“So what do the Jewish militias do?” asked Khalid, looking with pride to his daughter Sabria. “Do we know?”
“This is why I asked Sabria to share with all of us what she told me a few days ago,” Adnan replied. “She has seen what they do in Haifa and can share a bit of their plans for the near future.”
At Sabria’s suggestion, the group took a break for tea or coffee and a few slices of oranges. A buzz of several conversations started and stopped only with Adnan’s suggestion that Sabria was ready to tell what she knew.
“First I would like to hear from Aunt Judith. Did you leave Haifa with your children for the week, or will it be longer? How is your husband doing?”
“I wish I knew. The telephones lines are down, at least to our house. My husband was trying to continue his job as of two days ago. I don’t know whether we can stay or not. Bombs have destroyed so many of our neighbors’ homes. Lots of them still alive have left.”
“For where?” asked Rana. Jamal’s mother looked worried.
“I don’t know,” Judith continued. “They just disappear during the day. The bombing is at night and some families like my next-door neighbors have been killed. The father away at work survived, but now he is gone as well. He didn’t say where he headed.”
Everyone sat stunned, silent. Finally Sabria spoke. “What about you, Liana? What has happened so far in Qatamon, in Western Jerusalem?”
“We woke up one night with a horrible explosion that killed thirty people in the Samiramis hotel on January fourth. Since then, the more affluent Arab families began to leave. We don’t know what will happen next. If the leaders of the area leave, we are even more at the mercy of the militias. Two close friends of mine, one Muslim and one Jewish, have no idea either.”
“Interesting that you have a Jewish friend in Jerusalem, Liana. Tell us about her,” Sabria suggested.
“Valerie is upset to say the least by the bombing. She is a long-time friend and is a dear person with a heart for others of any faith or ethnicity. She takes in families who have lost their homes, mostly Arabs now, but before, new Jewish immigrant families who had nowhere to go. I think it is important in our discussions and thinking to recognize that many Jewish people, including the orthodox ones, do not agree with the idea of coming in like an elephant and crushing all the other animals in the forest.”
After several detailed questions about Valerie’s large home, Sabria began by telling the story of the refinery massacre. Several wiped their eyes on hearing of the young father dying. She related the cleansing of Arab families from Hawassa, the poorest district of Haifa. She told of their conversation with the family fleeing with all they could carry of their household goods on a small rickety horse-drawn cart.
“Did you go to these places alone?” Liana wondered.
“No, I went with an American friend, a fellow student.”
“Oh,” Liana said with a sly smile. “You’re going to tell us about him?”
“No. You’re getting me off the subject. We’re just friends.”
“So how do you know what the militias are going to do from now on?” Judith asked.
“That’s what I really want to tell you because we need to know what they are thinking. Our future will depend on what they do to us, and how we react. It all began with meeting a man in the cafeteria, an older student, who is a soldier, trained by the British army to fight with them in World War Two, both North Africa and Europe. Over a couple of encounters he decided I was Jewish and I went along with the deception.”
“That could be dangerous,” Hava remarked. “As your mother I’m not sure I approve.”
“Well, I did it, and it worked. He turned out to be a member of the Palmach, which is the elite commando branch of the Hagana. Apparently he is a commander of some sort and has access to the deliberations of the Jewish Agency, or something like that. Very brash and arrogant. I didn’t like him or encourage him in any way, but he wanted me to go to dinner with him. So I did. Anyway he told me two things that are important. The first is that the goal of some Zionists is to “cleanse” the land of all Arabs. His words. They would “transfer” all of us from our homes to somewhere else. He didn’t say where that would be.
“All of us? The entire Arab population? Impossible!” Judith spat out the words.
“I agree, and I got the feeling that most of them think that also. But it does mean that many of us are in danger of being expelled from our homes and lands . . . or killed. It has begun in the large cities as we heard just now, but would also include villages like ours.”
“You mean we could be kicked out and have to leave Tantura?” Jamal asked wide-eyed.
Sabria raised her hands, palms up. “It could happen. Apparently it has in one village that I know about. On December 31st in Balad al Shaykh where our 1930’s hero Din al Qassam is buried, the Hagana killed at least sixty people, including children and a number of women.”
The group reacted with a gasp, then no one spoke. Several stared at the floor silently. Finally Adnan spoke. “What is the second idea in their plan that bothered you?”
Sabria took a deep breath and sighed. “As you know, the main militia or army is the Hagana, which of course means ‘defense.’ The other units that you hear of are the Palmach, the special forces part of Hagana officially, and the more loose and unsupervised military organizations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Up until now the attacks on Arabs have been somewhat random, from any of the militias, often even unknown to the Jewish Agency until after they occur. They have often been attacks on an area or village in retaliation for Arab resistance. They have thought of these as ‘defense’ that will promote ‘security.’”
“The attack at the refinery, was that a response to some acts the workers had done?” Khalid asked.
“I don’t know, Father. We never found out the reason for the attack on the workers. But the thinking of the Jewish leadership at the top, David Ben Gurion and others, is to shift to Plan D, the fourth of several proposals they agreed to recently at the meeting of the Jewish Agency. This policy is to switch to an offensive approach. In other words, they will not wait for some provocation by residents of a city or village to get rid of us. They now have a plan with mapping and demographics of all the cities and villages in Palestine, detailed information about who is who in the area, the leadership, number of people, their political persuasion. It’s a plan to make the land pure and cleansed of Arabs. So they probably know of us in Tantura as well.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Hava said, shaking her head.
“It is, Mother. But apparently there is a geographer who for several years has organized a mapping of Palestine with all the demographic information included. So now they can strike wherever they want and whenever, with an idea of who to round up and expel or shoot. And they will go on offense to plant on the ground the partition plan of the UN and populate it without us. That will also allow them to ‘de-Arabize’ in their words, occupy and take over an entire city or village.”
“So where do local residents like us go in their Plan D?” Adnan asked.
“I don’t know. I think they don’t care. Just leave. That seems to be the Zionist goal.”
“So what can we do?” Liana looked pale.
“Maybe try to reason with the soldiers before they act. Maybe negotiate. I don’t know.” Sabria sighed and after a pause, continued. “We have no army to protect us. The few Palestinian police cannot prevent an attack. Perhaps we could get out temporarily and hope we have a home to come back to. We always have a right to return, I think, by international law. But if we are forced at gunpoint to leave, what we can do?”
Chapter 17
February 1948
As a man of action, Eldad had enough of policy meetings, even those at the highest level of the Consultancy. Menachim Begin, while head of the Palmach that had bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, let Yilgal Allon as commander of the northern arm deputize Moshe Kallman for the operation. The third battalion d
eputy chief had led the killings in Khisas. And now on the night of February 14 Eldad as his captain would play a major role in the destruction of yet another Arab village, Sa‘sa, beautiful at 1,208 meters above the plain in the midst of an evergreen forest. This was all according to Plan D. Allon had explained. “We have to prove ourselves that we can take the initiative.” He wrote the order: “You have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many warriors as possible.” Eldad when he read the order smiled at the use of “warrior.” All “warriors” would be sound asleep in their beds dreaming of their farms and families.
Eldad gathered his company in the dark at the outskirts of the village. They had their rifles ready. “Be sure you have the TNT secure. We strike at midnight.”
At that hour Eldad’s company moved into the village. They surprised a guard who turned in the dark and shouted “what is it?” Eldad silenced him with single shot. Then leading his troops down the main street, they began to attach TNT to houses, which then blew up while their residents slept inside. A third of the village was destroyed. (Kalman later summarized, “In the end the sky pried open. We left behind thirty-five demolished houses and sixty to eighty dead bodies.” He also praised the British Army for helping the troops transfer to the Safad hospital two Jewish soldiers wounded by flying debris.)
***
At the Consultancy’s mid-February meeting the operations dominated the agenda. Eldad had participated in several including Sa‘sa. The group reviewed the progress to date including the destruction of several villages in the North and along the Coast. Yigal Allon related the lessons learned so far. “If we destroy whole neighborhoods or many houses in the village, as we did in Sa‘sa, we make an impression.”
The group decided to prepare for a maximum effort to intimidate the locals. They agreed that rural Palestinians had no intent or ability to fight back and remained defenseless. Ben Gurion concluded that they should proceed with caution to see how events developed. In the meantime, “continue to terrorize the rural areas . . . through a series of offensives . . . so that the same mood of passivity reported . . . would prevail.”
***
By mid-February Valerie, in sympathy with her Arab friends, began to use her large home in Qatamon, West Jerusalem, to temporarily house Arab families whose houses had been demolished. The nightly explosions continued striking terror in everyone ever since the Hagana blew up the beautiful villa of the Shahins, a wealthy Arab family. Panic ensued and a mass exodus of Arab families began. Jewish families feared for their lives as well after an Arab sniper shot dead a Jewish cyclist. When Arab or Jewish homes emptied, that neighborhood became a place for the Hagana to move in.
Noor and Liana discussed the situation with Valerie in her home. Being Jewish, it seemed a safe place to be. The question of the Arab response to the escalating violence in the city burned in the minds of the two Arab women.
“Why don’t we do something about so many Arabs leaving?” Noor asked. “My Imam has done nothing to stop Muslims from leaving. I don’t know how long I can hold out. But if we all leave, the Zionists will have the whole of Qatamon. That’s exactly what they want.”
Liana took a deep breath. “Our National Committee has received orders from the Arab High Committee, the AHC, to not allow anyone to leave. But it’s not working. One mother told me, ‘It’s fine for them to talk, but who will care when our children get killed.’ They came to say goodbye and then said, ‘Still it won’t be for long. Just until the troubles die down.’”
Valerie shook her head. “I wonder if that is realistic? I would never have believed this could happen in the first place. The Zionists seem to grow stronger by the week. Will they turn and give back what they have taken or destroyed? Will the people who have lived here all their lives ever have a chance to return to . . . ” she was suddenly distracted by a knock on the front door. She rose quickly to let in whoever it might be as she had so many times. She still had one room empty to take in another family in trouble.
