by Ilan Pappe
The Arab General Command, on the other hand, was quickly losing its grip. The Egyptian military generals had pinned their hopes on their airforce, but the aircraft they had sent in the crucial second half of May failed in most of their missions, apart from a few raids on Tel-Aviv. In June, the Egyptian and other Arab air forces were preoccupied elsewhere, their main mission limited to protecting the Arab regimes, rather than helping to rescue parts of Palestine.
I am not an expert in military history, nor is this the place to tackle the purely military aspects of the war, since the focus of this book is not on military strategies but on their outcomes, i.e., war crimes. Significantly, many military historians summing up the month of May have been particularly impressed with the performance of the Syrian army, which began its campaign in May 1948 and kept it up intermittently until December 1948. In fact, it did quite poorly. Only for three days, between 15 and 18 May, did Syrian artillery, tanks and infantry, with the occasional help of their air force, constitute any kind of threat to the Israeli forces. A few days later their efforts had already become more sporadic and less effective. After the first truce, they were on their way back home.
By the end of May 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was progressing according to plan. Assessing the potential strength of the forces eventually sent by the Arab League into Palestine, Ben-Gurion and his advisers concluded – as they had already predicted a week after the Arab armies had moved into Palestine – that the all-Arab force could attack isolated Jewish settlements marginally more effectively than the volunteers’ army could ever have done, but apart from this it was as ineffective and weak as the irregular and paramilitary troops that had come first.
This realisation created a euphoric mood, which is clearly reflected in the orders to the twelve brigades of the Israeli army to start considering the occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon. On 24 May, after Ben-Gurion had met with his advisers, in his diary entry he sounds triumphant and more power-hungry than ever before:
We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight – we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during Biblical times.25
On that same day, the Israeli army had received a large shipment of modern, brand new 0.45-calibre cannons from the Communist Eastern bloc. Israel now possessed artillery unmatched not only by the Arab troops inside Palestine, but by all the Arab armies put together. It should be noted that the Israeli Communist Party was instrumental in arranging this deal.
This meant the Consultancy could now put aside the initial worries it had had at the beginning of the ‘real war’ about the overall capacity of its army to manage both fronts effectively and comprehensively. Its members were now free to turn their attention to other issues more in line with the qualifications of the Orientalist section of the Consultancy, such as advising the leader on what to do with the small communities of Palestinians that had been left in the mixed towns. The solution they came up with was to have all these people moved into one particular neighbourhood in each town, deprive them of their freedom of movement, and put them under a military regime.
Finally, it may be useful to add that, during the month of May, the definitive infrastructure of the IDF was decided upon and, within it, the central place of the military regime (referred to in Hebrew as Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzvai) and Israel’s internal security services, the Shabak. The Consultancy was no longer needed. The machinery of ethnic cleansing was working on its own, propelled by its own momentum.
On the last day of May, Arab volunteers and some regular units made one final attempt to retake some of the villages that lay within the designated Arab state, but failed. The military power that confronted them was such that, except when challenged by a well-trained professional army like the Legion, it had no match. The Legion defended those parts of the West Bank that King Abdullah thought should be his trophy for not having entered the areas the Zionist movement had set its mind on for their Jewish state – a promise he kept until the end of the war. However, his army did pay a heavy price for the two sides’ failure to agree on the fate of Jerusalem, as most of the Jordanian soldiers killed in the war fell during the Legion’s successful bid for the eastern parts of the Holy City.
Chapter 7
The Escalation of the Cleansing Operations: June–September 1948
Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 13/2: Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 17/2: No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), 10 December 1948, the day before Resolution 194 declared the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
By the beginning of June, the list of villages obliterated included many that had until then been protected by nearby kibbutzim. This was the fate of several villages in the Gaza district: Najd, Burayr, Simsim, Kawfakha, Muharraqa and Huj. Their destruction appeared to have come as a genuine shock to nearby kibbutzim when they learned how these friendly villages had been savagely assaulted, their houses destroyed and all their people expelled.1 On the land of Huj, Ariel Sharon built his private residence, Havat Hashikmim, a ranch that covers 5000 dunam of the village’s fields.
Despite the ongoing negotiations by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, to broker a truce, the ethnic cleansing moved on unhindered. With obvious satisfaction Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 5 June 1948, ‘We occupied today Yibneh (there was no serious resistance) and Qaqun. Here the cleansing [tihur] operation continues; have not heard from the other fronts.’ Indeed, by the end of May his diary had reflected a renewed interest in the ethnic cleansing. With the help of Yossef Weitz, he compiled a list of the names of the villages taken, the size of their lands and the number of people expelled, which he meticulously entered in his diary. The language is no longer guarded: ‘This is the list of the occupied and evicted [mefunim] villages.’ Two days later, he convened a meeting in his own house to assess how much money had meanwhile been looted from the banks of the ‘Arabs’, and how many citrus groves and other assets had been confiscated. Eliezer Kaplan, his minister of finance, persuaded him to authorise the confiscation of all Palestinian properties already taken in order to prevent the frenzied wrangling that was already threatening to break out between the predators who were waiting to swoop down on the spoils.
