The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappé

The Israeli air force dropped about 10,000 leaflets calling upon the villagers to surrender, although not promising them any immunity from expulsion. None of the villages did and, almost as a whole, came out to confront the Israeli forces. Thus, for a brief period, in courageous defiance of the vastly superior Israeli military power, Palestinian villages, for the first time since the ethnic cleansing started, turned themselves into strongholds, standing up to the besieging Israeli troops.

I have no illusion that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonises a people who have been colonised, expelled and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonised, expelled and occupied them.

While Israel’s divide-and-rule policy proved effective in the case of the Druze, to whom it promised not only immunity but also arms as rewards for their collaboration, the Christian communities were less ‘cooperative’. Israeli troops at first routinely deported them together with the Muslims, but then started transferring them to transit camps in the central coastal areas. In October, Muslims rarely remained long in these camps but were ‘transported’ – in the language of the Israeli army – to Lebanon. But Christians were now offered a different deal. In return for a vow of allegiance to the Jewish state, they were allowed to return to their villages for a short time. To their credit, most of the Christians refused to participate willingly in such a selection process. As a result, the army soon meted out the same treatment to Christian as to Muslim villages where they did not have a Druze population.

By 31 October, the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army.

but since so many Israelis today, politicians as well as academics, have come to accept and justify the ethnic cleansing that took place and to recommend it to future policy makers, the danger of additional expulsions still hovers above the Palestinian people in this part of Palestine.

The major activities towards the end of the 1948 ethnic cleansing operation now focused on implementing Israel’s anti-repatriation policy on two levels. The first level was national, introduced in August 1948 by an Israeli governmental decision to destroy all the evicted villages and transform them into new Jewish settlements or ‘natural’ forests. The second level was diplomatic, whereby strenuous efforts were made to avert the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the return of the refugees. The two were closely interconnected: the pace of demolition was deliberately accelerated with the specific aim of invalidating any discussion on the subject of refugees returning to their houses, since those houses would no longer be there.

The PCC called for the unconditional return of the refugees to their homes, which the assassinated UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, had demanded. They turned their position into a UN General Assembly resolution that was overwhelmingly supported by most of the member states and adopted on 11 December 1948. This resolution, UN Resolution 194, gave the refugees the option to decide between unconditional return to their homes and/or accepting compensation. There was a third anti-repatriation effort, and that was to control the demographic distribution of Palestinians both within the villages that had not been cleansed and in the previously mixed towns of Palestine, at that point already totally ‘de-Arabised’. For this purpose, the Israeli army established, on 12 January 1949, a new unit, the Minority Unit. It was made up of Druze, Circassians and Bedouin who were recruited to it for one specific job only: to prevent Palestinian villagers and town dwellers from returning to their original homes.

The ‘infiltrators’, as the Israeli army called them, were in many cases farmers who sought surreptitiously to harvest their fields or pick the fruit from their now unattended trees. Refugees who tried to slip past the army lines quite often met their death at the hands of Israeli army patrols.

Prisoners: cars will be ready to transport the refugees (plitim) to points on the Lebanese and Syrian borders. POW camps will be built in Safad and Haifa, and a transit camp in Acre; all the Muslim inhabitants have to be moved out.

UN observers did draw some conclusions in October, writing to the Secretary General – who did not publish their report – that Israeli policy was that of ‘uprooting Arabs from their native villages in Palestine by force or threat’.15 Arab member states attempted to bring the report on Palestine to the attention of the Security Council, but to no avail. For almost thirty years the UN uncritically adopted the rhetorical obfuscations of Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, who referred to the refugees as constituting a ‘humane problem’ for which no one could be held accountable or responsible. UN observers were also shocked by the scope of the looting that went on, which by October 1948 had reached every village and town in Palestine. After so overwhelmingly endorsing a partition resolution, almost a year earlier, the UN could have passed another resolution condemning the ethnic cleansing, but it never did. And worse was to come.

The main worry, however was a British counter-attack, since the Israelis wrongly believed this area was coveted by Britain or that His Majesty’s Government would activate its defense treaty with Egypt, as some of the Israeli forces were about to move into Egyptian territories proper. In the event, the British did neither, although they did clash here and there with the Israeli air force that mercilessly and, perhaps, pointlessly bombarded Rafah, Gaza and El-Arish.22 As a result, the Gazans, refugees and veteran population alike, have had the longest history as victims of Israeli air bombardment – from 1948 until the present.

