From July 9, 1948, when the first truce ended, and in the two weeks after the second began on July 18, the Israeli army added two major cities and another sixty-eight villages to the 290 they had already occupied and expelled. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were evicted from the homes in which their ancestors had abided for centuries. The U.N.’s attempts to impose a hiatus on the Israeli brigades’ cleansing operations merely emboldened them in their campaign of military and psychological terror.
A significant contingent of U.N. monitors was dispatched throughout Palestine, in both the Jewish and Arab states as designated by the Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947; there they witnessed at close hand the bombing and shelling of civilian populations, the massacres and executions of “suspects” in front of their families, the abuse, despoliation, and rape of women, young and old, the dynamiting of whole villages, and the expulsions of their inhabitants. Having observed these atrocities with their own eyes, not to mention the violation of the truces they were there to enforce, the U.N. monitors (like the British while they presided over Mandatory Palestine) did nothing to stop them.
In the words of the eminent Israeli-Jewish historian, Ilan Pappé, there was no “international intervention the Palestinians could hope for.” As one looks forward from the Nakba of 1948 to the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank today—not to mention Netanyahu’s decades-long record of, and most recent adventures in regime change in sovereign states in the Middle East that have resisted his depredations against the Palestinians and his Greater Israel project—one is forced to conclude that the U.N.’s periodic remonstrations and peace initiatives have been impotent at best and symbolic at worst.
The Second Truce
The fate of Count Folke Bernadotte was, as recent events have also demonstrated, premonitory. Bernadotte was the U.N.’s special envoy to Palestine from May 20, 1948 until his death in September. During the Second World War, as president of the Swedish Red Cross, he had dedicated himself to rescuing Jews from the Nazi genocide, which was why the Israelis enthusiastically endorsed his appointment as the U.N.’s chief negotiator. They had counted, that is, on his adherence to the Zionist cult, and had hardly anticipated that he would intercede on behalf of the oppressed Palestinians as he had done for the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe a few years earlier.
When he arrived, to the Israelis’ astonishment and dismay, Bernadotte insisted upon the division of Palestine in half—allocating slightly more land, that is, to the overwhelming Arab majority than the forty-five percent granted by the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947; moreover, during the first truce, he insisted that the Jewish state accept the unconditional repatriation of the Arab refugees it had displaced. When he reiterated his demands in a final report submitted to the U.N. in September, 1948, he was assassinated by Jewish terrorists. Once again, recent events demonstrate that the “decapitation” of peace negotiators by the Israelis has become a venerable tradition.
In any case, Ben-Gurion violated the second truce as insouciantly as he had violated the first. On the very first day it went into effect, the Alexandroni Brigade attacked the village of Qula (near Ramle), fomenting the inevitable panic and mass flight. Of the elderly who were too feeble to flee, six women and one man were shot or burned to death in their homes. With the bombardments, demolitions, and expulsions of Duman, Imwas, Tamra, Qabul, and Mi’ar, the occupation of the western Galilee was completed.
By July 26, six villages south of Haifa had been attacked and expelled by Israeli forces, three before the second truce was declared, and the other three while the truce was in effect.
The first three were Tirat Haifa, Ayn Hawd, and Kfar Lam, all of which fell on or around July 16. Tirat Haifa, a few kilometers south of the city, had a population of 5,000. The Irgun had shelled it as early as December, 1947, leaving thirteen dead, mostly children and the elderly. In the weeks before May of 1948, the British, collaborating with the Zionist cleansing operations under the facade of keeping the peace, ordered the women and children of Tirat Haifa to be deported by truck to the West Bank, while the men who stayed behind succumbed to the assault of elite troops from several Israeli brigades.
Following Tirat Haifa’s fall and occupation on July 16, the ruins of its stone and mud brick houses, its two village schools, its pilgrim churches, and its famous almond groves were swallowed up amidst the cubist concrete apartment blocks of the Jewish development town built on its site—another ignominious end for a community in which Muslims and Christians had coexisted since the time of the Crusades.
Two other Crusader-era villages, Kfar Lam and Ayn Hawd, were occupied and expelled on the same day. The local commander reported that “the operations to cleanse the pockets of resistance of refugees … east of [Tirat Haifa] continue,” and indeed, the inhabitants of Kfar Lam and Ayn Hawd were compelled to flee as far away as Iraq.
In the Haganah’s intelligence files, the claim was made that some of the inhabitants of Kfar Lam were Samaritan Jews, who had recently converted to Islam, a confabulation meant to subserve the fundamentalist Zionist “argument” that the population of Arab villages was originally Jewish, its lineage reaching back through the millennia of Old Testament history. In any case, as Pappé observes, “this did not mean that the people of Kfar Lam were entitled to remain as citizens of the new Jewish state, only that their village was now ‘rightfully returned’ to the Jewish people.”
After its expulsion, Kfar Lam was peremptorily “disappeared” beneath another Israeli agricultural cooperative, while Ayn Hawd became an avant-garde Jewish artists’ colony, its architecturally splendid but traditional village school the site of Dadaist art exhibitions, its mosque a bar, and one of its notables’ palatial estates a post office.
“Operation Policeman”
The three other villages in the Haifa area, Ayn Ghazal, Jaba, and Ijzim, had held out for so long that their occupation and expulsion became an obsession for Ben-Gurion, who insisted that the assault against them continue even after the second truce had come into effect. The codename for the campaign was “Operation Policeman,” the army’s High Command having reported to the U.N. observers that it was merely a “police action,” rather than a military offensive, and thereby in compliance with the truce. (“Operation Policeman” was, in fact, one of the more forthright codenames concocted by the Israeli war office amongst its more typically euphemistic designations; indeed, Israel, for its Arab population, had already become what we would now call a “police state.” Conversely, many of the most brutal massacres and cleansing campaigns were prettified with codenames such as “Operation Palm Tree” or “Operation Cypress Tree,” or sacralized with Hebrew pieties such as “Operation Kippa.”)
Ayn Ghazal, Jaba, and Ijzim were subject to intense aerial bombardment from B-17s and fighter planes procured on the black market during the first truce, though the Israeli Defense Minister lied to a U.N. mediator when he protested that “no planes were used.” The residents of Ayn Ghazal, lulled into a false sense of security by the news of the second truce—violating ceasefires is another venerable Israeli tradition—, and while celebrating the breaking of the Ramadan fast, gathered in the streets and coffeehouses in the village center, when an Israeli plane dropped its deadly cargo and scored a direct hit on the crowd below. After the women and children fled the carnage, the occupying soldiers followed the usual routine. The men who survived the bombing were rounded up, a hooded informant picked out seventeen “resisters,” and the intelligence officers executed them on the spot, before the rest were expelled.
Ijzim, with 3,000 inhabitants, was the largest of the three villages attacked from the air and expelled by July 26. After the aerial assault, an Israeli intelligence officer recorded an official tally of “200 corpses, many of them civilians killed by our bombardment.”
Compounding their trauma, those who remained in the three villages were made prisoners and forced by the occupying forces to bury their own dead, many of whose bodies had been burned or mutilated beyond recognition in the explosions. Count Bernadotte condemned Israel’s “systematic” destruction of Ayn Ghazal, Ijzim, and Jaba, and demanded that their 8,000 residents be allowed to return; of course, the Israeli government demurred. In August, Jewish settlers arrived with carts and embarked upon the usual kleptomaniacal orgies.
Following the eviction of Ijzim, those few houses that hadn’t been demolished were appropriated by recent settlers from eastern Europe, while the village school was re-purposed as a synagogue. Both Ayn Ghazal and Jaba, reduced to rubble, were partly covered over by pine forests, while some of their terrain became grazing pastures for the agricultural cooperatives that were established after their demolition. Thus, three more Palestinian villages, along with their ancient cultural, religious, and social patrimonies, vanished without a trace, occulted beneath what a casual visitor, unaware of the prior devastation, might imagine as idylls of bucolic serenity.
Ethnic Cleansing in the Negev
In July, Ben-Gurion turned his sights on the Negev, instructing his brigades to expel eleven Bedouin tribes and confine another nineteen in “military zones”—ghettoes, that is, whose inhabitants were only allowed to leave with a special permit. In 1948, there were 90,000 Bedouins in the Negev, where their ancestors had lived since the Byzantine era. By the end of 1948, most of the remaining Bedouin tribes had been driven out, reduced to a nomadic existence not by tradition but military compulsion. Some were transferred to Hebron and the Gaza Strip until 1967, when they were displaced yet again by the Israeli government, this time to the eastern bank of the Jordan River.
The northern Negev was also home to a number of Muslim villages which, with the collapse of the Egyptian forces stationed nearby, were left to the tender mercies of the Israeli cleansing machine. The Negev villages were stormed, occupied, and expelled in short order, leaving only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under the precarious guardianship of Egyptian and Jordanian troops. As Pappé observes,
[T]he Zionist leadership … now clearly envisaged [the] “Jewish state” as stretching over most of Palestine—in fact, all of it. … Consequently, villages that had gradually been isolated were now easily cleansed while the UN observers, who had been sent in to supervise the truce watched nearby.
As Pappé also notes, the question of the legality (or rather, illegality) of Israel’s occupation of the territories allocated to the Arab state by the Partition Resolution of November, 29, 1947 was never raised during the two truces, when the attention of the international community, as well as that of the U.N. monitors on the ground, was temporarily concentrated on the destiny of post-Mandatory Palestine and its indigenous Muslim population. Indeed, by July, 1948, the formal assurance of the right of self-determination vouchsafed by the member states of the U.N. to the Palestinians only months earlier had been consigned to oblivion, “along,” as Pappé remarks, “with the [Arab] villages, the fields and the houses—all ‘dissolved’ into the Jewish State of Israel.”
“Operation Autumn”
The second truce not only failed to restrain the feral appetite of the Israelis for Palestinian land, it scarcely inhibited the fundamentalist Zionist dream of a Greater Israel, in which the legendary grandeur of the Davidic empire would be reborn.
On the day the second truce ended, the order from the military High Command was issued to attack Qanaitra, the principal city in the Syrian Golan Heights. “Your orders,” wrote Yigdal Allon to the local commander, “are to destroy the city.” In one of the rare instances in which the Arab regular armies were able to resist the Israeli onslaught, the attack was repelled. Israeli attempts to conquer the Golan Heights continued throughout 1948 until its occupation in 1967, when Qanaitra’s 20,000 Muslims were ethnically cleansed. A few years later, in 1974, the city was completely demolished.
Through August and September of 1948, the Israeli army targeted those heavily populated Palestinian enclaves in the western and central Galilee, the northern West Bank—all within the 1947 U.N. borders of the Arab state—and the southern Negev. Special orders were issued to capture the West Bank cities of Qalqilya and Tul-Karem in an offensive codenamed “Operation Autumn.” Once again, the attacks were repelled, until both cities were taken and cleansed during the Six Day War of 1967. In Qalqilya, 850 buildings were bulldozed to the ground in a gratuitous act of vandalism that even Moshe Dayan condemned as “collective punishment”—another venerable Israeli tradition. (After the 1967 War, an additional 300,000 Palestinians were uprooted from the West Bank and Gaza, some for the second or third times over the course of the preceding two decades.)
Straddling the Jordanian border (and under Jordanian jurisdiction in 1948), Tul-Karem was ceded back to Israel by the 1949 Armistice Agreement between the two countries. As a consequence, most of its residents fled to Transjordan. In 1950 the Tul-Karem Camp was established by UNWRA, and remains the second largest Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, home mainly to the Arabs who had been cleansed from Caesarea, Haifa, and Jaffa. After its occupation in 1967, the remaining residents of Tul-Karem, like those of all of the occupied territories, were compelled to languish, until 1982, under the strictures of Israeli martial law.
In Galilee, local volunteers and the Arab Liberation Army also managed to temporarily slow the momentum of the Israeli cleansing offensive. The names of many of these valiant resisters are known to us, and as Pappé laments,
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 Gaza Strip in 1987 and 2000. I have no illusions that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonises a people who have been cleansed, expelled and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonized, expelled and occupied them.
Alas, nothing has changed since Pappé wrote these prophetic words. For the governments and mainstream media in the U.S. and Western Europe, Palestinian resistance to a fifty-year-long occupation, siege, and periodic aerial bombardments is reflexively denounced as “terror”; meanwhile, the IDF’s bombing and massacre of more than 200,000 innocent civilians (most of whom are women and children), its deliberate destruction of hospitals and execution of medics, humanitarian aid workers, journalists, and their families, its snipers’ targeting the heads and chests of scores of children, its total blockade of food, fuel, essential medicines and basic medical supplies, its recent slaughter of more than 1,000 Gazans waiting in lines for scraps of food at the U.S.-Israeli Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation’s killing fields, to name a few of Israel’s well-documented war crimes thus far—Israel’s campaign of terror, that is, is invariably blamed on Hamas and characterized as “self-defense.”
Operation Hiram: The Final Solution for Galilee
In mid-October, 1948, the newly-denominated “Israeli Defense Forces” launched “Operation Hiram,” named after the biblical king of the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, IDF military archives specify that the aim of the operation was to “destroy the enemy in the central Galilee ‘pocket,’ and to take control of the whole of the Galilee.”
From October 29 to November 2, twenty-eight villages in the upper Galilee—all within the Arab state (not that Israel any longer abided by the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947)—sustained intensive aerial bombardment and artillery shelling, before they were occupied and expelled, with most of the refugees fleeing to Lebanon and those who remained either placed under stringent martial law or removed to nearby POW camps. The list of villages is so long that only a few examples must suffice to convey the brutality to which their residents were subjected.
On the night of October 29, Tarshiha was bombed by three Israeli planes. According to the account of Benny Morris, “The bombing of Tarshiha … killed 24 and buried 60 more under rubble, and triggered mass flight.” The village was then occupied and its looting was so systematic that Israeli army trucks had to be called in to haul away the pilfered goods. About half of the 3,000 villagers fled to a refugee camp in Beirut, while those who were unable to complete the journey were rounded up by Israeli soldiers and packed into cattle-cars enroute to a camp in Aleppo. (Had the moral consciences of these soldiers become so calcified that scenes of the Nazis’ deportations of the Jews to the “east” failed to silt up from recent memory?)
As in other expelled villages, refugees from Tarshiha made sporadic attempts to return. Thus, as late as January, 1949, Israeli troops raided the village again, rounding up males over the age of sixteen, along with thirty-three heads of families and 101 family members, from one to seventy-nine years old, who were denounced by intelligence officers and selected for deportation. After being robbed, all were expelled to Jenin, their abandoned homes soon occupied by new Jewish settlers from eastern Europe.
Safsaf was the first of three villages (along with Salilah and Jish) to be attacked by the IDF’s notorious Brigade Seven. Accounts of survivors as well as the diary entries of senior Israeli military officer, Yosef Nachmani, leave no doubt that Safsaf was the scene of yet another massacre in the burgeoning resumé of massacres committed by Israeli soldiers with dispiriting regularity over the course of the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign.
On the evening of October 29, Safsaf was attacked on three flanks by columns of tanks and armoured cars. As Nachmani describes the massacre in his diary entry, “In Safsaf, after … the inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty-sixty peasants, and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women…” A villager who survived the massacre later recalled that “As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us.” According to the accounts of other survivors, the four women, including a fourteen-year-old girl, were raped in front of the villagers, and a pregnant woman was bayoneted. Following the massacre, the remaining villagers, unable to collect their possessions, were driven out towards the border with Lebanon, Israeli troops firing over their heads. Five boys and several elderly men were left behind to collect and bury the dead.
After the village of Jish was captured on October 29, Israeli troops executed approximately one hundred of those who had surrendered, including (according to Morris) four Marionite Christians, as well as a woman and her infant child, all buried in a mass grave. The soldiers responsible for the massacre were never brought to trial.
When Brigade Seven stormed Saliha in their armored vehicles, they distributed leaflets promising that those who surrendered would be spared. Carrying makeshift white flags, the residents emerged from their homes and assembled in front of the mosque, when the armored cars’ machine-gunnners opened fire killing seventy villagers. The corpses were left to rot for four days, before Israeli bulldozers arrived to pile them into the mosque which was then demolished with explosives. Nachmani, reflecting on the men and women gunned down in cold blood in the village square, recorded in his diary: “Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? … Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than by such methods?”
The Galilean village of Sa’sa had been the scene of a massacre in February of 1948, after the order was given by Yigdal Allon to Moshe Kelman, commander of the Third Battalion, “You have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many warriors as possible.” “Warriors” meant villagers, of course, and when Palmach units entered Sa’sa, they were unopposed. Kelman himself recorded that “We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60 – 80 dead bodies.” On October 30, yet another massacre was perpetrated in Sa’sa, though the number of those who were murdered is still unknown, because the relevant military archives remain sealed.
On the same day, the IDF added to its resumé of war crimes in the mixed Arab-Christian village of Ilabun. After it was invaded and occupied by Israeli troops, the residents of Ilabun sought refuge in its two churches. Cowering at the entrances, they were forced to listen to a long harangue from the local commander who accused them of having mutilated two Jewish bodies, before he took his revenge by gunning down a dozen men in front of the terrorized congregation. The villagers were then forcibly expelled, save for the men of “military age” (i.e., everyone between the ages of ten and fifty) who were led away as prisoners of war. A long column of 1,500 refugees was forced to march through the perilous mountain passes of the Galilee toward Lebanon, several dying along the way.
Again, the question to which there is no morally coherent response reasserts itself: Whether in the occupied territories today or in Palestine in 1948, how could a people whose state was erected on the ashes of the Holocaust have committed the same atrocities, reprising the same instrumentalities—the Gestapo-like search and arrest operations, the arbitrary executions, the looting and confiscations, the internment and transit camps, the militarized ghettoes, the mass deportations, the dehumanization of their victims as untermenschen, all in the pursuit of racial purity—as the Nazis had committed against them?