NATO Spokesman Jamie Shea said all reports reaching NATO indicated that what was happening in Kosovo was a well-organized master plan by Belgrade. He said the reported pattern of violence was that Serb tanks were surrounding villages, then paramilitaries are going in rounding up civilians at gunpoint, separating young men from women and children. The women and children are then expelled from their homes and then sent forward towards the border. After they have left the villages, the homes are looted and then systematically torched.
CNN, 30 March 1999
These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.
Plan Dalet, 10 March, 1948
The chronology of key events between February 1947 and May 1948 is worth recapping at this point. Hence, I will present an initial overview of the period I wish to focus on in detail in this chapter. First, in February 1947, the decision was made by the British Cabinet to pull out of Mandatory Palestine and leave it to the UN to solve the question of its future. The UN took nine months to deliberate the issue, and then adopted the idea of partitioning the country. This was accepted by the Zionist leadership who, after all, championed partition, but was rejected by the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership, who instead suggested keeping Palestine a unitary state and who wanted to solve the situation through a much longer process of negotiation. The Partition Resolution was adopted on 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centres that had been vandalised in the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution during the first few days after its adoption.1 Though sporadic, these early Jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people (almost 75,000).
On 9 January, units of the first all-Arab volunteer army entered Palestine and engaged with the Jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated Jewish settlements. Easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes, the Jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations. Coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February 1948 when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day. On 10 March 1948, Plan Dalet was adopted. The first targets were the urban centres of Palestine, which had all been occupied by the end of April. About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable of which was the Deir Yassin massacre. Aware of these developments, the Arab League took the decision, on the last day of April, to intervene militarily, but not until the British Mandate had come to an end.
The British left on 15 May 1948, and the Jewish Agency immediately declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, officially recognised by the two superpowers of the day, the USA and the USSR. That same day, regular Arab forces entered Palestine.
By February 1948, the American administration had already concluded that the UN Partition Resolution, far from being a peace plan, was proving a recipe for continued bloodshed and hostility. Therefore, it twice offered alternative schemes to halt the escalation of the conflict: a trusteeship plan for five years, in February 1948, and a three-month cease-fire, on 12 May. The Zionist leadership rejected both peace proposals out of hand.2
The official Zionist strategy was fed throughout this period by two impulses. The first consisted of ad-hoc reactions to two startling developments on the ground. One was the fragmentation, if not total disintegration, of the Palestinian political and military power systems, and the other the growing disarray and confusion within the Arab world in the face of the aggressive Jewish initiatives and the simultaneous international endorsement of the Zionist project and the future Jewish state.
The second impulse to propel Zionist strategic thinking was the drive to exploit to the full the unique historical opportunity they saw opening up to make their dream of an exclusively Jewish state come true. As we saw in the previous chapters, this vision of a purely Jewish nation-state had been at the heart of Zionist ideology from the moment the movement emerged in the late nineteenth century. By the mid 1930s, a handful of Zionist leaders recognised the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabisation of Palestine, i.e., making Palestine free of Arabs. By the end of November 1947, most of those in the inner circle of the leadership appeared to have grasped this nexus as well, and under Ben-Gurion’s guidance they now turned all their attention to the question of how to make the most of the opportunity that this connection appeared to have given them.
Before 1947, there had been other, more urgent, agendas: the primary mission had been to build a political, economic and cultural Zionist enclave within the country, and to ensure Jewish immigration to the area. As mentioned previously, ideas of how best to deal with the local Palestinian population had remained vague. But the impending end of the British Mandate, the Arab rejection of the partition resolution, and Ben-Gurion’s keen realization of how much of Palestine he would need to the make the Jewish state viable now helped translate past ideologies and nebulous scenarios into a specific master plan.
Prior to March 1948, the activities the Zionist leadership carried out to implement their vision could still be portrayed as retaliation for hostile Palestinian or Arab actions. However, after March this was no longer the case: the Zionist leadership openly declared – two months before the end of the Mandate – it would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force: Plan Dalet.
The first step towards the Zionist goal of obtaining as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as feasible was to decide what constituted a viable state in geographical terms. The UN Partition Plan, formalised in Resolution 181, designated the Negev, the coast, the eastern valleys (Marj Ibn Amir and the Baysan Valley) and lower Galilee for the Jews, but this was not enough. Ben-Gurion had the habit of regularly meeting with, what he called his ‘war cabinet’, which was an ad-hoc group of Jewish officers who had served in the British army (under pressure from other Hagana members, he later had to disband it). He now set out to impress on these officers the idea that they should start preparing for the occupation of the country as a whole. In October 1947, Ben-Gurion wrote to General Ephraim Ben-Artzi, the most senior officer among them, explaining that he wanted to create a military force able both to repel a potential attack from neighbouring Arab states and to occupy as much of the country as possible, and hopefully all of it.3
For the time being the Zionist leadership decided to determine the territory of their future state according to the location of the most remote and isolated Jewish settlements. All the land between these colonies, isolated at the extreme ends of the Mandatory state, had to become Jewish, and preferably enveloped by additional ‘security zones’ as buffer areas between them and Palestinian habitations.4
Since they were privy to the ongoing negotiations with the Hashemites in Transjordan, several members of the leadership allowed only one constraint to influence the shape of their future map, and that was the possibility that certain areas in the east of Palestine, in today’s West Bank, could become part of a future Greater Jordan rather than a Greater Israel. In late 1946 the Jewish Agency had embarked on intensive negotiations with King Abdullah of Jordan. Abdullah was a scion of the Hashemite royal family from the Hejaz – the seat of the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina – that had fought alongside the British in the First World War. In reward for their services to the crown, the Hashemites had been granted the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan that the Mandate system had created. Initially (in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence of 1915/1916) the Hashemites had also been promised Syria, according to their understanding at least, in a British attempt to block a French take-over of that part of the Middle East. However, when the French ousted Abdullah’s brother, Faysal, from Syria, the British compensated him, instead of Abdullah, with Iraq.5
As the eldest son of the dynasty, Abdullah was unhappy with his share in the deal, all the more so because in 1924 the Hejaz, the Hashemites’ home base, was wrested from them by the Saudis. Transjordan was little more than an arid desert princedom east of the River Jordan, full of Bedouin tribes and some Circassian villages. No wonder he wished to expand into fertile, cultural and populated Palestine, and all means justified the goal. The best way to achieve this, he soon found out, was to cultivate a good relationship with the Zionist leadership. After the Second World War he reached an agreement in principle with the Jewish Agency over how to divide post-mandatory Palestine between them. Vague ideas of sharing the land became a basis for serious negotiations that started after UN Resolution 181 was adopted on 29 November 1947. As there were very few Jewish colonies in the area the king wanted to acquire (today’s West Bank), most of the leaders of the Jewish community were ‘willing’ to give up this part of Palestine, even though it included some biblical Jewish sites, such as the city of Hebron (al-Khalil). Many of them would later regret this decision and back the push to occupy the West Bank in the June 1967 war, but at the time the Jordanian quid pro quo was very tempting indeed: Abdullah promised not to join any all-Arab military operations against the Jewish state. There were ups and downs in these negotiations as the Mandate drew to an end, but they remained intact not just because there were so few Jews in the West Bank but also because the Jordanians, with the help of an Iraqi contingent, successfully repelled repeated Jewish attempts to occupy parts of the West Bank throughout the second half of 1948 (one of the few triumphant chapters in the Arab military history of 1948).6
This decided the geographical territory the Zionist movement coveted, in other words, Palestine as a whole, the same territory they had demanded in the Biltmore programme of 1942, but with this one qualification, if one accepts – as most historians do today – that the Zionist leadership was commited to their collusion with the Jordanians. This meant that the Jewish leadership anticipated their future state to stretch over eighty per cent of Mandatory Palestine: the fifty-six per cent promised to the Jews by the UN, with an additional twenty-four per cent taken from the Arab state the UN had allocated to the Palestinians. The remaining twenty per cent would be picked up by the Jordanians.7
This tacit agreement with Jordan in many ways constituted the second step towards ensuring the ethnic cleansing operation could go ahead unhindered: crucially it neutralised the strongest army in the Arab world, and confined it to battle with the Jewish forces solely in a very small part of Palestine. Without the Jordanian Army, the Arab Legion, the Arab world lacked all serious capacity to defend the Palestinians or foil the Zionist plan to establish a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous population.
The third and possibly most decisive step towards ensuring a successful ethnic cleansing was building an adequate military capability. The Consultancy wanted to be left in no doubt that the military force the Jewish community possessed would be strong enough to implement successfully their two-pronged plan to take over most of Palestine and dislocate the Palestinians living there. In addition to taking over the Mandatory state once the last British troops had left, it would need to halt all attempts by Arab forces to invade the Jewish state in the making, while simultaneously carrying out the ethnic cleansing of all the parts of Palestine it would occupy. A highly competent professional army thus became a vital tool in the construction of a solidly Jewish state in ex-Mandatory Palestine.
All in all, on the eve of the 1948 war, the Jewish fighting force stood at around 50,000 troops, out of which 30,000 were fighting troops and the rest auxiliaries who lived in the various settlements. In May 1948, these troops could count on the assistance of a small air force and navy, and on the units of tanks, armoured cars and heavy artillery that accompanied them. Facing them were irregular para-military Palestinian outfits that numbered no more than 7000 troops: a fighting force that lacked all structure or hierarchy and was poorly equipped when compared with the Jewish forces.8 In addition, in February 1948, about 1000 volunteers had entered from the Arab world, reaching 3000 over the next few months.9
Until May 1948, the two sides were poorly equipped. Then the newly founded Israeli army, with the help of the country’s Communist party, received a large shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union,10 while the regular Arab armies brought some heavy weaponry of their own. A few weeks into the war, the Israeli recruitment was so efficient that by the end of the summer their army stood at 80,000 troops. The Arab regular force never crossed the 50,000 threshold, and in addition had stopped receiving arms from Britain, which was its main arms supplier.11
In other words, during the early stages of the ethnic cleansing (until May 1948), a few thousand irregular Palestinians and Arabs were facing tens of thousands of well-trained Jewish troops. As the next stages evolved, a Jewish force of almost double the number of all the Arab armies combined had little trouble completing the job.
On the margins of the main Jewish military power operated two more extreme groups: the Irgun (commonly referred to as Etzel in Hebrew) and the Stern Gang (Lehi). The Irgun had split from the Hagana in 1931 and in the 1940s was led by Menachem Begin. It had developed its own aggressive policies towards both the British presence and the local population. The Stern Gang was an offshoot of the Irgun, which it left in 1940. Together with the Hagana, these three organisations were united into one military army during the days of the Nakba (although as we shall see, they did not always act in unison and coordination).
An important part of the Zionists’ military effort was the training of special commando units, the Palmach, founded in 1941. Originally these were created to assist the British army in the war against the Nazis in case the latter reached Palestine. Soon, the Palmach’s zeal and activities were directed against the Palestinian rural areas. From 1944 onwards, it was also the main pioneering force in building new Jewish settlements. Before being dismantled in the autumn of 1948, its members were highly active and carried out some of the main cleansing operations in the north and the centre of the country.
