The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (33 page)

State Department Report on Kosovo, 1999.

In 1948, 85% of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees.

It is estimated that there were more than 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons at the beginning of 2003.

Badil Resource Centre: Facts and figures.

T
he month of October began rather frustratingly for the Israeli cleansing forces. The Galilee, especially in its upper parts, was still controlled by Palestinian volunteers reinforced by al-Qawqji’s ALA units. The latter could still be found in many villages in the northern Galilee – all part of the UN-designated Arab state – where they tried to wage a miniguerilla warfare against the armed Jewish forces, mainly in the form of sniper fire at convoys and troops. But theirs was an ineffective kind of resistance, largely in vain. October also saw the final futile attempt by
regular forces from Lebanon to add their firepower in a last pathetic gesture of Arab solidarity as they shelled one Jewish settlement, Manara, high up in the Galilee. Down south in the lower Galilee the Arab volunteers were left with one artillery gun in Ilabun. It symbolised their imminent and total collapse.

Whatever resistance may still have existed was wiped out during the onslaught of Operation Hiram in the middle of the month. Hiram was the name of the biblical king of Tyre, which was one of the targets of this ambitious and expansionist scheme: Israel’s takeover of the upper Galilee and Southern Lebanon. With intensive artillery and air force attacks, Jewish troops captured both in a matter of two weeks.

These two weeks now rank, together with the heroic struggle to save Wadi Ara, as one of the most impressive chapters in the history of the Palestinian resistance during the Nakba. The Israeli air force dropped about 10,000 leaflets calling upon the villagers to surrender, although not promising them any immunity from expulsion. None of the villages did and, almost as a whole, came out to confront the Israeli forces.

Thus, for a brief period, in courageous defiance of the vastly superior Israeli military power, Palestinian villages, for the first time since the ethnic cleansing started, turned themselves into strongholds, standing up to the besieging Israeli troops. A mixture of local youth and the remnants of the ALA were entrenched for a week or two, holding out with what meagre arms they had before being overpowered by the assailants. Fifty such brave men defended Ramaysh; others could be found in Deir al-Qasi, most of them in fact not locals but refugees from Saffuriyya, vowing not to be displaced again. They were commanded by a man called Abu Hammud from the ALA. Unfortunately, we only have the names of a few officers from the Israeli intelligence files and oral histories, such as Abu Ibrahim who defended Kfar Manda, but, like the Iraqi officers mentioned in the Wadi Ara campaign, they should all be written into the Palestinian, and universal, book of heroes who did everything they could to try to prevent ethnic cleansing from taking place. Israel, and the West in general, refers to them anonymously and collectively as Arab insurgents or terrorists – as they have done with the
Palestinians who fought within the PLO until the 1980s, and others who led the two uprisings against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1987 and 2000. I have no illusion that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonises a people who have been colonised, expelled and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonised, expelled and occupied them.

This handful of warriors of a sort were inevitably defeated, subjected to heavy bombardments from the air and fierce ground attacks. The ALA volunteers withdrew first, after which the local villagers decided to surrender, quite often through UN mediation. But a distingushing feature of this phase in the Nakba was that the withdrawal of the volunteers, who by now had already spent ten months in Palestine, only came about after they had desperately fought to defend the villages, quite often disobeying orders from their headquarters to leave: four hundred such volunteers lost their lives in those days in October.

The Israeli air bombardments were massive and caused a considerable amount of ‘collateral damage’ to the Palestinian villages. Some villages suffered more than others from heavy pounding: Rama, Suhmata, Malkiyya and Kfar Bir‘im. Only Rama was left intact; the other three were occupied and destroyed.

Most of the villages in the upper Galilee were seized in a single day at the end of October: Deir Hanna, Ilabun, Arraba, Iqrit, Farradiyya, Mi’ilya, Khirbat Irribin, Kfar Inan, Tarbikha, Tarshiha, Mayrun, Safsaf, Sa‘sa, Jish, Fassuta, and Qaddita. The list is long and includes another ten villages. Some villagers were evicted, some were allowed to stay.

