Coletivo Resistência
Since they were privy to the ongoing negotiations with the Hashemites in Transjordan, several members of the leadership allowed only one constraint to influence the shape of their future map, and that was the possibility that certain areas in the east of Palestine, in today’s West Bank, could become part of a future Greater Jordan rather than a Greater Israel. In late 1946 the Jewish Agency had embarked on intensive negotiations with King Abdullah of Jordan. Abdullah was a scion of the Hashemite royal family from the Hejaz – the seat of the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina – that had fought alongside the British in the First World War. In reward for their services to the crown, the Hashemites had been granted the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan that the Mandate system had created. Initially (in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence of 1915/1916) the Hashemites had also been promised Syria, according to their understanding at least, in a British attempt to block a French take-over of that part of the Middle East.
However, when the French ousted Abdullah’s brother, Faysal, from Syria, the British compensated him, instead of Abdullah, with Iraq.5
As the eldest son of the dynasty, Abdullah was unhappy with his share in
the deal, all the more so because in 1924 the Hejaz, the Hashemites’ home base, was wrested from them by the Saudis. Transjordan was little more than an arid desert princedom east of the River Jordan, full of Bedouin tribes and some Circassian villages. No wonder he wished to expand into fertile, cultural and populated Palestine, and all means justified the goal. The best way to achieve this, he soon found out, was to cultivate a good relationship with the Zionist leadership. After the Second World War he reached an agreement in principle with the Jewish Agency over how to divide post-mandatory Palestine between them. Vague ideas of sharing the land became a basis for serious negotiations that started after UN Resolution 181 was adopted on 29 November 1947. As there were very few Jewish colonies in the area the king wanted to acquire (today’s West Bank), most of the leaders of the Jewish community were ‘willing’ to give up this part of Palestine, even though it included some biblical Jewish sites, such as the city of Hebron (al-Khalil). Many of them would later regret this decision and back the push to occupy the West Bank in the June 1967 war, but at the time the Jordanian quid pro quo was very tempting indeed: Abdullah promised not to join any all-Arab military operations against the Jewish state. There were ups and downs in these negotiations as the Mandate drew to an end, but they remained intact not just because there were so few Jews in the West Bank but also because the Jordanians, with the help of an Iraqi contingent, successfully repelled repeated Jewish attempts to occupy parts of the West Bank throughout the second half of 1948 (one of the few triumphant chapters in the Arab military history of 1948).6
This decided the geographical territory the Zionist movement coveted, in other words, Palestine as a whole, the same territory they had demanded in the Biltmore programme of 1942, but with this one qualification, if one accepts – as most historians do today – that the Zionist leadership was commited to their collusion with the Jordanians. This meant that the Jewish leadership anticipated their future state to stretch over eighty per cent of Mandatory Palestine: the fifty-six per cent promised to the Jews by the UN, with an additional twenty-four per cent taken from the Arab state the UN
had allocated to the Palestinians. The remaining twenty per cent would be picked up by the Jordanians.7
This tacit agreement with Jordan in many ways constituted the second
step towards ensuring the ethnic cleansing operation could go ahead unhindered: crucially it neutralised the strongest army in the Arab world, and confined it to battle with the Jewish forces solely in a very small part of Palestine. Without the Jordanian Army, the Arab Legion, the Arab world lacked all serious capacity to defend the Palestinians or foil the Zionist plan to establish a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous population.
Creating the Means
O terceiro e possivelmente mais decisivo passo para garantir uma limpeza étnica bem-sucedida foi a construção de uma capacidade militar adequada. A Consultoria não queria ter dúvidas de que a força militar que a comunidade judaica possuía seria forte o suficiente para implementar com sucesso seu plano de duas frentes para tomar a maior parte da Palestina e deslocar os palestinos que vivem lá. Além de assumir o Estado Obrigatório assim que as últimas tropas britânicas partissem, ele precisaria interromper todas as tentativas das forças árabes de invadir o Estado judeu em formação, ao mesmo tempo em que realizava a limpeza étnica de todas as partes da Palestina que ocuparia. Um exército profissional altamente competente tornou-se, assim, uma ferramenta vital na construção de um Estado solidamente judeu na ex-Palestina Obrigatória.
