Chapter 20: The 1947–1948 War and the Nakba: Ethnic Cleansing

Background to the Nakba

An important link to the British announcement that it would end its mandate on May 15 was the Arab countries’ decision to enter Palestine to preserve what was left of the territory allotted to Palestine under UN Partition Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947. It is critical to understand that the urgency of the combined Zionist militias was motivated by the need to acquire as much territory as possible before the end of the mandate, by means of expulsion and transfer.

Before this book attempts to document the Palestinian Nakba, a review of the definition of ethnic cleansing is necessary. As defined by the Jewish historian Ilan Pappe

Ethnic cleansing is an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogenous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven from. There may well be a master plan, but most of the troops engaged in ethnic cleansing do not need direct orders: they know beforehand what is expected of them. Massacres accompany the operations, but where they occur they are not part of a genocidal plan: they are a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expul­sion. Later on, the expelled are then erased from the country’s official and popular history and excised from its collective memory. 330

The Hutchison Encyclopedia defines ethnic cleansing as expulsion by force in order to homogenize the ethnically mixed population of a particular region or territory. The purpose of expulsion is to cause the evacuation of as many residences as possible, by all means at the expeller’s disposal, including nonviolent ones. The US State Department also accepts this definition of ethnic cleansing. Its experts add that part of the essence of ethnic cleansing is the eradication, by all means available, of a region’s history. The UN’s Council for Human Rights (UNCHR) employs a similar definition. It links a state or regime’s desire to impose ethnic rule on a mixed area with the use of acts of expulsion and other violent means. It also includes “separation of men from women, detention of men, explosion of houses, and subsequently repopulating the remaining houses with another ethnic group.” 331

Nur Masalha, in his book Expulsion of the Palestinians, shows clearly how deeply rooted the concept of transfer was, and is, in Zionist political thought. As one of the Zionist movement’s most liberal thinkers, Leon Motzkin, put it in 1917:

Our thought is colonization of Palestine has to go in two direc­tions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside their country, the transfer of so many Arabs seen at first unacceptable economically, but is none­theless practical. It does not require too much money to resettle a Palestinian village on another land. 332

Expulsion of the Palestinian population from their country, and de-Arabisation of Palestine, constituted an essential part of the Zionist colonial project. So it was natural to start preparations for ethnic cleansing as early as the first settlements were built. The Zionist leadership was interested in settling the Jewish immigrants in the countryside. Most of the settler colonies were isolated islands in rural Palestine amidst the surrounding Palestinian villages. They were built like military garrisons rather than villages. The idea of Jewish statehood was from the beginning associated with militarism and an army, to protect the colonies against the possible resistance of the residents of nearby villages, and for the future plans of the transfer and expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes.

In 1946, the 22nd Zionist Congress entrusted Ben­-Gurion with the defense portfolio. From that moment on, he functioned as prime minister as well as defense minister. In this capacity, Ben-Gurion created an outfit called the Consultancy, composed of a combination of security figures and specialists on Arab affairs, to advise him on issues of security, strategies, and policy planning toward the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular. 333 From the moment in December 1947 when the British announced their intention to terminate the mandate on May 15 of the following year Ben-Gurion recognized the unique historical opportunity to make the dream of an exclusively Jewish state come true. Several issues faced him at that time. The first issue was the boundaries of the Jewish state; what consti­ tuted a feasible viable state in geographical terms. He determined the territory of the future state according to the location of the most remote and isolated Jewish settlements. All the land between these colonies had to become Jewish—in other words, all of Palestine.

After World War II, Prince Abdullah, son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca, had reached an agreement in principle with the Jewish Agency over how to divide post-mandatory Palestine between them. Serious negotiations started after UN Resolution 181 was adopted on November 29, 1947, for final agreement. As there were very few Jewish colonies in the area Abdullah wanted to acquire (today’s West Bank), the Zionists were willing to give up this part of Palestine. The fact that the Zionist leadership was committed to their collusion with Abdullah meant that they anticipated their future state to include over 80 percent of mandatory Palestine; Transjordan was to annex the remaining 20 percent. 334 Ben-Gurion believed that such an agreement with Abdullah would neutralize the strongest army in the Arab world in the future military conflict, and thus guaranteed that the ethnic cleansing operation could go ahead unhindered. However, Ben­Gurion accepted this agreement as a temporary measure; he did not believe in final borders for the Jewish state.

The second issue that concerned Ben­-Gurion and the Consultancy was build­ing an adequate Jewish military capability to ensure a successful ethnic cleansing operation. The Consultancy utilized all possible means to build a highly compe­ tent professional army. By the end of 1947, the Jewish armed forces had reached the highest levels of readiness for their mission of ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The third and most critical issue for the Zionist leadership was putting in place a concrete plan that would enable the Zionist occupation of at least 80 percent of Palestine, expulsion of the Palestinian population, and the destruction of Arab villages, as part of erasing Palestinian culture and history. This plan was com­ posed of three main elements: a military war plan, a psychological warfare plan, and a diplomatic political plan.

The Zionist military war plan was based on two-phased strategy. The objectives of the first phase were terrorizing and intimidating the Palestinians, and protecting the isolated Jewish settlements; this was based on “Plan Gimmel” or Plan C. The second phase, based on “Plan Dalet” or Plan D, was the all-out offensive to conquer and hold territory given to the Jews by the UN, in addition to areas to be occupied outside these borders, and to expel the Palestinian inhabitants of these territories, estimated at one million. Yigal Yadin, the future chief of staff of the Hagana Jewish militia (which would evolve into the Israeli army), prepared the nucleus of Plan Dalet in 1944, when he was head of planning in the underground. He worked on it further in the summer of 1947. The plan was to take control of the key points in the country and on the roads before the British left.

The first phase, Plan C, was developed after the British announced their intentions to end the mandate. It called for:

• Killing the Palestinian political leadership
• Killing Palestinian activists and their financial supporters
• Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews
• Killing Palestinian officers and officials in the mandatory system
• Damaging Palestinian transportation
• Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihood: water wells, mills, etc.
• Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks
• Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.

In addition, Plan C stated that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the Village Files (see page XX): lists of leaders, activists, “potential human targets,” the precise layout of villages, and so on. The implementation of Plan C started in early December 1947, following the adoption of Resolution 181 by the UN. 335

“Plan D” was approved by the Zionist leadership on March 10, 1948, and went into effect at the beginning of April 1948. 336 It contained direct references both to the geographic parameters of the future Jewish state (around 80 percent of Palestine) and the fate of the one million Palestinians living within that space. Military orders were issued to the units on the ground with detailed description of the methods to be employed: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, property, and goods; demolition; and finally planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. The country was divided into zones according to the number of the Hagana brigades. Each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighborhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed, and expunged of inhabitants, with exact dates. 337

The first Jewish military organization in Palestine was the Hagana, which had been established in 1920 to protect the colonies. During the Palestinian revolt, Hagana members had joined the British forces in the attacks against Arab villages and participated in the punitive missions against the Palestinian civilians. In World War II, many Hagana members had volunteered in the British army, thus gaining valuable experience.

In addition to the Hagana, two extremist underground military organizations operated in Palestine: the Irgun, which had split from the Hagana in 1931, and the Stern Gang (Lehi), which split from the Irgun in 1941. These two organizations, together with the Hagana, united into one military army during the 1948 war.

Special commando units, the Palmach, had been founded in 1941 to assist the British army in the war against the Nazis in case the latter reached Palestine. In 1948, these units played a major role in many of the savage cleansing operations in the north and the center of Palestine.

The Hagana also had an intelligence unit that had been founded in 1933. This is the unit that supervised the vital process of building the Village Files. It also was responsible for setting up the network of spies and collaborators inside the rural hinterland that helped identify the thousands of Palestinians who were later executed on the spot or imprisoned for long periods once the ethnic cleansing had started. 338

In the ethnic cleansing operations that followed, the Hagana, the Palmach, and the Irgun were the forces that actually occupied the villages. Soon after their occupation, villages were transferred into the hands of less combat-oriented troops, the Field Guard, which was the logistical arm of the Jewish forces, established in 1939.

In December 1947, the Jewish fighting force stood at around fifty thousand; around thirty thousand of these were fighting troops, and the rest were auxiliaries who lived in various settlements. 339 The Zionists’ recruitment and training programs were so efficient that by the end of the summer their army stood at eighty thousand troops.

The newly founded army, with the help of the Jewish Communist party, received a large shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Samuel Mikunis, the secretary-general of the Israeli Communist party, traveled to Eastern Europe in early 1948 to assist in the arms purchase deals. He visited Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The Czechs provided the Zionists with the following arsenal:

• 30 Messerschmitt planes
• 30 nine-ton tanks
• field-guns and anti-aircraft weapons
• flamethrowers and anti-tank weapons
• 5,000 rifles
• 1,200 machine guns
• 12 million rounds of ammunition

The first shipment arrived on March 31, 1948; the second shipment arrived on May 12; and the third shipment arrived May 14. Between May 1948 and February 1949, Israel received additional arms from Czechoslovakia: 43 million rounds of 7.92-mm, 350,000 rounds of 13-mm, and 150,000 rounds of 20-mm ammunition; 1,500 rifles; 3,000 light and 200 heavy machine guns; and 10,000 bombs ranging in size from three to seventy kilograms.

The Zionist weapon factories in Palestine were producing a hundred submachine guns per day (which increased to two hundred per day by the end of the first week of April), and 400,000 rounds of 9-mm ammunition per month. Moreover, these factories started producing flamethrowers, PIATS (anti-tank guns), Davidka heavy mortars that tossed a shell containing sixty pounds of TNT, two- and three-inch mortars and their ammunition, and Mills grenades. 340 The flamethrower project was part of a larger unit developing biological weapons under the directorship of Ephraim Katzir, who became the president of Israel from 1973 to 1978. In the 1980s it was revealed that Israel possessed nuclear weapons.

The Zionists’ diplomatic and political campaigns succeeded in securing world-wide support for their colonial project. Not only did the US and Western Europe endorse their plans, but the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe backed them up as well, endorsing their aspirations for a Jewish state in Palestine. At the UN Special General Assembly in the summer of 1947, Andrei Gromyko declared the Soviet Union in favor of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. 341

The war events can be divided into two periods: First, the events between December 1947 and May 1948, which were henceforth known as the civil war, in which local Palestinian fighters and the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) faced the Jewish military forces; and second, the events of the war after the declaration of the state of Israel, where the regular Arab armies faced the Jewish military forces.

The Civil War: December 1947–May 1948

The first phase of the Jewish military operations started in early December 1947. During this phase and through March 1948, special units of the Hagana would enter defenseless villages close to midnight, firing at random; they would stay there for a few hours, shooting at anyone who dared leave their house, and then depart. Threatening leaflets were distributed in the Palestinian villages as well as in Syrian and Lebanese villages on Palestine’s border, warning the population: “If the war is taken to your place, it will cause massive expulsion. In this war there will be merciless killing, no compassion. If you are not participating in this war, you will not have to leave your houses and villages.”

Later on, in December 1947, the military operations advanced to include blowing up houses, as happened in the assault on the village of Khisas. On December 18, 1947, Palmach forces under the command of Yigal Allon attacked this peaceful village located on the banks of Hula Lake. The Jewish troops started blowing up houses in the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack on Khisas.

This new strategy was aimed at the urban communities of Palestine; Haifa was chosen as the first target. The main Jewish quarter of the city was located in the mountainous area overlooking the city. In early December 1947, the 75,000 Palestinians of Haifa were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly executed by the Irgun and Hagana forces. Barrels full of explosives and huge steel bowls were rolled down into the Arab residential areas and then ignited. The Palestinian residents who came running out of their homes were sprayed with machine-gun fire. A special unit of the Hagana disguised as Palestinians brought cars loaded with explosives to Palestinian garages to be repaired. The detonation of these cars resulted in massive destruction and great loss of life. The Irgun, in coordination with the Hagana, attacked Palestinian workers in Haifa’s refineries with hand grenades. 342

In late December 1947, the Hagana forces in Haifa assaulted Wadi Rushmiyya, one of the city’s Arab neighborhoods. They blew up houses and expelled the people. The British, despite their heavy presence in the city, looked the other way instead of maintaining law and order. 343 That same night, the Hagana assaulted the village of Balad al­Shaykh, the burial place of Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the most honored and respected charismatic Palestinian leader of the 1930s. The attack lasted three hours, during which houses were destroyed and over sixty Palestinians massacred. Again, the British elected not to intervene. 344 Two weeks later, in January 1948, the Palmach attacked another Palestinian neighborhood in Haifa: Hawassa, the poorest quarter in town, where about five thousand Palestinians lived. Their huts were blown up, forcing all the inhabitants to flee in panic. 345 It is worth mentioning at this point that fifteen thousand of Haifa’s Palestinian elite left the city as the result of this campaign of terror and intimidation, putting an extra burden on the more impoverished parts of the city.