“Rabbi Yousef, come in.” Valerie’s face beamed. Her favorite source of wisdom appeared at just the right time, short with a black hat, beard, and a warm smile of greeting.
“Please sit down. These are my friends, Noor and Liana, both neighbors here in Qatamon. We were just discussing the current trouble with so many people leaving, mostly Arabs, but some Jewish families too. I presume they’re afraid of violence as well.”
“We’re all afraid it will spiral out of control,” Rabbi Yousef said. “We pray for the peace of Jerusalem. This is not the teaching of the Torah, to come in and destroy innocent people and drive them out of their homes. Moses wrote that we should care for the stranger among us and even love our neighbor as ourselves. That is part of Judaism. Accepting the ‘other,’ welcoming him, taking care of him. Not destroying him.”
“So you are against the Zionist dream to push Arab Palestinians out of their own country, homes and lands by force?” Noor spoke up.
“Indeed,” the Rabbi smiled. “You as a veiled Muslim must wonder what kind of religion would approve what is transpiring. I can tell you, it is not from above and it is not what we believe.”
“So where does this cruelty come from?” Liana inquired.
“From fifty years ago in response to the persecution of our people in the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe. From Herzl and others who apart from our religion or any reference to the divine will, decided to promote the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. So our people, fleeing the trouble, came here at first in small numbers.”
“We did,” Valerie explained. My parents came here from Poland in the 1920s and we have lived here with our Arab sisters and brothers for years. We always enjoyed each other and even at times celebrated our diversity.”
“And that’s the way it should be,” the Rabbi nodded. “But with increasing immigration culminating in the flood of our people escaping the Holocaust and after it, terrible as it was, we are taking it upon ourselves to force out local residents. So we end up persecuting those who had no responsibility for our suffering.
“So you think it could be done differently?” Liana asked.
He exhaled deeply and smiled while looking up. “Messiah will come someday. He is our hope. That is why we finish one of our most sacred moments celebrating Passover with the words, ‘next year in Jerusalem.’ We are still waiting. To jump ahead of his coming is the trouble.”
“And the Zionists don’t believe that, Rabbi?”
“No, Liana. That movement is not religious, it is secular. It is not Judaism. Many Jews like me oppose it. But with the British leaving and the countries of the world wanting to make up for the Holocaust, the momentum is growing for another one, this time for the Palestinian Arabs. A catastrophe, in Arabic, another Nakba.”
Chapter 18
March 1948
Sabria hurried two days after the family conference, to talk to her Grandfather Adnan. She had remained in Tantura trying to gather information about the increasing violence. What she would do with it remained a mystery. But she felt driven to help in whatever way possible. And now, in mid-February she just learned that the Hagana had struck in several coastal villages not far away. On the 15th, two nights ago, they attacked Qisarya near Caesarea on the Sea, and expelled the entire village in four hours. Then in a fierce sudden attack, the militias wiped out Barrat Qisarya with a population of about 1,000. Sabria learned of the operation against Khirbart-al Burj near the other two. Same result, entire village expelled. Finally the news of the attack on Sa‘sa became the focus of fear in Tantura. Sabria wondered where help could be found. Would any Arab countries come to their aid? She searched out her grandfather and posed that question.
“I don’t know. I hope so,” he said. He seemed discouraged, which wasn’t like him. “They can’t seem to agree on how to respond, and none of them want to do anything alone.”
***
Sabria found her grandfather quite animated at breakfast one morning in early March. He spoke with her father,
Khalid. Overhearing their conversation she became excited that they had some news.
Adnan pulled out a chair for Sabria. “Sit down. I was just explaining to your father that the council here in Tantura received news from the Arab League that the Arab Liberation Army, the ALA, attacked several Jewish convoys heading toward several occupied villages. They also are moving against several cities, but I don’t know which ones. At least something is happening to come to our aid.”
“Which countries are helping?” Sabria asked.
“I don’t know. They are being led by a Syrian general.”
“It sounds sporadic, an operation here and there but not a major invasion,” Khalid said.
“It may not succeed, but at least something is happening to counter the militias. Those units are turning into a real army, frighteningly destructive. From news on the BBC, they apparently get their heavy arms like mortars and artillery from Eastern Europe.”
***
Ben Gurion did not seem worried about the Arab countries’ efforts so far. Eldad listened intently to the leaders at another meeting, now almost April. The Consultancy concentrated on Plan D, now ready to be implemented by the militias. The handout at the session read: “These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centres that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”
Eldad felt a great wave of excitement as he began to realize the magnitude of the plan. It applied to 531 villages in Palestine, and eleven cities as well. The orders had gone out to the twelve brigades responsible for executing the orders in their respective regions. Special political personnel now available would help to motivate their men by demonizing the Arab people and invoking the Holocaust. By the end of March, thirty villages no longer existed.
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