20 May 2013. A World to
Win News Service. 15 May is Nakba Day, marking the Zionist expulsion and forced
exodus of many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to create a Jewish state in
1948. Every year on this day, Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and
the countries where they have been driven into exile hold protests and other
activities to express their determination to see their people return to their
historic homeland.
This year, according to
news reports, about ten thousand people took part in demonstrations in Gaza, the
West Bank and Israel itself, often waving keys to what were once their family
homes. Israeli police on horseback attacked a gathering in East Jerusalem, and
soldiers forcibly dispersed protests in Hebron and several other West Bank towns
and villages. One of the fiercest clashes took place in front of Ofer, a
military prison for Palestinians near the town of Ramallah, where dozens of
people were injured and arrested. This year's Nakba celebrates 65
years of Palestinian resistance in the face of violent repression, wide-scale
imprisonment and complex and difficult political conditions.
On this occasion we are
reprinting the following article from the 10 December 2007 AWTWNS. Population
figures have changed since then; today there are approximately 1.5 million
Palestinians in Israel, 3.8 in the West Bank, and 1.7 in Gaza, according to the
Palestinian Youth Movement, and millions more in the global Palestinian
diaspora. The continuing expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and
the "Judaization" of Jerusalem are further expanding the spaces reserved
exclusively for Jews and strategically fragmenting the remaining Palestinian
areas.
The author of the book
discussed in this article, Ilan Pappe, was driven out of Israel in 2008. (For
details, see Guardian, 20
January 2009.) The Winter 2013 issue of
The Jerusalem Quarterly has a new study of the village files, aerial photos and
maps the Zionists made in 1940-48 as they drew up detailed plans for the mass
expulsion of the Palestinians.
Palestinians call what
happened to them beginning in 1947 the Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe. It was
perpetrated by Zionist leaders looking to form the state of Israel on
Palestinian land without the Palestinians.
During the Nakba about the
half the Palestinian population were brutally forced from their land, villages
and homes, fleeing with only the possessions they could carry. Many were raped,
tortured and killed. [Estimates of the exodus vary; the UN Conciliation
Commission Report of 1949 says 726,000 people were driven out.] To
ensure that there would be nothing for the Palestinians to return to, their
villages and even many olive and orange trees were so well razed that few
visible remnants remain. When the Nakba ended, there had been 31 documented
massacres and probably others. Some 531 villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods
were emptied of their inhabitants.
Former Arabic village and
road names were Hebrewized. Ancient mosques and Christian churches were
destroyed. Theme parks, pine forests (trees not native to the region) and
Israeli settlements sit atop many of the old Palestinian villages. All this was
to wipe out any physical evidence that the land belonged to Palestinians and
give finality to the Nakba.
How many times have you had
a discussion about the plight of the Palestinians with supporters of the
existence of the Israeli state and met the argument that the problem arose from
Palestinian intolerance of Jewish settlers? How many people know – or admit –
that from the beginning Zionism had planned to permanently expel the Palestinian
people from their land? In many Western countries, Nakba denial is as obligatory
as Holocaust denial is condemned. How did this happen?
The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine, by Israeli historian and senior lecturer
at Haifa University Ilan Pappe, explores the period of the Nakba (One World
Publisher, Oxford, 2006). The premise is that the Nakba was nothing less than an
act of ethnic cleansing, normally regarded by international law as a crime
against humanity. To support this theory, the author outlines various
definitions from different current sources, including "an ethnically mixed area
being turned into a pure ethnic space." He shows how the slaughter and/or forced
expulsion of the Armenians in Turkey, the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Croatians and
Bosnians in former Yugoslavia is akin to what the Zionists did to the
Palestinians on a massive scale in 1948 and are still doing today. Pappe also
draws a connection between ethnic cleansing and colonialism as it occurred in
North and South America as well as Africa and Australia.
His research is based on
primary sources: newly released material (1990s) from the Israeli military
archives, David Ben-Gurion's diary where summaries of many of his meetings are
recorded, the rereading of the older archival material through the prism of the
ethnic cleansing paradigm and extensive use of Palestinian oral history
archives.
Pappe provides a brief
historical background leading up to the Nakba and a few chapters at the end of
the book about the situation today for Palestinians. The following is a very
sketchy timeline of events leading up to the Nakba.
The first Zionist
settlements began in 1878, when Palestine, like much of the Middle East, was a
part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1917, with the end of WWI and the defeat of the
Ottomans, the British army marched into Palestine and took over. Later that same
year, the British Lord Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised a
"national home" for the Jews on Palestinian land even though by most accounts,
Jews constituted at most only 8 percent of the population and even less
according to some estimates. The League of Nations legalized the British
occupation by giving it a mandate to run Palestine. In 1938 major fighting
between Jews and Palestinians broke out. The bombs of the Zionist military
organization Irgun killed 119 Palestinians; Palestinian bombs killed eight Jews.
In 1947 Britain told the newly formed United Nations that it would withdraw from
Palestine. In November the UN approved the plan to divide Palestine into two
states. By December 1947, the Zionists began mass expulsions of Palestinians.
When the British pulled out in May 1948, the Zionists declared independence. The
Nakba continued into the early months of 1949.
Pappe’s book reveals how
meticulously the Zionist movement planned, executed, lied about, and then denied
their takeover of Palestinian land and the removal (through force and terror) of
its population. He presents Israeli policies against the Palestinian minority
inside Israel as well as in the West Bank and Gaza in their proper historical
framework, setting the record straight on truths that conceptualize the
situation faced by Palestinians today. Pappe only briefly touches on the role of
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement in the late 1800s, to show
how deeply rooted the concept of "transfer" of the indigenous population was,
how the "demographic problem" as viewed by most Israelis today is a continuation
of the original Zionist exclusionist view. A map from 1919 clearly illustrates
Zionist intentions to grab all of Palestine. The Herzl ideologues stated that
"strangers" lived in their biblical land and by stranger they meant everyone who
was not Jewish, although most of Palestine’s Jews had left after the Roman
period. And even today, a recent poll indicated that 68 percent of Israeli Jews
want Palestinian citizens of Israel to be "transferred."
Much of the book’s exposure
concerns David Ben-Gurion, one of the masterminds and leading overseers of the
Zionist project and the ethnic cleansing that implemented it. From the
mid-1920s, Ben-Gurion functioned as the unofficial defence minister (or minister
of war) of the not-yet officially formed state and later became its founding
prime minister. He worked on an international level as well as locally
organizing other Zionists around his methods and goals. It was in his home that
ethnic cleansing was first discussed with a combination of security figures and
"Arab affairs" specialists (Jews who grew up in the region and could speak
Arabic) who would advise future governments of Israel (Pappe calls it the
Consultancy). His view toward achieving a Zionist state was ambitious and
strategic. He thought it could only be won by force, but that the Zionists had
to wait for the opportune historical moment to be able to deal "militarily" (as
Ben-Gurion put it) with the demographic reality on the ground: the presence of a
non-Jewish native majority population.
When in 1937 the British
offered the Jewish community a future state (on a much smaller percentage of
land than the UN was to give it in 1948), he accepted that as a good beginning
in that it formalized the idea. He had far more ambitious plans. In 1942
Ben-Gurion publicly stated the Zionist claim for all of Palestine, but later
came to believe that this was not realistic and that 80 percent would be
sufficient for a viable Israeli state.
The book talks about one
important strategic project guided by Ben-Gurion – the "village project" of
mapping all of Palestine. Through the use of aerial photography, details of
every Palestinian village were recorded: its access routes, quality of land,
water springs, main sources of income, socio-political composition, religious
affiliations, names of its mukhtars (traditional village heads), relationship
with other villages, the age of individual men and an index of "hostility"
toward the Zionist project measured by involvement in the 1938 revolt against
the British policy of allowing increased immigration of Jews into Palestine
(including those who may have killed Jews).
Those involved in the
village mapping understood that this growing database was not a mere academic
geography exercise. One person who went on one of these data collection
operations in 1940 recalled many years later: "We had to study the basic
structure of the Arab village. This means the structure and how best to attack
it… how best to approach the village from above or enter it from below. We had
to train our ‘Arabists’ (the Orientalists who operated a network of
collaborators) how best to work with informants."
The book describes another
preoccupation of Ben-Gurion and the Consultancy – the "demographic balance"
between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Whenever there was a majority of
Palestinians living in an area it was considered a disaster. The public policy
that was adopted was to promote widespread Jewish immigration. But the Jews who
were moving to Palestine since the 1920s preferred living in the more urban
areas which were inhabited by Jews and Palestinians in equal number, whereas the
countryside was overwhelmingly inhabited and cultivated by Palestinians. The
Zionists understood that immigration would not counterbalance the Palestinian
majority and use of other means would be necessary. Already in 1937 Ben-Gurion
told his cabal that the "'reality' of a Palestinian majority would compel the
Jewish settlers to use force to bring about the 'dream' – a purely Jewish
Palestine." "We have to face this new reality with all its severity and
distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain
Jewish sovereignty." "They can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better
to expel them."
When the British decided to
leave in 1947 the Palestine question was transferred to the UN, which, like the
British, also accepted the Zionist claims on Palestine and that partition of
Palestine was the best way to solve the issue. Even if you accepted the Zionist
logic, a partition according to relative population would have allowed less than
10 percent of the land for a Jewish state. But after considerable negotiations,
the UN Partition Resolution 181 of November 1947 allotted the Zionists 56
percent of Palestine. While Jerusalem, because of its religious significance to
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was kept as an international city, much of the
most fertile land was included in the Zionist portion.
