the Carmeli, was sent to the northern areas of Haifa and the western Galilee. Like other brigades at the same time or later, it was also given orders to capture the area of Wadi Ara, the valley that contained fifteen villages and connected the coast, near Hadera, with the eastern corner of Marj Ibn Amir, near Afula. The Carmeli captured two villages nearby – Jalama on 23 April and Kabara soon afterwards, but they did not enter the valley. The Israeli command regarded this route as a crucial lifeline, but never succeeded in occupying it. As mentioned above, it was then given to them by King Abdullah in the summer of 1949, a tragic outcome for a large group of Palestinians who had successfully resisted expulsion.

  As in the previous month, the Irgun – its units now part of the newly formed Israeli army – were sent in the second half of May to pockets along the coast to complete what the Hagana had regarded as questionable, or at least undesirable, operations at that particular moment. But even before its official inclusion in the army, the Irgun cooperated with the Hagana in the occupation of the greater Haifa area. It assited the Hagana in launching Operation Hametz (‘Leaven’) on 29 April, 1948. Three brigades took part in this operation, the Alexandroni, Qiryati and Givati. These brigades captured and cleansed Beit Dajan, Kfar Ana, Abbasiyya, Yahudiyya, Saffuriyya, Khayriyya, Salama and Yazur as well as the Jaffa suburbs of Jabalya and Abu Kabir.

  In the second half of May, the Irgun were allocated the greater area of Jaffa to complete the job of the three Hagana brigades. They were regarded as a lesser force, as was the Qiryati Brigade. The Israeli military commanders described it as made up of ‘lesser [quality] soldiers’, namely Mizrahi Jews. A report of all the brigades submitted by a supervising officer in June 1948 described the Qiryati as a ‘most problematic’ brigade consisting of ‘illiterate people, with no candidates for NCOS and of course none for the post of officers.’20

  The Irgun and Qiryati were ordered to continue their mopping-up operation south of Jaffa. By the middle of May, their troops helped complete Operation Hametz. The ruins of some of the villages and the suburbs occupied and expelled during that operation lie buried below the ‘White City’ of Tel-Aviv, that first ‘Hebrew’ city the Jews had founded in 1909 on sand dunes bought from a local landowner, now spread out into the sprawling metropolis of today.

  In the Israeli military archives there is a query from the commander of the Qiryati, dated 22 May 1948, asking whether he could employ bulldozers to destroy the villages instead of using explosives as ordered by Plan Dalet. His request shows how phony ‘the war’ was: only one week into it, this brigade commander had ample time to allow a slower method for demolishing and erasing the scores of villages on his list.21

  The Harel Brigade of Yitzhak Rabin showed no hesitation about which method of demolition to employ. Already on 11 May, the day before the final orders for the next stage in the ethnic cleansing were issued, it could report that it had occupied the village of Beit Masir, in what today is Jerusalem’s national park, on the western slopes of the mountains, and that ‘we are currently blowing up the houses. We have already blown up 60–70 houses.’22

  Together with Brigade Etzioni, the Harel troops focused on the Greater Jerusalem area. Far away from there, in the north-eastern valleys of the country, the soldiers of the ‘Bulgarian’ Brigade were so successful in their destruction mission that the High Command thought at the time that they could proceed immediately to occupy parts of the northern West Bank and sections of the upper Galilee. But this proved over-ambitious after all and failed. The ‘Bulgarim’, as they were called, were unable to push out the Iraqi contingent holding Jenin, and had to wait until October before it could take the upper Galilee. However presumptuous, the belief that this brigade could seize the northern part of the West Bank – despite the agreement with Abdullah – and even conduct invasions into southern Lebanon, while cleansing vast areas of Palestine, reveals once again the cynicism behind the myth that Israel was fighting a ‘war of survival’. The brigade, meanwhile, achieved ‘enough’ as it was and could boast of having destroyed and expelled a larger number of villages than expected.

  The two fronts of the ‘real’ and ‘phony’ war merged into one in those days in May, as the High Command was now confident enough to dispatch units to the border areas adjacent to the Arab countries, and there to engage the Arab expeditionary forces their governments had sent into Palestine on 15 May 1948. Meanwhile the Golani and Yiftach Brigades concentrated on cleansing operations on the border with Syria and Lebanon. In fact, they were able to carry out their mission unimpeded, following their usual routine for each village they had been ordered to destroy, while nearby Lebanese or Syrian troops stood idly by, looking the other way rather than risking their own men.

