Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 13/2: Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 17/2: No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), 10 December 1948, the day before Resolution 194 declared the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
By the beginning of June, the list of villages obliterated included many that had until then been protected by nearby kibbutzim. This was the fate of several villages in the Gaza district: Najd, Burayr, Simsim, Kawfakha, Muharraqa and Huj. Their destruction appeared to have come as a genuine shock to nearby kibbutzim when they learned how these friendly villages had been savagely assaulted, their houses destroyed and all their people expelled.1 On the land of Huj, Ariel Sharon built his private residence, Havat Hashikmim, a ranch that covers 5000 dunam of the village’s fields.
Despite the ongoing negotiations by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, to broker a truce, the ethnic cleansing moved on unhindered. With obvious satisfaction Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 5 June 1948, ‘We occupied today Yibneh (there was no serious resistance) and Qaqun. Here the cleansing [tihur] operation continues; have not heard from the other fronts.’ Indeed, by the end of May his diary had reflected a renewed interest in the ethnic cleansing. With the help of Yossef Weitz, he compiled a list of the names of the villages taken, the size of their lands and the number of people expelled, which he meticulously entered in his diary. The language is no longer guarded: ‘This is the list of the occupied and evicted [mefunim] villages.’ Two days later, he convened a meeting in his own house to assess how much money had meanwhile been looted from the banks of the ‘Arabs’, and how many citrus groves and other assets had been confiscated. Eliezer Kaplan, his minister of finance, persuaded him to authorise the confiscation of all Palestinian properties already taken in order to prevent the frenzied wrangling that was already threatening to break out between the predators who were waiting to swoop down on the spoils.
Dividing the booty was one matter that preoccupied the Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion was both an autocrat and a stickler for details, and was obsessive about questions of security, and his diary reflects other, miniscule problems that accompanied the systematic destruction of Palestine. In several entries he records conversations he had had with army officers about the shortage of TNT, created by the large number of individual houses the army was ordered to blow up under Plan D.2
Like a ferocious storm gathering force, the Israeli troops no longer spared anyone in their destructive zeal. All means became legitimate, including burning down houses where dynamite had become scarce and torching the fields and remains of a Palestinian village they had attacked.3 The escalation of the Israeli army’s cleansing operation was the outcome of a meeting of the new, reduced Consultancy, whose members had met on 1 June without Ben-Gurion. They later reported to the Prime Minister that villagers were trying to return to their homes, so they had decided to instruct the army to prevent this at all costs. To make sure that the more liberal-minded among his government members would not object to this policy, Ben-Gurion demanded prior approval, and was duly given carte blanche to proceed on 16 June 1948.4
Increased callousness was also part of the Israeli response to a brief spurt of activity by the Arab armies in early June. The latter’s artillery bombarded whatever was in range, and the Egyptian air force attacked Tel Aviv four or five times, scoring a direct hit on Ben-Gurion’s home on 4 June that caused only limited damage. The Israeli air force retaliated by shelling the Arab capitals, resulting in a considerable number of casualties, but the Arab effort to salvage Palestine was already running out of steam, mainly due to the Legion’s insistence that East Jerusalem should remain part of Jordan. The war lingered on: the division of labour between the Israeli forces on the different fronts, determined solely by Ben-Gurion, meant that the military effort on the Jewish side fell short of the impact it needed to gain the upper hand over the Jordanians. The fighting also persisted because of the tenacity the Egyptian volunteers displayed, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, who despite their poor equipment and lack of training succeeded in holding their lines in the Negev. The Egyptians were also able to hold on to the Palestinian town of Isdud on the coast and some inner enclaves in the Naqab (the Negev), as well as the villages south-west of Jerusalem, for quite some time. Realising they might have bitten off more than they could chew for the moment, the Israelis now accepted the offer by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, for a truce.
Demolition was a core part of the Israeli activities from the moment the truce went into effect (officially declared on 8 June, but in practice beginning on 11 June 1948, and to last four weeks). During the truce, the army embarked on the massive destruction of a number of expelled villages: Mazar in the south, Fayja near Petah Tikva, Biyar ’Adas, Misea, Hawsha, Sumiriyya and Manshiyya near Acre. Huge villages such as Daliyat al-Rawha, Butaymat and Sabbarin were destroyed in one day; many others were erased from the face of the earth by the time the truce ended on 8 July 1948.
All in all, the level of preparation the military command was engaged in during June for the next stages showed a growing confidence in the Israeli Army’s ability to continue not only its ethnic cleansing operations, but also its extension of the Jewish state beyond the seventy-eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine it had already occupied. Part of this confidence was due to the significant reinforcement of its air force. At the end of May, the Israelis were only disadvantaged in one area: air power. In June, however, they received a sizable shipment of new aeroplanes to supplement their rather primitive machines.
Operation ‘Yitzhak’ was launched on 1 June 1948 to attack and occupy Jenin, Tul-Karem and Qalqilya and capture the bridges on the Jordan River. As we saw, Jenin was attacked the previous month, but the Iraqi contingent guarding the city and its environs had successfully defended the area.5 Although Israeli air operations were primarily limited to raids along the state’s borders at this time, in the military archives one can find orders for the arial bombardment of Jenin and Tul-Karem, as well as other villages on the Palestine’s border. From July onwards, aeroplanes were used remorselessly in the cleansing operations, helping to force the villagers into a mass exodus – and indiscriminately targeting anyone unable to take cover in time.
At the beginning of June, Ben-Gurion was content to focus on the long march into the upper Galilee, driving his troops up to the border with Lebanon. The Lebanese army was 5000 strong, of which 2000 were stationed on the border. They were supported by 2000 ALA volunteers, most of them stationed around the city of Nazareth and the rest scattered in small groups among the dozens of villages in the area. Under the charismatic command of Fawzi al-Qawqji, the volunteers continued as best they could to defend the villages and show some resilience in the face of the looming Israeli offensive. But they were hampered not only numerically and by their inferior military skill, but also by the poor quality of their weapons and lack of ammunition.
One of the ALA battalions was the Hittin battalion. The commander at one point sent the following message to al-Qawqji: ‘The battalion’s equipment is not usable because of the amount of dirt in it. This includes rifles, machine guns and vehicles.’ The commander also complained that there was only one logistic supply line from Syria, which was often blocked, and even when the supply lines happened to be open, there were other problems to overcome. At one point he received the following telegram: ‘In reply to your telegram asking for cars to remove supply from Tarshiha to Rama, we have no fuel for the cars so we cannot reach you’ (sent on 29 June and intercepted by the Israeli military intelligence).
Thus, in the absence of any regular Arab troops the Galilee lay wide open for an Israeli assault. But as early as June, and increasingly over the following months, the villages themselves were beginning to offer the advancing troops more resistance, which is one reason there are still Palestinian villages in the Galilee today, unlike Marj Ibn Amir, the coast, the inner plains and the northern Negev.
The desperate courage of the Palestinian villages, however, also accounts for the brutality of the front. As they progressed, the Israeli troops were more determined than ever to resort to summary executions and any other means that might speed up the expulsions. One of the first villages to fall prey to this strategy was the village of Mi’ar, today the location of several Jewish settlements built in the 1970s: Segev, Yaad and Manof. The irony is that part of the land taken by force in 1948 remained uninhabited for decades, and was even cultivated by Palestinians living nearby until it was re-confiscated in the 1970s, as part of what Israel calls ‘the Judaization of the Galilee’, a brutal attempt by the government to de-Arabise the Galilee, which was still, in some areas, equally divided demographically between Jews and Arabs. It would appear that Israel intends to re-activate this scheme with the billions of dollars it hopes to extract from the US government following the pull-out from Gaza in August 2005.