Dividing the booty was one matter that preoccupied the Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion was both an autocrat and a stickler for details, and was obsessive about questions of security, and his diary reflects other, miniscule problems that accompanied the systematic destruction of Palestine. In several entries he records conversations he had had with army officers about the shortage of TNT, created by the large number of individual houses the army was ordered to blow up under Plan D.2
Like a ferocious storm gathering force, the Israeli troops no longer spared anyone in their destructive zeal. All means became legitimate, including burning down houses where dynamite had become scarce and torching the fields and remains of a Palestinian village they had attacked.3 The escalation of the Israeli army’s cleansing operation was the outcome of a meeting of the new, reduced Consultancy, whose members had met on 1 June without Ben-Gurion. They later reported to the Prime Minister that villagers were trying to return to their homes, so they had decided to instruct the army to prevent this at all costs. To make sure that the more liberal-minded among his government members would not object to this policy, Ben-Gurion demanded prior approval, and was duly given carte blanche to proceed on 16 June 1948.4
Increased callousness was also part of the Israeli response
to a brief spurt of activity by the Arab armies in early June. The latter’s artillery bombarded whatever was in range, and the Egyptian air force attacked Tel Aviv four or five times, scoring a direct hit on Ben-Gurion’s home on 4 June that caused only limited damage. The Israeli air force retaliated by shelling the Arab capitals, resulting in a considerable number of casualties, but the Arab effort to salvage Palestine was already running out of steam, mainly due to the Legion’s insistence that East Jerusalem should remain part of Jordan. The war lingered on: the division of labour between the Israeli forces on the different fronts, determined solely by Ben-Gurion, meant that the military effort on the Jewish side fell short of the impact it needed to gain the upper hand over the Jordanians. The fighting also persisted because of the tenacity the Egyptian volunteers displayed, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, who despite their poor equipment and lack of training succeeded in holding their lines in the Negev. The Egyptians were also able to hold on to the Palestinian town of Isdud on the coast and some inner enclaves in the Naqab (the Negev), as well as the villages south-west of Jerusalem, for quite some time. Realising they might have bitten off more than they could chew for the moment, the Israelis now accepted the offer by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, for a truce.
THE FIRST TRUCE
Demolition was a core part of the Israeli activities from the moment the truce went into effect (officially declared on 8 June, but in practice beginning on 11 June 1948, and to last four weeks). During the truce, the army embarked on the massive destruction of a number of expelled villages: Mazar in the south, Fayja near Petah Tikva, Biyar ’Adas, Misea, Hawsha, Sumiriyya and Manshiyya near Acre. Huge villages such as Daliyat al-Rawha, Butaymat and Sabbarin were destroyed in one day; many others were erased from the face of the earth by the time the truce ended on 8 July 1948.
All in all, the level of preparation the military command was engaged in during June for the next stages showed a growing confidence in the Israeli Army’s ability to continue not only its ethnic cleansing operations, but also its extension of the Jewish state beyond the seventy-eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine it had already occupied. Part of this confidence was due to the significant reinforcement of its air force. At the end of May, the Israelis were only disadvantaged in one area: air power. In June, however, they received a sizable shipment of new aeroplanes to supplement their rather primitive machines.
Operation ‘Yitzhak’ was launched on 1 June 1948 to attack and occupy Jenin, Tul-Karem and Qalqilya and capture the bridges on the Jordan River. As we saw, Jenin was attacked the previous month, but the Iraqi contingent guarding the city and its environs had successfully defended the area.5 Although Israeli air operations were primarily limited to raids along the state’s borders at this time, in the military archives one can find orders for the arial bombardment of Jenin and Tul-Karem, as well as other villages on the Palestine’s border. From July onwards, aeroplanes were used remorselessly in the cleansing operations, helping to force the villagers into a mass exodus – and indiscriminately targeting anyone unable to take cover in time.
At the beginning of June, Ben-Gurion was content to focus on the long march into the upper Galilee, driving his troops up to the border with Lebanon. The Lebanese army was 5000 strong, of which 2000 were stationed on the border. They were supported by 2000 ALA volunteers, most of them stationed around the city of Nazareth and the rest scattered in small groups among the dozens of villages in the area. Under the charismatic command of Fawzi al-Qawqji, the volunteers continued as best they could to defend the villages and show some resilience in the face of the looming Israeli offensive. But they were hampered not only numerically and by their inferior military skill, but also by the poor quality of their weapons and lack of ammunition.
