The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  When Ben-Gurion convened the Consultancy on 11 May he asked his colleagues to assess the possible implications of a more aggressive Jordanian campaign in the future. The bottom line of that meeting can be found in a letter Ben-Gurion sent to the commanders of the Hagana brigades telling them that the Legion’s more offensive intentions should not distract their troops from their principal tasks: ‘the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet’ (he used the noun bi‘ur, which means either ‘cleansing the leaven’ in Passover or ‘root out’, ‘eliminate’).2

  Their calculation proved to be right. Although the Jordanian army was the strongest of the Arab forces and thus would have formed the most formidable foe for the Jewish state, it was neutralised from the very first day of the Palestine war by the tacit alliance King Abdullah had made with the Zionist movement. It is no wonder that the Arab Legion’s English Commander-in-Chief, Glubb Pasha, dubbed the 1948 war in Palestine the ‘Phony War’. Glubb was not only fully aware of the restrictions Abdullah had imposed on the Legion’s actions, he was privy to the general pan-Arab consultations and preparations. Like the British military advisers of the various Arab armies – and there were many of them – he knew that the groundwork of the other Arab armies for a rescue operation in Palestine was quite ineffective – ‘pathetic’ some of his colleagues called it – and that included the ALA.3

  The only change we find in the overall Arab conduct once the Mandate had ended was in the rhetoric. The drums of war were now sounding louder and more boisterously than before but they failed to cover the inaction, disarray and confusion that prevailed. The situation may have differed from one Arab capital to the next, but the overall picture was quite uniform. In Cairo, the government only decided to send troops to Palestine at the very last moment, two days before the end of the Mandate. The 10,000 troops it had set aside included a large contingent, almost fifty per cent, of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers. The members of this political movement – vowing to restore Egypt and the Arab world to the Orthodox ways of Islam – regarded Palestine as a crucial battlefield in the struggle against European imperialism. But in the 1940s the Brotherhood also regarded the Egyptian government as a collaborator with this imperialism, and when its more extreme members resorted to violence in their campaign, thousands of them were imprisoned. These were now released in May 1948 so that they could join the Egyptian expedition, but of course they had had no military training and, for all their fervour, were no match for the Jewish forces.4

  Syrian forces were better trained and their politicians more committed, but only a few years after their own independence, following the French Mandate, the small number of troops the Syrians dispatched to Palestine performed so badly that even before the end of May 1948, the Consultancy had begun to consider expanding the Jewish state’s borders on its northeastern flank into Syria proper by annexing the Golan Heights.5 Even smaller and less committed were the Lebanese units, which for most of the war were happy to remain on their side of the border with Palestine, where they reluctantly tried to defend the adjacent villages.

  The Iraqi troops formed the last and most intriguing component of the all-Arab effort. They numbered a few thousand and had been ordered by their government to accept the Jordanian guideline: that is, not to attack the Jewish state, but just to defend the area allocated to King Abdullah, namely the West Bank. They were stationed in the northern part of the West Bank. However, they defied their politicians’ orders and tried to play a more effective role. Because of this, fifteen villages in Wadi Ara, on the road between Afula and Hadera, were able to hold out and thus escape expulsion (they were ceded to Israel by the Jordanian government in the summer of 1949 as part of a bilateral armistice agreement).

  For three weeks these Arab units – some provoked into action by their politicians’ hypocrisy, others deterred by it – succeeded in entering and holding on to the areas the UN Partition Resolution had allocated to the Arab state. In a few places they were able to encircle isolated Jewish settlements located there and occupy them for a while, only to lose them again within a few days.

  The Arab troops that entered Palestine quickly found out they had over-stretched their supply lines, which meant they stopped getting ammunition for their antiquated and quite often malfunctioning arms. Their officers then discovered that there was no coordinating hand between the various national armies, and that even when supply routes were open, the weaponry in their home countries was running out. Weapons were scarce since the Arab armies’ main suppliers were Britain and France, who had declared an arms embargo on Palestine. This crippled the Arab armies but hardly affected the Jewish forces, who found a willing furnisher in the Soviet Union and in its new Eastern bloc.6 As for the lack of coordination, this was the inevitable result of the decision by the Arab League to appoint King Abdullah as the supreme commander of the all-Arab army with an Iraqi general as the acting commander. While the Jordanians never looked back at those days of May, June and July of 1948, when they had done all they could to undermine the general Arab effort, the Iraqi revolutionary rulers who came to power in 1958 brought their generals to trial for their role in the catastrophe.

  Still, there were enough Arab troops to engage the Jewish army in battle and provoke some courageous Jewish responses, especially around isolated Jewish communities in the heart of the UN-designated Arab state or at the extreme outer ends of the country, where Ben-Gurion had made a strategic decision to leave vulnerable Jewish outposts to fend for themselves when Arab units started entering Palestine on 15 May. Units of the Syrian army marched along the Damascus–Tiberias road that day and were engaged in battle around the four isolated settlements there: Mishamr Hayarden, Ayelet Hashahar, Haztor and Menahemiya. They succeeded in occupying only Mishmar ha-Yarden, where they remained until the first day of the truce (11 June). In the words of the Israeli intelligence, they ‘showed no offensive spirit’ when they were later attacked and driven out of Palestine.7

  Israeli historians later criticised Ben-Gurion for having temporarily abandoned these settlements.8 From a purely military point of view, Ben-Gurion was right as none of them would ultimately remain in Arab hands anyway, and although the ethnic cleansing operation was obviously far more important and higher up on his agenda, he did care about the fate of these more remote spots.

  This also explains why most of the heroic stories that have fed the Israeli mythology and collective memory of the 1948 war have their origin in these first three weeks of hostilities. The real war also included other tests of resilience and resolution on the Israeli side – Tel-Aviv, for instance, was bombarded several times in the first few days of the war by Egyptian airplanes – but these subsided and disappeared over the following weeks. However, the presence of the Arab troops was never enough to stop the ethnic cleansing – none of whose horror stories ever troubled the official and popular Israeli narrative, as they were totally erased from it.

  Furthermore, the cleansing operations in the second half of May 1948 were no different from those of April and early May. In other words, the mass evictions were not affected by the end of the Mandate but went ahead uninterrupted. There had been ethnic cleansing on the day before 15 May 1948, and the same ethnic cleansing operations took place the day after. Israel had enough troops both to handle the Arab armies and to continue cleansing the land.

  It should be clear by now that the Israeli foundational myth about a voluntary Palestinian flight the moment the war started – in response to a call by Arab leaders to make way for invading armies – holds no water. It is a sheer fabrication that there were Jewish attempts, as Israeli textbooks still insist today, to persuade Palestinians to stay. As we have seen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled by force before the war began, and tens of thousands more would be expelled in the first week of the war. For most Palestinians, the date of 15 May 1948 was of no special significance at the time: it was just one more day in the horrific calendar of ethnic cleansing that had start
ed more than five months earlier.9

  DAYS OF TIHUR

  Tihur is yet another Hebrew word for cleansing, literally meaning ‘purifying’. After the Jewish state was declared on the evening of 14 May, the orders the units in the field received from above used the term frequently and explicitly. It was with this kind of language that the High Command chose to galvanise the Israeli soldiers before sending them on their way to destroy the Palestinian countryside and urban districts. This escalation in rhetoric was the only obvious difference from the previous month – otherwise the cleansing operations continued unabated.10

  The Consultancy went on meeting, but less regularly as the Jewish state had become a fait accompli with a government, cabinet, military command, secret services, etc., all in place. Its members were no longer preoccupied with the master plan of expulsion: ever since Plan Dalet had been put into motion it had been working well, and needed no further coordination and direction. Their attention was now focused on whether they had enough troops to sustain a ‘war’ on two fronts: against the Arab armies and against the one million Palestinians who, according to international law, had become Israeli citizens on 15 May. By the end of May even these apprehensions had petered out.