Early in January 1948, the Consultancy had a long seminar where the green light was given to the field commanders to a whole series of lethal attacks on Arab villages. Ben-Gurion demanded that these attacks should include targets in the south in addition to the northern targets. Specifically he gave orders to attack the town of Beersheba, targeting al-Hajj Salameh ibn Said, the deputy mayor of the city who in the past had refused to collaborate with the Zionist plans for settlement in the area. A new term was used after the seminar to describe the new mission: “aggressive defense.” Yigal Yadin, the future chief of staff of the Israeli army, stated: “We should paralyze the Arab transport and their economy, harass them in their villages and cities, and demoralize them.” 346

The “aggressive defense” strategy was implemented in the western highlands of the Jerusalem area. The village of Lifta was the first target in this operation. Lifta was famous historically, as it had been the center of the rebellion against the Egyptian rule of Ibrahim Pasha. It was a very prosperous community with attractive buildings, including a small shopping center, restaurants, and coffee houses. The Stern Gang attacked the village, destroying many buildings and shooting at the coffee houses at random. This assault terrorized the inhabitants and forced them to flee. The Hagana came back two weeks later to blow up the rest of the houses and to expel all the people who were still there. 347

Similar techniques were used against several villages in Galilee during the month of February. Sa’sa; a tranquil village located on the slopes of Palestine’s highest mountain, Jabel Jermak, was attacked on February 15, 1948. Yigal Allon gave clear and specific instructions: ‘“You have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many villagers as possible.” The Jewish troops took the main street of the village and systematically blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside. They demolished thirty-five houses and killed between sixty and eighty Palestinians, among them several children. 348

Despite the mining of residential areas and repeated nighttime raids on villages carried out in accordance with Plan C, between December 1947 and March 1948 the Arabs of Palestine held their ground. Of the four hundred villages that would fall between 1948 and 1949, only ten had been captured by Zionist forces by March 1, 1948. 349 The refusal of Palestinians to leave their towns and villages frustrated the Zionist leadership; most, if not all, who did leave were the elite and wealthy notables. The Zionists were also concerned about the success of the Plan C operation, as they could

not maintain contact with all their settlements, especially the isolated ones. Jaysh al-Jihad, under the command of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, had been able to block the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. Ben-Gurion and his close associates nonetheless were confident that the Jewish forces would be able to implement Plan D.

This period was the riskiest time for the Zionists during the entire war of 1948, especially when President Truman reversed the American attitude to partition in mid-March. On March 19, 1948, Warren Austen, the American ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the Security Council with a sensational request: all efforts to implement partition should be suspended; the General Assembly was to be convened in special session to work out a plan for temporary trusteeship. 350

The Zionist organizations in the United States launched a strong political and diplomatic campaign against this new US policy and succeeded in extracting a promise from President Truman to continue US support of the partition plan. The UN General Assembly convened in April 1948, and the partition resolution was not reversed. The Zionist leadership also launched a propaganda campaign warning the Jews in Palestine and abroad of an imminent second Holocaust. Ben-Gurion appealed to the Jews to join the armed forces, stating: “This is a war aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community.” He portrayed the Palestinians as Nazis and the war as a second Holocaust. Moshe Sharett, the acting Jewish foreign minister, was directing this campaign abroad to rally support from foreign countries, especially the US.

On August 8, 1947, Ben-­Gurion told the Zionist Actions Committee in Zurich: “The aim of Arab attacks on Zionism is not robbery, terror, or stopping the growth of the Zionist enterprise, but the total destruction of the Yishuv. It is not political adversaries who will stand before us, but the pupils and even teachers of Hitler, who claim there is only one way to solve the Jewish question, one way only—total annihilation.” 351

Yigal Yadin, the chief of staff of the Hagana, met with all the intelligence officers in March 1948 after the approval of Plan D. The purpose of the meeting was to account for the gap between the public announcement of the imminent second Holocaust and the fact that the Jewish forces were clearly able to implement their ethnic cleansing plan. He proudly told his audiences: “Today we have all the arms we need; they are already aboard ships, and the British are leaving, and the whole situation at the fronts will change.” April 1948 became the turning point in the war in which the fighting shifted from sporadic attacks against the Palestinian civilian population to the systemic mega-operation of expulsion. 352

The second phase of the military operations started in early April 1948. The most urgent task of this phase was to occupy the main Palestinian cities and the surrounding villages and to expel the Palestinian population by May 15, thus creating a new status quo in the country that would be beyond the means of the regular Arab armies to reverse. The events that unfolded later proved that there was collusion between the Zionists and the British, as well as between the Zionists and Abdullah. The British were acting as a shield protecting the Jewish forces as they rushed to take over the Palestinian urban centers and the countryside. 353

The rural hills on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains was the first area chosen for putting Plan D into action. On the first day of April the Palmach forces received their orders for the Nachshon Operation: “To capture, occupy, and destroy the Palestinian villages along the Jaffa–Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road; and to expel the inhabitants so that they would become an economic liability for the Arab forces.” 354 This operation failed initially, as the Palestinian fighters under the command of Abd al­ Qadir al­Husayni put up more resistance than the Zionists expected. A second attempt succeeded in taking over the village of Al–Qastal (Castel), on April 9, 1948; the charismatic Palestinian commander Abdul-Qader al-Husayni was killed in that battle. On the same day Qastal fell, the most savage massacre was committed in the village of Deir Yasin. This village had signed a non-aggression pact with the Hagana as early as 1942. Because of this prior agreement, the Hagana decided to send the Irgun and Stern Gang troops for the mission. As these troops burst into the village, they sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place, and many were murdered in cold blood. Many women were raped before being killed. A total of 245 Palestinian civilians were massacred, among them thirty babies. 355

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, breastfeeding her—they shot her too.” 356

Zaydan himself was shot 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. 357

Jacques de Reynier, head of the delegation of the International Red Cross in Palestine in 1948, drove into the village of Deir Yasin on April 10, 1948, the day after the massacre. He was met by a detachment of Irgun fighters:

All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine ­guns, hand­ grenades, and also large cutlasses in their hands, most of them still blood­stained. A beauti­ful young girl, with criminal eyes, showed me hers still dripping with blood; she displayed it like a trophy.” 358

The Irgun commander explained, in a familiar phrase, that they were engaged in a “cleanup” operation.

De Reynier, the Red Cross delegate, walked into the village:

Altogether more than 250 men women and children had been butchered to death. The survivors, at the point of hysterical collapse from shock and grief, recorded their hideous experience for the British authorities: “Families had been lined up and shot down in a barrage of machine­ gun fire; young girls raped; a pregnant mother was first slaughtered and then had her stomach cut open by her murderer with a butcher’s knife; a girl who tried to remove the unborn child from the woman’s womb was shot down. Some of the Irgun fighters slashed their victims to pieces with cutlasses. All this was meticulously recorded by the British authorities . . . [who were told that] “Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers, and part of some of the women’s ears were severed in order to remove earrings.” 359

The Jerusalem commander of the Hagana, Shaltiel, had approved the assault on Deir Yasin by the Irgun. He wrote to the Irgun commander in Jerusalem: “I wish to point out that the capture of Deir Yasin and holding it is one stage in our general plan. I have no objection to you carrying out the operation provided you are able to hold the village.” 360

Menachim Begin was later to assess the consequences of their barbarism:

Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of “Irgun butchery,” were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened uncontrollable stampede. 361

The Deir Yasin massacre was an advanced stage in the ethnic cleansing operations. Massacres that accompany military operations are not necessarily part of a genocidal plan; they are mainly a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion. The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yasin drove fear and panic into the Arab population and led to the flight of Palestinian civilians from their homes all over the country. Deir Yasin is considered by most historians to have been the direct reason for the flight of the Arabs from Haifa on April 21 and from Jaffa on May 4.

Deir Yasin was not the only massacre committed by the Zionists in Palestine. Two savage massacres were committed after the declaration of the state of Israel: the massacre of Tantura, north of Tel Aviv, committed on May 22, 1948, by the Alexandroni Brigade; and the massacre of Duweima, near Hebron, on October 29, 1948, by former Irgun members. The Palmach forces under the command of Yigal Allon committed many massacres between December 1947 and May 1948: Khisas in the upper east­ ern Galilee on December 18, 1947; Balad al­Shaykh east of Haifa on December 31, 1947; Sa’sa on the slopes of Jabel Jermak in northern Palestine on February 14–15, 1948; and Ayn al­Zaytun near Safad, Nasr al­Din near Tiberias, and Tirat Haifa near Haifa in May 1948.

Shortly after the Deir Yasin massacre, the Hagana forces attacked four nearby villages: Qalunya, Saris, Beit Surik, and Biddu. Taking only an hour or so in each village, the Hagana units blew up the houses and expelled the people. Operation Nachshon resulted in the expulsion of ten to fifteen thousand Arab villagers. 362 The ethnic cleansing of the major urban centers was preceded by the control of the surrounding villages. Ben-­Gurion’s strategy was to destroy the urban communities economically, not to fight house to house inside the cities and towns. As Simha Flapan points out, his purpose was “an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of foods and raw materials to the urban population; psychological warfare, ranging from ‘friendly warnings’ to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by underground terrorism; and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of the surrounding villages and the eviction of their inhabitants.” 363 This strategy led to the collapse and surrender of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safad, Acre, Baysan, Lydda, Ramleh, and Beersheba. Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos, and deprivation that forced them to surrender. 364

Eastern Galilee Operations

As soon as Operation Nahshon was concluded on April 13, Operation Jephtha was started; its goal was to clear eastern Galilee. The Hagana forces started their assault on Tiberias on April 13, after they gained control of the surrounding countryside. They were situated in the hills overlooking the ancient city on the Sea of Galilee, where six thousand Jews and five thousand Arabs, as well as their forebears, had coexisted in peace for centuries. 365 The city’s Palestinian population was subjected to daily heavy bombardments. Barrel bombs were rolled down from the hills, terrifying the inhabitants, to force them to flee. The terrified Arabs appealed to the British to protect them. The British delayed their departure from the city to allow the civilians to leave. King Abdullah of Transjordan sent thirty trucks to evacuate women and children, as he feared a massacre like the one that had taken place at Deir Yasin just a few days earlier. Residents of Tiberias were loaded in the trucks, forced to leave behind all their belongings. By the evening of April 18, all of the Arabs were gone, and the town was completely in Jewish hands. 366

During and after the battle, the Jewish residents and soldiers looted the town.

A UN Belgian officer, Captain F. Marchal, noted that Zionist troops had sacked and desecrated Christian religious establishments in the town, including the Holy Place convent. The Jews realized that in Palestine, where religion was taken seriously, the desecration of churches, mosques, and other religious buildings and monuments would serve to terrorize the population and convince them of the necessity to flee. 367

After the capture of Tiberias, the Palmach forces moved up the road toward Safad. They cleared all the villages along the Tiberias–Safad highway, expelling their inhabitants. When the Jewish army captured al­Rama, a Christian village, a Jewish soldier stood on top of a building and shouted, “All Druze may return to their homes.” Then he addressed the other Arabs: “You must leave for Lebanon. Anyone who dares to take any belongings will be shot.” Young men were taken as prisoners of war; a parish priest later testified that the Jews had kidnapped forty men. 368

When it became clear that the Jews had the upper hand in the war, some of the ethnic minorities in the country ceased supporting the Palestinian camp and joined the Jewish forces. The first and most important of these minorities was the Druze. In early April 1948, five hundred Druze deserted the ALA and joined the Jewish forces. The Druze troops went on to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Galilee. The Druze battalion’s defection helped the Hagana forces to capture Acre with relative ease.

The Druze emerged as an offshoot of the Ismailis, who are a splinter group of Shia Islam. The Druze in Palestine as a minority had suffered abuses at the hands of Sunni Muslims during the mandate period. During the 1936 revolt, vigorous Zionists efforts succeeded in convincing the Druze leadership to stay neutral. The friendly relations of the Druze leaders with the Jews and their refusal to support the revolt— and their possible collaboration with the British—angered some revolt commanders. In August 1939, the rebels assaulted the Druze community at Shafa Amr. This attack pushed the Druze to further collaboration with the British. Only recently has a younger Druze generation begun to rebel against the Druze elders and spiritual leaders. Faraj Khnayfus, the son of Saleh Khnayfus, an important Druze leader of Shafa Amr, is one of the younger generation of Druze. Faraj spent three years in jail for refusing to serve in the Israeli army; he is also a member of the left­ nationalist organization Abna al­Balad. 369

The ethnic cleansing of the countryside in eastern Galilee followed the same methods and techniques laid out in Plan Dalet: occupation of villages, demolition of houses, execution of fighters and activists, and expulsion of the Palestinian civilians. In some of the villages that were close to the urban centers, savage massacres were committed in order to precipitate the flight of the populations of nearby cities and towns. This was the case of the village of Nasr al­Din near Tiberias, Ayn al­Zaytun near Safad, and Tirat Haifa near Haifa. In these villages, all men between ten and fifty were executed.

The Ayn al-Zaytun massacre was one of the most egregious and best known of these incidents. The village of Ayn al­Zaytun was located a mile west of Safad. It took its name from a mountain stream that ran through the village. Any invader wishing to control Safad and the surrounding valley would need to occupy Ayn al-Zaytun. Furthermore, the village was also known for its opposition to the settlers in the area. Operation Matateh (broom) provided the Palmach forces a chance not only to cleanse the village in accordance with Plan Dalet, but also to settle old accounts. Palmach forces under the command of Moshe Kalman, who had in the past supervised savage attacks on Khisas and Sa’sa in the same district, attacked the village in the early morning of May 2, 1948. The soldiers threw hand grenades and used the primitive Davidka “drainpipe” mortar, which made a huge sound designed to frighten the Arab villagers. The armed men of Ayn al-Zaytun were no match for the well-trained Palmach soldiers, so they began to retreat, allowing the Jewish forces to control the village.

