The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  We know more about Safsaf. Muhammad Abdullah Edghaim was born 15 years before the Nakba. He had attended elementary school in the village until the seventh grade and had completed his first year in Safad’s high school when the city fell into Jewish hands in May. No longer able to attend school, he was at home when a mixed unit of Jewish and Druze soldiers entered his village on 29 October 1948.

  Their arrival had been preceded by heavy bombardment that had killed, among others, one of Galilee’s best known singers, Muhammad Mahmnud Nasir Zaghmout. He died when a shell hit a group of villagers working in the vineyards to the west of the village. The young boy witnessed the singer’s family trying to carry his body to the village, but they had to abandon the attempt due to the heavy shelling.

  Every one of the defenders of Safsaf, among them ALA volunteers, was waiting, for some reason, for a Jewish attack to arrive from the east, but it came from the west and the village was quickly overrun. The following morning the people were ordered to assemble in the village square. The familiar procedure for identifying ‘suspects’ now took place, this time also involving the Druze soldiers, and a large number were picked out from the captured population. Seventy of the unfortunate men were taken out, blindfolded and then moved to a remote spot and summarily shot. Israeli archival documents confirm this case.3 The rest of the villagers were then ordered to leave. Unable to collect even their most meagre personal possessions, they were driven out, with the Israeli troops firing shots above their heads, towards the nearby border with Lebanon.

  The oral testimonies, unlike the Israeli military archives, tell of even worse atrocities. There is very little reason to doubt these eyewitness accounts, as so many of them have been corroborated by other sources for other cases. Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.4

  A few people were left behind, as in Tantura, to collect and bury the dead – several elderly men and five boys. Safsaf in Arabic means ‘weeping willow’. Mahmoud Abdulah Edghaim, our main source for the atrocities, is today an old man, still living in the refugee camp of Ayn Hilwah. His little hut is surrounded by the many weeping willows he planted when he first arrived there almost sixty years ago. This is all that remains of Safsaf.

  Bulayda was the last village taken during Operation Hiram. It was left until the end as its people proved steadfast in their determination to protect their homes. It was very close to the Lebanese border and Lebanese soldiers crossed the fence and fought alongside the villagers – probably the only significant Lebanese contribution to the defence of the Galilee. For ten days, the village withstood repeated assaults and raids. In the end, realising the hopelessness of their situation, the population fled even before the Israeli soldiers moved in: they did not want to undergo the horrors the people of Safsaf had experienced.

  By 31 October, the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army.

  Mopping-Up Operations

  In November and December, some cleansing activity continued in the Galilee, but it took the form of what the Israelis called ‘mopping up operations’. These were in essence ‘second-thought’ operations to cleanse villages that had not originally been targeted. They were added to the list of villages to be evicted because Israel’s political elite wanted to eradicate the unmistakably ‘Arabic’ character of the Galilee. But today, despite all of Israel’s efforts to ‘Judaize’ the Galilee – beginning with direct expulsions in the 1940s, military occupation in the 1960s, massive confiscation of land in the 1970s, and a huge official Judaization settlement effort in the 1980s – it is still the only area in Palestine that has retained its natural beauty, its Middle Eastern flavour and its Palestinian culture. Since half the population is Palestinian, the ‘demographic balance’ prevents many Israeli Jews from thinking of the region as their ‘own’, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  Back in the winter of 1948, Israeli attempts to tip this ‘balance’ in their favour included the expulsion of additional small villages such as Arab al-Samniyya near Acre with its 200 inhabitants, and the large village of Deir al-Qasi with a population of 2500.5 In addition, there is the unique story of the three villages of Iqrit, Kfar Bir’im and Ghabisiyya, which began in October 1948 but has still not ended. The tale of Iqrit is fairly representative of what also happened to the other two villages.

  The village was close to the Lebanese border, perched high in the mountains, about thirty kilometres east of the coast. An Israeli battalion occupied it on 31 October 1948. The people surrendered without a fight – Iqrit was a Maronite community and they expected to be welcome in the new Jewish state. The commander of the battalion ordered the people to leave on the grounds that it was dangerous for them to stay, but promised them they would be able to return in two weeks time, after the military operations were over. On 6 November, the people of Iqrit were evicted from their houses and transported by army trucks to Rama. Fifty people, including the local priest, were allowed to stay behind to keep an eye on the houses and property but six months later, the Israeli army came back and drove them out as well.6

  This is another example of how the methodology of cleansing varied. The case of Iqrit and the neighbouring village of Kfar Bir’im is one of the few publicised instances where, in a long drawn-out process, the indigenous people decided to seek redress through the Israeli courts. The villagers, being Christians, were allowed to stay in the country, but not in their village. They did not capitulate, however, and began a protracted legal struggle for their right to return home, demanding that the army keep its promise. Almost sixty years later, the struggle to regain their stolen lives is still not over.

  On 26 September 1949, the Minister of Defence announced that Emergency Regulations (dating from the British Mandate) applied to Iqrit, in order to prevent the repatriation the occupying officer had promised earlier. Almost a year and a half later, on 28 May 1951, the people of Iqrit decided to take their case to the Israeli Supreme Court, which on 31 July declared that the eviction was illegal and ordered the army to allow the people of Iqrit to resettle in their original village. To bypass the Supreme Court ruling, the army needed to show that it had issued a formal order of expulsion during the 1948 war, which would have turned Iqrit into just another depopulated village, like the other 530 Palestinian villages whose expulsion the Israeli courts had condoned retrospectively. The IDF subquently fabricated this formal order without hesitation or scruples. And in September 1951, the former residents of Iqrit, now refugees living in the village of Rama were bewildered to receive the official military order for their ‘formal’ expulsion showing the date of 6 November 1948, but sent almost three years later.

  In order to settle the matter once and for all, on Christmas Eve 1951 the Israeli army completely demolished all the houses in Iqrit, sparing only the church and the cemetery. That same year, similar destruction was carried out on nearby villages, among them Qaddita, Deir Hanna, Kfar Bir’im and Ghabisiyya, to prevent repatriation.7 The people of Kfar Bir’im and Ghabisiyya had also managed to secure a categorical ruling from the Israeli courts. As with Iqrit the army had immediately ‘retaliated’ by destroying their villages, offering the cynical excuse that they had been conducting a military exercise in the area involving an air bombardment, somehow leaving the village in ruins – and uninhabitable.

  The destruction was part of an ongoing Israeli battle against the ‘Arabisation’ of the Galilee, as Israel sees it. In 1976, the highest official in the Ministry of Interior, Israel Koening, called the Palestinians in the Galilee a ‘cancer in the state’s body’ and the Israeli Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan, openly spoke of them as ‘cockroaches’. An intensified process of ‘Judaization’ has so far failed to make the Galilee ‘Jewish’, but since so many Israelis today, politicians as well as academics, have come to accept and justify the ethnic cleansing that took place and to recommend it to future policy makers, the danger of
additional expulsions still hovers above the Palestinian people in this part of Palestine.

  The ‘mopping-up’ operations actually continued well into April 1949, and sometimes resulted in further massacres. This happened in the village of Khirbat Wara al-Sawda, where the Bedouin tribe al-Mawassi resided. This small village in the eastern Galilee had held out against repeated assaults during Operation Hiram and had then been left alone. After one of the attacks, several of the villagers had severed the heads of the dead Israeli soldiers. After the overall hostilities had finally come to an end, in November 1948, revenge followed. The report of the commanding officer from Battalion 103, which committed the crime, describes it graphically. The men of the village were gathered in one place while the troops set fire to all the houses. Fourteen people were then executed on the spot, and the rest moved to a prison camp.8

  ISRAEL’S ANTI-REPATRIATION POLICY

  The major activities towards the end of the 1948 ethnic cleansing operation now focused on implementing Israel’s anti-repatriation policy on two levels. The first level was national, introduced in August 1948 by an Israeli governmental decision to destroy all the evicted villages and transform them into new Jewish settlements or ‘natural’ forests. The second level was diplomatic, whereby strenuous efforts were made to avert the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the return of the refugees. The two were closely interconnected: the pace of demolition was deliberately accelerated with the specific aim of invalidating any discussion on the subject of refugees returning to their houses, since those houses would no longer be there.

  The major international endeavour to facilitate the return of the refugees was led by the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission (the PCC). This was a small committee with only three members, one each from France, Turkey and the United States. The PCC called for the unconditional return of the refugees to their homes, which the assassinated UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, had demanded. They turned their position into a UN General Assembly resolution that was overwhelmingly supported by most of the member states and adopted on 11 December 1948. This resolution, UN Resolution 194, gave the refugees the option to decide between unconditional return to their homes and/or accepting compensation.

  There was a third anti-repatriation effort, and that was to control the demographic distribution of Palestinians both within the villages that had not been cleansed and in the previously mixed towns of Palestine, at that point already totally ‘de-Arabised’. For this purpose, the Israeli army established, on 12 January 1949, a new unit, the Minority Unit. It was made up of Druze, Circassians and Bedouin who were recruited to it for one specific job only: to prevent Palestinian villagers and town dwellers from returning to their original homes. Some of their methods for achieving this objective can be seen in the summary report of Operation Number 10, submitted by the Minority Unit on 25 February 1949:

  A report on the search and identification of the villages of Arraba and Deir Hanna. In Deir Hanna, shots were fired above the heads of the citizens (ezrahim) that were gathered for the identification. Eighty of them were taken to prison. There were cases of ‘unbecoming’ behaviour of the military police towards the local citizens in this operation.9

  As we shall see, ‘unbecoming’ behaviour usually meant physical and mental harassment of all kinds. In other reports these cases were detailed, yet here we find them obfuscated by vague terminology.

  Those who were arrested were deported to Lebanon; but if they found refuge in the area Israel continued to occupy until the spring of 1949, they were likely to be expelled again. Only on 16 January 1949 did the order came to stop the selective deportations from southern Lebanon, and the Minority Unit was instructed to confine its activity solely to the Galilee and the former mixed towns and cities. The mission there was clear: to prevent any attempt – and there were quite a few – by refugees to try to smuggle their way back home, no matter whether they tried to return to a village or a house to live, or just wanted to retrieve some of their personal possessions. The ‘infiltrators’, as the Israeli army called them, were in many cases farmers who sought surreptitiously to harvest their fields or pick the fruit from their now unattended trees. Refugees who tried to slip past the army lines quite often met their death at the hands of Israeli army patrols. In the language of Israeli intelligence reports, they were ‘successfully shot at’. A quote from such a report dated 4 December 1948 records: ‘successful shooting at Palestinians trying to return to the village of Blahmiyya and who attempted to retrieve their belongings.’10

  The ‘main problem’, complained one intelligence unit, was that ‘the Syrians are shooting at the refugees [from their side], so we are shooting back at them to enable the refugees to cross the River Jordan.’11 Those who tried to cross the river to Jordan were often turned back by the Hashemite Kingdom as it began to feel the burden of an ever-growing refugee community on its territory, which had already doubled the size of the Jordanian population. The same report commended the Lebanese for ‘allowing’ free passage of refugees into their country.

  But even when they were not subjected to ‘arrest-and-deport’ operations or fired at as ‘infiltrators’ or returnees, those villagers who were allowed to remain (around fifty villages out of 400 within the borders Israel had established for itself, as yet excluding the Wadi Ara) were still in danger of being forcibly evicted or transferred to other places because of the greed of Jewish farmers, especially kibbutzniks, who coveted their lands or their location.

  This happened on 5 November to a small village, Dalhamiyya, near Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov in the Jordan Valley area, which was evicted so that the kibbutz could expand its arable land.12 Even worse was the fate of the village of Raml Zayta, near the city of Hadera. It was moved once in April 1949, closer to the West Bank, and then a second time, when in 1953 a new Jewish settlement made up of the younger generation of older kibbutzim decided to move near the new location of Zayta. Upon arrival, the young kibbutzniks were not content with merely grabbing the land, but demanded the government move the houses of the Palestinian village out of their sight.13

  The crudeness of the kibbutzim’s demands was matched by the overall transformation of the language of the expellers. For Operation Hiram, the operative commands read as follows:

  Prisoners: cars will be ready to transport the refugees (plitim) to points on the Lebanese and Syrian borders. POW camps will be built in Safad and Haifa, and a transit camp in Acre; all the Muslim inhabitants have to be moved out.14

  Under the watchful eyes of UN observers who were patrolling the skies of the Galilee, the final stage of the ethnic cleansing operation, begun in October 1948, continued until the summer of 1949. Whether from the sky or on the ground, no one could fail to spot the hordes of men, women and children streaming north every day. Ragged women and children were conspicuously dominant in these human convoys: the young men were gone – executed, arrested or missing. By this time UN observers from above and Jewish eyewitnesses on the ground must have become desensitised towards the plight of the people passing by in front of them: how else to explain the silent acquiescence in the face of the massive deportation unfolding before their eyes?

  UN observers did draw some conclusions in October, writing to the Secretary General – who did not publish their report – that Israeli policy was that of ‘uprooting Arabs from their native villages in Palestine by force or threat’.15 Arab member states attempted to bring the report on Palestine to the attention of the Security Council, but to no avail. For almost thirty years the UN uncritically adopted the rhetorical obfuscations of Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, who referred to the refugees as constituting a ‘humane problem’ for which no one could be held accountable or responsible. UN observers were also shocked by the scope of the looting that went on, which by October 1948 had reached every village and town in Palestine. After so overwhelmingly endorsing a partition resolution, almost a year earlier, the UN could have passed another resolution condemning the ethnic clean
sing, but it never did. And worse was to come.

  A MINI EMPIRE IN THE MAKING

  So successful was Israel during this final phase that dreams re-emerged of creating a mini-empire. The Israeli forces were once again put on the alert to expand the Jewish state into the West Bank and southern Lebanon. The difference with these orders was that the allusions to the West Bank (called Samariyya or the Arab Triangle in those days) were clearer, actually forming the first transparent and official breach of the tacit Israeli–Transjordanian understanding. The order was to try to take the areas around Jenin in the northern part of today’s West Bank and, if they were successful, to proceed to Nablus. Although the attack was postponed, in the months to come the military High Command remained obsessed with the areas the army had not yet occupied, especially the West Bank. We have the names that were given to the different operations Israel had planned to implement there between December 1948 and March 1949, the best known of which was Operation ‘Snir’; when Israel and Jordan finally signed an armistice agreement, they had to be set aside.