Although disappointed
again, Ben-Gurion appreciated the international recognition of the Jewish state
while ignoring the part which stipulated how much and which territory. He
declared that Israel’s borders "will be determined by force and not by the
partition resolution." Ben-Gurion skilfully sidestepped what little there was of
the worldwide opposition to their schemes. While the Zionists publicly
proclaimed to uphold the Resolution, inside the country they began to implement
their own plans. This ignoring of agreements "before the ink is even dry" became
characteristic of subsequent negotiations Israel engaged in.
Pappe relates how Arab
leaders opposed the partition of Palestine and boycotted these UN negotiations.
They refused to participate on the grounds that giving their land to a settler
community (by then one third of the population, who owned only six percent of
the land and had long proclaimed that they wanted to de-Arabize Palestine) was
illegal and unjust. Resolution 181 created tremendous anxiety for the
Palestinians. They sensed the impending showdown with the Zionists. The
slaughter began in December 1947, even before the British left
Palestine.
Pappe details the
combination of meticulous planning as well as allowing "unauthorized" initiative
to the more terrorist military groups, like the Irgun, Stern gang and Palmach
(special commando units that pioneered the building of Jewish settlements). With
a group of military and civilian people, including well-known figures like Moshe
Dayan (a military leader who was army chief during the 1956 Suez crisis and
defence minister during the Six Day War in 1967) and Yitzhak Rabin (a general
and two-term prime minister, assassinated in 1995), Ben-Gurion established and
supervised plans to prepare the military forces of the Jewish community for an
offensive against the Palestinians.
Plan C (a revised version
of Plans A and B) spelled out the actions that would be taken: killing
Palestinian political leadership and those who financially supported them,
killing Palestinians who acted against Jews, killing officers and officials,
attacking villages that seemed more militant and might resist future attacks by
the Israeli army, and damaging Palestinian sources of livelihood.
Then Plan Dalet (or Plan D)
was drawn up, the blueprint for the systematic and total expulsion of
Palestinians from their homeland. Plan D described operations in the following
way: "destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by
planting mines in their debris) and especially those population centres which
are difficult to control in a constant manner; or by mounting combined control
operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages;
conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be
wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the
state."
In the course of carrying
out Plan D the Zionist leaders were not so concerned with resistance on the part
of the Palestinians or other Arabs who might come to their defence, as
opposition from the Arab states was half-hearted and their soldiers poorly
trained and equipped. Publicly the Zionist leaders railed about the possibility
of a "second Holocaust", this time at the hands of the Arabs, but privately they
were fully aware that the war rhetoric of the Arab states was not matched by
serious preparation on the ground. Often irresolute army leaders from the Arab
states were ignored by some Arab soldiers who took initiative and fought
valiantly to defend the Palestinians. The Zionist leadership's main fear was the
British army. But while it was still in Palestine, the British army rarely
intervened against the massacres, even when beseeched to do so by the local Arab
population.
Expulsions began by
December 1947, in villages and larger towns. The following is a condensed
description from Pappe’s book of what happened in Haifa under British
eyes.
The morning after the UN
resolution, the Hagana (the main military group that would become the Israeli
army) and the Irgun (an early split from the Hagana, led by future prime
minister Menachem Begin, which also later became part of the army) unleashed a
campaign of terror on the 75,000 Palestinian residents of Haifa. Jewish settlers
who had come in the 1920s and lived in the hills around the city took part in
these attacks alongside Zionist military units.
Various tactics were used.
Frequently artillery shells and sniper's bullets rained down on the Palestinian
population. Oil mixed with fuel was poured down the roads and ignited. Barrels
full of explosives were rolled down into the Palestinian areas. When
panic-stricken Palestinians came out to put out the fires they were sprayed with
machine-gun fire. Jews who passed as Palestinians brought cars stuffed with
explosives to be repaired at Palestinian garages and the cars were detonated.
In a refinery plant in
Haifa, Jews and Arabs worked shoulder to shoulder and had a long history of
solidarity in their fight for better labour conditions against their British
employers. The Irgun, which specialized in bomb throwing into Arab crowds, did
so at this refinery. Palestinian workers reacted by killing 39 Jewish workers,
one of the worst and also one of the last retaliatory skirmishes in that period.
Later Hagana units went into one of Haifa's Arab neighborhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya,
expelled people and blew up their houses. The British army looked the other way
while these atrocities were being committed. Two weeks later the Palmach went
into the Hawassa neighborhood of Haifa, where around 5,000 of the poorest Arabs
lived in dismal conditions. Huts and the local school were blown up, causing the
people to flee. Pappe regards this as the official beginning of the ethnic
cleansing operation in urban Palestine.
