The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (32 page)

But already, in the second half of July, Israeli pilots could tell from the spectacle unfolding before their eyes how effective their sorties were: throngs of refugees, carrying a few hastily collected possessions, flooded out of the villages onto the main roads and slowly made their way towards what they thought would be safer havens. For some troops on the ground this was too good a target to miss. A report from 17 July 1948 of the Northern Command reads as follows: ‘Our forces began harassing the only road leading out of Sejra where a throb of refugees were making their way.’
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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.

In the summer of 1948, however, Ben-Gurion was less interested in the north, where he had begun his career, and was focusing on the south, where he would end it. In July, the ethnic cleansing operations for the first time extended to the Naqab (the Negev) as well. The Negev Bedouin had inhabited the region since the Byzantine period, and had been following their semi-nomadic away of life since at least 1500. 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 of Negev Bedouin continued until 1959.
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The first tribe that was targeted was the Jubarat. Part of the tribe was expelled in July; the tribe as a whole was then forcibly transferred in mid-October, when the second truce was officially over, the majority of them to Hebron and the rest to the Gaza Strip. In 1967, Israel uprooted them once more, this time expelling them to the eastern bank of the River Jordan. Most of the other tribes were driven away towards the end of 1948.

The news of an impending second truce to come into effect on 18 July 1948 came at an inconvenient moment for the ethnic cleansing operation. Some operations were sped up and thus completed before the truce began, which was the case with the occupation of the villages Qula and Khirbat Shaykh Meisar. By then, the Israelis had added two towns, Lydd and Ramla, and another sixty-eight villages to the 290 they had already occupied and cleansed.

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.

Fighting also continued in the south during the second truce, as the
Israelis found it difficult to defeat the Egyptian forces that had been caught in the so-called Faluja pocket. Egypt’s main military effort was directed towards the coast where their advance was halted at the end of the first week of the official war. Since that debacle they found themselves gradually being pushed back to the border. A second expeditionary force had been sent to southern Jerusalem, where its troops had some initial successes. By the middle of July, however, a third Egyptian contingent in the northern Negev had been cut off from both the forces on the coast and those in southern Jerusalem, and now counted in vain on the Jordanian reinforcements that were scheduled to meet up with them in the original Arab war scheme.

By the end of July, the Israelis started strengthening the siege around this pocket to force it to surrender. The Egyptians, however, held on until the end of the year. The disintegration of the Egyptian forces left the northern Negev, from the slopes of Mt Hebron to the Mediterranean Sea near Gaza, at the mercy of the Israeli troops. The belt of villages that had been settled centuries ago on the edge of the arid Negev desert were now stormed, occupied and expelled in quick succession. 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.

Sensing that their violation of the truce would go uncensored as long as it was directed towards the remaining ‘Arab’ pockets within the Jewish state as designated by UN Resolution 181, the Zionist leadership also continued their operations in August and beyond. 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. Consequently, villages that had gradually been isolated were now easily cleansed while the UN observers, who had been sent in to supervise the truce, watched nearby.

Also in August, the Jewish forces took the opportunity of the truce to make some modifications to areas they had already occupied. These might have been on the orders of a local commander, for which he did not need authorisation from above, or, occasionally, at the request of a particular group, which may have collaborated with the Zionists and now wanted to take part in the division of the spoils. One such place was the Druze village of Isfiya on the Carmel. The Druze notables of Isfiya asked for the Bedouin living in their town to be expelled, claiming they were thieves and generally
‘incompatible’. The commander in charge said he did not have the time to deal with expulsions of people who were not in any case totally alien to the village. 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.
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These internal skirmishes show that in the relative calm that had descended on the fronts with the Arab armies, Israel had decided the time had come to institutionalise the occupation.

The Zionist leadership seemed most pressured to determine the status of the lands it had occupied but that were legally within the UN-designated Arab state. In August, Ben-Gurion still referred to these territories as ‘administered areas’, not part of the state as yet but governed by a military judicial system. 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 1949, the designation of these areas alternated between ‘administered’ and ‘occupied’. In May 1949, all distinctions disappeared, along with the villages, the fields and the houses – all ‘dissolved’ into the Jewish State of Israel.

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. However, the UN did succeed in averting an Israeli attack on the Golan Heights and the only proper town there, Qunaitra, the order for which arrived in the forces’ headquarters on the day the truce ended. Even at a distance of almost sixty years, it makes chilling reading: ‘Your orders,’ wrote Yigael Yadin to the commander in charge, ‘are to destroy the city’.
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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.

In 1948 Israel’s determination to take the Golan Heights was fed by the gradual withdrawal of the Syrian troops, first to the slopes of the Golan and then further into the Syrian hinterland, but most of the leaders of the Jewish state coveted Palestine, not Syria. In August there were still three main areas of Palestine that Israel had not yet taken but that Ben-Gurion saw as essential to would-be Israel: Wadi Ara, the western part of the upper Galilee, and the southern Negev. The first two were heavily populated Palestinian areas and thus became the inevitable targets of the ethnic cleansing campaign, wholly outside the theatre of war with the regular Arab armies that had in any case petered out in August due to the truce.

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. Some of them were sent on impossible missions to go beyond the occupation of the seventy-eight per cent of Palestine that had already proven to be within Israel’s grasp. One of these assignments in September was for the troops to try for a third time to occupy Wadi Ara and the northern tip of the West Bank, with special orders to capture Qalqilya and Tul-Karem. This was Operation Autumn. The attempt to invade the Wadi Ara area was again repelled. This part would be annexed by Israel when King Abdullah of Jordan decided to cede it in the spring of 1949 as part of the armistice agreement between the two countries. It is one of the ironies of history that many Israelis today, frightened by a potential adverse shift in the ‘demographic balance’, favour the transfer of this area back to the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank. The option between being imprisoned in a locked Bantustan on the West Bank or ‘enjoying’ second-class citizenship in Israel holds no exciting prospects either way, to say the least, but the people of the Wadi understandably go for the latter, as they rightly suspect that, as in the past, the Israelis want the territory without the people. Israel has already dislocated 200,000 people since it started erecting its Segregation Wall in an area very near to the Wadi and also heavily populated by Palestinians.

In September 1948, every single one of the fifteen villages that make up Wadi Ara showed resilience and bravery in repelling the attackers, aided by Iraqi officers from the nearby contingent that the Arab League had dispatched to protect the northern West Bank when the war started. These
Iraqis were among the few of Palestine’s neighbours who actually fought and succeeded in rescuing whole Palestinian villages. Captain Abu Rauf Abd al-Raziq was one such Iraqi officer who helped defend the villages of Taytaba and Qalansuwa. He had chivalrously decided to stay behind when all the other Iraqi soldiers had received orders to leave a few weeks before Operation Autumn. Major Abd al-Karim and Captain Farhan from the Iraqi army led the fortified opposition in Zayta and Jat, and Sargent Khalid Abu Hamud supervised the resistance in Attil. Captain Najib and Muhammad Sulayman did the same in Baqa al-Gharbiyya, Khalil Bek in the village of Ara and Mamduh Miara in Arara. The list of Iraqi junior officers mounting the guard and taking the lead is impressively long.

September also saw the preparations for Operation Snir, in another effort to take over the Golan Heights, including once more the town of Qunaitra, with 14 September set as D-day. The first stage was delayed to the 26th and eventually trimmed down to a mini-operation codenamed ‘
Bereshit’
(Genesis), involving the attempt to take a Syrian stronghold that, according to the UN map, was inside the Jewish state (Outpost 223). The Syrian defence forces repelled one Israeli attack after another. As part of their preparations, the Israelis tried to contact Circassian and Druze soldiers in the Syrian army to persuade them to collaborate. Israel’s military action on the Syrian line continued well into the spring of 1949 and included orders not only to occupy outposts but also villages. On 1 April 1949 the orders were then revised, confining the forces to offensives against military outposts only.
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In September the ethnic cleansing operation continued in the central Galilee, where Israeli troops wiped out Palestinian pockets ahead of the last big operation that was to come a month later in the upper Galilee and in the south of Palestine. Local volunteers and the ALA put up some tough resistance in several villages, most notably Ilabun. A report by the Israeli forces describes their abortive assault: ‘Tonight our forces raided Ilabun. After overcoming the enemy’s resistance, we found the village deserted; after inflicting damage and slaughtering a herd, our forces withdrew while constantly exchanging fire with the enemy.’
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In other words, although Ilabun had not yet been taken, it had already been emptied of most of its inhabitants. In the village of Tarshiha, on the other hand, mostly Christian Palestinians defended the village while the majority of the people were still there. With hindsight, it would seem that it was their decision to stay that
saved them from expulsion, although, had most of them been Muslim, their fate could have been very different. Tarshiha was eventually occupied in October, but was not subsequently evacuated. Had it been taken in September, this outcome, too, might have been very different, since the orders for Operation
Alef Ayn
, from 19 September 1948, read: ‘Tarshiha has to be evicted to the north.’
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But such moments of grace were few and far between and were certainly not bestowed upon the final group of villages that were depopulated in the western part of the upper Galilee and in the southern parts of the Hebron area, Beersheba, and along the southern coast line.

Over 1.5 million ethnic Albanians – at least 90% of the Kosovo population of the province had been forcibly expelled from their homes. At least a million left the province and half a million appear to be internally displaced persons. This is a campaign on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War.