The writer Taha Muhammad Ali was a boy of seventeen when, on 20 June 1948, the Israeli soldiers entered the village of Mi’ar. He was born in nearby Saffuriyya, but much of his poetry and prose today, as an Israeli citizen, is inspired by the traumatic events he saw unfolding in Mi’ar. That June, he stood watching, at sunset, the approaching Israeli troops shooting indiscriminately at the villagers still busy in the fields collecting their dura. When they got tired of the killing spree, the soldiers then began destroying the houses. People later returned to Mi’ar and continued living there until mid-July when Israeli troops re-occupied it and expelled them for good. Forty people were killed in the Israeli attack on 20 June, part of the few thousand Palestinians who perished in the massacres that accompanied the ethnic cleansing operation.6
The pace of occupying and cleansing villages in the lower and eastern Galilee was faster than in any phase of the operations that had gone before. By 29 June, large villages with a significant presence of ALA troops, such as Kuwaykat, Amqa, Tel-Qisan, Lubya, Tarbikha, Majd al-Krum, Mghar, Itarun, Malkiyya, Saffuriyya, Kfar Yassif, Abu Sinan, Judeida and Tabash appeared on the lists of future targets the troops were given. Within less than ten days they had all been taken – some villages were expelled but others were not, for reasons that varied from one village to the another.
Majd al-Krum and Mghar are still there today. In Majd al-Krum, the occupying forces had started a mass eviction of the village when a row suddenly erupted between the intelligence officers, resulting in half of the village being allowed to return from the trail of forced exile.7 ‘Most Glorious Olive Groves’ is the literal translation of this village name, and it still lies amidst vast vineyards and olive groves, adjacent to the northern slopes of Galilee’s highest mountains, not far from Acre. In ancient times the place was known as Majd Allah, ‘The Glory of God’, but the name was changed when the vineyards that began developing around the village became famous. At the centre of the village was a well whose water explains the abundance of plantations and orchards around it. Some of the houses looked indeed as if they had been there from time immemorial: stone-built and reinforced by clay, surrounded by the olive trees on the south and vast tracts of cultivated land on the east and west.
Today Majd al-Krum is strangulated by Israel’s discriminatory policy, which does not allow Palestinian villages to expand naturally, but at the same time continues building new Jewish settlements around it. This is why ever since 1948 the village has had a strong political cadre of nationalist and communist resistance, which the government then punished further by demolishing houses, the rubble of which the villagers have left in place in commemoration of their past resilience and heroism, and which is still visible today from the Acre–Safad highway.
Mghar is also still there, spread out within a scenic canyon in the descending valley that connects the lower Galilee with the Lake of Tiberias. Here the Jewish occupying force was faced with a village where Christians, Muslims and Druze had coexisted for centuries. The military commander interpreted Plan Dalet as calling for the expulsion of only the Muslims. To make sure this was done swiftly, he executed several Muslims on the village’s piazza in front of all the villagers, which effectively ‘persuaded’ the rest to flee.8
Many other villages in the Galilee were like Mghar in that they had mixed populations. Hence, from now on, the military commanders were given strict orders to leave the selection process that was to determine who could stay and who could not to the intelligence officers.9 The Druze were now fully collaborating with the Jews, and in villages that were partly Druze, Christians were generally spared expulsion.
Saffuriyya was less fortunate. All its inhabitants were evicted, with soldiers shooting over their heads to hasten their departure. Al-Hajj Abu Salim was twenty-seven, and the father of one beloved daughter, when the village was taken. His wife was expecting another baby and he recalls the warm family home with his father, a kind and generous man, one of the richest peasants in the village. For Abul Salim, the Nakba began with the news of other villages surrendering. ‘When your neighbour’s house is on fire, you begin to worry’ is a well-known Arab saying that captures the emotions and confusion of the villagers caught in the midst of the catastrophe.
Saffuriyya was one of the first villages Israeli forces bombarded from the air. In July many more would be terrorised in this way, but back in June this was a rarity. Terrified, the women took their children and hastily sought shelter in the ancient caves nearby. The young men prepared their primitive rifles for the inevitable attack, but the volunteers from the Arab countries took fright and escaped from the girls’ school where they had been stationed. Abu Salim stayed on with the men to fight although, as he remembered many years later, ‘The officer of the ALA advised me and others to run away,’ which, he admits, seemed to make sense. But he stayed put and so became a crucial eyewitness to the events that followed.
After the air bombardment came the ground attack, not only on the village but also on the caves. ‘The women and children were quickly exposed by the Jews and my mother was killed by the troops,’ he told a newspaper fifty-three years later. ‘She was trying to enter the Church of Annunciation, and the Jews dropped a bomb that hit her in the stomach.’ His father took Abu Salim’s wife and fled to Reina, a village that had already surrendered. There they took refuge with a Christian family for a few months, who shared their food and clothing with them. They worked in the family’s orchards and were well treated. As they had been forced to leave their own clothes behind in the village, villagers tried to return in the dead of the night to smuggle them out. Israeli troops caught several of them and shot them on the spot. In 2001, Abu Salim, now eighty years old, concluded his story by stating that he was still willing, as he had been in the past, to buy his old house back with good money. What he cannot rebuild is his family. He has lost all contact with his brother, whom he thinks has children somewhere in the diaspora, but he has been unable to track any of them down.
Like many villagers in the vicinity of Nazareth, the people of Saffuriyya fled to the city. Today sixty per cent of Nazareth’s residents are internal refugees. The decision of the local Israeli commander who occupied Nazareth the following month not to drive out its inhabitants meant that many of the expelled villagers around Nazareth were spared the fate of a second eviction. Along with many of the survivors of the other villages, the people of Saffuriyya put up new homes in a neighbourhood that faced their old village, today called Safafra. This meant another traumatic life experience: they actually watched as the Jewish settlers began emptying their houses, occupied them and slowly turned their beloved village into an Israeli moshav – a collective agricultural settlement – that they called Zippori, which Israeli archeologists quickly claimed was the name of the original Talmudic city.
In other neighbourhoods in the city of Nazareth today you can come across survivors of Malul and Mujaydil, who settled in the southern part of the city as near as they could to the Israeli development town of Migdal Ha-Emeq, built on the ruins of their villages after their occupation in July. Malul is gone without a trace; in Mujaydil two churches and a mosque were the only remnants until recently of the Palestinian presence. The mosque was destroyed in 2003 to make room for a shopping mall, and only the churches survive.
The village of Mujaydil had 2000 inhabitants, most of whom fled to Nazareth before the soldiers reached their houses. For some reason the army left these intact. In 1950, after the intervention of the Pope in Rome, the Christians were offered the opportunity to move back but refused to do so without their Muslim neighbours.10 Israel then destroyed half the houses and one of the village’s mosques. Mujaydil’s al-Huda Mosque had been built in 1930 and was twelve metres high and eight metres wide. A kuttab – an elementary Quranic school – was nearby. The site was famous for the elaborate system it used to collect the rainfall from the mosque’s roof into a well. A tall impressive minaret was added to the edifice in the 1940s.
The Christian sites were equally picturesque. Part of the Russian Orthodox Church is still there today, though its walls are long gone. It was built in honour of the brother of the Russian Czar, Serjei Alexandrov, who had visited the place in 1882 and who donated the money for its construction in the hope that local Christians of other denominations could be converted to Orthodox Christianity. But after he had left, the local representative of the Orthodox Church in Palestine, Patriarch Nikodim, proved less insistent on the missionary task he had been entrusted with and more genuinely concerned about education for all: he opened the church to all the denominations in the village and ensured it functioned most of the time as the local school.
The village also had a Roman Catholic church, built in 1903, which housed on its first floor a trilingual school for boys and girls (teaching was in Arabic, Italian and French). It also had a local clinic for the benefit of all the villagers. This church is still there and an old family who decided to come back from Nazareth to take care of the site, the Abu Hani family, now looks after the lovely orchard and the school.
As in other places in Palestine, it is worthwhile to dwell a little on the local history of the village as it demonstrates how not only houses or fields were destroyed in the Nakba but a whole community disappeared, with all its intricate social networks and cultural achievements. Thus in Mujaydil the Israeli army obliterated a piece of history that included some fine architectural specimens and a series of significant social developments. Just twenty years before the Nakba, the proud villagers decided to transform, actually modernise, the old traditional system that placed the mukhtar at the head of the village community. Already in 1925 they had elected a local council, whose first project was to provide lighting along the village’s roads.
