I have no doubt a massacre took place in Tantura. I did not go out into the streets and shout it about. It is not exactly something to be proud of. But once the affair was publicized, one should tell the truth. After 52 years, the state of Israel is strong and mature enough to confront its past.
Eli Shimoni, senior officer in the Alexandroni Brigade,
Maariv, 4 February 2001
Within weeks of the end of the Mandate, the Jewish troops had reached the vast majority of the isolated Jewish settlements. Only two of these were lost to the Arab Legion because they were in the area that both sides, prior to May 1948, had agreed Jordan would occupy and annex, i.e., the West Bank.1 The Jordanians also insisted they should have at least half of Jerusalem, including the Old City that incorporated the Muslim sanctuaries, but also the Jewish quarter, but since there was no prior agreement on this they had to fight for it. They did so bravely and successfully. It was the only time the two sides were engaged in battle, and stands in complete contrast to the inaction the Arab Legion displayed when their units were stationed near Palestinian villages and towns the Israeli army had begun occupying, cleansing, and destroying.
When Ben-Gurion convened the Consultancy on 11 May he asked his colleagues to assess the possible implications of a more aggressive Jordanian campaign in the future. The bottom line of that meeting can be found in a letter Ben-Gurion sent to the commanders of the Hagana brigades telling them that the Legion’s more offensive intentions should not distract their troops from their principal tasks: ‘the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet’ (he used the noun bi‘ur, which means either ‘cleansing the leaven’ in Passover or ‘root out’, ‘eliminate’).2
Their calculation proved to be right. Although the Jordanian army was the strongest of the Arab forces and thus would have formed the most formidable foe for the Jewish state, it was neutralised from the very first day of the Palestine war by the tacit alliance King Abdullah had made with the Zionist movement. It is no wonder that the Arab Legion’s English Commander-in-Chief, Glubb Pasha, dubbed the 1948 war in Palestine the ‘Phony War’. Glubb was not only fully aware of the restrictions Abdullah had imposed on the Legion’s actions, he was privy to the general pan-Arab consultations and preparations. Like the British military advisers of the various Arab armies – and there were many of them – he knew that the groundwork of the other Arab armies for a rescue operation in Palestine was quite ineffective – ‘pathetic’ some of his colleagues called it – and that included the ALA.3
The only change we find in the overall Arab conduct once the Mandate had ended was in the rhetoric. The drums of war were now sounding louder and more boisterously than before but they failed to cover the inaction, disarray and confusion that prevailed. The situation may have differed from one Arab capital to the next, but the overall picture was quite uniform. In Cairo, the government only decided to send troops to Palestine at the very last moment, two days before the end of the Mandate. The 10,000 troops it had set aside included a large contingent, almost fifty per cent, of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers. The members of this political movement – vowing to restore Egypt and the Arab world to the Orthodox ways of Islam – regarded Palestine as a crucial battlefield in the struggle against European imperialism. But in the 1940s the Brotherhood also regarded the Egyptian government as a collaborator with this imperialism, and when its more extreme members resorted to violence in their campaign, thousands of them were imprisoned. These were now released in May 1948 so that they could join the Egyptian expedition, but of course they had had no military training and, for all their fervour, were no match for the Jewish forces.4
Syrian forces were better trained and their politicians more committed, but only a few years after their own independence, following the French Mandate, the small number of troops the Syrians dispatched to Palestine performed so badly that even before the end of May 1948, the Consultancy had begun to consider expanding the Jewish state’s borders on its northeastern flank into Syria proper by annexing the Golan Heights.5 Even smaller and less committed were the Lebanese units, which for most of the war were happy to remain on their side of the border with Palestine, where they reluctantly tried to defend the adjacent villages.
The Iraqi troops formed the last and most intriguing component of the all-Arab effort. They numbered a few thousand and had been ordered by their government to accept the Jordanian guideline: that is, not to attack the Jewish state, but just to defend the area allocated to King Abdullah, namely the West Bank. They were stationed in the northern part of the West Bank. However, they defied their politicians’ orders and tried to play a more effective role. Because of this, fifteen villages in Wadi Ara, on the road between Afula and Hadera, were able to hold out and thus escape expulsion (they were ceded to Israel by the Jordanian government in the summer of 1949 as part of a bilateral armistice agreement).
For three weeks these Arab units – some provoked into action by their politicians’ hypocrisy, others deterred by it – succeeded in entering and holding on to the areas the UN Partition Resolution had allocated to the Arab state. In a few places they were able to encircle isolated Jewish settlements located there and occupy them for a while, only to lose them again within a few days.
