The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  As a result of these population movements inside the Galilee, Shafa‘Amr became a huge town, swollen by the streams of refugees entering it in the wake of the May-to-July operations in the surrounding area. It was occupied on 16 July but was basically left alone: that is, nobody was expelled. This was an exceptional decision that would recur in Nazareth – in both cases it was local commanders who took the initiative.

  Yigael Yadin, the Acting Chief of Staff, visited Shafa‘Amr later that month and was clearly taken aback to find an Arab town with all its inhabitants still there: ‘The people of the town roam about freely,’ he reported in his bewilderment to Ben-Gurion. Yadin immediately ordered the imposition of a curfew and a search-and-arrest campaign, but gave particular instructions to leave the Druze of Shafa‘Amr alone.16

  Operation Policeman

  One pocket of resistance held out for so long that some of the villages in the area endured ten days of fighting. This happened along the coast south of Haifa. Of the six villages there, three fell before the second truce was announced; the other three succumbed after the truce had taken effect.

  The first three were Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam and Ayn Hawd. The largest of them was Tirat Haifa, only a few kilometres south of Haifa, with a population of 5000. Today it is a dismal Jewish development town – with almost the same name, Tirat Hacarmel – clinging to the lower western slopes of the Carmel, at the bottom of Haifa’s wealthiest neighbourhood, Denya, which has gradually been expanding downwards from the crest of Mount Carmel (where Haifa University is located) but with Haifa’s municipality studiously avoiding connecting the two with a road system.

  It was the district’s most populous village and the second largest in terms of area. It was called St Yohan de Tire during the time of the Crusaders, when it became a significant site for both Christian pilgrims and the local churches. Since then, with its Muslim majority, Tirat Haifa had always had a small community of Christians, both groups respecting the village’s Christian heritage and its overall Muslim character. In 1596, when it was included in the sub-district of Lajjun, it had no more than 286 inhabitants. Three hundreds years later it was on the way to becoming a town but then fell prey to new centralisation policies in the late Ottoman period and the massive conscription of its younger people into the Ottoman army, most of whom chose not to return.

  Tirat Haifa was another village that at the end of the Second World War emerged from tough and difficult times into the dawn of a new era. Signs of recovery were visible everywhere: new stone and mud brick houses were being built and the two village schools, one for boys and one for girls, were renovated. The village’s economy was based on the cultivation of arable crops, vegetables and fruit. It was richer than most villages because it was endowed with an excellent water supply from the nearby springs. Its pride was its almonds, famous throughout the area. Tirat al-Lawz, the ‘Tira of the almonds’, was a household name in Palestine. An additional source of income was tourism, centred mainly around visits to the ruins of the monastery of St Brocardus, still there today.

  Throughout my childhood, the remains of the village’s old stone houses lay scattered around the cubic grey apartment blocks of the Jewish development town that had been built on the village site. After 1967 the local municipality demolished most of them, more out of profit-seeking real-estate zeal than as part of the ideological memoricide that had remained a priority for the Israelis.

  Like so many other villages in the Greater Haifa area, Tirat Haifa was exposed, prior to its final depopulation, to constant attacks and onslaughts by Jewish forces. The Irgun bombarded it as early as December 1947, killing thirteen people, mainly children and the elderly. After the shelling a raiding party of twenty Irgun members approached and began firing at an isolated house on the edge of the village. Between 23 April and 3 May every woman and child of Tirat Haifa was taken out of the village as part of the overall British ‘mediation’ effort that enabled the Jewish forces to cleanse the greater Haifa area unhampered by any external pressure. Tirat Haifa’s women and children were transferred by buses to the West Bank while the men stayed behind. A unit of special forces consisting of the combined elite troops from several brigades were brought in to bring Tirat Haifa down on 16 July.

  Later that same day came the turn of Kfar Lam. South of Tirat Haifa, this village was less wealthy, although it, too, enjoyed a good source of water – about fifteen springs flowed near the northern boundaries of the village. A dusty, unpaved road, off the main asphalt road between Haifa and Tel-Aviv led to the village. Its houses were made of hewn stone, the roofs of cement and the traditional arches of wood. It had no fences or guarding towers, not even in July.