Ao todo, às vésperas da guerra de 1948, a força de combate judaica era de cerca de 50.000 soldados, dos quais 30.000 eram soldados de combate e o restante auxiliares que viviam nos vários assentamentos. Em maio de 1948, essas tropas puderam contar com a ajuda de uma pequena força aérea e marinha, e com as unidades de tanques, carros blindados e artilharia pesada que os acompanhavam. Diante deles estavam equipamentos paramilitares palestinos irregulares que não contavam com mais de 7000 soldados: uma força de combate que não tinha toda estrutura ou hierarquia e estava mal equipada quando comparada com as forças judaicas.8 Além disso, em fevereiro de 1948, cerca de 1000 voluntários haviam entrado do mundo árabe, chegando a 3000 nos meses seguintes.9
Até maio de 1948, os dois lados estavam mal equipados. Em seguida, o recém-fundado exército israelense, com a ajuda do Partido Comunista do país,
receberam um grande carregamento de armas pesadas da Tchecoslováquia e da União Soviética,10 enquanto os exércitos árabes regulares trouxeram alguns armamentos pesados próprios. Algumas semanas após a guerra, o recrutamento israelense foi tão eficiente que, no final do verão, seu exército estava em 80.000 soldados. A força regular árabe nunca ultrapassou a barreira dos 50.000 e, além disso, havia parado de receber armas da Grã-Bretanha, que era seu principal fornecedor de armas.11
Em outras palavras, durante os estágios iniciais da limpeza étnica (até maio de 1948), alguns milhares de palestinos e árabes irregulares enfrentavam dezenas de milhares de tropas judaicas bem treinadas. À medida que os estágios seguintes evoluíam, uma força judaica de quase o dobro do número de todos os exércitos árabes combinados teve poucos problemas para concluir o trabalho.
À margem da principal potência militar judaica operavam dois grupos mais extremos: o Irgun (comumente referido como Etzel em hebraico) e o Stern Gang (Lehi). O Irgun havia se separado da Hagana em 1931 e na década de 1940 foi liderado por Menachem Begin. Tinha desenvolvido as suas próprias políticas agressivas em relação à presença britânica e à população local. A Gangue Stern foi um ramo do Irgun, que deixou em 1940. Juntamente com os Hagana, essas três organizações foram unidas em um exército militar durante os dias da Nakba (embora, como veremos, nem sempre agissem em uníssono e coordenação).
Uma parte importante do esforço militar dos sionistas foi o treinamento de unidades especiais de comando, a Palmach, fundada em 1941. Originalmente, estes foram criados para ajudar o exército britânico na guerra contra os nazistas, caso estes chegassem à Palestina. Logo, o zelo e as atividades do Palmach foram dirigidos contra as áreas rurais palestinas. A partir de 1944, foi também a principal força pioneira na construção de novos assentamentos judaicos. Antes de ser desmantelado no outono de 1948, seus membros eram muito ativos e realizavam algumas das principais operações de limpeza no norte e no centro do país.
Nas operações de limpeza étnica que se seguiram, os Hagana, os Palmach e os Irgun foram as forças que realmente ocuparam as aldeias. Logo após sua ocupação, as aldeias foram transferidas para as mãos de tropas menos combatentes, a Guarda de Campo (Hish em hebraico). Este era o braço logístico das forças judaicas, estabelecidas em 1939. Algumas das atrocidades que acompanharam as operações de limpeza foram cometidas por essas unidades auxiliares.
The Hagana also had an intelligence unit, founded in 1933, whose main function was to eavesdrop on the British authorities and intercept communications between the Arab political institutions inside and outside the country. It is this unit that I mentioned earlier as supervising the preparation of the village files and setting up the network of spies and collaborators inside the rural hinterland that helped identify the thousands of Palestinians who were later executed on the spot or imprisoned for long periods once the ethnic cleansing had started.12
Together these troops formed a military might strong enough to reinforce Ben-Gurion’s conviction in the ability of the Jewish community both to become the heir to the Mandatory state and to take over most of the Palestinian territory and the properties and assets it contained.13
Immediately upon the adoption of UN Resolution 181 the Arab leaders officially declared they would dispatch troops to defend Palestine. And yet, not once between the end of November 1947 and May 1948 did Ben- Gurion and, one should add, the small group of leading Zionist figures around him sense that their future state was in any danger, or that the list of military operations was so overwhelming that they would impinge on the proper expulsion of the Palestinians. In public, the leaders of the Jewish community portrayed doomsday scenarios and warned their audiences of an imminent ‘second Holocaust’. In private, however, they never used this discourse. They were fully aware that the Arab war rhetoric was in no way matched by any serious preparation on the ground. As we saw, they were well informed about the poor equipment of these armies and their lack of battlefield experience and, for that matter, training, and thus knew they had only a limited capability to wage any kind of war. The Zionist leaders were confident they had the upper hand militarily and could drive through most of their ambitious plans. And they were right.