The Arab troops that entered Palestine quickly found out they had over-stretched their supply lines, which meant they stopped getting ammunition for their antiquated and quite often malfunctioning arms. Their officers then discovered that there was no coordinating hand between the various national armies, and that even when supply routes were open, the weaponry in their home countries was running out. Weapons were scarce since the Arab armies’ main suppliers were Britain and France, who had declared an arms embargo on Palestine. This crippled the Arab armies but hardly affected the Jewish forces, who found a willing furnisher in the Soviet Union and in its new Eastern bloc.6 As for the lack of coordination, this was the inevitable result of the decision by the Arab League to appoint King Abdullah as the supreme commander of the all-Arab army with an Iraqi general as the acting commander. While the Jordanians never looked back at those days of May, June and July of 1948, when they had done all they could to undermine the general Arab effort, the Iraqi revolutionary rulers who came to power in 1958 brought their generals to trial for their role in the catastrophe.
Still, there were enough Arab troops to engage the Jewish army in battle and provoke some courageous Jewish responses, especially around isolated Jewish communities in the heart of the UN-designated Arab state or at the extreme outer ends of the country, where Ben-Gurion had made a strategic decision to leave vulnerable Jewish outposts to fend for themselves when Arab units started entering Palestine on 15 May. Units of the Syrian army marched along the Damascus–Tiberias road that day and were engaged in battle around the four isolated settlements there: Mishamr Hayarden, Ayelet Hashahar, Haztor and Menahemiya. They succeeded in occupying only Mishmar ha-Yarden, where they remained until the first day of the truce (11 June). In the words of the Israeli intelligence, they ‘showed no offensive spirit’ when they were later attacked and driven out of Palestine.7
Israeli historians later criticised Ben-Gurion for having temporarily abandoned these settlements.8 From a purely military point of view, Ben-Gurion was right as none of them would ultimately remain in Arab hands anyway, and although the ethnic cleansing operation was obviously far more important and higher up on his agenda, he did care about the fate of these more remote spots.
This also explains why most of the heroic stories that have fed the Israeli mythology and collective memory of the 1948 war have their origin in these first three weeks of hostilities. The real war also included other tests of resilience and resolution on the Israeli side – Tel-Aviv, for instance, was bombarded several times in the first few days of the war by Egyptian airplanes – but these subsided and disappeared over the following weeks. However, the presence of the Arab troops was never enough to stop the ethnic cleansing – none of whose horror stories ever troubled the official and popular Israeli narrative, as they were totally erased from it.
Furthermore, the cleansing operations in the second half of May 1948 were no different from those of April and early May. In other words, the mass evictions were not affected by the end of the Mandate but went ahead uninterrupted. There had been ethnic cleansing on the day before 15 May 1948, and the same ethnic cleansing operations took place the day after. Israel had enough troops both to handle the Arab armies and to continue cleansing the land.
It should be clear by now that the Israeli foundational myth about a voluntary Palestinian flight the moment the war started – in response to a call by Arab leaders to make way for invading armies – holds no water. It is a sheer fabrication that there were Jewish attempts, as Israeli textbooks still insist today, to persuade Palestinians to stay. As we have seen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled by force before the war began, and tens of thousands more would be expelled in the first week of the war. For most Palestinians, the date of 15 May 1948 was of no special significance at the time: it was just one more day in the horrific calendar of ethnic cleansing that had started more than five months earlier.9
Tihur is yet another Hebrew word for cleansing, literally meaning ‘purifying’. After the Jewish state was declared on the evening of 14 May, the orders the units in the field received from above used the term frequently and explicitly. It was with this kind of language that the High Command chose to galvanise the Israeli soldiers before sending them on their way to destroy the Palestinian countryside and urban districts. This escalation in rhetoric was the only obvious difference from the previous month – otherwise the cleansing operations continued unabated.10
The Consultancy went on meeting, but less regularly as the Jewish state had become a fait accompli with a government, cabinet, military command, secret services, etc., all in place. Its members were no longer preoccupied with the master plan of expulsion: ever since Plan Dalet had been put into motion it had been working well, and needed no further coordination and direction. Their attention was now focused on whether they had enough troops to sustain a ‘war’ on two fronts: against the Arab armies and against the one million Palestinians who, according to international law, had become Israeli citizens on 15 May. By the end of May even these apprehensions had petered out.
If there was anything new about the way the Consultancy now functioned, it was only the physical move to a new building, on a hill top overlooking the evicted village of Shaykh Muwannis. This became the Matkal, the headquarters of the general staff of the Israeli army.11 From this new vantage point, the Consultancy could literally observe the onslaught that had begun on 1 May against the nearby Palestinian villages. By no means the only operation that day, it was conducted simultaneously with identical operations in the east and the north. One brigade, the Alexandroni, was entrusted with the mission of cleansing the villages to the east and north of Tel-Aviv and Jaffa. It was then ordered to move north and, together with other units, start depopulating the Palestine coastline, all the way up to Haifa.
The orders had come on 12 May. ‘You must between the 14th and 15th occupy and destroy: Tira, Qalansuwa and Qaqun, Irata, Danba, Iqtaba and Shuweika. Furthermore, you should occupy but not destroy Qalqilya [the city in the occupied West Bank, which Alexandroni failed to take and which today is totally enclosed by the eight-metre-high segregation wall Israel has erected].’12 Within two days the next order arrived in the Alexandroni headquarters: ‘You will attack and cleanse Tirat Haifa, Ayn Ghazal, Ijzim, Kfar Lam, Jaba, Ayn Hawd and Mazar.’13
Re-tracing the route the brigade followed, it appears the troops preferred to sweep the area systematically from south to north and accomplish the destruction of the villages in the order that seemed right to them, rather than according to the exact instruction of which village should be hit first. As completing the list was the overall goal, no clear priorities were mentioned. So the Alexandroni began with the villages north and east of Tel-Aviv: Kfar Saba and Qaqun, whose populations were duly expelled. In Qaqun the UN claimed, and testimonies by Jewish troops corroborated, that the takeover had involved a case of rape.
All in all, there were sixty-four villages within the area that stretched between Tel-Aviv and Haifa, a rectangle 100 kilometres long and fifteen to twenty kilometres wide. Only two of these villages were spared in the end: Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa. They had been scheduled for expulsion as well, but members of the neighbouring Jewish settlements convinced the army commanders to leave them unharmed, because they claimed they needed the villagers for unskilled labour in their farms and houses.14 Today this rectangle is bisected by the two main highways that connect these two major cities: highways 2 and 4. Hundred of thousands of Israelis commute daily on these roads, most of them without having the slightest notion of the places they are driving through, let alone of their history. Jewish settlements, pine forests and commercial fishing ponds have replaced the Palestinian communities that once flourished there.
The Alexandroni’s pace cleansing the coastal rectangle was horrific – within the second half of the month alone they cleansed the following villages: Manshiyya (in the Tul-Karem area), Butaymat, Khirbat al-Manara, Qannir, Khirbat Qumbaza and Khirbat al-Shuna. A small number of villages courageously put up strong resistance, and the Alexandroni Brigade was unable to take them; neverthess, they were finally cleansed in July. That is, the ethnic cleansing operations in the central coastal plain developed in two phases: the first in May and the second in July. In the second half of May, the most important ‘trophy’ was the village of Tantura, which the Alexandroni captured on 21 May 1948.
Tantura was one of the largest of the coastal villages and for the invading brigade it stuck like ‘a bone in the throat’, as the official Alexandroni war book puts it. Tantura’s day came on 22 May.
Tantura was an ancient Palestinian village on the Mediterranean coast. It was a large village for the time, having around 1500 inhabitants whose livelihood depended on agriculture, fishing and menial jobs in nearby Haifa. On 15 May 1948, a small group of Tantura’s notables, including the mukhtar of the village, met the Jewish intelligence officers, who offered them terms of surrender. Suspecting that surrender would lead to the villagers’ expulsion, they rejected the offer.
A week later, on 22 May 1948, the village was attacked at night. At first, the Jewish commander in charge wanted to send a van into the village with a loudspeaker calling upon people to capitulate, but this scheme was not carried out.
The offensive came from all four flanks. This was uncommon; the brigade usually closed in on villages from three flanks, tactically creating an ‘open gate’ on the fourth flank through which they could drive the people out. Lack of coordination meant that the Jewish troops had fully encircled the village and consequently found themselves with a very large number of villagers on their hands.
Tantura’s captured villagers were herded at gunpoint down to the beach. The Jewish troops then separated the men from the women and children, and expelled the latter to nearby Furaydis, where some of the men joined them a year and half later. Meanwhile, the hundreds of men collected on the beach were ordered to sit down and await the arrival of an Israeli intelligence officer, Shimshon Mashvitz, who lived in the nearby settlement of Givat Ada and in whose ‘district’ the village fell.