The villagers were herded into the village center. They brought in a hooded informer who identified those whose names appeared on the intelligence officer’s list. The men selected were then taken to another location and shot dead. A young teen­ ager, Yusuf Ahmad Hajjar, suddenly stood up and told his captors: “Our village has been captured. We have surrendered and we expect to be treated humanely.” The Palmach commander slapped him on the face and then ordered him, by way of punishment, to choose thirty-seven teenage boys at random. While the rest of the villagers were forced into the storage room of the mosque, the teenagers were shot with their hands tied behind their backs. In his book The Palestinians: History and Present, Hans Lebrecht offers another glimpse of the atrocities: “The village had been totally destroyed, and among the debris there were many bodies. In particular, we found many bodies of women, children, and babies near the local mosque.” 370 The military documents reported that all in all, including the executions, seventy people had been shot. Netiva Ben­Yehuda was a member of the Palmach and was in the village when the execution happened. She tells the story in a fictionalized way. Her story offers a chilling detailed description of the way the men were shot, giving the number executed as several hundred. The surviving women and children of Ayn al-Zaytun were forced out of the village after being stripped of all their belongings. 371 (The story of Ayn al­Zaytun formed the basis of the novel Bab al-Shams by Elias Khoury. Netiva Ben-­Yehuda also chronicled the events in the village in her novel Between the Knots. Bab al-Shams was made into a film, a French-­Egyptian coproduction.)

The next target in eastern Galilee was Safad. After the British evacuated the city on April 16, 1948, the Arab militia controlled the city. In Safad there were 9,500 Arabs and 2,400 Jews. Most of the Jewish population were ultra Orthodox Jews who were not enthusiastic about political Zionism. The Palmach forces realized that capturing Safad appeared to be a very difficult task, so they followed their strategy of isolating the city by capturing the surrounding rural area. The fall of Ayn al-Zaytun, however, left the city besieged from the south and north. On May 10, 1948, Yigal Allon ordered his troops to start the attack on the city with heavy mortar bombardment. The Transjordan troops under the command of Sari Fnaish left Safad on the eve of the Palmach attack on orders from King Abdullah, who preferred to see Jews in Safad rather than his rival, the mufti, who was in the process of setting up a Palestinian government in Safad. The ALA commanders, including Adib Shishakli, were not in Safad when the Palmach launched their attack. According to a member of the local militia, Osama al­Naqib: “When rumors spread that the ALA had begun to with­ draw, the people began to flee in panic.”

The Palmach forces utilized their usual psychological warfare. The loudspeakers announced that the population should leave town, as the Jews were about to use the atom bomb. Safad had been a major center of 1936 revolt. Because of this previous animosity, the prisoners captured during the fighting were tortured during interrogation and then executed. The Palmach troops expelled most of the population save a hundred old people, who were allowed to stay on, but on June 5, they were expelled to Lebanon. 372

While the Palmach forces were carrying out their cleansing operations north of Tiberias in the Hula valley, the Golani Brigade was assigned to the Baysan Valley south of Tiberias. The Zionist plan aimed at the evacuation of the entire Baysan Valley except for the town of Baysan itself. This followed their strategy of isolating the urban centers by controlling the countryside. But on May 5, 1948, after most of the valley was “purified of Arabs,” the Golani Brigade began a siege of Baysan itself. On May 11, they captured the high ground near Baysan and controlled the approaches to the city, then started the shelling. The heavy bombardments, including from the air, affected the morale of Baysan residents. The Jews gave the Arabs ten hours to surrender, offering safe passage to those who wished to leave. Many people left for the Jordan valley. The road was full of people anxious to cross over the river into Transjordan. The next day, the town surrendered.

Father Naim Ateek, the founder of the Christian ecumenical liberation movement Sabeel, describes what happened in Baysan in May:

When the soldiers occupied our town in 1948, our simple and unpretentious life was disrupted. Some members of both the Muslim and Christian communities fled their homes, horrified when news of what the Jewish soldiers had done in Deir Yasin reached them. . . . Many friends tried to convince my father to leave. . . .

Our town was occupied on May 12; 1948 We lived under oc­cupation for fourteen days. On May 26, the military governor sent for the leading men of town; at military headquarters, he informed them quite simply and coldly that Baysan must be evacuated by all of its inhabitants within a few hours. . . .

I remember vividly my father’s return from headquarters to give us the bad news. “We have been given no choice. We must go.” My father asked us to carry with us whatever was lightweight yet valuable or important. The military orders were that we should all meet at the center of town in front of the courthouse, not far from my father’s shop. . . .

As people gathered at the center of town, the soldiers separated us into two groups, Muslims and Christians. The Muslims were sent across the Jordan River to Transjordan. The Christians were taken on buses, driven to the outskirts of Nazareth, and dropped off there, since Nazareth had not yet been occupied by the Zionists. Within a few hours, our family had become refugees, driven out of Baysan forever. 373

The ethnic cleansing campaign in eastern Galilee started in mid-March 1948 and aimed at complete control of Marj ibn Amir. The Jewish forces captured tens of villages and expelled thousands of Palestinians. The Jewish troops followed a plan of wiping the villages off the face of earth, erasing the history of Palestine; these techniques continued through the 1950s. After capturing Safad and Baysan, these operations seemed to slow down and appeared to be restricted, especially the area close to Nazareth all the way to Afula. The intelligence officers in charge of the operations in this area were concerned about the fate of the collaborating clans in these villages. Palti Sela, the intelligence officer, wanted to exempt the Zu’bi clan from expulsion. The villages that had a large share of Zu’bis were left intact, except for the village of Sirin, as it had only few of the clan. Palti later regretted what he did, as the Zu’bis in the end proved not that cooperative and reinforced their Palestinian identity after 1948. 374

The village of Sirin lay near Baysan on land that had nominally been under the Ottoman sultan’s title but was traditionally cultivated by Palestinian farmers. The village was built around the burial place (maqam) of a Muslim holy man named Shaykh ibn Sirin. Its houses were made of black volcanic stones. The land was rugged, but the residents had turned it into a small paradise. Their animals carried water from nearby springs three kilometers away. Sirin was noted as a fine example of the collective system of land sharing. The land belonged to the village as a whole, and the size of the family determined its share of the crops. The village was promised immunity by the Jewish Agency because the main family, the Zu’bi, belonged to a collaborative clan. The head of the clan, Mubarak al-Haj al-Zu’bi, was sure that his seven hundred villagers would be exempt from the fate of the nearby villages. The villagers did not put a fight when it was occupied on May 12. The Jewish troops gathered the inhabitants, Muslims and Christians, together and ordered them to cross the Jordan River to the other side. They then demolished the mosque, the church, and the monastery, together with all the houses. Soon all the trees in the orchards had withered away and died. Says Pappe, “Today, a cactus hedge surrounds the rubble that was Sirin. Jews never succeeded in repeating the success of the Palestinians in holding on to the tough soil in the valley, but the springs in the vicinity are still there—an eerie sight, as they serve no one.” 375

The history of collaboration with the Zionists did not spare Sirin. Only two villages in the Jerusalem area were spared: Abu Ghawsh and Nabi Samuil. The mukhtars of both villages had developed a special relationship with the Stern Gang. The Hagana wanted to demolish them, but the Stern Gang rescued them. This was a rare exception. 376

Operations in Haifa and Western Galilee

The attack on Haifa in April 1948 was the beginning of the conquest of Western Galilee. As mentioned earlier, the Jewish campaign of terrorization of Haifa began in December 1947 and went on for several months; it intensified in early April 1948. As the fighting became more intense, Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British commander of northern Palestine, decided to remove his forces from the residential and business areas of the city and concentrate his troops near the dock facilities that were essential for the British evacuation from Palestine. He also decided to make an effort to bring about a rapid decision in the fighting. Siding with the Jews, in his opinion, was the best way of bringing hostilities to a speedy conclusion. So on April 18, 1948, he informed the Jewish authorities in Haifa that in two days the British forces would be removed from the buffer zone between the two communities. The Arabs were not given the same notice. 377 The Zionists then assembled, from all over the country, a strike force in the Jewish quarter overlooking the Arab sections of the city. Menachem Begin, in his book The Revolt, reports: “The British commander in Haifa announced the evacuation of his forces in April. The Hagana knew the date and mobilized its forces for the decisive clash. At the request of the Hagana . . . Irgun units . . . also went into action, and were ordered to capture a fortified enemy building dominating Hehalutz Street, the main artery of Hadar Harcarmel.” 378

At 11:30 a.m. on April 21, 1948, General Stockwell invited Captain Izzedin, commander of the Arab National Guard, to his headquarters and handed him a note indicating the British plan to withdraw their forces from the city and to be sta­ tioned in the harbor. As Stockwell was handing the note to Izzedin, the British forces had already completed their withdrawal and the Hagana’s Carmeli Brigade had already occupied the vacated strong tactical points along the line of demarcation between the Jewish and Arab zones. When Captain Izzedin received the note, he was furious; immediately after the interview, that same day, he left the country with no notice. 379

The Arab quarters in Haifa were, from east to west: Halisa, Wadi Rushmiyya, Burj, the old town, and Wadi Nasnas, all of which lay below Hadar Harcarmel and between the Jewish quarter and the harbor. Wadi Nasnas and a section of the old town were situated between two Jewish quarters. The British blocked the roads to Jaffa in the south and Nazareth in the north, preventing access by reinforcements from neighboring Arab communities. Thus the Arabs of Haifa, entirely cut off from the outside world, were at the mercy of the Jewish forces pushing them toward the harbor. As the British were withdrawing from their positions, they advised the Arab leaders that it would be better for their people to leave the city.

The Jewish forces utilized their usual psychological warfare techniques to spread fear and panic among the Palestinian population, while they were waiting for sundown to start their final assault. Leo Heiman, a Hagana officer, described some of these techniques. The Hagana brought up jeeps with loudspeakers that broadcast recorded “horror sounds” such as “shrieks, wails, and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of sirens and the clang of fire­alarm bells, interrupted by a se­pulchral voice calling out in Arabic: ‘Save your souls, all ye faithful! Flee for your lives.’” 380 Hagana loudspeakers warned the Arabs that the Jews were using poison gas. At 6:30 p.m., shelling with heavy machine guns and mortars started, while the psychological warfare continued. In spite of these techniques, the four columns of Jewish forces were moving extremely slowly, fighting from house to house. Fighting continued from the early evening of April 21 through the entire night and into the evening hours of April 22. Mordechai Maklef, the operations officer who later be­ came the Israeli chief of staff, orchestrated the cleansing campaign. His orders to the troops were plain and simple: “Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflam­mable objects, and force doors open with explosives.” 381

On April 22, 1948, confusion and panic spread among the refugees who fled from the path of the advancing Jewish columns toward the old town. An eyewitness, Isam Taha, describes the scene in the old town: “We suddenly heard that the British army in the harbor area was prepared to protect all who took refuge there. Thus we all streamed towards the harbor, hundreds of people pushed against one another. The surging crowds trampled many children, women, and old men. At the harbor en­ trance, British policemen helped to carry our children. But there was a wild rush for the boats, and many people were drowned in the process.” By the evening hours, the Jewish columns controlled the city. The state of confusion and panic reached its climax and there was a virtual mass stampede for the sea. While the Arabs were in full flight, they were engaged by the Zionist troops, which killed and injured many of them. 382

A group of notables calling themselves the Arab Emergency Committee asked Stockwell to arrange for a meeting with the Jewish leaders. The meeting took place at 4 p.m. on April 22, 1948. The Jews demanded complete Hagana control of Haifa, the surrender of all weapons, and an immediate curfew in the Arab section of the city. The Arab committee asked for more time, as the Jews demanded they sign the surrender document immediately. The meeting was adjourned until 7 p.m. The committee tried to get a response from Damascus, but failed. Brossmead, the British ambassador in Damascus, later recounted that he had a meeting on April 22 with President Quwatli, who showed him a batch of telegrams that he had received from Haifa. Quwatli did not know what to reply. He told Brossmead, “I do not know what instructions to send. What do you suggest?” The ambassador advised Quwatli not to take any action, so he did not respond. 383

Despite Jewish promises that there would be no reprisal if they signed the truce, the Arab leaders in Haifa did not sign, but requested British assistance with the evacuation of the civilians who wished to leave the city. Most of the Arab population had already fled. Although the Jews were anxious to rid themselves of the remaining Palestinians, some feared the international reaction if the entire city was emptied of Arabs. According to the American consul, Aubrey Lippincott, the Jewish lead­ers also wanted some Arabs to remain in Haifa to operate the port facilities that were essential to the Zionist war effort. The Jewish Agency tried to convince the remaining Arabs to stay, as they believed that they needed every Jew for the army. Despite these efforts, the British evacuated about six thousand more civilians. For three days, the harbor area was crowded with Arab men, women, and children sleeping in the rain without cover. Some of them were barefoot and some women did not have enough clothes. Only about four thousand Arabs remained in the city out of a community that had once numbered seventy thousand. 384

On May 1, 1948, as Ben-Gurion visited Haifa, he exclaimed as he saw some Arabs leaving the city, “What a beautiful sight.” Soon after, the Zionist leader spoke to a group of Jewish notables in the city, telling them, “It is not our duty to see to it that the Arabs return.” When Ben-Gurion asked to see Abba Khousi, the chief Mapai functionary in the city, he was told that he was busy trying to convince the remaining Arabs in Haifa to stay. The prime minister asked, “Doesn’t he have anything better to do?” With Ben-Gurion having made his views clear, the short-lived Zionist effort to persuade the Arabs to stay in Haifa ceased. 385

The Jewish soldiers committed massive destruction in the Arab neighborhood and were engaged in looting of homes and businesses. The American consul in Haifa reported to Washington:

Considerable Jewish looting in evacuated Arab areas. Two churches desecrated. Clinics stripped of equipment and furnishing demolished. Hagana claims that looting stopped with imprisonment of forty Jewish looters. Constant visitors to consulate, among them nuns and priests, claim looting continues. 386

The Hagana forces took the offensive in western Galilee after they captured Haifa. The Carmeli brigade targeted the countryside around Acre first, as they had done in previous attacks against the other urban centers. The refugees from areas captured by Jewish forces, especially Haifa, doubled the population of Acre. Most people in Acre had experienced the Jewish terror as they fled from Haifa and the surrounding villages. Acre suffered from shortages of food, sanitary facilities, and medical supplies. These problems were exacerbated during the siege of the city that began on April 28, 1948, after the cleansing operations in the countryside.

