The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  Saffuriyya was less fortunate. All its inhabitants were evicted, with soldiers shooting over their heads to hasten their departure. Al-Hajj Abu Salim was twenty-seven, and the father of one beloved daughter, when the village was taken. His wife was expecting another baby and he recalls the warm family home with his father, a kind and generous man, one of the richest peasants in the village. For Abul Salim, the Nakba began with the news of other villages surrendering. ‘When your neighbour’s house is on fire, you begin to worry’ is a well-known Arab saying that captures the emotions and confusion of the villagers caught in the midst of the catastrophe.

  Saffuriyya was one of the first villages Israeli forces bombarded from the air. In July many more would be terrorised in this way, but back in June this was a rarity. Terrified, the women took their children and hastily sought shelter in the ancient caves nearby. The young men prepared their primitive rifles for the inevitable attack, but the volunteers from the Arab countries took fright and escaped from the girls’ school where they had been stationed. Abu Salim stayed on with the men to fight although, as he remembered many years later, ‘The officer of the ALA advised me and others to run away,’ which, he admits, seemed to make sense. But he stayed put and so became a crucial eyewitness to the events that followed.

  After the air bombardment came the ground attack, not only on the village but also on the caves. ‘The women and children were quickly exposed by the Jews and my mother was killed by the troops,’ he told a newspaper fifty-three years later. ‘She was trying to enter the Church of Annunciation, and the Jews dropped a bomb that hit her in the stomach.’ His father took Abu Salim’s wife and fled to Reina, a village that had already surrendered. There they took refuge with a Christian family for a few months, who shared their food and clothing with them. They worked in the family’s orchards and were well treated. As they had been forced to leave their own clothes behind in the village, villagers tried to return in the dead of the night to smuggle them out. Israeli troops caught several of them and shot them on the spot. In 2001, Abu Salim, now eighty years old, concluded his story by stating that he was still willing, as he had been in the past, to buy his old house back with good money. What he cannot rebuild is his family. He has lost all contact with his brother, whom he thinks has children somewhere in the diaspora, but he has been unable to track any of them down.

  Like many villagers in the vicinity of Nazareth, the people of Saffuriyya fled to the city. Today sixty per cent of Nazareth’s residents are internal refugees. The decision of the local Israeli commander who occupied Nazareth the following month not to drive out its inhabitants meant that many of the expelled villagers around Nazareth were spared the fate of a second eviction. Along with many of the survivors of the other villages, the people of Saffuriyya put up new homes in a neighbourhood that faced their old village, today called Safafra. This meant another traumatic life experience: they actually watched as the Jewish settlers began emptying their houses, occupied them and slowly turned their beloved village into an Israeli moshav – a collective agricultural settlement – that they called Zippori, which Israeli archeologists quickly claimed was the name of the original Talmudic city.

  In other neighbourhoods in the city of Nazareth today you can come across survivors of Malul and Mujaydil, who settled in the southern part of the city as near as they could to the Israeli development town of Migdal Ha-Emeq, built on the ruins of their villages after their occupation in July. Malul is gone without a trace; in Mujaydil two churches and a mosque were the only remnants until recently of the Palestinian presence. The mosque was destroyed in 2003 to make room for a shopping mall, and only the churches survive.

  The village of Mujaydil had 2000 inhabitants, most of whom fled to Nazareth before the soldiers reached their houses. For some reason the army left these intact. In 1950, after the intervention of the Pope in Rome, the Christians were offered the opportunity to move back but refused to do so without their Muslim neighbours.10 Israel then destroyed half the houses and one of the village’s mosques. Mujaydil’s al-Huda Mosque had been built in 1930 and was twelve metres high and eight metres wide. A kuttab – an elementary Quranic school – was nearby. The site was famous for the elaborate system it used to collect the rainfall from the mosque’s roof into a well. A tall impressive minaret was added to the edifice in the 1940s.

  The Christian sites were equally picturesque. Part of the Russian Orthodox Church is still there today, though its walls are long gone. It was built in honour of the brother of the Russian Czar, Serjei Alexandrov, who had visited the place in 1882 and who donated the money for its construction in the hope that local Christians of other denominations could be converted to Orthodox Christianity. But after he had left, the local representative of the Orthodox Church in Palestine, Patriarch Nikodim, proved less insistent on the missionary task he had been entrusted with and more genuinely concerned about education for all: he opened the church to all the denominations in the village and ensured it functioned most of the time as the local school.

  The village also had a Roman Catholic church, built in 1903, which housed on its first floor a trilingual school for boys and girls (teaching was in Arabic, Italian and French). It also had a local clinic for the benefit of all the villagers. This church is still there and an old family who decided to come back from Nazareth to take care of the site, the Abu Hani family, now looks after the lovely orchard and the school.

