The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (37 page)

As for your demand, sir, that I will make sure ‘that all the commodities required by our army, air force and navy will be handed over to the people in charge and taken out of Jaffa as fast as possible,’ I can inform you that as of 15 May, 1948 an average load of 100 trucks a day is taken out of Jaffa. The port is ready for operation. The storehouses were emptied, and the goods were taken out.
¹⁵

The same officials who pillaged these food stores promised the Palestinian population in Haifa and other occupied cities that their community centres, religious sites and secular establishments would not be ransacked or plundered. The people soon discovered that this was a false pledge when their mosques and churches were profaned and their convents and schools vandalised. In growing despair, Captain F. Marschal, one of the UN observers, reported back to the organisation that ‘the Jews violated frequently the guarantee given several times by the Jewish authorities to respect all buildings belonging to the religious community.’
¹⁶

Jaffa was also a particular victim of house robberies that took place in broad daylight. The looters took furniture, clothes and anything useful for the Jewish immigrants that were streaming into the country. UN observers were convinced that the plundering was also a means of preventing Palestinian refugees from returning, which fitted the overall rationale of the Israeli High Command that was not afraid to resort cold-bloodedly to brutal punitive action so as to push forward their strategic policies.

As the pretext for their robbery and looting campaigns the Israeli forces often gave ‘search for weapons’. The real or imaginary existence of weapons also triggered worse atrocities, as these inspections were frequently accompanied by beatings and inevitably ended in mass arrests: ‘Many people arrested for no reason at all,’ Yitzhak Chizik, the military governor of Jaffa, wrote to Ben-Gurion.
¹⁷

The level of ransacking in Jaffa reached such intensity that even Yitzhak Chizik felt he had to complain, in a letter on 5 June 1948 to Israel’s Minister of Finance, Eliezer Kaplan, that he could no longer control the looting. He would continue to protest, but when in the end of July he sensed his remonstrations were totally ignored, he resigned, stating that he surrendered to the uncontrollable ongoing crusade of pillage and robbery.
¹⁸
Most of his reports, which are to be found in the Israeli state archives, are censored, particularly passages relating to the abuse of the local people by Israeli soldiers. In one of these, not properly removed, we find Chizik clearly taken aback by the unlimited brutality of the troops: ‘They do not stop beating people,’ he writes.

Chizik was no angel himself. He did order the occasional demolition of houses and instructed his troops to torch a number of Palestinian shops, but these were punitive actions he wanted to control, that would bolster his self-image as sovereign master in the occupied domain he ruled: ‘It is
regrettable,’ he wrote in his letter to Kaplan, but he could no longer tolerate ‘the attitude of the soldiers in cases where I have given clear orders not to set fire to a house or a shop; not only do they ignore it, they make fun of me in front of the Arabs.’ He also criticised the official pillage that went on under the auspices of two gentlemen, a Mr Yakobson and a Mr Presiz, who allowed ‘looting of many things the army does not need.’
¹⁹

The High Command sent Abraham Margalit to check into these complaints, who reported back in June 1948: ‘There are many violations of discipline, especially in the attitude to the Arabs (beating and torture) and looting which emanate more from ignorance than malice.’ As Margalit explains himself, it was this ‘ignorance’ that led the soldiers to set aside special locations ‘where they kept and tortured Arabs.’
²⁰

This prompted a visit to Jaffa that same month by Israel’s Minister of Minorities, Bechor Shitrit. Born in Tiberias, this relatively dovish Israeli politician had shown an empathy towards the possibility of Jewish– Palestinian co-existence in the new state. He had served as judge in the British Mandatory and years later would become Minister of Justice. Shitrit was a token Mizrahi minister in an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, i.e., Eastern European, government and as such had been ‘promoted’ at first to deal with the most undesirable job in the government: the Arabs.

Shitrit developed personal relations with some of the notables who had remained in Jaffa after the occupation and headed the Palestinian community there, such as Nicola Sa’ab and Ahmad Abu Laben. Although he listened attentively in June 1948 when they beseeched him to lift at least the more appalling features of life under military occupation, and admitted to them that their complaints were valid, it took time before anything was done.

The notables told Shitrit that the way Israeli troops broke into individual houses was totally unnecessary as they, as members of the local national committee, had the keys people who had been evacuated had left with them, and they were ready to hand them in to the army; but the soldiers preferred to break in. Little did they know that after Shitrit left, some of the same people were arrested for ‘being in possession of illegal property’: the same keys to the empty houses they had mentioned.
²¹
Three weeks later Ahmad Abu Laben protested to Shitrit that not much had changed since they last met: ‘There is not one house or shop which was not broken into. The goods were taken from the port and stores. Food commodities were taken from the
inhabitants.’
²²
Abu Laben had been running a factory in the city together with a Jewish partner, but this did not save him. All the machines were removed and the factory was looted.

Indeed, the scope of both the official confiscation and private looting all over urban Palestine was so widespread that local commanders were unable to control it. On 25 June, the government decided to put some order into the looting and confiscation afflicting Jerusalem. David Abulafya, a local citizen, was made responsible for ‘confiscation and appropriation’. His main problem, he reported to Ben-Gurion, was that ‘the security forces and the militias continue to confiscate without permission.’
²³

That the Israelis had more than one way to imprison people or abuse their most basic rights can be seen from the experiences of the small community of Palestinians left in Haifa after Jewish troops cleansed the city on 23 April 1948. Their story is unique, but only in its details: in general it exemplifies the trials and tribulations of the Palestinian minority as a whole under occupation.

