The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  ‘I don’t understand: is this a military command? Let us look at the conditions of these people. I cannot see any reason, least of all a military one, that justifies such a move,’ protested Tawfiq Tubi, later a member of the Israeli Knesset for the Communist Party. He ended his protestation by saying: ‘We demand that the people stay in their homes.’25 Another participant, Bulus Farah, shouted, ‘This is racism,’ and called the move, appropriately, ‘ghettoising the Palestinians in Haifa.’26

  Even the dry tone of the document cannot hide the dismissive and indifferent reaction of the Israeli military commander. One can almost hear the clipped sound of his voice as he told them:

  I can see that you are sitting here and [think you can] give me advice, but I invited you in here to hear the orders of the High Command and carry them out! I am not involved in politics and do not deal with it. I am just obeying orders . . . I am fulfilling orders and I have to make sure that this order is executed by the 5th of July . . . If you don’t do it, I will do it myself. I am a soldier.27

  After he had finished his long monologue, another of the Palestinian notables, Shehadeh Shalah asked: ‘And if someone owns a house, does he have to leave?’ The military commander replied: ‘Everyone has to leave.’28 The notables then learned that the inhabitants would themselves have to cover the cost of their enforced transfer.

  Victor Khayat tried to reason with the Israeli commander that it would take more than one day for all the people to be notified which would not leave them much time. The commander replied that four days was ‘plenty of time’. The person who transcribed the meeting noted that at that point the Palestinian representatives shouted as one man: ‘But this is a very short time,’ to which the commander retorted: ‘I cannot change it.’29

  But this was not the end of their troubles. In the area to which they were confined, Wadi Nisnas – where today the municipality of Haifa annually celebrates the convergence of Hanuka, Christmas and Id al-Fitr as ‘The Feast of all Feasts for Peace and Coexistence’ – people continued to be robbed and abused, mostly by Irgun and Stern Gang members, but the Hagana also took an active part in the assaults. Ben-Gurion condemned their behaviour, but did nothing to stop it: He was content with recording it in his diary.30

  Rape

  We have three kinds of sources that report on rape, and thus know that severe cases of rape did take place. It remains more difficult to form an idea of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish troops in this way. Our first source is the international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross. They never submitted a collective report, but we do have short and concise accounts of individual cases. Thus, for instance, very soon after Jaffa was taken, a Red Cross official, de Meuron, reported how Jewish soldiers had raped a girl and killed her brother. He remarked in general that as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners, their women were left at the mercy of the Israelis. Yitzhak Chizik wrote to Kaplan in the letter mentioned above: ‘And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have already heard.’ In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how ‘a group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the mother and raped the daughter.’

  We know of course more about cases in places where outside observers were present, but this does not mean women were not raped elsewhere. Another Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9 December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter. Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant, to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade Seven. It is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed.31

  The second source is the Israeli archives, which only cover cases in which the rapists were brought to trial. David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: ‘Rape Cases’. One of these records the incident Chizik had reported to him: ‘a case in Acre where soldiers wanted to rape a girl. They killed the father and wounded the mother, and the officers covered for them. At least one soldier raped the girl.’32

  Jaffa seems to have been a hothouse for the cruelty and war crimes of the Israeli troops. One particular battalion, Battalion 3 – commanded by the same person who had been in charge when its soldiers committed massacres in Khisas and Sa‘sa, and cleansed Safad and its environs – was so savage in its behaviour that its soldiers were suspected of being involved in most of the rape cases in the city, and the High Command decided it best to withdraw them from the town. However, other units were no less guilty of molesting women in the first three to four months of the occupation. The worst period was towards the end of the first truce (July 8) when even Ben-Gurion became so apprehensive about the pattern of behaviour that emerged among the soldiers in the occupied cities, especially the private looting and the rape cases, that he decided not to allow certain army units to enter Nazareth after his troops had taken the town during the ‘ten-day’ war.33

  Our third source is the oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims. It is very difficult to get the facts in the former case and almost impossible, of course, in the latter. But their stories have already helped shed light on some of the most appalling and inhuman crimes in the war that Israel waged against the Palestinian people.

  The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing.

  Oral recollection also exposed cases of rape throughout the occupation of Palestine’s villages: from the village of Tantura in May, through the village of Qula in June, and ending with one story after another of abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram. Many of the cases were corroborated by UN officials who interviewed a number of women from the villages who were willing to come forward and talk about their experiences. When, many years later, some of these people were interviewed, it was obvious how difficult it still proved for the men and women from the village to talk about names and details in these cases, and the interviewers came away with the impression that they all knew more than they wished or were able to tell.

  Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewellery, to the very last item. The same women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape. Here is how Najiah Ayyub described it: ‘I saw that the troops who encircled us tried to touch the women but were rejected by them. When they saw that the women would not surrender, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and tried to undress them, claiming they had to search the bodies.’34

  Tradition, shame, and trauma are the cultural and psychological barriers that prevent us from gaining the fuller picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked with such ferocity in both rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949. Perhaps in the fulness of time someone will be able to complete this chapter of the chronicle of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

  DIVIDING THE SP
OILS

  Once the winds of war had subsided and the newly established State of Israel had signed armistice agreements with its neighbours, the Israeli government relaxed its occupation regime somewhat and gradually put a halt to the looting and ghettoisation of the small groups of urban Palestinians left behind. In August 1948, a new structure was put in place to deal with the consequences of the ethnic cleansing, called ‘The Committee for Arab Affairs’. As before, Bechor Shitrit’s proved to be the more humane voice among his colleagues on this committee, together with that of Israel’s first Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, but it also included some former members of the Consultancy. The presence of Yaacov Shimoni, Gad Machnes, Ezra Danin and Yossef Weitz, all people who had helped devise the expulsions, would have been quite alarming for those Palestinians who had remained, had they known.

  In August, the new outfit mainly dealt with the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the repatriation of the refugees. The tactic it decided upon was to try to push through a resettlement programme that they envisaged would pre-empt all confrontation on the subject, either because the principal players in the international community would agree to endorse it or, even better, it would persuade them to abandon the issue altogether. The Israeli offer suggested that all Palestinian refugees should be resettled in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. This is not surprising, since it was discussed at a meeting of the Jewish Agency as early as 1944. Ben-Gurion argued: ‘The transfer of Arabs is easier than the transfer of any other [people]. There are Arab states around . . . And it is clear that if the [Palestinian] Arabs are transferred this would improve their situation and not the opposite.’ While Moshe Sharett noted: [W]hen the Jewish state is established – it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.’35 Although the USA and Britain at the time responded favourably to this policy – which has remained the accepted line of argument for all successive Israeli governments – neither they nor the rest of the world seemed interested in investing too much effort in pushing it forward, or in arguing for the implementation of UN Resolution 194, which called for the unconditional repatriation of Palestinian refugees. As Israel had hoped, the fate of the refugees, not to mention their rights, soon dropped out of sight.

  But return or resettlement was not the only issue. There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the Israeli authorities after May 1948. Neither did Israel’s proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in Israeli hands. A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, and he estimated the combined value of property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds. To avoid becoming embroiled in international investigations and scrutiny, he suggested as a solution: ‘Maybe we can sell it to American Jews?’36

  An additional problem was the cultivated land the Palestinians had been forced to abandon, and in the Arab Affairs Committee meeting it was again Bechor Shitrit who naïvely pondered aloud its possible fate: ‘The cultivated land is probably 1 million dunam. According to international law, we cannot sell anything, so maybe we should buy from those Arabs who do not want to come back.’ Without ceremony, Yossef Weitz cut him short: ‘The fate of the cultivated land will be no different from the overall territory on which the villages existed.’ The solution, recommended Weitz, had to cover all the territory: all village land, whether cultivated or residential, and the urban areas.37

  Unlike Shitrit, Weitz was in the know. His official position as the head of the JNF settlement department and his de facto leadership of the ad-hoc ‘transfer committee’ fused into one once the ethnic cleansing had started. Weitz closely followed every single takeover within the rural areas, either personally or through loyal officials such as his close aide Yossef Nachmani. While the Jewish troops were responsible for the expulsion of the people and the demolition of their homes, Weitz went to work to make sure the villages passed into JNF custody.

  This proposal frightened Shitrit even more, as it meant the number of dunam Israel would take possession of, illegally in his mind, was triple the figure of 1 million dunam he had originally thought. Weitz’s next suggestion was even more alarming for anyone sensitive to international law or legality: ‘All we need’, declared the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund, ‘is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam – cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands. Land of lesser quality should be sold to private or public sectors.’