A huge tribe, the Tarabins, was expelled to Gaza; the army only allowed 1,000 of its members to remain. Another tribe, the Tayaha, was split into two: half of them were deported to Gaza and the other half forcibly evicted in the direction of Jordan. The al-Hajajre, whose land straddled the railway line, were pushed into Gaza by December. Only the al-Azazmeh succeeded in returning, but they were driven out again between 1950 and 1954, when they became the favourite target of a special Israeli commando force, Unit 101, led by a young ambitious officer called Ariel Sharon.

Habib Jarada, who today lives in the city of Gaza, remembered the people of Beersheba being driven out at gunpoint to Hebron. His most vivid image is that of the town’s mayor beseeching the occupying officer not to deport the people. ‘We need land, not slaves,’ was the blunt answer.

Then there was the village of Dawaymeh, between Beersheba and Hebron. The events that unfolded in Dawaymeh are probably the worst in the annals of Nakba atrocities.

The UN report from 14 June 1949 (accessible today on the Internet by simply searching for the village name) says the following: The reason why so little is known about this massacre which, in many respects, was more brutal than the Deir Yassin massacre, is because the Arab Legion (the army in control of that area) feared that if the news was allowed to spread, it would have the same effect on the moral of the peasantry that Deir Yassin had, namely to cause another flow of Arab refugees.

Amos Keinan, who participated in the massacre, confirmed its existence in an interview he gave in the late 1990s to the Palestinian actor and film maker Muhammad Bakri, for Bakri’s documentary ‘1948’. Half an hour after the midday prayer on 28 October, recalled the mukhtar, twenty armoured cars entered the village from Qubayba while soldiers attacked simultaneously from the opposite flank. The twenty people guarding the village were immediately paralysed with fear. The soldiers on the armoured cars opened fire with automatic weapons and mortars, making their way into the village in a semi-circular movement. Following the established routine, they surrounded the village from three flanks, leaving open the eastern flank with the aim of driving out 6,000 people in one hour. When this failed to happen, the troops jumped out of their vehicles and started shooting at the people indiscriminately, many of whom ran to the mosque to seek shelter or fled to a nearby holy cave, called Iraq al-Zagh. Venturing back into the village the next day, the mukhtar beheld with horror the piles of dead bodies in the mosque – with many more strewn about in the street – men, women and children, among them his own father. When he went to the cave, he found the entrance blocked by dozens of corpses. The count the mukhtar carried out told him that 455 people were missing, among them around 170 children and women. The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies ...

Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchering. Thousands of Palestinians were killed ruthlessly and savagely by Israeli troops of all backgrounds, ranks and ages. None of these Israelis was ever tried for war crimes, in spite of the overwhelming evidence.

As 1950 began, the energy and purposefulness of the expellers finally began to wane and those Palestinians who were still living in Palestine – by then divided into the State of Israel, a Jordanian West Bank and an Egyptian Gaza Strip – were largely safe from further expulsions.

About 8,000 spent the whole of 1949 in the prison camps, others suffered physical abuse in the towns, and large numbers of Palestinians were harassed in numerous ways under the military rule that Israel now exerted over them. Their houses continued to be looted, their fields confiscated, their holy places desecrated, and Israel violated such basic rights as their freedom of movement and expression, and of equality before the law.

In a procedure familiar to most Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today, Israeli troops would first put a place – a city or a village – under a closure order. Then intelligence units would start searching from house to house, pulling people out whom they suspected of being present ‘illegally’ in that particular location as well as any other ‘suspicious Arabs’. Often these would be people residing in their own homes. All people picked up in these raids were then brought to a special headquarters.

The worst offence was not being in possession of one of the newly-issued identity cards, which could result in a prison term for as long as a year and a half and immediate transfer to one of the pens to join other ‘unauthorised’ and ‘suspicious’ Arabs found in now Jewish-occupied areas.

The Israelis now introduced a novel feature, also well known among present-day Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories: roadblocks, where they carried out surprise checks to catch those who did not have the new ID card. But the granting of such an ID card, which allowed people limited freedom of movement in the area where they lived, itself became a means of intimidation: only people vetted and approved by the Israeli Secret Service were given such a card. Most areas were out of bounds anyway, even if you had the required identification. For these areas you needed another special permit. This included a specific authorisation, for example, for people living in the Galilee to travel along their most common and natural routes to work or to see family and friends, such as the road between Haifa and Nazareth. Here, permits were hardest to get.

two features of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens that continue up to the present day: the first is that people indicted for crimes against Arabs are likely to remain in positions in which they continue to affect the lives of Palestinians and, secondly, that they will never be brought to justice. The most recent illustration of this is the case of the policemen who murdered thirteen unarmed Palestinian citizens in October 2000 and another seventeen since then.

