The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (20 page)

The urbicide continued into May with the occupation of Acre on the coast and Baysan in the east on 6 May 1948. In the beginning of May, Acre proved once again that it was not only Napoleon who found it hard to defeat it: despite severe overcrowding due to the huge influx of refugees from the neighbouring city of Haifa, heavy daily shelling by the Jewish forces failed to subdue the Crusader city. However, its exposed water supply ten kilometres to the north, from the Kabri springs, via an almost 200-year old aqueduct, proved its Achilles’ heel. During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak.
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On 6 May 1948, in Acre’s Lebanese hospital, which belonged to the Red Cross, an emergency meeting was convened. Brigadier Beveridge, chief of the British medical services, Colonel Bonnet of the British army, Dr Maclean of the Medical Services, and Mr de Meuron, the Red Cross delegate in Palestine, met with city officials to discuss the seventy casualties the epidemic had already claimed. They concluded that the infection was undoubtedly water-borne, not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions, as the Hagana claimed. Tellingly, it had affected fifty-five British soldiers who were transferred to Port Said hospital in Egypt. ‘Nothing like that ever happened in Palestine,’ Brigadier Beveridge told de Meuron. The minute they had identified the aqueduct as the source, they switched to artesian wells and water from the agricultural station north of Acre. The refugees from Acre already in camps in the north were also examined in order to prevent the epidemic from spreading.

With their morale weakened by both the typhoid epidemic and the intensive shelling, residents heeded the call from loudspeakers that shouted at them: ‘Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.’
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Lieutenant Petite, a French UN observer, reported that after the city fell into Jewish hands, there was widespread and systematic looting by the army, including furniture, clothes, and anything that might be useful to the new Jewish immigrants, and the removal of which might discourage the refugees’ return.

A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled. The Egyptians caught two Jews, David Horin and David Mizrachi, trying to inject typhoid and dysentery viruses into Gaza’s wells. General Yadin reported the incident to Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s Prime Minister, who duly entered it in his diary, without comment. The two were later executed by the Egyptians without any official Israeli protestations.
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Ernest David Bergman, together with the Katzir brothers mentioned earlier, was part of a team working on Israel’s biological warfare capability set up by Ben-Gurion in the 1940s, euphemistically called the Science Corps of the Hagana. Ephraim Katzir was appointed its director in May 1948, when the outfit was renamed ‘HEMED’ (Sweetness, the acronym of Hayl Mada – the Science corps). It did not contribute in any major way to the 1948 campaigns but its early input was indicative of the unconventional aspirations the state of Israel would pursue in the future.
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Roughly at the same time that Acre was occupied, the Golani Brigade seized the town of Baysan in Operation Gideon. As in Safad, after occupying several villages in the vicinity, they moved in on the town. The Jewish forces, with the successful takeovers of Haifa, Tiberias and Safad behind them, were confident and highly effective. Experienced now in mass evictions, they tried to force a swift departure in Baysan by issuing an ultimatum to the people to leave their homes within ten hours. The ultimatum was delivered to the ‘city notables’, namely a fraction of the local national committee. These notables declined and hastily tried to accumulate food stocks for a long siege; they organised some weapons, mainly two cannons brought in by volunteers, in order to repel the impending assault. Nahum Spigel, the commander of the Golani Brigade, wanted a swift offensive and to take a number of prisoners of war in order to exchange them for some Jewish prisoners the Jordanian forces had captured earlier in their successful bid for both the Jewish quarter in the Old City and the Zionist settlement of Gush Etzion. In fact, the Legion rescued the Gush Etzion settlers from the hands of angry Palestinian paramilitary groups that had attacked the isolated Jewish colony and the convoy that had come to save it.
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(Today, Gush Etzion is a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank.) These settlers, together with the residents of the old Jewish quarter, were among the few Jewish POWs captured during the war. They were treated fairly and released soon after, unlike the thousands of Palestinians who were now, according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel, but on becoming prisoners were caged in pens.

After heavy daily bombardments, including from the air, the local committee in Baysan decided to surrender. The body that took the decision consisted of the
qadi
, the local priest, the municipal secretary and the richest merchant in town. They met Palti Sela and his colleagues to discuss the terms of surrender (before the meeting, the members asked permission to travel to Nablus to discuss capitulation, but this was refused). On 11 May, the town passed into Jewish hands. Palti Sela remembered particularly the two pathetic old artillery guns that had been meant to protect Baysan: two French anti-air cannon from the First World War, antiquated weaponry representative of the overall level of the arms the Palestinians and the volunteers possessed, on the eve of the regular Arab armies’ entrance into Palestine.

Immediately after, Palti Sela and his colleagues were able to oversee the ‘orderly expulsion’ of the town’s people. Some were transferred to Nazareth – still a free Palestinian city in May, but not for much longer – some to Jenin, but the majority were driven across the nearby Jordan River onto the opposite bank.
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Eyewitnesses remember the hordes of people from Baysan as particularly panic-stricken and cowed, hurriedly making their way in the direction of the Jordan River and from there inland to makeshift camps. While the Jewish troops were busy with other operations nearby, however, quite a few of them succeeded in returning; Baysan is very close to both the West Bank and the River Jordan and therefore slipping back unnoticed was relatively easy. They succeeded in staying on until mid-June when the Israeli army loaded the people at gunpoint onto trucks and drove them across the river once again.

Jaffa was the last city to be taken, on 13 May, two days before the end of the Mandate. Like so many of Palestine’s cities, it had a long history going back as far as the Bronze age, with an impressive Roman and Byzantine heritage. It was the Muslim commander, Umar Ibn al-‘Aas, who took the town in 632 and imbued it with its Arab character. The Greater Jaffa area included twenty-four villages and seventeen mosques; today one mosque survives, but not one of the villages is left standing.

On 13 May, 5000 Irgun and Hagana troops attacked the city as Arab volunteers headed by Michael al-Issa, a local Christian, tried to defend it.
Among them was an extraordinary unit of fifty Muslims from Bosnia as well as members of the second generation of the Templars, German colonists who had come in the mid-nineteenth century as religious missionaries and now decided to try and defend their colonies (other Templars in the Galilee surrendered without a fight, and were swiftly driven out of their two pretty colonies, Waldheim and Beit Lehem, west of Nazareth).

All in all, Jaffa enjoyed the largest defense force available to the Palestinians in any given locality: a total of 1500 volunteers confronted the 5000 Jewish troops. They survived a three-week siege and attack that began in the middle of April and ended in the middle of May. When Jaffa fell, its entire population of 50,000 was expelled with the ‘help’ of British mediation, meaning that their flight was less chaotic than in Haifa. Still, there were scenes reminiscent of the horrors that took place in the northern harbour of Haifa: people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion.

With the fall of Jaffa, the occupying Jewish forces had emptied and depopulated all the major cities and towns of Palestine. The vast majority of their inhabitants – of all classes, denominations and occupations – never saw their cities again, while the more politicised among them would come to play a formative role in the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO, demanding first and foremost their right to return.

Already towards the end of March the Jewish operations had destroyed much of the rural hinterland of Jaffa and Tel-Aviv. There was an apparent division of labour between the Hagana forces and the Irgun. While the Hagana moved in an orderly fashion from one place to the next according to plan, the Irgun was allowed sporadic actions in villages beyond the scope of the original list. This is how the Irgun arrived in the village of Shaykh Muwannis (or Munis, as it is known today) on 30 March and expelled its inhabitants by force. Today you will find the elegant campus of Tel-Aviv University sprawling over the ruins of this village, while one of the village’s few remaining houses has become the university’s faculty club.
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Had there not been the tacit understanding between the Hagana and the Irgun, Shaykh Muwannis might have been saved. The heads of the village had made a serious effort to cultivate a cordial relationship with the Hagana in order to prevent their expulsion, but the ‘Arabists’ who had concluded the treaty were nowhere to be found on the day the Irgun showed up and expelled the entire village.
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In April the operations in the countryside were more closely connected to the urbicide. Villages near urban centres were taken and expelled, and sometimes subjected to massacres, in a campaign of terror designed to prepare the ground for a more successful takeover of the cities.

The Consultancy met again on a Wednesday, 7 April 1948. It was decided to destroy, and expel the inhabitants from, all the villages on the Tel-Aviv–Haifa road, Jenin–Haifa road and the Jerusalam–Jaffa road. At the end of the day, apart from a tiny handful of villages, no one was spared.
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Thus, on the day the Irgun wiped out Shaykh Muwannis, the Hagana occupied six villages in the same area within a week: Khirbat Azzun was the first, on 2 April, followed by Khirbat Lid, Arab al-Fuqara, Arab al-Nufay’at and Damira, all cleansed by 10 April, and Cherqis on the 15th. By the end of the month another three villages in the vicinity of Jaffa and Tel-Aviv – Khirbat al-Manshiyya, Biyar ‘Adas and the large village of Miska – had all been taken and destroyed.
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All of this took place before a single regular Arab soldier had entered Palestine, and the pace now becomes hard to follow, for contemporary as well as for later historians. Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled. This is a fact that must be repeated, as it undermines the Israeli myth that the ‘Arabs’ ran away once the ‘Arab invasion’ began. Almost half of the Arab villages had already been attacked by the time the Arab governments eventually and, as we know, reluctantly decided to send in their troops. Another ninety villages would be wiped out between 15 May and 11 June 1948, when the first of two truces finally came into effect.
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Eyewitnesses on the Jewish side recall clearly thinking throughout April that the army could strive for more. In his recent interview with official historians, Palti Sela, whose testimony can be found in the Hagana Archives in Tel-Aviv, used colourful language to reconstruct that atmosphere of extra zeal. Palti Sela was a member of the Jewish forces that occupied and cleansed the town of Baysan, and who were ordered to push out the
large Bedouin tribes that had for centuries seasonally resided in the area. He later remarked:

After we cleansed the area from the Bedouin tribes the pus [he used the Yiddish word for a purulent wound: farunkel] of the Baysan are still infected with two villages, Faruna and Samariyya. They did not seem to be afraid and were still cultivating their fields and continued using the roads.
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One of the many villages captured during these attacks in the east was that of Sirin. Its story epitomises the fate that befell scores of villages depopulated by Jewish forces in Marj Ibn Amir and the Baysan Valley, where today one searches in vain for any trace of the Palestinian life that once flourished there.

Sirin was occupied on 12 May 1948. It lay near Baysan on one of the Jiftiliq’s lands: historically these lands, at times referred to as ‘mudawar’ lands, were nominally under the Ottoman Sultan’s title but were cultivated by Palestinian farmers. Sirin grew into a thriving community around the burial place (maqam) of a Muslim holy man named Shaykh Ibn Sirin. The terrain in that part of Palestine is tough and the summers are unbearably hot. And yet the habitation that developed around the maqam and the nearby springs, three kilomotres away, resembled that of villages endowed with a much better climate and an endless flow of fresh water. Animals carried the water from the wells and diligent farmers used it to turn the rugged land into a small Garden of Eden. Sirin was an isolated community as it was unreachable by car, but outsiders who did frequent the village single out the particular style of the buildings there: Sirin’s houses were made of volcanic black stones mixed with clay, and the roofs were covered with intertwined layers of wood and bamboo.