The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

  ‘Ilan Pappe is Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.’

  —John Pilger

  ‘Ilan Pappe has written an extraordinary book of profound relevance to the past, present, and future of Israel/Palestine relations.’

  —Richard Falk, Professor of International Law and Practise, Princeton University

  ‘If there is to be real peace in Palestine/Israel, the moral vigour and intellectual clarity of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine will have been a major contributor to it.’

  —Ahdaf Soueif, author of The Map of Love

  ‘This is an extraordinary book – a dazzling feat of scholarly synthesis and Biblical moral clarity and humaneness.’

  —Walid Khalidi, Former Senior Research Fellow, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

  ‘Fresh insights into a world historic tragedy, related by a historian of genius.’

  —George Galloway MP

  ‘Groundbreaking research into a well-kept Israeli secret. A classic of historical scholarship on a taboo subject by one of Israel’s foremost New Historians.’

  —Ghada Karmi, author of In Search of Fatima

  ‘Ilan Pappe is out to fight against Zionism, whose power of deletion has driven a whole nation not only out of its homeland but out of historic memory as well. A detailed, documented record of the true history of that crime,

  The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine puts an end to the Palestinian “Nakbah” and the Israeli “War of Independence” by so compellingly shifting both paradigms.’

  —Anton Shammas, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Literature, University of Michigan

  ‘An instant classic. Finally we have the authoritative account of an historic event, which continues to shape our world today, and drives the conflict in the Middle East. Pappe is the only historian who could have told it, and he has done so with supreme command of the facts, elegance, and compassion. The publication of this book is a landmark event.’

  —Karma Nabulsi, research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University

  ‘The first book to so clearly document the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, of which the massacre at Deir Yassin was emblematic. A masterful achievement.’

  —Daniel McGowan, Executive Director, Deir Yassin Remembered, Hobart and William Smith College

  ‘Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.’

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Succinct, clearly written, sometimes emotionally overwhelming in its personalized presentation, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine should be put forward as a document serving as a prime witness to the war crimes and the crimes against humanity of the destruction of Palestinian society and cultural geography by the Jewish state.’

  —Palestine Chronicle

  ‘Pappe offers a scorching indictment of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.’

  —Metro

  ‘Pappe is one of the brave few voices to stand up and be counted in the oppressive atmosphere of Israeli society.’

  —Morning Star

  ‘For anyone who possesses a strong stomach and an equally strong desire to know the truth.’

  —Counterpunch

  ‘Pappe is well positioned to lob a grenade such as this one into the twin worlds of Middle Eastern studies and politics.’

  —Arab Banker

  THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

  ILAN PAPPE

  THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

  First published by Oneworld Publications Limited October 2006

  This paperback edition first published 2007

  Reprinted 2008 (three times), 2010, 2011

  This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2011

  Copyright © Ilan Pappe 2006

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  ACIP record for this title is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978–1–78074–056–0

  Cover design by Jon Gray

  Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India

  Oneworld Publications

  185 Banbury Road

  Oxford, OX2 7AR

  England

  The publishers would like to thank the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for permission to reproduce the photographs on plates 8, 10–12, 18, 19, and back cover, all copyright © UNRWA. The publishers would also like to thank the Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut, for permission to publish the photographs on plates 14-17, all from the book All That Remains (ed. Walid Khalidi) and for generously providing maps 3, 4, and 7; and would like to express their sincere gratitude to Abu al-Sous of www.palestineremembered.com, whose assistance in locating images has been invaluable. The photographs on plates 4 & 13 copyright © Bettmann/Corbis; the photograph on plate 1 copyright © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; the photograph on plate 6 and front cover copyright © Getty Images; the facsimile article on plate 7 copyright © New York Times.

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  Contents

  List of Illustrations, Maps and Tables

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1. An ‘Alleged’ Ethnic Cleansing?