After one of their early visits, on 11 November 1948, Red Cross officials reported dryly that POWs were exploited in the general local effort to ‘strengthen the Israeli economy’.13 This guarded language was not accidental. Given its deplorable behaviour during the Holocaust, when it failed to report on what went on in Nazi concentration camps, on which it was well informed, the Red Cross was careful in its reproach and criticism of the Jewish state. But at least their documents do shed some light on the experiences of the Palestinian inmates, some of whom were kept in these camps until 1955.

The most common crime was looting, of both the systematic official kind and the sporadic private one. The systematic and official kind was ordered by the Israeli government itself and targeted the wholesale stores of sugar, flour, barley, wheat and rice that the British government kept for the Arab population. The booty taken was sent to Jewish settlements. Such actions had frequently taken place even before 15 May 1948, under the eyes of British soldiers who simply looked away as Jewish troops barged into areas under their legal authority and responsibility. Reporting in July to Ben-Gurion on how the organised confiscation was progressing, the military governor of Jaffa wrote: As for your demand, sir, that I will make sure ‘that all the commodities required by our army, air force and navy will be handed over to the people in charge and taken out of Jaffa as fast as possible,’ I can inform you that as of 15 May, 1948 an average load of 100 trucks a day is taken out of Jaffa. The port is ready for operation. The storehouses were emptied, and the goods were taken out.15

The human geography of Palestine as a whole was forceably transformed. The Arab character of the cities was effaced by the destruction of large sections, including the spacious park in Jaffa and community centres in Jerusalem. This transformation was driven by the desire to wipe out one nation’s history and culture and replace it with a fabricated version of another, from which all traces of the indegenous population were elided.

Totalling about 150,000, these became the ‘Israeli Arabs’ – as if it made sense to talk about ‘Syrian Arabs’ or ‘Iraqi Arabs’ and not ‘Syrians’ or ‘Iraqis’.

But to the public at large, a very different picture was portrayed: ‘creating’ new Jewish settlements was accompanied by such slogans as ‘making the desert bloom’, while the JNF’s forestation activities were marketed as an ecological mission designed to keep the country green.

The bottom line of this almost two-decade-long bureaucratic process (1949–1967) was that the legislation regarding the JNF, barring the selling, leasing and sub-letting of land to non-Jews, was put into effect for most of the state lands (more than ninety per cent of Israel’s land, seven per cent having been declared as private land). The primary objective of this legislation was to prevent Palestinians in Israel from regaining ownership, through purchase, of their own land or that of their people. This is why Israel never allowed the Palestinian minority to build even one new rural settlement or village, let alone a new town or city

One study has estimated that seventy per cent of the land belonging to the Palestinians in Israel has been either confiscated or made inaccessible to them.

In the early 1960s, before the final division of land between the ILA and the JNF, the latter launched Operation ‘Finally’ (Sof-Sof), which sought to further dispossess the Palestinians of land in the Galilee that was still in the villagers’ possession. The JNF offered to buy those lands or exchange them with lesser quality land elsewhere. But the villagers refused – their steadfastness forms one of the truly heroic chapters in the struggle against the Zionist ethnic cleansing operations. The JNF then began erecting special military outposts at the entrances to the ‘stubborn’ villages in an effort to exert psychological pressure on the inhabitants. Even with such callous means, the JNF only achieved its goal in a few cases.

Nationalist extremists are also trying to wipe out any physical evidence that could remind future generations that people other than Serbs ever lived together in Bosnia. Historic mosques, churches and synagogues as well as national libraries, archives, and museums have been torched, dynamited and bulldozed ... They want to eliminate the memory of the past as well.

Here, dispossession was accompanied by the renaming of the places it had seized, destroyed and now recreated. This mission was accomplished with the help of archaeologists and biblical experts who volunteered to serve on an official Naming Committee whose job it was to Hebraize Palestine’s geography.

Netanyahu (1996–1999) and Ariel Sharon (2001–2003; 2003–2006), which threatened to limit the JNF’s control. However, both these right-wing prime ministers were torn between Zionism and Capitalism, and time will tell how much land their successors will allow to remain in the JNF’s hands in the future.