  If there was anything new about the way the Consultancy now functioned, it was only the physical move to a new building, on a hill top overlooking the evicted village of Shaykh Muwannis. This became the Matkal, the headquarters of the general staff of the Israeli army.11 From this new vantage point, the Consultancy could literally observe the onslaught that had begun on 1 May against the nearby Palestinian villages. By no means the only operation that day, it was conducted simultaneously with identical operations in the east and the north. One brigade, the Alexandroni, was entrusted with the mission of cleansing the villages to the east and north of Tel-Aviv and Jaffa. It was then ordered to move north and, together with other units, start depopulating the Palestine coastline, all the way up to Haifa.

  The orders had come on 12 May. ‘You must between the 14th and 15th occupy and destroy: Tira, Qalansuwa and Qaqun, Irata, Danba, Iqtaba and Shuweika. Furthermore, you should occupy but not destroy Qalqilya [the city in the occupied West Bank, which Alexandroni failed to take and which today is totally enclosed by the eight-metre-high segregation wall Israel has erected].’12 Within two days the next order arrived in the Alexandroni headquarters: ‘You will attack and cleanse Tirat Haifa, Ayn Ghazal, Ijzim, Kfar Lam, Jaba, Ayn Hawd and Mazar.’13

  Re-tracing the route the brigade followed, it appears the troops preferred to sweep the area systematically from south to north and accomplish the destruction of the villages in the order that seemed right to them, rather than according to the exact instruction of which village should be hit first. As completing the list was the overall goal, no clear priorities were mentioned. So the Alexandroni began with the villages north and east of Tel-Aviv: Kfar Saba and Qaqun, whose populations were duly expelled. In Qaqun the UN claimed, and testimonies by Jewish troops corroborated, that the takeover had involved a case of rape.

  All in all, there were sixty-four villages within the area that stretched between Tel-Aviv and Haifa, a rectangle 100 kilometres long and fifteen to twenty kilometres wide. Only two of these villages were spared in the end: Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa. They had been scheduled for expulsion as well, but members of the neighbouring Jewish settlements convinced the army commanders to leave them unharmed, because they claimed they needed the villagers for unskilled labour in their farms and houses.14 Today this rectangle is bisected by the two main highways that connect these two major cities: highways 2 and 4. Hundred of thousands of Israelis commute daily on these roads, most of them without having the slightest notion of the places they are driving through, let alone of their history. Jewish settlements, pine forests and commercial fishing ponds have replaced the Palestinian communities that once flourished there.

  The Alexandroni’s pace cleansing the coastal rectangle was horrific – within the second half of the month alone they cleansed the following villages: Manshiyya (in the Tul-Karem area), Butaymat, Khirbat al-Manara, Qannir, Khirbat Qumbaza and Khirbat al-Shuna. A small number of villages courageously put up strong resistance, and the Alexandroni Brigade was unable to take them; neverthess, they were finally cleansed in July. That is, the ethnic cleansing operations in the central coastal plain developed in two phases: the first in May and the second in July. In the second half of May, the most important ‘trophy’ was the village of Tantura, which the Alexandroni captured on 21 May 1948.

  THE MASSACRE AT TANTURA15

  Tantura was one of the largest of the coastal villages and for the invading brigade it stuck like ‘a bone in the throat’, as the official Alexandroni war book puts it. Tantura’s day came on 22 May.

  Tantura was an ancient Palestinian village on the Mediterranean coast. It was a large village for the time, having around 1500 inhabitants whose livelihood depended on agriculture, fishing and menial jobs in nearby Haifa. On 15 May 1948, a small group of Tantura’s notables, including the mukhtar of the village, met the Jewish intelligence officers, who offered them terms of surrender. Suspecting that surrender would lead to the villagers’ expulsion, they rejected the offer.

  A week later, on 22 May 1948, the village was attacked at night. At first, the Jewish commander in charge wanted to send a van into the village with a loudspeaker calling upon people to capitulate, but this scheme was not carried out.

  The offensive came from all four flanks. This was uncommon; the brigade usually closed in on villages from three flanks, tactically creating an ‘open gate’ on the fourth flank through which they could drive the people out. Lack of coordination meant that the Jewish troops had fully encircled the village and consequently found themselves with a very large number of villagers on their hands.

  Tantura’s captured villagers were herded at gunpoint down to the beach. The Jewish troops then separated the men from the women and children, and expelled the latter to nearby Furaydis, where some of the men joined them a year and half later. Meanwhile, the hundreds of men collected on the beach were ordered to sit down and await the arrival of an Israeli intelligence officer, Shimshon Mashvitz, who lived in the nearby settlement of Givat Ada and in whose ‘district’ the village fell.

  Mashvitz went along with a local collaborator, hooded as at Ayn al-Zaytun, and picked out individual men – again, in the eyes of the Israeli army, ‘men’ were all males between the ages of ten and fifty – and took them out in small groups to a spot further away where they were executed. The men were selected according to a pre-prepared list drawn from Tantura’s village file, and included everybody who had participated in the 1936 Revolt, in attacks on Jewish traffic, who had contacts with the Mufti, and anyone else who had ‘committed’ one of the ‘crimes’ that automatically condemned them.

  These were not the only men executed. Before the selection and killing process took place on the coast, the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree inside the houses and in the streets. Joel Skolnik, a sapper in the battalion, had been wounded in this attack, but after his hospitalisation heard from other soldiers that this had been ‘one of the most shameful battles the Israeli army had fought.’ According to him, sniper shots from within the village as the soldiers entered had caused the Jewish troops to run amok soon after the village was taken and before the scenes on the beach unfolded. The attack happened after the villagers had signaled their surrender by waving a white flag.

  Solnik heard that two soldiers in particular had been doing the killing, and that they would have gone on had not some people from the nearby Jewish settlement of Zikhron Yaacov arrived and stopped them. It was the head of the Zikhron Yaacov settlement, Yaacov Epstein, who managed to call a halt to the orgy of killing in Tantura, but ‘he came too late’, as one survivor commented bitterly.

  Most of the killing was done in cold blood on the beach. Some of the victims were first interrogated and asked about a ‘huge cache’ of weapons that had supposedly been hidden
somewhere in the village. As they couldn’t tell – there was no such stack of weapons – they were shot dead on the spot. Today, many of the survivors of these horrific events live in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria, coping only with great difficulty with life after the trauma of witnessing the executions.

  This is how a Jewish officer described the executions at Tantura:

  Prisoners were led in groups to a distance of 200 metres aside and there they were shot. Soldiers would come to the commander-in-chief and say, ‘My cousin was killed in the war.’ His commander heard that and instructed the troops to take a group of five to seven people aside and execute them. Then a soldier came and said his brother had died in one of the battles. For one brother the retribution was higher. The commander ordered the troops to take a larger group and they were shot, and so on.

  In other words, what took place in Tantura was the systematic execution of able-bodied young men by Jewish soldiers and intelligence officers. One eyewitness, Abu Mashaykh, was staying in Tantura with a friend, as he originally came from Qisarya, the village Jewish troops had already destroyed and expelled in February 1948. He saw with his own eyes the execution of eighty-five young men of Tantura, who were taken in groups of ten and then executed in the cemetery and the nearby mosque. He thought even more were executed, and estimated that the total number could have been 110. He saw Shimshon Mashvitz supervising the whole operation: ‘He had a “Sten” [sub-machine gun] and killed them.’ Later he adds: ‘They stood next to the wall, all facing the wall. He came from the back and shot them in the head, all of them.’ He further testified how Jewish soldiers were watching the executions with apparent relish.