THE NAKBA: ETHNIC CLEANSING AND THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL
Bay Area Indymedia, CA
by AWTW News Service
/2008/05/20/18500429.php
May 20 2008
Palestinians call what happened to them beginning in 1947 the
Nakba–Arabic for catastrophe. It was perpetrated by Zionist leaders
looking to form the state of Israel on Palestinian land without the
Palestinians.
During the Nakba almost a million Palestinians (half the population at
that time) were brutally forced from their land, villages and homes,
fleeing with only the possessions they could carry. Many were raped,
tortured and killed. To ensure that there would be nothing for the
Palestinians to return to, their villages and even many olive and
orange trees were so well razed that few visible remnants remain. When
the Nakba ended, there had been 31 documented massacres and probably
others. Some 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods were emptied of
their inhabitants.
Former Arabic village and road names were Hebrewized. Ancient mosques
and Christian churches were destroyed. Theme parks, pine forests
(trees not native to the region) and Israeli settlements sit atop
many of the old Palestinian villages. All this was to wipe out any
physical evidence that the land belonged to Palestinians and give
finality to the Nakba.
How many times have you had a discussion about the plight of the
Palestinians with supporters of the existence of the Israeli state and
met the argument that the problem arose from Palestinian intolerance
of Jewish settlers? How many people know–or admit–that from the
beginning Zionism had planned to permanently expel the Palestinian
people from their land? In many Western countries, Nakba denial is
as obligatory as Holocaust denial is condemned. How did this happen?
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian and senior
lecturer at Haifa University Ilan Pappe, explores the period of
the Nakba (One World Publisher, Oxford, 2006). The premise is that
the Nakba was nothing less than an act of ethnic cleansing, normally
regarded by international law as a crime against humanity. To support
this theory, the author outlines various definitions from different
current sources, including "an ethnically mixed area being turned
into a pure ethnic space." He shows how the slaughter and/or forced
expulsion of the Armenians in Turkey, the Tutsis in Rwanda and the
Croatians and Bosnians in former Yugoslavia is akin to what the
Zionists did to the Palestinians on a massive scale in 1948 and
are still doing today. Pappe also draws a connection between ethnic
cleansing and colonialism as it occurred in North and South America
as well as Africa and Australia.
His research is based on primary sources: newly released material
(1990s) from the Israeli military archives, David Ben-Gurion’s diary
where summaries of many of his meetings are recorded, the rereading of
the older archival material through the prism of the ethnic cleansing
paradigm and extensive use of Palestinian oral history archives.
Pappe provides a brief historical background leading up to the Nakba
and a few chapters at the end of the book about the situation today
for Palestinians. The following is a very sketchy timeline of events
leading up to the Nakba.
The first Zionist settlements began in 1878, when Palestine, like
much of the Middle East, was a part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1917,
with the end of WWI and the defeat of the Ottomans, the British army
marched into Palestine and took over. Later that same year, the British
Lord Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised a "national
home" for the Jews on Palestinian land even though by most accounts,
Jews constituted at most only 8 percent of the population and even
less according to some estimates. The League of Nations legalized the
British occupation by giving it a mandate to run Palestine. In 1938
major fighting between Jews and Palestinians broke out. The bombs
of the Zionist military organization Irgun killed 119 Palestinians;
Palestinian bombs killed eight Jews. In 1947 Britain told the newly
formed United Nations that it would withdraw from Palestine. In
November the UN formulized the plan to divide Palestine into two
states. By December 1947, the Zionists began mass expulsions of
Palestinians. When the British pulled out in May 1948, the Zionists
declared independence. The Nakba continued into the early months
of 1949.
Pappe’s book reveals how meticulously the Zionist movement planned,
executed, lied about, and then denied their takeover of Palestinian
land and the removal (through force and terror) of its population. He
presents Israeli policies against the Palestinian minority inside
Israel as well as in the West Bank and Gaza in their proper historical
framework, setting the record straight on truths that conceptualize
the situation faced by Palestinians today. Pappe only briefly touches
on the role of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement in
the late 1800s, to show how deeply rooted the concept of "transfer"
of the indigenous population was, how the "demographic problem"
as viewed by most Israelis today is a continuation of the original
Zionist exclusionist view. A map from 1919 clearly illustrates Zionist
intentions to grab all of Palestine. The Herzl ideologues stated that
"strangers" lived in their biblical land and by stranger they meant
everyone who was not Jewish, although most of Palestine’s Jews had
left after the Roman period. And even today, a recent poll indicated
that 68 percent of Israeli Jews want Palestinian citizens of Israel
to be "transferred."
Much of the book’s exposure concerns David Ben-Gurion, one of the
masterminds and leading overseers of the Zionist project and the
ethnic cleansing that implemented it. From the mid-1920s, Ben-Gurion
functioned as the unofficial defense minister (or minister of war)
of the not-yet officially formed state and later became its founding
prime minister. He worked on an international level as well as locally
organizing other Zionists around his methods and goals. It was in his
home that ethnic cleansing was first discussed with a combination of
security figures and "Arab affairs" specialists (Jews who grew up in
the region and could speak Arabic) who would advise future governments
of Israel (Pappe calls it the Consultancy). His view toward achieving
a Zionist state was ambitious and strategic. He thought it could only
be won by force, but that the Zionists had to wait for the opportune
historical moment to be able to deal "militarily" (as Ben-Gurion
put it) with the demographic reality on the ground: the presence of a
non-Jewish native majority population. When in 1937 the British offered
the Jewish community a future state (on a much smaller percentage of
land than the UN was to give it in 1948), he accepted that as a good
beginning in that it formalized the idea. He had far more ambitious
plans. In 1942 Ben-Gurion publicly stated the Zionist claim for all
of Palestine, but later came to believe that this was not realistic
and that 80 percent would be sufficient for a viable Israeli state.
The book talks about one important strategic project guided by
Ben-Gurion–the "village project" of mapping all of Palestine. Through
the use of aerial photography, details of every Palestinian village
were recorded: its access routes, quality of land, water springs, main
sources of income, socio-political composition, religious affiliations,
names of its mukhtars (traditional village heads), relationship with
other villages, the age of individual men and an index of "hostility"
toward the Zionist project measured by involvement in the 1938 revolt
against the British policy of allowing increased immigration of Jews
into Palestine (including those who may have killed Jews).
Those involved in the village mapping understood that this growing
database was not a mere academic geography exercise. One person who
went on one of these data collection operations in 1940 recalled
many years later: "We had to study the basic structure of the Arab
village. This means the structure and how best to attack it… how
best to approach the village from above or enter it from below. We
had to train our ‘Arabists’ (the Orientalists who operated a network
of collaborators) how best to work with informants."
The book describes another preoccupation of Ben-Gurion and the
Consultancy–the "demographic balance" between Jews and Arabs in
Palestine. Whenever there was a majority of Palestinians living in an
area it was considered a disaster. The public policy that was adopted
was to promote widespread Jewish immigration. But the Jews who were
moving to Palestine since the 1920s preferred living in the more urban
areas which were inhabited by Jews and Palestinians in equal number,
whereas the countryside was overwhelmingly inhabited and cultivated
by Palestinians. The Zionists understood that immigration would
not counterbalance the Palestinian majority and use of other means
would be necessary. Already in 1937 Ben-Gurion told his cabal that
the "’reality’ of a Palestinian majority would compel the Jewish
settlers to use force to bring about the ‘dream’–a purely Jewish
Palestine." "We have to face this new reality with all its severity
and distinctness.
Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish
sovereignty." "They can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is
better to expel them."
When the British decided to leave in 1947 the Palestine question was
transferred to the UN, which, like the British, also accepted the
Zionist claims on Palestine and that partition of Palestine was the
best way to solve the issue. Even if you accepted the Zionist logic,
a partition according to relative population would have allowed less
than 10 percent of the land for a Jewish state. But after considerable
negotiations, the UN Partition Resolution 181 of November 1947 allotted
the Zionists 56 percent of Palestine. While Jerusalem, because of its
religious significance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was kept
as an international city, much of the most fertile land was included
in the Zionist portion. Although disappointed again, Ben-Gurion
appreciated the international recognition of the Jewish state while
ignoring the part which stipulated how much and which territory. He
declared that Israel’s borders "will be determined by force and not
by the partition resolution." Ben-Gurion skilfully sidestepped what
little there was of the worldwide opposition to their schemes. While
the Zionists publicly proclaimed to uphold the Resolution, inside
the country they began to implement their own plans. This ignoring
of negotiations "before the ink is even dry" became characteristic
of subsequent and current negotiations Israel engaged in.
Pappe relates how the Arab leaders opposed the partition of Palestine
and boycotted these UN negotiations. They refused to participate on
the grounds that the division of their land with a settler community
(by then one third of the population, who owned only 6 percent of the
land and had long proclaimed that they wanted to de-Arabize Palestine)
was illegal and unjust. Resolution 181 created tremendous anxiety
for the Palestinians. They sensed the impending showdown with the
Zionists. The slaughter began in December 1947, even before the
British left Palestine.
Pappe details the combination of meticulous planning as well as
allowing "unauthorized" initiative to the more terrorist military
groups, like the Irgun, Stern gang and the Palmach (special commando
units who pioneered the building of Jewish settlements). With a group
of military and civilian people, which included some well-known figures
like Moshe Dayan (a military leader who was army chief during the 1956
Suez crisis and defense minister during the time of the Six Day War
in 1967) and Yitzhak Rabin (a general and two-term prime minister,
assassinated in 1995), Ben-Gurion established and supervised the
different plans to prepare the military forces of the Jewish community
for an offensive against the Palestinians. Plan C (a revised version
of Plans A and B) spelled out the actions that would be taken: killing
Palestinian political leadership and those who financially supported
them, killing Palestinians who acted against Jews, killing officers
and officials, attacking villages that seemed more militant and might
resist future attacks by the Israeli army, and damaging Palestinian
sources of livelihood. Then Plan Dalet (or Plan D) was drawn up,
the blueprint for the systematic and total expulsion of Palestinians
from their homeland. Plan D described operations in the following way:
"destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and
by planting mines in their debris) and especially those population
centres which are difficult to control in a constant manner; or
by mounting combined control operations according to the following
guidelines: encirclement of the villages; conducting a search inside
them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and
the population expelled outside the borders of the state."
In the course of carrying out Plan D the Zionist leaders were not
so concerned with resistance on the part of the Palestinians or
other Arabs who might come to their defense, as opposition from the
Arab states was half hearted and their soldiers poorly trained and
equipped. Publicly the Zionist leaders railed about the possibility
of a "second Holocaust," this time at the hands of the Arabs, but
privately they were fully aware that the war rhetoric of the Arab
states was not matched by serious preparation on the ground. Often
irresolute army leaders from the Arab states were ignored by some
Arab soldiers who took initiative and fought valiantly to defend
the Palestinians. The Zionist leadership’s main fear was the British
army. But while it was still in Palestine, the British army rarely
intervened against the massacres, even when beseeched to do so by
the local Arab population.
Expulsions began by December 1947, in villages and larger towns. The
following is a condensed description from Pappe’s book of what happened
in Haifa under British eyes. The morning after the UN resolution, the
Hagana (the main military group that would become the Israeli army)
and the Irgun (an early split from the Hagana, led by future prime
minister Menachem Begin, which also later became part of the army)
unleashed a campaign of terror on the 75,000 Palestinian residents
of Haifa. Jewish settlers who had come in the 1920s and lived in the
hills around the city took part in these attacks alongside Zionist
military units.
Various tactics were used. Frequent shelling and sniping was reined
down on the Palestinian population, oil mixed with fuel was poured
down the roads and ignited, barrels full of explosives were rolled
down into the Palestinian areas. When panic-stricken Palestinians
came out to put out the fires they were sprayed with machine-gun
fire. Jews who passed as Palestinians brought cars stuffed with
explosives to be repaired at Palestinian garages and the cars were
detonated. In a refinery plant in Haifa, Jews and Arabs worked shoulder
to shoulder and had a long history of solidarity in their fight for
better labor conditions against their British employers. The Irgun,
which specialized in bomb throwing into Arab crowds, did so at this
refinery. Palestinian workers reacted by killing 39 Jewish workers,
one of the worst and also one of the last retaliatory skirmishes in
that period. Later the Hagana units went into one of Haifa’s Arab
neighborhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya, expelled people and blew up their
houses. The British army looked the other way while these atrocities
were being committed. Two weeks later the Palmach went into the Hawassa
neighborhood of Haifa, where around 5,000 of the poorest Arabs lived
in dismal conditions. Huts and the local school were blown up, causing
the people to flee. Pappe regards this as the official beginning of
the ethnic cleansing operation in urban Palestine.
By March 1948, Ben-Gurion commented to the Jewish Agency Executive,
"I believe the majority of the Palestinian masses accept the partition
as a fait accompli and do not believe it is possible to overcome or
reject it… The decisive majority of them do not want to fight us."
The armies of the Arab countries were no match for the well-equipped
Zionist military clandestine units, which had received weapons from
Britain, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Arab irregulars ambushed
Israeli convoys but refrained from attacking the settlements. The
Consultancy decided that ruthless retaliation was not sufficient and
they needed to change to more drastic actions.
Ben-Gurion used the Arab world’s attempts to rescue the Palestinians
to whip up a fear factor among the Jewish community that he carefully
nourished to the extent that it overcame any opposition these tactics
would engender. The "security" of the Jewish state (then as it is
still today) became the overriding fear that allowed many Israelis
as well as people outside the country to turn a blind eye to what
the Zionist leadership was doing, what their plan constituted.
Until March 1948, the Zionist leadership still portrayed their
activities as retaliation to hostile Arab actions. Then, two months
before the British were to leave, they openly declared that they would
take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force. When
the British left in May, the Zionists declared their state. They were
officially recognized by the U.S. and the USSR. Ruthless expulsion went
into high gear and the word retaliation was no longer used to describe
what the Israeli military forces were doing. Ben-Gurion said, "Every
attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion." There
was no longer any need to distinguish between the "innocent" and the
"guilty." Pre-emptive strikes and collateral damage became acceptable
and necessary.
Deir Yassin
On a hill to the west of Jerusalem lay the town of Deir Yassin. The
massacre there is well known throughout the world but bears mentioning
here as it reflected the systematic nature of Plan D as applied to
hundreds of villages throughout Palestine. Pappe describes how on
April 9, 1948, Jewish soldiers burst into the village and sprayed the
houses with machine-gun fire, killing many. "The remaining villagers
were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold-bold, their
bodies abused while a number of women were raped and then killed.
"Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he
saw his family murdered in front of his eyes: ‘They took us out one
after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried,
she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him
in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him–carrying
my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her–they
shot her too.’
"Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children
the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then
sprayed with bullets ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He
was lucky to survive his wounds."
When villages were entered, destroyed and the inhabitants
rounded up, decisions were made about who would live and who would
die. Intelligence officers on the ground aided the military officers
in this decision. The intelligence officers with the help of local
collaborators (hooded spies) would point out different people to the
main intelligence officer.
Israel and the Palestinians Today
As a result of the Nakba, there are now almost 4.5 million Palestinians
dispersed throughout the world, in addition to the 1.4 million under
Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and 1.3 million in Gaza,
a formerly sparsely populated desert strip now full of crowded refugee
camps and towns. About 1.5 million Palestinians continue to live in
Israel itself as second-class citizens. The Jewish population of Israel
numbers roughly 5.5 million. The Zionist state now comprises about 78
percent of historic Palestine, not counting the still-growing number
of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It has no parallel in the
world–a state consciously built, since its inception, for one people,
one culture, on religious grounds and with no real permanent borders.
Pappe’s argument that the Nakba was an act of ethnic cleansing
is convincing. The human and physical geography of Palestine was
transformed by the Zionist consciously punitive plan to wipe out
Palestine’s history and culture and thus deny any future claim
Palestinians could make to their land. Through the years since the
Nakba, the killing machine that is the Israeli army has continued
its dirty work. Pappe lists the following: Kfar Qassim in October
1956, Israeli troops massacred 49 villagers returning from their
fields. Qibya in the 1950s, Samoa in the 1960s, the villages of
Galilee in 1976, the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in
1982, Kfar Qana in 1999, Wadi Ara in 2000 and the Jenin refugee camp
in 2002. There has not been an end to Israel’s killing of Palestinians.
Pappe ends his book with the hope that Israelis will wake up
from their distorted view of wanting retribution, shed racism and
religious fanaticism, and wake up to the truth portrayed in this
book. He thinks that not accepting the Palestinian right of return
equals the continuing defense of the "white" apartheid-like enclave and
upholding Fortress Israel. He says that Palestinians and Jews coexisted
peacefully before the Nakba and even now many have strong social ties,
which shows that the two peoples can live in harmony. He calls for
the transformation of Israel into a secular and democratic state.
Pappe’s book does not concern itself with the central role that
Israel has come to play as the bastion of American imperial interests
in the Middle East. Without the military and political backing of
the U.S. government and the unparalleled financial support that is
central to Israeli society and its way of life ($3 billion a year
in U.S. government aid, along with officially encouraged private
funding), Israel would not be what it is today–if it even existed at
all. Nonetheless, the book is well worth the read for its historical
accuracy and as a vivid reminder of the tragedy that is the Nakba.