On 1 July 1948, in the evening, the Israeli military commander of the city summoned the leaders of the Palestinian community in Haifa to his headquarters. The purpose of the meeting was to order these notables, who represented the 3–5,000 Palestinians left behind after the approximately 70,000 of the city’s Arab residents had been expelled, to ‘facilitate’ their transfer from the various parts of the city where they were living into one single neighborhood, the crammed and small quarter of Wadi Nisnas, one of the city’s poorest areas. Some of those ordered to leave their residences on the upper slopes of Mt Carmel, or even on top of the mountain itself, had been living there for many years among the Jewish newcomers. The military commander now ordered all of them to make sure the move would be completed by 5 July 1948. The shock among the Palestinian leaders and notables was instant and deep. Many of them belonged to the Communist Party that had supported partition and hoped that now the fighting was over, life would return to normal under the auspices of a Jewish state whose creation they had not opposed.
²⁴

‘I don’t understand: is this a military command? Let us look at the conditions of these people. I cannot see any reason, least of all a military one, that justifies such a move,’ protested Tawfiq Tubi, later a member of the
Israeli Knesset for the Communist Party. He ended his protestation by saying: ‘We demand that the people stay in their homes.’
²⁵
Another participant, Bulus Farah, shouted, ‘This is racism,’ and called the move, appropriately, ‘ghettoising the Palestinians in Haifa.’
²⁶

Even the dry tone of the document cannot hide the dismissive and indifferent reaction of the Israeli military commander. One can almost hear the clipped sound of his voice as he told them:

I can see that you are sitting here and [think you can] give me advice, but I invited you in here to hear the orders of the High Command and carry them out! I am not involved in politics and do not deal with it. I am just obeying orders . . . I am fulfilling orders and I have to make sure that this order is executed by the 5th of July . . . If you don’t do it, I will do it myself. I am a soldier.
²⁷

After he had finished his long monologue, another of the Palestinian notables, Shehadeh Shalah asked: ‘And if someone owns a house, does he have to leave?’ The military commander replied: ‘Everyone has to leave.’
²⁸
The notables then learned that the inhabitants would themselves have to cover the cost of their enforced transfer.

Victor Khayat tried to reason with the Israeli commander that it would take more than one day for all the people to be notified which would not leave them much time. The commander replied that four days was ‘plenty of time’. The person who transcribed the meeting noted that at that point the Palestinian representatives shouted as one man: ‘But this is a very short time,’ to which the commander retorted: ‘I cannot change it.’
²⁹

But this was not the end of their troubles. In the area to which they were confined, Wadi Nisnas – where today the municipality of Haifa annually celebrates the convergence of Hanuka, Christmas and Id al-Fitr as ‘The Feast of all Feasts for Peace and Coexistence’ – people continued to be robbed and abused, mostly by Irgun and Stern Gang members, but the Hagana also took an active part in the assaults. Ben-Gurion condemned their behaviour, but did nothing to stop it: He was content with recording it in his diary.
³⁰

We have three kinds of sources that report on rape, and thus know that severe cases of rape did take place. It remains more difficult to form an idea
of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish troops in this way. Our first source is the international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross. They never submitted a collective report, but we do have short and concise accounts of individual cases. Thus, for instance, very soon after Jaffa was taken, a Red Cross official, de Meuron, reported how Jewish soldiers had raped a girl and killed her brother. He remarked in general that as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners, their women were left at the mercy of the Israelis. Yitzhak Chizik wrote to Kaplan in the letter mentioned above: ‘And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have already heard.’ In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how ‘a group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the mother and raped the daughter.’

We know of course more about cases in places where outside observers were present, but this does not mean women were not raped elsewhere. Another Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9 December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter. Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant, to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade Seven. It is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed.
³¹

The second source is the Israeli archives, which only cover cases in which the rapists were brought to trial. David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: ‘Rape Cases’. One of these records the incident Chizik had reported to him: ‘a case in Acre where soldiers wanted to rape a girl. They killed the father and wounded the mother, and the officers covered for them. At least one soldier raped the girl.’
³²

Jaffa seems to have been a hothouse for the cruelty and war crimes of the Israeli troops. One particular battalion, Battalion 3 – commanded by the same person who had been in charge when its soldiers committed massacres in Khisas and Sa‘sa, and cleansed Safad and its environs – was so savage in its behaviour that its soldiers were suspected of being involved in most of the rape cases in the city, and the High Command decided it best to withdraw them from the town. However, other units were no less guilty of molesting women in the first three to four months of the occupation. The worst period
was towards the end of the first truce (July 8) when even Ben-Gurion became so apprehensive about the pattern of behaviour that emerged among the soldiers in the occupied cities, especially the private looting and the rape cases, that he decided not to allow certain army units to enter Nazareth after his troops had taken the town during the ‘ten-day’ war.
³³

Our third source is the oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims. It is very difficult to get the facts in the former case and almost impossible, of course, in the latter. But their stories have already helped shed light on some of the most appalling and inhuman crimes in the war that Israel waged against the Palestinian people.

The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper
Ha’aretz
publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing.