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February 1948 saw major cleansing operations, and it was only then, in certain parts of the country, that the meaning of the imminent catastrophe began to dawn on people.
All of those present, without exception, reported that rural Palestine showed no desire to fight or attack, and was defenseless.
‘to continue to terrorize the rural areas . . . through a series of offensives . . . so that the same mood of passivity reported . . . would prevail.’
Like so many other scenic sites in this area set aside for recreation and tourism, this one too hides the ruins of a 1948 village. To my shame it took me years to discover this.
But they were the exception: the rule was the 531 villages and eleven urban neighbourhoods and towns that were destroyed and their inhabitants expelled under the direct orders the Consultancy put out in March 1948. By then, thirty villages were already gone. A few days after Plan D was typed up, it was distributed among the commanders of the dozen brigades the Hagana now incorporated. With the list each commander received came a detailed description of the villages in his realm of operation, and their imminent fate: occupation, destruction and expulsion.
contrary to claims historians such as Benny Morris have made, Plan Dalet was handed down to the brigade commanders not as vague guidelines, but as clear-cut operational orders for action.
special political officers would come down and actively incite the troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operations ahead,
we might instead conclude that the Jewish community in Palestine was not in any danger of annihilation: it was facing some obstacles on the way to completing its ethnic cleansing plan.
Official Israeli historiography describes the next month, April 1948, as a turning point.
According to this version, an isolated and threatened Jewish community in Palestine was moving from defence to offence, after its near defeat. The reality of the situation could not have been more different: the overall military, political and economic balance between the two communities was such that not only were the majority of Jews in no danger at all, but in addition, between the beginning of December 1947 and the end of March 1948, their army had been able to complete the first stage of the cleansing of Palestine, even before the master plan had been put into effect. If there were a
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His diary certainly does not betray any sense of a looming catastrophe or a ‘second Holocaust’, as he proclaimed with pathos in his public appearances.
He was not, however, over-confident and did not join in the celebrations on 15 May 1948, aware of the enormity of the task ahead of him: cleansing Palestine and making sure Arab attempts would not stop the Jewish takeover.
isolated Jewish settlements and a potential Arab army – as was the case in remote parts of the Galilee and the Negev, as well as in some parts of Jerusalem.
‘Seizing’ meaning only one thing: the massive expulsion of the Palestinians living there from their homes, businesses and land in both the cities and the rural areas.
the Hagana had more than 50,000 troops at its disposal, half of which had been trained by the British army during the Second World War. The time had come to put the plan into effect.
NACHSHON:
Jerusalem,
a sense of siege amongst the small Jewish population in the city.
‘the villages which you will capture, cleanse or destroy will be decided according to consultation with your advisors on Arab affairs and the intelligence officers.’
the blueprint was converted into military order to begin destroying villages.
Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni
Within a few days most of them would be expelled forever from the homes and fields where they and their ancestors had lived and worked for centuries. The
The systematic nature of Plan Dalet is manifested in Deir Yassin, a pastoral and cordial village that had reached a non-aggression pact with the Hagana in Jerusalem, but was doomed to be wiped out because it was within the areas designated in Plan Dalet to be cleansed.
As mentioned previously, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and welcomed by the Consultancy, although not necessarily initiated by it.
the Palestinian elite to leave for their residences in Lebanon and Egypt until calm returned to their city. It is hard to estimate how many fell within this category: most historians put the figure at around 15,000 to 20,000.
The ‘truth’ was that the urban elite in Palestine had collapsed after a month of heavy Jewish shelling and aggression.
the Consultancy was well aware that the rich and well-to-do had already left in December, that the Arab arms were not arriving, and the Arab governments did little beyond airing their inflammatory war rhetoric in all directions so as to hide their inaction and unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians.
The departure of the affluent meant that between 55,000 and 60,000 Palestinians in Haifa were leaderless and, given the relatively small number of armed Arab volunteers in the town,...
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Haifa, like Tiberias, had been allocated in the UN plan to the Jewish state: leaving the only major port in the country in Jewish control was yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered in the UN peace proposal.
The Jews wanted the port city but without the 75,000 Palestinians who lived there, and in April 1948, they achieved their objective.
As Palestine’s main port, Haifa was also the last station on the trail of...
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Their conduct, as many British politicians were later to admit, forms one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East.
The 2000 Carmeli Brigade troops faced a poorly equipped army of 500 local and mainly Lebanese volunteers, who had inferior arms and limited ammunition, and certainly nothing to match the armoured cars and mortars on the Jewish side.
Brutally appropriate, the cleansing of Haifa, in which the Palestinians were the bread and the flour, began on Passover’s eve, 21 April.
The Carmeli Brigade made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc.
‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’ (He later became the Israeli army Chief of Staff.)
When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier.20 But this apparently left no lasting
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Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied the western Arab neighbourhoods in April 1948.
transform these elegant residential areas into streets of monstrous villas and extravagant palaces for rich American Jews who tend to flock to the city in their old age.
All in all, eight Palestinian neighbourhoods and thirty-nine villages were ethnically cleansed in the Greater Jerusalem area, their population transferred to the eastern part of the city.
When Jaffa fell, its entire population of 50,000 was expelled with the ‘help’ of British mediation, meaning that their flight was less chaotic than in Haifa. Still,
before a single regular Arab soldier had entered Palestine,
Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled.
undermines the Israeli myth that the ‘Arabs’ ran away once the ‘A...
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In some of the villages that were close to urban centres, the Jewish troops followed a policy of massacres in order to precipitate the flight of the people in the cities and towns nearby.
groups of men that were, in the parlance of the Hagana, ‘males between the age of 10 and 50’, were executed in order to intimidate and terrorise the village population and those living in the nearby towns.
Bab al-Shams was made into a film, a French-Egyptian co-production.59 The
Try to see this film.
Their alliance with the Zionist movement has inexorably alienated the Druzes from the rest of the Palestinians.
Another sect, the Circassians, who had several villages in the north of the country, also decided to show allegiance to the powerful Jewish military presence, and 350 of them joined the Jewish forces in April.
between January and May 1948, when around 250,000 Palestinians were driven by force from their homes,