  Shitrit tried one more time, ‘At least, let us say that this confiscation is an exchange for the property the Jews from the Arab world lost when they immigrated to Palestine.’ Jewish immigration was quite limited at the time, but the concept of ‘exchange’ would later appeal to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, whose propaganda machine has frequently used it in abortive attempts to silence the debate on the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return. Shitrit’s idea was dropped in August 1948 because it risked implicating Israel in the commission of forced transfer. Yaacov Shimoni warned that such a declaration of mutual expropriation would inevitably direct attention to the expulsions – he termed them ‘transfer’ – Israel had carried out in Palestine.

  By now Ben-Gurion had grown impatient. He realised that sensitive subjects such as creating faits accomplis so as to pre-empt the threat of international sanctions – for instance the destruction of houses so that nobody could force Israel to allow their Palestinian owners to return to them – was no job for such a cumbersome body as the Committee for Arab Affairs. Thus he decided to appoint Danin and Weitz to a committee of two that from then on would take all final decisions on Palestinian property and land, the main features of which were destruction and confiscation.

  For a short and unique period the American administration showed an interest in the subject. Officials in the State Department, in an atypical move, dominated the policy on the refugee issues, while the White House seemed to stand aloof. The inevitable result was a growing dissatisfaction with the basic Israeli position. The US experts saw no legal alternative to the return of the refugees, and were considerably irritated by Israel’s refusal to even discuss the possibility. In May 1949, the State Department conveyed a strong message to the Israeli government that it considered the repatriation of the refugees as a precondition for peace. When the Israeli rejection arrived, the US administration threatened Israel with sanctions, and withheld a promised loan. In response, the Israelis at first suggested taking in 75,000 refugees and allowing the reunification of families for another 25,000. When this was deemed insufficient by Washington, the government suggested taking in the Gaza strip, with its 90,000 indigenous inhabitants and its refugee community of 200,000. Both proposals seemed niggardly but by then, the spring of 1949, a personnel reshuffle in the American State Department reoriented America’s Palestine policy onto a different course that completely sidelined, if not altogether ignored, the refugee question.

  During this short-lived period of US pressure (April–May 1949), Ben-Gurion’s basic response was to intensify the settlement of Jewish immigrants on the confiscated land and in the evicted houses. When Sharett and Kaplan objected, apprehensive of international condemnation of such acts, Ben-Gurion again appointed a more cabal-like body that soon encouraged hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world to seize the Palestinian homes left in the towns and cities and to build settlements on the ruins of the expelled villages.

  The appropriation of Palestinian property was supposed to follow a systematic national programme, but by the end of September Ben-Gurion gave up the idea of an orderly takeover in the major cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. Similarly, it proved impossible to coordinate the onslaught of covetous farmers and governmental agencies on the dispossessed villages and lands. The distribution of land was the res
ponsibility of the Jewish National Fund. After the 1948 war other bodies were given similar authority, the most important of which was the Custodian, mentioned below. The JNF found it had to compete for the job of principal divider of the spoils of war. In the final analysis the JNF came out on top, but it took time. All in all, Israel had taken over 3.5 million dunam of land in rural Palestine. This estimate from 1948 included all houses and fields of the destroyed villages. It took a while before a clear centralised policy emerged of how best to use this land. Ben-Gurion deferred a total takeover by private or public Jewish agencies while the UN was still discussing the fate of the refugees, first in Lausanne in 1949, and after that in a series of futile committees set up to deal with the refugee issue. He knew that in the wake of the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194, 11 December 1948, which demanded the unconditional repatriation of all Palestinian refugees, a formal and legal Israeli takeover would cause problems.

  In order to forestall international indignation over collective dispossession, the Israeli government appointed a ‘custodian’ for the newly acquired properties, pending a final decision over their fate. Typical of previous Zionist conduct, this ‘pragmatic’ solution became policy until a ‘strategic’ decision would follow to change it (i.e., by redefining the status of the dispossessed assets). The Custodian was thus a function the Israeli government created in order to fend off any possible fallout from UN Resolution 194 that insisted that all refugees be allowed to return and/or be compensated. By putting all private and collective possessions of the expelled Palestinians under its custody, the government could, and in effect did, sell these properties to public and private Jewish groups and individuals later under the spurious pretext that no claimants had come forward. Moreover, the moment the confiscated lands from Palestinian owners were put under government custodianship they became state lands, which by law belonged to the Jewish nation, which, in turn, meant that none of it could be sold to Arabs.38