by Ilan Pappe
5. Appears in the testimony of Edghaim, who interviewed Salim and Shehadeh Shraydeh.
6. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, pp. 194–5.
7. Iqrit has an official website with a succinct report about the events: www.iqrit.org
8. Daud Bader (ed.), Al-Ghabsiyya; Always in our Heart, Center of the Defence of the Displaced Persons’ Right, May 2002 (Nazareth, in Arabic).
9. IDF Archives, 51/957, File 1683, Battalion 103, company C.
10. Ibid. 50/2433, File 7.
11. Ibid. 51/957, File 28/4.
12. Ibid. 51/1957, File 20/4, 11 November 1948.
13. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 182.
14. IDF Archives, 51/957, File 42, Hiram Operative Commands and 49/715, File 9.
15. United Nation Archives, 13/3.3.1 Box 11, Atrocities September–November.
16. IDF Archives, The Committee of Five Meetings, 11 November 1948.
17. Ibid.
18. Ha-Olam ha-Ze, 1 March 1978 and testimony of Dov Yirmiya, the Israeli commander on the spot, published in Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 7/4 (Summer 1978), no. 28, pp. 143–5. Yirmiya does not mention numbers, but the Lebanese website of the association of these villages does; see Issah Nakhleh, The Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, Chapter 15.
19. IDF Archives, 50/121, File 226, 14 December 1948.
20. Michael Palumbo, Catastrophe, pp. 173–4.
21. Hagana Archives, 69/95, Doc. 2230, 7 October 1948.
22. IDF Archives, 51/957, File 42, 24 March 1948 to 12 March 1949.
23. The New York Times, 19 October 1948.
24. ‘Between Hope and Fear: Bedouin of the Negev’, Refugees International’s report 10 February, 2003 and Nakhleh, ibid., Chapter 11, parts 2–7.
25. Habib Jarada was interviewed in Gaza by Yasser al-Banna and was published in Islam On Line on15 May 2002.
26. All mentioned by Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, pp. 222–3.
27. A range of strategies that could only be described as psychological warfare was used by the Jewish forces to terrorize and demoralize the Arab population in a deliberate attempt to provoke a mass exodus. Radio broadcasts in Arabic warned of traitors in the Arabs’ midst, describing the Palestinians as having been deserted by their leaders, and accusing Arab militias of committing crimes against Arab civilians. They also spread fears of disease. Another, less subtle, tactic involved the use of loudspeaker trucks. These would be used in the villages and towns to urge the Palestinians to flee before they were all killed, to warn that the Jews were using poison gas and atomic weapons, or to play recorded ‘horror sounds’ – shrieking and moaning, the wail of sirens, and the clang of fire-alarm bells. See Erskine Childers, ‘The Wordless Wish: From Citizens to Refugees’, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Transformation of Palestine, pp. 186–8, and Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland, pp. 61–2, 64, 97–8).
CHAPTER 9
1. IDF Archives, 50/2433, File 7, Minorities Unit, Report no. 10, 25 February 1949.
2. The order was already given in one form in January 1948. IDF Archives, 50/2315, File 35, 11 January 1948.
3. IDF Archives, 50/2433, File 7, Operation Comb, undated.
4. IDF Archives, 50/121, File 226, Orders to the Military Governors, 16 November 1948.
5. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 17 November, vol. 3, p. 829.
6. IDF Archives, 51/957, File 42, report to HQ, 29 June 1948.
7. IDF Archives, 50/2315 File 35, 11 January 1948; emphasis added.
8. See Aharon Klien, ‘The Arab POWs in the War of Independence’ in Alon Kadish (ed.), Israel’s War of Independence 1948–9, pp. 573–4.
9. IDF Archives, 54/410, File 107, 4 April 1948.
10. I wish to thank Salman Abu Sitta for providing me with the Red Cross Documents: G59/I/GG 6 February 1949.
11. Al-Khatib, Palestine’s Nakbah, p. 116.
12. Ibid.
13. See note 10.
14. See note 4.
15. It appears also in Yossef Ulizki, From Events to A War, p. 53.
16. Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 108.
17. See note 4.
18. Dan Yahav, Purity of Arms: Ethos, Myth and Reality, 1936–1956, p. 226.
19. See note 15.
20. See note 4.
21. Ibid.
22. Interview with Abu Laben, in Dan Yahav, Purity of Arms: Ethos, Myth and Reality, 1936–1954, Tel-Aviv: Tamuz 2002, pp. 223–30
23. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 25 June 1948.
24. The protocol of the meeting was published in full by Tom Segev in his book, 1949 –The First Israelis, and can be found in the State Archives.
25. For the full transcript of the meeting, see Tom Segev, 1949–The First Israelis, Jerusalem Domino, 1984, pp. 69–73.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. See Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 5 July 1948.
31. IDF Archives, 50/121, File 226, report by Menahem Ben-Yossef, Platoon commander, Battalion 102, 26 December 1948.
32. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 5 July 1948.
33. Ibid., 15 July 1948.
34. Pappe, ‘Tantura’.
35. Ben-Gurion, As Israel Fights, pp. 68–9.
36. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 18 August 1948.
37. Ibid.
38. David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of Arabs in Israel.
39. Tamir Goren, From Independence to Integration: The Israeli Authority and the Arabs of Haifa, 1948–1950, p. 337, and Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 30 June 1948.
40. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 16 June 1948.
41. All the information in this section is based on an article by Nael Nakhle in Al-Awda, 14 September 2005 (published in Arabic in London).
42. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, p. 298.
43. Weitz, My Diary, vol. 3, p. 294, 30 May 1948.
44. Hussein Abu Hussein and Fiona Makay, Access Denied: Palestinian Access to Land in Israel.
45. Ha’aretz, 4 February 2005.
CHAPTER 10
1. The website address of the JNF is www.kkl.org.il; a limited English version can be found at www.jnf.org.il from which most of the information in this chapter is taken.
2. Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains, p. 169.
3. In Israeli Hebrew, ‘kfar’ normally means ‘Palestinian village’, i.e., there are no ‘Jewish’ villages as Hebrew uses instead yishuvim (settlements), kibbutzim, moshavim, etc.
4. Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains, p. 169.
CHAPTER 11
1. For the years 1964–1968, which I have called the ‘bogus PLO’, see Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples.
2. Ramzy Baroud (ed.), Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion 2002.
3. Ibid., p. 53–5.
4. Literally called ‘The Law for Safeguarding the Rejection of the Right of Return, 2001’.
CHAPTER 12
1. The Arab members come from three parties: the Communist Party (Hadash), the National Party of Azmi Bishara (Balad) and the United Arab List drawn up by the more pragmatic branch of the Islamic movement.
2. Entry for 12 June 1895, where Herzl discusses his proposal for a shift from building a Jewish society in Palestine to forming a state for Jews, as translated by Michael Prior from the original German; see Michael Prior, ‘Zionism and the Challenge of Historical truth and Morality,’ in Prior (ed.), Speaking the Truth about Zionism and Israel, p. 27.
3. From a speech in front of the Mapai Centre, 3 December 1947, reproduced in full in Ben-Gurion, As Israel Fights, p. 255.
4. Quoted in Yediot Achrinot, 17 December 2003.
5. ‘Disengagement’ is, of course, Zionist newspeak, and was invented to circumvent the use of such terms as ‘end of occupation’ and to sidestep the obligations incumbent upon Israel, according to international law, as the occupying power in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
.
6. Ruth Gabison, Ha’aretz, 1 December, where she literally says: ‘Le-Israel yesh zkhut le-fakeah al ha-gidul ha-tivi shel ha-‘Aravim.’
7. The term Mizrahim for Arab Jews in Israel came into use in the early 1990s. As Ella Shohat explains, while retaining its implicit opposite, ‘Ashkenazim’, it ‘condenses a number of connotations: it celebrates the past in the Eastern world; it affirms the pan-oriental communities [that] developed in Israel itself; and it invokes a future of revived cohabitation with the Arab-Muslim East’; Ella Shohat, ‘Rupture and Return: A Mizrahi Perspective on the Zionist Discourse’, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 1[2001] (my italics).
8. The ‘black’ Jews Israel brought over from Ethiopia in the 1980s were immediately relegated to the poor areas of the periphery and are almost invisible in Israeli society today; discrimination against them is high, as is the suicide rate among them.
EPILOGUE
1. Ha’aretz, 9 May 2006.
Chronology of Key Dates
1878
First Zionist agricultural colony in Palestine (Petah Tikva)
1882
25,000 Jewish immigrants begin to settle in Palestine, mainly from eastern Europe
1891
Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German, founds the Jewish Colonization Association in London to aid Zionist settlers in Palestine
1896
Der Judenstaat, a book advocating the establishment of a Jewish state, is published by Austro-Hungarian Jewish writer Theodor Herzl
Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) begins operations in Palestine
1897
Zionist Congress calls for a home for Jewish people in Palestine Pamphlet by founder of socialist Zionism, Nahman Syrkin, says Palestine “must be evacuated for the Jews”.
First Zionist Congress in Switzerland sets up the World Zionist Association (WZO) and petitions for “a home for the Jewish people in Palestine”.
1901
Jewish National Fund (JNF) set up to acquire land in Palestine for the WZO; the land is to be used and worked solely by Jews.
1904
Tensions between Zionists and Palestinian farmers in Tiberias area
1904–1914
40,000 Zionist immigrants arrive in Palestine; Jews now total 6% of the population.
1905
Israel Zangwill states Jews must drive out the Arabs or “grapple with the problem of a large alien population ...”
1907
First kibbutz established
1909
Tel Aviv founded north of Jaffa
1911
Memo to Zionist Executive speaks of “limited population transfer”.
1914
World War I starts
1917
Balfour Declaration; British Secretary of State pledges support for “a Jewish national home in Palestine”. Ottoman forces in Jerusalem surrender to British General Allenby
1918
Palestine occupied by Allies under Allenby
World War 1 over, Ottoman rule in Palestine ends
1919
First Palestinian National Congress in Jerusalem rejects Balfour declaration, demands independence
Chaim Weizmann, of the Zionist Commission at the Paris Peace Conference calls for a Palestine “as Jewish as England is English” Other Commission members say “as many Arabs as possible should be persuaded to emigrate”.
Winston Churchill wrote “there are Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience”.
1919–1933
35,000 Zionists immigrate to Palestine. Jews now total 12% of the population and hold 3% of the land
1920
Founding of Hagana, Zionist underground military organisation
Britain is assigned the Palestinian Mandate by the Supreme Council of San Remo Peace Conference
1921
Protests in Jaffa against large-scale Zionist immigration
1922
League of Nations Council approves Britain’s Mandate for Palestine
British census of Palestine: 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish, 9.6% Christian, total population 757,182
1923
British Mandate for Palestine officially comes into force
1924–28
67,000 Zionist immigrants come to Palestine, half of whom are from Poland, raising Jewish population to 16%. Jews now own 4% of land
1925
In Paris the Revisionist Party is founded, which insists on the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine and Transjordan
1929
Riots in Palestine over claims to the Wailing Wall, with 133 Jews and 116 Arabs killed, mainly by British
1930
International Commission founded by the League of Nations to establish the legal status of Jews and Arabs at the Wailing Wall.
1931
Irgun (IZL) founded to support more militancy against Arabs
Census shows total population of 1.03 million, 16.9% Jewish British director of development for Palestine publishes report on “landless Arabs” caused by Zionist colonization
1932
First regularly constituted Palestinian political party, the Istliqlal (Independence) Party, founded
1935
Arms smuggling by Zionist groups discovered at Jaffa port
1936
A conference of Palestinian National Committees demands “no taxation without representation”.
1937
Peel Commission recommends partition of Palestine, with 33% of the country to become a Jewish state. Part of the Palestinian population is to be transferred from this state.
British dissolve all Palestinian political organisations, deport five leaders, establish military courts against rebellion by Palestinians
1938
Irgun bombings kill 119 Palestinians. Palestinian bombs and mines kill 8 Jews
British bring reinforcements to help suppress rebellion
1939
Zionist leader Jabotinsky writes: “... the Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.”
British House of Commons votes in approval of a White Paper which plans conditional independence of Palestine after 10 years and the immigration of 15,000 Jews into Palestine each year for the next 5 years
World War II begins
1940
Land Transfer Regulations come into force, protecting Palestinian land against Zionist acquisition
1943
Five-year limit planned in White Paper of 1939 extended
1945
World War II ends
1947
Britain tells newly formed UN that it will withdraw from Palestine
UN appoints committee (UNSCOP) on Palestine
UNSCOP recommends partition
November 29: UN adopts Resolution 181 on partition of Palestine
Mass expulsion by the Jews of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs begins
1948
January
‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni returns to Palestine after ten-year exile to form a group to resist partition
20
Britain plans to hand over areas of land to whichever group is predominant in the region
February
War breaks out between Jews and Arabs
18
Hagana announces military service and calls up 25–35 year old men and women
24
US delegate to UN announces that the role of the Security Council is peacekeeping rather than enforcing partition
March
6
Hagana announces mobilization
10
Plan Dalet, the Zionist blueprint for the cleansing of Palestine, finalised
18
President Truman pledges support to the Zionist cause
19–20
Arab leaders dec
ide to accept a truce and limited trusteeship rather than partition, as suggested by UN Security Council. Jews reject the truce