Acre was subjected to a heavy mortar barrage for several days. British observers reported that the Jewish forces had cut the aqueduct supplying the city with water; almost immediately afterward, there was a typhoid oubreak. Presumably, typhoid germs were injected into the water supply north of the city. The Carmeli Brigade also used loudspeakers to spread fear and panic and to urge civilians to flee. By the time the Hagana forces took the city on May 18, 1948, most of the fifty thousand residents and refugees were already gone. The four thousand Arabs who remained were subjected to a reign of terror. The Israeli army conducted systematic looting, with soldiers carrying off furniture, clothes, and any other property that could be used by the new Jewish immigrants who were settling in the city. The UN French observer Lieutenant Petite reported that the Jews murdered at least a hundred Arab civilians, many of them residents of the new city who refused to move into the “Arab ghetto” in the old city. A typical story is what Mohammed Fayez Soufi told: he was relocated in the portion of the old city that had not been demolished. “When he and friends went back to their homes in the new section of town to get food, they were stopped by Jewish soldiers who . . . forced them to drink cyanide. Mohammed faked swallowing the poison, but his friends were not so lucky. After half an hour, three of the Arabs died.” 387

An attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on May 27 failed. The Egyptians caught two Jewish soldiers trying to inject typhoid and dysentery viruses into Gaza’s wells. After a military trial, the Egyptians executed them, with no official protestation from the Jewish authorities. 388

Jerusalem and Jaffa

The partition plan of UN Resolution 181 had designated Jerusalem an international city. In spite of this, the western Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, where the wealthier Palestinians had built their homes, were shelled, attacked, and occupied in April 1948. Eight Palestinian neighborhoods and thirty-nine villages were ethnically cleansed in the greater Jerusalem area, their population transferred to the eastern sections of the city. Loudspeaker vans were used to frighten the Arab population. American missionary Berta Vestin reported that the loudspeaker messages in Arabic said things like, “Unless you leave your homes, the fate of Deir Yasin will be your fate.” This agrees with the account of pro-­Zionist author Harry Levi, who recalls the loudspeakers exhorting, “The road to Jericho is open! Fly from Jerusalem before you are all killed.” 389 The Hagana raided the Shaykh Badr area at night, cutting telephone and electric wires, throwing hand grenades, and firing into the air. Eventually the residents were driven out. The Hagana also targeted the Katamon district, a Christian Arab neighborhood. The Semiramis Hotel, a well­known landmark of the district, was dynamited. Twenty-six people were killed, including a Spanish diplomat and numerous women and children. According to Sami Hadawi, “The next morning, the inhabitants of Katamon fled. Some returned to move their furniture away. Then a systematic blowing up of homes occurred.” Soon afterward, looting started. Many of the residents were killed; this was verified by a Red Cross doctor who loaded two trucks with decaying bodies. Thousands of residents of Katamon, Upper and Lower Baka, Musrara, Shaykh Jarrah, Nabi Dahoud, and El­Tor fled to the old city. The British troops who were still in Palestine at that time did not intervene. 390

The Shaykh Jarrah neighborhood, where the leading notable families such as the Husaynis, the Nashashibis, and the Khalidis lived, was attacked on April 24, 1948. The Hagana forces succeeded in blowing up twenty houses. Finally, the Jordanian Arab Legion’s involvement in the middle of May changed the picture and the ethnic cleansing in this section stopped.

The terror campaign against Jaffa started in early January 1948. Both Hagana and Irgun forces were involved. There was an unwritten agreement between Jaffa and Tel Aviv that the two towns would be divided by a strip of no-man’s land along the coast, which enabled an uneasy coexistence. The Hagana forces violated this pact: “[They started] killing people without provocation, near the water wells, within the no-man’s land, robbing the Arabs, abusing them, dismantling wells, confiscating assets, and shooting for the sake of intimidation.” 391

The Stern Gang terrorists used different methods. Two terrorists parked a large truck loaded with oranges in the center of the city in January 1948. The truck contained a large load of explosives beneath the orange boxes. When the explosives were detonated, many buildings were destroyed, including a feeding center for children, many of whom were among the over one hundred casualties. This incident was a serious blow to the morale of the people of Jaffa. 392

The terror campaign escalated in February, the harvest season of Jaffa’s famous oranges; the citrus groves were attacked and the farmers were denied their crops. By early 1948, the economy of Jaffa had deteriorated; factories closed down, public transport came to a standstill, and the famous Jaffa orange industry was wiped out. The wealthier people fled the city.

The greater Jaffa area included twenty-four villages. By the end of March 1948, the Jewish operations had destroyed the entire countryside of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. These operations were in line with the Zionist strategy of strangulating Jaffa economically. Throughout Palestine the Zionists followed a policy of occupying villages near urban centers and expelling their inhabitants. The rural populations sometimes were subjected to massacres in a campaign of terror designed to prepare the ground for a more successful takeover of the cities.

The city of Jaffa possessed the largest defense force available to any locality: a total of 1,600 volunteers. Among the defendants was an extraordinary unit of fifty Muslims from Bosnia as well as members of the second generation of the Templars, German colonists who had come in the mid-nineteenth century as religious missionaries. The local Palestinian fighters were under the command of Hassan Salameh, who had been appointed by the mufti. In early February, eighty ALA fighters under the command of an Iraqi officer, Abdul Wahab al­Shaykh Ali, arrived in Jaffa. On February 22, 1948, another company of ALA troops arrived under the command of Adel Najm al­Din, who replaced Abdul Wahab.

The Hagana forces’ military plan to take over Jaffa aimed at surrounding and isolating the city, thus avoiding direct attack on the Arab positions. The Irgun, however was anxious to win an impressive victory, to gain more support from the Jewish population of Tel Aviv. The Irgun leaders, then, decided to launch an assault ahead of the Hagana. They started their assault on April 26; two days later they launched their second attack, using explosives in addition to the shelling, blowing up buildings row by row. At the same time, the Hagana troops launched their operations following their own plan of attacking the city from north and south, first capturing the surrounding villages and expelling their inhabitants. The heavy bombardment of the civilian areas of the city by both Irgun and Hagana forces for three weeks created a state of fear and panic among Jaffa’s residents. Many Arabs were under the impression that the minute the Jews entered town, the inhabitants would be slaughtered. Thus the exodus of Jaffa’s civilians started as soon as the Irgun attack had begun. In response to these events, the British commander in Jaffa sent a message to the Irgun and Hagana: “Unless you stop mortaring Jaffa, I shall shell Tel Aviv.” The Jews continued their assault, which prompted the British to shell Tel Aviv, forcing a cease-fire. According to General Murray, the British commander, the cease-fire did not bring calm to the city; on the contrary, within hours the whole population was pouring out of the city on to the road heading south as fast as their legs could carry them. 393

The attackers—both Hagana and Irgun—looted the city. Everything that was movable was carried from Jaffa: furniture, carpets, pictures, crockery, jewelry, and cutlery. What could not be taken away was smashed. Windows, pianos, fittings, and lamps went in an orgy of destruction. 394 The Jewish soldiers desecrated Christian churches in Jaffa. Father Deleque, a Catholic cleric, said of the soldiers, “They broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.” 395

Adel Najm al­Din, the ALA commander, left the city by sea to Lebanon with his men on May 2, 1948. Michael al­Issa, who replaced him, left Jaffa on May 6, 1948. Thousands of civilians followed his men as they fled the city. 396 Many of the civilians attempted to escape by sea. Any type of craft was used, including rowing boats, sailing boats, and motorboats, as well as larger vessels. Many people were drowned; babies fell overboard as mothers had to choose which offspring to save. Many of those who attempted to sail to Gaza or Beirut in small boats were lost at sea. Their bodies were washed up along the coast of Palestine. 397

On May 3, 1948, an Arab emergency committee was formed for the purpose of salvaging whatever was possible from the deteriorating situation. On May 13, 1948, the committee signed an agreement in Tel Aviv after consulting with King Abdullah and the secretary-general of the Arab League. The Hagana, under the agreement, pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions. This agreement stipulated that anyone who had left Jaffa and wanted to return could only do so “provided that the Hagana command shall be satisfied that the applicant shall not constitute a danger to public security.” This provision was used to keep thousands of Jaffa residents from returning to their homes. As a matter of fact, thousands of Jaffa residents fled soon after the Hagana took over the city on May 14, 1948. The total population of Jaffa was down to three thousand, out of an original Arab population of seventy thousand. 398

In early April 1948, the Consultancy had decided to destroy and expel the inhabitants from all the villages on the Tel Aviv–Haifa road, the Jenin–Haifa road, and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road. Between March 30 and May 15, two hundred villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled. Another ninety were wiped out between May 15 and June 11, 1948, when the first truce came into effect. By June 1, 1948, approximately 391,000 Palestinians had fled from their homes. 399

An Agreement between Emir Abdullah and the Zionists

Soon after Abdullah had established his rule in Transjordan in 1921, he initiated contacts with the Zionists. Recognizing the strength of the forces behind the Zionist movement prompted him to negotiate with the Zionist leaders for the purpose of building an alliance which would help both parties. During the initial negotiations, he proposed the establishment of a Semitic kingdom under his rule that would encompass both Palestine and Transjordan. This idea received support from a few Jewish intellectuals such as Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and Jacob Haas, but the leaders of the Jewish Labour Party, who were in complete control of the Jewish political institutions in Palestine, rejected the idea. 400

As mentioned earlier, Abdullah was not the first member of the Hashemite family to establish strong relations with the Zionist movement. Emir Faysal had discussed the possibility of cooperation between the Arab and Jewish national movements with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann; their first meeting was in June of 1918. Their negotiations during that meeting and subsequent occasions resulted in a signed agreement on January 3, 1919 (see page XX).

The first meeting between Emir Abdullah and Chaim Weizmann took place in London in 1922. Abdullah offered to support the Balfour Declaration if the Zionists accepted him as the ruler of Palestine. The offer was politely brushed aside by Weizmann, but the relationship between the two parties was affirmed; and thus that meeting marked the beginning of an alliance between Transjordan and the Zionist movement. The Labour Zionists, under the leadership of Weizmann, wanted good relations with Abdullah, but they had no wish to be his subjects. The Revisionists, under the leadership of Jabotinsky, were never reconciled to the exclusion of Transjordan from Balfour Declaration. Both the Revisionists and the Labour Zionists rejected the exclusion of Transjordan from the terms of the British mandate of Palestine. Both were intending to reverse the verdict of Churchill’s 1922 White Paper (see page XX), whether through political, military, or economic means. Ben-Gurion defined his movement’s ultimate goal as the independence of the Jewish people in Palestine on both sides of the Jordan. He was strongly attached to the territories east of the Jordan River. The eastern border of what he called the “Jewish Commonwealth” was the Syrian Desert. 401

A number of Jewish businessmen and entrepreneurs approached Abdullah in the early years with projects that promised to contribute to the development of the emirate and to Abdullah’s personal wealth. In 1927 Pinhas Rutenberg was granted the concession to set up a hydroelectric power plant in Naharayim, at the confluence of the Yarmouk and Jordan rivers. In 1929 Moshe Novomeysky, a Jewish mining engineer from Siberia, obtained the concession to exploit the enormous chemical resources of the Dead Sea. 402

!n 1924, Colonel Fredrick Kish, the chairman of the Palestine Zionist Executive, met with Emir Abdullah and his father King Husayn of Hijaz, the head of the Hashemite family, in Amman. Both Abdullah and his father told Kish that they would welcome the presence of Jews not only in Palestine but in other Arab countries, provided the rights of the Arabs were secured. In August 1926, Abdullah made a passionate bid for Jewish involvement in the development of Transjordan:

Palestine is one unit. The division between Palestine and Transjordan is artificial and wasteful. We, the Arabs and Jews, can come to terms and live in peace in the whole country, but you will have difficulty reaching an understanding with the Palestine Arabs. You must make an alliance with us, the Arabs of Iraq, Transjordan, and Arabia. We are poor and you are rich. Please come to Transjordan. I guarantee your safety. Together we will work for the benefit of the country. 403

Kish visited Amman again in February 1931 and met the aged King Husayn, who had by then lost his kingdom of Hijaz to Ibn Saud, and Emir Abdullah. Emir Abdullah told Kish that they recognized and appreciated the Jewish connection with Palestine, which was even mentioned in the Koran. Hassan Khaled Pash, the prime minister of Transjordan, stated that he saw no objection to Arabs and Jews from Palestine participating in the development of Transjordan.

In August 1931, Chaim Arlozoroff replaced Colonel Kish as the political secretary of the Jewish Agency Executive. Arlozoroff initiated a new policy aimed at establishing Jewish settlements in Transjordan. He also was considering the east of the Jordan River as the destination for the Palestinians displaced as a result of Jewish immigration to Palestine. In March 1932, Arlozoroff and Moshe Sharett visited Emir Abdullah in his palace in Amman. Arlozoroff argued that economic development of Transjordan could not proceed without a close link with Palestine; economic cooperation between the countries would lead in time to political unity. Abdullah replied that he himself was not afraid of the Jews, and that his outlook was broader than that of the man in the street who regarded the Jew as he would a ghost.

In 1931, Emir Abdullah transferred ownership of seventy thousand dunums (seventeen thousand acres) of state land located in Ghaur al­Kibd, on the east of the Jordan, to himself personally. The land was situated in the central Jordan valley between the Allenby Bridge and the town of Salt. In 1933, an agreement was reached between Emir Abdullah and the Palestine Land Development Company granting the Zionist company a six-month option to lease the seventy thousand dunums for five hundred British pounds. The emir offered an option allowing the Zionist company a thirty-three-year lease period, renewable for two similar periods for an annual rent of two thousand British pounds plus 5 percent of the profits made in the process of cultivation. In 1935 Abdullah received a lump sum of 3,500 British pounds for a four-year extension of the option. Although the whole deal was kept secret by both parties, news of it was leaked to the press. 404

Sheikhs of Jordanian tribes were interested in similar deals. The first sheikh was Mithqal Pasha al­Faiz, the head of the Beni Sakhr tribe, and Rufayfan Pasha al­ Majali, head of the Majali tribe. The British authorities pressed for the enactment of a law restricting the sale or lease of land to foreigners. But the Permanent Mandate Commission of the League of Nations pointed out that the mandate could not prevent the emir or the sheikh from permitting their land to be colonized voluntarily. The Transjordan legislative council affirmed its support for an open-door policy for the Jews. The British, however, won the battle with the enactment of the Nationality Law, which prohibited the leasing of land to non­citizens, thus closing to the Jews the gateway to the Arabian Peninsula that the Transjordan ruler and tribal chiefs were united in wishing to keep open. 405

Throughout World War II Abdullah maintained close and friendly contact with the Zionists, using Muhammad al­Unsi as his principal go-between. Until his death in 1946, al-Unsi, who reached the position of minister of the interior and deputy prime minister, served in this capacity. Al-Unsi’s contact in the Jewish Agency was Elias Sasson, who had been the head of the Arab section of the agency’s political department since 1937. Sasson was the most outstanding Arabist on the staff of the Jewish Agency. As a young man during Turkish rule, he had been an active member of the Arab National Club in Damascus. Emir Faysal, recognizing his talent, asked him to publish an Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat, to spread a message of understanding and cooperation between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. The newspaper was closed down by the French when they occupied Damascus. Following the collapse of Faysal’s regime in Syria, Sasson moved to Palestine, where he transferred his public activities from the Arab National Movement to the Zionist movement. 406

The Zionist conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942 passed a resolution urging the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine after the Second World War. On August 5, 1946, in Paris, the expanded Jewish Agency voted by a large majority to support the establishment of a viable Jewish state in an adequate part of Palestine. This meant the acceptance of partition and a retreat from the Biltmore resolution for a Jewish state over the entire area west of the Jordan River. It was assumed by the participants that the Arab part of Palestine would be annexed to Transjordan and would be ruled by Abdullah. Even Ben-Gurion accepted the plan for the establishment of two independent states, “Judea” and “Abdallia,” Abdullah’s state, which would incorporate the hilly area west of the Jordan River with its large Arab population and compensate “Judea” with an uninhabited stretch of land to the east of the river. 407

Soon after the Paris resolution, Sasson visited Cairo and met with Egypt’s prime minister, Ismail Sidqi. He was able to persuade Sidqi to support the partition plan as being the best solution to the Palestinian problem. He emphasized the fact that the British would not evacuate Egypt as long as the Palestinian problem remained unsolved. Sidqi accepted the plan, provided that another Arab country accepted it. On August 12, 1946, Sasson visited Abdullah in the king’s winter palace in Shuneh, east of the Allenby Bridge, and presented to him the Jewish Agency’s Paris resolution. The king declared himself a supporter of partition and the annexation of the Arab part to Transjordan. When Sasson asked Abdullah whether he would continue to maintain this position, Abdullah replied that it depended on reaching an understanding between themselves. Avi Shlaim explains Abdullah’s objectives:

His aim was to enlarge Transjordan’s borders and to create one strong and unified Hashemite kingdom which would conclude alliances with Britain and Turkey and guard the British line of defense in the Middle East. Execution of the plan was to proceed in stages: (a) partition of Palestine and joining the Arab part to Transjordan; (b) the merger of Syria with Transjordan; (c) linking the enlarged Transjordan in a federation with Iraq; and (d) linking the Jewish part of Palestine in a federation or alliance with the Transjordanian­-Iraqi federation. 408

Abdullah asked Sasson to return again in a week’s time to discuss with him an action plan which he was preparing. He urged him to bring back on his return the Jewish Agency’s final answer to three questions: First, which plan would be acceptable to them? Second, were they willing to suppress all terrorist activity against the British and to try mend their relations with them? Third, were they prepared to back Abdullah sincerely and with all their might in implementing his far-reaching plan? Abdullah then asked Sasson to bring him ten thousand British pounds as a first payment. Over the next four or five months he needed 25,000 British pounds to spend on the elections in Syria to secure the election of a parliament and the ap­ pointment of a government that would help him carry out the second stage of his plan, the unification of Syria with Transjordan. Sasson, on his return to Shuneh after a week, he brought to Abdullah only five thousand British pounds. The meetings in Shuneh were useful in identifying the common ground between Abdullah and the Zionists and in providing a basis for future cooperation between the two parties. 409

As it became apparent that the partition plan would be approved by the United Nations, Abdullah arranged for a meeting with Golda Myerson (who later changed her name to Meir), the head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency. In the meeting that took place on November 10, 1947, Abdullah told Golda Meir of his intention to annex the part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs under the terms of the partition plan to Transjordan. He assured Golda Meir that Jordan would never attack the Jews. He described Hajj Amin al­Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, as being their common enemy. Both parties agreed to meet again after the approval of the partition resolution. The promised second meeting did not take place until just before the outbreak of hostilities between the Zionists and the Arab nations, but contact was maintained during the intervening period through third parties. When rumors were circulated that the Jordanian government had decided to join other Arab states in an invasion of Palestine, designed to seize the entire country, Abdullah sent Meir a message assuring her that his original promise still held good. 410

The Arab League War Plan

In contrast to the organized, disciplined approach of the Zionists in developing a war plan in 1946 and early 1947, the Palestinians and the Arab League were extremely disorganized and fractured. The Palestinian political and military systems were totally disintegrated, and the Arab world was in utter disarray.

The Arab League political committee met in Saoufer, Lebanon, in September 1947, and passed a resolution to establish a technical committee and to provide the Palestinians funds, materiel, and manpower. General Isma’il Safwat, a former Iraqi chief of staff and a key figure of the technical committee, reported that the Zionists could quickly field twenty thousand well-­trained and well­-armed troops who had at their disposal forty thousand trained reserves and more recruits from Europe and the United States, as well as good lines of communication and well­defended settlements. In addition, they had mobile commando troops and an arms industry. He warned of “very grave developments that [would be] to the advantage of the Zionists unless the Arabs promptly mobilized their utmost forces and efforts to counter Zionist intentions.” 411

The Arab Higher Committee was able to reorganize two paramilitary groups, al­ Futuwa and al­Najjada, into one unit comprising several thousand men. Consequently, the mufti established Jaysh al­Jihad al­Muqaddas (the Army of the Sacred Struggle) under the command of Abd al­Qadir al­Husayni.

President Quwatli of Syria, the head of the Technical Committee, appointed General Taha Hashimi, a former chief of staff and a former prime minister of Iraq, to oversee the recruitment of three thousand Arab recruits for the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) under the command of Fawzi al­Qawuqji. The Technical Committee of the League was in complete control of the ALA. Qawuqji was following the instructions and orders of Taha Hashimi, the head of the Technical Committee, and reporting to the Arab League with no obligation to the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). The Arab League policy was aimed at squeezing the mufti out. This situation was reflected in the relationship between the ALA and the fighting force of the AHC (Sacred Struggle) under the command of Abd al­Qader al­Husayni. The Palestinian fighters were suspicious of Qawuqji and would not recognize him as their commander in chief. This rivalry climaxed in Qawuqji’s refusal to aid Abd al-Qader in the decisive battle of Qastal with the Hagana in April 1948. 412 Thus the civil war in Palestine, from November 1947 until the termination of the mandate in May of 1948, was characterized by the complete absence of any overall strategy among the Palestinian fighting units.

The mufti, on the other hand, did not share Safwat’s assessment. He and his colleagues repeatedly argued that the Palestinians simply needed money and arms to defeat the Zionist forces. 413 He dismissed the idea of mobilizing Arab regular armed forces, as he was concerned about Abdullah’s intentions in view of his known collaboration with the Zionists.

The Arab League, since its establishment in October 1944, had assumed that it could confront Zionism by political means. The UN partition resolution came as a shock for the Arabs, but they were convinced it would ultimately be revoked. Hope was revived in March and April 1948 when the United States considered replacing it with a trusteeship. Some Arab diplomats in London and New York signaled to their capitals that the political battle against partition had already been won. The Zionist leadership also was not preoccupied with the possibility of an Arab military option. A Jewish Agency study in March 1948 stated that the Arab chiefs of staff warned their governments against the invasion of Palestine, as well as any lengthy war, because of the internal situation in most of the Arab countries. The Zionist leadership viewed the Arab states as backward, unstable, conflict–ridden, and ruled by corrupt leaders who held the reins of power through manipulation, intrigue, and bribery. 414

Conflicts and power struggles among the Arab states, rather than a vision of unity and clear direction, dominated the Arab League politics and conduct. The Arab states were divided into two camps: the Hashemites in Iraq and Transjordan in one camp, and Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia in the other. Abdullah of Transjordan, driven by his personal ambition to become the king of Greater Syria, was willing to collaborate and serve any and all powers that could help him to attain his goals. He supported the partition plan and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in return for the Zionists’ support of his plans to annex the Arab part of Palestine. The Arab leaders were aware of his meetings and negotiations with the Zionists; as a result, suspicion and fear separated Abdullah from the rest of the Arab states. The divisiveness and internal rivalries among the Arab leaders prevented them from formulating a unified strategy.

At its meeting in Bludan in 1946, the Arab League adopted a secret recommendation calling for economic sanctions against Britain and the United States as a lever for political pressure. But at the Sauofer meeting of September 16–19, 1947, the League failed to implement this secret resolution, as Saudi Arabia blocked the move. A month later the League met in Aley to discuss the military option. Egypt refused to join the technical committee that was intended to take general command of the Arab forces. The first meeting of the Arab chiefs of staff to work out a plan for military intervention took place on April 30, 1948, only two weeks before the end of the mandate. This meeting was prompted by the serious events of April, including the Deir Yasin massacre; the fall of many Palestinian cities, including Tiberius and Haifa; the collapse of the Palestinian forces; the failure of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA); and the mass flight of refugees.

The Zionist leaders were aware of the deep split in the Arab world and the reluctance to go to war. Representatives of the Jewish Agency met with Abdullah, Azzam Pasha, and the Egyptian prime ministers on multiple occasions before and after May 1948. Ben-Gurion, who was committed to the Biltmore program calling for a Jewish state in all of Palestine, hoped that an alliance with Abdullah would facilitate the transfer of the Palestinian Arab population to Transjordan, the settlement of Jews in the entirety of Palestine, and, in the distant future, land purchases and colonization in Transjordan. Moshe Sharett was pursuing a signed agreement with Jordan that would influence the UNSCOP recommendations. Ben-­Gurion, on the other hand, opposed such an agreement, as it would mean the fixing of final borders.

The Arab regular armies were not combat trained, and they were not prepared for the war. They lacked the experience of Jewish soldiers who had served in the Allied armies during World War II. The Arab armies, especially the Egyptian and Iraqi forces, were ill-equipped for long lines of communication and prolonged warfare. Most importantly, they lacked a unified command structure or a coordinated plan of operation. Finally, the psychological aspect played a decisive role. For the Jews, it was a war for survival, a matter of life and death; winning the war would guarantee a secure future in Palestine. On May 13, 1948, George C. Marshall, the US secretary of state, circulated a letter to US diplomatic offices describing the situation in the Middle East:

Internal weakness in various Arab countries make it difficult for them to act. The whole government structure in Iraq is endangered by political and economic disorders and the Iraqi government can­ not . . . afford to send more than the handful of troops it has already dispatched. Egypt has suffered recently from strikes and disorders. Its army has insufficient equipment because of its refusal of British aid, and what it has, is needed for police duty at home. Syria has nei­ ther arms nor army worthy of name and has not been able to orga­ nize one since the French left three years ago. Lebanon has no real army, while Saudi Arabia has a small army which is barely sufficient to keep tribes in order. 415

The best fighting force in the Arab world was the Arab Legion of Transjordan. It consisted of six thousand men, of whom only 4,500 were available for combat. Of its forty thousand men, the Egyptians had concentrated fifteen thousand in two brigades in El Arish in Sinai. They were not prepared for war. Some four to five thousand men of the main Egyptian forces, supported by aircraft and tanks, comprised a substantial force. The second Egyptian brigade, mainly made up of volunteers from the Muslim Brotherhood, moved into purely Arab held areas to contest Abdullah’s control of the West Bank. The Syrians would commit three to four thousand men—half their army—to Galilee. Iraqi offered a mechanical brigade of three thousand men for the north. Lebanon had smaller detachment. The Arab Legion’s plan was to secure its position in the West Bank and not to advance to the sea area near Tel Aviv, but to commit its main forces to Jerusalem. The Egyptians divided their forces; rather than advancing on Tel Aviv, they sent one part toward Jerusalem to deny Abdullah control. 416

The leading elements of Arab Liberation Army crossed from Syria to Palestine in December 1947, and were followed at intervals by the main body. The ALA commander, Fawzi al­Qawuqji, was the last to arrive in Palestine via Amman in February 1948. It was planned that the ALA should seize and hold positions of strategic importance until the regular Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948. Having established his position on Palestinian soil, however, Fawzi could not content himself with waiting in the role assigned to him. He started a series of attacks on Jewish settlements, all unsuccessful. The first attack was directed against a village of Orthodox Jews in the Jordan Valley called Tirat Zvi. His forces were forced to retreat after heavy losses among his men. The second target was the settlement of Mishmar ha Emek in the Plain of Esdralon. He was forced to withdraw his forces in a hurry to avoid being captured by Jewish reinforcements sent into action by adjacent settlements. The third attack was against the Nebi Samwil ridge just northwest of Jerusalem. He had to withdraw his forces when they were threatened with an air strike by the British Air Force.

