The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  One of the most detailed accounts on what unfolded in al-Lydd was published in the summer of 1998 by the sociologist Salim Tamari in the Journal of Palestine Studies. It drew on interviews with Spiro Munayar, who had lived all his life in Lydd and was an eyewitness to the events on that terrible day in July. He saw the occupation, the massacre in the mosque, the way Israeli troops barged into the houses and dragged out the families – sparing not a single house. He watched as the houses were then looted and the refugees robbed before they were told to start marching towards the West Bank, in one of the warmest months of the year, in one of the hottest places in Palestine.

  He was working as a young physician in the local hospital, alongside the dedicated Dr George Habash, the future founder and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He recalls the endless numbers of corpses and the wounded who were brought in from the scene of the slaughter, and these were the same horrible experiences that were to haunt Habash and drive him to take the road of guerilla warfare in order to redeem his town and homeland from those who had devastated it in 1948.

  Munayar also recounted the anguished scenes of expulsion he witnessed:

  During the night the soldiers began going into the houses in areas they had occupied, rounding up the population and expelling them from the city. Some were told to go to Kharruba and Barfilyya, while other soldiers said: ‘Go to King Abdullah, to Ramallah’. The streets filled with people setting out for indeterminate destinations.

  The same sights were observed by the few foreign journalists who were in the town that day. Two of them were Americans apparently invited by the Israeli forces to accompany them in the attack, what today we would call ‘embedded’ correspondents. Keith Wheeler of The Chicago Sun Times was one of the two. He wrote: ‘Practically everything in their [the Israeli forces’] way died. Riddled corpses lay by the roadside.’ The other, Kenneth Bilby of The New York Herald Tribune, reported seeing ‘the corpses of Arab men, women and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge.’ Bilby also wrote a book on these events, New Star in the Near East, published two years later.

  One might wonder why newspaper reports of a massacre on this scale did not provoke an outcry in the United States. For those who have been shocked by the callousness and inhumanity that US troops have sometimes displayed towards Arabs in the operation in Iraq, the reports from Lydd may seem strangely familiar. At the time, American reporters like Wheeler were astonished by what ironically he called the Israeli ‘Blitzkrieg’, and by the resoluteness of the Jewish troops. Like Bilby’s description (‘ruthlessly brilliant’), Wheeler’s account of the Israeli army’s campaign sadly neglected to provide a similarly probing report on the number of Palestinians killed, wounded, or expelled from their villages. The correspondents’ reports were totally one-sided.

  More sensitive and less biased was the London Economist as it described for its readers the horrific scenes that took place when inhabitants were forced to start marching after their houses had been looted, their family members murdered, and their city wrecked: ‘The Arab refugees were systematically stripped of all their belongings before they were sent on their trek to the frontier. Household belongings, stores, clothing, all had to be left behind.’

  This systematic robbery was also recollected by Munayar:

  The occupying soldiers had set up roadblocks on all the roads leading east and were searching the refugees, particularly the women, stealing their gold jewelry from their necks, wrists, and fingers and whatever was hidden in their clothes, as well as money and everything else that was precious and light enough to carry.

  Ramla, or Ramleh as is it is known today, the home town of one of the PLO’s most respected leaders, the late Khalil al-Wazir, Abu Jihad, lay nearby. The attack on this town with its 17,000 inhabitants had started two days earlier on 12 July 1948, but the final occupation was only completed after the Israelis had taken al-Lydd. The city had been the target of terrorist attacks by Jewish forces in the past; the first one had taken place on 18 February 1948, when the Irgun had planted a bomb in one of its markets that killed several people.

  Terrified by the news coming from Lydd, the city notables reached an agreement with the Israeli army that ostensibly allowed the people to stay. The Israeli units entered the city on 14 July and immediately began a search-and-arrest operation in which they rounded up 3000 people who they transferred to a prison camp nearby, and on the same day they started looting the city. The commander on the spot was Yitzhak Rabin. He recalled how Ben-Gurion had first called him in to his office to discuss the fate of both Lydd and Ramla: ‘Yigal Alon asked: what is to be done with the population [in Lydd and Ramla]? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: “Drive them out!”’22

  The people of both cities were forced to march, without food and water, to the West Bank, many of them dying from thirst and hunger on the way. As only a few hundred were allowed to stay in both towns, and given that people from nearby villages had fled there for refuge, Rabin estimated that a total of 50,000 people had been ‘transferred’ in this inhuman way. Again, the inevitable question present itself: three years after the Holocaust, what went through the minds of those Jews who watched these wretched people pass by?

  Further to the west, the Arab Legion, which had abandoned the two Palestinian towns, defended the Latrun area so tenaciously that the battle here would be engraved in the collective memory of the Israeli armed forces as its biggest defeat in the war. The bitter memory of this fiasco provoked feelings of revenge; the opportunity surfaced in June 1967 when Israel occupied the area. Retaliation then was directed not towards the Jordanians, but towards the Palestinians: three of the villages in the Latrun valley – Beit Nuba, Yalu and Imwas – were expelled and wiped out. The mass deportation of the villagers was the beginning of a new wave of ethnic cleansing.