The main question about those days is no longer why villages were expelled, but rather why some were allowed to remain, obviously almost always as a result of the decision made by a local commander. Why was Jish left intact and nearby Qaddita and Mayrun expelled by force? And why was Rama spared, while nearby Safsaf was totally demolished? It is hard to tell and much of what follows is based on speculation.

Located on the well-travelled road between Acre and Safad, the village of Rama was already overcrowded, having earlier taken in a large number of refugees from other villages. The size of the village, but quite possibly its large Druze community, were two factors that probably influenced the local decision not to expel its population. However, even for villages that were allowed to stay, scores, sometimes hundreds, of their inhabitants
were imprisoned in POW camps or expelled to Lebanon. In fact, the Hebrew noun
tihur
, ‘cleansing’, assumed new meanings in October. It still described, as before, the total expulsion and destruction of a village, but it could now also represent other activities, such as selective search-and-expulsion operations.

While Israel’s divide-and-rule policy proved effective in the case of the Druze, to whom it promised not only immunity but also arms as rewards for their collaboration, the Christian communities were less ‘cooperative’. Israeli troops at first routinely deported them together with the Muslims, but then started transferring them to transit camps in the central coastal areas. In October, Muslims rarely remained long in these camps but were ‘transported’ – in the language of the Israeli army – to Lebanon. But Christians were now offered a different deal. In return for a vow of allegiance to the Jewish state, they were allowed to return to their villages for a short time. To their credit, most of the Christians refused to participate willingly in such a selection process. As a result, the army soon meted out the same treatment to Christian as to Muslim villages where they did not have a Druze population.

Instead of waiting to be deported, imprisoned or killed, many villagers simply ran away. Heavy bombardments in advance of the occupation precipitated the flight of many villagers, varying in numbers from case to case. But in most instances, the majority of the people bravely stayed put until they were forcibly uprooted. Additionally, it would appear that during the very last days of October the ‘cleansing’ stamina of the Israeli troops was beginning to wane, because villages with large populations were eventually allowed to stay. This may help explain why Tarshiha, Deir Hanna and Ilabun are still intact today.

Or rather, half of the people of Ilabun are still with us today: the other half of the original population live in refugee camps in Lebanon. Those who were allowed to resettle in the village went through horrific experiences. During the occupation, the villagers had taken refuge in Ilabun’s two churches. The frightened community crowded inside the small church buildings, cowering at the entrances as they were forced to listen to a long ‘speech’ by the Israeli commander of the operation. A sadistic and capricious person, he told the besieged villagers that he blamed them for the mutilation of two Jewish bodies, for which he instantly retaliated by mowing down several young men in front of the horrified
congregation. The rest of the people were then forcibly evicted, apart from the men between the ages of ten and fifty who were led away as prisoners of war.
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At first, everyone the village was expelled, and started making their way in a long column marching towards the Lebanese border, several of the villagers dying on the way. Then the Israeli commander changed his mind and ordered the Christians, who made up half the deportees, to turn back along the same painful and arduous route they had just taken through the rocky mountains of the Galilee. Seven hundred and fifty people were thus allowed to return to their village.

The question of why certain villages were allowed to remain is perplexing, but equally hard to understand is why the Israeli forces subjected certain villages and not others to treatment that proved exceptionally savage. Why, for example, from all the villages conquered in the final days of October were Sa‘sa and Safsaf exposed to such barbarity while others were exempted from it?