In the ethnic cleansing operations that followed, the Hagana, the Palmach and the Irgun were the forces that actually occupied the villages. Soon after their occupation, villages were transferred into the hands of less combatant troops, the Field Guard (Hish in Hebrew). This was the logistics arm of the Jewish forces, established in 1939. Some of the atrocities that accompanied the cleansing operations were committed by these auxiliary units.
The Hagana also had an intelligence unit, founded in 1933, whose main function was to eavesdrop on the British authorities and intercept communications between the Arab political institutions inside and outside the country. It is this unit that I mentioned earlier as supervising the preparation of the village files and setting up the network of spies and collaborators inside the rural hinterland that helped identify the thousands of Palestinians who were later executed on the spot or imprisoned for long periods once the ethnic cleansing had started.12
Together these troops formed a military might strong enough to reinforce Ben-Gurion’s conviction in the ability of the Jewish community both to become the heir to the Mandatory state and to take over most of the Palestinian territory and the properties and assets it contained.13
Immediately upon the adoption of UN Resolution 181 the Arab leaders officially declared they would dispatch troops to defend Palestine. And yet, not once between the end of November 1947 and May 1948 did Ben-Gurion and, one should add, the small group of leading Zionist figures around him sense that their future state was in any danger, or that the list of military operations was so overwhelming that they would impinge on the proper expulsion of the Palestinians. In public, the leaders of the Jewish community portrayed doomsday scenarios and warned their audiences of an imminent ‘second Holocaust’. In private, however, they never used this discourse. They were fully aware that the Arab war rhetoric was in no way matched by any serious preparation on the ground. As we saw, they were well informed about the poor equipment of these armies and their lack of battlefield experience and, for that matter, training, and thus knew they had only a limited capability to wage any kind of war. The Zionist leaders were confident they had the upper hand militarily and could drive through most of their ambitious plans. And they were right.
Moshe Sharett, the Jewish state’s foreign minister ‘designate’, was out of the country during the months leading up to the declaration of the state. Every now and then he would receive letters from Ben-Gurion directing him how best to navigate between the need to recruit global and Jewish support for a future state in danger of being annihilated, and at the same time keeping him abreast of the true reality on the ground. When, on 18 February 1948, Sharett wrote to Ben-Gurion: ‘We will have only enough troops to defend ourselves, not to take over the country,’ Ben-Gurion replied:
If we will receive in time the arms we have already purchased, and maybe even receive some of that promised to us by the UN, we will be able not only to defend [ourselves] but also to inflict death blows on the Syrians in their own country – and take over Palestine as a whole. I am in no doubt of this. We can face all the Arab forces. This is not a mystical belief but a cold and rational calculation based on practical examination.14
This letter was wholly consistent with other letters the two had been exchanging ever since Sharett had been dispatched abroad. It began with a letter in December 1947 in which Ben-Gurion sought to convince his political correspondent of the Jews’ military supremacy in Palestine: ‘We can starve the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa [if we wish to do so].’15 This confident posture regarding the Hagana’s ability to take Palestine as a whole, and even beyond, would be maintained for the duration of the fighting, inhibited only by the promises they had made to the Jordanians.
There were, of course, moments of crisis, as I will describe later, in implementing the policies. These occurred when it proved impossible to defend all the isolated Jewish settlements and to secure free access of supply to the Jewish parts of Jerusalem. But most of the time the troops the Zionist leaders had at their disposal were sufficient to allow the Jewish community to prepare for both a possible confrontation with the Arab world and for the cleansing of the local population. Moreover, the Arab intervention only materialised on 15 May 1948, five and a half months after the UN partition resolution had been adopted. During that long period most of the Palestinians – apart from a few enclaves where paramilitary groups were trying to organise some sort of resistance – remained defenseless in the face of Jewish operations already underway.
When it comes to reconstructing that part of an historical process where intangible ideology becomes tangible reality, there are two options that we, as historians, can choose. In the case of 1948 Palestine, the first would be to draw the reader’s attention to how consistent the Zionist leaders – from Herzl down to Ben-Gurion – were in their desire to empty the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible, and then describe how this links up with the actual expulsions perpetrated in 1948. This approach is preeminently represented by the work of the historian Nur Masalha, who has meticulously charted for us the genealogy of the expulsionist dreams and plans of the Zionist ‘founding fathers’.16 He shows how the wish to de-Arabise Palestine formed a crucial pillar in Zionist thinking from the very first moment the movement entered onto the political stage in the form of Theodor Herzl. As we have seen, Ben-Gurion’s thoughts on the issue were clearly articulated by 1937. His biographer Michael Bar-Zohar explains, ‘In internal discussions, in instructions to his people, the “Old Man” demonstrated a clear stand: it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state.’17 The other option would be to concentrate on the incremental development of policy-making and try to show how, meeting by meeting, decisions about strategy and methods gradually coalesced into a systematic and comprehensive ethnic cleansing plan. I will make use of both options.
The question of what to do with the Palestinian population in the future Jewish state was being discussed intensively in the months leading up to the end of the Mandate, and a new notion kept popping up in the Zionist corridors of power: ‘the Balance’. This term refers to the ‘demographic balance’ between Arabs and Jews in Palestine: when it tilts against Jewish majority or exclusivity in the land, the situation is described as disastrous. And the demographic balance, both within the borders the UN offered the Jews and within those as defined by the Zionist leadership itself, was exactly that in the eyes of the Jewish leadership: a looming disaster.
The Zionist leadership came up with two kinds of response to this predicament: one for public consumption, the other for the limited corps of intimates Ben-Gurion had collected around himself. The overt policy he and his colleagues started voicing publicly in forums such as the local People’s Assembly (the Jewish ‘parliament’ in Palestine) was the need to encourage massive Jewish immigration into the country. In smaller venues the leaders admitted that increased immigration would never be enough to counterbalance the Palestinian majority: immigration needed to be combined with other means. Ben-Gurion had described these means already in 1937 when discussing with friends the absence of a solid Jewish majority in a future state. He told them that such a ‘reality’ – the Palestinian majority in the land – would compel the Jewish settlers to use force to bring about the ‘dream’ – a purely Jewish Palestine.18 Ten years later, on 3 December 1947 in a speech in front of senior members of his Mapai party (the Eretz Israel Workers Party), he outlined more explicitly how to deal with unacceptable realities such as the one envisaged by the UN partition resolution:
There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty ... Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.19
On 2 November, i.e., almost a month before the UN General Assembly Resolution was adopted, and in a different venue, the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion spelled out for the first time in the clearest possible terms that ethnic cleansing formed the alternative, or complementary, means of ensuring that the new state would be an exclusively Jewish one. The Palestinians inside the Jewish state, he told his audience, could become a fifth column, and if so ‘they can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel them.’20
But how to implement this strategic goal? Simcha Flapan asserts that the majority of the Zionist leaders at the time would have stopped short of mass expulsion. In other words, had the Palestinians refrained from attacking Jewish targets after the partition resolution was adopted, and had the Palestinian elite not left the towns, it would have been difficult for the Zionist movement to implement its vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.21 And yet, Flapan also accepted that Plan Dalet was a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Unlike, for instance, the analysis Benny Morris offers in the first edition of his book on the making of the refugee problem, but very much in line with the shift he gave that analysis in the second edition, the clear blueprint for Palestine’s ethnic cleansing, Plan Dalet, was not created in a vacuum.22 It emerged as the ultimate scheme in response to the way events gradually unfolded on the ground, through a kind of ad-hoc policy that crystallised with time. But that response was always inexorably grounded in the Zionist ideology and the purely Jewish state that was its goal. Thus, the main objective was clear from the beginning – the de-Arabisation of Palestine – whereas the means to achieve this most effectively evolved in tandem with the actual military occupation of the Palestinian territories that were to become the new Jewish state of Israel.
Now that the territory had been defined and military supremacy assured, the fourth step for the Zionist leadership towards completing the dispossession of Palestine was to put in place the actual concrete means that would enable them to remove such a large population. In the territory of their future greater Jewish state there lived, in early December 1947, one million Palestinians, out of an overall Palestinian population of 1.3 million, while the Jewish community itself was a minority of 600,000.
The Arab Higher Committee declared a three-day strike and organised a public demonstration in protest against the UN decision to adopt the Partition Resolution. There was nothing new in this type of response: it was the usual Palestinian reaction to policies they deemed harmful and dangerous–short and ineffective. Some of the demonstrations got out of hand and spilled over into Jewish business areas, as happened in Jerusalem where demonstrators attacked Jewish shops and a market. But other incidents were attacks that, according to Jewish intelligence, had nothing to do with the UN decision. For example, there was the ambushing of a Jewish bus, an incident that almost all Israeli history books identify as the beginning of the 1948 war. Staged by the Abu Qishq gang, the action was motivated more by clannish and criminal impulses than by any national agenda.23 In any case, after three days, foreign reporters observing the demonstrations and strikes detected a growing reluctance among common Palestinians to continue the protest, and noted a clear desire to return to normalcy. After all, for most Palestinians Resolution 181 meant a dismal, but not new, chapter in their history. Over the centuries, the country had been passed from one hand to another, sometimes belonging to European or Asian invaders and sometimes to parts of Muslim empires. However, the peoples’ lives had continued more or less unchanged: they toiled the land or conducted their trade wherever they were, and quickly resigned themselves to the new situation until it changed once again. Hence, villagers and city dwellers alike waited patiently to see what it would mean to be part of either a Jewish state or any other new regime that might replace British rule. Most of them had no idea what was in store for them, that what was about to happen would constitute an unprecedented chapter in Palestine’s history: not a mere transition from one ruler to another, but the actual dispossession of the people living on the land.
The eyes of the Palestinian community now turned towards Cairo, the seat of the Arab League and the temporary residence of their leader, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, in exile ever since the British had expelled him in 1937. The first days after the resolution found the Arab leaders in total disarray, but gradually during December 1947 some sort of a policy began to take shape. Arab leaders, especially of the countries neighbouring Palestine, preferred not to take individual or drastic decisions on the subject. They were perfectly aware that public opinion in their countries wanted to see urgent action taken against the UN decision. Consequently, the Arab League Council, made up of the Arab states’ foreign ministers, recommended the dispatch of arms to the Palestinians and the establishment of an all-Arab volunteer force, to be called the Arab Liberation Army (Jaish al-Inqath, literally ‘Rescue Army’, from the verb anqatha, ‘to rescue from imminent danger’). The League appointed a Syrian general at its head. Later that month, small groups of this army began trickling into Palestine, thereby providing a welcome pretext for the Consultancy to discuss the further escalation of the Hagana operations already underway.
The pattern was set, and from this perspective the month of December 1947 is perhaps the most intriguing chapter in the history of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing. The mild reaction in the Arab capitals surrounding Palestine was welcomed by Ben-Gurion’s Consultancy – while the indifferent, almost lethargic Palestinian response disturbed them. In the first three days after the Partition Resolution was adopted, a small select group within the Consultancy met every day,24 but they then relaxed somewhat and the format returned to the weekly Wednesday afternoon meetings of the High Command, with additional get-togethers of the smaller group a day after (usually at Ben-Gurion’s home). The first meetings in December were devoted to assessing the Palestinian mood and intention. The ‘experts’ reported that, despite the early trickling of volunteers into the Palestinian villages and towns, the people themselves seemed eager to continue life as normal.25 This craving for normality remained typical of the Palestinians inside Palestine in the years to come, even in their worst crises and at the nadir of their struggle; and normality is what they have been denied ever since 1948.
But the swift return to normality and the Palestinians’ wish not to become embroiled in a civil war posed a problem for a Zionist leadership determined to reduce drastically, if not totally, the number of Arabs within their future Jewish state. They needed a pretext, and this of course would be more difficult to create if the moderate Palestinian reaction continued. ‘Fortunately’ for them, at one point the army of Arab volunteers expanded their acts of hostility against Jewish convoys and settlements, thus making it easier for the Consultancy to frame the occupation and expulsion policy as a form of justified ‘retaliation’, tagmul in Hebrew. But already in December 1947, the Consultancy had begun to use the Hebrew word yotzma (‘initiative’) to describe the strategy it intended to follow with respect to the Palestinians in the territory of their coveted Jewish state. ‘Initiative’ meant taking action against the Palestinian population without waiting for a pretext for tagmul to come along. Increasingly, pretexts for retaliation would be conspicuously missing.
Palti Sela was a member of the intelligence units that would play a crucial role in implementing the ethnic cleansing operations. One of their tasks was to report daily on the mood among, and trends within, the rural population of Palestine. Stationed in the north-eastern valleys of the country, Sela was astonished by the apparent difference in the way the communities on either side reacted to the new political reality unfolding around them. The Jewish farmers in the kibbutzim and in the collective or private settlements turned their residences into military outposts – reinforcing their fortifications, mending fences, laying mines, etc. – ready to defend and attack; each member was issued with a gun and integrated into the Jewish military force. The Palestinian villages, to Sela’s surprise, ‘continued life as usual’. In fact in the three villages he visited – Ayndur, Dabburiyya and Ayn Mahel – people received him as they had always done, greeting him as a potential customer for bartering, trading and exchanging pleasantries or news. These villages were near the British hospital of Afula, where units of the Arab Legion were stationed as part of the British police force in the country. The Jordanian soldiers, too, seemed to regard the situation as normal and were not engaged in any special preparations. Throughout December 1947, Sela summed up in his monthly report: normalcy is the rule and agitation the exception.26 If these people were to be expelled, it could not be done as ‘retaliation’ for any aggression on their part.
On the top floor of the Red House, on Wednesday afternoon, 10 December 1947, a disappointed Consultancy met to assess the situation. Two speakers were leading the conversation, Ezra Danin and Yehoshua Palmon.27
Ezra Danin, as already mentioned, was a citrus grove businessman who had been invited into the intelligence corps because of his knowledge of Arabic (he was born in Syria). Danin was in his mid-forties when he joined the Hagana in 1940; in 1947 he became the head of its ‘Arab section’, which supervised the work of Arab Jews and indigenous Arab collaborators who spied for the High Command within the Palestinian community as well as in neighbouring Arab countries. In May 1948 he assumed a new role: supervising the post-occupation activities of the Jewish forces when the ethnic cleansing operation began in earnest. His people were responsible for the procedures that were followed after a Palestinian village or neighbourhood had been occupied. This meant that, with the help of informants, they detected and identified men who were suspected of having attacked Jews in the past, or of belonging to the Palestinian national movement, or who simply were disliked by the local informants who exploited the opportunity to settle old scores. The men thus selected were usually executed on the spot. Danin quite often came to inspect these operations at first hand. His unit was also responsible, as soon as a village or town had been occupied, for separating all men of ‘military age’, namely between ten and fifty, from the rest of the villagers, who were then ‘just’ expelled or imprisoned for long periods in POW camps.28
Yehoshua (‘Josh’) Palmon was in many ways Danin’s second-in-command and also took a great personal interest in the implementation of the policy of selection, interrogation and sometimes execution. Younger than Danin and born in Palestine itself, Palmon already had an impressive military career behind him. As a recruit to a British commando unit he had participated in the occupation of Syria and Lebanon in 1941 that brought French Vichy rule there to an end. The officers under Danin and Palmon’s command were known to and feared by many Palestinians, who quickly learned to spot them despite their attempts to dress anonymously in dull khaki uniform. They acted behind the scenes in hundreds of villages, and the oral history of the Nakba is full of references to these men and the atrocities they committed.29
But on 10 December 1947, Danin and Palmon were still hidden from the public eye. They opened the meeting by reporting that members of the Palestinian urban elite were leaving their houses and moving to their winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. This was a typical reaction from the urbanites in moments of stress – moving to safety until the situation calmed down. And yet Israeli historians, including revisionist ones such as Benny Morris, have interpreted these traditional temporary sorties as ‘voluntary flight’, in order to tell us that Israel was not responsible for them. But they left with the full intention of returning to their homes again later, only to be prevented by the Israelis from doing so: not allowing people to return to their homes after a short stay abroad is as much expulsion as any other act directed against the local people with the aim of depopulation.
Danin reported that this was the only instance they had been able to detect of Palestinians moving towards areas outside the UN-designated borders of the Jewish state, apart from several Bedouin tribes who had relocated closer to Arab villages out of fear of Jewish attacks. Danin seems to have been disappointed by this, because almost in the same breath he called for a far more aggressive policy – despite the fact that there were no offensive initiatives or tendencies on the Palestinian side – and went on to explain to the Consultancy the benefits it would have: his informants had told him that violent actions against Palestinians would terrify them, ‘which will render help from the Arab world useless,’ implying that the Jewish forces could do whatever they wanted with them.
‘What do you mean by violent action?’ inquired Ben-Gurion.
‘Destroying the traffic (buses, lorries that carry agricultural products and private cars) … sinking their fishing boats in Jaffa, closing their shops and preventing raw materials from reaching their factories.’
‘How will they react?’ asked Ben-Gurion.
‘The initial reaction may be riots, but eventually they will understand the message.’ The main goal was thus to assure that the population would be at the Zionists’ mercy, so their fate could be sealed. Ben-Gurion seemed to like this suggestion, and wrote to Sharett three days later to explain that the general idea: the Palestinian community in the Jewish area would be ‘at our mercy’ and anything the Jews wanted could be done to them, including ‘starving them to death’.30
It was another Syrian Jew, Eliyahu Sasson, who tried to some extent to play the devil’s advocate in the Consultancy; he seemed doubtful about the new aggressive approach Danin and Palmon were outlining. He had emigrated to Palestine in 1927, and was perhaps the most intriguing and also ambivalent member of the Consultancy. In 1919, before becoming a Zionist, he had joined the Arab national movement in Syria. In the 1940s, his main role was to instigate a policy of ‘divide and rule’ inside the Palestinian community but also in the neighbouring Arab countries. He was thus instrumental in strengthening the alliance with the Jordanian Hashemite king over the future of Palestine, but his attempts to pit one Palestinian group against another would become obsolete now that the Zionist leadership was moving towards a comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the country as a whole. However, his legacy of ‘divide and rule’ had its inevitable impact on Israeli policy in the years to come, as we can see, for instance, in the efforts Ariel Sharon made in 1981 when, as defence minister and on the advice of the Arabist Professor Menahem Milson, he attempted to undermine the Palestinian resistance movement by setting up so-called ‘Village Leagues’ as part of a pro-Israeli outfit in the occupied West Bank. This was a short-term and abortive endeavour. A more successful one was the incorporation, as early as 1948, of the Druze minority into the Israeli army within units that later became the principal tool for oppressing the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
The 10 December meeting would be the last in which Sasson tried to persuade his colleagues that despite the need for ‘a comprehensive plan’, as he called it – namely the uprooting of the local population – it was still prudent not to regard the whole Arab population as enemies, and to continue employing ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics. He was very proud of his role in the 1930s in arming Palestinian groups, the so-called ‘peace gangs’, that were made up of rivals of the Palestinian leader al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. These units fought against the national Palestinian formations during the Arab Revolt. Sasson now wanted to bring these divide and rule tactics to target some loyal Bedouin tribes.
The Consultancy not only rejected the idea of incorporating more collaborative ‘Arabs’, but they also went so far as to suggest putting behind them the whole notion of ‘retaliation’, as adopted at the time on the advice of Orde Wingate. Most of the participants in the meeting favoured ‘engagement’ in a systematic campaign of intimidation. Ben-Gurion approved, and the new policy was implemented the day after the meeting.
The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ (hasiyur ha-alim). This, too, was part of the legacy of Orde Wingate, who had instructed the Hagana in the use of this terrorist method against Palestinian villagers in the 1930s. In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart. Even in Wingate’s day this was already intended more as a show of force than a punitive action or retaliatory attack.
In December 1947, two such defenseless villages were chosen for the revival of Wingate’s tactics: Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa. When today you drive south-east of the city of Ramla for about 15 kilometres, especially on a wintry day when the typical thorny, yellow gorse bushes of the inner plains of Palestine turn green, you come upon a bizarre view: long lines of rubble and stones stretching out on an open field surrounding a relatively large imaginary square area. These were the stone fences of Deir Ayyub. In 1947, the rubble was a low stone wall that had been built more for aesthetic reasons than for the protection of the village, which had about 500 inhabitants. Named after Ayyub – Job in Arabic – most of its people were Muslim, living in stone and mud houses typical of the area. Just before the Jewish attack, the village had been celebrating the opening of a new school, which already had the gratifying number of fifty-one pupils enrolled in it, all made possible by money the villagers had collected among themselves and from which they could also pay the teacher’s salary. But their joy was instantly obliterated when at ten o’clock at night a company of twenty Jewish troops entered the village – which, like so many villages in December, had no defence mechanism of any kind – and began firing randomly at several houses. The village was later attacked three more times before being evacuated by force in April 1948, when it was completely destroyed. Jewish forces made a similar attack in December against Beit Affa in the Gaza Strip, but here the raiders were successfully repelled.31
Threatening leaflets were also distributed in Syrian and Lebanese villages on Palestine’s border, warning the population:
If the war will be taken to your place, it will cause massive expulsion of the villagers, with their wives and their children. Those of you who do not wish to come to such a fate, I will tell them: in this war there will be merciless killing, no compassion. If you are not participating in this war, you will not have to leave your houses and villages.32
There now followed a number of operations of destruction in limited areas throughout rural and urban Palestine. Actions in the countryside were at first hesitant. Three villages in the upper eastern Galilee were selected: Khisas, Na’ima and Jahula, but the operation was cancelled, perhaps because the High Command deemed them as yet too ambitious. The cancellation, however, was partly ignored by the commander of the Palmach in the north, Yigal Allon. Allon wanted to experience an attack on at least one village, and decided to assault Khisas.
