The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (18 page)

Every brigade assigned to the operation was asked to prepare to move into
Mazav Dalet
, State D, that is to ready themselves to implement the orders of Plan D: ‘You will move to State Dalet, for an operative implementation of Plan Dalet,’ was the opening sentence to each unit. And then ‘the villages which you will capture, cleanse or destroy will be decided according to consultation with your advisors on Arab affairs and the intelligence officers.’
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Judging by the end result of this stage, namely April–May 1948, this advice was not to spare a single village. Whereas the official Plan Dalet gave the villages the option to surrender, the operational orders did not exempt any village for any reason. With this the blueprint was converted into military order to begin destroying villages. The dates differed according to the geography: the Alexandroni Brigade, which would storm the coast with its tens of villages, leaving only two behind them, received its orders towards the end of April; the instruction to cleanse the Eastern Galilee arrived at the Golani Brigade headquarters on 6 May 1948, and the next day the first village in their ‘area’, Shajara, was cleansed.
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The Palmach units received their orders for Nachson on the very first day of April 1948. The night before, the Consultancy had met at Ben-Gurion’s house to finalise the directives to the units. Their orders were clear: ‘the principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages ... [and] the eviction of the villagers so that they would become an economic liability for the general Arab forces.’
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Operation Nachshon was also a novelty in other respects. It was the first operation in which all the various Jewish military organisations endeavoured to act together as a single army – providing the basis for the future Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). And it was the first operation in which the veteran East European Jews, who naturally dominated the military scene,
were incorporated into the campaign alongside other ethnic groups such as newcomers the Arab world and from post-Holocaust Europe.

The commander of one battalion who participated in this operation, Uri Ben-Ari, mentioned in his memoirs that ‘melting the Diasporas’ was one of the important goals of Nachshon. Ben-Ari was a young German Jew who had arrived in Palestine a few years earlier. His unit made its final preparations for Nachshon on the Mediterranean coast, near Hadera. He recalled likening himself to Russian generals fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. The ‘Nazis’ in his case were a large number of defenceless Palestinian villages in proximity to the Jaffa–Jerusalem road and the para-military groups of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni who had come to their rescue. Al-Husayni’s units had been retaliating for earlier Jewish attacks by firing randomly at Jewish traffic on the road, wounding and killing passengers. But the villagers themselves, as elsewhere in Palestine, were trying to continue life as normal, unaware of the demonised image attributed to them by Ben-Ari and his comrades. Within a few days most of them would be expelled forever from the homes and fields where they and their ancestors had lived and worked for centuries. The paramilitary Palestinian groups under the command of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni put up more resistance than Ben-Ari’s battalion had expected, which meant that the Nachshon operation did not at first go as planned. By 9 April, however, the campaign was over.

This was the day that the first of the many villages around Jerusalem fell into Jewish hands, despite its auspicious name – Qastal (the Castle). It did have ancient fortifications, but these could not protect it from the superior Jewish forces. The Qastal was located on the last western peak before the final ascent to Jerusalem. The monument to the Hagana that Israel has put up at the site fails to mention that there was once on this very spot a Palestinian village. The plaque commemorating the battle is a typical example of how deeply rooted the language of Plan Dalet is in today’s popular Israeli historiography. As in the plan, so on the plaque, the Qastal appears not as a village but as an ‘enemy base’: Palestinian villagers are dehumanised in order to turn them into ‘legitimate targets’ of destruction and expulsion. All over Israel many new settlements and national parks have become part of the country’s collective memory without any reference to the Palestinian villages that once stood there, even where there are vestiges, such as an isolated house or a mosque, which visibly attest to the fact that people used to live there as recently as 1948.

On 9 April, while defending Qastal, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was killed in battle. His death so demoralised his troops that all the other villages in the Greater Jerusalem area swiftly fell into the hands of the Jewish forces. One by one, they were surrounded, attacked and occupied, their people expelled and their homes and buildings demolished. In some of them, the expulsion was accompanied by massacres, the most notorious of which is the one Jewish troops perpetrated, on the same day Qastal fell, in Deir Yassin.

The systematic nature of Plan Dalet is manifested in Deir Yassin, a pastoral and cordial village that had reached a non-aggression pact with the Hagana in Jerusalem, but was doomed to be wiped out because it was within the areas designated in Plan Dalet to be cleansed. Because of the prior agreement they had signed with the village, the Hagana decided to send the Irgun and Stern Gang troops, so as to absolve themselves from any official accountability. In the subsequent cleansings of ‘friendly’ villages even this ploy would no longer be deemed necessary.

On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin. It lay on a hill west of Jerusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level and close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. The old village school serves today as a mental hospital for the western Jewish neighbourhood that expanded over the destroyed village.

As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.
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Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes:

They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him – carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they shot her too.
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Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds.

