The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (27 page)

It took more than a day to defeat Bassa, because of the resistance from the village militiamen and some ALA volunteers. If the orders to be extra harsh with the village in revenge for the attack on the Jewish convoy near Yechiam had not been enough, its resistance was seen as another reason to ‘punish’ the village (that is, beyond simply expelling its people). This pattern would recur: villages that proved hard to subdue had to be ‘penalised’. As with all traumatic events in the lives of human beings, some of the worst atrocities remain deeply engraved in the survivors’ memories. The victims’ family members guarded those recollections and passed them down through the generations. Nizar al-Hanna belonged to such a family, whose memories are based on the traumatic events witnessed by his grandmother:

My maternal grandmother was a teenager when Israeli troops entered Bassa and ordered all the young men to be lined up and executed in front of one of the churches. My grandmother watched as two of her brothers, one 21, the other 22 and recently married, were executed by the Hagana.
²⁴

The total destruction that followed the massacre spared a church in which the village’s Greek Orthodox Christians prayed, and a domed Muslim shrine that served the other half of the population. Today, one can still spot a few houses fenced off with barbed wire standing in an uncultivated field now expropriated by Jewish citizens. The village was so vast (25,000 dunam out of which 17,000 were cultivated) that its territory today includes a military airport, a kibbutz, and a development town. The more observant visitor cannot fail to notice the remains of an elaborate water system, which was the pride of the villagers and had been completed just before the place was wiped out.

The expulsion of so many villagers – whom the UN Partition Resolution had just transformed from citizens of the British Mandate into either citizens of the UN-designated Arab state or citizens of the Jewish state – went unnoticed by the UN. Consequently, despite the drama of the British withdrawal and the potential hitch of the Arab world sending units into Palestine, the business of ethnic cleansing continued without interruption. The leaders of the newly created State of Israel – still in the making – and its military commanders knew they had sufficient forces at their disposal to halt the incoming Arab units while continuing their relentless cleansing of the land. It was also obvious that in the following month, the capacity of the Jewish forces would reach new heights: in early June the orders sent down to the troops were even more far-reaching in both their geographical span and the ambitious quota of villages each brigade was now assigned to capture and destroy.

The Arab General Command, on the other hand, was quickly losing its grip. The Egyptian military generals had pinned their hopes on their airforce, but the aircraft they had sent in the crucial second half of May failed in most of their missions, apart from a few raids on Tel-Aviv. In June, the Egyptian and other Arab air forces were preoccupied elsewhere, their main mission limited to protecting the Arab regimes, rather than helping to rescue parts of Palestine.

I am not an expert in military history, nor is this the place to tackle the purely military aspects of the war, since the focus of this book is not on military strategies but on their outcomes, i.e., war crimes. Significantly, many military historians summing up the month of May have been particularly impressed with the performance of the Syrian army, which began its campaign in May 1948 and kept it up intermittently until December 1948. In fact, it did quite poorly. Only for three days, between 15 and 18 May, did Syrian artillery, tanks and infantry, with the occasional help of their air force, constitute any kind of threat to the Israeli forces. A few days later their efforts had already become more sporadic and less effective. After the first truce, they were on their way back home.

By the end of May 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was progressing according to plan. Assessing the potential strength of the forces eventually sent by the Arab League into Palestine, Ben-Gurion and his advisers concluded – as they had already predicted a week after the Arab armies had moved into Palestine – that the all-Arab force could attack isolated Jewish
settlements marginally more effectively than the volunteers’ army could ever have done, but apart from this it was as ineffective and weak as the irregular and paramilitary troops that had come first.

This realisation created a euphoric mood, which is clearly reflected in the orders to the twelve brigades of the Israeli army to start considering the occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon. On 24 May, after Ben-Gurion had met with his advisers, in his diary entry he sounds triumphant and more power-hungry than ever before:

We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight – we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during Biblical times.
²⁵

On that same day, the Israeli army had received a large shipment of modern, brand new 0.45-calibre cannons from the Communist Eastern bloc. Israel now possessed artillery unmatched not only by the Arab troops inside Palestine, but by all the Arab armies put together. It should be noted that the Israeli Communist Party was instrumental in arranging this deal.

This meant the Consultancy could now put aside the initial worries it had had at the beginning of the ‘real war’ about the overall capacity of its army to manage both fronts effectively and comprehensively. Its members were now free to turn their attention to other issues more in line with the qualifications of the Orientalist section of the Consultancy, such as advising the leader on what to do with the small communities of Palestinians that had been left in the mixed towns. The solution they came up with was to have all these people moved into one particular neighbourhood in each town, deprive them of their freedom of movement, and put them under a military regime.

Finally, it may be useful to add that, during the month of May, the definitive infrastructure of the IDF was decided upon and, within it, the central place of the military regime (referred to in Hebrew as
Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzvai
) and Israel’s internal security services, the Shabak. The Consultancy was no longer needed. The machinery of ethnic cleansing was working on its own, propelled by its own momentum.