  The Legion also successfully repelled Israeli attacks on the eastern neighbourhoods of Jerusalem in July, especially on Shaykh Jarrah. ‘Occupy and destroy’, a vengeful Ben-Gurion demanded from the army with this charming neighbourhood in mind.23 Thanks to the defiance of the Legion, today one can still find among its many treasures the American Colony Hotel – originally one of the first houses built outside the walls in the late nineteenth century by Rabah al-Husayni, a leading member of the local nobility.

  Operation Palm Tree continues

  On 11 July, the entry in Ben-Gurion’s diary reflects considerable confidence in Israel’s military strength against the combined might of its Arab neighbours: ‘[I ordered them] to occupy Nablus, [to inflict] heavy bombardment on Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and Beirut’24 Nablus, however, was not captured, despite Ben-Gurion’s instructions, but that was to be the fate of another Palestinian city in the ten days of frantic activity between the two truces: the city of Nazareth. Its story forms one of the most exceptional episodes in the urbicide campaign. This relatively large city had only 500 ALA volunteers who, under the command of Madlul Bek, were meant to protect not only the indigenous population but also the thousands of refugees from nearby villages who were flooding into the crowded city and its environs.

  The attack on Nazareth started 9 July, the day after the first truce ended. When the mortar bombardment on the city began, the people anticipated forced eviction and decided they would prefer to leave. However, Madlul Bek ordered them to stay. Telegrams between him and commanders of the Arab armies that Israel intercepted reveal that he, and other ALA officers, were ordered to try to stop expulsions by all means: the Arab governments wanted to prevent more refugees streaming into their countries. Thus we find Madlul turning back some people who were already making their way out of the city. When the shelling intensified, however, he saw no point in trying to stand up to the overwhelmingly superior Jewish forces, and encouraged people to leave. He himself surrendered the city at 10 pm on 16 July.

  Ben-Gurion did not wish the city of Nazareth to be depopulated for the simple reason that he knew the eyes of the Christ
ian world were fixed on the city. But a senior general and the supreme commander of the operation, Moshe Karmil, ordered the total eviction of all the people who had stayed behind (‘16,000,’ noted Ben-Gurion, ‘10,000 of whom were Christians’).25 Ben-Gurion now instructed Karmil to retract his order and let the people stay. He agreed with Ben Donkelman, the military commander of the operations: ‘Here the world is watching us,’ which meant that Nazareth was luckier than any other city in Palestine.26 Today Nazareth is still the only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel.

  Once again, however, not all those allowed to stay were spared. Some of the people were expelled or arrested on the first day of the occupation, as the intelligence officers began searching the city from house to house and seizing people according to a pre-prepared list of suspects and ‘undesirables’. Palti Sela was going around with a well-known Arab personality from Nazareth, carrying with them seven notebooks filled with the names of people who could stay, either because they belonged to clans that had been collaborating with the Israelis, or for some other reason.

  A similar process took place in the villages around Nazareth, and in 2002 Palti Sela claimed that thanks to his efforts 1600 people had been allowed to stay, a decision for which, again, he was later criticised. ‘The notebooks are lost,’ he told his interviewer. He recalled he had refused to write down the name of a single Bedouin: ‘They are all thieves,’ he had told his partners in the operation.27

  But nobody was really safe, not even the Arab notable – who will remain anonymous – who accompanied Palti Sela. The first military governor installed after the war did not, for some reason, like this person and wanted to deport him. Palti Sela then stepped in and saved him by promising to move him, his close family and friends to Haifa. He admitted that actually quite a few of those listed in his ‘good’ notebooks were eventually forced out of the country after all.

  One more village in the area between Nazareth and Tiberias was targeted for occupation after attempts to take it over in previous months had failed, and this was the village of Hittin. A 1937 photograph of the village could have come straight from a tourist brochure of today’s Tuscany or Greece. Clinging to the mountain slopes, eight kilometres northwest of Tiberias, at an elevation of 125 metres above sea level, but seemingly much higher as it overlooks the Sea of Galilee which is under sea level, the spot is breathtaking. The black-and-white picture clearly shows Hittin’s stone-built houses covered by roofs made of arched wood and surrounded by orchards and cactus fences. Cars had easy access to the village, but in 1948 it proved a hard site to take as it put up strong resistance, even though no more than 25 people, all poorly equipped volunteers, defended the village.

  The village’s history goes all the way back to the famous battle between Salah al-Din and the Crusaders in 1187. Its fame also rested on the presence of the grave of Nabi Shu‘ayb, the holy prophet of the Palestinian Druze, who identify him with Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, and for whom his maqam is a place of worship and pilgrimage. The fact that the Druze had already gone over to the other side and allied themselves with the Israeli army spurred the Israelis in their ambition to capture the village. Today a website for Hittin refugees contains the following reference to the Druze: ‘Whether they [the Druze] like it or not, they are still Palestinian Arabs,’ a clear reference to the fact that the Druze showed little solidarity or affinity with their fellow Palestinians, let alone compassion. On the contrary, many of them joined in the destruction of rural Palestine, to which – tragically – they, of course, also belonged.28

  As with so many of the villages mentioned, the Nakba hit when prosperity had just arrived. A new school and a new irrigation system were the signs of its recently won affluence, but these were all lost to the Hittin residents after 17 July 1948, when a unit of Brigade Seven entered the village and began cleansing it in a particularly brutal manner. Many people escaped to nearby villages that would be occupied in October, when they would be uprooted a second time. This brought to an end Operation Palm Tree, which expelled all the villages around Nazareth.