  The relative poverty of this village was due to its unusual system of land ownership, quite different from the villages around it. Half of the cultivated fields belonged to Ali Bek al-Khalil and his brother from Haifa, who leased the land for a share in the crops. A small number of families were not included in this leasing agreement and were forced to commute to Haifa for their livelihood. The village as a whole was closely connected to Haifa as most of its agricultural products were sold there. And here, too, three years before the Nakba, life looked brighter and more promising.

  Kfar Lam was a particularly apolitical village, which might explain its relative complacency in the face of the destruction already wreaked on the surrounding area since February 1948. The Hagana intelligence file described the village as ‘moderate’, but already back in the early 1940s an ominous detail had been inserted into the file that hinted at its future fate. The file stated that the village had some Samaritans in it who may originally have been Jews, but who, in the 1940s, had converted to Islam. For the Zionist historian and leading politician of the Zionist movement, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, this was enough to show that there had been continuity of Jewish presence along Palestine’s coast.

  This search for continuity was one of the main obsessions of the Zionist academia at the time. Ben-Zvi himself had published a book (in Yiddish) with Ben-Gurion as early as 1918 in which they claimed that the Arab fallahin (peasant farmers) were the descendents of Jewish peasants who had stayed behind in Palestine after the Roman Exile. Ben-Zvi continued to develop this argument in the 1930s and 40s. In his Sha‘ar ha-Yishuv (‘Gate to the Jewish Settlement’), he similarly argued that villagers in the Hebron mountains were actually Jews who had converted to Islam.

  In July 1948, proof of continuity did not mean that the people of Kfar Lam were entitled to remain as citizens of the new Jewish state, only that their village was now ‘rightfully returned’ to the Jewish people. Neither the relatively low yield of its harvests nor the political indifference of its people could save the village, and only its proximity to the more resilient villages on the coast allowed it to survive into July.

  While Kafr Lam has disappeared, the village of Ayn Hawd, occupied at the same time, is still almost intact. Adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘attractive’ and other synonyms were used to describe certain villages, and many of them were indeed recognised as such by contemporary visitors and by the inhabitants themselves, who often gave their villages names that clearly expressed the particular charm, beauty and serenity they knew their location exuded, as for instance the people of Khayriyya – literally in Arabic ‘The Blessing of the Land’ – which Israel demolished and turned into the city of Tel-Aviv’s garbage dump.

  Ayn Hawd was indeed unusual. It captured a special place in the hearts of many in the area. The main hamulla in the village, the Abu al-Hija, were thought to have special healing powers and therefore many people frequented the village, making their way up from the coast towards the Carmel mountains on a winding road, fifteen kilometres south of Haifa. The village lay partly hidden in one of the many river valleys flowing from the mountain to the sea in the west. This particularly exquisite place was left intact due to the presence of some Bohemian types in the unit that occupied it: they immediately recognised the potential of the village and decided to leave it as they found it be
fore coming back later to settle there and turn it into an artists’ colony. For many years it hosted some of Israel’s best-known artists, musicians and writers, often affiliated with the country’s ‘peace camp’. Houses that survived the ravages in the Old Cities of Safad and Jaffa were similarly turned into special artists’ enclaves.

  Ayn Hawd had already been attacked once in May and the five families making up the Abu al-Hija clan had successfully repelled the offensive, but on 16 July they succumbed. The original villagers were expelled and the governmental ‘naming committee’, a body in charge of replacing Palestinian names with Hebrew ones, decided to call the occupied village Ein Hod. One of the five families of the Abu al-Hija clan found refuge in the countryside nearby a few miles to the east and settled there. Stubbornly and courageously refusing to move, they gradually created a new village under the old name of Ayn Hawd.

  The success of this branch of the Abu al-Hija clan is quite remarkable. They looked for refuge first in the nearby village of Tirat Haifa, only to discover that that village had been occupied the day before. They were chased into the canyons near their own village but managed to hold out there. The Israeli commander reported that ‘the operations to cleanse the pockets of resistance of refugees in the Wadi east of the village continue’,17 but they failed in their attempts to drive the family away. The rest of the people of Ayn Hawd were scattered, some as distant as Iraq and others as near as the Druze villages overlooking Ayn Hawd from the top of Mount Carmel.