Recent research has brought down the accepted number of people massacred at Deir Yassin from 170 to ninety-three. Of course, apart from the victims of the massacre itself, dozens of others were killed in the fighting, and hence were not included in the official list of victims. However, as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them ‘in battle’ was slight. One only has to be told that thirty babies were among the slaughtered in Deir Yassin to understand why the whole ‘quantitative’ exercise – which the Israelis repeated as recently as April 2002 in the massacre in Jenin – is insignificant. At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin the epicentre of the catastrophe – a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight.
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Four nearby villages were next – Qalunya, Saris, Beit Surik and Biddu. Taking only an hour or so in each village, the Hagana units blew up the houses and expelled the people. Interestingly (or ironically, if you wish) Hagana officers claimed they had to struggle with their subordinates in order to prevent a frenzy of looting at the end of each occupation. Ben-Ari, who supervised the sappers unit that blew up the houses, recounts in his memoirs how he had single-handedly stopped the plunder of these villages, but this claim seems exaggerated to say the least, given that the peasants ran away with nothing while their possessions found their way into the living rooms and farms of both soldiers and officers as wartime mementos.
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Two villages in the same area were spared: Abu Ghawsh and Nabi Samuil. This was because their mukhtars had developed a relatively cordial relationship with the local commanders of the Stern Gang. Ironically, this saved them from destruction and expulsion: as the Hagana wanted to demolish them, the more extremist group, the Stern Gang, now came to their rescue. This was, however, a rare exception, and hundreds of villages suffered the same fate as Qalunya and the Qastal.
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The confidence the Jewish command in early April had in their capacity not only to take over, but also to cleanse the areas the UN had granted to the Jewish state, can be gauged from the way, immediately after operation
Nachshon, they turned their attention to the major urban centres of Palestine. These were systematically attacked throughout the rest of the month, as UN agents and British officials stood by and watched indifferently.

The offensive against the urban centres began with Tiberias. As soon as news of Deir Yassin and the massacre three days later (12 April) in the nearby village of Khirbat Nasr al-Din reached the large Palestinian population in the city, many fled.
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The people were also petrified by the daily heavy bombardments by the Jewish forces situated in the hills overlooking this historic, ancient capital on the Sea of Galilee, where 6000 Jews and 5000 Arabs and their forbears had for centuries co-existed peacefully. British obstruction meant that the ALA had only managed to supply the city with a force of about thirty volunteers. These were no match for the Hagana forces, who rolled barrel bombs down from the hills and used loudspeakers to broadcast terrifying noises to frighten the population – an early version of the supersonic flights over Beirut in 1983 and Gaza in 2005, which human rights organisations have decried as criminal acts. Tiberias fell on 18 April.
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The British played a questionable role in the attack on Tiberias. At first they offered to protect the Palestinian residents, but soon urged them to negotiate a general evacuation of the town with the Jewish forces. King Abdullah of Jordan was more ‘practical’: he sent thirty trucks to help move women and children. In his memoirs he claimed he was convinced another Deir Yassin was about to occur.
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British officers later professed to having had similar apprehensions, but documents showing heavy British pressure on the community’s leaders to leave do not reveal any great concern about an impending massacre. Some would say that the British thereby prevented Tiberias’ Arab residents from being massacred; others would argue that they collaborated with the expellers. The role of the British is much clearer, and far more negative, in the next chapters of Palestine’s urbicide, when Haifa and Jaffa were occupied.

As mentioned previously, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and welcomed by the Consultancy, although not necessarily initiated by it. The early terrorization of the city’s Arab population the previous December had prompted many among the Palestinian elite to leave for their residences in Lebanon and Egypt until calm returned to their city. It is
hard to estimate how many fell within this category: most historians put the figure at around 15,000 to 20,000.
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On 12 January 1948, a local leader called Farid Sa’ad, the manager of the Arab Bank in Haifa, and a member of the local national committee, telegraphed Dr. Husayn Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, in despair: ‘It is good the Jews do not know the truth.’
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The ‘truth’ was that the urban elite in Palestine had collapsed after a month of heavy Jewish shelling and aggression. However, the Jews knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, the Consultancy was well aware that the rich and well-to-do had already left in December, that the Arab arms were not arriving, and the Arab governments did little beyond airing their inflammatory war rhetoric in all directions so as to hide their inaction and unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians.

The departure of the affluent meant that between 55,000 and 60,000 Palestinians in Haifa were leaderless and, given the relatively small number of armed Arab volunteers in the town, at the mercy of the Jewish forces in April 1948. This was despite the presence of British troops in the city, who were theoretically responsible for the locals’ safety and well-being.

This phase of the Jewish operation around the city was given the ominous name of ‘Scissors’ (
Misparayim
), indicating both the idea of a pincer movement and of cutting the city off from its Palestinian hinterland. Haifa, like Tiberias, had been allocated in the UN plan to the Jewish state: leaving the only major port in the country in Jewish control was yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered in the UN peace proposal. The Jews wanted the port city but without the 75,000 Palestinians who lived there, and in April 1948, they achieved their objective.

As Palestine’s main port, Haifa was also the last station on the trail of the British pull-out. The British had been expected to stay until August, but in February 1948 they decided to bring the date of departure forward to May. Their troops were consequently present in great numbers and they still had the legal and, one could argue, moral authority to impose law and order in the city. Their conduct, as many British politicians were later to admit, forms one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East.
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The Jewish campaign of terrorization, begun in December, included heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, and went on for the first months of 1948, but it intensified in early April. On 18 April,
the day the Palestinians of Tiberias were put to flight, Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British commander of the Northern Sector seated in Haifa, summoned the Jewish authorities in the city to his office and informed them that in two days the British forces would be removed from locations in which they had been serving as a buffer zone between the two communities. This ‘buffer’ was the only obstacle preventing Jewish forces from a direct assault on, and takeover of, the Palestinian areas, where more than 50,000 people still resided. The road was wide open for the de-Arabisation of Haifa.