The three aims of keeping the country Jewish, European-looking and Green quickly fused into one. This is why forests throughout Israel today include only eleven per cent of indigenous species and why a mere ten per cent of all forests date from before 1948.1

Later visits by relatives of some of Mujaydial’s original villagers revealed that some of the pine trees had literally split in two and how, in the middle of their broken trunks, olive trees had popped up in defiance of the alien flora planted over them fifty-six years ago.

Most Israelis think these are ‘wild’ figs or ‘wild’ almonds, as they see them in full bloom, towards the end of the winter, heralding the beauty of spring. But these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. Wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village: still blossoming afresh each year, these trees are all that remain.

The true mission of the JNF, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence.

This version continues to spout the familiar myths of the narrative – Palestine as an ‘empty’ and ‘arid’ land before the arrival of Zionism – that Zionism employs to supplant all history that contradicts its own invented Jewish past.

In other words, what the JNF texts represent as an ‘ecological concern’ is yet one more official Israeli effort to deny the Nakba and conceal the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy.

Four of the larger and most popular picnic sites that appear on the JNF website – the Birya Forest, the Ramat Menashe Forest, the Jerusalem Forest, and the Sataf – all epitomise, better than any other space today in Israel, both the Nakba and the denial of the Nakba .

Thus, Palestinian bustans are attributed to nature and Palestine’s history transported back to a biblical and Talmudic past. Such is the fate of one of the best known villages,

Ein Zeitun has become one of the most attractive spots within the recreational ground as it harbors large picnic tables and ample parking for the disabled. It is located where once stood the settlement Ein Zeitun, where Jews used to live ever since the medieval times and until the 18th century. There were four abortive [Jewish] settlement attempts. The parking lot has biological toilets and playgrounds. Next to the parking lot, a memorial stands in memory of the soldiers who fell in the Six Day War. Fancifully meshing history and tourist tips, the text totally erases from Israel’s collective memory the thriving Palestinian community Jewish troops wiped out within a few hours.

a virtual or real journey into the forest takes the reader back to the alleged Talmudic town in the third century, before skipping a whole millennium of Palestinian villages and communities.

The bustans overlook some exquisite scenery and are popular with Jerusalem’s young professional class who come here to experience ‘ancient’ and ‘biblical’ ways of cultivating a plot of land that may even yield some ‘biblical’ fruits and vegetables. Needless to say, these ancient ways are far from ‘biblical’ but are Palestinian, as are the plots and the bustans and the place itself.

The JNF website narrative and the information offered on the various boards set up at the locations themselves is also widely available elsewhere. There has always been a thriving literature in Israel catering for domestic tourism where ecological awareness, Zionist ideology and erasure of the past often go hand in hand.

As Walid Khalidi has put in his forceful style: ‘It is a platitude of historiography that the victors in war get away with both the loot and the version of events.’

The solution of the Palestinian refugee problem remains the key to any just and lasting settlement of the conflict in Palestine: for close to sixty years now the Palestinians have remained steadfast as a nation in their demand to have their legal rights acknowledged, above all their Right of Return, originally granted to them by the United Nations in 1948. They continue to confront an official Israeli policy of denial and anti-repatriation that seems only to have hardened over the same period. There are two factors that have so far succeeded in defeating all chances of an equitable solution to the conflict in Palestine to take root: the Zionist ideology of ethnic supremacy and the ‘peace process’. From the former stems Israel’s continuing denial of the Nakba; in the latter we see the lack of international will to bring justice to the region – two obstacles that perpetuate the refugee problem and stand in the way of a just and comprehensive peace emerging in the land.

the Palestinians Israel had failed to expel from the country were subjected to the military regime Israel put in place in October 1948, and those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were now under foreign Arab occupation, the rest of the Palestinian people were scattered throughout the neighbouring Arab states where they had found shelter in makeshift tent camps provided by international aid organisations.

International Refugee Organization (IRO) but to create a special agency for the Palestinian refugees. It was Israel and the Zionist Jewish organisations abroad that were behind the decision to keep the IRO out of the picture: the IRO was the very same body that was assisting the Jewish refugees in Europe following the Second World War, and the Zionist organisations were keen to prevent anyone from making any possible association or even comparison between the two cases. Moreover, the IRO always recommended repatriation as the first option to which refugees were entitled.