  In the 1950s the Abu al-Hija built new cement houses inside the forest that now envelops their village. The Israeli government refused to recognise them as a legal settlement and the threat of expulsion constantly hovered over their heads. In 1986 the government wanted to demolish the new village, but heroically, and against all odds, the Abu al-Hija succeeded in halting attempts to expel them. Finally, in 2005, a relatively liberal-minded Minister of the Interior granted the village semi-recognition.

  The Jewish artist community, on the other hand, has gone into decline and seems less ‘attractive’ in the twenty-first century than it was in its heyday. The colony’s coffee bar’ ‘Bonanza’, located in the original village mosque, is generally empty these days. Marcel Janko, the artist founder of Jewish Ein Hod, wanted it to become the centre of Dadaism, the anti-establishment art movement that emerged in the early twentieth century and valued the ‘primitive’ as a counter to the classical Graeco-Roman tradition. Driven by a wish to preserve the ‘primitive’ essence of art, Janko was keen to save part of Ayn Hawd’s original stone houses from brutal renovation. Soon, however, the original Ayn Hawd village dwellings were turned into modern abodes for European Jewish artists, and the magnificent old village school building became the setting for art exhibitions, carnivals and other tourist attractions.

  Janko’s own works fittingly represent the racism shown by the contemporary Israeli Left in its approach towards Arab culture in general and towards the Palestinians in particular, a covert and at times even nuanced, but nonetheless pervasive, racism in their writings, artistic works and political activity. Janko’s paintings, for instance, incorporate Arab figures, but always fading into the background of occupied Ayn Hawd. In this way, Janko’s works are forerunners of the paintings you can find today on the Apartheid wall Israel has planted deep in the West Bank: where it runs near Israeli highways, Israeli artists were asked to decorate parts of this 8-metre high concrete monster with panoramas of the scenic landscape that lies behind the Wall, but always making sure to eliminate the Palestinian villages that lie on the other side and the people who live in them.

  Only three villages remained in the coastal area just south of Haifa, and throughout those ten days of fighting between the first and second truces a massive Jewish force tried but failed to capture them. Ben-Gurion appeared to have become obsessed with the three, and ordered the occupation effort to continue even after the second truce had come into effect; the High Command reported to the UN truce observers that the operation against the three villages was a policing activity, even choosing Operation Policeman as the codename for the whole assault.

  The largest of the three was the village of Ijzim, which had 3000 inhabitants. It was also the one that resisted the attackers the longest. On its ruins the Jewish settlement of Kerem Maharal was erected. A few picturesque houses are still left, and in one of them lives the former head of the Israeli Secret Service and founder of the ‘peace’ proposal he recently concocted, together with a Palestinian professor, that abolishes the Palestinian refugees’ right of return in exchange for a total withdrawal by Israel from the areas it occupied in 1967.

  Operation Policeman (Shoter, in Hebrew) began on 25 July, exactly one week into the ‘truce’, but Ijzim survived another three days of fierce fighting in which a small number of armed villagers courageously held out against hundreds of Israeli soldiers. Israel brought in its air force to break the resistance. When the fighting was over, the population as a whole was expelled to Jenin. One hundred and thirty villagers died in the battle according to the recollection of the survivors. The Israeli intelligence officers of the northern front reported upon entering the village of Ijzim on July 28 that ‘our forces collected 200 corpses, many of them civilians killed by our bombardment.’18

  Ayn Ghazal fell earlier on. It had 3000 inhabitants and, like Kfar Lam, life was harder here than in other places. The houses of this village were mainly made of concrete, atypical of the architecture in the area, and many of them had special wells and holes – sometimes three metres deep – in which people kept wheat. This tradition and its unique construction style may have been the result of the village’s ethnic origins. Ayn Ghazal was relatively new, ‘only’ 250 years old (by comparison, when we talk of relatively ‘old’ Jewish settlements, they might have been built only thirty to thirty-five years earlier, although a tiny minority were established at the end of the nineteenth century). The people of Ayn Ghazal had come from the Sudan, looking for jobs in Syria and Lebanon, and put down roots here (nearby villages such as Furaydis, Tantura, and Daliyat al-Rawha had been there for centuries).

