Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  These economic changes had influenced the political development of Ottoman Palestine. Most Palestinian Arabs lived in small villages as part of extended families, their lives defined by the rhythms of subsistence farming. But urban centres such as Jerusalem and, in particular, Jaffa now became more prominent, solidifying the power urban elites already held over the rural peasantry.

  The arrival of the British marked a significant shift for these notables (men whose family, political alliances, wealth, and acumen defined their place in the top strata of Palestinian Arab society). Their income suffered with the abolition of the right to collect taxes, a traditional perquisite of the Ottoman Empire. And politically, they were on the horns of a dilemma. They wanted to develop and maintain a good relationship with the new British administration, but this meant accepting the terms of the Mandate treaty, which included the Balfour Declaration and thus the negation of Arab self-determination. Their dilemma only sharpened as the years passed, contributing to their inability to form a united front against Zionism and what they perceived as its British allies.

  While there was a certain degree of economic interdependence, Jews and Arabs in Palestine inhabited two disparate, largely disconnected systems of social structure and political organization. As the numbers of the Yishuv grew progressively through the 1920s and 1930s, frictions between the two communities began sparking into violence.

  Miki Cohen grew up in Tel Aviv during the 1930s.[6] His mother’s Algerian-Jewish family had lived in Jaffa since 1840, but had moved to the new Jewish suburb just to the north of the city when it was founded in 1909. He remembers the growing tensions between Palestinian Arabs and Jews:

  I was not born in a mixed community, but Arabs were everywhere — they were here in Tel Aviv, we were going to Jaffa for this and that. My family had business connections, and friendships as well. We spoke the language, knew the culture. But animosity between the two communities had already started. There was growing Arab nationalism, and the rapid development of the Zionist movement, whose Number One target was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

  Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, giving recognition for a national Jewish homeland in Palestine, fueled the animosity. Jews were killed in Jaffa in 1921, and in 1929, there was tension in the air. World War Two gave a push to the idea of a state, when the Jews had to leave Europe. By the end of the 1930s, people were openly talking about it. On a personal level, I never thought of Arabs as a whole as my enemy, but on a national level, all over the country, there was a growing clash, and it has its effect in everyday life.

  With the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, the steady stream of European-Jewish migrants arriving in the British Mandate of Palestine became a flood. For Palestinian Arabs, already angered by the bleed of arable land sold by their notables into Jewish ownership, and the evictions of tenant farmers that inevitably followed, this was too much. In 1936, the surge in Jewish immigration precipitated a full-scale rebellion. This took the British three years to put down, and its pacification entailed harsh collective punishment and the deportation of the Arab leadership — an act of political emasculation that was to have dire consequences for Palestine’s Arabs. The British, who had been striving to keep a balance between the increasingly divergent aspirations of the Arab and Jewish populations, now clamped down on the Yishuv. Jewish land purchase and immigration were strictly curtailed. As the war against the Axis powers spread to the Mediterranean, it became imperative to keep the Arabs loyal: despite the news from Germany, Britain’s immigration policy continued throughout the war.

  By the summer of 1945, some 250,000 Holocaust survivors were being housed in Displaced Persons camps in Allied territory. In August, Earl G. Harrison reported to President Truman that they were “living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several descriptions (built by the Germans for slave-laborers and Jews), including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions.” He noted that “many of the Jewish displaced persons, late in July, had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb — a rather hideous striped pajama effect — while others, to their chagrin, were obliged to wear German SS uniforms.… As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” Harrison concluded that “Their desire to leave Germany is an urgent one.… They want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes.”[7] His words echoed a common sentiment that, despite their two-thousand-year diaspora, and the long-time presence of other peoples in the land, the natural home of the Jewish people was in Palestine.

  Truman’s letter to the British government requesting the immediate admission of one hundred thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine was ignored. The Yishuv had thrown its small weight behind the Allied war effort, but, seeing that the immigration quotas remained firmly in place, began a campaign of insurgency against the British. Bridges and telephone cables were destroyed, and Etzel, a breakaway rightwing militia, dynamited Jerusalem’s prestigious King David Hotel, the headquarters of British administration in Palestine. Illegal immigration, already underway, became a priority.

  Purchasing what ships they could, Zionist organisers crammed them with refugees in the ports of southern Europe and navigated them across the Mediterranean to Palestine. Small boats sailed out from fishing villages and deserted bays, bringing more passengers. Ninety percent of these ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy, which barred their entry. The pitched battles between British sailors and unarmed refugees ended, inevitably, with detainment and deportation to British internment camps, most of them on Cyprus. By 1948, these camps held over fifty thousand people. Sixteen hundred refugees had drowned at sea.

  Of the 142 voyages made to Palestine after the war, it was the story of the Exodus 1947 that made international headlines. Once a Chesapeake Bay excursion boat, the battered, leaky Exodus was now tightly packed with 4,554 Jewish refugees. It had been shadowed by Royal Navy vessels since leaving France. Twenty miles from the coast of Palestine, two of them rammed the Exodus, and she was boarded by sailors armed with truncheons and tear gas. They were met with volleys of bottles and tins of corned beef — the desperation of people with nothing to lose. After three hours of hand-to-hand fighting, the sailors opened fire; three passengers were killed, and the rest became prisoners once again. The Exodus was escorted by six battleships into the harbour at Haifa where, singing defiantly in Hebrew, the refugees were transferred onto three other more seaworthy vessels and taken to Port-de-Bouc in southern France.

  On arrival in Port-de-Bouc, the refugees went on a twenty-four-hour hunger strike and refused to disembark. “We wish to go to Palestine,” they declared. “We shall not land in Europe as long as we are alive.”[8] Kept below decks by an iron grille, they remained in the holds of their prison ships for three weeks. The British authorities announced that if they did not leave the ships, they would be taken to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, location of the only camps big enough to house them. National and international media were not impressed. “British conduct … is moving rapidly to the ultimate stage of lunacy,” commented Britain’s News Chronicle. “No one but a fool would try to compel a Jew to go to Germany of all countries.…”[9] But that is exactly what happened.

  The refugees, most of whom had survived the death camps, were forcibly disembarked in Hamburg. Reports vary as to precisely what occurred, but, fearing resistance, the British sent three hundred military personnel on to one of the ships, the Runnymede Park, to encourage its passengers to leave. Dr. Noah Barou, an official observer, was horrified by the violence he witnessed. “They went into the operation as a football match ... it seemed evident that they had not had it explained to them that they were dealing with people who had suffered a lot and who are resisting in accordance with their convictions.”[10] Reporters watched as people were dragged down the gangplank; at least one was dragged
by his feet, his head bumping down the wooden boards. Jazz music was played at high volume over loudspeakers to drown out the screams and shouting.

  Conditions at Camp Poppendorf were difficult, and the British public-relations disaster was compounded by accurate reports that the prisoners were monitored not by British soldiers but by German guards. Many of the Exodus passengers were smuggled out of Germany by Zionist organizers, headed for Palestine, and ended up in the internment camps on Cyprus.

  The Exodus debacle, widely covered by the American and European press, helped firm up international pressure for a Jewish state in Palestine. Britain, weakened from the intensity of its conflict with Germany, had already decided to quit Palestine, and was handing over the question of its governance to the newly created United Nations. Two representatives of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) had been on the pier in Haifa, watching the transfer of the defiant refugees to the prison ships. It was clear to them that Britain’s policy of restricting Jewish immigration was ill-advised. “What can I think of all this?” asked Vladimir Simic. “It’s the best possible evidence that we can have.”[11] The report he co-authored came out six weeks later.

  UNSCOP’s report suggested partition of Mandate Palestine into two separate states: one for the Jews, one for the Arabs. Partition was not a new idea, the 1937 Peel Commission having made a similar proposal to the British government. But, while Peel’s proposals gave both sides contiguous territories, with the larger share to an Arab state, UNSCOP’s plan left a jigsaw puzzle of pieces of land, which for either nation would be almost impossible to secure. What horrified the Palestinian Arabs, however, was that, although Jews accounted for barely a third of the population, these borders would give them 55 percent of the land.

  Countries that had done very little to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe during the bitter years of the war were now convinced that a Jewish state was a moral imperative. President Truman pushed Partition through the U.N., letting reluctant delegates know that a “no” vote could have unfortunate economic consequences for their country. On November 29, 1947, thirty-three nations voted in favour of Partition, thirteen against. Ten nations abstained.

  David Ben-Gurion, who would be the first prime minister of the new state, described partition as “Western civilization’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust.”[12] The irony of this was not lost on the heads of Arab states. Reading the writing on the wall, in 1944 they had issued a joint statement, declaring in part that they were “second to none in regretting the woes that have been inflicted upon the Jews of Europe by European dictatorial states. But the question of these Jews should not be confused with Zionism, for there can be no greater injustice and aggression than solving the problem of the Jews of Europe by another injustice, that is, by inflicting injustice on the Palestine Arabs of various religions and denominations.”[13]

  Naftali Kadmon vividly recalls the U.N. Partition vote. In his Jerusalem apartment he has an album of small black and white photographs; serrated edges, mounted on black pages. The tiny images convey the jubilant celebrations in Tel Aviv on November 29, 1947. “I well remember how joyful we were that night, everyone was out on the streets. The next day the Arabs began fighting, and we had our first dead.”[14]

  Partition and Armistice Borders

  White - Territories granted to a Jewish state under the U.N.’s 1947 Partition plan for Mandate Palestine.

  Light Grey - Territories granted to an Arab state under the U.N.’s 1947 Partition plan that became part of the new State of Israel after the 1948 War.

  The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were slated to become part of a new Arab state under Partition. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was occupied by Jordan during the 1948 War. Egypt occupied, and later annexed, the Gaza Strip.

  Naftali was then a young meteorologist at the British RAF Lydda airport. His brother was living in a youth village not far away, and he went to visit him. “When I passed through the town of Lydda I heard the Mufti’s [Palestinian Arab leader’s] anti-Jewish propaganda, which wasn’t very pleasant. It was broadcast by loudspeaker from the minarets. They said, ‘We will drive out the Jews, and if there is a war they will leave and you will get their homes.’”

  Britain, wary of antagonizing its Arab allies, had abstained during the U.N. partition vote, simply announcing that it would end its Mandate and pull out of Palestine on May 14, 1948. Nothing was done to negotiate or even ease any transition of power. The Yishuv, as a relatively new and highly politically focused presence in Mandate Palestine, already had an administrative structure in place that could easily be developed into self-governance. The Arab community, still reeling from the brutal suppression of their three-year revolt, did not. Nor could it match the Jewish defence force, the Haganah, in military experience. As citizens of Mandate Palestine, neither Jews nor Arabs had their own official armed forces. But members of the Yishuv had fought alongside the British in the Second World War, and these veterans, with their expertise and their weapons, now formed the core of Israel’s nascent army.

  The first six months after the U.N. vote saw a brutal spiralling of attacks by both Arab and Jewish armed militia. This, effectively, was a civil war. Villages and settlements were attacked, convoys ambushed, bombs were planted in Arab and Jewish centres. Acts of retaliation became increasingly savage. The Palestinian Arab fighters were joined by the “Arab Liberation Army,” ill-trained and ill-equipped volunteers from neighbouring states. Foreign volunteers also came to help the Jewish cause.

  As the chaos and violence spread, wealthier urban Arabs began leaving their homes to wait out the war in the relative safety of the Galilee, or of bordering countries. This was not unusual. Many had left during the 1936 Arab Uprising, returning when things had quieted down; inhabitants of Jewish settlements and districts had done the same. But soon, Arab departures were becoming involuntary. Ben-Gurion ordered the forced evacuation of Jerusalem’s Arabs, and of those living in the previously mixed coastal town of Caesarea. Similar stories of intimidation, violence, and expulsion began to flow through the towns and villages of Arab Palestine.

  By April 1948, the Haganah had adopted a strategy of aggression into areas granted to an Israeli state under the U.N. Partition plan but as yet not militarily secured. The purpose of “Plan D,” authored by the Zionist leadership, was to give them contiguous territory that could be defended from anticipated attack by forces from the surrounding Arab states. Consolidation of the Jewish population within the Jewish state was also a goal. As well, there were about a dozen significant Jewish settlements in the regions granted to Palestinian Arabs. Now that war had broken out, the problematics of the U.N.’s Partition map could be resolved by unilaterally shifting the borders to incorporate those settlements, and their land, into the territory of the new state.

  Similarly, the regions granted to the Yishuv were currently home to 350,000 Arabs. Plan D was specific on how they could be dealt with:

  [By] mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

  Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

  Mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.[15]

  These policies also applied to villages in Palestinian Arab territory that was deemed strategically valuable — given the awkward border divisions under Partition that could cover a significant amount of land. It is also worth noting that “resistance” is an ambiguous term: it can as comfortably encompass a few shots fired at invaders from a barn as a pitched battle.

  Through
the spring, summer and autumn of 1948, Plan D was put into brutal effect. Stories of rape and the massacre of over two hundred villagers at Deir Yassin,† a village close to Jerusalem that had declared its neutrality, travelled ahead of the soldiers, precipitating what an Israeli intelligence report termed a “psychosis of flight.”[16]

  On May 14, 1948, as the British terminated their Mandate over Palestine, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the State of Israel. The Arab League had already made plain its intention to invade once the new nation was declared, and its soldiers began crossing the borders the following day. The Arab armies were uncoordinated, fatally riven by inter-state rivalry, and the total numbers of troops fielded by the seven states (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, with small numbers of Saudi and Yemeni soldiers), was actually less than those of the Haganah. But, at the time, that was not apparent to the people of the Yishuv. This war came hard on the heels of the Holocaust with all its attendant terrors, which were fed by radio broadcasts from Arab states warning that the Jews would be thrown into the sea. Ben-Gurion, distracted by the loss of the Kfar Etzion bloc of settlements in the Hebron Hills and the killing of their defenders, tersely noted in his diary on May 14: “At four o’clock in the afternoon, Jewish independence was announced and the state officially came into being. Our fate is in the hands of the defense forces.”[17] The entry ends, “Will Tel-Aviv be bombed tonight?”