The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  INHUMAN IMPRISONMENT

  A common sight in rural Palestine in the wake of the cleansing operations were huge pens in which male villagers, ranging from children from the age of ten to older men up to the age of fifty, were being held after the Israelis had picked them out in the ‘search-and-arrest’ operations that had now become routine. They were later moved to centralized prison camps. The Israeli search-and-arrest operations were quite systematic, took place all over the countryside, and usually carried similar generic codenames, such as ‘Operation Comb’ or even ‘Distillation’ (ziquq).1

  The first of these operations took place in Haifa, a few weeks after the city was occupied. The Israeli intelligence units were after ‘returnees’: refugees who, understandably, wanted to come back to their homes after the fighting had subsided and calm and normality seemed to have returned to the cities of Palestine. However, others were also targeted under the category of ‘suspicious Arab’. In fact, the order went out to find as many such ‘suspicious Arabs’ as possible, without actually bothering to define the nature of the suspicion.2

  In a procedure familiar to most Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today, Israeli troops would first put a place – a city or a village – under a closure order. Then intelligence units would start searching from house to house, pulling people out whom they suspected of being present ‘illegally’ in that particular location as well as any other ‘suspicious Arabs’. Often these would be people residing in their own homes. All people picked up in these raids were then brought to a special headquarters.

  In the city of Haifa this headquarters quickly became the dread of the Palestinians in the city. It was located in the Hadar neighbourhood, the quarter above the harbour, higher up the mountainside. The house is still there today at 11 Daniel Street, its grey exterior betraying little of the terrible scenes that took place inside in 1948. All those people picked up and brought in for interrogation in this way were according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel. The worst offence was not being in possession of one of the newly-issued identity cards, which could result in a prison term for as long as a year and a half and immediate transfer to one of the pens to join other ‘unauthorised’ and ‘suspicious’ Arabs found in now Jewish-occupied areas. From time to time, even the High Command expressed reservations about the brutality the intelligence people displayed towards the interned Palestinians at the Haifa interrogation centre.3

  The rural areas were subjected to the same treatment. Often the operations reminded the villagers there of the original attack launched against them just a few months or even weeks earlier. The Israelis now introduced a novel feature, also well known among present-day Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories: roadblocks, where they carried out surprise checks to catch those who did not have the new ID card. But the granting of such an ID card, which allowed people limited freedom of movement in the area where they lived, itself became a means of intimidation: only people vetted and approved by the Israeli Secret Service were given such a card.

  Most areas were out of bounds anyway, even if you had the required identification. For these areas you needed another special permit. This included a specific authorisation, for example, for people living in the Galilee to travel along their most common and natural routes to work or to see family and friends, such as the road between Haifa and Nazareth. Here, permits were hardest to get.4

  Thousands of Palestinians languished throughout 1949 in the prison camps where they had been transferred from the temporary pens. There were five such camps, the largest being the one in Jalil (near today’s Herzliya) and a second one in Atlit, south of Haifa. According to Ben-Gurion’s diary there were 9,000 prisoners.5

  Initially, the jailing system was quite chaotic. ‘Our problem,’ complained one officer towards the end of June 1948, ‘is the concentration of large numbers of Arab POWs and civilian prisoners. We need to transfer them to safer places.’6 By October 1948, under the direct supervision of Yigael Yadin, a network of prison camps had been institutionalised and the disarray was over.

  As early as February 1948 we find Hagana guidelines concerning the treatment of POWs stating the following: ‘Releasing a captive or eliminating him needs an approval of the intelligence officer.’7 In other words, there was already a selection process in operation, and summary executions took place. The Israeli intelligence officers who orchestrated them hounded the people continuously from the moment they arrived in these camps. This is why, even after captured Palestinians were moved to ‘safer’ places, as the army put it, they felt anything but safe in these lockups. To begin with, it was decided to employ mainly ex-Irgun and Stern Gang troops as camp guards,8 but they were not the only tormentors of the camp inmates. At one point, senior ex-Hagana officer Yisca Shadmi was found guilty of murdering two Palestinian prisoners. His is a familiar name in the history of the Palestinians in Israel: in October 1956 Shadmi was one of the principal perpetrators of the Kfar Qassim massacre in which forty-nine Palestinians lost their lives. He escaped punishment for his part in the massacre, and went on to become a high-ranking official in the governmment apparatus that managed the state’s relations with its Palestinian minority. He was acquitted eventually in 1958. His case reveals two features of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens that continue up to the present day: the first is that people indicted for crimes against Arabs are likely to remain in positions in which they continue to affect the lives of Palestinians and, secondly, that they will never be brought to justice. The most recent illustration of this is the case of the policemen who murdered thirteen unarmed Palestinian citizens in October 2000 and another seventeen since then.

  One concerned army officer who happened to visit such a prison camp wrote: ‘In recent times there were some very grave cases in the treatment of prisoners. The barbaric and cruel behaviour these cases reveal undermines the army’s discipline.’9 The concern voiced here for the army rather than for the victims will also sound familiar by now in the history of military ‘selfcriticism’ in Israel.