By mid-May, the Palestinian and Arab volunteer forces had been decimated. And as hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into safer areas of Palestine and into neighboring Arab countries, the Arab League ordered the regular armies into battle. The numbers, equipment, and firepower of those regular armies were less than half of what the Technical Committee of the Arab League had recommended. Abdullah demanded that he be allowed to lead the Arab armies and then used his position to wreck the invasion plan that had been developed by the Arab League’s military experts. He ordered his British­-commanded Arab Legion to secure only the part of Palestine allotted to the Arab state, in accordance with his agreement with the Zionists.

The Arab Legion Operations

At noon on the dot on May 15, 1948, the long column of Jordanian troops crossed the border in the direction of Jericho. The Arab Legion then amounted to about 4,500 men: four Bedouin mechanized regiments, seven infantry companies, and two four-gunned batteries of twenty-five-pound artillery. There were no combatant aircraft in the Legion.

Jerusalem had not been allotted to the Arabs under the partition resolution, but had been earmarked for internationalization. The defense of the Arab quarters of Jerusalem was left to the irregular formations. In the north of the country, the Iraqi detachment moved across the Jordan River at Jist al-Majami and took positions around Nablus. The Iraqi Air Force at Mafraq had two flights of obsolete Gladiator fighters and a flight of Anson light bombers. Further to the north, the Lebanese and the Syrian armies made little more than demonstrations of force along their frontiers with Palestine. The Syrians managed to get as far as the abandoned camp of the Transjordan Frontier Force near Semakh, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The ALA took up position in Samaria, between the zones held by the Iraqi Army and the Arab Legion. The Egyptians, who put the largest Arab contingent into the field, marched up from Sinai to Gaza, stretching their advances as far to the north as Bethlehem by May 22, 1948. 417

Urgent appeals for help from the inhabitants of Jerusalem prompted King Abdullah to give orders to the British commander of the Arab Legion, John Glubb (known as “Glubb Pasha”), to defend the city. The Arab Legion moved one company of about hundred men followed by further reinforcements, which tipped the scales enough to prevent the collapse of the defenders of the city. The king had made a decision to depart from the original plan to confine the Jordanian control of only to the portion allotted to the Arabs by the partition resolution. The force of public opinion on the subject of Jerusalem, the third most holy shrine of Islam, was too intense for help against the Israeli offensive to be withheld, whatever the consequences of intervention. It was also an important consideration to King Abdullah personally due to the presence of the tomb of his father, King Husayn ibn Ali, at one of the gates of Haram-esh Sherif in Jerusalem.

The front line in Jerusalem was established, with the old city and the eastern and northern quarters left in the hands of the Arabs. The Jewish quarter in the old city fell during the fighting prior to the first truce, and some fifteen hundred Jewish prisoners were taken by the Arab Legion. Only fighting men and others of military age were sent to the internment camp that had been set up for them at Mafraq on the edge of the desert. The rest were delivered across the lines into Israeli territory.

Once the positions of the Arab Legion and the Israeli forces inside Jerusalem were stabilized before the commencement of the first truce, the Israeli forces developed a plan to establish road communications between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. At the same time, the Arab Legion developed its own plan to prevent the Israelis from achieving that objective by controlling the Latrun region, through which the main road from the coast to the highlands passed. The Jordanian commanders were concerned about the ability of the Arab Legion to protect Latrun and to hold on their positions in this region. They expected that the Israelis’ next move would be to capture al-Lydd and Ramleh before starting their offensive against the Jordanians at Latrun. Glubb Pasha was convinced that his army would not be able to provide the necessary troops for the protection of the two cities and at the same time maintain its hold on Latrun. The inhabitants of both cities had assumed that the Legion forces would defend their cities as they had in East Jerusalem and the Latrun area. But they were wrong: Glubb Pasha had decided to leave the people of the cities resist the Israeli attack on their own. 418

The people of al­Lydd and Ramleh begged the Jordanian command to send an adequate garrison of regular troops. Their pleas were met during the truce by the arrival of two hundred Bedouin volunteers from Jordan and an infantry company of about a hundred men. It was clear to everybody that these reinforcements would not be able to secure the safety of the two towns. Sending this inadequate force was meant to appease the inhabitants, but was not a serious effort to secure the towns. The Bedouin volunteers had no military training, and were definitely unqualified for the mission assigned to them. They had a wonderful time for as long as the truce lasted; they were lodged and fed at the expense of the municipalities.

On July 10, 1948, Ben-Gurion appointed Yigal Allon as the commander of the attack against Lydda and Ramleh, and Yitzhak Rabin as his second in command. Allon began his offensive by ordering the bombardment of al-Lydd from the air—it was the first city to be attacked this way. This was followed by a direct attack on the city’s center. As soon as the Israeli attack started, the tribesmen fired most of their ammunition and then retreated and faded away. The infantry company, whose commander had been ordered to avoid loss of personnel, also withdrew under cover of the night. The soldiers made their way back on foot to their companions at Latrun. 419

Deserted by both the volunteers and the Legionaries, the men of al-Lydd, armed only with some old rifles, took shelter in the Dahamish mosque in the city center. After a few hours of fighting they surrendered, only to be massacred inside the mosque by the Israeli forces. In the mosque and in the streets nearby, the Jewish troops went on rampage of murder: 426 men, women, and children were killed (146 bodies were found inside the mosque). On July 14, 1948, the Jewish soldiers went from house to house taking people outside, and marched about fifty thousand of them outside the city toward the West Bank. More than half of these were already refugees from nearby villages. Spiro Munayar, who had lived all his life in Lydda and was an eyewitness on that terrible day in July, wrote:

During the night the soldiers began going into houses in the areas they had occupied, rounding up the population and expelling them from the city. Some were told to go to Kharruba and Barfilyya, while other soldiers said: “Go to King Abdullah, to Ramallah.” The streets filled with people setting out for indeterminate destinations. . . .

The occupying soldiers had set up roadblocks on all the roads leading east and were searching the refugees, particularly the women, stealing their gold jewelry from their necks, wrists, and fingers and whatever was hidden in their clothes, as well as money and every­ thing else that was precious and light enough to carry. 420

The same sights were observed by the few foreign journalists who were in the town that day. Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Sun Times wrote: “Practically everything in their [the Israeli forces’] way died; riddled corpses lay by the roadside.” Kinneth Bilby of the New York Herald Tribune reported seeing the corpses of Arab men, women, and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly attack. The London Economist described the horrific scenes that took place when inhabitants were forced to start marching after their houses had been looted, their family members murdered, and their city wrecked: “The Arab refugees were systematically stripped of all their belongings before they were sent on their trek to the frontier. Household belongings, stores, clothing, all had to be left behind.” 421

Ramleh, with its seventeen thousand inhabitants, was attacked on July 12, 1948, but its final occupation was completed after the Israelis had taken al-Lydd. The city had been the target of terrorist attacks by Jewish forces in the past; the first one had taken place on February 18, 1948, when the Irgun had planted a bomb in one of its markets, killing many people. Terrified by the news coming from al-Lydd, the city notables reached an agreement with the Israeli army that allowed the people to stay. However, the Israeli units entered the city on July 14, 1948, and immediately began a search-and-arrest operation in which they rounded up three thousand people, transferring them to a prison camp nearby. On the same day, they started looting the city. 422

The Arab Legion, which had abandoned al-Lydd and Ramleh, defended the Latrun area tenaciously. The Legion also successfully repelled Israeli attacks on the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem in July, especially on Sheikh Jarrah.

While the cease-fire negotiations were going on, a major battle was fought between the Israeli forces and the Iraqi Army. The battle was for the control of the triangle: Jenin in the north, Nablus in the east, and Tulkarem in the west. The Israelis were concerned about the advance of the Iraqi forces along the Tulkarem–Natanya road to within only ten kilometers off the Mediterranean coast. To defend Israel’s narrow waistline, the Israeli command ordered its largest offensive operation of the war. Three brigades were assigned for this operation: The Golani and Carmel brigades on the northern flank of the Iraqi Army in Jenin and a diversionary attack on Tulkarem from the south by the Alexandroni Brigade. Between June 1 and 3, Moshe Carmel, the commander of the northern front, captured Jenin, but the Alexandroni failed to attack Tulkarem. All the power of the Iraqi forces was then turned against the northern Israeli forces, inflicting heavy casualties on them and forcing their retreat and withdrawal from Jenin. 423

According to the Iraqi chief of staff, Salih Saib al­Juburi, the Arab armies’ war plan called for the Arab Legion to send one infantry regiment to Nablus and an armored regiment to Ramallah. The failure of the Arab Legion to carry out the mission assigned to it exposed the Iraqi Army to Israeli attacks and prevented the Iraqis from advancing to the Mediterranean coast. The Arab invasion plan also called for the Arab Legion to send a force to Jenin and from there to proceed to attack Afuleh. The failure of the Arab Legion to carry out its part of the war plan prompted Nur al­Din Mahmud, the head of all the Arab armies, to go to Ramallah to meet with Glubb in a vain attempt to discover the reasons for the Arab Legion’s inactions. On May 20, 1949, Juburi, Glubb, and senior Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese officers met with King Abdullah, Abd al-Illah, and Azzam Pasha in the king’s palace in Amman. Juburi concluded that Glubb was not going to carry out the Arab war plan, but would follow the British government’s instructions. At the time, Juburi had no knowledge of the secret meeting between Bevin, Glubb, and Abul Huda, but when he learned about it after the war, it confirmed his suspicions that Glubb’s direction of the operations of the Arab Legion in 1948 conformed to a plan that had previously been settled in London. 424

The Egyptians had their forces spread along a line running across the maritime plain from Isdud, on the coast, through Falluja to Beit Jibreen in the foothills and thence up to Bethlehem. Behind this line lay a number of Jewish settlements which had been bypassed and which had successfully resisted subsequent attacks by the Egyptian troops. During the truce, the Israelis sent caravans, under the supervision of United Nations Observers, carrying supplies to their settlements in the south. On October 15, 1948, one of the Israeli convoys was sent forward to the Egyptian lines without the prescribed United Nations escort, and when the Egyptian lines fired at them, the Israelis launched a major attack on the Egyptian troops. The Egyptian formations were taken by surprise. Numerically, the two armies were about the same strength, but the Egyptians were dispersed at length while the Israelis were concentrated on one point of attack and were able to burst through the defense without difficulty. The Israelis managed to split the Egyptian forces into two halves. On the plain, all the territory in Palestine was lost except a small enclave around the town of Falluja, where a number of survivors, about 2,500, held out. The Egyptian garrisons at Hebron and Bethlehem were cut off from the main body of their army, which had retreated to the south into Sinai. 425

The defeat of the Egyptian army left the southern wing of the Jordanian forces in imminent danger of an Israeli advance on Hebron. On October 28, 1948, the anticipated attack against Hebron materialized. However, the Arab Legion fought the Israeli forces between Beit Hebron and Beit Jibrin and forced them to retreat. Following this military engagement between the Israeli forces and the Arab Legion, a meeting took place in Jerusalem, under United Nations auspices, between Moche Dayan and Abdullah el Tel where a cease-fire agreement was reached. 426

On December 1,1948, the Jordanian government convened a congress of Palestinian leaders at Jericho, where a resolution passed unanimously, in favor of the union of Palestine with the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. This decision was accepted by the Transjordanian parliament. 427

The Galilee Operations

At the beginning of June, Ben-Gurion gave the orders to march into the upper Galilee all the way to the border of Lebanon. The Lebanese army was composed of five thousand men, of which two thousand were stationed on the border. They were supported by two thousand Arab Liberation Army (ALA) volunteers, most stationed around the city of Nazareth; the rest were scattered in small groups among the dozens of villages in the area. In the absence of any regular Arab troops, Galilee was wide open for Israeli assault. The villages were able to resist the advancing Jewish troops on their own. The desperate courage of the Palestinian villages was what motivated the brutality of Jewish forces when they were able to break their resistance. The Israeli soldiers resorted to executions and any other means that might speed up the expulsion.

One of the first villages to be captured was the village of Mi’ar. The writer Muhammad Ali Taha was seventeen years old when the Israeli soldiers entered the village on June 20, 1948. He stood watching at sunset, as the approaching Israeli troops began shooting indiscriminately at the villagers still busy in the fields collecting their dura. When they got tired of the killing spree, the soldiers began destroying the houses. People later returned to Mi’ar and continued living there until mid-July, when Israeli troops reccupied it and expelled them for good. Forty people were killed in the Israel attack on June 20, 1948. 428

The pace of occupying and cleansing villages in the lower and eastern Galilee was faster than in any phase of the operations that had gone before. By June 29, 1948, large villages with a significant ALA presence were targeted. Within less than ten days they had all been taken and the majority of their inhabitants expelled. Only a few were not evacuated. Among these were the villages of Majd al-Krum and Mghar. In Marj al-Krum, mass evictions started, and after half the village inhabitants were expelled, a row suddenly erupted between the intelligence officers, resulting in some being allowed to return from the trail of forced exile. The name of the village was once Majd Allah, “the Glory of God”; it had been changed to “Glorious Olive Groves” after the trees around the village became famous. At the center of the village was a well whose water explains the abundance of the plantations and orchards around it. Some of the houses looked as if they had been there from time immemorial, surrounded by the olive trees on the south and vast tracts of cultivated land on the east and west. Today Marj al-Krum is hemmed in by Israel’s discriminatory policy which prevents its natural expansion. Since 1948, this village has had the strongest cadre of nationalists in Palestine. The villagers have left the rubble of the demolished houses standing to commemorate the resilience and heroism of its inhabitants. 429

In July, the Israeli troops took many of the pockets that had been left in the previous two months. Several villages on the coastal road that had held out courageously— Ayn Ghazal, Jaba, Ayn Hawd, Tirat Haifa, Kfar lam, and Ijzim—fell, as did the city of Nazareth and a number of the villages around it.