As mentioned earlier, in February 1948 Jewish troops had perpetrated a massacre in the village of Sa‘sa that ended in the killing of fifteen villagers, including five children. Sa‘sa is located on the main road to Mount Myarun (today Meron), the highest mountain peak in Palestine. After it had been occupied, the soldiers of Brigade Seven ran amok, firing randomly at anyone in the houses and on the streets. Besides the fifteen villagers killed, they left behind them a large number of wounded. The troops then demolished all the houses, apart from a few that the members of Kibbutz Sasa, built on the ruins of the village, took over for themselves after the forced eviction of their original owners. The chronicle of what happened in Sa‘sa in 1948 cannot easily be constructed from the archival material, but there is a highly active community of survivors bent on preserving their testimonies for posterity. Most of the refugees live in Naher al-Barid, a refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon; some are in Rashidiyya camp near Tyre, and others, mostly from a single clan, live in Ghazzawiyya. A smaller community also resides in the Ayn Hilwa refugee camp in southern Lebanon, while I met a few of the survivors now living in the village of Jish, in the Galilee.
²
They find it difficult to revisit the horrible events surrounding the
occupation of their village. Though more information needs to be gathered before we can reconstruct exactly how events unfolded in Sa‘sa, the story they tell does indicate, as in the case of the survivors of Tantura, that the Israeli troops perpetrated a massacre in the village.

We know more about Safsaf. Muhammad Abdullah Edghaim was born 15 years before the Nakba. He had attended elementary school in the village until the seventh grade and had completed his first year in Safad’s high school when the city fell into Jewish hands in May. No longer able to attend school, he was at home when a mixed unit of Jewish and Druze soldiers entered his village on 29 October 1948.

Their arrival had been preceded by heavy bombardment that had killed, among others, one of Galilee’s best known singers, Muhammad Mahmnud Nasir Zaghmout. He died when a shell hit a group of villagers working in the vineyards to the west of the village. The young boy witnessed the singer’s family trying to carry his body to the village, but they had to abandon the attempt due to the heavy shelling.

Every one of the defenders of Safsaf, among them ALA volunteers, was waiting, for some reason, for a Jewish attack to arrive from the east, but it came from the west and the village was quickly overrun. The following morning the people were ordered to assemble in the village square. The familiar procedure for identifying ‘suspects’ now took place, this time also involving the Druze soldiers, and a large number were picked out from the captured population. Seventy of the unfortunate men were taken out, blindfolded and then moved to a remote spot and summarily shot. Israeli archival documents confirm this case.
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The rest of the villagers were then ordered to leave. Unable to collect even their most meagre personal possessions, they were driven out, with the Israeli troops firing shots above their heads, towards the nearby border with Lebanon.

The oral testimonies, unlike the Israeli military archives, tell of even worse atrocities. There is very little reason to doubt these eyewitness accounts, as so many of them have been corroborated by other sources for other cases. Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.
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A few people were left behind, as in Tantura, to collect and bury the dead – several elderly men and five boys. Safsaf in Arabic means ‘weeping willow’. Mahmoud Abdulah Edghaim, our main source for the atrocities, is today an old man, still living in the refugee camp of Ayn Hilwah. His little
hut is surrounded by the many weeping willows he planted when he first arrived there almost sixty years ago. This is all that remains of Safsaf.

Bulayda was the last village taken during Operation Hiram. It was left until the end as its people proved steadfast in their determination to protect their homes. It was very close to the Lebanese border and Lebanese soldiers crossed the fence and fought alongside the villagers – probably the only significant Lebanese contribution to the defence of the Galilee. For ten days, the village withstood repeated assaults and raids. In the end, realising the hopelessness of their situation, the population fled even before the Israeli soldiers moved in: they did not want to undergo the horrors the people of Safsaf had experienced.

By 31 October, the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army.

In November and December, some cleansing activity continued in the Galilee, but it took the form of what the Israelis called ‘mopping up operations’. These were in essence ‘second-thought’ operations to cleanse villages that had not originally been targeted. They were added to the list of villages to be evicted because Israel’s political elite wanted to eradicate the unmistakably ‘Arabic’ character of the Galilee. But today, despite all of Israel’s efforts to ‘Judaize’ the Galilee – beginning with direct expulsions in the 1940s, military occupation in the 1960s, massive confiscation of land in the 1970s, and a huge official Judaization settlement effort in the 1980s – it is still the only area in Palestine that has retained its natural beauty, its Middle Eastern flavour and its Palestinian culture. Since half the population is Palestinian, the ‘demographic balance’ prevents many Israeli Jews from thinking of the region as their ‘own’, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century.