Mashvitz went along with a local collaborator, hooded as at Ayn al-Zaytun, and picked out individual men – again, in the eyes of the Israeli army, ‘men’ were all males between the ages of ten and fifty – and took them out in small groups to a spot further away where they were executed. The men were selected according to a pre-prepared list drawn from Tantura’s village file, and included everybody who had participated in the 1936 Revolt, in attacks on Jewish traffic, who had contacts with the Mufti, and anyone else who had ‘committed’ one of the ‘crimes’ that automatically condemned them.
These were not the only men executed. Before the selection and killing process took place on the coast, the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree inside the houses and in the streets. Joel Skolnik, a sapper in the battalion, had been wounded in this attack, but after his hospitalisation heard from other soldiers that this had been ‘one of the most shameful battles the Israeli army had fought.’ According to him, sniper shots from within the village as the soldiers entered had caused the Jewish troops to run amok soon after the village was taken and before the scenes on the beach unfolded. The attack happened after the villagers had signaled their surrender by waving a white flag.
Solnik heard that two soldiers in particular had been doing the killing, and that they would have gone on had not some people from the nearby Jewish settlement of Zikhron Yaacov arrived and stopped them. It was the head of the Zikhron Yaacov settlement, Yaacov Epstein, who managed to call a halt to the orgy of killing in Tantura, but ‘he came too late’, as one survivor commented bitterly.
Most of the killing was done in cold blood on the beach. Some of the victims were first interrogated and asked about a ‘huge cache’ of weapons that had supposedly been hidden somewhere in the village. As they couldn’t tell – there was no such stack of weapons – they were shot dead on the spot. Today, many of the survivors of these horrific events live in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria, coping only with great difficulty with life after the trauma of witnessing the executions.
This is how a Jewish officer described the executions at Tantura:
Prisoners were led in groups to a distance of 200 metres aside and there they were shot. Soldiers would come to the commander-in-chief and say, ‘My cousin was killed in the war.’ His commander heard that and instructed the troops to take a group of five to seven people aside and execute them. Then a soldier came and said his brother had died in one of the battles. For one brother the retribution was higher. The commander ordered the troops to take a larger group and they were shot, and so on.
In other words, what took place in Tantura was the systematic execution of able-bodied young men by Jewish soldiers and intelligence officers. One eyewitness, Abu Mashaykh, was staying in Tantura with a friend, as he originally came from Qisarya, the village Jewish troops had already destroyed and expelled in February 1948. He saw with his own eyes the execution of eighty-five young men of Tantura, who were taken in groups of ten and then executed in the cemetery and the nearby mosque. He thought even more were executed, and estimated that the total number could have been 110. He saw Shimshon Mashvitz supervising the whole operation: ‘He had a “Sten” [sub-machine gun] and killed them.’ Later he adds: ‘They stood next to the wall, all facing the wall. He came from the back and shot them in the head, all of them.’ He further testified how Jewish soldiers were watching the executions with apparent relish.
Fawzi Muhammad Tanj, Abu Khalid, also witnessed the executions. In the account he gives the village men were separated from the women, and then groups of seven to ten were taken and executed. He witnessed the killing of ninety people.
Mahmud Abu Salih of Tantura also reported the killing of ninety people. He was seventeen at the time and his most vivid memory is the killing of a father in front of his children. Abu Salih kept in touch with one of the sons, who went out of his mind seeing his father executed and never recovered. Abu Salih saw the execution of seven male members of his own family.
Mustafa Abu Masri, known as Abu Jamil, was thirteen at the time, but was probably mistaken for being around ten during the selection and thus was sent to the group of women and children, which saved him. A dozen members of his family, aged between ten and thirty, were less fortunate and he witnessed them being shot. The sequence of events he relates makes for chilling reading. His father ran into a Jewish officer whom the family knew and trusted, and so he sent his family away with that officer: he himself was later shot. Abu Jamil recalled 125 people being killed in summary executions. He saw Shimson Mashvitz walking among the people who had been collected on the beach, carrying a whip, lashing out at them ‘just for the fun of it’. Anis Ali Jarban told similar horror stories about Mashvitz. He came from the nearby village of Jisr al-Zarqa and had fled with his family to Tantura, thinking the larger village would be safer.
When the rampage in the village was over and the executions had come to an end, two Palestinians were ordered to dig mass graves under the supervision of Mordechai Sokoler, of Zikhron Yaacov, who owned the tractors that had been brought in for the gruesome job. In 1999, he said he remembered burying 230 bodies; the exact number was clear in his mind: ‘I lay them one by one in the grave.’
Several more Palestinians who took part in the digging of the mass graves told of the horrific moment when they realised they were about to be killed themselves. They were only saved because Yaacov Epstein, who had intervened in the frenzy of violence in the village, arrived and also stopped the killing on the beach. Abu Fihmi, one of the eldest and most respected members of the village, was one of those recruited to first identify the bodies and then help carry them to the graves: Shimon Mashvitz ordered him to list the bodies, and he counted ninety-five. Jamila Ihsan Shura Khalil saw how these bodies were then put on carts and pushed by the villagers to the burial place.
Most of the interviews with the survivors were done in 1999 by an Israeli research student, Teddy Katz, who ‘stumbled upon’ the massacre while doing his MA dissertation for Haifa University. When this became public, the University retroactively disqualified his thesis and Alexandroni veterans dragged Katz himself into court, suing him for libel. Katz’s most senior interviewee was Shlomo Ambar, later a general in the IDF. Ambar refused to give him details of what he had seen, saying: ‘I want to forget what happened there.’ When Katz pressed him, all he was willing to say was:
I connect this to the fact that I went to fight the Germans [he had served with the Jewish Brigade in the Second World War]. The Germans were the worst enemy the Jewish people has had, but when we fought we fought according to the laws of war dictated by the international community. The Germans did not kill Prisoners of War, they killed Slav Prisoners of War, but not British, not even [when they were] Jewish.
Ambar admitted to hiding things: ‘I did not talk then, why should I talk now?’ Understandable, given the images that came to his mind when Katz asked him what his comrades had done in Tantura.
In fact the story of Tantura had already been told before, as early as 1950, but then it failed to attract the same attention as the Deir Yassin massacre. It appears in the memoirs of a Haifa notable, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who, a few days after the battle, recorded the testimony of a Palestinian who had told him about summary executions on the beach of dozens of Palestinians. Here it is in full:
On the night of 22/23 May the Jews attacked from 3 sides and landed in boats from the seaside. We resisted in the streets and houses and in the morning the corpses were seen everywhere. I shall never forget this day all my life. The Jews gathered all women and children in a place, where they dumped all bodies, for them to see their dead husbands, fathers and brothers and terrorize them, but they remained calm.
They gathered men in another place, took them in groups and shot them dead. When women heard this shooting, they asked their Jewish guard about it. He replied: ‘We are taking revenge for our dead.’ One officer selected 40 men and took them to the village square. Each four were taken aside. They shot one, and ordered the other three to dump his body in a big pit. Then they shot another and the other two carried his body to the pit and so on.16
When they had completed their cleansing operations along the coast, the Alexandroni were instructed to move towards the Upper Galilee:
You are asked to occupy Qadas, Mayrun, Nabi Yehoshua and Malkiyye; Qadas has to be destroyed; the other two should be given to the Golani Brigade and its commander will decide what to do with them. Mayrun should be occupied and handed over to Golani.17
The geographical distance between the various locations is quite considerable, revealing again the ambitious pace the troops were expected to maintain on their journey of destruction.
The above formed part of the bloody trail the Alexandroni left behind along Palestine’s coast. More massacres by other brigades would follow, the worst of which was in the autumn of 1948 when the Palestinians finally succeeded in putting up some resistance against the ethnic cleansing in certain places, and in response the Jewish expellers revealed an ever-increasing callousness in the atrocities they perpetrated.
Meanwhile, the Golani Brigade followed in the footsteps of the Alexandroni. It attacked pockets the other brigades had missed or enclaves that for whatever reason had not yet been taken. One such destination was the village of Umm al-Zinat, which had been spared in the February cleansing operation in the Haifa district. Another was Lajjun near the ruins of ancient Meggido. Controlling the area between Lajjun and Umm al-Zinat meant that the whole western flank of Marj Ibn Amir and Wadi Milk, the canyon leading to the valley from the coastal road, were now in Jewish hands.
By the end of May 1948, some Palestinan enclaves still remaining inside the Jewish state proved harder to occupy than normal and it would take another few months to complete the job. For example, attempts to extend control over the remoter areas of the Upper Galilee that month failed, mainly because Lebanese and local volunteers courageously defended villages such as Sa‘sa, which was the primary target of the Jewish forces.
In the order to the Golani Brigade for the second attack on Sa‘sa it says: ‘The occupation is not for permanent stay but for the destruction of the village, mining of the rubble and the junctures nearby.’ Sa‘sa, however, was spared for a few more months. Even for the efficient and zealous Golani troops the plan had proved to be too ambitious. Towards the end of May came the following clarification: ‘If there is a shortage of soldiers, you are entitled to limit (temporarily) the cleansing operation, take-over and destruction of the enemy’s villages in your district.’18
The orders the brigades now received were phrased in more explicit language than the vague oral instructions they had been given before. The fate of a village was sealed when the order said either to ‘le-taher’, to cleanse, meaning leaving the houses intact but expelling the people, or ‘le-hashmid’, to destroy, meaning to dynamite the houses after the expulsion of the people and lay mines in the rubble to prevent their return. There were no direct orders for massacres, but neither were these fully and genuinely condemned when they took place.
Sometimes the decision to ‘cleanse’ or ‘destroy’ was left in the hands of the local commanders: ‘The villages in your district you have either to cleanse or destroy, decide for yourself according to consultation with the Arab advisors and the Shai [military intelligence] officers.’19
While these two brigades, the Alexandroni and the Golani, applied the methods described in Plan Dalet almost religiously to the coastal area, another brigade, the Carmeli, was sent to the northern areas of Haifa and the western Galilee. Like other brigades at the same time or later, it was also given orders to capture the area of Wadi Ara, the valley that contained fifteen villages and connected the coast, near Hadera, with the eastern corner of Marj Ibn Amir, near Afula. The Carmeli captured two villages nearby – Jalama on 23 April and Kabara soon afterwards, but they did not enter the valley. The Israeli command regarded this route as a crucial lifeline, but never succeeded in occupying it. As mentioned above, it was then given to them by King Abdullah in the summer of 1949, a tragic outcome for a large group of Palestinians who had successfully resisted expulsion.
As in the previous month, the Irgun – its units now part of the newly formed Israeli army – were sent in the second half of May to pockets along the coast to complete what the Hagana had regarded as questionable, or at least undesirable, operations at that particular moment. But even before its official inclusion in the army, the Irgun cooperated with the Hagana in the occupation of the greater Haifa area. It assited the Hagana in launching Operation Hametz (‘Leaven’) on 29 April, 1948. Three brigades took part in this operation, the Alexandroni, Qiryati and Givati. These brigades captured and cleansed Beit Dajan, Kfar Ana, Abbasiyya, Yahudiyya, Saffuriyya, Khayriyya, Salama and Yazur as well as the Jaffa suburbs of Jabalya and Abu Kabir.
In the second half of May, the Irgun were allocated the greater area of Jaffa to complete the job of the three Hagana brigades. They were regarded as a lesser force, as was the Qiryati Brigade. The Israeli military commanders described it as made up of ‘lesser [quality] soldiers’, namely Mizrahi Jews. A report of all the brigades submitted by a supervising officer in June 1948 described the Qiryati as a ‘most problematic’ brigade consisting of ‘illiterate people, with no candidates for NCOS and of course none for the post of officers.’20
The Irgun and Qiryati were ordered to continue their mopping-up operation south of Jaffa. By the middle of May, their troops helped complete Operation Hametz. The ruins of some of the villages and the suburbs occupied and expelled during that operation lie buried below the ‘White City’ of Tel-Aviv, that first ‘Hebrew’ city the Jews had founded in 1909 on sand dunes bought from a local landowner, now spread out into the sprawling metropolis of today.
In the Israeli military archives there is a query from the commander of the Qiryati, dated 22 May 1948, asking whether he could employ bulldozers to destroy the villages instead of using explosives as ordered by Plan Dalet. His request shows how phony ‘the war’ was: only one week into it, this brigade commander had ample time to allow a slower method for demolishing and erasing the scores of villages on his list.21
The Harel Brigade of Yitzhak Rabin showed no hesitation about which method of demolition to employ. Already on 11 May, the day before the final orders for the next stage in the ethnic cleansing were issued, it could report that it had occupied the village of Beit Masir, in what today is Jerusalem’s national park, on the western slopes of the mountains, and that ‘we are currently blowing up the houses. We have already blown up 60–70 houses.’22
Together with Brigade Etzioni, the Harel troops focused on the Greater Jerusalem area. Far away from there, in the north-eastern valleys of the country, the soldiers of the ‘Bulgarian’ Brigade were so successful in their destruction mission that the High Command thought at the time that they could proceed immediately to occupy parts of the northern West Bank and sections of the upper Galilee. But this proved over-ambitious after all and failed. The ‘Bulgarim’, as they were called, were unable to push out the Iraqi contingent holding Jenin, and had to wait until October before it could take the upper Galilee. However presumptuous, the belief that this brigade could seize the northern part of the West Bank – despite the agreement with Abdullah – and even conduct invasions into southern Lebanon, while cleansing vast areas of Palestine, reveals once again the cynicism behind the myth that Israel was fighting a ‘war of survival’. The brigade, meanwhile, achieved ‘enough’ as it was and could boast of having destroyed and expelled a larger number of villages than expected.
The two fronts of the ‘real’ and ‘phony’ war merged into one in those days in May, as the High Command was now confident enough to dispatch units to the border areas adjacent to the Arab countries, and there to engage the Arab expeditionary forces their governments had sent into Palestine on 15 May 1948. Meanwhile the Golani and Yiftach Brigades concentrated on cleansing operations on the border with Syria and Lebanon. In fact, they were able to carry out their mission unimpeded, following their usual routine for each village they had been ordered to destroy, while nearby Lebanese or Syrian troops stood idly by, looking the other way rather than risking their own men.
The sky was not always the limit, however. Inevitably there were hitches in the wild galloping pace of the Israeli operations, and there was a price to be paid for the systematic cleansing of Palestine and simultaneous confrontation with the regular Arab armies that had begun moving into the country. Isolated settlements in the south were left exposed to the Egyptian troops, who occupied several of them – albeit only for a few days – and to Syrian troops, who took over three settlements for a few days as well. Another sacrifice was exacted from the regular practice of sending convoys though densely Arab areas not yet taken: when some of them were successfully attacked, more than two hundred Jewish troops lost their lives.
Following one such attack, on a convoy heading towards the Jewish settlement of Yechiam in the north-western tip of the country, the troops who later carried out operations in its vicinity were particularly vengeful and callous in the way they performed their duties. The settlement of Yechiam was several kilometres south of Palestine’s western border with Lebanon. The Jewish troops who attacked the villages in operation ‘Ben-Ami’ in May 1948 were specifically told that the villages had to be eliminated in revenge for the loss of the convoy. Thus the villages of Sumiriyya, Zib, Bassa, Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr were subjected to an upgraded, crueler version of the ‘destroy-and-expel’ drill of the Israeli units: ‘Our mission: to attack for the sake of occupation . . . to kill the men, destroy and set fire to Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr.’23
The extra zeal thus infused into the troops produced one of the swiftest depopulation operations in one of the densest Arab areas of Palestine. Within twenty-nine hours of the end of the Mandate, almost all the villages in the north-western districts of the Galilee – all within the designated Arab state – had been destroyed, allowing a satisfied Ben-Gurion to announce to the newly assembled parliament: ‘The Western Galilee has been liberated’ (some of the villages north of Haifa were actually only occupied later). In other words, it took Jewish troops just over a day to turn a district with a population that was ninety-six per cent Palestinian and only four per cent Jewish – with a similar ratio of land ownership – into an area almost exclusively Jewish. Ben-Gurion was particularly satisfied with the ease with which the populations of the larger villages had been driven out, such as those of Kabri with 1500, Zib with 2000, and the largest, Bassa, with its 3000 inhabitants.
It took more than a day to defeat Bassa, because of the resistance from the village militiamen and some ALA volunteers. If the orders to be extra harsh with the village in revenge for the attack on the Jewish convoy near Yechiam had not been enough, its resistance was seen as another reason to ‘punish’ the village (that is, beyond simply expelling its people). This pattern would recur: villages that proved hard to subdue had to be ‘penalised’. As with all traumatic events in the lives of human beings, some of the worst atrocities remain deeply engraved in the survivors’ memories. The victims’ family members guarded those recollections and passed them down through the generations. Nizar al-Hanna belonged to such a family, whose memories are based on the traumatic events witnessed by his grandmother:
My maternal grandmother was a teenager when Israeli troops entered Bassa and ordered all the young men to be lined up and executed in front of one of the churches. My grandmother watched as two of her brothers, one 21, the other 22 and recently married, were executed by the Hagana.24
The total destruction that followed the massacre spared a church in which the village’s Greek Orthodox Christians prayed, and a domed Muslim shrine that served the other half of the population. Today, one can still spot a few houses fenced off with barbed wire standing in an uncultivated field now expropriated by Jewish citizens. The village was so vast (25,000 dunam out of which 17,000 were cultivated) that its territory today includes a military airport, a kibbutz, and a development town. The more observant visitor cannot fail to notice the remains of an elaborate water system, which was the pride of the villagers and had been completed just before the place was wiped out.
