The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (12 page)

On the top floor of the Red House, on Wednesday afternoon, 10 December 1947, a disappointed Consultancy met to assess the situation. Two speakers were leading the conversation, Ezra Danin and Yehoshua Palmon.
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Ezra Danin, as already mentioned, was a citrus grove businessman who had been invited into the intelligence corps because of his knowledge of Arabic (he was born in Syria). Danin was in his mid-forties when he joined
the Hagana in 1940; in 1947 he became the head of its ‘Arab section’, which supervised the work of Arab Jews and indigenous Arab collaborators who spied for the High Command within the Palestinian community as well as in neighbouring Arab countries. In May 1948 he assumed a new role: supervising the post-occupation activities of the Jewish forces when the ethnic cleansing operation began in earnest. His people were responsible for the procedures that were followed after a Palestinian village or neighbourhood had been occupied. This meant that, with the help of informants, they detected and identified men who were suspected of having attacked Jews in the past, or of belonging to the Palestinian national movement, or who simply were disliked by the local informants who exploited the opportunity to settle old scores. The men thus selected were usually executed on the spot. Danin quite often came to inspect these operations at first hand. His unit was also responsible, as soon as a village or town had been occupied, for separating all men of ‘military age’, namely between ten and fifty, from the rest of the villagers, who were then ‘just’ expelled or imprisoned for long periods in POW camps.
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Yehoshua (‘Josh’) Palmon was in many ways Danin’s second-in-command and also took a great personal interest in the implementation of the policy of selection, interrogation and sometimes execution. Younger than Danin and born in Palestine itself, Palmon already had an impressive military career behind him. As a recruit to a British commando unit he had participated in the occupation of Syria and Lebanon in 1941 that brought French Vichy rule there to an end. The officers under Danin and Palmon’s command were known to and feared by many Palestinians, who quickly learned to spot them despite their attempts to dress anonymously in dull khaki uniform. They acted behind the scenes in hundreds of villages, and the oral history of the Nakba is full of references to these men and the atrocities they committed.
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But on 10 December 1947, Danin and Palmon were still hidden from the public eye. They opened the meeting by reporting that members of the Palestinian urban elite were leaving their houses and moving to their winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. This was a typical reaction from the urbanites in moments of stress – moving to safety until the situation calmed down. And yet Israeli historians, including revisionist ones such as Benny Morris, have interpreted these traditional temporary sorties as ‘voluntary flight’, in order to tell us that Israel was not responsible for them. But they
left with the full intention of returning to their homes again later, only to be prevented by the Israelis from doing so: not allowing people to return to their homes after a short stay abroad is as much expulsion as any other act directed against the local people with the aim of depopulation.

Danin reported that this was the only instance they had been able to detect of Palestinians moving towards areas outside the UN-designated borders of the Jewish state, apart from several Bedouin tribes who had relocated closer to Arab villages out of fear of Jewish attacks. Danin seems to have been disappointed by this, because almost in the same breath he called for a far more aggressive policy – despite the fact that there were no offensive initiatives or tendencies on the Palestinian side – and went on to explain to the Consultancy the benefits it would have: his informants had told him that violent actions against Palestinians would terrify them, ‘which will render help from the Arab world useless,’ implying that the Jewish forces could do whatever they wanted with them.

‘What do you mean by violent action?’ inquired Ben-Gurion.

‘Destroying the traffic (buses, lorries that carry agricultural products and private cars) … sinking their fishing boats in Jaffa, closing their shops and preventing raw materials from reaching their factories.’

‘How will they react?’ asked Ben-Gurion.

‘The initial reaction may be riots, but eventually they will understand the message.’ The main goal was thus to assure that the population would be at the Zionists’ mercy, so their fate could be sealed. Ben-Gurion seemed to like this suggestion, and wrote to Sharett three days later to explain that the general idea: the Palestinian community in the Jewish area would be ‘at our mercy’ and anything the Jews wanted could be done to them, including ‘starving them to death’.
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It was another Syrian Jew, Eliyahu Sasson, who tried to some extent to play the devil’s advocate in the Consultancy; he seemed doubtful about the new aggressive approach Danin and Palmon were outlining. He had emigrated to Palestine in 1927, and was perhaps the most intriguing and also ambivalent member of the Consultancy. In 1919, before becoming a Zionist, he had joined the Arab national movement in Syria. In the 1940s, his main role was to instigate a policy of ‘divide and rule’ inside the Palestinian community but also in the neighbouring Arab countries. He was thus instrumental in strengthening the alliance with the Jordanian Hashemite king over the future of Palestine, but his attempts to pit one
Palestinian group against another would become obsolete now that the Zionist leadership was moving towards a comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the country as a whole. However, his legacy of ‘divide and rule’ had its inevitable impact on Israeli policy in the years to come, as we can see, for instance, in the efforts Ariel Sharon made in 1981 when, as defence minister and on the advice of the Arabist Professor Menahem Milson, he attempted to undermine the Palestinian resistance movement by setting up so-called ‘Village Leagues’ as part of a pro-Israeli outfit in the occupied West Bank. This was a short-term and abortive endeavour. A more successful one was the incorporation, as early as 1948, of the Druze minority into the Israeli army within units that later became the principal tool for oppressing the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

The 10 December meeting would be the last in which Sasson tried to persuade his colleagues that despite the need for ‘a comprehensive plan’, as he called it – namely the uprooting of the local population – it was still prudent not to regard the whole Arab population as enemies, and to continue employing ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics. He was very proud of his role in the 1930s in arming Palestinian groups, the so-called ‘peace gangs’, that were made up of rivals of the Palestinian leader al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. These units fought against the national Palestinian formations during the Arab Revolt. Sasson now wanted to bring these divide and rule tactics to target some loyal Bedouin tribes.