Mujaydil was a unique place in many other aspects. Apart from its religious buildings and modern infrastructure it had a relatively large number of schools. In addition to the two schools associated with the churches, there was also a state school, the Banin School, known for the magnificent trees that provided shade for the pupils during their breaks, for the well situated in the middle of the school yard and for the fruit trees that surrounded it. The village’s main source of collective wealth, which supported all these impressive constructions, was a mill, built in the eighteenth century, that served the villages in the vicinity, including the people of the ‘veteran’ Jewish settlement of Nahalal (Moshe Dayan, who came from Nahalal, mentions his father’s reliance on this mill).
Mujaydil was taken in the military operation to take over Nazareth and the villages around it, which was codenamed ‘Dekel’, Hebrew for palm tree. It is actually pine trees and not palms that today cover many of the destroyed Palestinian villages, hiding their remains under vast ‘green lungs’ planted by the Jewish National Fund for the purpose of ‘recreation and tourism’. Such a forest of pine trees was planted over the destroyed village of Lubya. Only the diligent and meticulous work of later generations, spearheaded by historian Mahmoud Issa, now living in Denmark, has enabled visitors today to trace the vestiges of the village and join in the commemorations of the sixty people who lost their lives there. The village lay near a main junction (today called the ‘Golani Junction’), the last main crossroads on the Nazareth–Tiberias road before it starts its steep descent towards the Sea of Galilee.
In those days of June 1948, when Israeli forces were on the whole able to occupy and cleanse Palestinian villages with relative ease, tenacious pockets of resistance sometimes held on for a little longer, though never for too long. These were usually locations where ALA volunteers or Arab regular troops, especially Iraqis, helped in the attempt to repel the attacks. One such village was Qaqun: it was first attacked and occupied in May by the Alexandroni, but had been retaken by Iraqi troops. The Israeli headquarters ordered a special operation codenamed ‘Kippa’ (‘summit’, ‘dome’, but also ‘skullcap’ in Hebrew) on 3 June in order to re-occupy the village where Israeli military intelligence estimated 200 Iraqis and ALA volunteers were entrenched. Even this proved an exaggeration: when the Alexandroni once again took it over they found a much smaller number of defenders.
The order for Operation Kippa introduces yet another Hebrew synonym for cleansing. We have already encountered tihur and biur, and now Platoon D of the Alexandroni Brigade was ordered to execute a ‘cleaning’ operation (nikkuy),11 all terms that fit the accepted international definitions of ethnic cleansing.
The assault on Qaqun was also the first in which the new state’s Military Police were ordered to play an integral role in the occupation. Well before the attack, they had set up prison camps nearby for the expelled villagers. This was done to avoid the problem they had encountered in Tantura and before that in Ayn al-Zaytun, where the occupying forces had ended up with too many men of ‘military age’ (between ten and fifty) on their hands, many of whom they therefore killed.
In July the Israeli troops took many of the ‘pockets’ that had been left in the previous two months. Several villages on the coastal road that had held out courageously, Ayn Ghazal, Jaba, Ayn Hawd, Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam and Ijzim, now fell, as did the city of Nazareth and a number of the villages around it.
By 8 July 1948 the first truce had come to an end. It took the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, ten days to negotiate another one, which came into effect on 18 July. As we have seen, 15 May 1948 may have been a very significant date for the ‘real war’ between Israel and the Arab armies, but it was totally insignificant for the ethnic cleansing operations. The same goes for the two periods of truce – they were notable landmarks for the former but irrelevant for the latter, with one qualification, perhaps: it proved easier during the actual fighting to conduct large-scale cleansing operations as the Israelis did between the two truces, when they expelled the populations of the two towns of Lydd and Ramla, altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, when they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.
From 9 July, the day after the first truce ended, the sporadic fighting between the Israeli army and the Arab units from Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon continued for another ten days. In less than two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from their villages, towns and cities. The UN ‘peace’ plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorised by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped. By July, most of their houses had gone, dynamited by Israeli sappers. There was no international intervention the Palestinians could hope for in 1948, nor could they count on outside concern about the atrocious reality evolving in Palestine. Neither did help come from the UN observers, scores of whom roamed the country at close hand ‘observing’ the barbarisation and killings, but were unwilling, or unable, to do anything about them.
One United Nations emissary was different. Count Folke Bernadotte had arrived in Palestine on 20 May and stayed there until Jewish terrorists murdered him in September for having ‘dared’ to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country in half, and to demand the unconditional return of all the refugees. He had already called for the refugees’ repatriation during the first truce, which had been ignored, and when he repeated his recommendation in the final report he submitted to the UN, he was assassinated. Still, it is thanks to Bernadotte that in December 1948, the UN General Assembly posthumously adopted his legacy and recommended the unqualified return of all the refugees Israel had expelled, one of a host of UN resolutions Israel has systematically ignored. As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.
Bernadotte succeeded in focusing international pressure of some kind on Israel, or he had at least produced the potential for such pressure. In order to counteract this, the Israeli architects of the ethnic cleansing programme realised they would need to involve the state’s diplomats and the Foreign Ministry more directly. By July the political apparatus, the diplomatic corps and the military organisations within the new State of Israel were already working harmoniously together. Prior to July, it is not clear how much of the ethnic cleansing plan had been shared with Israeli diplomats and senior officials. However, when the results gradually became visible the government needed a public relations campaign to stymie adverse international responses, and began to involve and inform those officials responsible for producing the right image abroad – that of a liberal democracy in the making. Officials in the Foreign Ministry worked closely with the country’s intelligence officers, who would warn them in advance of the next stages in the cleansing operation, so as to ensure they would be kept hidden from the public eye.
Yaacov Shimoni functioned as a liaison between the two branches of the government. As both an Orientalist and a European Jew, Shimoni was pre-eminently suited to help propagate Israel’s case abroad. In July he was eager to see a more accelerated pace on the ground: he believed there was a window of opportunity for completing the uprooting and occupation before the world turned its attention once more to Palestine.12 Shimoni would later become one of the doyens of Orientalism in Israeli academia due to his expertise on Palestine and the Arab world, expertise he and many of his colleagues in Israel’s universities had gained during the ethnic cleansing and de-Arabisation of Palestine.
The first targets of the Israeli forces in the ten days between the two truces were the pockets within the Galilee around Acre, and Nazareth. ‘Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages’ was the order that three brigades received on July 6, two days before the Israeli troops – straining at their leashes to continue the cleansing operations – were ordered to violate the first truce. Jewish soldiers automatically understood that ‘enemy’ meant defenceless Palestinian villagers and their families. The brigades they belonged to were the Carmeli, the Golani and Brigade Seven, the three brigades of the north that would also be responsible for the final cleansing operations in the upper Galilee in October. The inventive people whose job it was to come up with the names for operations of this kind had now switched from ‘cleansing’ synonyms (‘Broom’, ‘Scissors’) to trees: ‘Palm’ (Dekel) for the Nazareth area and ‘Cypress’ (Brosh) for the Jordan Valley area.13
The operation in and around Nazareth was executed at a fast pace, and large villages not taken in May were now quickly captured: Amqa, Birwa (the village where the famous contemporary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born), Damun, Khirbat Jiddin and Kuwaykat each had more than 1500 inhabitants and yet they were easily forced out.