One of the ALA battalions was the Hittin battalion. The commander at one point sent the following message to al-Qawqji: ‘The battalion’s equipment is not usable because of the amount of dirt in it. This includes rifles, machine guns and vehicles.’ The commander also complained that there was only one logistic supply line from Syria, which was often blocked, and even when the supply lines happened to be open, there were other problems to overcome. At one point he received the following telegram: ‘In reply to your telegram asking for cars to remove supply from Tarshiha to Rama, we have no fuel for the cars so we cannot reach you’ (sent on 29 June and intercepted by the Israeli military intelligence).
Thus, in the absence of any regular Arab troops the Galilee lay wide open for an Israeli assault. But as early as June, and increasingly over the following months, the villages themselves were beginning to offer the advancing troops more resistance, which is one reason there are still Palestinian villages in the Galilee today, unlike Marj Ibn Amir, the coast, the inner plains and the northern Negev.
The desperate courage of the Palestinian villages, however, also accounts for the brutality of the front. As they progressed, the Israeli troops were more determined than ever to resort to summary executions and any other means that might speed up the expulsions. One of the first villages to fall prey to this strategy was the village of Mi’ar, today the location of several Jewish settlements built in the 1970s: Segev, Yaad and Manof. The irony is that part of the land taken by force in 1948 remained uninhabited for decades, and was even cultivated by Palestinians living nearby until it was re-confiscated in the 1970s, as part of what Israel calls ‘the Judaization of the Galilee’, a brutal attempt by the government to de-Arabise the Galilee, which was still, in some areas, equally divided demographically between Jews and Arabs. It would appear that Israel intends to re-activate this scheme with the billions of dollars it hopes to extract from the US government following the pull-out from Gaza in August 2005.
The writer Taha Muhammad Ali was a boy of seventeen when, on 20 June 1948, the Israeli soldiers entered the village of Mi’ar. He was born in nearby Saffuriyya, but much of his poetry and prose today, as an Israeli citizen, is inspired by the traumatic events he saw unfolding in Mi’ar. That June, he stood watching, at sunset, the approaching Israeli troops shooting indiscriminately at the villagers still busy in the fields collecting their dura. When they got tired of the killing spree, the soldiers then began destroying the houses. People later returned to Mi’ar and continued living there until mid-July when Israeli troops re-occupied it and expelled them for good. Forty people were killed in the Israeli attack on 20 June, part of the few thousand Palestinians who perished in the massacres that accompanied the ethnic cleansing operation.6
The pace of occupying and cleansing villages in the lower and eastern Galilee was faster than in any phase of the operations that had gone before. By 29 June, large villages with a significant presence of ALA troops, such as Kuwaykat, Amqa, Tel-Qisan, Lubya, Tarbikha, Majd al-Krum, Mghar, Itarun, Malkiyya, Saffuriyya, Kfar Yassif, Abu Sinan, Judeida and Tabash appeared on the lists of future targets the troops were given. Within less than ten days they had all been taken – some villages were expelled but others were not, for reasons that varied from one village to the another.
Majd al-Krum and Mghar are still there today. In Majd al-Krum, the occupying forces had started a mass eviction of the village when a row suddenly erupted between the intelligence officers, resulting in half of the village being allowed to return from the trail of forced exile.7 ‘Most Glorious Olive Groves’ is the literal translation of this village name, and it still lies amidst vast vineyards and olive groves, adjacent to the northern slopes of Galilee’s highest mountains, not far from Acre. In ancient times the place was known as Majd Allah, ‘The Glory of God’, but the name was changed when the vineyards that began developing around the village became famous. At the centre of the village was a well whose water explains the abundance of plantations and orchards around it. Some of the houses looked indeed as if they had been there from time immemorial: stone-built and reinforced by clay, surrounded by the olive trees on the south and vast tracts of cultivated land on the east and west.
Today Majd al-Krum is strangu
lated by Israel’s discriminatory policy, which does not allow Palestinian villages to expand naturally, but at the same time continues building new Jewish settlements around it. This is why ever since 1948 the village has had a strong political cadre of nationalist and communist resistance, which the government then punished further by demolishing houses, the rubble of which the villagers have left in place in commemoration of their past resilience and heroism, and which is still visible today from the Acre–Safad highway.
Mghar is also still there, spread out within a scenic canyon in the descending valley that connects the lower Galilee with the Lake of Tiberias. Here the Jewish occupying force was faced with a village where Christians, Muslims and Druze had coexisted for centuries. The military commander interpreted Plan Dalet as calling for the expulsion of only the Muslims. To make sure this was done swiftly, he executed several Muslims on the village’s piazza in front of all the villagers, which effectively ‘persuaded’ the rest to flee.8
Many other villages in the Galilee were like Mghar in that they had mixed populations. Hence, from now on, the military commanders were given strict orders to leave the selection process that was to determine who could stay and who could not to the intelligence officers.9 The Druze were now fully collaborating with the Jews, and in villages that were partly Druze, Christians were generally spared expulsion.
