More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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).
New Star in the Near East,
American reporters book on lydd massacre
The correspondents’ reports were totally one-sided.
‘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.’
Lydd and Ramla:
dying from thirst and hunger on the way.
Rabin estimated that a total of 50,000 people had been ‘transferred’ in this inhuman way.
three years after the Holocaust, what went through the minds of those Jews who watched these wretched people pass by?
The most salient question of the Nachba!
‘Occupy and destroy’, a vengeful Ben-Gurion demanded from the army with this charming neighbourhood in mind.
Nazareth is still the only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel.
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.
Air bombardment comesintoitsown as cleancsingtool
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
...more
UN doesn't give a fuck about Israei occupation.
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.
‘Your orders,’ wrote Yigael Yadin to the commander in charge, ‘are to destroy the city’.
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.
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.
Wadi Ara
Wadi Ara. The northern triangle
These Iraqis were among the few of Palestine’s neighbours who actually fought and succeeded in rescuing whole Palestinian villages.
Iraqi contigents from Arab League save Wadi Ara villages.
Operation Hiram
Israel’s takeover of the upper Galilee and Southern Lebanon. With intensive artillery and air force attacks, Jewish troops captured both in a matter of two weeks.
Abu Hammud from the ALA.
By 31 October, the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army.
They were added to the list of villages to be evicted because Israel’s political elite wanted to eradicate the unmistakably ‘Arabic’ character of the Galilee.
Arabic character pf the Gallilee. Jews eanted to cleanse
But today, despite all of Israel’s efforts to ‘Judaize’ the Galilee – beginning with direct expulsions in the 1940s, military occupation in the 1960s, massive confiscation of land in the 1970s, and a huge official Judaization settlement effort in the 1980s – it is still the only area in Palestine that has retained its natural beauty, its Middle Eastern flavour and its Palestinian culture.
The tale of Iqrit is fairly representative of what also happened to the other two villages.
The destruction was part of an ongoing Israeli battle against the ‘Arabisation’ of the Galilee, as Israel sees it. In 1976, the highest official in the Ministry of Interior, Israel Koening, called the Palestinians in the Galilee a ‘cancer in the state’s body’ and the Israeli Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan, openly spoke of them as ‘cockroaches’.
Khirbat Wara al-Sawda,
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.
Those who tried to cross the river to Jordan were often turned back by the Hashemite Kingdom as it began to feel the burden of an ever-growing refugee community on its territory, which had already doubled the size of the Jordanian population.
especially kibbutzniks, who coveted their lands or their location.
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.
The Israeli forces were once again put on the alert to expand the Jewish state into the West Bank and southern Lebanon.
War over…now israel wants west bank.
As we know, these plans were eventually reactivated in June 1967, when the Israeli government exploited Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brinkmanship policies to wage an attack on the West Bank as a whole.
Ben-Gurion now consulted this five-man body of decision-makers about a future occupation of the West Bank.
Thirteen villages were captured in southern Lebanon, which left the Israelis with a larger number of what they called ‘prisoners of war’ – a mixture of villagers and regular soldiers – than they could handle. Consequently, executions took place here as well. On 31 October 1948, the Jewish forces executed more than eighty villagers in the village of Hula alone, while in the village of Saliha Israeli troops butchered more than 100 people.
In November 1948 the organisation’s representatives reported a scene of devastation: in every village they visited, the able men had been imprisoned, leaving behind women and children without their traditional breadwinners and creating total disarray; crops were not harvested and were left to rot in the fields, and diseases were spreading in the rural areas at an alarming pace. The Red Cross reported malaria as being the main problem, but also found numerous cases of typhoid, rickets, diphtheria and scurvy.
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.
When they had finished, ninety per cent of the people who had lived for centuries in this, the most southern inhabited region of Palestine, were gone.
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.
Palestine Conciliation Commission,
More likely, the Jordanians feared accusations being rightly leveled against them for their impotence and lack of action.
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.
The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death.