  The troops on the ground could now count on the embryonic Israeli air force for assistance. As we already saw, two of the villages, Saffuriyya and Mujaydil, were shelled from the air, as were several villages on the coast: Jaba, Ijzim and Ayn Ghazal were bombarded into submission well into the second truce, In fact, what developed in July was ethnic cleansing from the air, as air attacks became a major tool for sowing panic and wreaking destruction in Palestine’s larger villages in order to force people to flee before the actual occupation of the village. This new tactic would come into its own in October.

  But already, in the second half of July, Israeli pilots could tell from the spectacle unfolding before their eyes how effective their sorties were: throngs of refugees, carrying a few hastily collected possessions, flooded out of the villages onto the main roads and slowly made their way towards what they thought would be safer havens. For some troops on the ground this was too good a target to miss. A report from 17 July 1948 of the Northern Command reads as follows: ‘Our forces began harassing the only road leading out of Sejra where a throb of refugees were making their way.’29 Sejra was a village near Mount Tabor, which had maintained an uneasy relationship with the ‘veteran’ Zionist colonies that had taken in Ben-Gurion when he first arrived in Palestine.

  In the summer of 1948, however, Ben-Gurion was less interested in the north, where he had begun his career, and was focusing on the south, where he would end it. In July, the ethnic cleansing operations for the first time extended to the Naqab (the Negev) as well. The Negev Bedouin had inhabited the region since the Byzantine period, and had been following their semi-nomadic away of life since at least 1500. There were 90,000 Bedouin in 1948, divided between 96 tribes, already in the process of establishing a land-ownership system, grazing rights and water access. Jewish troops immediately expelled eleven tribes, while they forced another nineteen into reservations that Israel defined as closed military areas, which meant they were allowed to leave only with a special permit. The expulsion of Negev Bedouin continued until 1959.30

  The first tribe that was targeted was the Jubarat. Part of the tribe was expelled in July; the tribe as a whole was then forcibly transferred in mid-October, when the second truce was officially over, the majority of them to Hebron and the rest to the Gaza Strip. In 1967, Israel uprooted them once more, this time expelling them to the eastern bank of the River Jordan. Most of the other tribes were driven away towards the end of 1948.

  THE TRUCE THAT WASN’T

  The news of an impending second truce to come into effect on 18 July 1948 came at an inconvenient moment for the ethnic cleansing operation. Some operations were sped up and thus completed before the truce began, which was the case with the occupation of the villages Qula and Khirbat Shaykh Meisar. By then, the Israelis had added two towns, Lydd and Ramla, and another sixty-eight villages to the 290 they had already occupied and cleansed.

  The second truce was violated the moment it came into effect. In its first ten days Israeli forces occupied key villages north of Haifa, another pocket they had left alone for a while, as they had to the villages south of the city along the coast. Damun, Imwas, Tamra, Qabul and Mi’ar were thus taken. This completed the occupation of the Western Galilee.

  Fighting also continued in the south during the second truce, as the Israelis found it difficult to defeat the Egyptian forces that had been caught in the so-called Faluja pocket. Egypt’s main military effort was directed towards the coast where their advance was halted at the end of the first week of the official war. Since that debacle they found themselves gradually being pushed back to the border. A second expeditionary force had been sent to southern Jerusalem, where its troops had some initial successes. By the middle of July, however, a third Egyptian contingent in the northern Negev had been cut off from both the forces on the coast and those in southern Jerusalem, and now counted in vain on the Jordanian reinforcements that were scheduled to meet up with them in th
e original Arab war scheme.

  By the end of July, the Israelis started strengthening the siege around this pocket to force it to surrender. The Egyptians, however, held on until the end of the year. The disintegration of the Egyptian forces left the northern Negev, from the slopes of Mt Hebron to the Mediterranean Sea near Gaza, at the mercy of the Israeli troops. The belt of villages that had been settled centuries ago on the edge of the arid Negev desert were now stormed, occupied and expelled in quick succession. Only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were successfully protected by Egyptian and Jordanian troops respectively, who thereby prevented many more refugees from being added to the thousands of Palestinians already expelled since December 1947.

  Sensing that their violation of the truce would go uncensored as long as it was directed towards the remaining ‘Arab’ pockets within the Jewish state as designated by UN Resolution 181, the Zionist leadership also continued their operations in August and beyond. They now clearly envisaged this ‘Jewish state’ as stretching over most of Palestine – in fact, all of it – had it not been for the Egyptian and, crucially, Jordanian steadfastness. Consequently, villages that had gradually been isolated were now easily cleansed while the UN observers, who had been sent in to supervise the truce, watched nearby.