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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The massacre at Dawaymeh was the last large massacre Israeli troops perpetrated until 1956, when forty-nine villagers of Kfar Qassim, a village transferred to Israel in the armistice agreement with Jordan, were butchered.
Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchering.
Ethnic cleansing v. Genocide
‘shoot and cry’, a typically righteous Israeli way of seeking self-absolution.
Shoot and cry
November 1948 and all the way up to the final agreement with Syria and Lebanon in the summer of 1949, another eighty-seven villages were occupied; thirty-six of these were emptied by force, while from the rest a selective number of people were deported. 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. True, they were placed under military rule both in Israel and
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The Israeli search-and-arrest operations were quite systematic, took place all over the countryside, and usually carried similar generic codenames, such as ‘Operation Comb’ or even ‘Distillation’ (ziquq).
The first of these operations took place in Haifa,
the order went out to find as many such ‘suspicious Arabs’ as possible, without actually bothering to define the nature of the suspicion.
In the city of Haifa this headquarters quickly became the dread of the Palestinians in the city. It was located in the Hadar neighbourhood,
11 Daniel Street,
citizens of the State of Israel.
roadblocks, where they carried out surprise checks to catch those who did not have the new ID card.
Israeli ID card.
only people vetted and approved by the Israeli Secret Service were given such a card.
By October 1948, under the direct supervision of Yigael Yadin, a network of prison camps had been institutionalised and the disarray was over.
they felt anything but safe in these lockups. To begin with, it was decided to employ mainly ex-Irgun and Stern Gang troops as camp guards,
Worse still were the labour camps. The idea of using Palestinian prisoners as forced labour came from the Israeli military command and was endorsed by the politicians.
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.
Red Cross representatives crossing the country sent back disturbing reports to their headquarters in Geneva about life under occupation.
the worst of which seemed to be taking place in Jaffa.
The same officials who pillaged these food stores promised the Palestinian population in Haifa and other occupied cities that their community centres, religious sites and secular establishments would not be ransacked or plundered. The people soon discovered that this was a false pledge when their mosques and churches were profaned and their convents and schools vandalised.
As the pretext for their robbery and looting campaigns the Israeli forces often gave ‘search for weapons’.
Yitzhak Chizik
Chizic ...Military governor of jaffa
Shitrit was a token Mizrahi minister in an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, i.e., Eastern European, government and as such had been ‘promoted’ at first to deal with the most undesirable job in the government: the Arabs.
Shitrit developed personal relations with some of the notables who had remained in Jaffa after the occupation and headed the Palestinian community there, such as Nicola Sa’ab and Ahmad Abu Laben. Although he listened attentively in June 1948 when they beseeched him to lift at least the more appalling features of life under military occupation, and admitted to them that their complaints were valid, it took time before anything was done.
Indeed, the scope of both the official confiscation and private looting all over urban Palestine was so widespread that local commanders were unable to control it.
Ghettoising the Palestinians of Haifa
to ‘facilitate’ their transfer from the various parts of the city where they were living into one single neighborhood, the crammed and small quarter of Wadi Nisnas, one of the city’s poorest areas.
Many of them belonged to the Communist Party that had supported partition and hoped that now the fighting was over, life would return to normal under the auspices of a Jewish state whose creation they had not opposed.
But this was not the end of their troubles. In the area to which they were confined, Wadi Nisnas – where today the municipality of Haifa annually celebrates the convergence of Hanuka, Christmas and Id al-Fitr as ‘The Feast of all Feasts for Peace and Coexistence’ – people continued to be robbed and abused, mostly by Irgun and Stern Gang members, but the Hagana also took an active part in the assaults. Ben-Gurion condemned their behaviour, but did nothing to stop it: He was content with recording it in his diary.
It remains more difficult to form an idea of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish troops in this way.
as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners, their women were left at the mercy of the Israelis.
David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: ‘Rape Cases’.
Battalion 3 –
Infamous battalion 3
soldiers were suspected of being involved in most of the rape cases in the city,
oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims.
On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl.
Rape and murder of 12yo girl.
abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram.
Once the winds of war had subsided and the newly established State of Israel had signed armistice agreements with its neighbours, the Israeli government relaxed its occupation regime somewhat and gradually put a halt to the looting and ghettoisation of the small groups of urban Palestinians left behind.
In August, the new outfit mainly dealt with the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the repatriation of the refugees.
The tactic it decided upon was to try to push through a resettlement programme that they envisaged would pre-empt all confrontation on the subject, either because the principal players in the international community would agree to endorse it or, even better, it would persuade them to abandon the issue altogether.
UN Resolution 194, which called for the unconditional repatriation of Palestinian refugees.
As Israel had hoped, the fate of the refugees, not to mention their rights, soon dropped out of sight.
There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the Israeli authorities after May 1948.
Israel and the money stolen from Palestinians
the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, and he estimated the combined value of property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds.
‘The cultivated land is probably 1 million dunam.
While the Jewish troops were responsible for the expulsion of the people and the demolition of their homes, Weitz went to work to make sure the villages passed into JNF custody.
JNF and confiscation of palestinian cultivated land
was no job for such a cumbersome body as the Committee for Arab Affairs. Thus he decided to appoint Danin and Weitz to a committee of two that from then on would take all final decisions on Palestinian property and land, the main features of which were destruction and confiscation.
During this short-lived period of US pressure (April–May 1949), Ben-Gurion’s basic response was to intensify the settlement of Jewish immigrants on the confiscated land and in the evicted houses.
Ben-Gurion again appointed a more cabal-like body that soon encouraged hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world to seize the Palestinian homes left in the towns and cities and to build settlements on the ruins of the expelled villages.
but by the end of September Ben-Gurion gave up the idea of an orderly takeover in the major cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa.
The distribution of land was the responsibility of the Jewish National Fund.