On the last day of May, Arab volunteers and some regular units made one final attempt to retake some of the villages that lay within the designated Arab state, but failed. The military power that confronted them was such that, except when challenged by a well-trained professional army like the Legion, it had no match. The Legion defended those parts of the West Bank that King Abdullah thought should be his trophy for not having entered the areas the Zionist movement had set its mind on for their Jewish state – a promise he kept until the end of the war. However, his army did pay a heavy price for the two sides’ failure to agree on the fate of Jerusalem, as most of the Jordanian soldiers killed in the war fell during the Legion’s successful bid for the eastern parts of the Holy City.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 13/2: Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 17/2: No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), 10 December 1948, the day before Resolution 194 declared the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

B
y the beginning of June, the list of villages obliterated included many that had until then been protected by nearby kibbutzim. This was the fate of several villages in the Gaza district: Najd, Burayr, Simsim, Kawfakha, Muharraqa and Huj. Their destruction appeared to have come as a genuine shock to nearby kibbutzim when they learned how these friendly villages had been savagely assaulted, their houses destroyed and all their people expelled.
¹
On the land of Huj, Ariel Sharon built his private residence, Havat Hashikmim, a ranch that covers 5000 dunam of the village’s fields.

Despite the ongoing negotiations by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, to broker a truce, the ethnic cleansing moved on unhindered.
With obvious satisfaction Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 5 June 1948, ‘We occupied today Yibneh (there was no serious resistance) and Qaqun. Here the cleansing [
tihur
] operation continues; have not heard from the other fronts.’ Indeed, by the end of May his diary had reflected a renewed interest in the ethnic cleansing. With the help of Yossef Weitz, he compiled a list of the names of the villages taken, the size of their lands and the number of people expelled, which he meticulously entered in his diary. The language is no longer guarded: ‘This is the list of the occupied and evicted [
mefunim
] villages.’ Two days later, he convened a meeting in his own house to assess how much money had meanwhile been looted from the banks of the ‘Arabs’, and how many citrus groves and other assets had been confiscated. Eliezer Kaplan, his minister of finance, persuaded him to authorise the confiscation of all Palestinian properties already taken in order to prevent the frenzied wrangling that was already threatening to break out between the predators who were waiting to swoop down on the spoils.

Dividing the booty was one matter that preoccupied the Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion was both an autocrat and a stickler for details, and was obsessive about questions of security, and his diary reflects other, miniscule problems that accompanied the systematic destruction of Palestine. In several entries he records conversations he had had with army officers about the shortage of TNT, created by the large number of individual houses the army was ordered to blow up under Plan D.
²

Like a ferocious storm gathering force, the Israeli troops no longer spared anyone in their destructive zeal. All means became legitimate, including burning down houses where dynamite had become scarce and torching the fields and remains of a Palestinian village they had attacked.
³
The escalation of the Israeli army’s cleansing operation was the outcome of a meeting of the new, reduced Consultancy, whose members had met on 1 June without Ben-Gurion. They later reported to the Prime Minister that villagers were trying to return to their homes, so they had decided to instruct the army to prevent this at all costs. To make sure that the more liberal-minded among his government members would not object to this policy, Ben-Gurion demanded prior approval, and was duly given
carte blanche
to proceed on 16 June 1948.
⁴

Increased callousness was also part of the Israeli response to a brief spurt of activity by the Arab armies in early June. The latter’s artillery
bombarded whatever was in range, and the Egyptian air force attacked Tel Aviv four or five times, scoring a direct hit on Ben-Gurion’s home on 4 June that caused only limited damage. The Israeli air force retaliated by shelling the Arab capitals, resulting in a considerable number of casualties, but the Arab effort to salvage Palestine was already running out of steam, mainly due to the Legion’s insistence that East Jerusalem should remain part of Jordan. The war lingered on: the division of labour between the Israeli forces on the different fronts, determined solely by Ben-Gurion, meant that the military effort on the Jewish side fell short of the impact it needed to gain the upper hand over the Jordanians. The fighting also persisted because of the tenacity the Egyptian volunteers displayed, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, who despite their poor equipment and lack of training succeeded in holding their lines in the Negev. The Egyptians were also able to hold on to the Palestinian town of Isdud on the coast and some inner enclaves in the Naqab (the Negev), as well as the villages south-west of Jerusalem, for quite some time. Realising they might have bitten off more than they could chew for the moment, the Israelis now accepted the offer by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, for a truce.

Demolition was a core part of the Israeli activities from the moment the truce went into effect (officially declared on 8 June, but in practice beginning on 11 June 1948, and to last four weeks). During the truce, the army embarked on the massive destruction of a number of expelled villages: Mazar in the south, Fayja near Petah Tikva, Biyar ’Adas, Misea, Hawsha, Sumiriyya and Manshiyya near Acre. Huge villages such as Daliyat al-Rawha, Butaymat and Sabbarin were destroyed in one day; many others were erased from the face of the earth by the time the truce ended on 8 July 1948.

All in all, the level of preparation the military command was engaged in during June for the next stages showed a growing confidence in the Israeli Army’s ability to continue not only its ethnic cleansing operations, but also its extension of the Jewish state beyond the seventy-eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine it had already occupied. Part of this confidence was due to the significant reinforcement of its air force. At the end of May, the
Israelis were only disadvantaged in one area: air power. In June, however, they received a sizable shipment of new aeroplanes to supplement their rather primitive machines.

Operation ‘Yitzhak’ was launched on 1 June 1948 to attack and occupy Jenin, Tul-Karem and Qalqilya and capture the bridges on the Jordan River. As we saw, Jenin was attacked the previous month, but the Iraqi contingent guarding the city and its environs had successfully defended the area.
⁵
Although Israeli air operations were primarily limited to raids along the state’s borders at this time, in the military archives one can find orders for the arial bombardment of Jenin and Tul-Karem, as well as other villages on the Palestine’s border. From July onwards, aeroplanes were used remorselessly in the cleansing operations, helping to force the villagers into a mass exodus – and indiscriminately targeting anyone unable to take cover in time.