Khisas was a small village with a few hundred Muslims and one hundred Christians, who lived peacefully together in a unique topographical location in the northern part of Hula Plain, on a natural terrace that was about 100 metres wide. This terrace had been formed thousands of years before by the gradual shrinking of Lake Hula. Foreign travellers used to single this village out for the natural beauty of its location on the banks of the lake, and its proximity to the Hasbani River.33 Jewish troops attacked the village on 18 December 1947, and randomly started blowing up houses at the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack. The incident shocked The New York Times’ correspondent, who closely followed the unfolding events. He went and demanded an explanation from the Hagana, which at first denied the operation. When the inquisitive reporter did not let go, they eventually admitted it. Ben-Gurion issued a dramatic public apology, claiming the action had been unauthorised but, a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.34
When the Consultancy had met again on Wednesday, 17 December, they were joined by Yohanan Ratner and Fritz Eisenshtater (Eshet), two officers who had been designated by Ben-Gurion to formulate a ‘national strategy’ before he devised the Consultancy body. The meeting expanded on the implications of the successful Khisas operation, with some members calling for additional ‘retaliatory’ operations that were to include the destruction of villages, expulsion of people, and resettlement in their stead by Jewish settlers. The following day, in front of the formal larger body of the Jewish community that was responsible for defence affairs, ‘The Defence Committee’, Ben-Gurion summarized the earlier meeting. The operation seemed to thrill everyone, including the representative of the ultra Orthodox Jews, Agudat Israel, who said: ‘We were told that the army had the ability of destroying a whole village and taking out all its inhabitants; indeed, let’s do it!’ The committee also approved the appointment of intelligence officers for each such operation. They would play a crucial role in executing the next stages of the ethnic cleansing.35
The new policy was also aimed at the urban spaces of Palestine, and Haifa was chosen as the first target. Interestingly, this city is singled out by mainstream Israeli historians and the revisionist historian Benny Morris as an example of genuine Zionist goodwill towards the local population. The reality was very different by the end of 1947. From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them. They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos. A special unit of the Hagana, Hashahar (‘Dawn’), made up of mistarvim – literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians – was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units. On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’36 But worse was to come.
The early eruption of violence put a sad end to a relatively long history of workers’ cooperation and solidarity in the mixed city of Haifa. This class consciousness was curbed in the 1920s and 1930s by both national leaderships, in particular by the Jewish Trade Union movement, but it continued to motivate joint industrial action against employers of all kinds, and inspired mutual help at times of recession and scarcity.
The Jewish attacks in the city heightened tensions in one of the major areas where Jews and Arabs worked shoulder to shoulder: the refinery plant of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in the bay area. This began with a gang from the Irgun throwing a bomb into a large group of Palestinians who were waiting to enter the plant. The Irgun claimed it was in retaliation for an earlier attack by Arab workers on their Jewish co-workers, a new phenomenon in an industrial site where Arab and Jewish workers had usually joined forces in trying to secure better labour conditions from their British employers. But the UN Partition Resolution seriously dented that class solidarity and tensions grew high. Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun, who had already done so before 1947. However, this particular attack in the refineries was undertaken in coordination with the Hagana forces as part of the new scheme to terrorise the Palestinians out of Haifa. Within hours, Palestinian workers reacted and rioted, killing a large number of Jewish workers – thirty-nine – in one of the worst but also last Palestinian counterattacks; the last, because there the usual chain of retaliatory skirmishes stopped.
The next stage introduced a new chapter in the history of Palestine. Eager to test, among other things, British vigilance in the face of their actions, the Hagana’s High Command, as part of the Consultancy, decided to ransack a whole village and massacre a large number of its inhabitants. At the time the British authorities were still responsible for maintaining law and order and were very much present in Palestine. The village the High Command selected was Balad al-Shaykh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, one of Palestine’s most revered and charismatic leaders of the 1930s, who was killed by the British in 1935. His grave is one of the few remains of this village, about ten kilometres east of Haifa, still extant today.37
A local commander, Haim Avinoam, was ordered to ‘encircle the village, kill the largest possible number of men, damage property, but refrain from attacking women and children.’38 The attack took place on 31 December and lasted three hours. It left over sixty Palestinians dead, not all of them men. But note the distinction still made here between men and women: in their next meeting, the Consultancy decided that such a separation was an unnecessary complication for future operations. At the same time as the attack on Balad al-Shaykh, the Hagana units in Haifa tested the ground with a more drastic action: they went into one of the city’s Arab neigbourhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya, expelled its people and blew up its houses. This act could be regarded as the official beginning of the ethnic cleansing operation in urban Palestine. The British looked the other way while these atrocities were being committed.
Two weeks later, in January 1948, the Palmach ‘used’ the momentum that had been created to attack and expel the relatively isolated Haifa neighbourhood of Hawassa. This was the poorest quarter of town, originally made up of huts and inhabited by impoverished villagers who had come to seek work there in the 1920s, all living in dismal conditions. At the time there were about 5000 Palestinians in this eastern part of the city. Huts were blown up, and so was the local school, while the ensuing panic caused many people to flee. The school was rebuilt on the ruins of Hawassa, now part of the Tel-Amal neighbourhood, but this building too was recently destroyed to make room for a new Jewish school.39
These operations were accompanied by acts of terrorism by the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Their ability to sow fear in Haifa’s Arab neighbourhoods, and in other cities as well, was directly influenced by the gradual but obvious British withdrawal from any responsibility for law and order. In the first week of January alone the Irgun executed more terrorist attacks than in any period before. These included detonating a bomb in the Sarraya house in Jaffa, the seat of the local national committee,40 which collapsed leaving twenty-six people dead. It continued with the bombing of the Samiramis Hotel in Qatamon, in western Jerusalem, in which many people died, including the Spanish consul. This last fact seems to have prompted Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British High Commissioner, to issue a feeble complaint to Ben-Gurion, who refused to condemn the action, either in private or in public. In Haifa such actions were now a daily occurrence.41
Cunningham appealed again to Ben-Gurion when in the weeks that followed he noticed the shift in the Hagana’s policy from retaliation to offensive initiatives, but his protestations were ignored. In the last meeting he had with Ben-Gurion in March 1948, he told the Zionist leader that to his mind, while the Palestinians were trying to maintain calm in the country, the Hagana did all it could to escalate the situation.42 This did not contradict Ben-Gurion’s assessment. He told the Jewish Agency Executive, shortly after he met Cunningham: ‘I believe the majority of the Palestinian masses accept the partition as a fait accompli and do not believe it is possible to overcome or reject it ... The decisive majority of them do not want to fight us.’43 From Paris, the Jewish Agency representative there, Emile Najjar, wondered how he could pursue an effective propaganda policy given the present reality.44
The national committee of the Palestinians in Haifa appealed again and again to the British, assuming, wrongly, that since Haifa was to be the last station in the British evacuation, they would be able to rely on their protection at least until then. When this failed to materialise, they started sending numerous desperate letters to members of the Arab Higher Committee inside and outside Palestine asking for guidance and help. A small group of volunteers reached the city in January, but by then some of the notables and community leaders had realised that the moment the UN had adopted the Partition Resolution, they were doomed to be dispossessed by their Jewish neighbours. These were people whom they themselves had first invited to come and stay with them back in the late Ottoman period, who had arrived wretched and penniless from Europe, and with whom they had shared a thriving cosmopolitan city – until that fateful decision by the UN.
Against this background one should recall the exodus at this time of about 15,000 of Haifa’s Palestinian elite – many of them prosperous merchants whose departure ruined local trade and commerce, thus putting an extra burden on the more impoverished parts of the city.
The picture would not be complete without mentioning here the overall nature of the Arab activity up to the beginning of January 1948. During December 1947, Arab irregulars had attacked Jewish convoys but refrained from attacking Jewish settlements.45 In November the Consultancy had already defined its policy of retaliating for each such attack. But the feeling among the Zionist leaders was that they needed to move on to more drastic actions.
‘This is not enough,’ exclaimed Yossef Weitz when the Consultancy met on Wednesday, 31 December 1947, only a few hours before the people of Balad al-Shaykh were massacred. And he now suggested openly what he had been privately writing in his diary back in the early 1940s: ‘Is it not now the time to get rid of them? Why continue to keep in our midst those thorns at a time when they pose a danger to us?’47 Retaliation seemed to him an old-fashioned way of doing things, as it missed the main purpose of attacks on and subsequent occupation of villages. Weitz had been added to the Consultancy because he was the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund, having already played a crucial role in translating for his friends the vague notions of transfer into a concrete policy. He felt the present discussion of what lay ahead lacked a sense of purpose, an orientation he had outlined in the 1930s and ’40s.
‘Transfer’, he had written in 1940, ‘does not serve only one aim – to reduce the Arab population – it also serves a second purpose by no means less important, which is: to evict land now cultivated by Arabs and to free it for Jewish settlement.’ Therefore, he concluded: ‘The only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be let off.’48
Weitz was a particularly valuable addition to the Consultancy because of his prior involvement in the village files project. Now, more than any other member of the Consultancy, Weitz deeply involved himself in the practicalities of the ethnic cleansing, jotting down details about every location and village for future reference, and entering his own surveys into those of the village files. His most trusted colleague in those days was Yossef Nachmani, a kindred soul, who shared Weitz’s dismay at what they both saw as the lacklustre performance of the Jewish leadership on this issue. Weitz wrote to Nachmani that the takeover of all Arab land was a ‘sacred duty’. Nachmani concurred and added that a kind of jihad (he used the term ‘milhement kibush’, a war of occupation) was required, but that the Jewish leadership failed to see its necessity. Weitz’s alter ego wrote: ‘The current leadership is characterised by impotent and weak people.’ Weitz was equally disappointed by the leadership’s inability, as he saw it, to rise to the historical occasion. His invitation to the Consultancy, and especially to their first meeting in January, made Weitz privy for the first time to the plans for ethnic cleansing as they evolved at the leadership level.49
Weitz’s chance to display his ideas more widely came immediately, as that first Wednesday in January was turned into a long seminar, for which the participants moved into Ben-Gurion’s home nearby. It was Ben-Gurion’s idea to have a longer meeting as he sensed opportunities were opening up to make his dream of a Greater Israel come true. In this more comfortable setting, Weitz and others could make extended speeches and elaborate their views at leisure. This was also the only meeting of the Consultancy for which we have a protocol, found in the archives of the Hagana. For this ‘Long Seminar’ Weitz had prepared a memo, personally addressed to Ben-Gurion, in which he urged the leader to endorse his plans for transferring the Palestinian population out of areas the Jews wanted to occupy, and to make such actions the ‘cornerstone of Zionist policy’. He obviously felt that the ‘theoretical’ stage of transfer plans was over. The time to start implementing the ideas had come. In fact, Weitz left the Long Seminar with a permit to create his own small cabal under the title of a ‘transfer committee’, and by the next meeting showed up with concrete plans, about which more will be said below.