It was Brigade Seven that supervised the execution of Operation Palm Tree, with auxiliary forces coming from the Carmeli and the Golani. In many of the Palestinian oral histories that have now come to the fore, few brigade names appear. However, Brigade Seven is mentioned again and again, together with such adjectives as ‘terrorists’ and ‘barbarous’.14
The first village to be attacked was Amqa, which like so many villages on the coastal plain from south to north had a long history going back to at least the sixth century. Amqa was also typical because it was a mixed Muslim and Druze community who had been living together in harmony before the Israeli policy of divide and rule forced a wedge between them, deporting the Muslims and allowing the Druze to join other Druze villages in the area.15
Today some of the remains of Amqa are still visible despite the massive destruction that occurred almost sixty years ago. In the midst of the wild grass that covers the area, one can clearly see the remnants of the school and the village mosque. Though now dilapidated, the mosque reveals even today the exquisite masonry the villagers produced for its construction. it cannot be entered, as its current Jewish ‘owner’ uses it as a storehouse, but its size and unique structure are visible from the outside.
Operation Palm Tree completed the take-over of the Western Galilee. Some of the villages were left intact: Kfar Yassif, Iblin and the town of Shafa‘Amr. These were mixed villages, with Christians, Muslims and Druze. Still, many of their inhabitants who proved of the ‘wrong’ origin or affiliation were deported. Actually, many families had deserted the villages before the occupation, as they knew what was in store for them. Some villages, in fact, were totally emptied, but they are there today because the Israelis allowed them to be repopulated by refugees from other villages they had destroyed. Such policies created confusion and havoc – as orders were followed by counter-orders, they disoriented even the expellers. In some of the mixed villages the Israelis ordered the frenzied expulsion of half of the population, mostly the Muslims, and then permitted Christian refugees from nearby emptied villages to resettle in the newly evacuated places, as happened in the cases of the villages of Kfar Yassif and Iblin, and the town of Shafa‘Amr.
As a result of these population movements inside the Galilee, Shafa‘Amr became a huge town, swollen by the streams of refugees entering it in the wake of the May-to-July operations in the surrounding area. It was occupied on 16 July but was basically left alone: that is, nobody was expelled. This was an exceptional decision that would recur in Nazareth – in both cases it was local commanders who took the initiative.
Yigael Yadin, the Acting Chief of Staff, visited Shafa‘Amr later that month and was clearly taken aback to find an Arab town with all its inhabitants still there: ‘The people of the town roam about freely,’ he reported in his bewilderment to Ben-Gurion. Yadin immediately ordered the imposition of a curfew and a search-and-arrest campaign, but gave particular instructions to leave the Druze of Shafa‘Amr alone.16
One pocket of resistance held out for so long that some of the villages in the area endured ten days of fighting. This happened along the coast south of Haifa. Of the six villages there, three fell before the second truce was announced; the other three succumbed after the truce had taken effect.
The first three were Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam and Ayn Hawd. The largest of them was Tirat Haifa, only a few kilometres south of Haifa, with a population of 5000. Today it is a dismal Jewish development town – with almost the same name, Tirat Hacarmel – clinging to the lower western slopes of the Carmel, at the bottom of Haifa’s wealthiest neighbourhood, Denya, which has gradually been expanding downwards from the crest of Mount Carmel (where Haifa University is located) but with Haifa’s municipality studiously avoiding connecting the two with a road system.
It was the district’s most populous village and the second largest in terms of area. It was called St Yohan de Tire during the time of the Crusaders, when it became a significant site for both Christian pilgrims and the local churches. Since then, with its Muslim majority, Tirat Haifa had always had a small community of Christians, both groups respecting the village’s Christian heritage and its overall Muslim character. In 1596, when it was included in the sub-district of Lajjun, it had no more than 286 inhabitants. Three hundreds years later it was on the way to becoming a town but then fell prey to new centralisation policies in the late Ottoman period and the massive conscription of its younger people into the Ottoman army, most of whom chose not to return.
Tirat Haifa was another village that at the end of the Second World War emerged from tough and difficult times into the dawn of a new era. Signs of recovery were visible everywhere: new stone and mud brick houses were being built and the two village schools, one for boys and one for girls, were renovated. The village’s economy was based on the cultivation of arable crops, vegetables and fruit. It was richer than most villages because it was endowed with an excellent water supply from the nearby springs. Its pride was its almonds, famous throughout the area. Tirat al-Lawz, the ‘Tira of the almonds’, was a household name in Palestine. An additional source of income was tourism, centred mainly around visits to the ruins of the monastery of St Brocardus, still there today.
Throughout my childhood, the remains of the village’s old stone houses lay scattered around the cubic grey apartment blocks of the Jewish development town that had been built on the village site. After 1967 the local municipality demolished most of them, more out of profit-seeking real-estate zeal than as part of the ideological memoricide that had remained a priority for the Israelis.
Like so many other villages in the Greater Haifa area, Tirat Haifa was exposed, prior to its final depopulation, to constant attacks and onslaughts by Jewish forces. The Irgun bombarded it as early as December 1947, killing thirteen people, mainly children and the elderly. After the shelling a raiding party of twenty Irgun members approached and began firing at an isolated house on the edge of the village. Between 23 April and 3 May every woman and child of Tirat Haifa was taken out of the village as part of the overall British ‘mediation’ effort that enabled the Jewish forces to cleanse the greater Haifa area unhampered by any external pressure. Tirat Haifa’s women and children were transferred by buses to the West Bank while the men stayed behind. A unit of special forces consisting of the combined elite troops from several brigades were brought in to bring Tirat Haifa down on 16 July.
Later that same day came the turn of Kfar Lam. South of Tirat Haifa, this village was less wealthy, although it, too, enjoyed a good source of water – about fifteen springs flowed near the northern boundaries of the village. A dusty, unpaved road, off the main asphalt road between Haifa and Tel-Aviv led to the village. Its houses were made of hewn stone, the roofs of cement and the traditional arches of wood. It had no fences or guarding towers, not even in July.
The relative poverty of this village was due to its unusual system of land ownership, quite different from the villages around it. Half of the cultivated fields belonged to Ali Bek al-Khalil and his brother from Haifa, who leased the land for a share in the crops. A small number of families were not included in this leasing agreement and were forced to commute to Haifa for their livelihood. The village as a whole was closely connected to Haifa as most of its agricultural products were sold there. And here, too, three years before the Nakba, life looked brighter and more promising.
Kfar Lam was a particularly apolitical village, which might explain its relative complacency in the face of the destruction already wreaked on the surrounding area since February 1948. The Hagana intelligence file described the village as ‘moderate’, but already back in the early 1940s an ominous detail had been inserted into the file that hinted at its future fate. The file stated that the village had some Samaritans in it who may originally have been Jews, but who, in the 1940s, had converted to Islam. For the Zionist historian and leading politician of the Zionist movement, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, this was enough to show that there had been continuity of Jewish presence along Palestine’s coast.
This search for continuity was one of the main obsessions of the Zionist academia at the time. Ben-Zvi himself had published a book (in Yiddish) with Ben-Gurion as early as 1918 in which they claimed that the Arab fallahin (peasant farmers) were the descendents of Jewish peasants who had stayed behind in Palestine after the Roman Exile. Ben-Zvi continued to develop this argument in the 1930s and 40s. In his Sha‘ar ha-Yishuv (‘Gate to the Jewish Settlement’), he similarly argued that villagers in the Hebron mountains were actually Jews who had converted to Islam.
In July 1948, proof of continuity did not mean that the people of Kfar Lam were entitled to remain as citizens of the new Jewish state, only that their village was now ‘rightfully returned’ to the Jewish people. Neither the relatively low yield of its harvests nor the political indifference of its people could save the village, and only its proximity to the more resilient villages on the coast allowed it to survive into July.
While Kafr Lam has disappeared, the village of Ayn Hawd, occupied at the same time, is still almost intact. Adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘attractive’ and other synonyms were used to describe certain villages, and many of them were indeed recognised as such by contemporary visitors and by the inhabitants themselves, who often gave their villages names that clearly expressed the particular charm, beauty and serenity they knew their location exuded, as for instance the people of Khayriyya – literally in Arabic ‘The Blessing of the Land’ – which Israel demolished and turned into the city of Tel-Aviv’s garbage dump.
Ayn Hawd was indeed unusual. It captured a special place in the hearts of many in the area. The main hamulla in the village, the Abu al-Hija, were thought to have special healing powers and therefore many people frequented the village, making their way up from the coast towards the Carmel mountains on a winding road, fifteen kilometres south of Haifa. The village lay partly hidden in one of the many river valleys flowing from the mountain to the sea in the west. This particularly exquisite place was left intact due to the presence of some Bohemian types in the unit that occupied it: they immediately recognised the potential of the village and decided to leave it as they found it before coming back later to settle there and turn it into an artists’ colony. For many years it hosted some of Israel’s best-known artists, musicians and writers, often affiliated with the country’s ‘peace camp’. Houses that survived the ravages in the Old Cities of Safad and Jaffa were similarly turned into special artists’ enclaves.
Ayn Hawd had already been attacked once in May and the five families making up the Abu al-Hija clan had successfully repelled the offensive, but on 16 July they succumbed. The original villagers were expelled and the governmental ‘naming committee’, a body in charge of replacing Palestinian names with Hebrew ones, decided to call the occupied village Ein Hod. One of the five families of the Abu al-Hija clan found refuge in the countryside nearby a few miles to the east and settled there. Stubbornly and courageously refusing to move, they gradually created a new village under the old name of Ayn Hawd.
The success of this branch of the Abu al-Hija clan is quite remarkable. They looked for refuge first in the nearby village of Tirat Haifa, only to discover that that village had been occupied the day before. They were chased into the canyons near their own village but managed to hold out there. The Israeli commander reported that ‘the operations to cleanse the pockets of resistance of refugees in the Wadi east of the village continue’,17 but they failed in their attempts to drive the family away. The rest of the people of Ayn Hawd were scattered, some as distant as Iraq and others as near as the Druze villages overlooking Ayn Hawd from the top of Mount Carmel.
In the 1950s the Abu al-Hija built new cement houses inside the forest that now envelops their village. The Israeli government refused to recognise them as a legal settlement and the threat of expulsion constantly hovered over their heads. In 1986 the government wanted to demolish the new village, but heroically, and against all odds, the Abu al-Hija succeeded in halting attempts to expel them. Finally, in 2005, a relatively liberal-minded Minister of the Interior granted the village semi-recognition.
The Jewish artist community, on the other hand, has gone into decline and seems less ‘attractive’ in the twenty-first century than it was in its heyday. The colony’s coffee bar’ ‘Bonanza’, located in the original village mosque, is generally empty these days. Marcel Janko, the artist founder of Jewish Ein Hod, wanted it to become the centre of Dadaism, the anti-establishment art movement that emerged in the early twentieth century and valued the ‘primitive’ as a counter to the classical Graeco-Roman tradition. Driven by a wish to preserve the ‘primitive’ essence of art, Janko was keen to save part of Ayn Hawd’s original stone houses from brutal renovation. Soon, however, the original Ayn Hawd village dwellings were turned into modern abodes for European Jewish artists, and the magnificent old village school building became the setting for art exhibitions, carnivals and other tourist attractions.
Janko’s own works fittingly represent the racism shown by the contemporary Israeli Left in its approach towards Arab culture in general and towards the Palestinians in particular, a covert and at times even nuanced, but nonetheless pervasive, racism in their writings, artistic works and political activity. Janko’s paintings, for instance, incorporate Arab figures, but always fading into the background of occupied Ayn Hawd. In this way, Janko’s works are forerunners of the paintings you can find today on the Apartheid wall Israel has planted deep in the West Bank: where it runs near Israeli highways, Israeli artists were asked to decorate parts of this 8-metre high concrete monster with panoramas of the scenic landscape that lies behind the Wall, but always making sure to eliminate the Palestinian villages that lie on the other side and the people who live in them.
Only three villages remained in the coastal area just south of Haifa, and throughout those ten days of fighting between the first and second truces a massive Jewish force tried but failed to capture them. Ben-Gurion appeared to have become obsessed with the three, and ordered the occupation effort to continue even after the second truce had come into effect; the High Command reported to the UN truce observers that the operation against the three villages was a policing activity, even choosing Operation Policeman as the codename for the whole assault.
The largest of the three was the village of Ijzim, which had 3000 inhabitants. It was also the one that resisted the attackers the longest. On its ruins the Jewish settlement of Kerem Maharal was erected. A few picturesque houses are still left, and in one of them lives the former head of the Israeli Secret Service and founder of the ‘peace’ proposal he recently concocted, together with a Palestinian professor, that abolishes the Palestinian refugees’ right of return in exchange for a total withdrawal by Israel from the areas it occupied in 1967.
Operation Policeman (Shoter, in Hebrew) began on 25 July, exactly one week into the ‘truce’, but Ijzim survived another three days of fierce fighting in which a small number of armed villagers courageously held out against hundreds of Israeli soldiers. Israel brought in its air force to break the resistance. When the fighting was over, the population as a whole was expelled to Jenin. One hundred and thirty villagers died in the battle according to the recollection of the survivors. The Israeli intelligence officers of the northern front reported upon entering the village of Ijzim on July 28 that ‘our forces collected 200 corpses, many of them civilians killed by our bombardment.’18
Ayn Ghazal fell earlier on. It had 3000 inhabitants and, like Kfar Lam, life was harder here than in other places. The houses of this village were mainly made of concrete, atypical of the architecture in the area, and many of them had special wells and holes – sometimes three metres deep – in which people kept wheat. This tradition and its unique construction style may have been the result of the village’s ethnic origins. Ayn Ghazal was relatively new, ‘only’ 250 years old (by comparison, when we talk of relatively ‘old’ Jewish settlements, they might have been built only thirty to thirty-five years earlier, although a tiny minority were established at the end of the nineteenth century). The people of Ayn Ghazal had come from the Sudan, looking for jobs in Syria and Lebanon, and put down roots here (nearby villages such as Furaydis, Tantura, and Daliyat al-Rawha had been there for centuries).
Ayn Ghazal was a popular destination for many Muslims as it hosted a maqam, the burial place of a religious holy man called Shaykh Shehadeh. Some of the people who had left the village before it was attacked had taken refuge in the only two villages that were left intact on the coast out of the original sixty-four – Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa. Elderly members of these villages, ever since 1948, had been trying to maintain the maqam of Shaykh Shehadeh. Aware of these efforts and in an attempt to stop this journey of memory and worship, the Israeli authorities declared the maqam a holy Jewish site. One of the refugees from the village, Ali Hamuda, almost single-handedly safeguarded the maqam and kept its Muslim character alive. Although he was fined and threatened with arrest for having renovated it in 1985, he persisted in keeping the place of his worship sacred and the memory of his village alive.
The people of Ayn Ghazal who had stayed put rejoiced when they heard a second truce had come into effect. Even those who had been guarding the village since May thought they could now relax their guard. These were also the days of the annual Ramadan fast and on 26 July most of the villagers had come out onto the street in the afternoon to break the fast and were gathering at the few coffeehouses in the village centre when an aeroplane appeared and dropped a bomb that scored a direct hit on the crowd. The women and children fled in panic while the men stayed behind and, soon enough, saw the Jewish troops entering the village.19
The ‘men’ were ordered by the occupying forces to gather in one place, as was the routine throughout rural Palestine on such occasions. The informer, always hooded, and the intelligence officer soon appeared. The people watched as seventeen of them were selected, largely for having taken part in the 1936 Revolt, and killed on the spot. The rest were expelled.20 On the same day, a similar fate befell the sixth village in this pocket of resistance, Jaba.
Operation ‘Dani’ was the innocent-sounding codename for the attack on the two Palestinian towns of Lydd and Ramla, located roughly halfway between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
Lydd lies fifty metres above sea level on the inner plains of Palestine. In the local popular memory it is engraved as the ‘city of the mosques’, some of which were famous around the Arab world. For example, the Big Mosque, al-Umari, which still stands today, was built during the time of the Mamluks by Sultan Rukn al-Din Baybars, who took the city from the Crusaders. Another well-known mosque is the Dahamish Mosque, which could host 800 worshippers and had six shops adjacent to it. Today, Lyyd is the Jewish development town of Lod – one of the belt towns encircling Tel-Aviv housing the poorest and most underprivileged of the metropolis. Lod was also once the name for many years of Israel’s only international airport, today called Ben-Gurion Airport.
