by Adam LeBor
Thousands more left at the beginning of May, either by sea, or with the help of the British as they crossed the Haganah lines, too scared to remain in Jaffa once the British departed. The Arab Liberation Army contingent finally arrived at the end of April, and behaved in characteristic fashion: looting, terrorising and molesting women, records Nimr al-Khatib.16 By early May the city had collapsed. Mayor Heikal and the rest of the municipal leaders had fled. The Irgun and Haganah finally entered Jaffa proper on 14 May, after the British troops had left. Between four and five thousand Arabs remained. ‘Jaffa had surrendered,’ says Yoseph Nachmias. ‘We field commanders wanted to put those few thousand on buses as well and send them away. That is what they would have done to us. But our leader Menachem Begin said not to touch those who remained, and to let them be. He said if they did not leave with their brothers, then let them live in peace with us.’ But most of Jaffa’s inhabitants did not believe they could live in peace with the victorious Jews. Those who fled recall days of terror: a seemingly endless rain of mortars, a city starving and sealed off from its surroundings, civilians killed and injured by bombings and sniping. Flight from violence and anarchy is a natural human instinct, especially for parents desperate to protect their children. Yet some of the few thousand who did stay argue that their compatriots should have shown more fortitude. Even today the bitter debate continues among Palestinians – both within Jaffa and in the diaspora – over whether the city was unnecessarily abandoned.
On 18 May Ben-Gurion visited Jaffa. ‘I couldn’t understand,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Why did the inhabitants leave?’17 Haganah intelligence reports from 1948 describe the Palestinians as being possessed by a ‘psychosis of flight’. The Haganah’s Operation Chametz, which had captured several villages near Jaffa at the end of April, was a factor, as Jaffa was cut off, with no food supply. So was the massacre at Deir Yassin. The Irgun’s terrifying mortar bombardment of Jaffa was the first stage of ethnic cleansing and triggered the mass panic and exodus. But the bombardment stopped after the British intervened. Most of the close-quarter urban warfare was confined to Manshiyyeh. Jaffa was not bombarded for weeks by tanks, bombed by aeroplanes or shelled to rubble by heavy artillery. The mortars did damage buildings, killing and wounding civilians, but mortar fire alone cannot destroy a city and did not destroy Jaffa. The Irgun did not advance street by street into Clock Tower Square, or Ajami, or Jebaliyyeh, setting houses on fire, and killing civilians. They were held back by the British. When the British left and the Irgun and Haganah did take over the city, they met no resistance, because Jaffa was empty. The Arab exodus had begun in the winter of 1947/48, six months before the Irgun attacked Manshiyyeh. Most of those who left, it seems, thought they would soon return. But they were wrong.
* * *
By the second day at sea, Mustafa Hammami no longer thought that the journey was a great adventure. There was barely any food, little water, and most of what he ate came straight back up again. ‘We were seasick. We vomited into a drainage pipe. I had never before smelled that acrid stench of vomit and urine, and I still remember it now.’ That night the boat ran into a storm. It was dangerously overloaded and began to list to one side. Several millennia before, the prophet Jonah had fled from Jaffa on a cargo ship. Jonah was trying to escape God’s command to go and preach at Nineveh. Jonah’s boat hit bad weather. ‘Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.’ (Jonah 1:4–5)
The Hammamis’ captain also ordered the passengers to throw all heavy belongings overboard. ‘We were all frightened. The next morning one woman could not find her newborn baby. In the darkness and confusion she must have accidentally thrown it overboard. Her wailing broke our hearts. That night an old man passed away, and a woman delivered a baby. We were very shocked, and a sombre mood fell on us. We sat quietly for the rest of the voyage,’ says Mustafa. A Royal Navy vessel passed by and a sailor barked into his loud-hailer: who were they, and what where they doing? ‘We are Arabs, leaving Jaffa and heading for Beirut,’ someone shouted. The ship sailed closer. The crew swept the spotlight up and down the rows of shivering, frightened refugees, before pulling away. ‘I often wonder what went through that captain’s mind when he saw us, packed like sardines, and then steamed away, without offering us any help,’ says Hasan Hammami.