By March 1948, Ben-Gurion
commented to the Jewish Agency Executive, "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."
The armies of the Arab
countries were no match for the well-equipped Zionist military clandestine
units, which had received weapons from Britain, the Soviet Union and
Czechoslovakia. Arab irregulars ambushed Israeli convoys but refrained from
attacking the settlements. The Consultancy decided that ruthless retaliation was
not sufficient and they needed to change to more drastic actions.
Ben-Gurion used the Arab
world's attempts to rescue the Palestinians to whip up a fear factor among the
Jewish community that he carefully nourished to the extent that it overcame any
opposition these tactics would engender. The "security" of the Jewish state
(then as it is still today) became the overriding fear that allowed many
Israelis as well as people outside the country to turn a blind eye to what the
Zionist leadership was doing, what their plan constituted.
Until March 1948, the
Zionist leadership still portrayed their activities as retaliation to hostile
Arab actions. Then, two months before the British were to leave, they openly
declared that they would take over the land and expel the indigenous population
by force. When the British left in May, the Zionists declared their state. They
were officially recognized by the U.S. and the USSR. Ruthless expulsion went
into high gear and the word retaliation was no longer used to describe what the
Israeli military forces were doing. Ben-Gurion said, "Every attack has to end
with occupation, destruction and expulsion." There was no longer any need to
distinguish between the "innocent" and the "guilty". Pre-emptive strikes and
collateral damage became acceptable and necessary.
Deir
Yassin
On a hill to the west of
Jerusalem lay the town of Deir Yassin. The massacre there is well known
throughout the world but bears mentioning here as it reflected the systematic
nature of Plan D as applied to hundreds of villages throughout Palestine. Pappe
describes how on 9 April 1948, Jewish soldiers burst into the village and
sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many. "The remaining villagers
were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold-bold, their bodies abused
while a number of women were raped and then killed.
"Fahim Zaydan, who was
twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front
of his eyes: 'They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one
of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad,
and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him –
carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they
shot her too.'
"Zaydan himself was shot,
too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up
against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets 'just for the fun of
it', before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds."
When villages were entered,
destroyed and the inhabitants rounded up, decisions were made about who would
live and who would die. Intelligence officers on the ground aided the military
officers in this decision. The intelligence officers with the help of local
collaborators (hooded spies) would point out different people to the main
intelligence officer.
Israel and the
Palestinians today
As a result of the Nakba,
there are now almost 4.5 million Palestinians dispersed throughout the world, in
addition to the 1.4 million under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank
and 1.3 million in Gaza, a formerly sparsely populated desert strip now full of
crowded refugee camps and towns. About 1.5 million Palestinians continue to live
in Israel itself as second-class citizens. The Jewish population of Israel
numbers roughly 5.5 million. The Zionist state now comprises about 78 percent of
historic Palestine, not counting the still-growing number of Israeli settlements
in the West Bank. It has no parallel in the world – a state consciously built,
since its inception, for one people, one culture, on religious grounds and with
no real permanent borders.
Pappe's argument that
the Nakba was an act of ethnic cleansing is convincing. The human and physical
geography of Palestine was transformed by the Zionist consciously punitive plan
to wipe out Palestine's history and culture and thus deny any future claim
Palestinians could make to their land. Through the years since the Nakba, the
killing machine that is the Israeli army has continued its dirty work. Pappe
lists the following: Kfar Qassim in October 1956, Israeli troops massacred 49
villagers returning from their fields. Qibya in the 1950s, Samoa in the 1960s,
the villages of Galilee in 1976, the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon
in 1982, Kfar Qana in 1999, Wadi Ara in 2000 and the Jenin refugee camp in 2002.
There has not been an end to Israel’s killing of Palestinians.
Pappe ends his book with
the hope that Israelis will wake up from their distorted view of wanting
retribution, shed racism and religious fanaticism, and wake up to the truth
portrayed in this book. He thinks that not accepting the Palestinian right of
return equals the continuing defence of the "white" apartheid-like enclave and
upholding Fortress Israel. He says that Palestinians and Jews coexisted
peacefully before the Nakba and even now many have strong social ties, which
shows that the two peoples can live in harmony. He calls for the transformation
of Israel into a secular and democratic state.
Pappe’s book does not
concern itself with the central role that Israel has come to play as the bastion
of American imperial interests in the Middle East. Without the military and
political backing of the U.S. government and the unparalleled financial support
that is central to Israeli society and its way of life ($3 billion a year in
U.S. government aid, along with officially encouraged private funding), Israel
would not be what it is today – if it even existed at all. Nonetheless, the book
is well worth the read for its historical accuracy and as a vivid reminder of
the tragedy that is the Nakba
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