The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  Also in August, the Jewish forces took the opportunity of the truce to make some modifications to areas they had already occupied. These might have been on the orders of a local commander, for which he did not need authorisation from above, or, occasionally, at the request of a particular group, which may have collaborated with the Zionists and now wanted to take part in the division of the spoils. One such place was the Druze village of Isfiya on the Carmel. The Druze notables of Isfiya asked for the Bedouin living in their town to be expelled, claiming they were thieves and generally ‘incompatible’. The commander in charge said he did not have the time to deal with expulsions of people who were not in any case totally alien to the village. The Bedouins of Isfiya are still there today, discriminated against as ‘lesser’ members of the local community, but fortunate that the Israeli army was too busy to follow up on the request of the Druze.31 These internal skirmishes show that in the relative calm that had descended on the fronts with the Arab armies, Israel had decided the time had come to institutionalise the occupation.

  The Zionist leadership seemed most pressured to determine the status of the lands it had occupied but that were legally within the UN-designated Arab state. In August, Ben-Gurion still referred to these territories as ‘administered areas’, not part of the state as yet but governed by a military judicial system. The Israeli government wanted to obfuscate the legal status of these areas, which had originally been granted to the Palestinians, because of its apprehension that the UN would demand an explanation for their occupation, an apprehension that proved totally unfounded. Inexplicably, the issue of Israel’s legal (read: ‘illegal’) status in UN-designated Arab Palestine was never raised during the momentary interest the international community briefly displayed in the fate of post-mandatory Palestine and that of its indigenous population. Until Israel was accepted as a full member of the UN, in May 1949, the designation of these areas alternated between ‘administered’ and ‘occupied’. In May 1949, all distinctions disappeared, along with the villages, the fields and the houses – all ‘dissolved’ into the Jewish State of Israel.

  The Collapse of the Second Truce

  The second truce was extended through the summer of 1948, although due to continuing hostilities on both sides, it seemed a truce in name only. However, the UN did succeed in averting an Israeli attack on the Golan Heights and the only proper town there, Qunaitra, the order for which arrived in the forces’ headquarters on the day the truce ended. Even at a distance of almost sixty years, it makes chilling reading: ‘Your orders,’ wrote Yigael Yadin to the commander in charge, ‘are to destroy the city’.32 The city would remain relatively unscathed until 1967, when it was ethnically cleansed by Israeli troops occupying the Golan Heights. In 1974, Yadin’s terse order was implemented literally when the Israeli forces destroyed the town of Qunaitra, before returning it to the Syrians a complete ghost town, as part of a disengagement settlement.

  In 1948 Israel’s determination to take the Golan Heights was fed by the gradual withdrawal of the Syrian troops, first to the slopes of the Golan and then further into the Syrian hinterland, but most of the leaders of the Jewish state coveted Palestine, not Syria. In August there were still three main areas of Palestine that Israel had not yet taken but that Ben-Gurion saw as essential to would-be Israel: Wadi Ara, the western part of the upper Galilee, and the southern Negev. The first two were heavily populated Palestinian areas and thus became the inevitable targets of the ethnic cleansing campaign, wholly outside the theatre of war with the regular Arab armies that had in any case petered out in August due to the truce.

  September 1948 looked very much like August 1948: real fighting with the regular Arab armies had dwindled, leaving Israeli troops trying to complete the job they had started in December 1947. Some of them were sent on impossible missions to go beyond the occupation of the seventy-eight per cent of Palestine that had already proven to be within Israel’s grasp. One of these assignments in September was for the troops to try for a third time to occupy Wadi Ara and the northern tip of the West Bank, with special orders to capture Qalqilya and Tul-Karem. This was Operation Autumn. The attempt to invade the Wadi Ara area was again repelled. This part would be annexed by Israel when King Abdullah of Jordan decided to cede it in the spring of 1949 as part of the armistice agreement between the two countries. It is one of the ironies of history that many Israelis today, frightened by a potential adverse shift in the ‘demographic balance’, favour the transfer of this area back to the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank. The option between being imprisoned in a locked Bantustan on the West Bank or ‘enjoying’ second-class citizenship in Israel holds no exciting prospects either way, to say the least, but the people of the Wadi understandably go for the latter, as they rightly suspect that, as in the past, the Israelis want the territory without the people. Israel has already dislocated 200,000 people since it started erecting its Segregation Wall in an area very near to the Wadi and also heavily populated by Palestinians.