  CAMPAIGNS OF REVENGE

  The sky was not always the limit, however. Inevitably there were hitches in the wild galloping pace of the Israeli operations, and there was a price to be paid for the systematic cleansing of Palestine and simultaneous confrontation with the regular Arab armies that had begun moving into the country. Isolated settlements in the south were left exposed to the Egyptian troops, who occupied several of them – albeit only for a few days – and to Syrian troops, who took over three settlements for a few days as well. Another sacrifice was exacted from the regular practice of sending convoys though densely Arab areas not yet taken: when some of them were successfully attacked, more than two hundred Jewish troops lost their lives.

  Following one such attack, on a convoy heading towards the Jewish settlement of Yechiam in the north-western tip of the country, the troops who later carried out operations in its vicinity were particularly vengeful and callous in the way they performed their duties. The settlement of Yechiam was several kilometres south of Palestine’s western border with Lebanon. The Jewish troops who attacked the villages in operation ‘Ben-Ami’ in May 1948 were specifically told that the villages had to be eliminated in revenge for the loss of the convoy. Thus the villages of Sumiriyya, Zib, Bassa, Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr were subjected to an upgraded, crueler version of the ‘destroy-and-expel’ drill of the Israeli units: ‘Our mission: to attack for the sake of occupation . . . to kill the men, destroy and set fire to Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr.’23

  The extra zeal thus infused into the troops produced one of the swiftest depopulation operations in one of the densest Arab areas of Palestine. Within twenty-nine hours of the end of the Mandate, almost all the villages in the north-western districts of the Galilee – all within the designated Arab state – had been destroyed, allowing a satisfied Ben-Gurion to announce to the newly assembled parliament: ‘The Western Galilee has been liberated’ (some of the villages north of Haifa were actually only occupied later). In other words, it took Jewish troops just over a day to turn a district with a population that was ninety-six per cent Palestinian and only four per cent Jewish – with a similar ratio of land ownership – into an area almost exclusively Jewish. Ben-Gurion was particularly satisfied with the ease with which the populations of the larger villages had been driven out, such as those of Kabri with 1500, Zib with 2000, and the largest, Bassa, with its 3000 inhabitants.

  It took more than a day to defeat Bassa, because of the resistance from the village militiamen and some ALA volunteers. If the orders to be extra harsh with the village in revenge for the attack on the Jewish convoy near Yechiam had not been enough, its resistance was seen as another reason to ‘punish’ the village (that is, beyond simply expelling its people). This pattern would recur: villages that proved hard to subdue had to be ‘penalised’. As with all traumatic events in the lives of human beings, some of the worst atrocities remain deeply engraved in the survivors’ memories. The victims’ family members guarded those recollections and passed them down through the generations. Nizar al-Hanna belonged to such a family, whose memories are based on the traumatic events witnessed by his grandmother:

  M
y maternal grandmother was a teenager when Israeli troops entered Bassa and ordered all the young men to be lined up and executed in front of one of the churches. My grandmother watched as two of her brothers, one 21, the other 22 and recently married, were executed by the Hagana.24

  The total destruction that followed the massacre spared a church in which the village’s Greek Orthodox Christians prayed, and a domed Muslim shrine that served the other half of the population. Today, one can still spot a few houses fenced off with barbed wire standing in an uncultivated field now expropriated by Jewish citizens. The village was so vast (25,000 dunam out of which 17,000 were cultivated) that its territory today includes a military airport, a kibbutz, and a development town. The more observant visitor cannot fail to notice the remains of an elaborate water system, which was the pride of the villagers and had been completed just before the place was wiped out.

  The expulsion of so many villagers – whom the UN Partition Resolution had just transformed from citizens of the British Mandate into either citizens of the UN-designated Arab state or citizens of the Jewish state – went unnoticed by the UN. Consequently, despite the drama of the British withdrawal and the potential hitch of the Arab world sending units into Palestine, the business of ethnic cleansing continued without interruption. The leaders of the newly created State of Israel – still in the making – and its military commanders knew they had sufficient forces at their disposal to halt the incoming Arab units while continuing their relentless cleansing of the land. It was also obvious that in the following month, the capacity of the Jewish forces would reach new heights: in early June the orders sent down to the troops were even more far-reaching in both their geographical span and the ambitious quota of villages each brigade was now assigned to capture and destroy.