Genocide, Variations on a Theme #I
Part Twelve, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine #4
The crime was not long in waiting. As Pappé recounted: “The Partition Resolution was adopted on the 29th of November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 ... On the 9th of January, units of the first all-Arab volunteer army entered Palestine and engaged with the Jewish forces in small battles ... Easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes, the Jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations ... On the 10th of March, Plan Dalet was adopted ... About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable of which was the Deir Yassin massacre. Aware of these developments, the Arab League took the decision, on the last day of April, to intervene militarily, but not until the British Mandate had come to an end. The British left on the 15th of May 1948, and the Jewish Agency immediately declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine...”
The military weight was decidedly on the side of the Zionists: “All in all, on the eve of the 1948 war, the Jewish fighting force stood around 50,000 troops, out of which 30,000 were fighting troops and the rest auxiliaries who lived in the various settlements ... Facing them were irregular paramilitary Palestinian outfits that numbered no more than 7,000 troops: a fighting force that lacked all structure or hierarchy and was poorly equipped when compared with the Jewish forces...”
The defenseless villages of Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa were two of the first to fall victim to the assaults. The former was celebrating the opening of a new school when a company of twenty Jewish troops entered and started shooting randomly. The next victims included the villages of Khisas, Na‘ima and Jahula. The former, a village where a hundred Christians lived together with a few hundred Muslims, was attacked at night. Houses were randomly blown up while the occupants were still sleeping. Fifteen, including five children, were killed.
In Haifa barrels full of explosives were rolled into Arab residential areas and the roads set alight with oil. When residents emerged to try to put out the fires they were gunned down.
Car bombs were set off and explosives tossed into crowds. At the very end of December Balad al Shaykh was surrounded and attacked, leaving sixty dead.
In the village of Lifta the café was sprayed with machine gun fire while a bus was stopped and its passengers killed.
The Palestinians, who remained largely passive, appealed to the British, who were still responsible for security, but received no aid. By February 1948, when up to four villages could be attacked on a single day, 1,500 Palestinians had been killed and thirty villages destroyed.
Having seen how effective these tactics proved Plan D was developed in February and implemented in March. Each of the twelve Haganah brigades was given a list and a time plan for the expulsion of villagers.
Pappé passes quickly over one of the most notorious incidents of the war in 1948: the massacre of Deir Yassin. Although the British were nominally in control and responsible for security they let the civilian population of the village, located west of Jerusalem, be butchered on 9th of April. Perhaps worst of all: the village had made a non-aggression pact with both the neighboring Jewish village and with the Haganah.
According to Meir Pa’il, a Palmach intelligence officer who observed the operation: “The dissidents [Irgun and Lehi] were going about the village robbing and stealing everything: Chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, gold and more ... Each dissident walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed. Their lack of education and intelligence as compared to our soldiers [i.e., the Haganah] was apparent ... In one of the houses at the center of the village were assembled some 200 women and small children. The women sat quietly and didn’t utter a word. When I arrived, the ‘commander’ explained that they intended to kill all of them.”
According to Pappé 93 civilians were killed. He quotes Fahim Zaydan: “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.” Thirty babies were among the slaughtered.
Although slightly more disciplined the Haganah was equally brutal. Mordechai Maklef, operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade issued the order: “Kill any Arab you encounter...” The results were so shocking that Golda Meir was reminded of pogroms in Russia.