  Definitions of Ethnic Cleansing

  Ethnic Cleansing as a Crime

  Reconstructing an Ethnic Cleansing

  2. The Drive for an Exclusively Jewish State

  Zionism’s Ideological Motivation

  Military Preparations

  The Village Files

  Facing the British: 1945–1947

  David Ben-Gurion: The Architect

  3. Partition and Destruction: UN Resolution 181 and its Impact

  Palestine’s Population

  The UN’s Partition Plan

  The Arab and Palestinian Positions

  The Jewish Reaction

  The Consultancy Begins its Work

  4. Finalising A Master Plan

  The Methodology of Cleansing

  The Changing Mood in the Consultancy: From Retaliation to Intimidation

  December 1947: Early Actions

  January 1948: Farewell to Retaliation

  The Long Seminar: 31 December–2 January

  February 1948: Shock and Awe

  March: Putting the Finishing Touches to the Blueprint

  5. The Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing: Plan Dalet

  Operation Nachshon: The First Plan Dalet Operation

  The Urbicide of Palestine

  The Cleansing Continues

  Succumbing to a Superior Power

  Arab Reactions

  Towards the ‘Real War’

  6. The Phony War and the Real War over Palestine: May 1948

  Days of Tihur

  The Massacre at Tantura

  The Brigades’ Trail of Blood

  Campaigns of Revenge

  7. The Escalation of the Cleansing Operations: June–September 1948

  The First Truce

  Operation Palm Tree

  In Between Truces

  The Truce that Wasn’t

  8. Completing the Job: October 1948–January 1949

  Operation Hiram

  Israel’s Anti-Repatriation Policy

  A M
ini Empire in the Making

  Final Cleansing of the South and the East

  The Massacre in Dawaymeh

  9. Occupation and its Ugly Faces

  Inhuman Imprisonment

  Abuses Under Occupation

  Dividing the Spoils

  Desecration of Holy Sites

  Entrenching the Occupation

  10. The Memoricide of the Nakba

  The Reinvention of Palestine

  Virtual Colonialism and the JNF

  The JNF Resort Parks in Israel

  11. Nakba Denial and the ‘Peace Process’

  First Attempts at Peace

  The Exclusion of 1948 from the Peace Process

  The Right of Return

  12. Fortress Israel

  The ‘Demographic Problem’

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Chronology

  Maps and Tables

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations, Maps, and Tables

  ILLUSTRATIONS: PLATE SECTION

  1. Irgun troops marching through Tel-Aviv, 14 May 1948

  2. Jewish forces occupy a village near Safad

  3. Jewish forces enter Malkiyya

  4. Arab men of military age are marched to holding camps

  5. The Red House in Tel-Aviv, headquarters of the Hagana

  6. Refugee women, children and the elderly are evacuated

  7. The New York Times report on the Deir Yassin massacre

  8. Palestinian refugees flock to the sea to escape

  9. Refugees on the move

  10. Loading belongings into trucks for the journey

  11. Elderly refugees

  12. Palestinian refugees flee on fishing boats

  13. Jewish immigrants arrive at the port in Haifa

  14. The village of Iqrit before its destruction

  15. The village of Iqrit, 1990

  16. A theme park on the site of Tantura

  17. The cemetery of Salama

  18. Nahr al-Barid refugee camp in northern Lebanon

  19. Baqa’a refugee camp, Jordan

  MAPS AND TABLES

  1. Jewish State Proposed by the World Zionist Organisation, 1919

  2. The Peel Commission Partition Plan, 1937

  3. Palestine Partition Commission Plan B, 1938

  4. Palestine Partition Commission Plan C, 1938

  5. United Nations General Assembly Partition Plan, 1947

  6. 1949 Armistice Agreement

  7. Palestinian villages depopulated, 1947–1949

  Table 1: Jewish and Palestinian land ownership, 1945

  Table 2: Jewish and Palestinian population distribution, 1946

  Acknowledgements

  Over the years, the theme of this book was discussed with many friends, all of whom, in one way or another, have contributed to this book with their encouragement and support; many also provided me with documents, testimonies and evidence. There were so many of them that I do not dare compose a list, but wish to thank them collectively. The military material was collected by Oshri Neta-Av, and I thank him for what was, in hindsight, a very difficult task, not only because of the voluminous material, but also due to a murky political atmosphere.