  In September 1948, every single one of the fifteen villages that make up Wadi Ara showed resilience and bravery in repelling the attackers, aided by Iraqi officers from the nearby contingent that the Arab League had dispatched to protect the northern West Bank when the war started. These Iraqis were among the few of Palestine’s neighbours who actually fought and succeeded in rescuing whole Palestinian villages. Captain Abu Rauf Abd al-Raziq was one such Iraqi officer who helped defend the villages of Taytaba and Qalansuwa. He had chivalrously decided to stay behind when all the other Iraqi soldiers had received orders to leave a few weeks before Operation Autumn. Major Abd al-Karim and Captain Farhan from the Iraqi army led the fortified opposition in Zayta and Jat, and Sargent Khalid Abu Hamud supervised the resistance in Attil. Captain Najib and Muhammad Sulayman did the same in Baqa al-Gharbiyya, Khalil Bek in the village of Ara and Mamduh Miara in Arara. The list of Iraqi junior officers mounting the guard and taking the lead is impressively long.

  September also saw the preparations for Operation Snir, in another effort to take over the Golan Heights, including once more the town of Qunaitra, with 14 September set as D-day. The first stage was delayed to the 26th and eventually trimmed down to a mini-operation codenamed ‘Bereshit’ (Genesis), involving the attempt to take a Syrian stronghold that, according to the UN map, was inside the Jewish state (Outpost 223). The Syrian defence forces repelled one Israeli attack after another. As part of their preparations, the Israelis tried to contact Circassian and Druze soldiers in the Syrian army to persuade them to collaborate. Israel’s military action on the Syrian line continued well into the spring of 1949 and included orders not only to occupy outposts but also villages. On 1 April 1949 the orders were then revised, confining the forces to offensives against military outposts only.33

  In September the ethnic cleansing operation continued in the central Galilee, where Israeli troops wiped out Palestinian pockets ahead of the last big operation that was to come a month later in the upper Galilee and in the south of Palestine. Local volunteers and the ALA put up some tough resistance in several villages, most notably Ilabun. A report by the Israeli forces describes their abortive assault: ‘Tonight our forces raided Ilabun. After overcoming the enemy’s resistance, we found the village deserted; after inflicting damage and slaughtering a herd, our forces withdrew while constantly exchanging fire with the enemy.’34 In other words, although Ilabun had not yet been taken, it had already been emptied of most of its inhabitants. In the village of Tarshiha, on the other hand, mostly Christian Palestinians defended the village while the majority of the people were still there. With hindsight, it would seem that it was their decision to stay that saved them from expulsion, although, had most of them been Muslim, their fate could have been very different. Tarshiha was eventually occupied in October, but was not subsequently evacuated. Had it been taken in September, this outcome, too, might have been very different, since the orders for Operation Alef Ayn, from 19 September 1948, read: ‘Tarshiha has to be evicted to th
e north.’35

  But such moments of grace were few and far between and were certainly not bestowed upon the final group of villages that were depopulated in the western part of the upper Galilee and in the southern parts of the Hebron area, Beersheba, and along the southern coast line.

  Chapter 8

  Completing the Job: October 1948–January 1949

  Over 1.5 million ethnic Albanians – at least 90% of the Kosovo population of the province had been forcibly expelled from their homes. At least a million left the province and half a million appear to be internally displaced persons. This is a campaign on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War.

  State Department Report on Kosovo, 1999.

  In 1948, 85% of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees.

  It is estimated that there were more than 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons at the beginning of 2003.

  Badil Resource Centre: Facts and figures.