UN Mediation Efforts

In May, the secretary-general of the UN appointed Count Folke Bernadotte as its official mediator in Palestine. Bernadotte, a cousin of the king of Sweden, was the chairman of the Swedish Red Cross. In this role during the Second World War, he had negotiated directly with Heinrich Himmler, succeeding in saving some thirty thousand prisoners of war from Nazi concentration camps, including at least ten thousand Jews. 430 He was considered a person of unimpeachable character, and was accepted, grudgingly, by both Arabs and Israelis as an unbiased, objective negotiator (at least initially; later, Israel claimed that he was an agent of the British and accused him of bias toward the Arabs).

On May 30, the UN informed Bernadotte of a Security Council resolution calling for a four-week cease-fire. Bernadotte succeeded in implementing a suspension of hostilities between Israel and the Arab League to commence on June 11, 1948. 431

During the truce, Bernadotte produced his first plan outlining a settlement to the Palestinian problem. This proposed a union or federation between Jordan and Israel. Each state would continue to administer its internal affairs independently of the other, but would cooperate on foreign policy, defense, and economics. It was suggested that the Arabs should take the Negev in exchange for western Galilee, that Jerusalem should be an Arab city, and that there should be free zones at the Haifa port and the Lydda airport.

Bernadotte’s first plan was rejected by the representatives of the Arab League in Cairo, on the grounds that it prioritized Zionist demands over those of Arabs.432 It was rejected by Israel as it infringed on the sovereignty and independence of its state, and because it relegated Jerusalem to Arab rule. Bernadotte had to rework the entire framework of his proposal. He tried to prolong the truce for an indefinite period, but this was rejected by the Arab League, who could not accept the demilitarization of Jerusalem.433 The Jews, for their part, responded to the request for an extended truce by seizing the strongholds of Ramleh and Lydda. 434 Accepting failure, Bernadotte ordered the evacuation of UN observers from Palestine, and hostilities resumed.

However, he received a request for a meeting from Transjordan. Speaking through his foreign minister, Abdullah indicated that he had been surprised by the response of the other Arab leaders, and that he was willing to continue talks based on Bernadotte’s proposals. He urged Bernadotte to encourage the UN Security Council to pressure the Arab states to comply with a cease-fire order, even applying sanctions if necessary. Apparently this was because Abdullah knew that the military capacity of the other states was weakening. 435 Bernadotte took his suggestions to the Security Council, and after heated debate, the UN approved a resolution ordering a second, indefinite truce, effective within twenty­four hours, empower­ ing the Truce Commission “to take any necessary steps” to bring it about. It also instructed the mediator to continue demilitarizing Jerusalem in order to ensure access to the holy sites there, and to supervise the observance of the truce. The Arabs, represented by Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, agreed to the truce on the condition that Jewish immigration be halted and 300,000 Arab refugees be enabled to return to their homes in Palestine. The Israelis accepted this as well. The second cease­fire became effective on July 18. A cadre of international truce observers was installed, and the truce held, although many violations were observed.

The Ten Days’ War

During the ten days of fighting between the two truces, the Israelis’ position hardened. The first targets of the Israeli forces were the pockets within the Galilee around Acre and Nazareth. On July 6, three brigades—Carmel, the Golani, and Brigade Seven—received orders to violate the first truce, and to continue the cleansing operations. The operations in and around Nazareth were carried out rapidly, and large villages not taken in May were quickly captured.

Operation Palm Tree completed the takeover of western Galilee. Three villages were left intact: Kfar Yassif, Iblin, and the town of Shafa’Amr. These were mixed villages, with Christian, Muslim, and Druze residents. Many families had deserted these villages; the Israelis allowed them to be repopulated by refugees from other villages they had destroyed. As a result of these population movements inside Galilee, Shafa’Amr became a huge town, swollen by the streams of refugees entering it in the wake of the May to July operations in the surrounding areas. It was occupied on July 16, 1948, but was left alone; no one was expelled. This was an exceptional decision. 436

The attack on Nazareth started on July 9, 1948, the day after the first truce ended. When the mortar bombardment on the city began, the people anticipated forced eviction and decided they would prefer to leave. Madlul Bek, the commander of the five hundred Arab Liberation Army troops in the city, ordered them to stay. Telegrams between him and commanders of the Arab armies, which Israel intercepted, reveal that he and other ALA officers were ordered to try to stop expulsion by all means. When the shelling intensified, he was unable to stop the city’s inhabitants from departing. On July 16, 1948, he surrendered. However, Ben-Gurion did not wish the city of Nazareth to be depopulated for the simple reason that he knew the eyes of the Christian world were fixed on the city. The supreme commander of the operation, Moshe Karmil, ordered the total eviction of all the people who had stayed behind (sixteen thousand, of whom ten thousand were Christians). Ben-Gurion instructed Karmil to retract his order and let the people stay. However, not all those allowed to stay were spared. Some of the people were expelled or arrested on the first day of the occupation, as the intelligence officers began searching the city from house to house and seizing people according to a prepared list of suspects. A similar process took place in the villages around Nazareth. 437

One pocket of resistance—six villages along the coast of south Haifa—held out.

Of the six villages in this area, three fell before the first truce and the other three were captured after the truce. The village of Ayn Hawd was an unusual case that captured the hearts of many in the area. The main clan in the village, the Abu al­ Hija, were thought to have special healing powers; people frequently came from the coast toward the Carmel mountains where the village was situated to visit them. In May, Ayn Hawd was attacked and the five families making up the Abu al-Hija clan were able to save the village. But on July 16, the Israelis captured it. The original villagers were expelled and the Hebrew inhabitants renamed the village Ein Hod. Certain members of the Israeli unit that occupied the town, seeing its beauty, decided not to destroy it. They later returned and settled there, turning it into an artists’ colony that hosted some of Israel’s best-known artists, musicians, and writers. One of the five families of Abu al-Hija found refuge in the countryside a few kilometers to the east and settled there. Stubbornly and courageously, they refused to move, and gradually created a new village under the name of Ayn Hawd. In the 1950s, the Abu al-Hija built new cement houses inside the forest that envelops their village. The Israeli government refused to recognize them as a legal settlement until 2005, when a relatively liberal-minded minister of the interior granted them semi-recognition. 438

Bernadotte’s Second Plan and Assassination

Meanwhile, Bernadotte continued his negotiations, the most difficult points of which were the demilitarization of the Haifa port, which was essential to the supply of oil out of the Middle East; the demilitarization of Jerusalem, because of its importance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and the disposition of Palestinian Arab refugees. On the first point, the US, supported by the British, refused to allow the demilitarization of Haifa, but exerted pressure on the UN to allow the Zionists to restart operation of the refineries. 439 On the second point, Bernadotte pled with the UN to send material support, particularly from the US, to aid in the demilitarization of Jerusalem, which he felt was the key to bringing peace to the region. The US turned down his request for six thousand troops, and in the absence of armed UN guards, fighting in Jerusalem remained active. With respect to the third point, members of the Arab League pressed Bernadotte to return Palestinian refugees to their homes, particularly in Jaffa and Haifa. The possibility was rejected out of hand by Israeli foreign minister Shertok. Visiting the refugee camps in Ramallah and Lydda, Bernadotte found the conditions appalling, and appealed to the UN and other international organizations for relief measures. 440 Receiving reports of massacres and mass displacements in Ein Ghazal, Ijizim, and Jaba from truce supervisors, Bernadotte ordered Israel to allow the inhabitants of those villages to return forthwith, and to rehabilitate them. 441

On September 16, Bernadotte submitted a report on the situation in Palestine to the UN secretary-general, urging them (over US opposition) to place the Palestine question on the General Assembly’s agenda. He also proposed a second plan for settling the region. This second plan differed from his first on several key points:

• The state of Israel was recognized as a sovereign nation, with control of its own foreign policy, defense, immigration, etc.
• The status of Jaffa was, by omission, accepted as part of the state of Israel.
• The city of Jerusalem was to be placed under UN control, in accordance with the UN resolution of November 29, 1947.
• Arab Palestine should comprise the entire Negev; its fate was to be decided by the Arab states, in consultation with its inhabitants, though it was still recommended to merge it with Transjordan.
• The Jewish state was to comprise all of the Galilee, which encompasses some 20 percent of mandatory Palestine, including Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Nazareth, and Safed. Furthermore, Arab refugees should be given the right to return to this area, or be compensated for the loss of their property if they chose not to go back.
• The port of Haifa, in Israeli territory, should be a free port, with access by Arab nations; the airport at Lydda should likewise be free.
• Lydda and Ramla, which Israeli forces had occupied during the Ten Days’ War, should be returned to Arab control. 442

After Bernadotte submitted his second plan, Israel’s foreign minister, Shertok, accused the mediator of bias toward the Arab side. Indeed, the plan did not favor Israel, but was based on Bernadotte’s observations of the historical context and events of the conflict. On September 17, 1948, the day after he submitted his proposal to UN secretary-general Trygve Lie, he was assassinated by four members of the Stern Gang, in a plot masterminded by Yitzhak Shamir (who would go on to become prime minister of Israel from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992). Unfortunately, Count Bernadotte’s peace plan died with him. 443

Armistice

After Bernadotte’s assassination, the UN appointed Dr. Ralph Bunche, who had been Bernadotte’s deputy, as acting mediator to Palestine.

On October 28, 1948, the Israelis advanced north in Galilee and forced the ALA forces to retreat to Lebanon. Fighting on the Lebanese front was over for the duration of the war.

On February 24, 1949, an armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel was signed at Rhodes, terminating the state of war between the two countries. According to this agreement, Israel had to agree to Egyptian military presence in the Gaza Strip, to the release of the Egyptian brigade from Falluja, and to the demilitarization of El Abuja. The agreement secured Israel’s control over the northern Negev and the capture of the southern Negev. It should be noted that the armistice did not include recognition of Israel as a state (Egypt recognized Israel in 1978 under Sadat; Jordan finally recognized Israel in 1994; and the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized it at Oslo in 1993).

Negotiations between Lebanon and Israel began on March 1, 1949, at Ras al-Naqura. When the talks began, the Israeli army was occupying a narrow strip of Lebanese territory containing fourteen villages. The Israelis tried to link the withdrawal from the villages with the withdrawal of the Syrians from points on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee. The Lebanese rejected the Israeli conditions, and in the end, Israel abandoned them. An armistice agreement between the two countries was signed on March 23, 1949.

The negotiations between Transjordan and Israel were more complicated. The first issue was the extreme southern part of the Negev, which was held by a small detachment of the Arab Legion. For Jordan, the possession of Aqaba was essential, as its port held the only direct access to the world outside. The Jordanians invoked the terms of the Anglo-Jordanian Treaty of Alliance which entitled them to British protection from attacks on territory belonging to Jordan proper. In response, a battalion of British infantry was sent to the port, joined by a frigate of the Royal Navy. The Israeli attack to capture southern Negev had started on March 7, 1949, and by the end of the month had reached the shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. No attempt was made to cross into Jordanian territory at Aqaba, which was in the hands of the British. 444

The second issue was related to the announcement by the Iraqi government of its intention to withdraw its troops and its declaration that they were not going to sign any agreement with Israel. The Israelis made an agreement to the Arab Legion to take over the Iraqi positions subject to the surrender of a strip of rich cultivable land, an area of some four hundred square kilometers. They threatened an all-out assault if Transjordan rejected their offer. When Britain and the US refused to intervene, Transjordan accepted Israel’s conditions. After settling this issue, Transjordan and Israel signed an armistice agreement on April 3, 1949. 445

The negotiations between Syria and Israel were the most protracted, lasting nearly four months. The Syrians rejected all attempts to push them back across the Jordan. The course of the negotiations was affected by the military coup of Husni al­Zaim. Although al-Zaim had promised his co-conspirators a fight to the end against Zionism, once he took power, he offered to meet Ben-Gurion in person to conclude a peace settlement rather an armistice agreement, with an exchange of ambassadors, open borders, and normal economic relations. Three weeks later, Husni al-Zaim was overthrown. On July 20, 1949, the armistice agreement between the two parties was signed.

After the Nakba

During the twenty-five years of the British mandate over Palestine, the Zionist movement succeeded in building the infrastructure of its future state in Palestine. The mandate government provided the Zionists with all the help they needed to achieve their goals. The British facilitated the immigration of Jews to Palestine, and took all possible measures to allow them to acquire land to establish their settlements. The mandate government provided the settlers with the protection and the security that allowed them to build a strong, well-trained, well-equipped army. This volume has presented in full detail the different stages that the Zionist movement went through to lay down the foundations of their future state with the aid of the British colonial authority.

The partition resolution that was adopted by the United Nations in November 1947 was the result of concentrated efforts by all the Allied colonial powers who had won the Second World War. The Zionist colonial project in Palestine was the project of these imperial world powers, and its goal was to control the Middle East and beyond. The United States became the leader of imperialism at the end of World War II, and the partition resolution paved the way toward a successful military campaign to capture most of Palestine. Although the resolution called for the establishment of a Jewish state over 55 percent of Palestine, the military campaign aimed at capturing 80 percent. This decision had already made by the Zionists in the early 1940s at the Biltmore Convention. The remaining 20 percent was to be allocated to the client state of Jordan. The powers had made a decision not to have an Arab Palestinian state.

The Palestinians had to pay a very heavy price in order for the Zionists to establish their state. Eighty percent of the Palestinian population was forced out of their cities, towns, and villages; a total of 750,000 became refugees; many were forced to cross the borders of Palestine to settle in neighboring countries. The Zionists committed serious war crimes in which thousands—fighters and civilians alike— were executed. There were horrific massacres throughout Palestine. Hundreds of villages were erased, libraries and museums were removed, and properties were looted. This was al-Nakba, the Catastrophe.

The Palestinian Resistance Movement was no match for the Zionist military forces. The Zionists refer to the 1947–1948 conflict as the Independence War. They characterize it as a glorious victory against several Arab armies and a Palestinian militia. In reality, however, the Arab states’ armies combined were fewer in number than the Zionist forces, and were poorly equipped. Furthermore, most of the Arab states involved were client-states of the imperial powers who were behind the Zionists’ colonial project; they were not able to make independent decisions. The strongest of those armies was the Jordanian army, which allowed itself to be neutralized in the war in return for a reward: the 20 percent of Palestine to be annexed to East Jordan.

Waves of refugees flooded the cities of what became known as the West Bank during the period between December 1947 and the summer of 1948. Temporary shelters in schools were established for the refugees; tents were erected at the outskirts of almost every city. The West Bank, which was under the control of the Jordanian and Iraqi armies, was considered a safe zone, although these cities did not escape the terror of the air raids of the Israeli planes, which were dropping their bombs on civilians as part of the Zionists’ tactics to generate fear and cause more people to flee from the country. Hundreds of thousands had to cross the borders to find safe refuge in East Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and even further toward Iraq. Refugees from 144 cities, towns, and villages emptied by the Zionists ended up in Gaza, a small coastal city on the Mediterranean, in an area just forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide, making it the most densely populated area in the world.

Transfer, Refugees, and the Right of Return

The exodus of the Palestinian people in 1948, which created the refugee problem, has its roots in the ideology of the Zionist movement and the early planning, at its inception, for the transfer (i.e., expulsion) of the Arab Palestinians. The Zionist mantra for Israel was “A land without a people for a people without a land.” The land did, in fact, have people in it, as the originators of Zionism, like Jabotinsky and Herzl, were aware. On June 12, 1895, as he considered the transition from “a society of Jews” to statehood, Herzl wrote:

When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us.

We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.

The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be caried out discreetly and circumspectly. 446

The first mention of compulsory population transfer by outside authorities was in the Peel Commission report, included at the behest of the Zionist lobby. “If . . . it is clear that a substantial amount of land could be made available for the resettlement of Arabs living in the Jewish area, the most strenuous efforts should be made to obtain an agreement for the transfer of land and population.”

The historic opportunity to enact the Zionist transfer strategy came with UN Resolution 181, passed on November 29, 1947; as detailed earlier in this book, the Zionist forces began carrying out Plan Dalet which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This was long before the Arab armies intervened to stop the exodus of Palestinians into their countries and to save as much of the territories allotted to Palestinians as possible from being occupied by the Jewish militias. By June 1, 1948, approximately 370,000 Palestinians had fled from their homes. 447 In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Benny Morris chronicles the Zionist crimes that emptied the villages and cities of Palestine. 448

In the wake of the 1948 war, the Palestine Conciliation Commission made valiant efforts to forge a peace agreement, but the Arabs refused to participate in a general peace conference until Israel complied with UN Resolution 194, which provided for the return of all refugees who desired repatriation. The Israelis stalled, refusing to consider an American proposal for the repatriation of 250,000 refugees. (This infuriated Truman, but his administration was too dependent on the American Jewish community to put serious pressure on Israel.) In the end, the Arab nations dropped their stipulation, and the Lausanne Peace Conference proceeded. However, though negotiations dragged on for months, there was never a possibility for the return of even a token number of refugees. Over a ten­-year period, only about eight thousand Palestinians were allowed to return to Israeli territory as part of a family reuni­fication plan. 449

The United Nations and the Creation of Agencies to Help Refugees

In 1948, following the assassination of Count Bernadotte, the UN established a relief agency to provide aid for Palestinian refugees and to coordinate the assistance donated by NGOs and other UN agencies. In December of 1949, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 302, establishing the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which was established to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees specifically pending the implementation of Resolution 194 and a just and lasting solution to their plight (the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, UNHCR, is mandated to resettle or otherwise solve the problem of refugees). As a humanitarian organization, UNRWA has no authority to seek durable solutions for those displaced from their homes in Palestine. As the UNRWA website states:

It is worth noting that the protracted situation in which Palestine refugees live is not unique. Resettlement requires the consent not only of refugees, but also of the receiving state. UNHCR estimates that 78 percent of all refugees under its mandate—16 million refugees—were in protracted refugee situations in 2019. According to UNHCR data, of the 20.7 million refugees under UNHCR protection in 2020, less than 2 percent of refugees (251,000) were repatriated to their country of origin. Far fewer were resettled in a third country (34,400) or naturalized as citizens in their country of asylum (33,746). The vast majority remained refugees pending a solution to their plight.

The Right of Return

Considered a basic human right under Article 13 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this principle guarantees any person the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his own country. Refugees in dias­ pora, no matter where they are, still hold on to the dream of having the right to return or be compensated for their lost homeland. 450

The issue of Palestinian refugees was one of Bernadotte’s chief concerns, and a matter of grave concern of all the Arab states as well. He said, “It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.” 451

The Arab nations’ position was that, as Israel had created the refugee problem, it alone should be held responsible for solving it. They lobbied for UN resolutions like Resolution 194 that would give the refugees the choice between returning to their homes or being compensated by Israel for the loss of their property, and this was the position held by all the Arab nations. Israel, however, did not accept these resolutions, blaming the Arabs for starting the war. It refused to cooperate with international agencies to solve the refugee problem unless the refugees were settled outside Israel’s borders. This unresolved issue has caused innumerable conflicts and skirmishes in the years since the 1948 war. It remains one of the most contentious issues in ne­gotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. 452

Israel’s Nationality Law provides that all Jewish immigrants are entitled to Israeli citizenship by way of return or being born there. Arabs who lived in Palestine, however, are excluded from this law. They are entitled to citizenship under a separate and more stringent set of rules that many Arabs failed to meet.453 As Edward Said points out, “These two exclusionary categories systematically and juridically make it im­ possible, on any grounds whatsoever, for the Arab Palestinian to return, be com­ pensated for his property, or live in Israel as a citizen equal before the law with a Jewish Israeli.” 454

Palestinians in Israel

By the end of the 1948 war, about 150,000 Palestinian Arabs—comprising about 10 percent of all Palestinians—remained in the territory that became Israel and became citizens of Israel living within the Green Line. They are concentrated in three parts of the country: about 60 percent live in Galilee, a region that includes all of northern Israel, from the Lebanese border to down to a line between Haifa and Tel Aviv. About 20 percent live in the Triangle, a region adjacent to the Green Line and parallel to the coast between Haifa and Tel Aviv. About 10 percent live in the southern region of Al-Naqab. The remaining 10 percent live in the mixed cities of the coastal plain, such as Acre, Haifa, Lida, Ramleh, and Yaffa. Their religious affiliation falls in three distinct groups: 75 percent are Muslims who live in Arab communities all over the country; 14 percent are Christians, almost all living in Galilee. They are divided into many denominations, including Catholic, Orthodox, Maronite, Protestant, and Armenian. The remaining 11 percent are Druze, living exclusively in Galilee. 455

The Palestinians who remained in Israel were not socially representative of the Palestinian people. Those who were left were mainly living in rural areas, and were the poorest and most disadvantaged; the middle and upper classes, representing the social, political, and cultural leadership, had been forced out of Palestine and were not allowed back. A fifth of the Palestinians left in Israel were internal refu­ gees who had been evicted from their villages and towns. Israeli laws later defined them as “absentees.” They lost all their land and possessions, becoming dependent on the state for goods and services; they had no way of opposing the political structures and regulations that were applied to them. 456

Shortly after its establishment, Israel created laws for the specific purpose of expropriating land or transferring it from Arabs to Jewish citizens or to the state. More than 90 percent of the land in Israel is owned either by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) or the state, and is regulated by the government. The charter of the JNF states that Palestinian lands expropriated by Israel can only be used for the benefit of the Jewish people. Thus, dispossessed Arab owners could not buy or even lease what had once been their property. 457

UN Resolution 181 called on the future Jewish and Arab states to “guarantee to all persons equal and nondiscriminatory rights in civil, political, economic, and religious matters and the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of religion, language, speech and publication, ed­ucation, assembly, and association.” Israel agreed to the provisions of this resolution when it was established, and the Basic Principles of the Government Program, approved by the Knesset in 1959, enacted the rights of Arabs in Israel, including civic equality before the law and entitlement to government assistance in education, health, and social welfare. Thus, technically, Arabs in Israel enjoy democratic rights—they have freedom of assembly for protest, and vote and elect representation in government. However, in practice, they do not enjoy full equality. Because the Israeli constitution recognizes Israel as “the state of the Jewish people,” non-Jews are prevented from claiming the state as equally theirs. 458

With time, Israeli Arabs made strides in education, civil organization, economic standards, political participation and standards of living, in spite of the restrictions on land ownership and their status as second-class citizens. However, their national identity remains consistently central, and is stronger than their civic identity. Thus they developed their collective self-identification as “Palestinians in Israel,” as they feel they are citizens of Israel in name only. 459

The All-Palestine Government

On July 8, 1948, the Political Committee of the Arab League established a temporary civil administration in Palestine directly responsible to the League. At the next meeting of the Political Committee of the League, held in Alexandria, Egypt, from September 6 to 16, 1948, a proposal for transforming the temporary civil administration into a government of all Palestine was debated. Despite Transjordan, Iraqi, and Egyptian reservations, the proposal passed. On September 22, 1948, the Arab Higher Committee announced the establishment of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza under the chairmanship of Ahmad Hilmi Abd al­Baqi.

King Abdullah of Transjordan opposed the establishment of the new government, claiming that it had been established against the will of the Palestinians. To counter these accusations, the All-Palestine Government decided to convene a Palestinian National Council in Gaza on September 30, to which 150 representatives from the chambers of commerce, trade unions, political parties, local councils, and national committees were invited. Mufti Amin al-Husayni arrived in Gaza in secret on September 28, 1948. The streets of Gaza were crowded when he and Ahmed Hilmi entered the city, accompanied by motorcycles and armored cars. The Palestine National Council convened on September 30, 1948, and elected the mufti president of the council. A Palestine declaration of independence was issued on October 1, 1948, which included the following: “Based on the natural and historical right of the Palestine Arab People for freedom and independence . . . [we declare] the total independence of all of Palestine and the establishment of an independent, democratic state whose inhabitants will exercise their liberties and rights.” The council passed a vote of confidence in the government, confirming Ahmad Hilmi as prime minister. With him were ten other ministers comprising the government: Jamal al-Husayni, Raja’i al-Husayni, Michael Abcarius, Anwar Nusayba, Awni Abd al-Hadi, Akram Zu’aytir, Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, Ali Hasna, Yousef Sahyun, and Amin Aqil.

Within days of the declaration of the All-­Palestine Government in Gaza, the Egyptian prime minister ordered the mufti back to Cairo. He was escorted out of Gaza by military police and was put under police surveillance. Later on, Ahmed Hilmi and the members of his cabinet were forced by the Egyptian government to leave Gaza and move to Cairo, where they were unable to perform their duties. Within weeks, these educated and talented professionals had been offered positions in various Arab countries. The All-Palestine Government became nothing but a subsidiary arm of the Arab League. 460

Conclusion

This book, which began as a short history of Palestine, has turned out to be a ten-thousand-year account of the country starting from the time hunters became farmers until the year 1948, the year of the Nakba, the Catastrophe.

The history of Palestine is long and rich. Our country was the center of the ancient world and the birthplace of ancient civilizations and of two monotheistic religions. Migrations from the west, east, north, and south took place over thousands of years. The immigrants assimilated with the original inhabitants of the land and enriched it. Besides peaceful immigration, waves of invaders came and went over time; inevitably, some stayed and became absorbed into the Palestinian culture and civilization and contributed to its development.

They adopted different religions and yet integrated with one another to make a rich culture of peace and harmony. All those who endured the invasions, floods, famines, and droughts that passed over the land through the centuries were Palestinian. Those who tilled the land, died for it, were buried in its soil generation after generation, who faced armies and conquerors and prevailed to build their homes there—all were Palestinian. No single ethnic, tribal, or religious entity can lay sole claim to this land; they are us, and we are them. We are all Palestinian.

Throughout all these years of history, Palestinians have shown how deeply they resent tyranny and occupation. Over and over, they have opposed their occupiers and finally won in the end. In the present day, we are facing a vicious enemy—the Zionist settler-colonial project, which intends to remove us from the land with the support of the imperial powers of the West. But history teaches us a great lesson: like all the invaders of the past, the new invaders will fail. The Zionist invaders will leave; as always, some will remain and assimilate with the Palestinians, the culture will grow and be enriched, and tyranny will be defeated.

As long as we protect our identity and stay strong against this invasion and remain on the road of steadfastness and resistance, we will prevail, and our people will continue to contribute to human civilization and progress.