  Uri Davis, Nur Masalha and Charles Smith read the manuscript, and I hope that, at least in part, the end result reflects their industrious work. Needless to say, the final version is mine and they share no responsibility for the text. Nonetheless, I owe them a great deal and wish to thank them very much for their cooperation.

  Walid Khalidi and Anton Shamas, who read the manuscript, provided moral support and empowerment, which made the writing of the book a valuable and meaningful project, even prior to publication.

  My dear old friend Dick Bruggeman, as always, was there editing meticulously and painstakingly. This project could not have been completed without him.

  Novin Doostdar, Drummond Moir, Kate Kirkpatrick, and above all Juliet Mabey at Oneworld lost sleep and time over this manuscript. I hope the end result is a fine reward for their immense efforts.

  Revital, Ido and Yonatan, as always, suffered for the fact that their husband and father did not choose a far-away country in the distant past as a specialist subject, hobby and obsession. This book is another attempt to tell them, as much as anyone else, why our beloved country is devastated, hopeless and torn by hatred and bloodshed.

  And finally, this book is not formally dedicated to anyone, but it is written first and foremost for the Palestinian victims of the 1948 ethnic cleansing. Many of them are friends and comrades, many others are nameless to me, and yet ever since I learned about the Nakba I have carried with me their suffering, their loss and their hopes. Only when they return will I feel that this chapter of the catastrophe has finally reached the closure we all covet, enabling all of us to live in peace and harmony in Palestine.

  Preface

  THE RED HOUSE

  We are not mourning the farewell

  We do not have the time nor the tears

  We do not grasp the moment of farewell

  Why, it is the Farewell

  And we are left with the tears

  Taha Muhammad Ali (1988), a refugee from the village of Saffuriyya

  ‘I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’

  David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 19381

  The ‘Red House’ was a typical early Tel-Avivian building. The pride of the Jewish builders and craftsmen who toiled over it in the 1920s, it had been designed to house the head office of the local workers’ council. It remained such until, towards the end of 1947, it became the headquarters of the Hagana, the main Zionist underground militia in Palestine. Located near the sea on Yarkon Street in the northern part of Tel-Aviv, the building formed another fine addition to the first ‘Hebrew’ city on the Mediterranean, the ‘White City’ as its literati and pundits affectionately called it. For in those days, unlike today, the immaculate whiteness of its houses still bathed the town as a whole in the opulent brightness so typical of Mediterranean port cities of the era and the region. It was a sight for sore eyes, elegantly fusing Bauhaus motifs with native Palestinian architecture in an admixture that was called Levantine, in the least derogatory sense of the term. Such, too, was the ‘Red House’, its simple rectangular features graced with frontal arches that framed the entrance and supported the balconies on its two upper storeys. It was either its association with a workers’ movement that had inspired the adjective ‘red’, or a pinkish tinge it acquired during sunset that had given the house its name.2 The former was more fitting, as the building continued to be associated with the Zionist version of socialism when, in the 1970s, it became the main office for Israel’s kibbutzim movement. Houses like this, important historical remnants of the Mandatory period, prompted UNESCO in 2003 to designate Tel-Aviv as a World Heritage site.

  Today the house is no longer there, a victim of development, which has razed this architectural relic to the ground to make room for a car park next to the new Sheraton Hotel. Thus, in this street, too, no trace is left of the ‘White City’, which it has slowly transmogrified into the sprawling, polluted, extravagant metropolis that is modern Tel-Aviv.

  In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country.3 The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets o
f this master plan. Codenamed Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.4 In the words of one of the first historians to note the significance of that plan, Simcha Flapan, ‘The military campaign against the Arabs, including the “conquest and destruction of the rural areas” was set forth in the Hagana’s Plan Dalet’.5 The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine.