Some Recent Events in the Context of the Past
Readers of this series will know that after Israel’s unilateral violation of the first phase of the cease-fire agreement in early March, the IDF has resumed its genocidal attacks on the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank. In another demonstration of the rank disparity between the treatment of Jews and Arabs in Israel’s model “democracy,” at the end of March the Palestinian co-director of an Academy Award winning documentary was brutally assaulted outside his home in the West Bank by both fanatical Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers, who held a gun to his head. An arrest followed, not of the assailants, but of the victim of the attack.
On March 23, the IDF added to its already virtuosic repertoire of war crimes the mass execution of 15 paramedics and humanitarian relief workers attempting to rescue Palestinians from the rubble to which Gaza has been reduced by the 2,000-pound bombs dropped in Israeli air strikes on residential neighborhoods for the past eighteen months. With Netanyahu’s total blockade having prevented humanitarian aid trucks from entering Gaza for the past 50 days, the deliberate starvation of the population has become another weapon in Israel’s genocidal arsenal. As UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X, “Hunger is spreading & deepening, deliberate & manmade. Two million people: a majority of women & children are undergoing collective punishment.”
As reported in Part One of this series, the IDF has deliberately targeted hospitals with its missiles and bombs and medics with its snipers’ bullets. Padding its grim resumé of attacks against institutions and volunteers dedicated to relieving the suffering of the wounded and dying, the IDF recently launched a missile that struck the last functioning hospital in Gaza City early Palm Sunday morning, a hospital administered by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem which had been operating for the past 143 years. At least three patients died as a result of having to be evacuated from the hospital’s demolished ICU and emergency department, including one child being treated for head injuries. The adjacent St. Philips Church was also heavily damaged.
On Holy Saturday, the square in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (which is normally full of Orthodox Christian worshippers bearing candles) was barricaded by Israeli police. Thousands of pilgrims to the ancient site were required to line up at multiple police checkpoints, where they were subjected to long delays, verbal abuse, and physical harassment. According to a report filed by the World Council of Churches, during their detainment, Christians were “pushed, beaten, and subjected to derogatory remarks. At least three individuals were arrested.” Witnesses also testify to Christians being threatened by Israeli police brandishing guns.
Meanwhile, fanatical Jewish supremacist members of Netanyahu’s coalition since 2022, such as Bentzi Gopstein, have referred to Christians as “blood-sucking vampires” and “the Christian church” as “our deadly centuries-old enemy,” calling for the expulsion of Christians from Palestine and the burning of their churches. As we are reminded again, the Zionist aspiration to ethnically cleanse Palestine of all non-Jews does not discriminate between Muslims and Christians.
Ben-Gvir, another fanatical Zionist in Netanyahu’s cabinet, has recently defended spitting on Christians—which has become a common practice in both Jerusalem and amongst the ultra-orthodox settlers of the West Bank—as a “Jewish tradition.” Shakespeare’s Shylock, who protests that he has been spat upon, might have been consoled to know that this boorish and degrading insult was also a “Jewish tradition.” But Jewish anti-Christianism has never possessed the mystique of Christian antisemitism, which has become a word of mana, and is generally construed as an autonomous reflex, abstracted (like the events of October 7, 2023) from the causal logic of history.
I mention these latest atrocities as an apologia of sorts for this series, in which I have attempted to chronicle a longstanding pattern of massacres and expulsions carried out by the Jewish brigades in their campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous Arab population in the years prior to and after the declaration of the modern state of Israel in May, 1948. Little, if anything, has changed in the merciless and stiff-necked ethos of Zionism since its origins; the ongoing violence in the West Bank, incursions into south Lebanon and Syria, and massacres in Gaza represent, that is, another resumption of the Greater Israel project as foreseen by Herzl and implemented by Ben-Gurion, for whom Zionism meant the usurpation of as much of Arab Palestine, with as few Arabs, as possible.
As an aside, it may be edifying to recall that for seventy years the Soviet Union murdered, starved, and worked to death its own citizens and subject peoples, while the massacres, expulsions, blockades, and subjugation of the Arab population of Palestine have now reached their eighth decade, making the Jewish state the longest continuous occupying power of the present age.
From the End of World War II to U.N. Partition
During the Second World War, as Ilan Pappé observes, the Zionist leadership “became more keenly aware that the sole obstacle that stood in their way of successfully seizing the land was the British presence, not any Palestinian resistance.” At the same time, the Zionists were confident that Britain’s commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine (as prescribed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917) would override their concomitant but conflicting obligation under the Mandate’s charter to protect the rights and foster the establishment of an independent state for the indigenous Arab majority. Thus, in 1942, a meeting was convened at the Biltmore Hotel in New York where, as Avi Shlaim recounts, “the Zionist movement for the first time openly staked a claim to the whole of Mandatory Palestine.”
By the end of the war, the Jews had succeeded in acquiring only 5.8 percent of the land, but Ben-Gurion sought and found his military “opportunity” when, after a series of murderous terrorist attacks on the British by the Irgun, Stern Gang, and Haganah beginning in 1944, the governors of Mandatory Palestine—rather like another imperial governor nearly two thousand years before—decided to wash their hands of Jewish zealotry and violence.
In February of 1947, the British resolved to quit Palestine and hand the problem over to the recently-founded United Nations. In May of the same year, the U.N. appointed UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine), which met for nine months before issuing its final recommendation. As Pappé notes, none of the eleven legates of UNSCOP had the least experience with the Middle East, let alone the longstanding Zionist strategy for overcoming the Arab demographic impediment, and many of them arrived in Palestine only after having been adroitly lobbied by the Jewish Agency’s negotiators to visit the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps, lest contrition for the Holocaust fail to obtrude dispositively upon their deliberations.
In its preliminary report, however, UNSCOP acknowledged that the principle of self-determination which was an inherent imperative of the mandatory system “was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.” In fact, a minority of the Committee’s members tabled a proposal for a binational federal state, with a government to be elected on democratic lines. With its rejection, a just and potentially enduring solution to the conflict in the form of a pluralist democracy in Palestine lapsed forever after into abeyance.
Of course, a democratic government was incompatible with the Zionist project, whose very raison d’être had always been the abnegation of the indigenous Palestinian majority. And once a well-prepared Jewish delegation presented a coherent plan for partition, while the Arabs ineptly declined to suggest any alternative, the fate of the Palestinians was sealed.
UNSCOP’s final recommendation for the partition of Palestine was introduced and passed the U.N. General Assembly on November 29 (as Resolution 181), against the strenuous objections of the Arabs, who argued that it violated the principle of national sovereignty enshrined in the U.N. Charter, while scapegoating them for a Nazi genocide in which they had played no part.
| In 1945, according to an UNSCOP survey, the total population within the borders of Mandatory Palestine was 1,845,000, comprised of 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs. Despite the fact that the Jews constituted less than half of the Arab majority, and still occupied only 7 percent of the total area of Palestine, the Partition Plan granted the new Jewish state more than 55 percent of the land. |
In spite of its beneficent terms, Ben-Gurion’s acceptance of partition was nonetheless predicated on its being a provisional stage in the Zionists’ original design for the appropriation of as much of Palestine as possible. As he wrote in his Diary on October 7, 1947—that is, before the U.N. Partition Plan was formally adopted—there are “no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish State”; and again on December 3, “Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement—not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements.”
The only “final arrangement” apparently credited by the Zionists was the Jews’ immutable “historical right” to land they had conquered with the help of the “mighty arm of the Lord” more than three thousand years ago. Exploiting the Palestinians’ rejection of partition as a justification—another “opportunity,” one might say—for the violent expulsions to come, Ben-Gurion went on to insist that the borders of the Jewish state “will be determined by force and not by partition resolution.”
The Nakba
According to the canonical narrative of Israel’s founding, the occasional skirmishes during the conflict of 1947 – 1949 were attributable to a cycle of violence oscillating between the poles of Arab attacks on Jewish settlements and Jewish retaliation; but by mid-December of 1947 it had already become apparent that the former was a pretext for implementing the final phase in the perennial Zionist strategy for the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine, and the Judaization of the “Promised Land.”
From December of 1947 to January of 1949, the Haganah and its paramilitary brigades (the Palmach, Stern Gang, and Irgun) demolished, depopulated, and occupied at least 530 Arab villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods, carrying out in the process approximately 50 massacres of unarmed civilians, executions of prisoners of war, and indiscriminate Gestapo-like searches and murders of suspected resistors or collective punishments of those deemed guilty by association. By most estimates, between 800,000 and one million Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Most were deported to tented refugee encampments in neighboring Arab countries or outside the borders of the new Jewish state, where they remained dependent upon humanitarian aid dispensed by the U.N. Others were caged in barbaric internment pens or immured in urban ghettos, in either case, under stringent Israeli military rule.
Meanwhile, what remained of their towns and villages was bulldozed to the ground, so that over the rubble new Jewish settlements could be erected, then assigned Hebrew names (after their supposed originals in biblical Israel), thus expunging from Israeli collective memory the distinct Palestinian civilization and identity that had perdured for centuries, while the right of return upon which the international community insisted was repeatedly denied by the nascent Israeli state.
The Ethnic Cleansing Begins
As recounted by Pappé, as early as September, 1947, about 70,000 of the Palestinian “notables” had already begun to flee in fear of the looming conflict and in the vain hope of returning after the storm had subsided. Twelve days after the ratification of the U.N. Partition Resolution, the expulsions of the inhabitants of Arab towns and villages commenced.
On December 10, 1947 (less than two weeks after Partition), Ben-Gurion met with his “Consultancy” and approved the systematic campaign of intimidation and ethnic cleansing that was to begin the next day. The plan called for well-trained and heavily armed brigades of the Haganah to storm defenceless Palestinian villages in the middle of the night, stay for a few hours, separate males between the ages of ten and fifty, and either execute or imprison them, and shoot those who attempted to escape from their homes.
The first village was Deir Ayyub, which had about 500 residents, and was besieged by Jewish troops while villagers were celebrating the opening of a small school for which they had finally raised enough money to hire its only teacher. Snipers fired randomly into the festive crowds and at several houses. The village was attacked three more times before it was forcibly evacuated and demolished in April, 1948.
On December 18, the Palmach attacked the village of Khisas (with a population of about 300 Muslims and 100 Christians who had cohabited peacefully for centuries). As Pappé describes the assault, Jewish troops “randomly started blowing up houses at the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed…”
Israeli historian Benny Morris recounts the massacre at Balad al-Shaykh after midnight of December 31 by a Palmach brigade whose orders—in another eery echo of Yahweh’s command to Joshua—“were to ‘kill as many as possible’…. The raiders moved from house to house, pulling out men and executing them. Sometimes they threw grenades into houses and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire. There were several dozen dead, including women and children.” Pappé puts the number of victims of the massacre at 60.
The first urban center to be targeted was Haifa, a mixed town whose 75,000 Palestinian residents were subjected to a campaign of terror staged from the Jewish settlement that was perched on the heights above them. The day after Partition and through December, 1947, Jewish troops relentlessly fired upon them from their superior position, rolled barrels full of explosives down into the Palestinian quarter, detonated cars loaded with explosives which were ostensibly sent for repair to the garages of unsuspecting Palestinian mechanics, and ignited rivers of fuel with which they had inundated the roads. The panic-stricken residents who fled their homes were then cut down with machine-gun fire.
Shortly thereafter, the Irgun lobbed a bomb into a crowd of Palestinians on their way to work at a local oil refinery. “Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun,” as Pappé observes off-handedly. Dropping 2,000-pound bombs from American fighter jets on residential neighborhoods continues to the specialty of the IDF today.
On December 31 (the same day as the massacre at Balad al-Shaykh had begun), the Haganah entered Wadi Rushmiyya, one of Haifa’s Arab enclaves, blew up its houses and expelled its surviving residents. Later in January of 1948 the Palmach invaded Hawassa, the poorest of Haifa’s Arab enclaves, and levelled its mud huts and a local school, causing its 5,000 residents to take flight in panic. By mid-January, 1948, 15,000 of Haifa’s most prosperous merchants and entrepreneurs had fled, resulting in the destruction of the city’s economy and the immiseration of an already pauperized Arab labor force. The national committee of the Palestinians in Haifa appealed repeatedly for protection to the British forces still stationed there, but their entreaties fell on deaf ears.
January to March, 1948
On January 4, 1948, the Irgun detonated a bomb that demolished the Sarraya house in Jaffa, seat of the local national committee, leaving 26 dead. The Irgun’s bombardment of the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem resulted in another 25 casualties on January 5.
On the first Wednesday in January, Ben-Gurion’s senior military advisors met at his house during what Pappé calls the “Long Seminar,” at the end of which Ben-Gurion approved “a whole series of provocative and lethal attacks on Arab villages…the intention of which was to cause optimal damage and kill as many villagers as possible,” with no need, any longer, to distinguish between active resistors and quiescent civilians. This latter stipulation seems, in retrospect, entirely superfluous, since no such distinction had ever been observed. As Ben-Gurion had already recorded in his Diary on January 1: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction….If we accuse a family—we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included….During the operation, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”
At the “Long Seminar,” Ben-Gurion admonished his eager co-belligerents that “Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.” And as Yigal Allon, the Haganah’s second-in-command, exhorted, “We have to go for a series of ‘collective punishments’ even if there are children living in the homes.” Once again, it need hardly be pointed out that Netanyahu’s high-tech massacres in Gaza since October 8, 2023 are merely refinements on an old paradigm, and the continuation of the premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing that cleared the ground (both figuratively and literally) upon which the modern state of Israel was erected.
December and January had been productive months for Ben-Gurion’s henchmen. The large village of Lifta, on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountain, was home to 2,500 residents, mostly Muslim, with a small Christian minority. One of the two coffee houses that had been the centers of social life for the region, including Jerusalem itself, was attacked on December 28. Haganah soldiers broke in and sprayed the café with machine-gun fire, while the Stern gang fired randomly at a nearby bus. A second assault upon the same village was ordered on January 11 during which the Haganah detonated most of the houses and expelled the remaining inhabitants.
In February, the killing sprees continued, while the Arabs remained insouciantly passive and effectively defenceless. Although Jewish troop casualties were insignificant by comparison to the number of Palestinians who had been slaughtered thus far, in his public orations Ben-Gurion issued melodramatic proclamations of the Arabs’ Nazi-inspired avidity to exterminate the Jews in “a second Holocaust”—a “public relations ploy,” as Pappé rather too generously describes it, given Ben-Gurion’s scarcely disguised plans for a final solution to his Arab demographic problem.
On February 5, 1948, the order was issued to destroy a number of villages in the vicinity of Qisarya (the ancient Roman town of Caesarea), in all of which Jews and the Muslim Arab majority had lived and worked together in harmony for generations. With no defence forces, neither domestic nor foreign volunteers, Qisarya’s occupation on February 15 and the expulsion of its 1500 inhabitants took but a few hours.
On the same day, Jewish troops expelled the inhabitants of Barrat Qisarya, another mixed town of 1000 Muslims and 500 Jews who had been invited to join the workforce by the Palestinian owner of the Alit Salt Company. Meanwhile, just after midnight of February 14, the Palmach entered Sa’sa unopposed, then affixed bundles of TNT explosives to the residents’ houses, detonating them one after another while the families within were asleep. The commander of the operation, Moshe Kalman, later rhapsodized about his epic triumph, “In the end the sky was prised open….We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60 to 80 dead bodies,” many of whom, as usual, were women and children.
By the beginning of March, the Haganah had begun to implement “Plan Dalet,” the blueprint for the occupation and depopulation of about 500 more Palestinian villages—30 had already been wiped off the map—and 11 more urban Arab enclaves both within the borders delineated by the U.N. Partition for the new Jewish state, and outside of them in the Arab territories.
The text of the Plan called for the encirclement of Palestinian villages, a search for resistors who would then be executed, the demolition of the villages by arson or explosives, the expulsion of survivors, and the mining of the rubble lest any of the banished villagers attempt to return. Plan Dalet also called for a propaganda initiative to be carried out by special agents to diabolize the Arabs as sub-human barbarians and thus stoke the war-fever of the settler population and the military, while simultaneously conjuring the paranoic specter of a second Holocaust, notwithstanding that the Arab states outside Palestine had yet to enter the field and the Jews were in no danger from a complacent and passive population within. As one of the main architects of the Plan, Ben-Gurion vouchsafed to his Consultancy that the military objective was to conquer 80 percent of the area of Mandatory Palestine— everything, that is, with the exception of the West Bank which he temporarily conceded to Jordan (until, that is, it too was conquered and occupied in 1967).
Successive attacks (during March 12-13 and March 16-17) by the Palmach’s third battalion on the village of Husayniyya in northeastern Palestine involved massacres of approximately 50 residents. March 15 also saw the destruction, occupation, and expulsion of the 2,000 residents of two villages in the Haifa subdistrict. Later on the same day, the smaller village of Khirbat al-Ras (near the ancient town of Ashdod) was subjected to the usual procedures of ethnic cleansing: occupation, destruction of houses, and expulsion.
The Cruelist Month
In early April, Ben-Gurion’s Consultancy met and decided to cleanse the rural villages on the Tel-Aviv—Haifa, Jenin—Haifa, and Jerusalem—Jaffa roads. By the end of the month, more than 40 villages in the vicinities of Jaffa, Jenin, Haifa, and Tel-Aviv had been destroyed, depopulated, and occupied. After April 4, the expulsion of 5 large villages in the vicinity of Haifa led to the chaotic exodus at gunpoint of thousands of Palestinians on the roads east to Jenin. Between March 30 and May 15, in fact, 200 villages were occupied, destroyed, and expelled, including many in the U.N. designated Arab state, while another 90 would be demolished and cleansed between May 15 and June 11,
In the second week of April, the Haganah turned its sights on the villages around Jerusalem. Qastal was the first to be destroyed, cleansed, and occupied on April 9. All that is left of it today is a plaque marking its location as an “enemy base.” As Pappé notes, all over Israel there are new settlements, national parks, and cultural institutions built on the ruins of Palestinian towns and villages, with no reference to their existence, to the end of erasing from Israel’s collective memory every vestige of the ancient civilization and native people its terrorist militias had systematically eradicated. Wherever a few mosques or great houses of Palestinian notables have survived, they have been converted, ironically enough, into Israeli government offices or historical museums commemorating the heroism and sacrifices of the Jews during their valorous struggle for statehood.
On the same day (April 9) as Qastal was destroyed, the Palmach and Irgun committed one the campaign’s most infamous massacres at Deir Yassin, a village perched on a hill west of Jerusalem. As Pappé describes it (in a now familiar scenario), “Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire…. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.” The surviving children were then lined up against a wall and shot, “just for the fun of it.” There were 20 babies amongst the 150 victims of the bloodbath. Four contiguous villages were subsequently occupied and subjected to a frenzy of looting by the Haganah. The inhabitants fled with nothing but the proverbial clothes on their backs, while their possessions became war memorabilia proudly displayed in the parlors of the Haganah’s bandits.
Looking forward from the events of April 9, 1948 to the IDF’s ongoing massacres, executions, and looting sprees in Gaza and the West Bank, such savage and conscienceless velleities seem to recrudesce as if permanently encoded in the Zionist DNA.
To paraphrase the famous line from T.S. Eliot’s appositely titled poem “The Wasteland,” for the Palestinians, April may have been the cruelist month. When news reached Tiberias of the massacre at Deir Yassin, and of another slaughter of 20 Palestinians three days later at the nearby village of Nasr al-Din, the Arab population of the mixed city began to flee. Tiberias was another ancient city in which Jews and Palestinians had coexisted amicably for centuries. For nearly a week, Haganah brigades terrorized the Arab residents with loudspeakers blaring deafening noises and barrel bombs rolled down the hills. Tiberias fell on April 18, its 5,000 Palestinian inhabitants expelled. Once again, the British soldiers stationed there for the express purpose of maintaining peace and order refused to intervene, indeed, collaborated with the Jewish troops in the “orderly” expulsion of the city’s Arab residents.
In the same month, the Haganah returned to Haifa, whose Arab population had already been terrorized in December and thus depleted of approximately 20,000 of its elites, who fled to Lebanon and Egypt in the hope of returning once the British troops encamped there had secured the safety of the remaining 50,000 Arabs. That hope, of course, was misplaced, and when the Haganah’s Carmeli brigade resumed the campaign of terror on April 18, the British soldiers stood idly by. Defenceless and panic-stricken, the Arabs abandoned their homes (to be plundered, inevitably, by Jewish troops) and without any of their belongings stampeded the port, hoping to escape in the small fishing boats moored there. Overloaded, many of the boats capsized with their human cargo still aboard as they sank beneath the waters of the sea. Before dawn on April 22, a few self-appointed Arab leaders spontaneously emerged. Hoping to organize a less chaotic evacuation, they instructed the fleeing crowds to gather in the old marketplace, which the Carmeli brigade then bombarded from their position above with their larger and more lethal mortars.
This, then, was the third major expulsion and second mass murder perpetrated by Jewish forces in a span of less than two weeks. Meanwhile, in Haifa’s vicinity, 15 villages, some with a population as large as 5,000, were erased from the map in a subdistrict still patrolled by British soldiers.
The expulsion of Safad, begun in the middle of April, was completed on May 1. Safad was another mixed town comprised of 9,500 Arabs and 2,400 Jews. On April 29, approximately one thousand seasoned and well-equipped Palmach troops quickly overwhelmed 400 Arab volunteers (only half of whom were armed with World War I vintage rifles), exemplifying the typically lopsided ratio of forces, as Pappé points out, that dispels the myth of an Israeli David confronting an Arab Goliath. The Palmach expelled all but 100 of the Arab residents, until they too were forcibly deported to Lebanon some time before June 5.