  As in other places in Palestine, it is worthwhile to dwell a little on the local history of the village as it demonstrates how not only houses or fields were destroyed in the Nakba but a whole community disappeared, with all its intricate social networks and cultural achievements. Thus in Mujaydil the Israeli army obliterated a piece of history that included some fine architectural specimens and a series of significant social developments. Just twenty years before the Nakba, the proud villagers decided to transform, actually modernise, the old traditional system that placed the mukhtar at the head of the village community. Already in 1925 they had elected a local council, whose first project was to provide lighting along the village’s roads.

  Mujaydil was a unique place in many other aspects. Apart from its religious buildings and modern infrastructure it had a relatively large number of schools. In addition to the two schools associated with the churches, there was also a state school, the Banin School, known for the magnificent trees that provided shade for the pupils during their breaks, for the well situated in the middle of the school yard and for the fruit trees that surrounded it. The village’s main source of collective wealth, which supported all these impressive constructions, was a mill, built in the eighteenth century, that served the villages in the vicinity, including the people of the ‘veteran’ Jewish settlement of Nahalal (Moshe Dayan, who came from Nahalal, mentions his father’s reliance on this mill).

  OPERATION PALM TREE

  Mujaydil was taken in the military operation to take over Nazareth and the villages around it, which was codenamed ‘Dekel’, Hebrew for palm tree. It is actually pine trees and not palms that today cover many of the destroyed Palestinian villages, hiding their remains under vast ‘green lungs’ planted by the Jewish National Fund for the purpose of ‘recreation and tourism’. Such a forest of pine trees was planted over the destroyed village of Lubya. Only the diligent and meticulous work of later generations, spearheaded by historian Mahmoud Issa, now living in Denmark, has enabled visitors today to trace the vestiges of the village and join in the commemorations of the sixty people who lost their lives there. The village lay near a main junction (today called the ‘Golani Junction’), the last main crossroads on the Nazareth–Tiberias road before it starts its steep descent towards the Sea of Galilee.

  In those days of June 1948, when Israeli forces were on the whole able to occupy and cleanse Palestinian villages with relative ease, tenacious pockets of resistance sometimes held on for a little longer, though never for too long. These were usually locations where ALA volunteers or Arab regular troops, es
pecially Iraqis, helped in the attempt to repel the attacks. One such village was Qaqun: it was first attacked and occupied in May by the Alexandroni, but had been retaken by Iraqi troops. The Israeli headquarters ordered a special operation codenamed ‘Kippa’ (‘summit’, ‘dome’, but also ‘skullcap’ in Hebrew) on 3 June in order to re-occupy the village where Israeli military intelligence estimated 200 Iraqis and ALA volunteers were entrenched. Even this proved an exaggeration: when the Alexandroni once again took it over they found a much smaller number of defenders.

  The order for Operation Kippa introduces yet another Hebrew synonym for cleansing. We have already encountered tihur and biur, and now Platoon D of the Alexandroni Brigade was ordered to execute a ‘cleaning’ operation (nikkuy),11 all terms that fit the accepted international definitions of ethnic cleansing.

  The assault on Qaqun was also the first in which the new state’s Military Police were ordered to play an integral role in the occupation. Well before the attack, they had set up prison camps nearby for the expelled villagers. This was done to avoid the problem they had encountered in Tantura and before that in Ayn al-Zaytun, where the occupying forces had ended up with too many men of ‘military age’ (between ten and fifty) on their hands, many of whom they therefore killed.

  In July the Israeli troops took many of the ‘pockets’ that had been left in the previous two months. Several villages on the coastal road that had held out courageously, Ayn Ghazal, Jaba, Ayn Hawd, Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam and Ijzim, now fell, as did the city of Nazareth and a number of the villages around it.

  IN BETWEEN TRUCES

  By 8 July 1948 the first truce had come to an end. It took the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, ten days to negotiate another one, which came into effect on 18 July. As we have seen, 15 May 1948 may have been a very significant date for the ‘real war’ between Israel and the Arab armies, but it was totally insignificant for the ethnic cleansing operations. The same goes for the two periods of truce – they were notable landmarks for the former but irrelevant for the latter, with one qualification, perhaps: it proved easier during the actual fighting to conduct large-scale cleansing operations as the Israelis did between the two truces, when they expelled the populations of the two towns of Lydd and Ramla, altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, when they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.

  From 9 July, the day after the first truce ended, the sporadic fighting between the Israeli army and the Arab units from Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon continued for another ten days. In less than two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from their villages, towns and cities. The UN ‘peace’ plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorised by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped. By July, most of their houses had gone, dynamited by Israeli sappers. There was no international intervention the Palestinians could hope for in 1948, nor could they count on outside concern about the atrocious reality evolving in Palestine. Neither did help come from the UN observers, scores of whom roamed the country at close hand ‘observing’ the barbarisation and killings, but were unwilling, or unable, to do anything about them.

