by Ilan Pappe
The eyes of the Palestinian community now turned towards Cairo, the seat of the Arab League and the temporary residence of their leader, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, in exile ever since the British had expelled him in 1937. The first days after the resolution found the Arab leaders in total disarray, but gradually during December 1947 some sort of a policy began to take shape. Arab leaders, especially of the countries neighbouring Palestine, preferred not to take individual or drastic decisions on the subject. They were perfectly aware that public opinion in their countries wanted to see urgent action taken against the UN decision. Consequently, the Arab League Council, made up of the Arab states’ foreign ministers, recommended the dispatch of arms to the Palestinians and the establishment of an all-Arab volunteer force, to be called the Arab Liberation Army (Jaish al-Inqath, literally ‘Rescue Army’, from the verb anqatha, ‘to rescue from imminent danger’). The League appointed a Syrian general at its head. Later that month, small groups of this army began trickling into Palestine, thereby providing a welcome pretext for the Consultancy to discuss the further escalation of the Hagana operations already underway.
The pattern was set, and from this perspective the month of December 1947 is perhaps the most intriguing chapter in the history of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing. The mild reaction in the Arab capitals surrounding Palestine was welcomed by Ben-Gurion’s Consultancy – while the indifferent, almost lethargic Palestinian response disturbed them. In the first three days after the Partition Resolution was adopted, a small select group within the Consultancy met every day,24 but they then relaxed somewhat and the format returned to the weekly Wednesday afternoon meetings of the High Command, with additional get-togethers of the smaller group a day after (usually at Ben-Gurion’s home). The first meetings in December were devoted to assessing the Palestinian mood and intention. The ‘experts’ reported that, despite the early trickling of volunteers into the Palestinian villages and towns, the people themselves seemed eager to continue life as normal.25 This craving for normality remained typical of the Palestinians inside Palestine in the years to come, even in their worst crises and at the nadir of their struggle; and normality is what they have been denied ever since 1948.
But the swift return to normality and the Palestinians’ wish not to become embroiled in a civil war posed a problem for a Zionist leadership determined to reduce drastically, if not totally, the number of Arabs within their future Jewish state. They needed a pretext, and this of course would be more difficult to create if the moderate Palestinian reaction continued. ‘Fortunately’ for them, at one point the army of Arab volunteers expanded their acts of hostility against Jewish convoys and settlements, thus making it easier for the Consultancy to frame the occupation and expulsion policy as a form of justified ‘retaliation’, tagmul in Hebrew. But already in December 1947, the Consultancy had begun to use the Hebrew word yotzma (‘initiative’) to describe the strategy it intended to follow with respect to the Palestinians in the territory of their coveted Jewish state. ‘Initiative’ meant taking action against the Palestinian population without waiting for a pretext for tagmul to come along. Increasingly, pretexts for retaliation would be conspicuously missing.
Palti Sela was a member of the intelligence units that would play a crucial role in implementing the ethnic cleansing operations. One of their tasks was to report daily on the mood among, and trends within, the rural population of Palestine. Stationed in the north-eastern valleys of the country, Sela was astonished by the apparent difference in the way the communities on either side reacted to the new political reality unfolding around them. The Jewish farmers in the kibbutzim and in the collective or private settlements turned their residences into military outposts – reinforcing their fortifications, mending fences, laying mines, etc. – ready to defend and attack; each member was issued with a gun and integrated into the Jewish military force. The Palestinian villages, to Sela’s surprise, ‘continued life as usual’. In fact in the three villages he visited – Ayndur, Dabburiyya and Ayn Mahel – people received him as they had always done, greeting him as a potential customer for bartering, trading and exchanging pleasantries or news. These villages were near the British hospital of Afula, where units of the Arab Legion were stationed as part of the British police force in the country. The Jordanian soldiers, too, seemed to regard the situation as normal and were not engaged in any special preparations. Throughout December 1947, Sela summed up in his monthly report: normalcy is the rule and agitation the exception.26 If these people were to be expelled, it could not be done as ‘retaliation’ for any aggression on their part.