  Worse still were the labour camps. The idea of using Palestinian prisoners as forced labour came from the Israeli military command and was endorsed by the politicians. Three special labour camps were built for the purpose, one in Sarafand, another in Tel-Litwinski (today Tel-Hashomer Hospital) and a third in Umm Khalid (near Netanya). The authorities used the prisoners in any job that could help strengthen both the Israeli economy and the army’s capabilities.10

  One survivor from Tantura, on his eventual release from such a camp, recalled what he had gone through in an interview with one of Haifa’s former notables who, in 1950, published a book on those days. Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib transcribed the following testimony:

  The survivors of the Tantura massacre were imprisoned in a nearby pen; for three days without food, then pushed into lorries, ordered to sit in impossible space, but threatened with being shot. They did not shoot but clubbed them on the head, and blood gushed everywhere, finally taken to Umm Khalid (Netanya).11

  The witness then describes the routine of forced labour in the camp: working in the quarries and carrying heavy stones; living on one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at noon. There was no point in complaining as disobedience was punished with severe beatings. After fifteen days, 150 men were moved to a second camp in Jalil, where they were exposed to similar treatment: ‘We had to remove rubble from destroyed Arab houses.’ But then, one day, ‘an officer with good English told us that “from now on” we would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. And indeed, conditions improved.’

  Five months later, al-Khatib’s witness told him, he was back at Umm Khalid where he recalled scenes that could have come straight from another place and time. When the guards discovered that twenty people had escaped, ‘We, the people of Tantura, were put in a cage, oil was poured on our clothes and our blankets were taken away.’12

  After one of their early visits, on 11 November 1948, Red Cross officials
reported dryly that POWs were exploited in the general local effort to ‘strengthen the Israeli economy’.13 This guarded language was not accidental. Given its deplorable behaviour during the Holocaust, when it failed to report on what went on in Nazi concentration camps, on which it was well informed, the Red Cross was careful in its reproach and criticism of the Jewish state. But at least their documents do shed some light on the experiences of the Palestinian inmates, some of whom were kept in these camps until 1955.

  As previously noted, there was a stark contrast between the Israeli conduct towards Palestinian civilians they had imprisoned and the treatment Israelis received who had been captured by the Arab Legion of Jordan. Ben-Gurion was angry when the Israeli press reported how well Israeli POWs were treated by the Legion. His diary entry for 18 June 1948 reads: ‘It is true but it could encourage surrender of isolated spots.’

  ABUSES UNDER OCCUPATION

  In 1948 and 1949 life outside prison or the labour camps was not much easier. Here, too, Red Cross representatives crossing the country sent back disturbing reports to their headquarters in Geneva about life under occupation. These depict a collective abuse of basic rights, which began in April 1948 during the Jewish attacks on the mixed towns, and continued well into 1949, the worst of which seemed to be taking place in Jaffa.

  Two months after the Israelis had occupied Jaffa, Red Cross representatives discovered a pile of dead bodies. They asked for an urgent meeting with Jaffa’s military governor, who admitted to the Red Cross’s Mr Gouy that they had probably been shot by Israeli soldiers for not complying with their orders. A curfew was imposed every night between 5 pm and 6 am, he explained, and anyone found outside, the orders stated clearly, ‘will be shot’.14

  Under the cover of curfews and closures the Israelis also committed other crimes in Jaffa, which were representative of much that went on elsewhere. The most common crime was looting, of both the systematic official kind and the sporadic private one. The systematic and official kind was ordered by the Israeli government itself and targeted the wholesale stores of sugar, flour, barley, wheat and rice that the British government kept for the Arab population. The booty taken was sent to Jewish settlements. Such actions had frequently taken place even before 15 May 1948, under the eyes of British soldiers who simply looked away as Jewish troops barged into areas under their legal authority and responsibility. Reporting in July to Ben-Gurion on how the organised confiscation was progressing, the military governor of Jaffa wrote:

  As for your demand, sir, that I will make sure ‘that all the commodities required by our army, air force and navy will be handed over to the people in charge and taken out of Jaffa as fast as possible,’ I can inform you that as of 15 May, 1948 an average load of 100 trucks a day is taken out of Jaffa. The port is ready for operation. The storehouses were emptied, and the goods were taken out.15

  The same officials who pillaged these food stores promised the Palestinian population in Haifa and other occupied cities that their community centres, religious sites and secular establishments would not be ransacked or plundered. The people soon discovered that this was a false pledge when their mosques and churches were profaned and their convents and schools vandalised. In growing despair, Captain F. Marschal, one of the UN observers, reported back to the organisation that ‘the Jews violated frequently the guarantee given several times by the Jewish authorities to respect all buildings belonging to the religious community.’16

  Jaffa was also a particular victim of house robberies that took place in broad daylight. The looters took furniture, clothes and anything useful for the Jewish immigrants that were streaming into the country. UN observers were convinced that the plundering was also a means of preventing Palestinian refugees from returning, which fitted the overall rationale of the Israeli High Command that was not afraid to resort cold-bloodedly to brutal punitive action so as to push forward their strategic policies.