  Ayn Ghazal was a popular destination for many Muslims as it hosted a maqam, the burial place of a religious holy man called Shaykh Shehadeh. Some of the people who had left the village before it was attacked had taken refuge in the only two villages that were left intact on the coast out of the original sixty-four – Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa. Elderly members of these villages, ever since 1948, had been trying to maintain the maqam of Shaykh Shehadeh. Aware of these efforts and in an attempt to stop this journey of memory and worship, the Israeli authorities declared the maqam a holy Jewish site. One of the refugees from the village, Ali Hamuda, almost single-handedly safeguarded the maqam and kept its Muslim character alive. Although he was fined and threatened with arrest for having renovated it in 1985, he persisted in keeping the place of his worship sacred and the memory of his village alive.

  The people of Ayn Ghazal who had stayed put rejoiced when they heard a second truce had come into effect. Even those who had been guarding the village since May thought they could now relax their guard. These were also the days of the annual Ramadan fast and on 26 July most of the villagers had come out onto the street in the afternoon to break the fast and were gathering at the few coffeehouses in the village centre when an aeroplane appeared and dropped a bomb that scored a direct hit on the crowd. The women and children fled in panic while the men stayed behind and, soon enough, saw the Jewish troops entering the village.19

  The ‘men’ were ordered by the occupying forces to gather in one place, as was the routine throughout rural Palestine on such occasions. The informer, always hooded, and the intelligence officer soon appeared. The people watched as seventeen of them were selected, largely for having taken part in the 1936 Revolt, and killed on the spot. The rest were expelled.20 On the same day, a similar fate befell the sixth village in this pocket of resistance, Jaba.

  Operation Dani

  Operation ‘Dani’ w
as the innocent-sounding codename for the attack on the two Palestinian towns of Lydd and Ramla, located roughly halfway between Jaffa and Jerusalem.

  Lydd lies fifty metres above sea level on the inner plains of Palestine. In the local popular memory it is engraved as the ‘city of the mosques’, some of which were famous around the Arab world. For example, the Big Mosque, al-Umari, which still stands today, was built during the time of the Mamluks by Sultan Rukn al-Din Baybars, who took the city from the Crusaders. Another well-known mosque is the Dahamish Mosque, which could host 800 worshippers and had six shops adjacent to it. Today, Lyyd is the Jewish development town of Lod – one of the belt towns encircling Tel-Aviv housing the poorest and most underprivileged of the metropolis. Lod was also once the name for many years of Israel’s only international airport, today called Ben-Gurion Airport.

  On 10 July 1948 David Ben-Gurion appointed Yigal Allon as the commander of the attack and Yitzhak Rabin as his second in command. Allon first ordered al-Lydd to be bombarded from the air, the first city to be attacked in this way. This was followed by a direct attack on the city’s centre, which caused all the remaining ALA volunteers to leave: some had fled their positions earlier on learning that the Jordanian Legion units, stationed near the city, had been instructed by their British chief, Glubb Pasha, to withdraw. As both Lydd and Ramla were clearly within the designated Arab state, both the residents and the defendants had assumed that the Legion would resist the Israeli occupation by force, as they did in East Jerusalem and in the Latrun area, west of the city (not far from Lydd and Ramla), but they were wrong. For his decision to retreat, Glubb Pasha later lost his position and had to return to Britain.

  Deserted by both the volunteers and the Legionaries, the men of Lydd, armed with some old rifles, took shelter in the Dahamish Mosque in the city centre. After a few hours of fighting they surrendered, only to be massacred inside the mosque by the Israeli forces. Palestinian sources recount that in the mosque and in the streets nearby, where the Jewish troops went on yet another rampage of murder and pillage, 426 men, women and children were killed (176 bodies were found in the mosque). The following day, 14 July, the Jewish soldiers went from house to house taking the people outside and marching about 50,000 of them out of the city towards the West Bank (more than half of them were already refugees from nearby villages).21