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In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.
Codenamed Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population.
The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This
Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.
Still, this was enough for some of his Israeli readers to realise that the ‘voluntary flight’ of the Palestinians had been a myth and that the Israeli self-image of having waged a ‘moral’ war in 1948 against a ‘primitive’ and hostile Arab world was considerably flawed and possibly already bankrupt. The
he ignored such atrocities as the poisoning of the water supply into Acre with typhoid, numerous cases of rape and the dozens of massacres the Jews perpetrated. He also kept insisting – wrongly – that before 15 May 1948 there had been no forced evictions.
Walid Khalidi’s seminal book All That Remains. This is an almanac of the destroyed villages, which is still an essential guide for anyone wishing to comprehend the enormity of the 1948 catastrophe.
Possible next read.
Dayton agreement of November 1995.
But the more critical view today sees the Zionist drive to settle in Palestine, instead of other possible locations, as closely interwoven with nineteenth-century Christian millenarianism and European colonialism.
European Concert
What?
inspired pious politicians, such as Lloyd George, the British prime minister during the First World War, to act with even greater commitment for the success of the Zionist project.
when the main objective became making Palestine exclusively Jewish rather than socialist, it was significantly the Labour movement within Zionism that instituted and implemented the ethnic cleansing of the local population.
Jewish National Fund (JNF)
Founded in 1901, the JNF was the principal Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine.
As we shall see, in 1948 these last bits of information fuelled the worst atrocities in the villages, leading to mass executions and torture.
Ezra Danin, who would play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The men who were picked out were often shot on the spot.
His central role in deciding the fate of the Palestinians stemmed from the complete control he exercised over all issues of security and defence in the Jewish community in Palestine.
He then swayed the Zionist leadership into accepting both his supreme authority and the fundamental notion that future statehood meant absolute Jewish domination.
one had to wait for the opportune historical moment to come along in order to be able to deal ‘militarily’ with the demographic reality on the ground: the presence of a non-Jewish native majority population.
by the end of the Mandate, as we have already seen, the Zionist movement had only been able to purchase around six per cent of the land.
Plan Dalet called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland.
Briefly, it allowed him to determine almost single-handedly the main policies of the Jewish community vis-à-vis the world, the Arab neighbours and the Palestinians.
But the impending end of the British Mandate, the Arab rejection of the partition resolution, and Ben-Gurion’s keen realization of how much of Palestine he would need to the make the Jewish state viable now helped translate past ideologies and nebulous scenarios into a specific master plan.
Zionist goal of obtaining as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as feasible
the Field Guard (Hish in Hebrew). This was the logistics arm of the Jewish forces, established in 1939. Some of the atrocities that accompanied the cleansing operations were committed by these auxiliary units.
the Zionist ‘founding fathers’.16 He shows how the wish to de-Arabise Palestine formed a crucial pillar in Zionist thinking from the very first moment the movement entered onto the political stage in the form of Theodor Herzl.
Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.
The Palestinians inside the Jewish state, he told his audience, could become a fifth column, and if so ‘they can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel them.’
The operation seemed to thrill everyone, including the representative of the ultra Orthodox Jews, Agudat Israel, who said: ‘We were told that the army had the ability of destroying a whole village and taking out all its inhabitants; indeed, let’s do it!’
The early eruption of violence put a sad end to a relatively long history of workers’ cooperation and solidarity in the mixed city of Haifa.
Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun, who had already done so before 1947.
The next stage introduced a new chapter in the history of Palestine. Eager to test, among other things, British vigilance in the face of their actions, the Hagana’s High Command, as part of the Consultancy, decided to ransack a whole village and massacre a large number of its inhabitants.
But note the distinction still made here between men and women: in their next meeting, the Consultancy decided that such a separation was an unnecessary complication for future operations.
Hagana units in Haifa tested the ground with a more drastic action: they went into one of the city’s Arab neigbourhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya, expelled its people and blew up its houses. This act could be regarded as the official beginning of the ethnic cleansing operation in urban Palestine.
Weitz had been added to the Consultancy because he was the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund,
Now, more than any other member of the Consultancy, Weitz deeply involved himself in the practicalities of the ethnic cleansing, jotting down details about every location and village for future reference, and entering his own surveys into those of the village files.
Weitz wrote to Nachmani that the takeover of all Arab land was a ‘sacred duty’.
Tahon was a German Jew who, together with Arthur Rupin, had developed the first plans for the Jewish colonization of Palestine in the early decades of the twentieth century. As a true colonialist, at first he saw no need to expel the ‘natives’; all he wanted was to exploit them. But in the Long Seminar he also appeared taken by Weitz’s notion that ‘without transfer there will be no Jewish State’.
there was hardly a dissenting voice, which is why the Long Seminar is such a pivotal meeting in this story. Its departure point, accepted by all, was that ethnic cleansing was necessary;
Similar complaints, Ben-Gurion noted in his diary, were coming from members of other Jewish municipalities located in proximity to Arab towns or villages. Protests had come in from Rehovot, Nes Ziona, Rishon Le-Zion, and Petah Tikva, the oldest Jewish settlements in the greater Tel-Aviv area, whose members, like their Palestinian neighbours, failed to grasp that the Hagana had adopted a ‘new approach’ against the Palestinian population.
He wanted a clear directive from above to the troops who, he now reported, were full of enthusiasm and eager at any moment to go and assault Arab villages and neighbourhoods.
On 31 January, Ben-Gurion gave direct orders to David Shaltiel, the city’s military commander, to assure Jewish contiguity and expansion through the destruction of Shaykh Jarrah, the occupation of other neighborhoods, and the immediate settlement of Jews in the evicted places. His mission was ‘to settle Jews in every house of an evicted semi-Arab neighbourhood, such as Romema.’
This discrepancy between a destructive and violent Zionist policy on the one hand and an overt discourse of peace on the other will reoccur at various junctures in the history of the conflict, but the deceitfulness in 1948 seems to have been particularly startling.
While still appearing outside with doomsday scenarios of a second Holocaust, the enlarged Consultancy heard Ben-Gurion outline amazing achievements in the compulsory recruitment the Zionist leadership had imposed on the Jewish community and in the arms purchases it had made, especially in the sphere of heavy weaponry and aircraft.
A principal result of the upgraded weaponry were the heavy bombardments, especially from new mortars, that were now carried out on densely populated villages and neighbourhoods.
The oral history of the Nakba is full of evidence of the terrible effect this weapon had on people and properties.
The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February. Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people.
We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.’ In June, Katzir suggested using it on human beings.