The expulsion of so many villagers – whom the UN Partition Resolution had just transformed from citizens of the British Mandate into either citizens of the UN-designated Arab state or citizens of the Jewish state – went unnoticed by the UN. Consequently, despite the drama of the British withdrawal and the potential hitch of the Arab world sending units into Palestine, the business of ethnic cleansing continued without interruption. The leaders of the newly created State of Israel – still in the making – and its military commanders knew they had sufficient forces at their disposal to halt the incoming Arab units while continuing their relentless cleansing of the land. It was also obvious that in the following month, the capacity of the Jewish forces would reach new heights: in early June the orders sent down to the troops were even more far-reaching in both their geographical span and the ambitious quota of villages each brigade was now assigned to capture and destroy.
The Arab General Command, on the other hand, was quickly losing its grip. The Egyptian military generals had pinned their hopes on their airforce, but the aircraft they had sent in the crucial second half of May failed in most of their missions, apart from a few raids on Tel-Aviv. In June, the Egyptian and other Arab air forces were preoccupied elsewhere, their main mission limited to protecting the Arab regimes, rather than helping to rescue parts of Palestine.
I am not an expert in military history, nor is this the place to tackle the purely military aspects of the war, since the focus of this book is not on military strategies but on their outcomes, i.e., war crimes. Significantly, many military historians summing up the month of May have been particularly impressed with the performance of the Syrian army, which began its campaign in May 1948 and kept it up intermittently until December 1948. In fact, it did quite poorly. Only for three days, between 15 and 18 May, did Syrian artillery, tanks and infantry, with the occasional help of their air force, constitute any kind of threat to the Israeli forces. A few days later their efforts had already become more sporadic and less effective. After the first truce, they were on their way back home.
By the end of May 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was progressing according to plan. Assessing the potential strength of the forces eventually sent by the Arab League into Palestine, Ben-Gurion and his advisers concluded – as they had already predicted a week after the Arab armies had moved into Palestine – that the all-Arab force could attack isolated Jewish settlements marginally more effectively than the volunteers’ army could ever have done, but apart from this it was as ineffective and weak as the irregular and paramilitary troops that had come first.
This realisation created a euphoric mood, which is clearly reflected in the orders to the twelve brigades of the Israeli army to start considering the occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon. On 24 May, after Ben-Gurion had met with his advisers, in his diary entry he sounds triumphant and more power-hungry than ever before:
We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight – we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during Biblical times.25
On that same day, the Israeli army had received a large shipment of modern, brand new 0.45-calibre cannons from the Communist Eastern bloc. Israel now possessed artillery unmatched not only by the Arab troops inside Palestine, but by all the Arab armies put together. It should be noted that the Israeli Communist Party was instrumental in arranging this deal.
This meant the Consultancy could now put aside the initial worries it had had at the beginning of the ‘real war’ about the overall capacity of its army to manage both fronts effectively and comprehensively. Its members were now free to turn their attention to other issues more in line with the qualifications of the Orientalist section of the Consultancy, such as advising the leader on what to do with the small communities of Palestinians that had been left in the mixed towns. The solution they came up with was to have all these people moved into one particular neighbourhood in each town, deprive them of their freedom of movement, and put them under a military regime.
Finally, it may be useful to add that, during the month of May, the definitive infrastructure of the IDF was decided upon and, within it, the central place of the military regime (referred to in Hebrew as Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzvai) and Israel’s internal security services, the Shabak. The Consultancy was no longer needed. The machinery of ethnic cleansing was working on its own, propelled by its own momentum.
On the last day of May, Arab volunteers and some regular units made one final attempt to retake some of the villages that lay within the designated Arab state, but failed. The military power that confronted them was such that, except when challenged by a well-trained professional army like the Legion, it had no match. The Legion defended those parts of the West Bank that King Abdullah thought should be his trophy for not having entered the areas the Zionist movement had set its mind on for their Jewish state – a promise he kept until the end of the war. However, his army did pay a heavy price for the two sides’ failure to agree on the fate of Jerusalem, as most of the Jordanian soldiers killed in the war fell during the Legion’s successful bid for the eastern parts of the Holy City.