By May 15, 1948, when the state of Israel was internationally recognized, almost half of the more than 500 Arab villages in Mandatory Palestine and most of its urban Arab enclaves had already been destroyed and evicted. Three hundred thousand Arabs who had lived in Palestine for centuries were forced to flee their homes, some to neighboring villages—only to be made refugees again when they too were occupied and de-Arabized by Israeli forces—some to barbaric internment prisons within the Jewish state, most to makeshift refugee encampments in the surrounding Arab countries or what we now call the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Israel’s merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing continued and only intensified.
The Phony War
By contrast to the grandiose myth of Israel’s founding, according to which the nascent Jewish state was nearly throttled in its crib by the military might of the inimical Arab nations on its borders, the entry into the conflict of the regular armies of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt proved to be a non-factor. This was the beginning of what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé calls the “phony war” of 1948 – 1949. Phony, because Israel had already become the Middle East’s overwhelming military superpower (as it remains today), its troops outnumbering those of all the contiguous Arab countries combined, whose armies were comparatively ill-trained, equipped with antiquated weapons, and predominantly content to protect their own borders or opportunistically seize parcels of land for themselves, with little commitment to rescuing their Arab brothers in the towns and villages under Israeli occupation or siege. To cite only one example, the Machiavellian bargain struck by the Jewish state to cede the West Bank to Jordan’s King Abdullah effectively neutralized the Jordanian Legion, which was the only professional army in the coalition. The Arab League, moreover, was morbidly fractured by intramural quarrels.
All in all, the external Arab forces, as Ben-Gurion acknowledged at the time, proved a minor distraction to the Israeli Leviathan’s insatiable campaign to engorge the remaining towns and villages of Palestine in both the Jewish state and the state allocated to the indigenous Arabs by the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine progressed against so little resistance, in fact, that Israeli forces were sufficiently confident to simultaneously invade and expand into southern Lebanon and Syria, which once again ought to dispel the propagandistic fiction that after its founding in May, 1948, the Jewish people were facing the threat of a “second Holocaust” from an Arab Goliath.
The orders dispatched to the Israeli brigades no longer made any attempt to obscure the monstrous intent of the Haganah to expunge Palestine of its Arab inhabitants: the Hebrew words were le-taher, meaning “to cleanse,” or le-hashmid, “to destroy,” which implied not only expulsion but the dynamiting of Arab houses and the laying of mines in the rubble to deter the return of refugees.
In the appropriately named “Operation Hametz” (“Leaven”)—another triumphalist Old Testament allusion equating the Arab presence with the historical enemies of the ancient Hebrews—three brigades occupied and cleansed 8 villages in the Haifa area and 2 suburbs of Jaffa, all under orders to “kill the men, and set fire” to the houses.
Within 29 hours of the departure of the last remnants of the British military from Mandatory Palestine, almost all of the villages in northwestern Galilee—within the Arab designated state—were destroyed. In little more than a day, that is, an area that was 96 percent Arab was completely Judaized, with the occupation of large villages such as Kabri, Zib, and Bassa, whose 15,000, 2,000, and 3,000 inhabitants respectively were expelled. Bassa, besides, was the locus of another massacre in which the men of the village were lined up and executed while their disconsolate families were forced to watch.
Meanwhile, the expulsions of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine who had just been made full citizens under the 1947 Partition Plan of either the Jewish or Arab state provoked not a reprobatory word from the U.N. And so little was Ben-Gurion concerned with the hollow threat posed by the Arab expeditionary forces, that on May 24, 1948, he recorded in his diary his plans to invade and conquer southern Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.
His rationale, notably, was anachronistically freighted, once again, with the literalist Old Testament argument for Zionism: “This,” he concluded, “will be in revenge for what they [the Egyptians and Assyrians] did to our forefathers during biblical times.” Like that of his predecessor Ben-Gurion, Netanyahu’s recent adjuration to the Jewish people to “remember what Amalek did to us” is another rankly theocratic invocation of the Old Testament’s primitive ethos of revenge, and the ostensibly divine command to a bronze age tribe to kill every last man, woman, and child in the “Promised Land.”
By the beginning of June, 6 villages in the district of Gaza—once again, in the state allocated by U.N. Partition to the Arabs—had been wiped off the map. In his diary entry on June 5, Ben-Gurion noted that the Gazan village of Yibneh (population 6,000) and Qaqun (north of Jaffa) had been occupied; thus, as he exulted, “the cleansing operation continues.”
The assault on Qaqun began with the usual artillery barrage, and ended with its evicted male population herded into a nearby prison camp, erected in order to avoid the “problem” encountered after previous expulsions of having too many men of “military age” (i.e., anyone between the ages of ten and fifty) on the hands of the occupying soldiers, who had been obliged to solve the “problem” by resorting to summary executions. Of course, that these atrocities continued in any case belies the notion that Israeli executioners had been belatedly assailed by unwonted pangs of conscience.
On June 7, Ben-Gurion convened a meeting with his advisors in which he callously tallied up the money that had been pilfered from Arab banks, along with the citrus groves and household items stolen from the hundreds of rural villages that had been cleansed. With supplies of TNT nearly exhausted (so many villages having already been blown up), the Israeli brigades were now ordered to use any means necessary, including setting fire to residential blocks that remained in the expelled villages and torching the crops in the fields. This scorched earth tactic—still being employed by the IDF in Gaza today, and for the same purpose—was intended to dissuade Arab refugees from returning to their homes.
The Phony Truce
When a truce came into effect between Israel and the Arab Liberation Army on June 11, 1948, the Israeli forces simply ignored it, and embarked upon a campaign to eradicate all vestiges of the villages they had expelled. By the time the truce ended on July 8, 1948, 12 villages (including 5 near Acre in the Arab state, and 3 large villages south of Haifa) were reduced to rubble. One of the villages in the Haifa subdistrict, Sabbarin, had capitulated to Jewish forces on May 12. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, an armoured car fired on the villagers as they fled, while of those who remained, more than one hundred, including the elderly, women, and children, were penned behind barbed wire for several days before being deported to refugee camps administered by the Jordanians in the West Bank city of Jenin.
The Jewish state now occupied 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine, and with its newly developed and sophisticated air force, began confidently to bombard the capitals of the surrounding Arab nations. Jenin, Tul-Karem—both in the Arab state’s West Bank—and other villages on the borders of Mandatory Palestine were subjected to a merciless and indiscriminate campaign of aerial bombardments.
This was another tactic that the nascent state of Israel deployed with no moral compunctions (as it has continued to do in Gaza today), as an effective instrument of terror and mass murder. A single bomb, as the Israeli brigades discovered early, is a far more efficient instrument for inflicting civilian casualties than executioners’ bullets or prolonged artillery shelling, and a more compelling inducement to mass flight.
The Cleansing of Galilee
From the beginning of June, Ben-Gurion became obsessed with the cleansing of Galilee (much of which was also in the Arab state), deploying his troops right up to the border with Lebanon. Galilee’s poorly armed villagers mounted a valiant defense, which only incited the feral response of their attackers. Arbitrary executions, as Pappé observes, were the means of hastening expulsions.
Mi’ar was amongst the first villages to be expelled when, on June 20, Israeli troops approached, machine-gunning those who were harvesting their cereal crops in the fields, then entered the village and began detonating the houses. Forty villagers were killed in the massacre.
On June 29, 14 other villages in Galilee were listed for destruction, all of which were evicted and occupied within the next ten days. Mghar, in which Christians, Muslims, and Druze had coexisted peacefully for centuries, was depopulated in short order after a number of Muslims were executed in its main square, persuading the rest to flee.
Two days before the end of the first truce, on July 6, three brigades of the Israeli army (the Golani, Carmeli, and Brigade Seven) were issued the order to “Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages.” The Israeli soldiers had no doubt that the “enemy” referred not to the regular Arab armies but the defenseless Palestinian villagers and their families. Amongst the three brigades, Brigade Seven was notorious for its brutality, the descriptors “terrorists” and “barbarous” punctuating the annals of Palestinian witnesses and survivors.
In the environs of Nazareth and Acre, Amqa, Birwa, Damun, Khirbat Jiddin, Kuwaykat, and Shafa’Amr, each with more the 1,500 inhabitants, were captured and expelled within weeks of the issuance of the expulsion order on July 6. Kuwaykat came under heavy shelling around midnight on July 9, while the villagers were asleep in their beds, causing many to flee in their night clothes. In 1949, a kibbutz was established on the site, with Jewish settlers newly arrived from England, Hungary, and the Netherlands.
Amqa’s fate was typical of the others: all that remains of it today is a mosque and school (both used as warehouses), and the few Arabs who were allowed to remain languished under martial law until 1966. The refugees from Birwa, many of whom fled to Lebanon, repeatedly sought, and were denied, the right of return from Ben-Gurion, who accused the villagers of having conspired with the Arab leaders of the 1936 Revolt. In 1951, Birwa, like so many other Palestinian villages, became a closed military zone, off-limits to Arabs.
Damun was attacked and completely destroyed on July 16, the ruins of its elegant eighteenth-century stone houses, with their richly ornamented facades, now overgrown with thorns, cacti, and pine trees. Shafa’Amr was a mixed village consisting of significant Christian, Druze, and Muslim populations. Its Muslim enclave was shelled on July 16, precipitating the flight of thousands of inhabitants to Saffuriyya. After Nazareth was occupied, some of the Arab refugees were allowed to return to their homes, where they lived under military rule until 1967.
Though indisputably within the Arab state as designated by the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947, all six of these Galilean villages were, following their eviction, declared to be “legally” within the borders and under the jurisdiction of the Jewish state. (For Israel, ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion were complementary instruments for the achievement of the original Zionist dream of acquiring as much of Palestine with as few Arabs as possible.)
Those Arabs who fled to neighboring villages—before they too were occupied and evicted—were treated as internal refugees, irritants dependent upon the tender mercies of the Jewish state for their survival and always treated with suspicion and hostility. The village of Kfar Yassif is an example. By contrast to most Arab villages in Galilee, it escaped the Israeli juggernaut, and thus was soon swollen with refugees fleeing Birwa, Kuwaykat, and other nearby villages that had been destroyed and de-Arabized by the Israeli brigades. But the refugees were not allowed to remain in Kfar Yassif for long; in February of 1949, nearly a thousand were herded into trucks and driven to the northern border of the ever-expanding Jewish state, where they were forced to cross into Lebanon. On March 1, another 250 refugees were deported.
Saffuriyya (in close vicinity to Nazareth) was one of the largest villages in Galilee, with over 5,000 inhabitants. An aerial bombardment killed scores of villagers as they sought refuge in the nearby caves or in the village’s Church of St. Gabriel. Some of those who fled attempted to return in the middle of the night to recover the clothes they had left behind; detected by the occupying Israeli soldiers, they were shot on the spot.
Like other villages in the vicinity of Nazareth, the inhabitants of Saffuriyya fled to the city, whose majority Muslim population today consists predominantly of refugees from 1948 and their descendants. Since Nazareth evaded destruction by the Israeli forces, its refugees from Saffuriyya sought consolation in constructing new houses within sight of their old village. From there, they were subjected to a second humiliation in watching more Jewish settlers looting their former homes, occupying them, and converting their ancestral village into a collective farm, called Zippori, which Israeli “archeologists” affected to have been the name of an ancient biblical town.
The residents of two other villages destroyed by Israeli forces in July, Mujaydil and Malul, also fled to Nazareth. Malul, with its significant minority of Palestinian Christians, was evicted and occupied on July 15. Its sole remaining structures are two churches and a mosque. Having been expelled by force, the Israeli government subsequently declared its inhabitants “absentees” and confiscated their land under the so-called “Absentees Property Law.” Owned today by the Jewish National Fund, Malul’s ruins are now the site of an Israeli military base and the pine forest planted by the JNF and dedicated to the Jewish “heroes” of the 1948 “war.” (Malul’s two churches still stand and are used as cow sheds by a neighboring kibbutz.)
On the same day (July 15), the Golani Brigade captured and occupied Mujaydil after a bombing raid by the Israeli air force induced the inhabitants to flee. On several occasions during the subsequent weeks, groups of Arab men and women surreptitiously returned to work the village’s agricultural fields, where they were executed by an Israeli commander who observes dryly in his report that he “expended 31 bullets,” and congratulates himself on the effectiveness with which he “stymie[d] every attempt to return to the village.”
Mujaydil had 2,000 villagers, a mosque, a Russian Orthodox and a Roman Catholic church (both of which provided educational and medical facilities for the mixed local population), as well as a state school, and an eighteenth-century mill. As Pappé observes, “it is worthwhile to dwell on the local history of [Palestinian villages] as it demonstrates how not only houses or fields were destroyed in the Nakba but a whole community disappeared, with all its intricate social networks and cultural achievements.”
“Never Again”
In most cases, visitors to the sites of the Arab homelands cleansed by Israeli forces from 1947 to 1949 will find no tangible evidence that they ever existed. Rather, their mosques and churches, their quaint stone or mud-brick dwellings, and their surrounding citrus groves, have been systematically interred beneath multi-lane highways, security walls, the brutalist tenements of Jewish settlements—assigned confabulated Hebrew “biblical” names—built over their ruins, or the pine forests planted by the Jewish state, all for the deliberate purpose of eradicating every vestige of the age-old civilization that once flourished throughout Palestine.
Israel persists today in a state of self-induced historical and moral amnesia; apparently, the ethnic cleansing of a population requires the cleansing of the conscience of the people who perpetrated it. The apotropaic Zionist mantra, “Never again,” intended to forestall—or rather to create the illusion of—an imminent future genocide of the Jews, has hardly restrained the Jewish state from committing one. Indeed, in the light of the state’s exertions to erase the Arab presence from Israeli collective memory and deny the Arabs the right of repatriation, the defiant proclamation “Never again” collapses under the weight of its own moral ambivalence; never again will the 800,000 Arabs see the homes from which they were expelled nearly eight decades ago. Indeed, it is an unfathomable moral solecism that a people from whose ranks came the author of as poignant a threnody as the Lamentations of Jeremiah should have driven another people into permanent exile.
In July, the Alexandroni Brigade was issued orders for another “cleansing” operation, the new Hebrew synonym for which was nikkuy. Six rural villages on the coastal road that had thus far clung to existence quickly fell, along with the city of Nazareth itself (within the borders of the Arab state as designated by U.N. Partition) and its contiguous villages.
Between the Truces. The Massacres in Lydda and Ramle, and the Lydda Death March
When the first “truce” ended on July 8, its U.N. negotiator, Count Folke Bernadotte, brokered another one, which came into effect ten days later, on July 18. Neither truce retarded the momentum of the Israeli army’s ethnic cleansing operations; on the contrary, the irenic masquerade of the Jewish state merely made it easier for it to expand the geographical scope of its pogroms. Between the two truces, massive cleansing operations were conducted in Nazareth, Lydda, and Ramle—all within the Arab state as designated by the U.N. Partition Plan—ending with the expulsions of 70,000 Palestinians. Hundreds were killed in multiple massacres, and in what has been called the “Lydda death march.”
The attack on the major city of Nazareth began on July 9, the day after the expiration of the first truce, with the city surrendering on July 16. All but 16,000 of its inhabitants were made refugees, and (as Ben-Gurion notes in his diary), the order for the total eviction of the city was stayed only because “the [Christian] world was watching.” In any case, not all of those who remained escaped the usual harassment by the occupying soldiers. Some were expelled or arrested after another house-to-house search by intelligence officers carrying their sham lists of “suspects” and “undesirables,” that is, anyone who had not already been collaborating with the Israelis.
Hittin was another village (between Nazareth and Tiberias) attacked and occupied (on July 17), a day before the second truce was declared. Hittin was once an extraordinarily picturesque and thriving hilltop community, which had existed since the Crusades. Defended by a mere 25 ill-equipped volunteers, Hittin, like Saffuriyya, Mujaydil, Jaba, Ijzim, and Ayn Ghazal were (as Pappé describes it)
bombarded into submission well into the second truce. In fact, what developed in July was ethnic cleansing from the air, as air attacks became a major tool of sowing panic and wreaking destruction … in order to force people to flee before the actual occupation of the village.
Throngs of refugees, carrying on their backs whatever possessions they could smuggle out, flooded the main roads on their way, as they thought, to safe haven. There, they became—as a report from July 17 from the Northern Command attests—an irresistible target for Israeli snipers.
When some of Hittin’s inhabitants attempted to return, they were repelled at gun-point. Many found temporary refuge in the nearby village of Salamah, until their food supply ran out, and they fled to Lebanon. Today the hillside on which Hittin once perched is used as a grazing pasture for nearby kibbutzim.
The assault on Lydda and Ramle was entrusted by Ben-Gurion to Yigal Allon, who had previously presided over many of the Palmach’s terrorist operations. In Lydda, Allon delegated Yitzak Rabin (a future prime minister of Israel) as his field commander. On July 10, a relentless aerial bombardment persuaded both the Arab League volunteers and the Jordanian Legion regulars to desert, leaving both Lydda and Ramle defenseless.
Armed only with antiquated rifles, the men of Lydda sought refuge in the town’s principal mosque, expecting that the Israeli forces would respect the immemorial civilizational norm that recognized religious sites as sanctuaries from armed violence; Israeli troops stormed the mosque all the same, and when its cowering occupants surrendered, they were massacred inside. Outside the mosque, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune described what he had witnessed as follows:
[The Israeli jeep column] raced into Lydda with rifles, Stens, and sub-machine guns blazing. It coursed through the main streets, blasting at everything that moved … the corpses of Arab men, women, and even children were strewn about the streets in the wake of this ruthlessly brilliant charge. The exultant adjective “brilliant” attests to American (and Western) moral insouciance then and now.
The attack on Lydda thus degenerated, as so often, into yet another orgy of slaughter and pillage, leaving 426 men, women, and children dead, counting the bullet-ridden corpses of the 176 supplicants strewn within the mosque. Later, on July 14, Israeli soldiers stormed every house in the town, dragged out their families, and ordered that all their belongings be left behind, which were then systematically looted. About 50,000 captives were then marched out of the city toward the Jordanian West Bank.
The assault on Ramle, with its nearly 20,000 inhabitants, began on July 12 with an aerial bombardment and ground invasion, during which Israeli soldiers lobbed grenades into the city’s houses, killing hundreds, including entire families, within. In February of 1948, the city had already been the target of terrorist attacks by the Irgun, which had planted a bomb in the marketplace that killed scores of locals. On July 14, Israeli intelligence officers arbitrarily rounded up 3,000 “suspects” who were consigned to a nearby prison camp, before the occupying soldiers embarked upon the usual looting sprees.
In his memoirs, Yitzak Rabin recalled being summoned by Ben-Gurion to discuss the fate of the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle: “Yigal Allon asked: what is to be done with the population? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: ‘Drive them out.’ ”
The forced march of the 70,000 refugees from Lydda and Ramle would surely evoke the same outrage in the West today as similar mass population “transfers” (by the Nazis or in the Killing Fields of Cambodia), were the subject of Israeli war crimes not an inviolable tabu. (As I write, even the mainstream media has broadcast video images of two million Gazans marching in a column as wide and long as the eye can see toward supposed “safety” in the south, the sight of which has failed to disturb the sleep of Israel’s political puppets in the West.)
On the roads leading out of Lydda and Ramle—in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi deportations of Jews that had occurred but a few years earlier— the occupying soldiers set up checkpoints where they searched the refugees, especially the women, stripping jewelry from their necks, wrists, and fingers, and stealing any money hidden in their clothes. This humiliation was only the beginning of their ordeal, since the 70,000 refugees of both Lydda and Ramle were then forced to walk for three days without food or water, in the midst of a summer heat wave (with temperatures reaching 35 degrees Celsius). As one survivor described it: “People began to die of thirst. Some women died and their babies nursed from their dead bodies. Many of the elderly died on the way. … Many buried their dead in the leaves of corn”. By conservative estimates, at least 500 perished from dehydration, hunger, or exhaustion during—what shall we call it?—their exodus to nowhere. As Pappé observes, “Again, the inevitable question presents itself: three years after the Holocaust, what went through the minds of those Jews who watched these wretched people pass by?”