  The month of October began rather frustratingly for the Israeli cleansing forces. The Galilee, especially in its upper parts, was still controlled by Palestinian volunteers reinforced by al-Qawqji’s ALA units. The latter could still be found in many villages in the northern Galilee – all part of the UN-designated Arab state – where they tried to wage a miniguerilla warfare against the armed Jewish forces, mainly in the form of sniper fire at convoys and troops. But theirs was an ineffective kind of resistance, largely in vain. October also saw the final futile attempt by regular forces from Lebanon to add their firepower in a last pathetic gesture of Arab solidarity as they shelled one Jewish settlement, Manara, high up in the Galilee. Down south in the lower Galilee the Arab volunteers were left with one artillery gun in Ilabun. It symbolised their imminent and total collapse.

  Whatever resistance may still have existed was wiped out during the onslaught of Operation Hiram in the middle of the month. Hiram was the name of the biblical king of Tyre, which was one of the targets of this ambitious and expansionist scheme: Israel’s takeover of the upper Galilee and Southern Lebanon. With intensive artillery and air force attacks, Jewish troops captured both in a matter of two weeks.

  OPERATION HIRAM

  These two weeks now rank, together with the heroic struggle to save Wadi Ara, as one of the most impressive chapters in the history of the Palestinian resistance during the Nakba. The Israeli air force dropped about 10,000 leaflets calling upon the villagers to surrender, although not promising them any immunity from expulsion. None of the villages did and, almost as a whole, came out to confront the Israeli forces.

  Thus, for a brief period, in courageous defiance of the vastly superior Israeli military power, Palestinian villages, for the first time since the ethnic cleansing started, turned themselves into strongholds, standing up to the besieging Israeli troops. A mixture of local youth and the remnants of the ALA were entrenched for a week or two, holding out with what meagre arms they had before being overpowered by the assailants. Fifty such brave men defended Ramaysh; others could be found in Deir al-Qasi, most of them in fact not locals but refugees from Saffuriyya, vowing not to be displaced again. They were commanded by a man called Abu Hammud from the ALA. Unfortunately, we only have the names of a few officers from the Israeli intelligence files and oral histories, such as Abu Ibrahim who defended Kfar Manda, but, like the Iraqi officers mentioned in the Wadi Ara campaign, 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 the Gaza Strip in 1987 and 2000. I have no illusion that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonises a people who have been colonised, expelled and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonised, expelled and occupied them.

  This handful of warriors of a sort were inevitably defeated, subjected to heavy bombardments from the air and fierce ground attacks. The ALA volunteers withdrew first, after which the local villagers decided to surrender, quite often through UN mediation. But a distingushing feature of this phase in the Nakba was that the withdrawal of the volunteers, who by now had already spent ten months in Palestine, only came about after they had desperately fought to defend the villages, quite often disobeying orders from their headquarters to leave: four hundred such volunteers lost their lives in those days in October.

  The Israeli air bombardments were massive and caused a considerable amount of ‘collateral damage’ to the Palestinian villages. Some villages suffered more than others from heavy pounding: Rama, Suhmata, Malkiyya and Kfar Bir‘im. Only Rama was left intact; the other three were occupied and destroyed.

  Most of the villages in the upper Galilee were seized in a single day at the end of October: Deir Hanna, Ilabun, Arraba, Iqrit, Farradiyya, Mi’ilya, Khirbat Irribin, Kfar Inan, Tarbikha, Tarshiha, Mayrun, Safsaf, Sa‘sa, Jish, Fassuta, and Qaddita. The list is long and includes another ten villages. Some villagers were evicted, some were allowed to stay.

  The main question about those days is no longer why villages were expelled, but rather why some were allowed to remain, obviously almost always as a result of the decision made by a local commander. Why was Jish left intact and nearby Qaddita and Mayrun expelled by force? And why was Rama spared, while nearby Safsaf was totally demolished? It is hard to tell and much of what follows is based on speculation.

  Located on the well-travelled road between Acre and Safad, the village of Rama was already overcrowded, having earlier taken in a large number of refugees from other villages. The size of the village, but quite possibly its large Druze community, were two factors that probably influenced the local decision not to expel its population. However, even for villages that were allowed to stay, scores, sometimes hundreds, of their inhabitants were imprisoned in POW camps or expelled to Lebanon. In fact, the Hebrew noun tihur, ‘cleansing’, assumed new meanings in October. It still described, as before, the total expulsion and destruction of a village, but it could now also represent other activities, such as selective search-and-expulsion operations.

  While Israel’s divide-and-rule policy proved effective in the case of the Druze, to whom it promised not only immunity but also arms as rewards for their collaboration, the Christian communities were less ‘cooperative’. Israeli troops at first routinely deported them together with the Muslims, but then started transferring them to transit camps in the central coastal areas. In October, Muslims rarely remained long in these camps but were ‘transported’ – in the language of the Israeli army – to Lebanon. But Christians were now offered a different deal. In return for a vow of allegiance to the Jewish state, they were allowed to return to their villages for a short time. To their credit, most of the Christians refused to participate willingly in such a selection process. As a result, the army soon meted out the same treatment to Christian as to Muslim villages where they did not have a Druze population.

  Instead of waiting to be deported, imprisoned or killed, many villagers simply ran away. Heavy bombardments in advance of the occupation precipitated the flight of many villagers, varying in numbers from case to case. But in most instances, the majority of the people bravely stayed put until they were forcibly uprooted. Additionally, it would appear that during the very last days of October the ‘cleansing’ stamina of the Israeli troops was beginning to wane, because villages with large populations were eventually allowed to stay. This may help explain why Tarshiha, Deir Hanna and Ilabun are still intact today.

  Or rather, half of the people of Ilabun are still with us today: the other half of the original population live in refugee camps in Lebanon. Those who were allowed to resettle in the village went through horrific experiences. During the occupation, the villagers had taken refuge in Ilabun’s two chu
rches. The frightened community crowded inside the small church buildings, cowering at the entrances as they were forced to listen to a long ‘speech’ by the Israeli commander of the operation. A sadistic and capricious person, he told the besieged villagers that he blamed them for the mutilation of two Jewish bodies, for which he instantly retaliated by mowing down several young men in front of the horrified congregation. The rest of the people were then forcibly evicted, apart from the men between the ages of ten and fifty who were led away as prisoners of war.1

  At first, everyone the village was expelled, and started making their way in a long column marching towards the Lebanese border, several of the villagers dying on the way. Then the Israeli commander changed his mind and ordered the Christians, who made up half the deportees, to turn back along the same painful and arduous route they had just taken through the rocky mountains of the Galilee. Seven hundred and fifty people were thus allowed to return to their village.

  The question of why certain villages were allowed to remain is perplexing, but equally hard to understand is why the Israeli forces subjected certain villages and not others to treatment that proved exceptionally savage. Why, for example, from all the villages conquered in the final days of October were Sa‘sa and Safsaf exposed to such barbarity while others were exempted from it?

  War Crimes During the Operation

  As mentioned earlier, in February 1948 Jewish troops had perpetrated a massacre in the village of Sa‘sa that ended in the killing of fifteen villagers, including five children. Sa‘sa is located on the main road to Mount Myarun (today Meron), the highest mountain peak in Palestine. After it had been occupied, the soldiers of Brigade Seven ran amok, firing randomly at anyone in the houses and on the streets. Besides the fifteen villagers killed, they left behind them a large number of wounded. The troops then demolished all the houses, apart from a few that the members of Kibbutz Sasa, built on the ruins of the village, took over for themselves after the forced eviction of their original owners. The chronicle of what happened in Sa‘sa in 1948 cannot easily be constructed from the archival material, but there is a highly active community of survivors bent on preserving their testimonies for posterity. Most of the refugees live in Naher al-Barid, a refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon; some are in Rashidiyya camp near Tyre, and others, mostly from a single clan, live in Ghazzawiyya. A smaller community also resides in the Ayn Hilwa refugee camp in southern Lebanon, while I met a few of the survivors now living in the village of Jish, in the Galilee.2 They find it difficult to revisit the horrible events surrounding the occupation of their village. Though more information needs to be gathered before we can reconstruct exactly how events unfolded in Sa‘sa, the story they tell does indicate, as in the case of the survivors of Tantura, that the Israeli troops perpetrated a massacre in the village.