Even the most liberal participant invited to the Long Seminar, Dr Yaacov Tahon, seemed to concur, dropping the more hesitant position he had previously taken. Tahon was a German Jew who, together with Arthur Rupin, had developed the first plans for the Jewish colonization of Palestine in the early decades of the twentieth century. As a true colonialist, at first he saw no need to expel the ‘natives’; all he wanted was to exploit them. But in the Long Seminar he also appeared taken by Weitz’s notion that ‘without transfer there will be no Jewish State’.
Indeed, there was hardly a dissenting voice, which is why the Long Seminar is such a pivotal meeting in this story. Its departure point, accepted by all, was that ethnic cleansing was necessary; the remaining questions, or rather problems, were more of a psychological and logistical nature. Ideologues such as Weitz, Orientalists such as Machnes, and army generals such as Allon complained that their troops had not yet properly absorbed the previous orders they had been given to expand operations beyond the usual selective actions. The main problem, as they saw it, was that they seemed unable to put behind them the old methods of retaliation. ‘They are still blowing up a house here and house there,’ complained Gad Machnes, a colleague of Danin and Palmon, who ironically was to become the director general of the Israeli ministry for minorities in 1949 (where at least, one might add in his favour, he appeared to have shown some remorse about his conduct in 1948, admitting candidly in the 1960s that: ‘If it had not been for the open [Zionist military] preparations which had a provocative nature, the drift into war [in 1948] could have been averted.’). But back then, in January 1948, he seemed impatient that the Jewish troops were still engaged in searching for ‘guilty individuals’ in each location, instead of actively inflicting damage.
Allon and Palmon now set out to explain the new orientation to their colleagues: there was a need for a more aggressive policy in areas that had been ‘quiet for too long’.50 There was no need to persuade Ben-Gurion. By the end of the Long Seminar he had given the green light to a whole series of provocative and lethal attacks on Arab villages, some as retaliation, some not, the intention of which was to cause optimal damage and kill as many villagers as possible. And when he heard that the first targets proposed for the new policy were all in the north, he demanded a trial action in the south as well, but it had to be specific, not general. In this he suddenly revealed himself as a vindictive book-keeper. He pushed for an attack on the town of Beersheba (Beer Sheva today), particularly targeting the heads of al-Hajj Salameh Ibn Said, the deputy mayor and his brother, who in the past had both refused to collaborate with the Zionist plans for settlement in the area. There was no need, stressed Ben-Gurion, to distinguish any more between the ‘innocent’ and the ‘guilty’ – the time had come for inflicting collateral damage. Danin recalled years later that Ben-Gurion spelled out what collateral damage meant: ‘Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.’51 Danin even claimed that some specific villages were discussed.52
As for the ‘conservative’ mood among the Hagana troops, and Wingate’s training of them as a retaliatory force, Yigael Yadin, the acting chief of staff of the Hagana – and as of 15 May 1948 of the Israeli army – suggested that the way forward lay in adopting a new, more straightforward terminology and a tougher form of indoctrination. He recommended abandoning the term ‘retaliation’: ‘This is not what we are doing; this is an offensive and we need to initiate preemptive strikes, no need for a village to attack us [first]. We have not used properly our ability to strangulate the economy of the Palestinians.’ The, for many Israelis, legendary head of the Palmach, Yitzhak Sadeh, agreed with Yadin and added, ‘We were wrong to initiate only retaliations.’ What was needed was instilling in the troops that aggression ‘is the mood and mode now’.
His second in command, Yigal Allon, was even more critical. He criticised the Consultancy indirectly for not having issued explicit orders for a comprehensive attack at the beginning of December. ‘We could have taken Jaffa by now easily and should have attacked the villages around Tel-Aviv. We have to go for a series of “collective punishments” even if there are children living in the [attacked] houses’. When Eliyahu Sasson, helped by Reuven Shiloah, one of his aides (later a leading figure in Israeli Orientalism), tried to draw attention to the fact that provocation was liable to alienate friendly or peaceful Palestinians, as he would throughout the seminar, Allon impatiently sidelined him by declaring: ‘A call for peace will be weakness!’ Moshe Dayan expressed similar views, and Ben-Gurion ruled out any attempt to reach an agreement in Jaffa or anywhere else.
That there was still a psychological problem among the troops was indeed evident in the case of Jaffa. In the weekly meeting of 7 January, officials of Tel-Aviv’s municipality wondered why the Hagana, and not just the Irgun, was provoking the Arabs of Jaffa, when they themselves had been successful in ensuring an atmosphere of peace between the two neighbouring cities.53 On 25 January 1948, a delegation of these senior officials came to see Ben-Gurion at home, complaining that they had detected a distinct change in the Hagana’s behaviour towards Jaffa. There was an unwritten agreement between Jaffa and Tel-Aviv that the two towns would be divided by a strip of no-man’s land along the coast, which enabled an uneasy coexistence. Without consulting them, the Hagana troops had entered this area, covered by citrus groves, and had upset this delicate balance. And this was done at a time, remonstrated one of the participants, that the two municipalities were trying to reach a new modus vivendi. He complained that the Hagana seemed to be doing its best to foil such attempts and spoke of them attacking randomly: killing people without provocation, near the water wells, within the no man’s land, robbing the Arabs, abusing them, dismantling wells, confiscating assets, and shooting for the sake of intimidation.54
Similar complaints, Ben-Gurion noted in his diary, were coming from members of other Jewish municipalities located in proximity to Arab towns or villages. Protests had come in from Rehovot, Nes Ziona, Rishon Le-Zion, and Petah Tikva, the oldest Jewish settlements in the greater Tel-Aviv area, whose members, like their Palestinian neighbours, failed to grasp that the Hagana had adopted a ‘new approach’ against the Palestinian population.
A month later, however, we already find these very same officials sucked into the more general atmosphere of intransigence as they tell Ben-Gurion: ‘We have to hit Jaffa in every possible way.’ The temptation was indeed great: in February the picking season of the oranges for which Jaffa was famous was in full swing and a greedy Tel-Aviv municipality quickly set aside its earlier inclination to maintain a modus vivendi with the neighbouring Palestinian town.55 There was in fact no need for their pleas: a few days before, the High Command had already decided to attack the citrus groves and picking stations of the Palestinians in Jaffa.56
In the weekend that followed the Long Seminar, in a meeting with six out of the eleven members of his Consultancy,57 Ben-Gurion hinted to them why he thought the policy of the military High Command had not at first struck a chord with the civilian heads of the municipality, and he suggested to the smaller cabal they start using a new term: ‘aggressive defense’. Yadin liked the idea and said: ‘We have to explain to our commanders that we have the upper hand . . . we should paralyse the Arab transport and their economy, harass them in their villages and the cities and demoralise them.’ Galili concurred but warned: ‘We still cannot destroy places as we do not have the equipment’ and he was also worried about the British reaction.58
But it was Yigal Allon, and not Tel-Aviv’s senior city clerks, who carried the day. He wanted a clear directive from above to the troops who, he now reported, were full of enthusiasm and eager at any moment to go and assault Arab villages and neighbourhoods. The absence of a clear coordinating hand also troubled the rest of the military men in the Consultancy. Zealous troops, it was reported, sometimes attacked villages in areas where the High Command currently wished to avoid any provocation. One particular case discussed in the Long Seminar was an incident in the western Jerusalemite neighbourhood of Romema. That area of the city had been particularly quiet until a local Hagana commander decided to intimidate the Palestinians in the neighbourhood under the pretext that the owner of a petrol station there encouraged villagers to strike out at passing Jewish traffic. When the troops killed the station owner, his village, Lifta, retaliated by striking at a Jewish bus. Sasson added that the allegation had proved to be false. But the Hagana attack signalled the onset of a series of offensives against Palestinian villages on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains, especially directed at the village of Lifta that, even according to Hagana intelligence, had never attacked any convoys at all.
Until five years ago, when a new road connected the main Jerusalem–Tel-Aviv highway to the northern Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem was built – illegally on territory occupied after 1967 – upon entering the city you could see on your left a number of attractive old houses, still almost wholly intact, clinging to the mountain. They are gone now, but for many years these were the remnants of the picturesque village of Lifta, one of the very first to be ethnically cleansed in Palestine. It had been the residence of Qasim Ahmad, the leader of the 1834 rebellion against the Egyptian rule of Ibrahim Pasha, which some historians view as the first national revolt in Palestine. The village was a fine example of rural architecture, with its narrow street running parallel to the slopes of the mountains. The relative prosperity it enjoyed, like many other villages, especially during and after the Second World War, manifested itself in the construction of new houses, the improvement of roads and pavements, as well as in an overall higher standard of living. Lifta was a large village, home to 2500 people, most of them Muslims with a small number of Christians. Another sign of the recent prosperity was the girls’ school a number of the villages had combined forces to build in 1945, investing their joint capital.
Social life in Lifta revolved around a small shopping centre, which included a club and two coffee houses. It attracted Jerusalemites as well, as no doubt it would today were it still there. One of the coffee houses was the target of the Hagana when it attacked on 28 December 1947. Armed with machine guns the Jews sprayed the coffee house, while members of the Stern Gang stopped a bus nearby and began firing into it randomly. This was the first Stern Gang operation in rural Palestine; prior to the attack, the gang had issued pamphlets to its activists: ‘Destroy Arab neighbourhoods and punish Arab villages.’59
The involvement of the Stern Gang in the attack on Lifta may have been outside the overall scheme of the Hagana in Jerusalem, according to the Consultancy, but once it had occurred it was incorporated into the plan. In a pattern that would repeat itself, creating faits accomplis became part of the overall strategy. The Hagana High Command at first condemned the Stern Gang attack at the end of December, but when they realised that the assault had caused villagers to flee, they ordered another operation against the same village on 11 January in order to complete the expulsion. The Hagana blew up most of the houses in the village and drove out all the people who were still there.