  One United Nations emissary was different. Count Folke Bernadotte had arrived in Palestine on 20 May and stayed there until Jewish terrorists murdered him in September for having ‘dared’ to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country in half, and to demand the unconditional return of all the refugees. He had already called for the refugees’ repatriation during the first truce, which had been ignored, and when he repeated his recommendation in the final report he submitted to the UN, he was assassinated. Still, it is thanks to Bernadotte that in December 1948, the UN General Assembly posthumously adopted his legacy and recommended the unqualified return of all the refugees Israel had expelled, one of a host of UN resolutions Israel has systematically ignored. As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.

  Bernadotte succeeded in focusing international pressure of some kind on Israel, or he had at least produced the potential for such pressure. In order to counteract this, the Israeli architects of the ethnic cleansing programme realised they would need to involve the state’s diplomats and the Foreign Ministry more directly. By July the political apparatus, the diplomatic corps and the military organisations within the new State of Israel were already working harmoniously together. Prior to July, it is not clear how much of the ethnic cleansing plan had been shared with Israeli diplomats and senior officials. However, when the results gradually became visible the government needed a public relations campaign to stymie adverse international responses, and began to involve and inform those officials responsible for producing the right image abroad – that of a liberal democracy in the making. Officials in the Foreign Ministry worked closely with the country’s intelligence officers, who would warn them in advance of the next stages in the cleansing operation, so as to ensure they would be kept hidden from the public eye.

  Yaacov Shimoni functioned as a liaison between the two branches of the government. As both an Orientalist and a European Jew, Shimoni was pre-eminently suited to help propagate Israel’s case abroad. In July he was eager to see a more accelerated pace on the ground: he believed there was a window of opportunity for completing the uprooting and occupation before the world turned its attention once more to Palestine.12 Shimoni would later become one of the doyens of Orientalism in Israeli academia due to his expertise on Palestine and the Arab world, expertise he and many of his colleagues in Israel’s universities had gained during the ethnic cleansing and de-Arabisation of Palestine.

  The first targets of the Israeli forces in the ten days between the two truces were the pockets within the Galilee around Acre, and Nazareth. ‘Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages’ was the order that three brigades received on July 6, two days before the Israeli troops – straining at their leashes to continue the cleansing operations – were ordered to violate the first truce. Jewish soldiers automatically understood that ‘enemy’ meant defenceless Palestinian villagers and their families. The brigades they belonged to were the Carmeli, the Golani and Brigade Seven, the three brigades of the north that would also be responsible for the final cleansing operations in the upper Galilee in October. The inventive people whose job it was to come up with the names for operations of this kind had now switched from ‘cleansing’ synonyms (‘Broom’, ‘Scissors’) to trees: ‘Palm’ (Dekel) for the Nazareth area and ‘Cypress’ (Brosh) for the Jordan Valley area.13

  The operation in and around Nazareth was executed at a fast pace, and large villages not taken in May were now quickly captured: Amqa, Birwa (the village where the famous contemporary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born), Damun, Khirbat Jiddin and Kuwaykat each had more than 1500 inhabitants and yet they were easily forced out.

  It was Brigade Seven that supervised the execution of Operation Palm Tree, with auxiliary forces coming from the Carmeli and the Golani. In many of the Palestinian oral histories that have now come to the fore, few brigade names appear. However, Brigade Seven is mentioned again and again, together with such adjectives as ‘terrorists’ and ‘barbarous’.14

  The first village to be attacked was Amqa, which like so many villages on the coastal plain from south to north had a long history going back to at least the sixth century. Amqa was also typical because it was a mixed Muslim and Druze community who had been living together in harmony before the Israeli policy of divide and rule forced a wedge between them, deporting the Muslims and allowing the Druze to join other Druze villag
es in the area.15

  Today some of the remains of Amqa are still visible despite the massive destruction that occurred almost sixty years ago. In the midst of the wild grass that covers the area, one can clearly see the remnants of the school and the village mosque. Though now dilapidated, the mosque reveals even today the exquisite masonry the villagers produced for its construction. it cannot be entered, as its current Jewish ‘owner’ uses it as a storehouse, but its size and unique structure are visible from the outside.

  Operation Palm Tree completed the take-over of the Western Galilee. Some of the villages were left intact: Kfar Yassif, Iblin and the town of Shafa‘Amr. These were mixed villages, with Christians, Muslims and Druze. Still, many of their inhabitants who proved of the ‘wrong’ origin or affiliation were deported. Actually, many families had deserted the villages before the occupation, as they knew what was in store for them. Some villages, in fact, were totally emptied, but they are there today because the Israelis allowed them to be repopulated by refugees from other villages they had destroyed. Such policies created confusion and havoc – as orders were followed by counter-orders, they disoriented even the expellers. In some of the mixed villages the Israelis ordered the frenzied expulsion of half of the population, mostly the Muslims, and then permitted Christian refugees from nearby emptied villages to resettle in the newly evacuated places, as happened in the cases of the villages of Kfar Yassif and Iblin, and the town of Shafa‘Amr.