  As the pretext for their robbery and looting campaigns the Israeli forces often gave ‘search for weapons’. The real or imaginary existence of weapons also triggered worse atrocities, as these inspections were frequently accompanied by beatings and inevitably ended in mass arrests: ‘Many people arrested for no reason at all,’ Yitzhak Chizik, the military governor of Jaffa, wrote to Ben-Gurion.17

  The level of ransacking in Jaffa reached such intensity that even Yitzhak Chizik felt he had to complain, in a letter on 5 June 1948 to Israel’s Minister of Finance, Eliezer Kaplan, that he could no longer control the looting. He would continue to protest, but when in the end of July he sensed his remonstrations were totally ignored, he resigned, stating that he surrendered to the uncontrollable ongoing crusade of pillage and robbery.18 Most of his reports, which are to be found in the Israeli state archives, are censored, particularly passages relating to the abuse of the local people by Israeli soldiers. In one of these, not properly removed, we find Chizik clearly taken aback by the unlimited brutality of the troops: ‘They do not stop beating people,’ he writes.

  Chizik was no angel himself. He did order the occasional demolition of houses and instructed his troops to torch a number of Palestinian shops, but these were punitive actions he wanted to control, that would bolster his self-image as sovereign master in the occupied domain he ruled: ‘It is regrettable,’ he wrote in his letter to Kaplan, but he could no longer tolerate ‘the attitude of the soldiers in cases where I have given clear orders not to set fire to a house or a shop; not only do they ignore it, they make fun of me in front of the Arabs.’ He also criticised the official pillage that went on under the auspices of two gentlemen, a Mr Yakobson and a Mr Presiz, who allowed ‘looting of many things the army does not need.’19

  The High Command sent Abraham Margalit to check into these complaints, who reported back in June 1948: ‘There are many violations of discipline, especially in the attitude to the Arabs (beating and torture) and looting which emanate more from ignorance than malice.’ As Margalit explains himself, it was this ‘ignorance’ that led the soldiers to set aside special locations ‘where they kept and tortured Arabs.’20

  This prompted a visit to Jaffa that same month by Israel’s Minister of Minorities, Bechor Shitrit. Born in Tiberias, this relatively dovish Israeli politician had shown an empathy towards the possibility of Jewish– Palestinian co-existence in the new state. He had served as judge in the British Mandatory and years later would become Minister of Justice. Shitrit was a token Mizrahi minister in an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, i.e., Eastern European, government and as such had been ‘promoted’ at first to deal with the most undesirable job in the government: the Arabs.

  Shitrit developed personal relations with some of the notables who had remained in Jaffa after the occupation and headed the Palestinian community there, such as Nicola Sa’ab and Ahmad Abu Laben. Although he listened attentively in June 1948 when they beseeched him to lift at least the more appalling features of life under military occupation, and admitted to them that their complaints were valid, it took time before anything was done.

  The notables told Shitrit that the way Israeli troops broke into individual houses was totally unnecessary as they, as members of the local national committee, had the keys people who had been evacuated had left with them, and they were ready to hand them in to the army; but the soldiers preferred to break in. Little did they know that after Shitrit left, some of the same people were arrested for ‘being in possession of illegal property’: the same keys to the empty houses they had mentioned.21 Three weeks later Ahmad Abu Laben protested to Shitrit that not much had changed since they last met: ‘There is not one house or shop which was not broken into. The goods were taken from the port and stores. Food commodities were taken from the inhabitants.’22 Abu Laben had been running a factory in the city together with a Jewish partner, but this did not save him. All the machines were removed and the factory was looted.

  Indeed, the scope of both the official confiscation and private looting all over urban Palestine was so widespread that local com
manders were unable to control it. On 25 June, the government decided to put some order into the looting and confiscation afflicting Jerusalem. David Abulafya, a local citizen, was made responsible for ‘confiscation and appropriation’. His main problem, he reported to Ben-Gurion, was that ‘the security forces and the militias continue to confiscate without permission.’23

  Ghettoising the Palestinians of Haifa

  That the Israelis had more than one way to imprison people or abuse their most basic rights can be seen from the experiences of the small community of Palestinians left in Haifa after Jewish troops cleansed the city on 23 April 1948. Their story is unique, but only in its details: in general it exemplifies the trials and tribulations of the Palestinian minority as a whole under occupation.

  On 1 July 1948, in the evening, the Israeli military commander of the city summoned the leaders of the Palestinian community in Haifa to his headquarters. The purpose of the meeting was to order these notables, who represented the 3–5,000 Palestinians left behind after the approximately 70,000 of the city’s Arab residents had been expelled, to ‘facilitate’ their transfer from the various parts of the city where they were living into one single neighborhood, the crammed and small quarter of Wadi Nisnas, one of the city’s poorest areas. Some of those ordered to leave their residences on the upper slopes of Mt Carmel, or even on top of the mountain itself, had been living there for many years among the Jewish newcomers. The military commander now ordered all of them to make sure the move would be completed by 5 July 1948. The shock among the Palestinian leaders and notables was instant and deep. Many of them belonged to the Communist Party that had supported partition and hoped that now the fighting was over, life would return to normal under the auspices of a Jewish state whose creation they had not opposed.24