The Consultancy not only rejected the idea of incorporating more collaborative ‘Arabs’, but they also went so far as to suggest putting behind them the whole notion of ‘retaliation’, as adopted at the time on the advice of Orde Wingate. Most of the participants in the meeting favoured ‘engagement’ in a systematic campaign of intimidation. Ben-Gurion approved, and the new policy was implemented the day after the meeting.

The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several
villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ (
hasiyur ha-alim
). This, too, was part of the legacy of Orde Wingate, who had instructed the Hagana in the use of this terrorist method against Palestinian villagers in the 1930s. In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart. Even in Wingate’s day this was already intended more as a show of force than a punitive action or retaliatory attack.

In December 1947, two such defenseless villages were chosen for the revival of Wingate’s tactics: Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa. When today you drive south-east of the city of Ramla for about 15 kilometres, especially on a wintry day when the typical thorny, yellow gorse bushes of the inner plains of Palestine turn green, you come upon a bizarre view: long lines of rubble and stones stretching out on an open field surrounding a relatively large imaginary square area. These were the stone fences of Deir Ayyub. In 1947, the rubble was a low stone wall that had been built more for aesthetic reasons than for the protection of the village, which had about 500 inhabitants. Named after Ayyub – Job in Arabic – most of its people were Muslim, living in stone and mud houses typical of the area. Just before the Jewish attack, the village had been celebrating the opening of a new school, which already had the gratifying number of fifty-one pupils enrolled in it, all made possible by money the villagers had collected among themselves and from which they could also pay the teacher’s salary. But their joy was instantly obliterated when at ten o’clock at night a company of twenty Jewish troops entered the village – which, like so many villages in December, had no defence mechanism of any kind – and began firing randomly at several houses. The village was later attacked three more times before being evacuated by force in April 1948, when it was completely destroyed. Jewish forces made a similar attack in December against Beit Affa in the Gaza Strip, but here the raiders were successfully repelled.
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Threatening leaflets were also distributed in Syrian and Lebanese villages on Palestine’s border, warning the population:

If the war will be taken to your place, it will cause massive expulsion of the villagers, with their wives and their children. Those of you who do not wish to come to such a fate, I will tell them: in this war there will be merciless killing, no compassion. If you are not participating in this war, you will not have to leave your houses and villages.
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There now followed a number of operations of destruction in limited areas throughout rural and urban Palestine. Actions in the countryside were at first hesitant. Three villages in the upper eastern Galilee were selected: Khisas, Na’ima and Jahula, but the operation was cancelled, perhaps because the High Command deemed them as yet too ambitious. The cancellation, however, was partly ignored by the commander of the Palmach in the north, Yigal Allon. Allon wanted to experience an attack on at least one village, and decided to assault Khisas.

Khisas was a small village with a few hundred Muslims and one hundred Christians, who lived peacefully together in a unique topographical location in the northern part of Hula Plain, on a natural terrace that was about 100 metres wide. This terrace had been formed thousands of years before by the gradual shrinking of Lake Hula. Foreign travellers used to single this village out for the natural beauty of its location on the banks of the lake, and its proximity to the Hasbani River.
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Jewish troops attacked the village on 18 December 1947, and randomly started blowing up houses at the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack. The incident shocked
The New York Times
’ correspondent, who closely followed the unfolding events. He went and demanded an explanation from the Hagana, which at first denied the operation. When the inquisitive reporter did not let go, they eventually admitted it. Ben-Gurion issued a dramatic public apology, claiming the action had been unauthorised but, a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.
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When the Consultancy had met again on Wednesday, 17 December, they were joined by Yohanan Ratner and Fritz Eisenshtater (Eshet), two officers who had been designated by Ben-Gurion to formulate a ‘national strategy’ before he devised the Consultancy body. The meeting expanded on the implications of the successful Khisas operation, with some members calling for additional ‘retaliatory’ operations that were to include the destruction of villages, expulsion of people, and resettlement in their stead by Jewish settlers. The following day, in front of the formal larger body of the Jewish community that was responsible for defence affairs, ‘The Defence Committee’, Ben-Gurion summarized the earlier meeting. The operation seemed to thrill everyone, including the representative of the ultra Orthodox Jews,
Agudat Israel
, who said: ‘We were told that the army had the ability of destroying a whole village and taking out all its inhabitants; indeed, let’s do it!’
The committee also approved the appointment of intelligence officers for each such operation. They would play a crucial role in executing the next stages of the ethnic cleansing.
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The new policy was also aimed at the urban spaces of Palestine, and Haifa was chosen as the first target. Interestingly, this city is singled out by mainstream Israeli historians and the revisionist historian Benny Morris as an example of genuine Zionist goodwill towards the local population. The reality was very different by the end of 1947. From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them. They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos. A special unit of the Hagana,
Hashahar
(‘Dawn’), made up of
mistarvim
– literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians – was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units. On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’
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But worse was to come.