The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappé

seventy-eight

In other words, the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank at first came about thanks to a prior agreement with the Jews, but it remained in Hashemite hands thereafter due to the tenacious defensive efforts of the Jordanians and the Iraqi forces that helped repel Israeli attacks.

the Jordanians saved 250,000 Palestinians from being ousted

Arab Higher Committee, the unofficial government of the Palestinians since the 1930s,

The Palestinian community for all intents and purposes was a leaderless nation.

Had it not been for highly effective pressure by the Zionist lobby on President Harry Truman, the course of Palestine’s history could have run very differently. Instead,

In a longer process that continued through the 1950s and early 1960s, the Zionist lobby succeeded in sidelining the State Department’s experts on the Arab world and left American Middle Eastern policy in the hands of Capitol Hill and the White House, where the Zionists wielded considerable influence.

the Consultancy was already pushing ahead with its ethnic cleansing operations, which Ben-Gurion would not have allowed others in the Zionist political elite to halt, who were not privy in the past to the vision and the plan.

they took no action beyond watching and reporting the beginning of the ethnic cleansing.

Ben-Gurion sent to the commanders of the Hagana brigades telling them that the Legion’s more offensive intentions should not distract their troops from their principal tasks: ‘the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet’ (he used the noun bi‘ur, which means either ‘cleansing the leaven’ in Passover or ‘root out’, ‘eliminate’).

tacit alliance King Abdullah had made with the Zionist movement.

The situation may have differed from one Arab capital to the next, but the overall picture was quite uniform. In Cairo, the government only decided to send troops to Palestine at the very last moment, two days before the end of the Mandate. The 10,000 troops it had set aside included a large contingent, almost fifty per cent, of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers. The members of this political movement – vowing to restore Egypt and the Arab world to the Orthodox ways of Islam – regarded Palestine as a crucial battlefield in the struggle against European imperialism.

Weapons were scarce since the Arab armies’ main suppliers were Britain and France, who had declared an arms embargo on Palestine.

This crippled the Arab armies but hardly affected the Jewish forces, who found a willing furnisher in the Soviet Union and in its new Eastern bloc.

As for the lack of coordination, this was the inevitable result of the decision by the Arab League to appoint King Abdullah as the supreme commander of the all-Arab army...

the Iraqi revolutionary rulers who came to power in 1958 brought their generals to trial for their role in the catastrophe.

It is a sheer fabrication that there were Jewish attempts, as Israeli textbooks still insist today, to persuade Palestinians to stay.

For most Palestinians, the date of 15 May 1948 was of no special significance at the time: it was just one more day in the horrific calendar of ethnic cleansing that had started more than five months earlier.

‘purifying’.

used the term frequently and explicitly.

‘You will attack and cleanse Tirat Haifa, Ayn Ghazal, Ijzim, Kfar Lam, Jaba, Ayn Hawd and Mazar.’

"Cleanse" explicitly used in army orders to the field.

In 1999, he said he remembered burying 230 bodies; the exact number was clear in his mind: ‘I lay them one by one in the grave.’

the worst of which was in the autumn of 1948 when the Palestinians finally succeeded in putting up some resistance against the ethnic cleansing in certain places, and in response the Jewish expellers revealed an ever-increasing callousness in the atrocities they perpetrated.

cleansing operation,

The orders the brigades

Cleanse and destroy become explicit and persistent.

‘le-taher’,

‘le-hashmid’,

There were no direct orders for massacres, but neither were these fully and genuinely condemned when they took place.

Arab advisors

??

As mentioned above, it was then given to them by King Abdullah in the summer of 1949, a tragic outcome for a large group of Palestinians who had successfully resisted expulsion.

King Abdullah treachery .

Alexandroni, Qiryati and Givati. These brigades captured and cleansed Beit Dajan, Kfar Ana, Abbasiyya, Yahudiyya, Saffuriyya, Khayriyya, Salama and Yazur as well as the Jaffa suburbs of Jabalya and Abu Kabir.

Hagana brigades:

three Hagana brigades. They were regarded as a lesser force, as was the Qiryati Brigade. The Israeli military commanders described it as made up of ‘lesser [quality] soldiers’, namely Mizrahi Jews. A report of all the brigades submitted by a supervising officer in June 1948 described the Qiryati as a ‘most problematic’ brigade consisting of ‘illiterate people, with no candidates for NCOS and of course none for the post of officers.’

Hagana brigades considered inferior

The ruins of some of the villages and the suburbs occupied and expelled during that operation lie buried below the ‘White City’ of Tel-Aviv, that first ‘Hebrew’ city the Jews had founded in 1909 on sand dunes bought from a local landowner, now spread out into the sprawling metropolis of today.

Tel Aviv becomes burial site of clesnsed and destroyed villages.

However presumptuous, the belief that this brigade could seize the northern part of the West Bank – despite the agreement with Abdullah – and even conduct invasions into southern Lebanon, while cleansing vast areas of Palestine, reveals once again the cynicism behind the myth that Israel was fighting a ‘war of survival’.

Myth of war of survival.

Meanwhile the Golani and Yiftach Brigades concentrated on cleansing operations on the border with Syria and Lebanon. In fact, they were able to carry out their mission unimpeded, following their usual routine for each village they had been ordered to destroy, while nearby Lebanese or Syrian troops stood idly by, looking the other way rather than risking their own men.

Lebanese and Syrian troops do nothing

performance of the Syrian army, which began its campaign in May 1948 and kept it up intermittently until December 1948. In fact, it did quite poorly. Only for three days, between 15 and 18 May, did Syrian artillery, tanks and infantry, with the occasional help of their air force, constitute any kind of threat to the Israeli forces. A few days later their efforts had already become more sporadic and less effective. After the first truce, they were on their way back home.

Poor performance of Syrian army

power-hungry

Ben Gurion power hungry.

On that same day, the Israeli army had received a large shipment of modern, brand new 0.45-calibre cannons from the Communist Eastern bloc. Israel now possessed artillery unmatched not only by the Arab troops inside Palestine, but by all the Arab armies put together. It should be noted that the Israeli Communist Party was instrumental in arranging this deal.

The solution they came up with was to have all these people moved into one particular neighbourhood in each town, deprive them of their freedom of movement, and put them under a military regime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By July the political apparatus, the diplomatic corps and the military organisations within the new State of Israel were already working harmoniously together.

‘Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages’

Cleanse

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.

Tel Aviv's garbage dump.

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.

a massive Jewish force tried but failed to capture them.

the High Command reported to the UN truce observers that the operation against the three villages was a policing activity,