Moshe Sharett, the Jewish state’s foreign minister ‘designate’, was out of the country during the months leading up to the declaration of the state. Every now and then he would receive letters from Ben-Gurion directing him how best to navigate between the need to recruit global and Jewish support for a future state in danger of being annihilated, and at the same time keeping him abreast of the true reality on the ground. When, on 18 February 1948, Sharett wrote to Ben-Gurion: ‘We will have only enough troops to defend ourselves, not to take over the country,’ Ben-Gurion replied:
If we will receive in time the arms we have already purchased, and maybe even receive some of that promised to us by the UN, we will be able not only to defend [ourselves] but also to inflict death blows on the Syrians in their own country – and take over Palestine as a whole. I am in no doubt of this. We can face all the Arab forces. This is not a mystical belief but a cold and rational calculation based on practical examination.14
This letter was wholly consistent with other letters the two had been exchanging ever since Sharett had been dispatched abroad. It began with a letter in December 1947 in which Ben-Gurion sought to convince his political correspondent of the Jews’ military supremacy in Palestine: ‘We can starve the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa [if we wish to do so].’15 This confident posture regarding the Hagana’s ability to take Palestine as a whole, and even beyond, would be maintained for the duration of the fighting, inhibited only by the promises they had made to the Jordanians.
There were, of course, moments of crisis, as I will describe later, in implementing the policies. These occurred when it proved impossible to defend all the isolated Jewish settlements and to secure free access of supply to the Jewish parts of Jerusalem. But most of the time the troops the Zionist leaders had at their disposal were sufficient to allow the Jewish community to prepare for both a possible confrontation with the Arab world and for the cleansing of the local population. Moreover, the Arab intervention only materialised on 15 May 1948, five and a half months after the UN partition resolution had been adopted. During that long period most of the Palestinians – apart from a few enclaves where paramilitary groups were trying to organise some sort of resistance – remained defenseless in the face of Jewish operations already underway.
When it comes to reconstructing that part of an historical process where intangible ideology becomes tangible reality, there are two options that we, as historians, can choose. In the case of 1948 Palestine, the first would be to draw the reader’s attention to how consistent the Zionist leaders – from Herzl down to Ben-Gurion – were in their desire to empty the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible, and then describe how this links up with the actual expulsions perpetrated in 1948. This approach is preeminently represented by the work of the historian Nur Masalha, who
has meticulously charted for us the genealogy of the expulsionist dreams and plans of 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. As we have seen, Ben-Gurion’s thoughts on the issue were clearly articulated by 1937. His biographer Michael Bar-Zohar explains, ‘In internal discussions, in instructions to his people, the “Old Man” demonstrated a clear stand: it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state.’17 The other option would be to concentrate on the incremental development of policy-making and try to show how, meeting by meeting, decisions about strategy and methods gradually coalesced into a systematic and comprehensive ethnic cleansing plan. I will make use of both options.
The question of what to do with the Palestinian population in the future Jewish state was being discussed intensively in the months leading up to the end of the Mandate, and a new notion kept popping up in the Zionist corridors of power: ‘the Balance’. This term refers to the ‘demographic balance’ between Arabs and Jews in Palestine: when it tilts against Jewish majority or exclusivity in the land, the situation is described as disastrous. And the demographic balance, both within the borders the UN offered the Jews and within those as defined by the Zionist leadership itself, was exactly that in the eyes of the Jewish leadership: a looming disaster.
The Zionist leadership came up with two kinds of response to this predicament: one for public consumption, the other for the limited corps of intimates Ben-Gurion had collected around himself. The overt policy he and his colleagues started voicing publicly in forums such as the local People’s Assembly (the Jewish ‘parliament’ in Palestine) was the need to encourage massive Jewish immigration into the country. In smaller venues the leaders admitted that increased immigration would never be enough to counterbalance the Palestinian majority: immigration needed to be combined with other means. Ben-Gurion had described these means already in 1937 when discussing with friends the absence of a solid Jewish majority in a future state. He told them that such a ‘reality’ – the Palestinian majority in the land – would compel the Jewish settlers to use force to bring about the ‘dream’ – a purely Jewish Palestine.18 Ten years later, on 3 December 1947 in a speech in front of senior members of his Mapai party (the Eretz Israel Workers Party), he outlined more explicitly how to deal with
unacceptable realities such as the one envisaged by the UN partition resolution:
There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty ... Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.19
On 2 November, i.e., almost a month before the UN General Assembly Resolution was adopted, and in a different venue, the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion spelled out for the first time in the clearest possible terms that ethnic cleansing formed the alternative, or complementary, means of ensuring that the new state would be an exclusively Jewish one. 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.’20
But how to implement this strategic goal? Simcha Flapan asserts that the majority of the Zionist leaders at the time would have stopped short of mass expulsion. In other words, had the Palestinians refrained from attacking Jewish targets after the partition resolution was adopted, and had the Palestinian elite not left the towns, it would have been difficult for the Zionist movement to implement its vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.21 And yet, Flapan also accepted that Plan Dalet was a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Unlike, for instance, the analysis Benny Morris offers in the first edition of his book on the making of the refugee problem, but very much in line with the shift he gave that analysis in the second edition, the clear blueprint for Palestine’s ethnic cleansing, Plan Dalet, was not created in a vacuum.22 It emerged as the ultimate scheme in response to the way events gradually unfolded on the ground, through a kind of ad-hoc policy that crystallised with time. But that response was always inexorably grounded in the Zionist ideology and the purely Jewish state that was its goal. Thus, the main objective was clear from the beginning – the de-Arabisation of Palestine – whereas the means to achieve this most effectively evolved in tandem with the actual military
occupation of the Palestinian territories that were to become the new Jewish state of Israel.
Now that the territory had been defined and military supremacy assured, the fourth step for the Zionist leadership towards completing the dispossession of Palestine was to put in place the actual concrete means that would enable them to remove such a large population. In the territory of their future greater Jewish state there lived, in early December 1947, one million Palestinians, out of an overall Palestinian population of 1.3 million, while the Jewish community itself was a minority of 600,000.
Choosing the Means: Worrisome Normality (Detember 1947)
The Arab Higher Committee declared a three-day strike and organised a public demonstration in protest against the UN decision to adopt the Partition Resolution. There was nothing new in this type of response: it was the usual Palestinian reaction to policies they deemed harmful and dangerous–short and ineffective. Some of the demonstrations got out of hand and spilled over into Jewish business areas, as happened in Jerusalem where demonstrators attacked Jewish shops and a market. But other incidents were attacks that, according to Jewish intelligence, had nothing to do with the UN decision. For example, there was the ambushing of a Jewish bus, an incident that almost all Israeli history books identify as the beginning of the 1948 war. Staged by the Abu Qishq gang, the action was motivated more by clannish and criminal impulses than by any national agenda.23 In any case, after three days, foreign reporters observing the demonstrations and strikes detected a growing reluctance among common Palestinians to continue the protest, and noted a clear desire to return to normalcy. After all, for most Palestinians Resolution 181 meant a dismal, but not new, chapter in their history. Over the centuries, the country had been passed from one hand to another, sometimes belonging to European or Asian invaders and sometimes to parts of Muslim empires. However, the peoples’ lives had continued more or less unchanged: they toiled the land or conducted their trade wherever they were, and quickly resigned themselves to the new situation until it changed once again. Hence, villagers and city dwellers alike waited patiently to see what it would mean to be part of either a Jewish state or any other new regime that might replace British
rule. Most of them had no idea what was in store for them, that what was about to happen would constitute an unprecedented chapter in Palestine’s history: not a mere transition from one ruler to another, but the actual dispossession of the people living on the land.
The eyes of the Palestinian community now turned towards Cairo, the seat of the Arab League and the temporary residence of their leader, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, in exile ever since the British had expelled him in 1937. The first days after the resolution found the Arab leaders in total disarray, but gradually during December 1947 some sort of a policy began to take shape. Arab leaders, especially of the countries neighbouring Palestine, preferred not to take individual or drastic decisions on the subject. They were perfectly aware that public opinion in their countries wanted to see urgent action taken against the UN decision. Consequently, the Arab League Council, made up of the Arab states’ foreign ministers, recommended the dispatch of arms to the Palestinians and the establishment of an all-Arab volunteer force, to be called the Arab Liberation Army (Jaish al-Inqath, literally ‘Rescue Army’, from the verb anqatha, ‘to rescue from imminent danger’). The League appointed a Syrian general at its head. Later that month, small groups of this army began trickling into Palestine, thereby providing a welcome pretext for the Consultancy to discuss the further escalation of the Hagana operations already underway.
The pattern was set, and from this perspective the month of December 1947 is perhaps the most intriguing chapter in the history of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing. The mild reaction in the Arab capitals surrounding Palestine was welcomed by Ben-Gurion’s Consultancy – while the indifferent, almost lethargic Palestinian response disturbed them. In the first three days after the Partition Resolution was adopted, a small select group within the Consultancy met every day,24 but they then relaxed somewhat and the format returned to the weekly Wednesday afternoon meetings of the High Command, with additional get-togethers of the smaller group a day after (usually at Ben-Gurion’s home). The first meetings in December were devoted to assessing the Palestinian mood and intention. The ‘experts’ reported that, despite the early trickling of volunteers into the Palestinian villages and towns, the people themselves seemed eager to continue life as normal.25 This craving for normality remained typical of the Palestinians inside Palestine in the years to come, even in their worst crises and at the
nadir of their struggle; and normality is what they have been denied ever since 1948.
But the swift return to normality and the Palestinians’ wish not to become embroiled in a civil war posed a problem for a Zionist leadership determined to reduce drastically, if not totally, the number of Arabs within their future Jewish state. They needed a pretext, and this of course would be more difficult to create if the moderate Palestinian reaction continued. ‘Fortunately’ for them, at one point the army of Arab volunteers expanded their acts of hostility against Jewish convoys and settlements, thus making it easier for the Consultancy to frame the occupation and expulsion policy as a form of justified ‘retaliation’, tagmul in Hebrew. But already in December 1947, the Consultancy had begun to use the Hebrew word yotzma (‘initiative’) to describe the strategy it intended to follow with respect to the Palestinians in the territory of their coveted Jewish state. ‘Initiative’ meant taking action against the Palestinian population without waiting for a pretext for tagmul to come along. Increasingly, pretexts for retaliation would be conspicuously missing.
Palti Sela was a member of the intelligence units that would play a crucial role in implementing the ethnic cleansing operations. One of their tasks was to report daily on the mood among, and trends within, the rural population of Palestine. Stationed in the north-eastern valleys of the country, Sela was astonished by the apparent difference in the way the communities on either side reacted to the new political reality unfolding around them. The Jewish farmers in the kibbutzim and in the collective or private settlements turned their residences into military outposts – reinforcing their fortifications, mending fences, laying mines, etc. – ready to defend and attack; each member was issued with a gun and integrated into the Jewish military force. The Palestinian villages, to Sela’s surprise, ‘continued life as usual’. In fact in the three villages he visited – Ayndur, Dabburiyya and Ayn Mahel – people received him as they had always done, greeting him as a potential customer for bartering, trading and exchanging pleasantries or news. These villages were near the British hospital of Afula, where units of the Arab Legion were stationed as part of the British police force in the country. The Jordanian soldiers, too, seemed to regard the situation as normal and were not engaged in any special preparations. Throughout December 1947, Sela summed up in his monthly report: normalcy is the rule and agitation the exception.26 If these people were to
be expelled, it could not be done as ‘retaliation’ for any aggression on their part.
THE CHANGING MOOD IN THE CONSULTANCY: FROM RETALIATION TO INTIMIDATION
On the top floor of the Red House, on Wednesday afternoon, 10 December 1947, a disappointed Consultancy met to assess the situation. Two speakers were leading the conversation, Ezra Danin and Yehoshua Palmon.27
Ezra Danin, as already mentioned, was a citrus grove businessman who had been invited into the intelligence corps because of his knowledge of Arabic (he was born in Syria). Danin was in his mid-forties when he joined the Hagana in 1940; in 1947 he became the head of its ‘Arab section’, which supervised the work of Arab Jews and indigenous Arab collaborators who spied for the High Command within the Palestinian community as well as in neighbouring Arab countries. In May 1948 he assumed a new role: supervising the post-occupation activities of the Jewish forces when the ethnic cleansing operation began in earnest. His people were responsible for the procedures that were followed after a Palestinian village or neighbourhood had been occupied. This meant that, with the help of informants, they detected and identified men who were suspected of having attacked Jews in the past, or of belonging to the Palestinian national movement, or who simply were disliked by the local informants who exploited the opportunity to settle old scores. The men thus selected were usually executed on the spot. Danin quite often came to inspect these operations at first hand. His unit was also responsible, as soon as a village or town had been occupied, for separating all men of ‘military age’, namely between ten and fifty, from the rest of the villagers, who were then ‘just’ expelled or imprisoned for long periods in POW camps.28
Yehoshua (‘Josh’) Palmon was in many ways Danin’s second-in- command and also took a great personal interest in the implementation of the policy of selection, interrogation and sometimes execution. Younger
than Danin and born in Palestine itself, Palmon already had an impressive military career behind him. As a recruit to a British commando unit he had participated in the occupation of Syria and Lebanon in 1941 that brought French Vichy rule there to an end. The officers under Danin and Palmon’s command were known to and feared by many Palestinians, who quickly learned to spot them despite their attempts to dress anonymously in dull khaki uniform. They acted behind the scenes in hundreds of villages, and the oral history of the Nakba is full of references to these men and the atrocities they committed.29
But on 10 December 1947, Danin and Palmon were still hidden from the public eye. They opened the meeting by reporting that members of the Palestinian urban elite were leaving their houses and moving to their winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. This was a typical reaction from the urbanites in moments of stress – moving to safety until the situation calmed down. And yet Israeli historians, including revisionist ones such as Benny Morris, have interpreted these traditional temporary sorties as ‘voluntary flight’, in order to tell us that Israel was not responsible for them. But they left with the full intention of returning to their homes again later, only to be prevented by the Israelis from doing so: not allowing people to return to their homes after a short stay abroad is as much expulsion as any other act directed against the local people with the aim of depopulation.
Danin reported that this was the only instance they had been able to detect of Palestinians moving towards areas outside the UN-designated borders of the Jewish state, apart from several Bedouin tribes who had relocated closer to Arab villages out of fear of Jewish attacks. Danin seems to have been disappointed by this, because almost in the same breath he called for a far more aggressive policy – despite the fact that there were no offensive initiatives or tendencies on the Palestinian side – and went on to explain to the Consultancy the benefits it would have: his informants had told him that violent actions against Palestinians would terrify them, ‘which will render help from the Arab world useless,’ implying that the Jewish forces could do whatever they wanted with them.
‘What do you mean by violent action?’ inquired Ben-Gurion. ‘Destroying the traffic (buses, lorries that carry agricultural products and
private cars) … sinking their fishing boats in Jaffa, closing their shops and preventing raw materials from reaching their factories.’
‘How will they react?’ asked Ben-Gurion.
‘The initial reaction may be riots, but eventually they will understand the message.’ The main goal was thus to assure that the population would be at the Zionists’ mercy, so their fate could be sealed. Ben-Gurion seemed to like this suggestion, and wrote to Sharett three days later to explain that the general idea: the Palestinian community in the Jewish area would be ‘at our mercy’ and anything the Jews wanted could be done to them, including ‘starving them to death’.30
It was another Syrian Jew, Eliyahu Sasson, who tried to some extent to play the devil’s advocate in the Consultancy; he seemed doubtful about the new aggressive approach Danin and Palmon were outlining. He had emigrated to Palestine in 1927, and was perhaps the most intriguing and also ambivalent member of the Consultancy. In 1919, before becoming a Zionist, he had joined the Arab national movement in Syria. In the 1940s, his main role was to instigate a policy of ‘divide and rule’ inside the Palestinian community but also in the neighbouring Arab countries. He was thus instrumental in strengthening the alliance with the Jordanian Hashemite king over the future of Palestine, but his attempts to pit one Palestinian group against another would become obsolete now that the Zionist leadership was moving towards a comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the country as a whole. However, his legacy of ‘divide and rule’ had its inevitable impact on Israeli policy in the years to come, as we can see, for instance, in the efforts Ariel Sharon made in 1981 when, as defence minister and on the advice of the Arabist Professor Menahem Milson, he attempted to undermine the Palestinian resistance movement by setting up so-called ‘Village Leagues’ as part of a pro-Israeli outfit in the occupied West Bank. This was a short-term and abortive endeavour. A more successful one was the incorporation, as early as 1948, of the Druze minority into the Israeli army within units that later became the principal tool for oppressing the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
The 10 December meeting would be the last in which Sasson tried to persuade his colleagues that despite the need for ‘a comprehensive plan’, as he called it – namely the uprooting of the local population – it was still prudent not to regard the whole Arab population as enemies, and to continue employing ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics. He was very proud of his role in the 1930s in arming Palestinian groups, the so-called ‘peace gangs’, that were made up of rivals of the Palestinian leader al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. These units fought against the national Palestinian formations during the
Arab Revolt. Sasson now wanted to bring these divide and rule tactics to target some loyal Bedouin tribes.
DECEMBER 1947: EARLY ACTIONS
The Consultancy not only rejected the idea of incorporating more collaborative ‘Arabs’, but they also went so far as to suggest putting behind them the whole notion of ‘retaliation’, as adopted at the time on the advice of Orde Wingate. Most of the participants in the meeting favoured ‘engagement’ in a systematic campaign of intimidation. Ben-Gurion approved, and the new policy was implemented the day after the meeting.
The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ (hasiyur ha-alim). This, too, was part of the legacy of Orde Wingate, who had instructed the Hagana in the use of this terrorist method against Palestinian villagers in the 1930s. In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart. Even in Wingate’s day this was already intended more as a show of force than a punitive action or retaliatory attack.
In December 1947, two such defenseless villages were chosen for the revival of Wingate’s tactics: Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa. When today you drive south-east of the city of Ramla for about 15 kilometres, especially on a wintry day when the typical thorny, yellow gorse bushes of the inner plains of Palestine turn green, you come upon a bizarre view: long lines of rubble and stones stretching out on an open field surrounding a relatively large imaginary square area. These were the stone fences of Deir Ayyub. In 1947, the rubble was a low stone wall that had been built more for aesthetic reasons than for the protection of the village, which had about 500 inhabitants. Named after Ayyub – Job in Arabic – most of its people were Muslim, living in stone and mud houses typical of the area. Just before the
Jewish attack, the village had been celebrating the opening of a new school, which already had the gratifying number of fifty-one pupils enrolled in it, all made possible by money the villagers had collected among themselves and from which they could also pay the teacher’s salary. But their joy was instantly obliterated when at ten o’clock at night a company of twenty Jewish troops entered the village – which, like so many villages in December, had no defence mechanism of any kind – and began firing randomly at several houses. The village was later attacked three more times before being evacuated by force in April 1948, when it was completely destroyed. Jewish forces made a similar attack in December against Beit Affa in the Gaza Strip, but here the raiders were successfully repelled.31
Threatening leaflets were also distributed in Syrian and Lebanese villages on Palestine’s border, warning the population:
If the war will be taken to your place, it will cause massive expulsion of the villagers, with their wives and their children. Those of you who do not wish to come to such a fate, I will tell them: in this war there will be merciless killing, no compassion. If you are not participating in this war, you will not have to leave your houses and villages.32
There now followed a number of operations of destruction in limited areas throughout rural and urban Palestine. Actions in the countryside were at first hesitant. Three villages in the upper eastern Galilee were selected: Khisas, Na’ima and Jahula, but the operation was cancelled, perhaps because the High Command deemed them as yet too ambitious. The cancellation, however, was partly ignored by the commander of the Palmach in the north, Yigal Allon. Allon wanted to experience an attack on at least one village, and decided to assault Khisas.
Khisas was a small village with a few hundred Muslims and one hundred Christians, who lived peacefully together in a unique topographical location in the northern part of Hula Plain, on a natural terrace that was about 100 metres wide. This terrace had been formed thousands of years before by the gradual shrinking of Lake Hula. Foreign travellers used to single this village out for the natural beauty of its location on the banks of the lake, and its proximity to the Hasbani River.33 Jewish troops attacked the village on 18 December 1947, and randomly started blowing up houses at the dead
of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack. The incident shocked The New York Times’ correspondent, who closely followed the unfolding events. He went and demanded an explanation from the Hagana, which at first denied the operation. When the inquisitive reporter did not let go, they eventually admitted it. Ben-Gurion issued a dramatic public apology, claiming the action had been unauthorised but, a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.34
When the Consultancy had met again on Wednesday, 17 December, they were joined by Yohanan Ratner and Fritz Eisenshtater (Eshet), two officers who had been designated by Ben-Gurion to formulate a ‘national strategy’ before he devised the Consultancy body. The meeting expanded on the implications of the successful Khisas operation, with some members calling for additional ‘retaliatory’ operations that were to include the destruction of villages, expulsion of people, and resettlement in their stead by Jewish settlers. The following day, in front of the formal larger body of the Jewish community that was responsible for defence affairs, ‘The Defence Committee’, Ben-Gurion summarized the earlier meeting. 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 committee also approved the appointment of intelligence officers for each such operation. They would play a crucial role in executing the next stages of the ethnic cleansing.35
The new policy was also aimed at the urban spaces of Palestine, and
Haifa was chosen as the first target. Interestingly, this city is singled out by mainstream Israeli historians and the revisionist historian Benny Morris as an example of genuine Zionist goodwill towards the local population. The reality was very different by the end of 1947. From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them. They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab
residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos. A special unit of the Hagana, Hashahar (‘Dawn’), made up of mistarvim – literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians – was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units. On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’36 But worse was to come.
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. This class consciousness was curbed in the 1920s and 1930s by both national leaderships, in particular by the Jewish Trade Union movement, but it continued to motivate joint industrial action against employers of all kinds, and inspired mutual help at times of recession and scarcity.
The Jewish attacks in the city heightened tensions in one of the major areas where Jews and Arabs worked shoulder to shoulder: the refinery plant of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in the bay area. This began with a gang from the Irgun throwing a bomb into a large group of Palestinians who were waiting to enter the plant. The Irgun claimed it was in retaliation for an earlier attack by Arab workers on their Jewish co-workers, a new phenomenon in an industrial site where Arab and Jewish workers had usually joined forces in trying to secure better labour conditions from their British employers. But the UN Partition Resolution seriously dented that class solidarity and tensions grew high. Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun, who had already done so before 1947. However, this particular attack in the refineries was undertaken in coordination with the Hagana forces as part of the new scheme to terrorise the Palestinians out of Haifa. Within hours, Palestinian workers reacted and rioted, killing a large number of Jewish workers – thirty-nine – in one of the worst but also last Palestinian counterattacks; the last, because there the usual chain of retaliatory skirmishes stopped.
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. At the time the British authorities were still responsible for maintaining law and order and were very much present in Palestine. The village the High Command selected was Balad al-Shaykh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz al-Din al- Qassam, one of Palestine’s most revered and charismatic leaders of the 1930s, who was killed by the British in 1935. His grave is one of the few remains of this village, about ten kilometres east of Haifa, still extant today.37
A local commander, Haim Avinoam, was ordered to ‘encircle the village, kill the largest possible number of men, damage property, but refrain from attacking women and children.’38 The attack took place on 31 December and lasted three hours. It left over sixty Palestinians dead, not all of them men. 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. At the same time as the attack on Balad al-Shaykh, the 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. The British looked the other way while these atrocities were being committed.
Two weeks later, in January 1948, the Palmach ‘used’ the momentum
that had been created to attack and expel the relatively isolated Haifa neighbourhood of Hawassa. This was the poorest quarter of town, originally made up of huts and inhabited by impoverished villagers who had come to seek work there in the 1920s, all living in dismal conditions. At the time there were about 5000 Palestinians in this eastern part of the city. Huts were blown up, and so was the local school, while the ensuing panic caused many people to flee. The school was rebuilt on the ruins of Hawassa, now part of the Tel-Amal neighbourhood, but this building too was recently destroyed to make room for a new Jewish school.39
JANUARY 1948: FAREWELL TO RETALIATION
These operations were accompanied by acts of terrorism by the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Their ability to sow fear in Haifa’s Arab neighbourhoods, and in other cities as well, was directly influenced by the gradual but obvious British withdrawal from any responsibility for law and order. In the first week of January alone the Irgun executed more terrorist attacks than in any period before. These included detonating a bomb in the Sarraya house in Jaffa, the seat of the local national committee,40 which collapsed leaving twenty-six people dead. It continued with the bombing of the Samiramis Hotel in Qatamon, in western Jerusalem, in which many people died, including the Spanish consul. This last fact seems to have prompted Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British High Commissioner, to issue a feeble complaint to Ben-Gurion, who refused to condemn the action, either in private or in public. In Haifa such actions were now a daily occurrence.41
Cunningham appealed again to Ben-Gurion when in the weeks that followed he noticed the shift in the Hagana’s policy from retaliation to offensive initiatives, but his protestations were ignored. In the last meeting he had with Ben-Gurion in March 1948, he told the Zionist leader that to his mind, while the Palestinians were trying to maintain calm in the country, the Hagana did all it could to escalate the situation.42 This did not contradict Ben-Gurion’s assessment. He told the Jewish Agency Executive, shortly after he met Cunningham: ‘I believe the majority of the Palestinian masses accept the partition as a fait accompli and do not believe it is possible to overcome or reject it ... The decisive majority of them do not want to fight us.’43 From Paris, the Jewish Agency representative there, Emile Najjar, wondered how he could pursue an effective propaganda policy given the present reality.44
The national committee of the Palestinians in Haifa appealed again and again to the British, assuming, wrongly, that since Haifa was to be the last station in the British evacuation, they would be able to rely on their protection at least until then. When this failed to materialise, they started sending numerous desperate letters to members of the Arab Higher