In the final week of April, 8 Palestinian neighbourhoods and 39 villages in the Greater Jerusalem area were ethnically cleansed, with the usual artillery shellings, detonations of houses, and looting of furniture, clothing, and even food abandoned on dining tables by terrorized families forced to take flight in mid-meal.
From May, 1948 to the Declaration of the State of Israel
On May 2, another massacre was carried out by the Palmach at the village of Ein al-Zeitun (near Safad), which was, as usual, completely depopulated. The attack was orchestrated by Moshe Kalman, who had already overseen the brutal massacres at Khisas, Sa’sa, and Husayniyya in the same subdistrict. Heavy bombardment with mortars and hand grenades began at dawn. When women, children, and the elderly came out of their houses waving white flags, they were directed at gun-point to the center of the village. There a list of names already prepared by intelligence officers was read aloud; the accused were then taken to another location and executed. Several in the square who protested were also executed. When one of the residents told his captors that the villagers had surrendered and thus “expected to be treated humanely,” a Palmach commander slapped him in the face and ordered him to pick out 37 teenagers at random, who were then shot with their hands cuffed behind their backs. In his written account, one of the Palmach soldiers who observed the massacre gave the number of those executed as several hundred. The “routine procedures,” as Pappé puts it, were then followed: the surviving residents were herded to the edge of the village where Palmach snipers “started firing over their heads as they ordered them to flee”; “the people were stripped of all their belongings before being banished from their homeland.”
In the first week of May, Acre and Baysan were occupied. In Acre (allocated by U.N. Partition to the Arab state), relentless shelling failed to subdue the ancient city, until the Haganah resorted to the biological weapons that had long ago been developed in Jewish laboratories for the de-Arabization of Palestine. The Haganah poisoned the city’s ancient aqueduct with typhoid germs, which engendered an epidemic that by May 6 had claimed 70 lives. As Pappé describes the scene, “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.’ ” The loudspeaker had thus become the modern successor of Joshua’s trumpet. As usual, the expulsion of Acre ended with an orgy of looting, of furniture, clothes or anything that might be of use in the houses of recent Jewish immigrants. For the Jewish forces, Palestinian homes were the equivalent of the “charity shops” one sees today on practically every block of the high streets of English towns, save that Jewish soldiers merely helped themselves to the Arabs’ second-hand goods.
Baysan, preceded by its surrounding villages, fell after heavy aerial bombardment on May 11. Its terrorized citizenry fled en masse into improvised refugee camps across the Jordan river. During the assault, a number of Palestinians were captured as prisoners of war and caged with thousands of others in barbed-wire pens, where they remained indefinitely under martial law, by contrast to the few Jewish POWs who were treated with dignity and soon released.
During May 12–13, Palmach brigades attacked Burayr, in the Arab-allocated subdistrict of Gaza, executing approximately 50 males of “military age” and evicting the nearly 3,000 residents of the village. On May 13, Jaffa was the final city to fall (along with its 24 neighbouring villages). After a siege that lasted for three weeks, the city’s entire population of 50,000 was expelled. As in Haifa, frantic crowds attempted to board fishing boats, some being pushed into the sea, while Jewish troops fired over their heads lest they have second thoughts about leaving.
By May 15 the last British forces departed Palestine, and the modern state of Israel was declared and internationally recognized. With the defeat and occupation of Jaffa, the Haganah brigades had de-Arabized all the major towns and cities of the Jewish homeland and more than 200 rural villages, including a number located within the boundaries of the Arab state as delineated by the U.N. Partition Plan. Their displaced residents— comprising more than one third of the indigenous population of Palestine from every social rank and religious denomination—would never see their homes again (notwithstanding that, under the auspices of the Partition Resolution, the Jewish delegation had agreed to recognize their Arab cohabitants as full citizens of the Jewish state).
In this flood of refugees, several hundred thousands were banished to the Gaza Strip, the first inmates of what was to become, as it has been called by Pappé, Norman Finklestein, and others, the largest open-air prison in the world. Compounding the tragedy, the massacres and expulsions carried out by Jewish troops from November 29, 1947 to May 15, 1948 took place, not only under the insouciant gaze of British forces deployed to Palestine to keep the peace, and in the presence of journalists from around the world, but in plain sight of the U.N. monitors delegated to ensure that the terms of the Partition Resolution were adhered to. And as its massacres and expulsions continue today in Gaza and the West Bank, with its apologists and coadjutants in the West, Israel remains an impregnable fortress of moral impunity.
To be continued…