On 10 July 1948 David Ben-Gurion appointed Yigal Allon as the commander of the attack and Yitzhak Rabin as his second in command. Allon first ordered al-Lydd to be bombarded from the air, the first city to be attacked in this way. This was followed by a direct attack on the city’s centre, which caused all the remaining ALA volunteers to leave: some had fled their positions earlier on learning that the Jordanian Legion units, stationed near the city, had been instructed by their British chief, Glubb Pasha, to withdraw. As both Lydd and Ramla were clearly within the designated Arab state, both the residents and the defendants had assumed that the Legion would resist the Israeli occupation by force, as they did in East Jerusalem and in the Latrun area, west of the city (not far from Lydd and Ramla), but they were wrong. For his decision to retreat, Glubb Pasha later lost his position and had to return to Britain.
Deserted by both the volunteers and the Legionaries, the men of Lydd, armed with some old rifles, took shelter in the Dahamish Mosque in the city centre. After a few hours of fighting they surrendered, only to be massacred inside the mosque by the Israeli forces. Palestinian sources recount that in the mosque and in the streets nearby, where the Jewish troops went on yet another rampage of murder and pillage, 426 men, women and children were killed (176 bodies were found in the mosque). The following day, 14 July, the Jewish soldiers went from house to house taking the people outside and marching about 50,000 of them out of the city towards the West Bank (more than half of them were already refugees from nearby villages).21
One of the most detailed accounts on what unfolded in al-Lydd was published in the summer of 1998 by the sociologist Salim Tamari in the Journal of Palestine Studies. It drew on interviews with Spiro Munayar, who had lived all his life in Lydd and was an eyewitness to the events on that terrible day in July. He saw the occupation, the massacre in the mosque, the way Israeli troops barged into the houses and dragged out the families – sparing not a single house. He watched as the houses were then looted and the refugees robbed before they were told to start marching towards the West Bank, in one of the warmest months of the year, in one of the hottest places in Palestine.
He was working as a young physician in the local hospital, alongside the dedicated Dr George Habash, the future founder and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He recalls the endless numbers of corpses and the wounded who were brought in from the scene of the slaughter, and these were the same horrible experiences that were to haunt Habash and drive him to take the road of guerilla warfare in order to redeem his town and homeland from those who had devastated it in 1948.
Munayar also recounted the anguished scenes of expulsion he witnessed:
During the night the soldiers began going into the houses in areas they had occupied, rounding up the population and expelling them from the city. Some were told to go to Kharruba and Barfilyya, while other soldiers said: ‘Go to King Abdullah, to Ramallah’. The streets filled with people setting out for indeterminate destinations.
The same sights were observed by the few foreign journalists who were in the town that day. Two of them were Americans apparently invited by the Israeli forces to accompany them in the attack, what today we would call ‘embedded’ correspondents. Keith Wheeler of The Chicago Sun Times was one of the two. He wrote: ‘Practically everything in their [the Israeli forces’] way died. Riddled corpses lay by the roadside.’ The other, Kenneth Bilby of The New York Herald Tribune, reported seeing ‘the corpses of Arab men, women and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge.’ Bilby also wrote a book on these events, New Star in the Near East, published two years later.
One might wonder why newspaper reports of a massacre on this scale did not provoke an outcry in the United States. For those who have been shocked by the callousness and inhumanity that US troops have sometimes displayed towards Arabs in the operation in Iraq, the reports from Lydd may seem strangely familiar. At the time, American reporters like Wheeler were astonished by what ironically he called the Israeli ‘Blitzkrieg’, and by the resoluteness of the Jewish troops. Like Bilby’s description (‘ruthlessly brilliant’), Wheeler’s account of the Israeli army’s campaign sadly neglected to provide a similarly probing report on the number of Palestinians killed, wounded, or expelled from their villages. The correspondents’ reports were totally one-sided.
More sensitive and less biased was the London Economist as it described for its readers the horrific scenes that took place when inhabitants were forced to start marching after their houses had been looted, their family members murdered, and their city wrecked: ‘The Arab refugees were systematically stripped of all their belongings before they were sent on their trek to the frontier. Household belongings, stores, clothing, all had to be left behind.’
This systematic robbery was also recollected by Munayar:
The occupying soldiers had set up roadblocks on all the roads leading east and were searching the refugees, particularly the women, stealing their gold jewelry from their necks, wrists, and fingers and whatever was hidden in their clothes, as well as money and everything else that was precious and light enough to carry.
Ramla, or Ramleh as is it is known today, the home town of one of the PLO’s most respected leaders, the late Khalil al-Wazir, Abu Jihad, lay nearby. The attack on this town with its 17,000 inhabitants had started two days earlier on 12 July 1948, but the final occupation was only completed after the Israelis had taken al-Lydd. The city had been the target of terrorist attacks by Jewish forces in the past; the first one had taken place on 18 February 1948, when the Irgun had planted a bomb in one of its markets that killed several people.
Terrified by the news coming from Lydd, the city notables reached an agreement with the Israeli army that ostensibly allowed the people to stay. The Israeli units entered the city on 14 July and immediately began a search-and-arrest operation in which they rounded up 3000 people who they transferred to a prison camp nearby, and on the same day they started looting the city. The commander on the spot was Yitzhak Rabin. He recalled how Ben-Gurion had first called him in to his office to discuss the fate of both Lydd and Ramla: ‘Yigal Alon asked: what is to be done with the population [in Lydd and Ramla]? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: “Drive them out!”’22
The people of both cities were forced to march, without food and water, to the West Bank, many of them dying from thirst and hunger on the way. As only a few hundred were allowed to stay in both towns, and given that people from nearby villages had fled there for refuge, Rabin estimated that a total of 50,000 people had been ‘transferred’ in this inhuman way. Again, the inevitable question present itself: three years after the Holocaust, what went through the minds of those Jews who watched these wretched people pass by?
Further to the west, the Arab Legion, which had abandoned the two Palestinian towns, defended the Latrun area so tenaciously that the battle here would be engraved in the collective memory of the Israeli armed forces as its biggest defeat in the war. The bitter memory of this fiasco provoked feelings of revenge; the opportunity surfaced in June 1967 when Israel occupied the area. Retaliation then was directed not towards the Jordanians, but towards the Palestinians: three of the villages in the Latrun valley – Beit Nuba, Yalu and Imwas – were expelled and wiped out. The mass deportation of the villagers was the beginning of a new wave of ethnic cleansing.
The Legion also successfully repelled Israeli attacks on the eastern neighbourhoods of Jerusalem in July, especially on Shaykh Jarrah. ‘Occupy and destroy’, a vengeful Ben-Gurion demanded from the army with this charming neighbourhood in mind.23 Thanks to the defiance of the Legion, today one can still find among its many treasures the American Colony Hotel – originally one of the first houses built outside the walls in the late nineteenth century by Rabah al-Husayni, a leading member of the local nobility.
On 11 July, the entry in Ben-Gurion’s diary reflects considerable confidence in Israel’s military strength against the combined might of its Arab neighbours: ‘[I ordered them] to occupy Nablus, [to inflict] heavy bombardment on Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and Beirut’24 Nablus, however, was not captured, despite Ben-Gurion’s instructions, but that was to be the fate of another Palestinian city in the ten days of frantic activity between the two truces: the city of Nazareth. Its story forms one of the most exceptional episodes in the urbicide campaign. This relatively large city had only 500 ALA volunteers who, under the command of Madlul Bek, were meant to protect not only the indigenous population but also the thousands of refugees from nearby villages who were flooding into the crowded city and its environs.
The attack on Nazareth started 9 July, the day after the first truce ended. When the mortar bombardment on the city began, the people anticipated forced eviction and decided they would prefer to leave. However, Madlul Bek ordered them to stay. Telegrams between him and commanders of the Arab armies that Israel intercepted reveal that he, and other ALA officers, were ordered to try to stop expulsions by all means: the Arab governments wanted to prevent more refugees streaming into their countries. Thus we find Madlul turning back some people who were already making their way out of the city. When the shelling intensified, however, he saw no point in trying to stand up to the overwhelmingly superior Jewish forces, and encouraged people to leave. He himself surrendered the city at 10 pm on 16 July.
Ben-Gurion did not wish the city of Nazareth to be depopulated for the simple reason that he knew the eyes of the Christian world were fixed on the city. But a senior general and the supreme commander of the operation, Moshe Karmil, ordered the total eviction of all the people who had stayed behind (‘16,000,’ noted Ben-Gurion, ‘10,000 of whom were Christians’).25 Ben-Gurion now instructed Karmil to retract his order and let the people stay. He agreed with Ben Donkelman, the military commander of the operations: ‘Here the world is watching us,’ which meant that Nazareth was luckier than any other city in Palestine.26 Today Nazareth is still the only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel.
Once again, however, not all those allowed to stay were spared. Some of the people were expelled or arrested on the first day of the occupation, as the intelligence officers began searching the city from house to house and seizing people according to a pre-prepared list of suspects and ‘undesirables’. Palti Sela was going around with a well-known Arab personality from Nazareth, carrying with them seven notebooks filled with the names of people who could stay, either because they belonged to clans that had been collaborating with the Israelis, or for some other reason.
A similar process took place in the villages around Nazareth, and in 2002 Palti Sela claimed that thanks to his efforts 1600 people had been allowed to stay, a decision for which, again, he was later criticised. ‘The notebooks are lost,’ he told his interviewer. He recalled he had refused to write down the name of a single Bedouin: ‘They are all thieves,’ he had told his partners in the operation.27
But nobody was really safe, not even the Arab notable – who will remain anonymous – who accompanied Palti Sela. The first military governor installed after the war did not, for some reason, like this person and wanted to deport him. Palti Sela then stepped in and saved him by promising to move him, his close family and friends to Haifa. He admitted that actually quite a few of those listed in his ‘good’ notebooks were eventually forced out of the country after all.
One more village in the area between Nazareth and Tiberias was targeted for occupation after attempts to take it over in previous months had failed, and this was the village of Hittin. A 1937 photograph of the village could have come straight from a tourist brochure of today’s Tuscany or Greece. Clinging to the mountain slopes, eight kilometres northwest of Tiberias, at an elevation of 125 metres above sea level, but seemingly much higher as it overlooks the Sea of Galilee which is under sea level, the spot is breathtaking. The black-and-white picture clearly shows Hittin’s stone-built houses covered by roofs made of arched wood and surrounded by orchards and cactus fences. Cars had easy access to the village, but in 1948 it proved a hard site to take as it put up strong resistance, even though no more than 25 people, all poorly equipped volunteers, defended the village.
The village’s history goes all the way back to the famous battle between Salah al-Din and the Crusaders in 1187. Its fame also rested on the presence of the grave of Nabi Shu‘ayb, the holy prophet of the Palestinian Druze, who identify him with Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, and for whom his maqam is a place of worship and pilgrimage. The fact that the Druze had already gone over to the other side and allied themselves with the Israeli army spurred the Israelis in their ambition to capture the village. Today a website for Hittin refugees contains the following reference to the Druze: ‘Whether they [the Druze] like it or not, they are still Palestinian Arabs,’ a clear reference to the fact that the Druze showed little solidarity or affinity with their fellow Palestinians, let alone compassion. On the contrary, many of them joined in the destruction of rural Palestine, to which – tragically – they, of course, also belonged.28
As with so many of the villages mentioned, the Nakba hit when prosperity had just arrived. A new school and a new irrigation system were the signs of its recently won affluence, but these were all lost to the Hittin residents after 17 July 1948, when a unit of Brigade Seven entered the village and began cleansing it in a particularly brutal manner. Many people escaped to nearby villages that would be occupied in October, when they would be uprooted a second time. This brought to an end Operation Palm Tree, which expelled all the villages around Nazareth.
The troops on the ground could now count on the embryonic Israeli air force for assistance. As we already saw, two of the villages, Saffuriyya and Mujaydil, were shelled from the air, as were several villages on the coast: Jaba, Ijzim and Ayn Ghazal were bombarded into submission well into the second truce, In fact, what developed in July was ethnic cleansing from the air, as air attacks became a major tool for sowing panic and wreaking destruction in Palestine’s larger villages in order to force people to flee before the actual occupation of the village. This new tactic would come into its own in October.
But already, in the second half of July, Israeli pilots could tell from the spectacle unfolding before their eyes how effective their sorties were: throngs of refugees, carrying a few hastily collected possessions, flooded out of the villages onto the main roads and slowly made their way towards what they thought would be safer havens. For some troops on the ground this was too good a target to miss. A report from 17 July 1948 of the Northern Command reads as follows: ‘Our forces began harassing the only road leading out of Sejra where a throb of refugees were making their way.’29 Sejra was a village near Mount Tabor, which had maintained an uneasy relationship with the ‘veteran’ Zionist colonies that had taken in Ben-Gurion when he first arrived in Palestine.
In the summer of 1948, however, Ben-Gurion was less interested in the north, where he had begun his career, and was focusing on the south, where he would end it. In July, the ethnic cleansing operations for the first time extended to the Naqab (the Negev) as well. The Negev Bedouin had inhabited the region since the Byzantine period, and had been following their semi-nomadic away of life since at least 1500. There were 90,000 Bedouin in 1948, divided between 96 tribes, already in the process of establishing a land-ownership system, grazing rights and water access. Jewish troops immediately expelled eleven tribes, while they forced another nineteen into reservations that Israel defined as closed military areas, which meant they were allowed to leave only with a special permit. The expulsion of Negev Bedouin continued until 1959.30
The first tribe that was targeted was the Jubarat. Part of the tribe was expelled in July; the tribe as a whole was then forcibly transferred in mid-October, when the second truce was officially over, the majority of them to Hebron and the rest to the Gaza Strip. In 1967, Israel uprooted them once more, this time expelling them to the eastern bank of the River Jordan. Most of the other tribes were driven away towards the end of 1948.
The news of an impending second truce to come into effect on 18 July 1948 came at an inconvenient moment for the ethnic cleansing operation. Some operations were sped up and thus completed before the truce began, which was the case with the occupation of the villages Qula and Khirbat Shaykh Meisar. By then, the Israelis had added two towns, Lydd and Ramla, and another sixty-eight villages to the 290 they had already occupied and cleansed.
The second truce was violated the moment it came into effect. In its first ten days Israeli forces occupied key villages north of Haifa, another pocket they had left alone for a while, as they had to the villages south of the city along the coast. Damun, Imwas, Tamra, Qabul and Mi’ar were thus taken. This completed the occupation of the Western Galilee.
Fighting also continued in the south during the second truce, as the Israelis found it difficult to defeat the Egyptian forces that had been caught in the so-called Faluja pocket. Egypt’s main military effort was directed towards the coast where their advance was halted at the end of the first week of the official war. Since that debacle they found themselves gradually being pushed back to the border. A second expeditionary force had been sent to southern Jerusalem, where its troops had some initial successes. By the middle of July, however, a third Egyptian contingent in the northern Negev had been cut off from both the forces on the coast and those in southern Jerusalem, and now counted in vain on the Jordanian reinforcements that were scheduled to meet up with them in the original Arab war scheme.
By the end of July, the Israelis started strengthening the siege around this pocket to force it to surrender. The Egyptians, however, held on until the end of the year. The disintegration of the Egyptian forces left the northern Negev, from the slopes of Mt Hebron to the Mediterranean Sea near Gaza, at the mercy of the Israeli troops. The belt of villages that had been settled centuries ago on the edge of the arid Negev desert were now stormed, occupied and expelled in quick succession. Only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were successfully protected by Egyptian and Jordanian troops respectively, who thereby prevented many more refugees from being added to the thousands of Palestinians already expelled since December 1947.
Sensing that their violation of the truce would go uncensored as long as it was directed towards the remaining ‘Arab’ pockets within the Jewish state as designated by UN Resolution 181, the Zionist leadership also continued their operations in August and beyond. They now clearly envisaged this ‘Jewish state’ as stretching over most of Palestine – in fact, all of it – had it not been for the Egyptian and, crucially, Jordanian steadfastness. Consequently, villages that had gradually been isolated were now easily cleansed while the UN observers, who had been sent in to supervise the truce, watched nearby.
Also in August, the Jewish forces took the opportunity of the truce to make some modifications to areas they had already occupied. These might have been on the orders of a local commander, for which he did not need authorisation from above, or, occasionally, at the request of a particular group, which may have collaborated with the Zionists and now wanted to take part in the division of the spoils. One such place was the Druze village of Isfiya on the Carmel. The Druze notables of Isfiya asked for the Bedouin living in their town to be expelled, claiming they were thieves and generally ‘incompatible’. The commander in charge said he did not have the time to deal with expulsions of people who were not in any case totally alien to the village. The Bedouins of Isfiya are still there today, discriminated against as ‘lesser’ members of the local community, but fortunate that the Israeli army was too busy to follow up on the request of the Druze.31 These internal skirmishes show that in the relative calm that had descended on the fronts with the Arab armies, Israel had decided the time had come to institutionalise the occupation.
The Zionist leadership seemed most pressured to determine the status of the lands it had occupied but that were legally within the UN-designated Arab state. In August, Ben-Gurion still referred to these territories as ‘administered areas’, not part of the state as yet but governed by a military judicial system. The Israeli government wanted to obfuscate the legal status of these areas, which had originally been granted to the Palestinians, because of its apprehension that the UN would demand an explanation for their occupation, an apprehension that proved totally unfounded. Inexplicably, the issue of Israel’s legal (read: ‘illegal’) status in UN-designated Arab Palestine was never raised during the momentary interest the international community briefly displayed in the fate of post-mandatory Palestine and that of its indigenous population. Until Israel was accepted as a full member of the UN, in May 1949, the designation of these areas alternated between ‘administered’ and ‘occupied’. In May 1949, all distinctions disappeared, along with the villages, the fields and the houses – all ‘dissolved’ into the Jewish State of Israel.
The second truce was extended through the summer of 1948, although due to continuing hostilities on both sides, it seemed a truce in name only. However, the UN did succeed in averting an Israeli attack on the Golan Heights and the only proper town there, Qunaitra, the order for which arrived in the forces’ headquarters on the day the truce ended. Even at a distance of almost sixty years, it makes chilling reading: ‘Your orders,’ wrote Yigael Yadin to the commander in charge, ‘are to destroy the city’.32 The city would remain relatively unscathed until 1967, when it was ethnically cleansed by Israeli troops occupying the Golan Heights. In 1974, Yadin’s terse order was implemented literally when the Israeli forces destroyed the town of Qunaitra, before returning it to the Syrians a complete ghost town, as part of a disengagement settlement.
In 1948 Israel’s determination to take the Golan Heights was fed by the gradual withdrawal of the Syrian troops, first to the slopes of the Golan and then further into the Syrian hinterland, but most of the leaders of the Jewish state coveted Palestine, not Syria. In August there were still three main areas of Palestine that Israel had not yet taken but that Ben-Gurion saw as essential to would-be Israel: Wadi Ara, the western part of the upper Galilee, and the southern Negev. The first two were heavily populated Palestinian areas and thus became the inevitable targets of the ethnic cleansing campaign, wholly outside the theatre of war with the regular Arab armies that had in any case petered out in August due to the truce.
September 1948 looked very much like August 1948: real fighting with the regular Arab armies had dwindled, leaving Israeli troops trying to complete the job they had started in December 1947. Some of them were sent on impossible missions to go beyond the occupation of the seventy-eight per cent of Palestine that had already proven to be within Israel’s grasp. One of these assignments in September was for the troops to try for a third time to occupy Wadi Ara and the northern tip of the West Bank, with special orders to capture Qalqilya and Tul-Karem. This was Operation Autumn. The attempt to invade the Wadi Ara area was again repelled. This part would be annexed by Israel when King Abdullah of Jordan decided to cede it in the spring of 1949 as part of the armistice agreement between the two countries. It is one of the ironies of history that many Israelis today, frightened by a potential adverse shift in the ‘demographic balance’, favour the transfer of this area back to the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank. The option between being imprisoned in a locked Bantustan on the West Bank or ‘enjoying’ second-class citizenship in Israel holds no exciting prospects either way, to say the least, but the people of the Wadi understandably go for the latter, as they rightly suspect that, as in the past, the Israelis want the territory without the people. Israel has already dislocated 200,000 people since it started erecting its Segregation Wall in an area very near to the Wadi and also heavily populated by Palestinians.
In September 1948, every single one of the fifteen villages that make up Wadi Ara showed resilience and bravery in repelling the attackers, aided by Iraqi officers from the nearby contingent that the Arab League had dispatched to protect the northern West Bank when the war started. These Iraqis were among the few of Palestine’s neighbours who actually fought and succeeded in rescuing whole Palestinian villages. Captain Abu Rauf Abd al-Raziq was one such Iraqi officer who helped defend the villages of Taytaba and Qalansuwa. He had chivalrously decided to stay behind when all the other Iraqi soldiers had received orders to leave a few weeks before Operation Autumn. Major Abd al-Karim and Captain Farhan from the Iraqi army led the fortified opposition in Zayta and Jat, and Sargent Khalid Abu Hamud supervised the resistance in Attil. Captain Najib and Muhammad Sulayman did the same in Baqa al-Gharbiyya, Khalil Bek in the village of Ara and Mamduh Miara in Arara. The list of Iraqi junior officers mounting the guard and taking the lead is impressively long.
September also saw the preparations for Operation Snir, in another effort to take over the Golan Heights, including once more the town of Qunaitra, with 14 September set as D-day. The first stage was delayed to the 26th and eventually trimmed down to a mini-operation codenamed ‘Bereshit’ (Genesis), involving the attempt to take a Syrian stronghold that, according to the UN map, was inside the Jewish state (Outpost 223). The Syrian defence forces repelled one Israeli attack after another. As part of their preparations, the Israelis tried to contact Circassian and Druze soldiers in the Syrian army to persuade them to collaborate. Israel’s military action on the Syrian line continued well into the spring of 1949 and included orders not only to occupy outposts but also villages. On 1 April 1949 the orders were then revised, confining the forces to offensives against military outposts only.33
In September the ethnic cleansing operation continued in the central Galilee, where Israeli troops wiped out Palestinian pockets ahead of the last big operation that was to come a month later in the upper Galilee and in the south of Palestine. Local volunteers and the ALA put up some tough resistance in several villages, most notably Ilabun. A report by the Israeli forces describes their abortive assault: ‘Tonight our forces raided Ilabun. After overcoming the enemy’s resistance, we found the village deserted; after inflicting damage and slaughtering a herd, our forces withdrew while constantly exchanging fire with the enemy.’34 In other words, although Ilabun had not yet been taken, it had already been emptied of most of its inhabitants. In the village of Tarshiha, on the other hand, mostly Christian Palestinians defended the village while the majority of the people were still there. With hindsight, it would seem that it was their decision to stay that saved them from expulsion, although, had most of them been Muslim, their fate could have been very different. Tarshiha was eventually occupied in October, but was not subsequently evacuated. Had it been taken in September, this outcome, too, might have been very different, since the orders for Operation Alef Ayn, from 19 September 1948, read: ‘Tarshiha has to be evicted to the north.’35
But such moments of grace were few and far between and were certainly not bestowed upon the final group of villages that were depopulated in the western part of the upper Galilee and in the southern parts of the Hebron area, Beersheba, and along the southern coast line.