The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (24 page)

Already by 12 March 1948, the State Department had drafted a new proposal to the UN, which suggested an international trusteeship over Palestine for five years, during which the two sides would negotiate an agreed solution. It has been suggested that this was the most sensible American proposal ever put forward in the history of Palestine, the like of which, alas, was never repeated. In the words of Warren Austin, the US ambassador to the United Nations: ‘The USA position is that the partition of Palestine is no longer a viable option.’
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Member states of the UN coming together in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the UN was located before it moved to its current high rise in Manhattan, liked the idea. It made a lot of sense to conclude that partition had failed to bring peace to Palestine and, in fact, was breeding more violence and bloodshed. However, while logic was one aspect to take into consideration, the wish not to antagonise a powerful domestic lobby was another, and in this case a superior one. Had it not been for highly effective pressure by the Zionist lobby on President Harry Truman, the course of Palestine’s history could have run very differently. Instead, the Zionist sections of the American Jewish community learned an important lesson about their ability to impact American policy in Palestine (and later beyond, in the Middle East as a whole). In a longer process that continued through the 1950s and early 1960s, the Zionist lobby succeeded in sidelining the State Department’s experts on the Arab world and left American Middle Eastern policy in the hands of Capitol Hill and the White House, where the Zionists wielded considerable influence.

But the victory on Capitol Hill was not easily won. The ‘Arabists’ in the State Department, reading more carefully the reports from the
New York Times
than the President’s men, desperately tried to convice Truman, if not to substitute partition with trusteeship, at least to allow more time for rethinking the partition plan. They persuaded him to offer the two sides a three month armistice.

On 12 May, a Wednesday afternoon, the ordinary meeting of the
Matkal
and the Consultancy was postponed for a crucial meeting in a new body, the ‘People’s Board’, which was three days later to become the government of the State of Israel. Ben-Gurion claimed that almost all those present supported the decision to reject the American offer. Historians later claimed he had a difficult time passing the resolution, which meant not only rejecting the American plan but declaring, three days later, a state. This was not such an important meeting after all, as the Consultancy was already pushing ahead with its ethnic cleansing operations, which Ben-Gurion would not have allowed others in the Zionist political elite to halt, who were not privy in the past to the vision and the plan. The White House then went on to recognise the new state and the State Department was pushed again to its back bench on US policy on Palestine.
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On the last day of April, the Arab world had appointed the man most of its leaders knew had a secret agreement with the Jews to head the military operations against Palestine. No wonder that Egypt, the largest Arab state, waited until the failure of the last American initiative before deciding to join the military effort, something its leaders knew would end in a fiasco. The decision passed in the Egyptian Senate on 12 May left the Egyptian army with less than three days to prepare for the ‘invasion’, and its performance on the battlefield testified to this impossibly short period of preparation.
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The other armies, as we shall see later, did not fare any better. Britain remained the last hope in those days of April and May, but nowhere in its Empire did Albion demonstrate such perfidious behaviour.

Did the British know about Plan Dalet? One assumes they did, but it is not easy to prove. Highly striking is that after Plan Dalet was adopted, the British announced that they were no longer responsible for law and order in the areas where their troops were still stationed, and limited their activities
to protecting these troops. This meant that Haifa and Jaffa and the whole coastal region between them were now one open space where the Zionist leadership could implement Plan Dalet without any fear of being thwarted or even confronted by the British army. Far worse was that the disappearance of the British from the countryside and the towns meant that in Palestine as a whole law and order totally collapsed. The newspapers of the day, such as the daily
Filastin
, reflected the people’s anxiety about the rising level of such crimes as theft and burglary in the urban centres and looting around the villages. The withdrawal of British policemen from the cities and towns also meant, for example, that many Palestinians could no longer collect their salaries in the local municipalities: most of the governmental services were located in Jewish neighbourhoods in which they were likely to be assaulted.

No wonder one can still hear Palestinians say today: ‘The main responsibility for our catastrophe lies with the British Mandate,’ as Jamal Khaddura, a refugee from Suhmata near Acre, put it.
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He bore this sense of betrayal with him throughout his life and re-articulated it in front of a joint British parliamentary Middle East commission of inquiry on the Palestinian refugees established in 2001. Other refugees who gave testimonies to this commission echoed Khaddura’s bitterness and accusations of blame.

Indeed, the British avoided any serious intervention as early as October 1947, and stood idly by in the face of attempts by the Jewish forces to control outposts; nor did they try to stop small-scale infiltration by Arab volunteers. In December, they still had 75,000 troops in Palestine, but these were dedicated solely to safeguard the eviction of the Mandatory soldiers, officers and officials.

The British sometimes assisted in other, more direct, ways in the ethnic cleansing, by providing the Jewish leadership with ownership deeds and other vital data, which they had photocopied before destroying them, as was quite common in their decolonization process. This inventory added to the village files the final details the Zionists needed for the massive depopulation. Military force, and a brutal one at that, is the first requirement for expulsion and occupation, but bureaucracy is no less important for efficiently carrying out a huge cleansing operation that entails not only dispossession of the people but also the repossession of the spoils.

According to the Partition Resolution, the UN was to be present on the ground to supervise the implementation of its peace plan: the making of Palestine as a whole into an independent country, with two distinct states that were to form one economic unity. The resolution of 29 November 1947 included very clear imperatives. Among them, the UN pledged to prevent any attempt by either side to confiscate land that belonged to citizens of the other state, or the other national group – be it cultivated or uncultivated land, i.e., land that had lain fallow for about a year.

To the local UN emissaries’ credit, it can be said that they at least sensed things were going from bad to worse and were tying to push for a re-evaluation of the partition policy, but they took no action beyond watching and reporting the beginning of the ethnic cleansing. The UN had only limited access to Palestine, since the British authorities forbade an organised UN outfit to be present on the ground, thereby ignoring that part of the Partition Resolution that demanded the presence of a United Nations committee. Britain allowed the cleansing to take place, in front of the eyes of its soldiers and officials, during the Mandate period, which came to an end at midnight on 14 May 1948, and hampered the UN efforts to intervene in a way that might have saved a number of Palestinians. After 15 May, there was no excuse for the way the UN abandoned the people whose land they had divided and whose welfare and lives they had surrendered to the Jews who, since the late nineteenth century, wished to uproot them and take their place in the country they deemed as theirs.

I have no doubt a massacre took place in Tantura. I did not go out into the streets and shout it about. It is not exactly something to be proud of. But once the affair was publicized, one should tell the truth. After 52 years, the state of Israel is strong and mature enough to confront its past.

Eli Shimoni, senior officer in the Alexandroni Brigade,
Maariv
, 4 February 2001

W
ithin weeks of the end of the Mandate, the Jewish troops had reached the vast majority of the isolated Jewish settlements. Only two of these were lost to the Arab Legion because they were in the area that both sides, prior to May 1948, had agreed Jordan would occupy and annex, i.e., the West Bank.
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The Jordanians also insisted they should have at least half of Jerusalem, including the Old City that incorporated the Muslim sanctuaries, but also the Jewish quarter, but since there was no prior agreement on this they had to fight for it. They did so bravely and successfully. It was the only time the two sides were engaged in battle, and stands in complete contrast to the inaction the Arab Legion displayed when their units were stationed near Palestinian villages and towns the Israeli army had begun occupying, cleansing, and destroying.

When Ben-Gurion convened the Consultancy on 11 May he asked his colleagues to assess the possible implications of a more aggressive Jordanian campaign in the future. The bottom line of that meeting can be found in a letter Ben-Gurion sent to the commanders of the Hagana brigades telling them that the Legion’s more offensive intentions should not distract their troops from their principal tasks: ‘the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet’ (he used the noun
bi‘ur
, which means either ‘cleansing the leaven’ in Passover or ‘root out’, ‘eliminate’).
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Their calculation proved to be right. Although the Jordanian army was the strongest of the Arab forces and thus would have formed the most formidable foe for the Jewish state, it was neutralised from the very first day of the Palestine war by the tacit alliance King Abdullah had made with the Zionist movement. It is no wonder that the Arab Legion’s English Commander-in-Chief, Glubb Pasha, dubbed the 1948 war in Palestine the ‘Phony War’. Glubb was not only fully aware of the restrictions Abdullah had imposed on the Legion’s actions, he was privy to the general pan-Arab consultations and preparations. Like the British military advisers of the various Arab armies – and there were many of them – he knew that the groundwork of the other Arab armies for a rescue operation in Palestine was quite ineffective – ‘pathetic’ some of his colleagues called it – and that included the ALA.
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The only change we find in the overall Arab conduct once the Mandate had ended was in the rhetoric. The drums of war were now sounding louder and more boisterously than before but they failed to cover the inaction, disarray and confusion that prevailed. The situation may have differed from one Arab capital to the next, but the overall picture was quite uniform. In Cairo, the government only decided to send troops to Palestine at the very last moment, two days before the end of the Mandate. The 10,000 troops it had set aside included a large contingent, almost fifty per cent, of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers. The members of this political movement – vowing to restore Egypt and the Arab world to the Orthodox ways of Islam – regarded Palestine as a crucial battlefield in the struggle against European imperialism. But in the 1940s the Brotherhood also regarded the Egyptian government as a collaborator with this imperialism, and when its more extreme members resorted to violence in their campaign, thousands of them were imprisoned. These were now released in May 1948 so that they could join the Egyptian expedition, but of course they had had no military training and, for all their fervour, were no match for the Jewish forces.
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Syrian forces were better trained and their politicians more committed, but only a few years after their own independence, following the French Mandate, the small number of troops the Syrians dispatched to Palestine performed so badly that even before the end of May 1948, the Consultancy had begun to consider expanding the Jewish state’s borders on its northeastern flank into Syria proper by annexing the Golan Heights.
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Even smaller and less committed were the Lebanese units, which for most of the war were happy to remain on their side of the border with Palestine, where they reluctantly tried to defend the adjacent villages.

The Iraqi troops formed the last and most intriguing component of the all-Arab effort. They numbered a few thousand and had been ordered by their government to accept the Jordanian guideline: that is, not to attack the Jewish state, but just to defend the area allocated to King Abdullah, namely the West Bank. They were stationed in the northern part of the West Bank. However, they defied their politicians’ orders and tried to play a more effective role. Because of this, fifteen villages in Wadi Ara, on the road between Afula and Hadera, were able to hold out and thus escape expulsion (they were ceded to Israel by the Jordanian government in the summer of 1949 as part of a bilateral armistice agreement).

For three weeks these Arab units – some provoked into action by their politicians’ hypocrisy, others deterred by it – succeeded in entering and holding on to the areas the UN Partition Resolution had allocated to the Arab state. In a few places they were able to encircle isolated Jewish settlements located there and occupy them for a while, only to lose them again within a few days.

The Arab troops that entered Palestine quickly found out they had over-stretched their supply lines, which meant they stopped getting ammunition for their antiquated and quite often malfunctioning arms. Their officers then discovered that there was no coordinating hand between the various national armies, and that even when supply routes were open, the weaponry in their home countries was running out. Weapons were scarce since the Arab armies’ main suppliers were Britain and France, who had declared an arms embargo on Palestine. This crippled the Arab armies but hardly affected the Jewish forces, who found a willing furnisher in the Soviet Union and in its new Eastern bloc.
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As for the lack of coordination, this was the inevitable result of the decision by the Arab League to appoint King Abdullah as the supreme commander of the all-Arab army with an Iraqi
general as the acting commander. While the Jordanians never looked back at those days of May, June and July of 1948, when they had done all they could to undermine the general Arab effort, the Iraqi revolutionary rulers who came to power in 1958 brought their generals to trial for their role in the catastrophe.