This was the ultimate outcome of the Long Seminar: although the Zionist leadership acknowledged the need for a coordinated and supervised campaign, they decided to turn every unauthorised initiative into an integral part of the plan, giving it their blessing retrospectively. Such was the case in Jerusalem, where sporadic retaliatory actions were systemised into an offensive initiative of occupation and expulsion. On 31 January, Ben-Gurion gave direct orders to David Shaltiel, the city’s military commander, to assure Jewish contiguity and expansion through the destruction of Shaykh Jarrah, the occupation of other neighborhoods, and the immediate settlement of Jews in the evicted places. His mission was ‘to settle Jews in every house of an evicted semi-Arab neighbourhood, such as Romema.’60
The mission was successfully accomplished. On 7 February 1948, which happened to fall on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, Ben-Gurion came up from Tel-Aviv to see the emptied and destroyed village of Lifta with his own eyes. That same evening he reported jubilantly to the Mapai Council in Jerusalem what he had seen:
When I come now to Jerusalem, I feel I am in a Jewish (Ivrit) city. This is a feeling I only had in Tel-Aviv or in an agricultural farm. It is true that not all of Jerusalem is Jewish, but it has in it already a huge Jewish bloc: when you enter the city through Lifta and Romema, through Mahaneh Yehuda, King George Street and Mea Shearim – there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Ever since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans – the city was not as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighbourhoods in the West you do not see even one Arab. I do not suppose it will change. And what happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa – can happen in large parts of the country. If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country.61
Ben-Gurion’s diary also reveals how eager he was in January to move ahead with building a more effective assault force. He was particularly worried that the Irgun and the Stern Gang continued their terror attacks against the Palestinian population without any coordination from the Hagana command. David Shaltiel, the Jerusalem Hagana commander, reported to him that in his city, and actually all over the country, the Irgun often acted in areas where the other forces were not yet fully prepared. For example, troops belonging to the Irgun had murdered Arab drivers in Tiberias and were torturing captured villagers everywhere. Shaltiel was mainly fretting about the repercussions for the isolated Jewish quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. All the Jewish attempts then and later to occupy that part of the city failed because of the resistance the Jordanian Legion put up to ensure it remained part of Jordan. In the end, the people of the Jewish quarter themselves decided to surrender.
Allon, Yadin, Sadeh and Dayan, the military professionals in the Consultancy, understood the ‘Old Man’, as they affectionately called Ben-Gurion, better than anyone else. Any military action, authorised or not, helped contribute to the expulsion of the ‘strangers’. When he confided his thoughts to them privately, he added another reason for simultaneously encouraging an official coordinated policy and local ‘unauthorised’ initiatives: the new intimidation policy had to be connected to the question of Jewish settlements. There happened to be thirty settlements in the UN-designated Arab state. One of the most effective ways to incorporate them into the Jewish state was to build new settlement belts between them and the Jewish designated areas. These were the same tactics Israel would use again in the occupied West Bank during the years of the Oslo accord and again in the early years of the twenty-first century.
The person who understood Ben-Gurion the least was Eliahu Sasson. He reported to the Long Seminar another case of what he thought was an unprovoked and ‘barbaric’ Jewish attack on peaceful villagers. This was the case of Khisas, mentioned earlier. He complained in the seminar: ‘Actions such as the one in Khisas will prompt quiet Arabs to act against us. In all the areas where we committed no provocative actions – in the coastal plain and the Negev – the atmosphere is calm, but not in the Galilee.’ As before, no one listened to him. All participants concurred with Moshe Dayan when he told Sasson: ‘Our action against Khisas ignited the Galilee and this was a good thing.’ There appears to be no trace of Ben-Gurion’s earlier reaction to the Khisas operation, when he had gone so far as to publish an apology. In the Long Seminar he sided with those who welcomed the act, but suggested that actions like this should not be done officially in the name of the Hagana: ‘We need to involve the Mossad [the special branch that would become Israel’s secret service] in such actions.’ In his diary he laconically summarised the meeting by repeating Allon’s words:
There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.62
Eliahu Sasson left the Long Seminar still believing that he had persuaded Ben-Gurion to continue with a selective policy directed against ‘hostile’ Arabs that would allow ‘friendly’ areas, most of the country in fact, to remain calm and peaceful. But in the following meetings, we soon find him toeing the general line, and he no longer mentions the divide-and-rule tactics he had championed before, realising that none of his associates was interested any longer in exploiting distinctions between political forces, but only in expelling as many Palestinians as possible.
Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, on the other hand, left the meeting with the impression that they had been given a free rein to start massive attacks against the Palestinian towns and villages within the coveted Jewish state. The military men appeared to grasp Ben-Gurion’s wishes better, or at least assumed that he would not object to more aggressive initiatives on their part. They were right.
Ben-Gurion’s shift at this point to systematic operations of take-over, occupation and expulsion had much to do with his keen understanding of the fluctuations in the global mood. In the Long Seminar we find him stressing the need for further swift operations as he sensed a possible change in the international political will regarding the Palestine crisis. UN officials had begun to realise that the peace resolution their organisation had adopted was not a solution at all, but actually fostered war, as had American diplomats and British officials. True, the presence of the ALA on the whole served to restrain Palestinian actions and postponed any significant general Arab invasion, but the danger of a shift in UN and American policies remained, and establishing facts, Ben-Gurion believed, was the best means to thwart any such potential change of policy.
Moreover, the sense that an opportune moment for action towards cleansing the country was developing was reinforced by the fact that the Zionist leadership knew how weak the Palestinian and Arab military opposition actually was. The intelligence unit of the Hagana was well aware, through telegrams it intercepted, that the ALA failed to cooperate with the paramilitary groups led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni in Jerusalem and Hassan Salameh in Jaffa. This lack of cooperation resulted in the ALA deciding, in January 1948, not to operate in the cities but rather to try and attack isolated Jewish settlements.63 The acting commander of the ALA was Fawzi Al-Qawqji, a Syrian officer, who had led a group of volunteers, mainly from Iraq, into Palestine in the 1936 Revolt. Ever since then he had been at loggerheads with the Husayni family, and gave his loyalty instead to the governments of Syria and Iraq, who had authorised his move into Palestine both in 1936 and in 1948. The Iraqi government saw al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni as a rival to its Hashemite sister-country Jordan, while the Syrian government of the time was apprehensive of his pan-Arabist ambitions. Hence, an Arab League decision to divide Palestine between the three commanders, al-Qawqji in the north, Abd al-Qadir in Jerusalem and Salameh in Jaffa, was a farce, and what little military power the Palestinians themselves possessed was made wholly ineffective by the way it was being employed.
In a way, the hesitations in the global community about the way things were going and the highly limited nature of the pan-Arab military activity could have restored calm to Palestine and opened the way for a renewed attempt to solve the problem. However, the new Zionist policy of an aggressive offensive that the Consultancy hastened to adopt blocked all possible moves towards a more reconciliatory reality.
On 9 January 1948, the first significant unit of the ALA volunteer army crossed into Palestine, mainly into the areas the UN had allotted to the future Arab state; quite often they camped along the boundaries of this imaginary state. In general, they adopted a defensive policy and focused on organising the people’s fortification lines in cooperation with the national committees – bodies of local notables that had been established in 1937, which acted as an emergency leadership in the cities – and with the village mukhtars. However, in several limited cases, especially after just crossing the border, they assaulted Jewish convoys and settlements. The first settlements that came under attack were Kefar Sold (9 January 1948) and Kefar Etzion (14 January 1948). Thirty-five Jewish troops, who were part of a convoy that was sent to help Kefar Etzion (south west of Jerusalem), were ambushed and killed. Long after these Hagana troops were killed, ‘35’, ‘Lamed-Heh’ in Hebrew (which substitutes letters for numbers), continued to serve as a codename for operations carried out supposedly in retaliation for this attack. Ben-Gurion’s biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, commented rightly that these operations had already been contemplated during the Long Seminar and all were aimed at inflicting the kind of collateral damage Ben-Gurion had envisaged there as desirable. The attack on the Lamed-Heh convoy proved to be just one more pretext for the new offensive initiative, the final plan for which would be implemented in March 1948.64
After the Long Seminar, Jewish military operations began more systematically to transcend retaliation and punitive action, moving to cleansing initiatives within the UN-designated area of the Jewish state. The word cleansing, ‘tihur’, was used economically in the Consultancy’s meetings, but appears on every order the High Command passed down to the units on the ground. It means in Hebrew what it means in any other language: the expulsion of entire populations from their villages and towns. This determination overshadowed all other political consideration. There were crossroads ahead where the Zionist leadership was offered a chance to take a different course of action, both by the United States and by Arab actors on the scene. Ben-Gurion and his Consultancy had decided to blaze a clear road ahead, and they rejected these offers one after the other.
Nothing of the atmosphere that pervaded the first meetings of the Consultancy was reflected in the fiery speeches Ben-Gurion delivered to the wider public. Melodramatic and full of pathos, he told his audience: ‘This is a war aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community,’ never referring to the passivity of the Palestinians or the provocative nature of Zionist actions.
These speeches, one should add, were not just rhetoric. The Jewish forces did suffer casualties in their attempts to keep the lines open to all the isolated settlements the Zionists had planted in the heart of the Palestinian areas. By the end of January, 400 Jewish settlers had died in these attacks – a high number for a community of 660,000 (but still a much lower number than the 1500 Palestinians who had so far been killed by the random bombardment and shelling of their villages and neighbourhoods). These casualties Ben-Gurion now depicted as ‘victims of a second Holocaust’.
The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings. Already in 1945, Natan Alterman, the national poet of the Jewish community, had identified the impending confrontation with the Palestinians with the war against the Nazis in Europe:
Like you the brave English nation
that stood with its back
to the wall when Europe and France
were covered black
and you fought on the beaches, in the houses and the streets,
so will we fight in the beaches, in the houses and the streets.
The triumphant English people greet us on our last battle.
In some of his public appearances, Ben-Gurion even went so far as to describe the Jewish war effort as an attempt to protect the honour of the UN and its Charter. This discrepancy between a destructive and violent Zionist policy on the one hand and an overt discourse of peace on the other will reoccur at various junctures in the history of the conflict, but the deceitfulness in 1948 seems to have been particularly startling.
In February 1948, David Ben-Gurion decided to enlarge the Consultancy and absorb into it members of the Zionist organisations responsible for recruitment and arms purchase. Again, this brings to the fore how closely interconnected the issues of ethnic cleansing and military capability were. While still appearing outside with doomsday scenarios of a second Holocaust, the enlarged Consultancy heard Ben-Gurion outline amazing achievements in the compulsory recruitment the Zionist leadership had imposed on the Jewish community and in the arms purchases it had made, especially in the sphere of heavy weaponry and aircraft.
It was these new procurements of arms that by February 1948 had enabled the forces on the ground to extend their operations and act with greater efficiency in the Palestinian hinterland. A principal result of the upgraded weaponry were the heavy bombardments, especially from new mortars, that were now carried out on densely populated villages and neighbourhoods.
The confidence of the military can be gauged from the fact that the Jewish army was now able to develop its own weapons of destruction. Ben-Gurion followed personally the purchase of a particularly lethal weapon that would soon be used to set fire to the fields and houses of Palestinians: a flame-thrower. An Anglo-Jewish professor of chemistry, Sasha Goldberg, headed the project of purchasing and then manufacturing this weapon, first in a laboratory in London and later in Rehovot, south of Tel-Aviv, in what was to become the Weizmann Institute in the 1950s.65 The oral history of the Nakba is full of evidence of the terrible effect this weapon had on people and properties.
The flame-thrower project was part of a larger unit engaged in developing biological warfare under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir (later the president of Israel who in the 1980s, through a slip of the tongue, revealed to the world that the Jewish state possessed nuclear weapons). The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February. Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people. Katzir reported to Ben-Gurion: ‘We are experimenting with animals. Our researchers were wearing gas masks and adequate outfit. Good results. The animals did not die (they were just blinded). We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.’ In June, Katzir suggested using it on human beings.66
More military might was also needed since the Arab Liberation Army units had now positioned themselves in some of the villages, and greater effort would be required to occupy them. In some places the arrival of the ALA was more important psychologically than materially. They had no time to turn the villagers into fighting men, nor did they have the equipment to defend the villages. All in all, the ALA had only reached a few villages by February, which meant that most of the Palestinians remained unaware of how dramatically and crucially their life was about to change. Neither their leaders nor the Palestinian press had any inkling of what was being contemplated behind closed doors in the Red House, close to the northern outskirts of Jaffa. February 1948 saw major cleansing operations, and it was only then, in certain parts of the country, that the meaning of the imminent catastrophe began to dawn on people.
In the middle of February 1948, the Consultancy met to discuss the implications of the growing presence of Arab volunteers inside Palestine. Eliyahu Sasson reported that no more than 3000 volunteers in total had so far entered as part of the ALA (Ben-Gurion’s diary cites a smaller number). He described all of them as ‘poorly trained’ and added that if ‘we do not provoke them, they will remain idle and the Arab states will send no more volunteers’. This prompted Yigal Allon once more to speak out vociferously in favour of large-scale cleansing operations, but he was opposed by Yaacov Drori, the designated Chief of Staff, who insisted they adopt a more cautious approach. However, Drori fell ill soon thereafter and ceased to play a role. He was replaced by the more bellicose Yigael Yadin.67
On 9 February, Yadin had already shown his true intentions by calling for ‘deep invasions’ into the Palestinian areas. He specified heavily populated villages such as Fassuta, Tarbikha, and Aylut in the northern Galilee as targets for such invasions, with the aim of totally destroying the villages. The Consultancy rejected the plan as too far-reaching and Ben-Gurion suggested shelving it for the time being. Yadin’s codename for his plan had been ‘Lamed-Heh’; he had meant it as retaliation for the assault on the Gush Etzion convoy.68 A few days later, the Consultancy did approve other similar plans – with the same codename – inside Palestine’s rural areas, but still insisted they should be related, at least loosely, to Arab acts of hostility. These operations were also Yigael Yadin’s brainchild. They began on 13 February 1948 and focused on several areas. In Jaffa, houses were randomly selected and then dynamited with people still in them, the village of Sa‘sa was attacked, as well as three villages around Qisarya (Caesarea today).
The February operations, carefully planned by the Consultancy, differed from the actions that took place in December: no longer sporadic, they formed part of a first attempt to link the concept of unhampered Jewish transport on Palestine’s main routes with the ethnic cleansing of villages. But unlike the following month, when operations would be given codenames and clearly defined territories and targets, directives were still vague.
The first targets were three villages around the ancient Roman city of Caesarea, a town whose impressive history went all the way back to the Phoenicians. Established as a trading colony, Herod the Great later named it Caesarea in honour of his patron in Rome, Augustus Caesar. The largest of these villages was Qisarya, where 1500 people lived within the ancient walls of the old city. Among them, as was quite common in the Palestinian villages on the coast, were several Jewish families who had bought land there and lived practically inside the village. Most of the villagers lived in stone houses next to Bedouin families, who were part of the village but still lived in tents. The village wells provided enough water for both the semi-sedentary and the peasant communities, and allowed them to cultivate extensive tracts of land and grow a wide range of agricultural produce, including citrus fruit and bananas. Thus, Qisarya was a typical model of the live-and-let-live attitude that pervaded coastal rural life in Palestine.
The three villages were chosen because they were easy prey: they had no defence force of any kind, neither local nor volunteers from the outside. The order came on 5 February to occupy, expel and destroy them.69
Qisarya was the first village to be expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948. The expulsion took only a few hours and was carried out so systematically that the Jewish troops were able to evacuate and destroy another four villages on the same day, all under the watchful eyes of the British troops stationed in police stations nearby.70
The second village was Barrat Qisarya (‘outside Qaysariyya’), which had a population of about 1000. There are a number of photographs from the 1930s of this village showing its picturesque location on the sandy beach close to the ruins of the Roman city. It was wiped out in February in an attack so sudden and fierce that both Israeli and Palestinian historians refer to its disappearance as quite enigmatic. Today a Jewish development town, Or Akiva, stretches out over every square metre of this destroyed village. Some old houses were still standing in the town in the 1970s, but they were quickly demolished when Palestinian research teams tried to document them as part of an overall attempt to reconstruct the Palestinian heritage in this part of the country.
Similarly, only vague information exists about the nearby village of Khirbat al-Burj. This village was smaller than the other two and its remains are still visible to the observant eye if one travels through the area east of the veteran Jewish settlement of Binyamina (relatively ‘veteran’, as it dates from 1922). The major building in the village was an Ottoman inn, a khan, and it is the only building still standing. Called the Burj, the plaque nearby will tell you that once this was a historic castle – not a word is said about the village. Today the building is a popular Israeli venue for exhibitions, fairs and family celebrations.71
North of these three villages, but not very far away, lies another ancient monument, the Crusader’s castle of Atlit. This castle had impressively withstood both the passage of time and the various invading armies that had come down upon the region since the medieval era. The village of Atlit was built next to it and was unique for the rare example it presented of Arab-Jewish cooperation in Mandatory Palestine in the salt industry along its beaches. For ages, the village’s topography had made it a source of salt extraction from the sea, and Jews and Palestinians jointly worked in the evaporation pans southwest of the village that produced quality sea salt. A Palestinian employer, the Atlit Salt company, had invited 500 Jews to live and work alongside the 1000 Arab inhabitants of the village. However, in the 1940s the Hagana turned the Jewish part of the village into a training ground for its members, whose intimidating presence soon reduced the number of Palestinians to 200. No wonder that with the operation in nearby Qisariya, the Jewish troops in the training base did not hesitate to expel their Palestinian co-workers from the joint village. Today the castle is closed to the public as it is now a major training base for Israel’s Naval Commando elite units.
In February, the Jewish troops also reached the village of Daliyat al-Rawha, on the plain overlooking the Milq valley connecting the coast with the Marj Ibn Amir in northeast Palestine. In Arabic the name means ‘the fragrant vine’, a testimony to the scents and sights that still characterise this scenic part of the country. This, too, was a village where Jews lived among Arabs and owned land. The initiative for the attack had come from Yossef Weitz, who wanted to use the new phase of operations to get rid of the village. He had set his eyes on the rich soil, generously supplied by an extremely abundant source of natural water, which was responsible for the village’s fertile fields and vineyards.72
Then came the raid on Sa‘sa, on the night between 14 and 15 February. You cannot miss Sa‘sa today. The Arabic pronunciation uses two laryngeal ‘A’s, but the sign to the entrance of the kibbutz built on the ruins of the Palestinian village points to ‘Sasa’, Hebraization having done away with the throaty pronunciation of the Arabic (difficult for Europeans to master) in favour of the obviously more European soft-sounding ‘A’s. Some of the original Palestinian houses have survived and now lie inside the kibbutz, on the way to Palestine’s highest mountain, Jabel Jermak (Har Meron in Hebrew), 1208 metres above sea level. Beautifully located in the only evergreen part of the country, with its hewn-stone houses, Sa‘sa is one of those Palestinian villages that appears quite often in Israeli official tourist guides.
The order to attack Sa‘sa came from Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach in the north, and was entrusted to Moshe Kalman, the deputy commander of the third battalion that had committed the atrocities in Khisas. Allon explained that the village had to be attacked because of its location. ‘We have to prove to ourselves that we can take the initiative,’ he wrote to Kalman. The order was very clear: ‘You have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many “warriors” [read: “villagers”] as possible’. Sa‘sa was attacked at midnight – all the villages attacked under the ‘Lamed-Heh’ order were assaulted around midnight, recalled Moshe Kalman. The New York Times (16 April 1948) reported that the large unit of Jewish troops encountered no resistance from the residents as they entered the village and began attaching TNT to the houses. ‘We ran into an Arab guard,’ Kalman recounted later. ‘He was so surprised that he did not ask “min hada?”, “who is it?”, but “eish hada?”, “what is it?” One of our troops who knew Arabic responded humorously [sic] “hada esh!” (“this is [in Arabic] fire [in Hebrew]”) and shot a volley into him.’ Kalman’s troops took the main street of the village and systematically blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside. ‘In the end the sky prised open,’ recalled Kalman poetically, as a third of the village was blasted into the air. ‘We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60–80 dead bodies’ (quite a few of them were children).73 He commended the British army for helping the troops to transfer the two wounded soldiers – hurt by debris flying through the air – to the Safad hospital.74
The Long Seminar participants were called in for another meeting on 19 February 1948, four days after the attack on Sa‘sa. It was a Thursday morning, they met once again in Ben-Gurion’s home, and the Zionist leader recorded the discussion almost verbatim in his diary. The purpose was to examine the impact of the Lamed Heh operations on the Palestinians.
Josh Palmon brought the ‘Orientalist’ point of view: the Palestinians still showed no inclination to fight. He was supported by Ezra Danin who reported: ‘The villagers show no wish to fight.’ Moreover, the ALA was clearly confining its activities to the areas the UN resolution had allocated to a future Palestinian state. Ben-Gurion was unimpressed. His thoughts were already somewhere else. He was unhappy with the limited scope of the operations: ‘A small reaction [to Arab hostility] does not impress anyone. A destroyed house – nothing. Destroy a neighborhood, and you begin to make an impression!’ He liked the Sa‘sa operation for the way it had ‘caused the Arabs to flee’.
Danin thought the operation had sent shock waves through the nearby villages, which would serve to dissuade other villagers from taking part in the fighting. The conclusion was therefore to retaliate with force for every single Arab act, and not pay too much attention to whether particular villages or Arabs were neutral.75 This feedback process between response and further planning would continue until March 1948. After that, ethnic cleansing stopped being part of retaliation, but was codifed into a well-defined plan that aimed to uproot the Palestinians en masse from their homeland.
Allon continued to expand on the lessons learned from the Lamed-Heh operations in the Consultancy’s mid-February meeting: ‘If we destroy whole neighbourhoods or many houses in the village, as we did in Sa‘sa, we make an impression.’ More people than usual were invited to this particular meeting. ‘Experts’ on Arab affairs from all over the country had been summoned, among them Giyora Zayd, from the western Galilee, and David Qaron from the Negev. The meeting spelled out the wish to prepare for an all-out operation. All of those present, without exception, reported that rural Palestine showed no desire to fight or attack, and was defenseless. Ben-Gurion concluded by saying he preferred to move more cautiously for the time being and see how events developed. In the meantime, the best thing to do was ‘to continue to terrorize the rural areas . . . through a series of offensives . . . so that the same mood of passivity reported . . . would prevail.’76 Passivity, on the one hand, prevented actions in some areas, but led to many others elsewhere, on the other.
The month ended with the occupation and the expulsion of another village in the district of Haifa, the village of Qira. It too had a mixed Jewish and Arab population, and here, too, as in Daliyat al-Rawha, the presence of Jewish settlers on the village’s land essentially sealed its fate. Again it was Yossef Weitz who urged the army commanders not to delay the operation in the village too long. ‘Get rid of them now,’77 he suggested. Qira was close to another village, Qamun, and Jewish settlers had built their homes strategically between the two.
Qira is very close to where I live today. Now called Yoqneam, Dutch Jews had bought some land here in 1935 before ‘incorporating’ the two evicted Palestinian villages into their settlement in 1948. Nearby Kibbutz Hazorea took over some of the land as well. Yoqneam is an attractive spot because it has one of the last clean water rivers in the Marj Ibn Amir area. In spring, the water gushes through a beautiful canyon down to the valley, as it did in the early days when it reached the stone houses of the village. The inhabitants of Qira called it the Muqata River; Israelis call it ‘the river of peace’. Like so many other scenic sites in this area set aside for recreation and tourism, this one too hides the ruins of a 1948 village. To my shame it took me years to discover this.
Qira and Qamun were not the only places where Weitz could vent his expulsion impulses. He was eager to act wherever he could. In January, soon after he had been invited to join the Consultancy, his diary shows how he contemplated using the ‘retaliation’ policy for getting rid of Palestinian tenants on land already bought by Jews: ‘Is it not time to get rid of them? Why should we continue to keep these thorns in our flesh?’78 In another entry, for 20 January, he recommended that these tenants be treated according to ‘our original plan’, i.e., the ideas he had put forward in the 1930s for transferring the Palestinians.79
Benny Morris lists a number of operations that Weitz directed in February and March for which, Morris adds, no authorization had been given by what Morris euphemistically calls ‘the political leadership’. This is impossible. The centralised Hagana command authorised all actions of expulsion; it is true that, before 10 March 1948, it did not always want to know about them in advance, but it always granted authorization in retrospect. Weitz was never rebuked for the expulsions he was responsible for in Qamun and Qira, Arab al-Ghawarina in the Naman valley, Qumya, Mansurat al-Khayt, Husayniyya, Ulmaniyya, Kirad al-Ghannama and Ubaydiyya, all villages he had selected either for the quality of their land or because Jewish settlers resided in or nearby them.80
The Consultancy had first discussed a draft of Plan Dalet in the second half of February 1948. According to Ben-Gurion’s diary this was on Sunday, 29 February, though one Israeli military historian put the date as 14 February.81 Plan Dalet was finalised in the early days of March. Based on the recollections of the army generals from that period, Israeli historiography generally claims that March 1948 was the most difficult month in the history of the war. But this assessment is only based on one aspect of the unfolding conflict: the ALA attacks on the Jewish convoys to the isolated Jewish settlements that in early March briefly proved relatively effective. Moreover, some of the ALA officers at the time tried to fend off or retaliate for the ongoing Jewish offensives in the mixed cities by terrorizing the Jewish areas through a series of mini raids. Two such attacks gave the public the (false) impression that the ALA might after all be able to show some resistance in the face of a Jewish takeover.
In fact, March 1948 began with this final and short-lived Palestinian military effort to protect its community. The Jewish forces were not yet sufficiently well organised to be able to react immediately and successfully to every counterattack, which explains the sense of distress in some sections of the Jewish community. However, the Consultancy did not lose its grip on reality for a moment. When they met again at the beginning of March, they did not even discuss the ALA counterattack, nor did they seem to regard the overall situation as particularly troubling. Instead, under the guidance of Ben-Gurion, they were busy preparing a final master plan.
Some members of the Consultancy proposed to continue with the ethnic cleansing operations as the most effective means of protecting the routes to isolated settlements. Their main concern was the Tel-Aviv road to Jerusalem, but Ben-Gurion had already set his mind on something more comprehensive. The conclusion he had drawn from the period between late November 1947 and early March 1948 was that, despite all the efforts from above, a competent guiding hand on the ground was still missing. He also felt that three previous plans the Hagana had prepared for the takeover of the Mandatory state – one in 1937 and two more in 1946 – now needed updating. He therefore ordered a revision of these plans, the two recent ones being code-named Plans B and C.
We have no record of what Ben-Gurion said about ethnic cleansing to the team that made up the Consultancy on their regular Wednesday afternoon meeting on 10 March 1948, but we do have the plan they authored and which, after they had put the final touches to it, was approved by the Hagana High Command and then sent out as military orders to the troops in the field.
The official name of Plan Dalet was the Yehoshua plan. Born in Bellarus in 1905, Yehoshua Globerman had been sent to prison in the 1920s for anticommunist activity, but was released after three years in a Soviet jail after Maxim Gorki, a friend of his parents, had intervened on his behalf. Globerman was the commander of the Hagana in various parts of Palestine and was killed by unknown assailants in December 1947, who had fired at him while he was driving his car. He had been destined to become one of the future chiefs of staff of the Israeli army, but his untimely death meant that his name would be associated not with military prowess but rather with the Zionist master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was so revered by his peers that he was posthumously given the rank of general after the Jewish state was established.
A few days after Globerman was killed, the intelligence unit of the Hagana drafted the blueprint for the coming months. Codenamed Plan D, it contained direct references both to the geographical parameters of the future Jewish state (the seventy-eight per cent coveted by Ben-Gurion) and to the fate of the one million Palestinians living within that space:
These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centres that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.82
Villages were to be expelled in their entirety either because they were located in strategic spots or because they were expected to put up some sort of resistance. These orders were issued when it was clear that occupation would always provoke some resistance and that therefore no village would be immune, either because of its location or because it would not allow itself to be occupied. This was the master plan for the expulsion of all the villages in rural Palestine. Similar instructions were given, with much the same wording, for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centres.
The orders coming through to the units in the field were more specific. The country was divided into zones according to the number of brigades, whereby the four original brigades of the Hagana were turned into twelve so as to facilitate the implementation of the plan. Each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed and their inhabitants expelled, with exact dates. Some of the commanders were over-ambitious in executing their orders, and added additional locations in the momentum their zeal had created. Some of the orders, on the other hand, proved too far-fetched and could not be implemented within the expected timeframe. This meant that several villages on the coast that had been scheduled to be occupied in May were not destroyed until July. And the villages in the Wadi Ara area – a valley connecting the coast near Hadera with Marj Ibn Amir (Emeq Izrael) and Afula (today’s Route 65) – managed to survive repeated Jewish attacks throughout the war. But they were the exception: the rule was the 531 villages and eleven urban neighbourhoods and towns that were destroyed and their inhabitants expelled under the direct orders the Consultancy put out in March 1948. By then, thirty villages were already gone.
A few days after Plan D was typed up, it was distributed among the commanders of the dozen brigades the Hagana now incorporated. With the list each commander received came a detailed description of the villages in his realm of operation, and their imminent fate: occupation, destruction and expulsion. The Israeli documents released from the IDF archives in the late 1990s show clearly that, contrary to claims historians such as Benny Morris have made, Plan Dalet was handed down to the brigade commanders not as vague guidelines, but as clear-cut operational orders for action.83
Unlike the general draft that was sent to the political leaders, the list of villages the military commanders received did not detail how the action of destruction or expulsion should be carried out. There was no specification here for how villages could save themselves, for instance by surrendering unconditionally as promised in the general document. There was another difference between the draft handed to the politicians and the one the military commanders were given: the official draft stated that the plan would only be activated after the end of the Mandate; the officers on the ground were ordered to start executing it within a few days after its adoption. This dichotomy is typical of the relationship that exists in Israel between the army and politicians up to the present day – the army quite often misinforms the politicians as to its real intentions: Moshe Dayan did so in 1956, Ariel Sharon in 1982, and Shaul Mofaz in 2000.
What the political version of Plan Dalet and the military directives had in common was the overall purpose of the scheme. In other words, even before the direct orders had reached the field, the troops already knew exactly what was expected of them. That venerable and courageous Israeli campaigner for civil rights, Shulamit Aloni, who was a woman officer in those days, recalled how special political officers would come down and actively incite the troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operations ahead, quite often the day after the indoctrinating event had taken place.84
After the Consultancy had approved Plan Dalet, the Acting Chief of Staff, Yigael Yadin, summoned all the intelligence officers of the Hagana to a building that housed the headquarters of the Jewish public health service, Kupat Holim, in Tel-Aviv’s Zamenhof Street (still functioning as such opposite a popular Indian restaurant). Hundreds of officers filled what was normally a reception hall for patients.
Yadin did not tell them about Plan Dalet: the orders had gone out that week to their brigade commanders, but he provided them with a general idea that was meant to leave no doubt in their minds as to the troops’ ability to carry out the plan. Intelligence officers were also Politruk (political commissars) of a kind, and Yadin realised he needed to account for the gap between the public declarations the leadership was making of an imminent ‘second Holocaust’ and the reality that the Jewish forces clearly faced no real challenge in the scheduled depopulation of the territory they wished to turn into their Jewish state. Yadin, dramatic as ever, set out to impress upon his listeners that since they were going to be issued with orders to occupy, conquer and dispossess a population, they deserved an explanation of how they could afford to do so when, as they read in their newspapers and heard from their politicians, they themselves were facing the ‘danger of annihilation’. The officer, whose tall and lean figure would soon become familiar to all Israelis, then proudly told his audience: ‘Today we have all the arms we need; they are already aboard ships, and the British are leaving and then we bring in the weapons, and the whole situation at the fronts will change.’85
In other words, when we find Yigael Yadin’s narrative depicting the last weeks of March 1948 as the toughest period of the war as a whole, we might instead conclude that the Jewish community in Palestine was not in any danger of annihilation: it was facing some obstacles on the way to completing its ethnic cleansing plan. These difficulties were the relative lack of arms and the isolated Jewish colonies within the designated Arab state. Especially vulnerable seemed to be the few settlements inside the West Bank and those on the north-western parts of the Negev (Negba, Yad Mordechai, Nizanim and Gat). These four would still be left isolated even during the Egyptian forces’ entry into Palestine that overtook them for a short while. Similarly, some settlements in the upper Galilee were not easily reached or defended as they were surrounded by scores of Palestinian villages that were lucky enough to have the protection of several hundreds of volunteers from the ALA. Finally, the road to Jerusalem was subjected to Palestinian sniper attacks, serious enough for a sense of siege to descend over the Jewish parts of the city that month.
Official Israeli historiography describes the next month, April 1948, as a turning point. According to this version, an isolated and threatened Jewish community in Palestine was moving from defence to offence, after its near defeat. The reality of the situation could not have been more different: the overall military, political and economic balance between the two communities was such that not only were the majority of Jews in no danger at all, but in addition, between the beginning of December 1947 and the end of March 1948, their army had been able to complete the first stage of the cleansing of Palestine, even before the master plan had been put into effect. If there were a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population towards the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed.