The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (15 page)

Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, on the other hand, left the meeting with the impression that they had been given a free rein to start massive attacks against the Palestinian towns and villages within the coveted Jewish state. The military men appeared to grasp Ben-Gurion’s wishes better, or at least assumed that he would not object to more aggressive initiatives on their part. They were right.

Ben-Gurion’s shift at this point to systematic operations of take-over, occupation and expulsion had much to do with his keen understanding of the fluctuations in the global mood. In the Long Seminar we find him stressing the need for further swift operations as he sensed a possible change in the international political will regarding the Palestine crisis. UN officials had begun to realise that the peace resolution their organisation had adopted was not a solution at all, but actually fostered war, as had American diplomats and British officials. True, the presence of the ALA on the whole served to restrain Palestinian actions and postponed any significant general Arab invasion, but the danger of a shift in UN and American policies remained, and establishing facts, Ben-Gurion believed, was the best means to thwart any such potential change of policy.

Moreover, the sense that an opportune moment for action towards cleansing the country was developing was reinforced by the fact that the Zionist leadership knew how weak the Palestinian and Arab military opposition actually was. The intelligence unit of the Hagana was well aware, through telegrams it intercepted, that the ALA failed to cooperate with the paramilitary groups led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni in Jerusalem and Hassan Salameh in Jaffa. This lack of cooperation resulted in the ALA deciding, in January 1948, not to operate in the cities but rather to try and attack isolated Jewish settlements.
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The acting commander of the ALA was Fawzi Al-Qawqji, a Syrian officer, who had led a group of volunteers, mainly from Iraq, into Palestine in the 1936 Revolt. Ever since then he had been at loggerheads with the Husayni family, and gave his loyalty instead to the governments of Syria and Iraq, who had authorised his move into Palestine both
in 1936 and in 1948. The Iraqi government saw al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni as a rival to its Hashemite sister-country Jordan, while the Syrian government of the time was apprehensive of his pan-Arabist ambitions. Hence, an Arab League decision to divide Palestine between the three commanders, al-Qawqji in the north, Abd al-Qadir in Jerusalem and Salameh in Jaffa, was a farce, and what little military power the Palestinians themselves possessed was made wholly ineffective by the way it was being employed.

In a way, the hesitations in the global community about the way things were going and the highly limited nature of the pan-Arab military activity could have restored calm to Palestine and opened the way for a renewed attempt to solve the problem. However, the new Zionist policy of an aggressive offensive that the Consultancy hastened to adopt blocked all possible moves towards a more reconciliatory reality.

On 9 January 1948, the first significant unit of the ALA volunteer army crossed into Palestine, mainly into the areas the UN had allotted to the future Arab state; quite often they camped along the boundaries of this imaginary state. In general, they adopted a defensive policy and focused on organising the people’s fortification lines in cooperation with the national committees – bodies of local notables that had been established in 1937, which acted as an emergency leadership in the cities – and with the village mukhtars. However, in several limited cases, especially after just crossing the border, they assaulted Jewish convoys and settlements. The first settlements that came under attack were Kefar Sold (9 January 1948) and Kefar Etzion (14 January 1948). Thirty-five Jewish troops, who were part of a convoy that was sent to help Kefar Etzion (south west of Jerusalem), were ambushed and killed. Long after these Hagana troops were killed, ‘35’, ‘
Lamed-Heh
’ in Hebrew (which substitutes letters for numbers), continued to serve as a codename for operations carried out supposedly in retaliation for this attack. Ben-Gurion’s biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, commented rightly that these operations had already been contemplated during the Long Seminar and all were aimed at inflicting the kind of collateral damage Ben-Gurion had envisaged there as desirable. The attack on the
Lamed-Heh
convoy proved to be just one more pretext for the new offensive initiative, the final plan for which would be implemented in March 1948.
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After the Long Seminar, Jewish military operations began more systematically to transcend retaliation and punitive action, moving to cleansing initiatives within the UN-designated area of the Jewish state. The word
cleansing, ‘
tihur
’, was used economically in the Consultancy’s meetings, but appears on every order the High Command passed down to the units on the ground. It means in Hebrew what it means in any other language: the expulsion of entire populations from their villages and towns. This determination overshadowed all other political consideration. There were crossroads ahead where the Zionist leadership was offered a chance to take a different course of action, both by the United States and by Arab actors on the scene. Ben-Gurion and his Consultancy had decided to blaze a clear road ahead, and they rejected these offers one after the other.

Nothing of the atmosphere that pervaded the first meetings of the Consultancy was reflected in the fiery speeches Ben-Gurion delivered to the wider public. Melodramatic and full of pathos, he told his audience: ‘This is a war aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community,’ never referring to the passivity of the Palestinians or the provocative nature of Zionist actions.

These speeches, one should add, were not just rhetoric. The Jewish forces did suffer casualties in their attempts to keep the lines open to all the isolated settlements the Zionists had planted in the heart of the Palestinian areas. By the end of January, 400 Jewish settlers had died in these attacks – a high number for a community of 660,000 (but still a much lower number than the 1500 Palestinians who had so far been killed by the random bombardment and shelling of their villages and neighbourhoods). These casualties Ben-Gurion now depicted as ‘victims of a second Holocaust’.

The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings. Already in 1945, Natan Alterman, the national poet of the Jewish community, had identified the impending confrontation with the Palestinians with the war against the Nazis in Europe:

In some of his public appearances, Ben-Gurion even went so far as to describe the Jewish war effort as an attempt to protect the honour of the UN and its Charter. This discrepancy between a destructive and violent Zionist policy on the one hand and an overt discourse of peace on the other will reoccur at various junctures in the history of the conflict, but the deceitfulness in 1948 seems to have been particularly startling.

In February 1948, David Ben-Gurion decided to enlarge the Consultancy and absorb into it members of the Zionist organisations responsible for recruitment and arms purchase. Again, this brings to the fore how closely interconnected the issues of ethnic cleansing and military capability were. While still appearing outside with doomsday scenarios of a second Holocaust, the enlarged Consultancy heard Ben-Gurion outline amazing achievements in the compulsory recruitment the Zionist leadership had imposed on the Jewish community and in the arms purchases it had made, especially in the sphere of heavy weaponry and aircraft.

It was these new procurements of arms that by February 1948 had enabled the forces on the ground to extend their operations and act with greater efficiency in the Palestinian hinterland. A principal result of the upgraded weaponry were the heavy bombardments, especially from new mortars, that were now carried out on densely populated villages and neighbourhoods.

The confidence of the military can be gauged from the fact that the Jewish army was now able to develop its own weapons of destruction. Ben-Gurion followed personally the purchase of a particularly lethal weapon that would soon be used to set fire to the fields and houses of Palestinians: a flame-thrower. An Anglo-Jewish professor of chemistry, Sasha Goldberg, headed the project of purchasing and then manufacturing this weapon, first in a laboratory in London and later in Rehovot, south of Tel-Aviv, in what was to become the Weizmann Institute in the 1950s.
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The oral history of the Nakba is full of evidence of the terrible effect this weapon had on people and properties.

The flame-thrower project was part of a larger unit engaged in developing biological warfare under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir (later the president of Israel who in the 1980s, through a slip of the tongue, revealed to the world that the Jewish state possessed nuclear
weapons). The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February. Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people. Katzir reported to Ben-Gurion: ‘We are experimenting with animals. Our researchers were wearing gas masks and adequate outfit. Good results. The animals did not die (they were just blinded). We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.’ In June, Katzir suggested using it on human beings.
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More military might was also needed since the Arab Liberation Army units had now positioned themselves in some of the villages, and greater effort would be required to occupy them. In some places the arrival of the ALA was more important psychologically than materially. They had no time to turn the villagers into fighting men, nor did they have the equipment to defend the villages. All in all, the ALA had only reached a few villages by February, which meant that most of the Palestinians remained unaware of how dramatically and crucially their life was about to change. Neither their leaders nor the Palestinian press had any inkling of what was being contemplated behind closed doors in the Red House, close to the northern outskirts of Jaffa. 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.

In the middle of February 1948, the Consultancy met to discuss the implications of the growing presence of Arab volunteers inside Palestine. Eliyahu Sasson reported that no more than 3000 volunteers in total had so far entered as part of the ALA (Ben-Gurion’s diary cites a smaller number). He described all of them as ‘poorly trained’ and added that if ‘we do not provoke them, they will remain idle and the Arab states will send no more volunteers’. This prompted Yigal Allon once more to speak out vociferously in favour of large-scale cleansing operations, but he was opposed by Yaacov Drori, the designated Chief of Staff, who insisted they adopt a more cautious approach. However, Drori fell ill soon thereafter and ceased to play a role. He was replaced by the more bellicose Yigael Yadin.
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On 9 February, Yadin had already shown his true intentions by calling for ‘deep invasions’ into the Palestinian areas. He specified heavily populated villages such as Fassuta, Tarbikha, and Aylut in the northern Galilee as targets for such invasions, with the aim of totally destroying the villages. The Consultancy rejected the plan as too far-reaching and Ben-Gurion suggested shelving it for the time being. Yadin’s codename for his plan had
been ‘
Lamed-Heh
’; he had meant it as retaliation for the assault on the Gush Etzion convoy.
⁶⁸
A few days later, the Consultancy did approve other similar plans – with the same codename – inside Palestine’s rural areas, but still insisted they should be related, at least loosely, to Arab acts of hostility. These operations were also Yigael Yadin’s brainchild. They began on 13 February 1948 and focused on several areas. In Jaffa, houses were randomly selected and then dynamited with people still in them, the village of Sa‘sa was attacked, as well as three villages around Qisarya (Caesarea today).

The February operations, carefully planned by the Consultancy, differed from the actions that took place in December: no longer sporadic, they formed part of a first attempt to link the concept of unhampered Jewish transport on Palestine’s main routes with the ethnic cleansing of villages. But unlike the following month, when operations would be given codenames and clearly defined territories and targets, directives were still vague.

The first targets were three villages around the ancient Roman city of Caesarea, a town whose impressive history went all the way back to the Phoenicians. Established as a trading colony, Herod the Great later named it Caesarea in honour of his patron in Rome, Augustus Caesar. The largest of these villages was Qisarya, where 1500 people lived within the ancient walls of the old city. Among them, as was quite common in the Palestinian villages on the coast, were several Jewish families who had bought land there and lived practically inside the village. Most of the villagers lived in stone houses next to Bedouin families, who were part of the village but still lived in tents. The village wells provided enough water for both the semi-sedentary and the peasant communities, and allowed them to cultivate extensive tracts of land and grow a wide range of agricultural produce, including citrus fruit and bananas. Thus, Qisarya was a typical model of the live-and-letlive attitude that pervaded coastal rural life in Palestine.