On the last morning a Lebanese fighter flew overhead, so low Mustafa could see its markings. The journey by boat from Jaffa to Beirut normally took twelve hours. After three days at sea, the Hammamis disembarked at the southern Lebanese port of Tyre. Ahmad Hammami never saw Jaffa, or his house, again. His wife Nafise and several of their children would return, decades later. By then Ahmad’s house would have new owners, and Jaffa new rulers.
10
Jaffa has new Masters
Summer 1948
Jaffa the Great, clamorous with sounds of the Orient – silence reigns there, and the silence frightens me.
Joseph Weitz, member of the
committee responsible for renaming
abandoned Arab villages after the Nakba1
In May 1948 Amin Andraus’ house was a fortress. There were sandbags around the walls, and sandbags on the roof. Amin was a widower, living with his mother Haya, and these were the most difficult days of his life. His family was in exile, his business ruined, his hometown abandoned and his country no longer existed. Amin’s wife Hanneh had died in 1945, leaving him with four children to raise. As the fighting worsened, Amin sent his son Salim and daughters Wedad, Suad and Leila to Jordan, with his sister Fahima. Amin’s car showroom had been demolished by the British after a policeman had gone up to the roof for a cigarette and been shot dead by a sniper. He had had nothing to do with the incident. Despite his vociferous protests, Amin had just half an hour to get out what he could before the explosives were detonated and the building came crashing down on his stock of cars, crushing them beneath the rubble.
Amin was a member of Jaffa’s Emergency Committee, and by now also the Arab mayor in all but name. Yousef Heikal, the actual mayor, had left the keys to the New Seray (or what was left of it) with Amin when he left, saying, ‘You look after the city until I get back.’ Heikal did not return. Despite Amin’s entreaties, most of his friends had fled. From Clock Tower Square, through the markets, down into Ajami and Jebaliyyeh, Jaffa was eerily empty. For Amin it was a tragedy. ‘My father believed in staying and tried to convince people to stay. But they left, because they thought it was only for a few days. It was very sad. Jaffa was let down by its population,’ says Amin’s son Salim. Amin tried to persuade his mother Haya to leave with his children, but she had refused. ‘I will not leave my house, and I will not leave my son,’ she said. ‘I want to die in my country.’
Amin understood that further military resistance was pointless. On 9 May the Emergency Committee wrote to the British District Commissioner, declaring that Jaffa was no longer defensible. It would be an ‘open city’, once the Mandate ended, and would not ‘be used for military purposes’. On 13 May 1948 Jaffa capitulated. Amin Andraus and three others, including Abdel Rahim, a cousin of Ahmad Hammami, signed the surrender agreement. ‘My father explained that Jaffa was a peaceful town, there was nobody there to fight, just old people and foreign workers who did not have money to leave. He wanted Jaffa to be an “open city”, with no looting or destruction,’ says his daughter Suad. ‘There has been criticism of this, but they had to do it. It was heartbreaking but it was the best option they had at the time. There was no way to fight, and he wanted to save Jaffa from being destroyed.’
The agreement stipulated that all arms and ammunition must be surrendered, on pain of severe punishment; that any information about mines or booby traps must be submitted to the Haganah; that anyone considered dangerous to peace and security would be interrogated and possibly interned and that all municipal records and documents must
be left intact.2 Arab males, even if they had fought against the Haganah, would not be detained unless they were criminals or a threat to peace and security. However, they would be gathered in Ajami until they were properly identified. Tel Aviv municipality would assist in the restoration of normal life. Clause eight seemed to leave the door open for some to return: ‘… any male Arab who has left Jaffa and who wishes to return to Jaffa may apply for a permit to do so. Permits will be granted after their bona fides have been proved, provided that the Commander of the Haganah is convinced that applicants will not, at any time, constitute a threat to peace and security’.3 The Haganah commander may have been sincere, but his political masters had other plans.
On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel and took office as prime minister. Israel was recognised immediately by the United States, and three days later by the Soviet Union. After the first Zionist Congress in 1897, Theodor Herzl had written: ‘At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years’ time, and certainly in fifty, everyone will see it.’4 Herzl was out by one year. There were rapturous, if brief, celebrations across the new state, which was still at war. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were formed, eventually absorbing most of the fighters of the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi, except in Jerusalem where some Irgun and Lehi fighters continued to operate independently. Old enmities between the different factions did not fade quickly. The Lehi fighter Yoram Aharoni was happy to serve in a Hebrew army, but his wife Rina was more ambivalent. The IDF took its orders from the new Israeli government, the same people who launched the ‘Hunting Season’ in 1944, and handed over Irgun and Lehi members to the British. ‘Lehi did not take part in the celebrations. We were an underground [movement], used to working in very small groups and now we were in an army,’ says Rina. ‘The others in the IDF who knew I was in Lehi were afraid to talk to me at first. It was hard for them and hard for me.’
There were more pressing threats than intra-Zionist rivalry. Four Arab armies invaded the new state: Egypt from the south, Jordan, Iraq and Syria from the north and west. Other Arab states sent reinforcements and the 1948 war entered its second phase. These were not the rag-tag Palestinian militias but well-armed national armies, with tanks, artillery and planes. Arab leaders loudly proclaimed that they would annihilate the Jewish state. ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades,’ announced Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League. He confidently predicted that, ‘It does not matter how many Jews there are. We will sweep them into the sea’.5
Which was why, on 17 May 1948, when Israel was three days old, Shlomo Chelouche was steadily tracking an Egyptian fighter plane in the sights of his machine gun. Shlomo was a Haganah commander for north Tel Aviv, based at Sde Dov airport. The airport had already been bombed that morning, shortly after dawn. A tent was hit, holding arms and ammunition. Shlomo had helped pull the wounded from the wreckage. He was later decorated for his bravery. ‘Who goes in to pull out the wounded when ammunition is exploding everywhere? Only a fool,’ he says, laughing. ‘The second plane came towards us an hour later, from the direction of Jaffa. He was not flying very high. I positioned the gun and waited for him for a few minutes. He was coming and I was waiting. I was calm, I aimed. I gave him everything I had and the plane flew out to sea.’
Shlomo shot well. Aharon Remez, Commander of the Israeli Air Force, told Shlomo that the plane had gone down near Herzliya and he was going to look for the pilot. ‘After an hour Remez came back to Sde Dov with the pilot. I spoke to him in Arabic. He was shivering. I asked him if he wanted to drink something. He said, no, no, no. He was afraid. Remez wanted to take him to the big chief, Ben-Gurion, to question him. I told him that you don’t take an officer to Ben-Gurion. I said he was a prisoner of war and Remez should leave him with me. He laughed, and agreed. I gave the Arab a comb, for his hair. He took the comb and started combing – he was so nervous, he couldn’t hold it.’
Down the coast in Jaffa, the Haganah command did not keep its promise to guarantee safety and security. Jewish troops ran wild, looting and robbing at will. Houses were broken into, cars towed away, silverware and valuables plundered. Even cows were stolen. On 20 May the Emergency Committee wrote a letter of protest to the Israeli authorities, complaining that properties belonging to absentee owners were being broken into and robbed. Movable items were taken away in broad daylight, while heavier furniture was ‘smashed into pieces due to nothing but destructive motives only’. People were being openly robbed on the street, a girl of twelve was raped and the outrages were even happening at night, when the population was under curfew. But if any Jewish soldiers were caught plundering, the letter continued, they were immediately released and carried on where they had left off.6
It seems Amin Andraus had a reasonable working relationship with Yitzhak Chisik, the military governor. But Chisik lacked the authority to bring law and order. By 10 June, Amin had had enough. He wrote to Chisik, resigning from the Emergency Committee, and asked for a permit to leave Jaffa, ‘as I cannot see any benefit from my staying here’.7 In the end, Amin stayed. Six days later the Israeli cabinet met to discuss the question of the Arab refugees. Mapam, the left-wing party in the coalition, was pushing for some to be allowed home. Ben-Gurion refused: no refugees would be permitted to return, at least not as long as hostilities continued. ‘I believe we should prevent their return… We must settle Jaffa, Jaffa will become a Jewish city,’ he proclaimed.8 The issue would be considered once Israel was at peace. This was enough for Mapam to stay in the coalition. But by the time the fighting had ended, opposition to any return was so widespread that the doors stayed closed, and remain so to this day.
Amin Andraus and the Jaffa Emergency Committee knew nothing of this. On 26 June they wrote to Yitzhak Chisik, asking for permission for the relatives of Arabs still in Jaffa to return. Chisik, a decent man, forwarded the appeal onto Bechor Shitrit, the Minority Affairs minister. He enclosed a copy of the 13 May surrender agreement, and pointed out the wording of the crucial clause eight. Similar appeals were arriving from the remaining Arabs of Haifa. Shitrit in turn wrote to Ben-Gurion. His answer was still no, ‘so long as the war continues and the enemy stands at the gates’. The appeals of Amin Andraus and the Jaffa Emergency Committee were brushed aside.
Other pressures were less easy to ignore. At the end of July 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator, demanded that Israel allow the return of a limited number of displaced Palestinians, especially those from Jaffa and Haifa. The port cities had a special resonance and symbolic value. Israel again refused. In August Count Bernadotte met with Moshe Shertok, Israel’s foreign minister. He pointed out the anomaly of Israel demanding the immediate immigration of Jewish refugees, while ‘they refused to recognise the existence of the Arab refugees which they had created’. On 17 September Count Bernadotte, who had helped save thousands of Jews from the Nazi camps, was killed in his car in Jerusalem by members of Lehi.
Amin’s robust defence of Jaffa’s Arab population made him many enemies, especially in the Israeli military administration that controlled Jaffa. For Amin, experienced in dealing with the British, there was room to manoeuvre in the cracks and crevices of the Israeli state, much of which, especially the legal system, had been inherited from the Mandate. ‘My father immediately learnt Hebrew, even when everything was happening around him,’ says Suad. ‘He said you have to know your enemy and their language. They didn’t know he spoke fluent German, and the Israeli officials spoke Yiddish, which was very similar. He managed to keep a poker face for a long time, listening to everything, until one day he was in an office where someone who knew he spoke German began speaking to him in German.’ Amin began to sense that he was in danger. On the afternoon of 1 July, Amin and other Jaffa notables were meeting newspaper correspondents. Someone interrupted the discussion an
d told him that his house was being looted. He rushed home to find his mother, Haya, furious. The robbers, she explained, had jumped over the garden fence while she had been on the other side of the house talking to a neighbour. When Haya and the neighbour heard noises they rushed over and surprised the burglars, who were trying to steal two carpets. They escaped with one, some rolls of cloth, and Amin’s Kodak camera.
Robbery was a hazard for every Jaffa resident in those lawless days. But Amin had more sinister adversaries. Two days later, on the night of 2 July, two shots hit the western side of his house. On 5 July, he wrote to the military governor, explaining that ‘a group of Jewish soldiers and civilians came in bus no. M 4233 to the garage in my house and wanted to break in and take its contents away.’ The looters were prevented from doing so by Abraham Cohen, of the Special Police, who was in charge of the checkpoint at Jebaliyyeh. ‘These incidents, having taken place immediately after each other in the course of three days made me suspect that I have been earmarked for injury,’ Amin continued, before asking for measures to be taken to ensure his safety, and for police officer Cohen to be properly rewarded and promoted for his diligence.9
Across Palestine the Arab exodus continued through the summer of 1948. No systematic plan was drawn up for the nationwide expulsion of the Palestinians, nor did Ben-Gurion issue written orders to that effect. But he did not need to, as it was understood that population displacement was inevitable, and in some places, necessary. Plan Dalet, which outlined the IDF’s military strategy, ordered that the Arab villages, where the irregulars were based, be ‘pacified’, meaning they would either surrender or be depopulated. Hostile villages were to be levelled. In military terms this was standard strategy. Israel, at war on several fronts, was fighting for its very survival, and its territory needed to be secured and contiguous. The Palestinians were a potential, or actual, fifth column. In the 1948 war, as in countless other conflicts where an army fights an enemy supported by the local population, the distinction between military and civilian was at best blurred, and often non-existent. Plan Dalet was a military blueprint, not an order to expel the Palestinians, as Benny Morris notes, but by providing for the destruction of communities that resisted the IDF, it gave a ‘strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions’.10