The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

The Israeli army continued destroying Palestinian villages—including friendly villages—through June, while the attempts of the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte to broker a truce went nowhere. Over time, Zionist aggression escalated, and brutal measures were often used to prevent refugees from returning to their villages. In the summer, though, the Arab armies in the west and south grew more active, so Israel finally agreed to the UN offer for a truce.

In the first titled section of the chapter, “The First Truce,” Pappé discusses the truce of June 8, which lasted four weeks. Israel used this truce to destroy some villages they had already emptied and to bolster their military, especially the air force. Beginning in early June, Israel began targeting west and upper Galilee more aggressively, meeting resistance from the Lebanese army under the leadership of Fawzi al-Qawuqji. Though the Lebanese army did manage to save some villages, they were eventually defeated. Israel continued to deal very harshly with some villages. In “mixed” villages, Christians were usually spared and the Druze collaborated with Israelis, though in some villages, like Saffuriyya, everyone was evicted. Many refugees resettled in Nazareth, sometimes close enough to their original villages to watch them be transformed into Jewish settlements.

In the next section, Pappé describes Operation Palm Tree (Dekel), which aimed to take over Nazareth and the surrounding villages. Here, they encountered some pockets of resistance from Arab forces in places like Qaqun. Military Police were sent in for the first time, setting up prison camps to hold POWs and to prevent the massacres that had occurred at sites like Tantura when the Israeli army took more prisoners than they could handle and had to execute many of them.

In the next section, “In Between Truces,” Pappé discusses what happened between the end of the first truce on July 8 and the beginning of the second truce on July 18. Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during this period. The only meaningful international help Palestinians received came from Bernadotte, who arrived on May 20 and remained in the country trying to make peace until he was murdered by Israeli terrorists in September. Bernadotte created international pressure on Israel to let the refugees return, so Israel set up a Foreign Ministry to tackle the issue diplomatically.

Meanwhile, the army continued to hone their cleansing methods, with the notorious Brigade Seven implementing terror tactics in northern villages such as Amqa. In western Galilee, some villages and towns fled before they could be expelled by force. In some cases, Israel allowed refugees to resettle in different towns, such as Shafa’Amr. At coastal Haifa, there was particularly fierce resistance, with fighting in some villages even continuing into the second truce. Israel framed this part of the conflict as a policing activity, giving it the name “Operation Policeman.” Another operation, “Operation Dani,” was led by Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin and targeted Lydd and Ramla on the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem. ALA and Jordanian troops were soon forced to withdraw, and local villagers were forced to march to the West Bank (though further west, in the Latrun area, Israel was defeated by Jordan). Meanwhile, beginning on July 9, Israeli forces attacked Nazareth, which was defended by about 500 ALA troops led by Madlul Bek. On July 17, Bek surrendered. Because of Nazareth’s connection with Christianity, however, Ben-Gurion was uniquely conscious of global judgment and gave orders not to evict the local population. By the summer, Ben-Gurion had turned his attention to expelling the Negev Bedouin in the south.

The second truce “came at an inconvenient moment for the ethnic cleansing operation” (191), so Israel disregarded it from the very beginning. With Israel growing more ambitious, only the Egyptian and Jordanian presence prevented them from taking all of Palestine. The international community did virtually nothing. The second truce lasted through summer, though hostilities continued on both sides. By August, the three main areas of Palestine that Israel had not yet taken were Wadi Ara on the northern tip of the West Bank, the western part of upper Galilee, and southern Negev. Operation Autumn, launched in September, again failed to occupy Wadi Ara. Meanwhile, Operation Snir, which set out to capture Golan Heights, ran from late September until well into 1949. Cleansing operations in central Galilee continued into September amid some resistance from the ALA.

In October 1948, Galilee was still holding out thanks to pockets of resistance by the ALA and the Lebanese army. This resistance crumbled, however, under Operation Hiram in the second half of the month. Operation Hiram lasted two weeks and saw some of the most resolute resistance on the part of the Palestinians. Israel finally defeated the resistance with heavy aerial and ground attacks, forcing the ALA to withdraw and inflicting significant collateral damage.

For unclear reasons, some villages were expelled while others were allowed to remain. In some cases, the villages that were allowed to remain had very large populations of the cooperative Druze. Some villages, such as Sa’sa and Safsaf, received exceptionally harsh treatment, as described by Pappé in the subsection “War Crimes During the Operation.” Galilee was occupied by the Israeli army by October 31. Over the next two months, the army continued to run “mopping-up” or “second-thought” operations targeting villages that were originally left out of the cleansing plan. Here, however, Israel was less successful in its ethnic cleansing, and the local population remains mostly Arab. In some communities, including Iqrit, Kfar Bir’im and Ghabisiyya, local Christian inhabitants who were supposed to be allowed to return to their homes later sought legal redress. The region suffered large-scale destruction during occupation as “part of an ongoing Israeli battle against the ‘Arabisation’ of the Galilee, as Israel sees it” (204). The mopping-up operations continued into April 1949, sometimes resulting in massacres such as the one at Khirbat Wara al-Sawda.

In the next section, “Israel’s Anti-Repatriation Policy,” Pappé explains how Israel spent the end of 1948 implementing an anti-repatriation policy by turning the occupied villages into Jewish settlements or parks. The UN Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) was the main attempt by the international community to facilitate the return of the refugees, led by France, Turkey, and the US. This committee demanded the unconditional return of the refugees, and their terms—which gave the refugees the choice between returning and accepting compensation—were passed as UN Resolution 194 on December 11, 1948. Israel completely ignored this resolution. Instead, they set up the Minority Unit, made up of Druze, Circassians, and Bedouin, to control Palestinians left in their borders and to prevent refugees from returning to their homes. Even communities that had been allowed to remain were in constant danger of eviction, something that happened to villages such as Dalhamiyya, which was evicted in November so that Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov could expand. The UN never even condemned Israel’s actions.

The next section, “A Mini Empire in the Making,” describes Israel’s ambitious attempts to expand its borders further by launching assaults on the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Israel soon gave up on the West Bank, repelled by Jordan’s army and preferring not to provoke Jordan’s British allies. Israel occupied some villages in southern Lebanon, capturing and executing many people. Israel’s conduct toward their prisoners and the occupied population was “exploitative and abusive” (209)—a fact noted by the Red Cross when it entered the country in November 1948.

In the next section, “Final Cleansing of the South and the East,” Pappé turns to Israel’s operations in southern Negev in November 1948, which continued until Israeli forces reached the Red Sea village of Umm Rashrash (today called Eilat) in March 1949. Ethnic cleansing operations continued in coastal towns such as Isdud and Majdal, and in December 1948, Israel cleansed many of the Bedouin tribes living in the region, including the Tarabins and Tayaha. Israel attacked Wadi Ara again in November-December, but they were repelled by local villagers and Iraqi units. More successful, however, was Operation Python in the Beersheba-Hebron area, which resulted in more expulsions and massacres, including the brutal massacre at the village of Dawaymeh, which was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight on October 28, 1948. Pappé discusses the massacre in detail in the last section of the chapter.