THE CHANGING MOOD IN THE CONSULTANCY: FROM RETALIATION TO INTIMIDATION
On the top floor of the Red House, on Wednesday afternoon, 10 December 1947, a disappointed Consultancy met to assess the situation. Two speakers were leading the conversation, Ezra Danin and Yehoshua Palmon.27
Ezra Danin, as already mentioned, was a citrus grove businessman who had been invited into the intelligence corps because of his knowledge of Arabic (he was born in Syria). Danin was in his mid-forties when he joined the Hagana in 1940; in 1947 he became the head of its ‘Arab section’, which supervised the work of Arab Jews and indigenous Arab collaborators who spied for the High Command within the Palestinian community as well as in neighbouring Arab countries. In May 1948 he assumed a new role: supervising the post-occupation activities of the Jewish forces when the ethnic cleansing operation began in earnest. His people were responsible for the procedures that were followed after a Palestinian village or neighbourhood had been occupied. This meant that, with the help of informants, they detected and identified men who were suspected of having attacked Jews in the past, or of belonging to the Palestinian national movement, or who simply were disliked by the local informants who exploited the opportunity to settle old scores. The men thus selected were usually executed on the spot. Danin quite often came to inspect these operations at first hand. His unit was also responsible, as soon as a village or town had been occupied, for separating all men of ‘military age’, namely between ten and fifty, from the rest of the villagers, who were then ‘just’ expelled or imprisoned for long periods in POW camps.28
Yehoshua (‘Josh’) Palmon was in many ways Danin’s second-in-command and also took a great personal interest in the implementation of the policy of selection, interrogation and sometimes execution. Younger than Danin and born in Palestine itself, Palmon already had an impressive military career behind him. As a recruit to a British commando unit he had participated in the occupation of Syria and Lebanon in 1941 that brought French Vichy rule there to an end. The officers under Danin and Palmon’s command were known to and feared by many Palestinians, who quickly learned to spot them despite their attempts to dress anonymously in dull khaki uniform. They acted behind the scenes in hundreds of villages, and the oral history of the Nakba is full of references to these men and the atrocities they committed.29
But on 10 December 1947, Danin and Palmon were still hidden from the public eye. They opened the meeting by reporting that members of the Palestinian urban elite were leaving their houses and moving to their winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. This was a typical reaction from the urbanites in moments of stress – moving to safety until the situation calmed down. And yet Israeli historians, including revisionist ones such as Benny Morris, have interpreted these traditional temporary sorties as ‘voluntary flight’, in order to tell us that Israel was not responsible for them. But they left with the full intention of returning to their homes again later, only to be prevented by the Israelis from doing so: not allowing people to return to their homes after a short stay abroad is as much expulsion as any other act directed against the local people with the aim of depopulation.
Danin reported that this was the only instance they had been able to detect of Palestinians moving towards areas outside the UN-designated borders of the Jewish state, apart from several Bedouin tribes who had relocated closer to Arab villages out of fear of Jewish attacks. D
anin seems to have been disappointed by this, because almost in the same breath he called for a far more aggressive policy – despite the fact that there were no offensive initiatives or tendencies on the Palestinian side – and went on to explain to the Consultancy the benefits it would have: his informants had told him that violent actions against Palestinians would terrify them, ‘which will render help from the Arab world useless,’ implying that the Jewish forces could do whatever they wanted with them.
‘What do you mean by violent action?’ inquired Ben-Gurion.
‘Destroying the traffic (buses, lorries that carry agricultural products and private cars) … sinking their fishing boats in Jaffa, closing their shops and preventing raw materials from reaching their factories.’
‘How will they react?’ asked Ben-Gurion.
‘The initial reaction may be riots, but eventually they will understand the message.’ The main goal was thus to assure that the population would be at the Zionists’ mercy, so their fate could be sealed. Ben-Gurion seemed to like this suggestion, and wrote to Sharett three days later to explain that the general idea: the Palestinian community in the Jewish area would be ‘at our mercy’ and anything the Jews wanted could be done to them, including ‘starving them to death’.30
It was another Syrian Jew, Eliyahu Sasson, who tried to some extent to play the devil’s advocate in the Consultancy; he seemed doubtful about the new aggressive approach Danin and Palmon were outlining. He had emigrated to Palestine in 1927, and was perhaps the most intriguing and also ambivalent member of the Consultancy. In 1919, before becoming a Zionist, he had joined the Arab national movement in Syria. In the 1940s, his main role was to instigate a policy of ‘divide and rule’ inside the Palestinian community but also in the neighbouring Arab countries. He was thus instrumental in strengthening the alliance with the Jordanian Hashemite king over the future of Palestine, but his attempts to pit one Palestinian group against another would become obsolete now that the Zionist leadership was moving towards a comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the country as a whole. However, his legacy of ‘divide and rule’ had its inevitable impact on Israeli policy in the years to come, as we can see, for instance, in the efforts Ariel Sharon made in 1981 when, as defence minister and on the advice of the Arabist Professor Menahem Milson, he attempted to undermine the Palestinian resistance movement by setting up so-called ‘Village Leagues’ as part of a pro-Israeli outfit in the occupied West Bank. This was a short-term and abortive endeavour. A more successful one was the incorporation, as early as 1948, of the Druze minority into the Israeli army within units that later became the principal tool for oppressing the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
The 10 December meeting would be the last in which Sasson tried to persuade his colleagues that despite the need for ‘a comprehensive plan’, as he called it – namely the uprooting of the local population – it was still prudent not to regard the whole Arab population as enemies, and to continue employing ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics. He was very proud of his role in the 1930s in arming Palestinian groups, the so-called ‘peace gangs’, that were made up of rivals of the Palestinian leader al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. These units fought against the national Palestinian formations during the Arab Revolt. Sasson now wanted to bring these divide and rule tactics to target some loyal Bedouin tribes.
DECEMBER 1947: EARLY ACTIONS
The Consultancy not only rejected the idea of incorporating more collaborative ‘Arabs’, but they also went so far as to suggest putting behind them the whole notion of ‘retaliation’, as adopted at the time on the advice of Orde Wingate. Most of the participants in the meeting favoured ‘engagement’ in a systematic campaign of intimidation. Ben-Gurion approved, and the new policy was implemented the day after the meeting.
The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ (hasiyur ha-alim). This, too, was part of the legacy of Orde Wingate, who had instructed the Hagana in the use of this terrorist method against Palestinian villagers in the 1930s. In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart. Even in Wingate’s day this was already intended more as a show of force than a punitive action or retaliatory attack.
In December 1947, two such defenseless villages were chosen for the revival of Wingate’s tactics: Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa. When today you drive south-east of the city of Ramla for about 15 kilometres, especially on a wintry day when the typical thorny, yellow gorse bushes of the inner plains of Palestine turn green, you come upon a bizarre view: long lines of rubble and stones stretching out on an open field surrounding a relatively large imaginary square area. These were the stone fences of Deir Ayyub. In 1947, the rubble was a low stone wall that had been built more for aesthetic reasons than for the protection of the village, which had about 500 inhabitants. Named after Ayyub – Job in Arabic – most of its people were Muslim, living in stone and mud houses typical of the area. Just before the Jewish attack, the village had been celebrating the opening of a new school, which already had the gratifying number of fifty-one pupils enrolled in it, all made possible by money the villagers had collected among themselves and from which they could also pay the teacher’s salary. But their joy was instantly obliterated when at ten o’clock at night a company of twenty Jewish troops entered the village – which, like so many villages in December, had no defence mechanism of any kind – and began firing randomly at several houses. The village was later attacked three more times before being evacuated by force in April 1948, when it was completely destroyed. Jewish forces made a similar attack in December against Beit Affa in the Gaza Strip, but here the raiders were successfully repelled.31
Threatening leaflets were also distributed in Syrian and Lebanese villages on Palestine’s border, warning the population:
If the war will be taken to your place, it will cause massive expulsion of the villagers, with their wives and their children. Those of you who do not wish to come to such a fate, I will tell them: in this war there will be merciless killing, no compassion. If you are not participating in this war, you will not have to leave your houses and villages.32
There now followed a number of operations of destruction in limited areas throughout rural and urban Palestine. Actions in the countryside were at first hesitant. Three villages in the upper eastern Galilee were selected: Khisas, Na’ima and Jahula, but the operation was cancelled, perhaps because the High Command deemed them as yet too ambitious. The cancellation, however, was partly ignored by the commander of the Palmach in the north, Yigal Allon. Allon wanted to experience an attack on at least one village, and decided to assault Khisas.
Khisas was a small village with a few hundred Muslims and one hundred Christians, who lived peacefully together in a unique topographical location in the northern part of Hula Plain, on a natural terrace that was about 100 metres wide. This terrace had been formed thousands of years before by the gradual shrinking of Lake Hula. Foreign travellers used to single this village out for the natural beauty of its location on the banks of the lake, and its proximity to the Hasbani River.33 Jewish troops attacked the village on 18 December 1947, and randomly started blowing up houses at the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack. The incident shocked The New York Times’ correspondent, who closely followed the unfolding events. He went and demanded an explanation from the Hagana, which at first denied the operation. When the inquisitive reporter did not let go, they eventually admitted it. Ben-Gurion issued a dramatic public apology, claiming the action had been unauthorised
but, a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.34