9 Occupation
and its Ugly Face
Refugees have claimed that Serb forces have been systematically separating ‘military aged’ ethnic Albanian men – those ranging from as young as age 14 up to 59 years old – from the population as they expel the Kosovar Albanians from their homes. The Serbs use the Ferro-Nickel factory in Glogovac as a detention centre for a large number of Kosovar Albanians.
State Department Report on Kosovo 1999
The order is to take captive any suspicious Arab of military age, between the ages of 10 and 50.
IDF Orders, IDF Archives, 5943/49/114, 13 April 1948 General Orders for how to treat POWs.
Since the beginning of the Intifada in September 2000 over 2,500 children have been arrested. Currently there are at least 340 Palestinian children being held in Israeli prisons.
The People’s Voice, 15 December 2005
Since 1967, Israel has detained 670,000 Palestinians.
Official Declaration by the Arab League, 9 January 2006
A Child: Every human being under the age of 18.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child. UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty.
Although Israel had essentially completed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by now, the hardships did not end for the Palestinians. About 8,000 spent the whole of 1949 in the prison camps, others suffered physical abuse in the towns, and large numbers of Palestinians were harassed in numerous ways under the military rule that Israel now exerted over them. Their houses continued to be looted, their fields confiscated, their holy places desecrated, and Israel violated such basic rights as their freedom of movement and expression, and of equality before the law.
9.1 INHUMAN IMPRISONMENT
A common sight in rural Palestine in the wake of the cleansing operations were huge pens in which male villagers, ranging from children from the age of ten to older men up to the age of fifty, were being held after the Israelis had picked them out in the ‘search-and-arrest’ operations that had now become routine. They were later moved to centralized prison camps. The Israeli search-and-arrest operations were quite systematic, took place all over the countryside, and usually carried similar generic codenames, such as ‘Operation Comb’ or even ‘Distillation’ (ziquq).1
The first of these operations took place in Haifa, a few weeks after the city was occupied. The Israeli intelligence units were after ‘returnees’: refugees who, understandably, wanted to come back to their homes after the fighting had subsided and calm and normality seemed to have returned to the cities of Palestine. However, others were also targeted under the category of ‘suspicious Arab’. In fact, the order went out to find as many such ‘suspicious Arabs’ as possible, without actually bothering to define the nature of the suspicion.2
In a procedure familiar to most Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today, Israeli troops would first put a place – a city or a village – under a closure order. Then intelligence units would start searching from house to house, pulling people out whom they suspected of being present ‘illegally’ in that particular location as well as any other ‘suspicious Arabs’. Often these would be people residing in their own homes. All people picked up in these raids were then brought to a special headquarters.
In the city of Haifa this headquarters quickly became the dread of the Palestinians in the city. It was located in the Hadar neighbourhood, the quarter above the harbour, higher up the mountainside. The house is still there today at 11 Daniel Street, its grey exterior betraying little of the terrible scenes that took place inside in 1948. All those people picked up and brought in for interrogation in this way were according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel. The worst offence was not being in possession of one of the newly-issued identity cards, which could result in a prison term for as long as a year and a half and immediate transfer to one of the pens to join other ‘unauthorised’ and ‘suspicious’ Arabs found in now Jewish-occupied areas. From time to time, even the High Command expressed reservations about the brutality the intelligence people displayed towards the interned Palestinians at the Haifa interrogation centre.3
The rural areas were subjected to the same treatment. Often the operations reminded the villagers there of the original attack launched against them just a few months or even weeks earlier. The Israelis now introduced a novel feature, also well known among present-day Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories: roadblocks, where they carried out surprise checks to catch those who did not have the new ID card. But the granting of such an ID card, which allowed people limited freedom of movement in the area where they lived, itself became a means of intimidation: only people vetted and approved by the Israeli Secret Service were given such a card.
Most areas were out of bounds anyway, even if you had the required identification. For these areas you needed another special permit. This included a specific authorisation, for example, for people living in the Galilee to travel along their most common and natural routes to work or to see family and friends, such as the road between Haifa and Nazareth. Here, permits were hardest to get.4
Thousands of Palestinians languished throughout 1949 in the prison camps where they had been transferred from the temporary pens. There were five such camps, the largest being the one in Jalil (near today’s Herzliya) and a second one in Atlit, south of Haifa. According to Ben-Gurion’s diary there were 9,000 prisoners.5
Initially, the jailing system was quite chaotic. ‘Our problem,’ complained one officer towards the end of June 1948, ’is the concentration of large numbers of Arab POWs and civilian prisoners. We need to transfer them to safer places.’6 By October 1948, under the direct supervision of Yigael Yadin, a network of prison camps had been institutionalised and the disarray was over.
As early as February 1948 we find Hagana guidelines concerning the treatment of POWs stating the following: ‘Releasing a captive or eliminating him needs an approval of the intelligence officer.’7 In other words, there was already a selection process in operation, and summary executions took place. The Israeli intelligence officers who orchestrated them hounded the people continuously from the moment they arrived in these camps. This is why, even after captured Palestinians were moved to ‘safer’ places, as the army put it, they felt anything but safe in these lockups. To begin with, it was decided to employ mainly ex-Irgun and Stern Gang troops as camp guards,8 but they were not the only tormentors of the camp inmates. At one point, senior ex-Hagana officer Yisca Shadmi was found guilty of murdering two Palestinian prisoners. His is a familiar name in the history of the Palestinians in Israel: in October 1956 Shadmi was one of the principal perpetrators of the Kfar Qassim massacre in which forty-nine Palestinians lost their lives. He escaped punishment for his part in the massacre, and went on to become a high-ranking official in the governmment apparatus that managed the state’s relations with its Palestinian minority. He was acquitted eventually in 1958. His case reveals two features of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens that continue up to the present day: the first is that people indicted for crimes against Arabs are likely to remain in positions in which they continue to affect the lives of Palestinians and, secondly, that they will never be brought to justice. The most recent illustration of this is the case of the policemen who murdered thirteen unarmed Palestinian citizens in October 2000 and another seventeen since then.
One concerned army officer who happened to visit such a prison camp wrote: ‘In recent times there were some very grave cases in the treatment of prisoners. The barbaric and cruel behaviour these cases reveal undermines the army’s discipline.’9 The concern voiced here for the army rather than for the victims will also sound familiar by now in the history of military ‘selfcriticism’ in Israel.
Worse still were the labour camps. The idea of using Palestinian prisoners as forced labour came from the Israeli military command and was endorsed by the politicians. Three special labour camps were built for the purpose, one in Sarafand, another in Tel-Litwinski (today Tel-Hashomer Hospital) and a third in Umm Khalid (near Netanya). The authorities used the prisoners in any job that could help strengthen both the Israeli economy and the army’s capabilities.10
One survivor from Tantura, on his eventual release from such a camp, recalled what he had gone through in an interview with one of Haifa’s former notables who, in 1950, published a book on those days. Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib transcribed the following testimony:
The survivors of the Tantura massacre were imprisoned in a nearby pen; for three days without food, then pushed into lorries, ordered to sit in impossible space, but threatened with being shot. They did not shoot but clubbed them on the head, and blood gushed everywhere, finally taken to Umm Khalid (Netanya).11
The witness then describes the routine of forced labour in the camp: working in the quarries and carrying heavy stones; living on one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at noon. There was no point in complaining as disobedience was punished with severe beatings. After fifteen days, 150 men were moved to a second camp in Jalil, where they were exposed to similar treatment: ‘We had to remove rubble from destroyed Arab houses.’ But then, one day, ‘an officer with good English told us that “from now on” we would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. And indeed, conditions improved.’
Five months later, al-Khatib’s witness told him, he was back at Umm Khalid where he recalled scenes that could have come straight from another place and time. When the guards discovered that twenty people had escaped, ’We, the people of Tantura, were put in a cage, oil was poured on our clothes and our blankets were taken away.’12
After one of their early visits, on 11 November 1948, Red Cross officials reported dryly that POWs were exploited in the general local effort to ‘strengthen the Israeli economy’.13 This guarded language was not accidental. Given its deplorable behaviour during the Holocaust, when it failed to report on what went on in Nazi concentration camps, on which it was well informed, the Red Cross was careful in its reproach and criticism of the Jewish state. But at least their documents do shed some light on the experiences of the Palestinian inmates, some of whom were kept in these camps until 1955.
As previously noted, there was a stark contrast between the Israeli conduct towards Palestinian civilians they had imprisoned and the treatment Israelis received who had been captured by the Arab Legion of Jordan. Ben-Gurion was angry when the Israeli press reported how well Israeli POWs were treated by the Legion. His diary entry for 18 June 1948 reads: ‘It is true but it could encourage surrender of isolated spots.’
9.2 ABUSES UNDER OCCUPATION
In 1948 and 1949 life outside prison or the labour camps was not much easier. Here, too, Red Cross representatives crossing the country sent back disturbing reports to their headquarters in Geneva about life under occupation. These depict a collective abuse of basic rights, which began in April 1948 during the Jewish attacks on the mixed towns, and continued well into 1949, the worst of which seemed to be taking place in Jaffa.
Two months after the Israelis had occupied Jaffa, Red Cross representatives discovered a pile of dead bodies. They asked for an urgent meeting with Jaffa’s military governor, who admitted to the Red Cross’s Mr Gouy that they had probably been shot by Israeli soldiers for not complying with their orders. A curfew was imposed every night between 5 pm and 6 am, he explained, and anyone found outside, the orders stated clearly, ‘will be shot’.14
Under the cover of curfews and closures the Israelis also committed other crimes in Jaffa, which were representative of much that went on elsewhere. The most common crime was looting, of both the systematic official kind and the sporadic private one. The systematic and official kind was ordered by the Israeli government itself and targeted the wholesale stores of sugar, flour, barley, wheat and rice that the British government kept for the Arab population. The booty taken was sent to Jewish settlements. Such actions had frequently taken place even before 15 May 1948, under the eyes of British soldiers who simply looked away as Jewish troops barged into areas under their legal authority and responsibility. Reporting in July to Ben-Gurion on how the organised confiscation was progressing, the military governor of Jaffa wrote:
As for your demand, sir, that I will make sure ‘that all the commodities required by our army, air force and navy will be handed over to the people in charge and taken out of Jaffa as fast as possible,’ I can inform you that as of 15 May, 1948 an average load of 100 trucks a day is taken out of Jaffa. The port is ready for operation. The storehouses were emptied, and the goods were taken out.15
The same officials who pillaged these food stores promised the Palestinian population in Haifa and other occupied cities that their community centres, religious sites and secular establishments would not be ransacked or plundered. The people soon discovered that this was a false pledge when their mosques and churches were profaned and their convents and schools vandalised. In growing despair, Captain F. Marschal, one of the UN observers, reported back to the organisation that ’the Jews violated frequently the guarantee given several times by the Jewish authorities to respect all buildings belonging to the religious community.’16
Jaffa was also a particular victim of house robberies that took place in broad daylight. The looters took furniture, clothes and anything useful for the Jewish immigrants that were streaming into the country. UN observers were convinced that the plundering was also a means of preventing Palestinian refugees from returning, which fitted the overall rationale of the Israeli High Command that was not afraid to resort cold-bloodedly to brutal punitive action so as to push forward their strategic policies.
As the pretext for their robbery and looting campaigns the Israeli forces often gave ‘search for weapons’. The real or imaginary existence of weapons also triggered worse atrocities, as these inspections were frequently accompanied by beatings and inevitably ended in mass arrests: ‘Many people arrested for no reason at all,’ Yitzhak Chizik, the military governor of Jaffa, wrote to Ben-Gurion.17
The level of ransacking in Jaffa reached such intensity that even Yitzhak Chizik felt he had to complain, in a letter on 5 June 1948 to Israel’s Minister of Finance, Eliezer Kaplan, that he could no longer control the looting. He would continue to protest, but when in the end of July he sensed his remonstrations were totally ignored, he resigned, stating that he surrendered to the uncontrollable ongoing crusade of pillage and robbery.18 Most of his reports, which are to be found in the Israeli state archives, are censored, particularly passages relating to the abuse of the local people by Israeli soldiers. In one of these, not properly removed, we find Chizik clearly taken aback by the unlimited brutality of the troops: ‘They do not stop beating people,’ he writes.
Chizik was no angel himself. He did order the occasional demolition of houses and instructed his troops to torch a number of Palestinian shops, but these were punitive actions he wanted to control, that would bolster his self-image as sovereign master in the occupied domain he ruled: ‘It is regrettable,’ he wrote in his letter to Kaplan, but he could no longer tolerate ‘the attitude of the soldiers in cases where I have given clear orders not to set fire to a house or a shop; not only do they ignore it, they make fun of me in front of the Arabs.’ He also criticised the official pillage that went on under the auspices of two gentlemen, a Mr Yakobson and a Mr Presiz, who allowed ’looting of many things the army does not need.’19
The High Command sent Abraham Margalit to check into these complaints, who reported back in June 1948: ‘There are many violations of discipline, especially in the attitude to the Arabs (beating and torture) and looting which emanate more from ignorance than malice.’ As Margalit explains himself, it was this ‘ignorance’ that led the soldiers to set aside special locations ’where they kept and tortured Arabs.’20
This prompted a visit to Jaffa that same month by Israel’s Minister of Minorities, Bechor Shitrit. Born in Tiberias, this relatively dovish Israeli politician had shown an empathy towards the possibility of Jewish– Palestinian co-existence in the new state. He had served as judge in the British Mandatory and years later would become Minister of Justice. Shitrit was a token Mizrahi minister in an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, i.e., Eastern European, government and as such had been ‘promoted’ at first to deal with the most undesirable job in the government: the Arabs.
Shitrit developed personal relations with some of the notables who had remained in Jaffa after the occupation and headed the Palestinian community there, such as Nicola Sa’ab and Ahmad Abu Laben. Although he listened attentively in June 1948 when they beseeched him to lift at least the more appalling features of life under military occupation, and admitted to them that their complaints were valid, it took time before anything was done.
The notables told Shitrit that the way Israeli troops broke into individual houses was totally unnecessary as they, as members of the local national committee, had the keys people who had been evacuated had left with them, and they were ready to hand them in to the army; but the soldiers preferred to break in. Little did they know that after Shitrit left, some of the same people were arrested for ‘being in possession of illegal property’: the same keys to the empty houses they had mentioned.21 Three weeks later Ahmad Abu Laben protested to Shitrit that not much had changed since they last met: ’There is not one house or shop which was not broken into. The goods were taken from the port and stores. Food commodities were taken from the inhabitants.’22 Abu Laben had been running a factory in the city together with a Jewish partner, but this did not save him. All the machines were removed and the factory was looted.
Indeed, the scope of both the official confiscation and private looting all over urban Palestine was so widespread that local commanders were unable to control it. On 25 June, the government decided to put some order into the looting and confiscation afflicting Jerusalem. David Abulafya, a local citizen, was made responsible for ‘confiscation and appropriation’. His main problem, he reported to Ben-Gurion, was that ’the security forces and the militias continue to confiscate without permission.’23
9.2.1 Ghettoising the Palestinians of Haifa
That the Israelis had more than one way to imprison people or abuse their most basic rights can be seen from the experiences of the small community of Palestinians left in Haifa after Jewish troops cleansed the city on 23 April 1948. Their story is unique, but only in its details: in general it exemplifies the trials and tribulations of the Palestinian minority as a whole under occupation.
On 1 July 1948, in the evening, the Israeli military commander of the city summoned the leaders of the Palestinian community in Haifa to his headquarters. The purpose of the meeting was to order these notables, who represented the 3–5,000 Palestinians left behind after the approximately 70,000 of the city’s Arab residents had been expelled, to ‘facilitate’ their transfer from the various parts of the city where they were living into one single neighborhood, the crammed and small quarter of Wadi Nisnas, one of the city’s poorest areas. Some of those ordered to leave their residences on the upper slopes of Mt Carmel, or even on top of the mountain itself, had been living there for many years among the Jewish newcomers. The military commander now ordered all of them to make sure the move would be completed by 5 July 1948. The shock among the Palestinian leaders and notables was instant and deep. Many of them belonged to the Communist Party that had supported partition and hoped that now the fighting was over, life would return to normal under the auspices of a Jewish state whose creation they had not opposed.24
‘I don’t understand: is this a military command? Let us look at the conditions of these people. I cannot see any reason, least of all a military one, that justifies such a move,’ protested Tawfiq Tubi, later a member of the Israeli Knesset for the Communist Party. He ended his protestation by saying: ‘We demand that the people stay in their homes.’25 Another participant, Bulus Farah, shouted, ‘This is racism,’ and called the move, appropriately, ’ghettoising the Palestinians in Haifa.’26
Even the dry tone of the document cannot hide the dismissive and indifferent reaction of the Israeli military commander. One can almost hear the clipped sound of his voice as he told them:
I can see that you are sitting here and [think you can] give me advice, but I invited you in here to hear the orders of the High Command and carry them out! I am not involved in politics and do not deal with it. I am just obeying orders . . . I am fulfilling orders and I have to make sure that this order is executed by the 5th of July . . . If you don’t do it, I will do it myself. I am a soldier.27
After he had finished his long monologue, another of the Palestinian notables, Shehadeh Shalah asked: ‘And if someone owns a house, does he have to leave?’ The military commander replied: ’Everyone has to leave.’28 The notables then learned that the inhabitants would themselves have to cover the cost of their enforced transfer.
Victor Khayat tried to reason with the Israeli commander that it would take more than one day for all the people to be notified which would not leave them much time. The commander replied that four days was ‘plenty of time’. The person who transcribed the meeting noted that at that point the Palestinian representatives shouted as one man: ‘But this is a very short time,’ to which the commander retorted: ’I cannot change it.’29
But this was not the end of their troubles. In the area to which they were confined, Wadi Nisnas – where today the municipality of Haifa annually celebrates the convergence of Hanuka, Christmas and Id al-Fitr as ‘The Feast of all Feasts for Peace and Coexistence’ – people continued to be robbed and abused, mostly by Irgun and Stern Gang members, but the Hagana also took an active part in the assaults. Ben-Gurion condemned their behaviour, but did nothing to stop it: He was content with recording it in his diary.30
9.2.2 Rape
We have three kinds of sources that report on rape, and thus know that severe cases of rape did take place. It remains more difficult to form an idea of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish troops in this way. Our first source is the international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross. They never submitted a collective report, but we do have short and concise accounts of individual cases. Thus, for instance, very soon after Jaffa was taken, a Red Cross official, de Meuron, reported how Jewish soldiers had raped a girl and killed her brother. He remarked in general that as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners, their women were left at the mercy of the Israelis. Yitzhak Chizik wrote to Kaplan in the letter mentioned above: ‘And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have already heard.’ In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how ‘a group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the mother and raped the daughter.’
We know of course more about cases in places where outside observers were present, but this does not mean women were not raped elsewhere. Another Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9 December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter. Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant, to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade Seven. It is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed.31
The second source is the Israeli archives, which only cover cases in which the rapists were brought to trial. David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: ‘Rape Cases’. One of these records the incident Chizik had reported to him: ’a case in Acre where soldiers wanted to rape a girl. They killed the father and wounded the mother, and the officers covered for them. At least one soldier raped the girl.’32
Jaffa seems to have been a hothouse for the cruelty and war crimes of the Israeli troops. One particular battalion, Battalion 3 – commanded by the same person who had been in charge when its soldiers committed massacres in Khisas and Sa‘sa, and cleansed Safad and its environs – was so savage in its behaviour that its soldiers were suspected of being involved in most of the rape cases in the city, and the High Command decided it best to withdraw them from the town. However, other units were no less guilty of molesting women in the first three to four months of the occupation. The worst period was towards the end of the first truce (July 8) when even Ben-Gurion became so apprehensive about the pattern of behaviour that emerged among the soldiers in the occupied cities, especially the private looting and the rape cases, that he decided not to allow certain army units to enter Nazareth after his troops had taken the town during the ‘ten-day’ war.33
Our third source is the oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims. It is very difficult to get the facts in the former case and almost impossible, of course, in the latter. But their stories have already helped shed light on some of the most appalling and inhuman crimes in the war that Israel waged against the Palestinian people.
The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing.
Oral recollection also exposed cases of rape throughout the occupation of Palestine’s villages: from the village of Tantura in May, through the village of Qula in June, and ending with one story after another of abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram. Many of the cases were corroborated by UN officials who interviewed a number of women from the villages who were willing to come forward and talk about their experiences. When, many years later, some of these people were interviewed, it was obvious how difficult it still proved for the men and women from the village to talk about names and details in these cases, and the interviewers came away with the impression that they all knew more than they wished or were able to tell.
Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewellery, to the very last item. The same women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape. Here is how Najiah Ayyub described it: ’I saw that the troops who encircled us tried to touch the women but were rejected by them. When they saw that the women would not surrender, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and tried to undress them, claiming they had to search the bodies.’34
Tradition, shame, and trauma are the cultural and psychological barriers that prevent us from gaining the fuller picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked with such ferocity in both rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949. Perhaps in the fulness of time someone will be able to complete this chapter of the chronicle of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
9.3 DIVIDING THE SPOILS
Once the winds of war had subsided and the newly established State of Israel had signed armistice agreements with its neighbours, the Israeli government relaxed its occupation regime somewhat and gradually put a halt to the looting and ghettoisation of the small groups of urban Palestinians left behind. In August 1948, a new structure was put in place to deal with the consequences of the ethnic cleansing, called ‘The Committee for Arab Affairs’. As before, Bechor Shitrit’s proved to be the more humane voice among his colleagues on this committee, together with that of Israel’s first Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, but it also included some former members of the Consultancy. The presence of Yaacov Shimoni, Gad Machnes, Ezra Danin and Yossef Weitz, all people who had helped devise the expulsions, would have been quite alarming for those Palestinians who had remained, had they known.
In August, the new outfit mainly dealt with the growing international pressure on Israel to allow the repatriation of the refugees. The tactic it decided upon was to try to push through a resettlement programme that they envisaged would pre-empt all confrontation on the subject, either because the principal players in the international community would agree to endorse it or, even better, it would persuade them to abandon the issue altogether. The Israeli offer suggested that all Palestinian refugees should be resettled in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. This is not surprising, since it was discussed at a meeting of the Jewish Agency as early as 1944. Ben-Gurion argued: ‘The transfer of Arabs is easier than the transfer of any other [people]. There are Arab states around . . . And it is clear that if the [Palestinian] Arabs are transferred this would improve their situation and not the opposite.’ While Moshe Sharett noted: [W]hen the Jewish state is established – it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.’35 Although the USA and Britain at the time responded favourably to this policy – which has remained the accepted line of argument for all successive Israeli governments – neither they nor the rest of the world seemed interested in investing too much effort in pushing it forward, or in arguing for the implementation of UN Resolution 194, which called for the unconditional repatriation of Palestinian refugees. As Israel had hoped, the fate of the refugees, not to mention their rights, soon dropped out of sight.
But return or resettlement was not the only issue. There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the Israeli authorities after May 1948. Neither did Israel’s proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in Israeli hands. A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, and he estimated the combined value of property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds. To avoid becoming embroiled in international investigations and scrutiny, he suggested as a solution: ’Maybe we can sell it to American Jews?’36
An additional problem was the cultivated land the Palestinians had been forced to abandon, and in the Arab Affairs Committee meeting it was again Bechor Shitrit who naïvely pondered aloud its possible fate: ‘The cultivated land is probably 1 million dunam. According to international law, we cannot sell anything, so maybe we should buy from those Arabs who do not want to come back.’ Without ceremony, Yossef Weitz cut him short: ‘The fate of the cultivated land will be no different from the overall territory on which the villages existed.’ The solution, recommended Weitz, had to cover all the territory: all village land, whether cultivated or residential, and the urban areas.37
Unlike Shitrit, Weitz was in the know. His official position as the head of the JNF settlement department and his de facto leadership of the ad-hoc ‘transfer committee’ fused into one once the ethnic cleansing had started. Weitz closely followed every single takeover within the rural areas, either personally or through loyal officials such as his close aide Yossef Nachmani. While the Jewish troops were responsible for the expulsion of the people and the demolition of their homes, Weitz went to work to make sure the villages passed into JNF custody.
This proposal frightened Shitrit even more, as it meant the number of dunam Israel would take possession of, illegally in his mind, was triple the figure of 1 million dunam he had originally thought. Weitz’s next suggestion was even more alarming for anyone sensitive to international law or legality: ‘All we need’, declared the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund, ‘is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam – cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands. Land of lesser quality should be sold to private or public sectors.’
Shitrit tried one more time, ‘At least, let us say that this confiscation is an exchange for the property the Jews from the Arab world lost when they immigrated to Palestine.’ Jewish immigration was quite limited at the time, but the concept of ‘exchange’ would later appeal to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, whose propaganda machine has frequently used it in abortive attempts to silence the debate on the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return. Shitrit’s idea was dropped in August 1948 because it risked implicating Israel in the commission of forced transfer. Yaacov Shimoni warned that such a declaration of mutual expropriation would inevitably direct attention to the expulsions – he termed them ‘transfer’ – Israel had carried out in Palestine.
By now Ben-Gurion had grown impatient. He realised that sensitive subjects such as creating faits accomplis so as to pre-empt the threat of international sanctions – for instance the destruction of houses so that nobody could force Israel to allow their Palestinian owners to return to them – was no job for such a cumbersome body as the Committee for Arab Affairs. Thus he decided to appoint Danin and Weitz to a committee of two that from then on would take all final decisions on Palestinian property and land, the main features of which were destruction and confiscation.
For a short and unique period the American administration showed an interest in the subject. Officials in the State Department, in an atypical move, dominated the policy on the refugee issues, while the White House seemed to stand aloof. The inevitable result was a growing dissatisfaction with the basic Israeli position. The US experts saw no legal alternative to the return of the refugees, and were considerably irritated by Israel’s refusal to even discuss the possibility. In May 1949, the State Department conveyed a strong message to the Israeli government that it considered the repatriation of the refugees as a precondition for peace. When the Israeli rejection arrived, the US administration threatened Israel with sanctions, and withheld a promised loan. In response, the Israelis at first suggested taking in 75,000 refugees and allowing the reunification of families for another 25,000. When this was deemed insufficient by Washington, the government suggested taking in the Gaza strip, with its 90,000 indigenous inhabitants and its refugee community of 200,000. Both proposals seemed niggardly but by then, the spring of 1949, a personnel reshuffle in the American State Department reoriented America’s Palestine policy onto a different course that completely sidelined, if not altogether ignored, the refugee question.
During this short-lived period of US pressure (April–May 1949), Ben-Gurion’s basic response was to intensify the settlement of Jewish immigrants on the confiscated land and in the evicted houses. When Sharett and Kaplan objected, apprehensive of international condemnation of such acts, Ben-Gurion again appointed a more cabal-like body that soon encouraged hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world to seize the Palestinian homes left in the towns and cities and to build settlements on the ruins of the expelled villages.
The appropriation of Palestinian property was supposed to follow a systematic national programme, but by the end of September Ben-Gurion gave up the idea of an orderly takeover in the major cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. Similarly, it proved impossible to coordinate the onslaught of covetous farmers and governmental agencies on the dispossessed villages and lands. The distribution of land was the responsibility of the Jewish National Fund. After the 1948 war other bodies were given similar authority, the most important of which was the Custodian, mentioned below. The JNF found it had to compete for the job of principal divider of the spoils of war. In the final analysis the JNF came out on top, but it took time. All in all, Israel had taken over 3.5 million dunam of land in rural Palestine. This estimate from 1948 included all houses and fields of the destroyed villages. It took a while before a clear centralised policy emerged of how best to use this land. Ben-Gurion deferred a total takeover by private or public Jewish agencies while the UN was still discussing the fate of the refugees, first in Lausanne in 1949, and after that in a series of futile committees set up to deal with the refugee issue. He knew that in the wake of the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194, 11 December 1948, which demanded the unconditional repatriation of all Palestinian refugees, a formal and legal Israeli takeover would cause problems.
In order to forestall international indignation over collective dispossession, the Israeli government appointed a ‘custodian’ for the newly acquired properties, pending a final decision over their fate. Typical of previous Zionist conduct, this ‘pragmatic’ solution became policy until a ‘strategic’ decision would follow to change it (i.e., by redefining the status of the dispossessed assets). The Custodian was thus a function the Israeli government created in order to fend off any possible fallout from UN Resolution 194 that insisted that all refugees be allowed to return and/or be compensated. By putting all private and collective possessions of the expelled Palestinians under its custody, the government could, and in effect did, sell these properties to public and private Jewish groups and individuals later under the spurious pretext that no claimants had come forward. Moreover, the moment the confiscated lands from Palestinian owners were put under government custodianship they became state lands, which by law belonged to the Jewish nation, which, in turn, meant that none of it could be sold to Arabs.38
This legal sleight of hand meant that as long as no final strategic decision on how to divide the lands had been made, ‘tactical’ interim resolutions could be adopted in order to hand over part of the lands to the IDF, for instance, or to new immigrants or (at cheap rates) to the kibbutzim movements. The JNF faced fierce competition from all these ‘clients’ in the scramble over the spoils. It did well to begin with, and bought up almost every destroyed village together with all its houses and lands. The Custodian had sold a million dunam out of the total 3.5 million directly to the JNF at a bargain price in December 1948. Another quarter of a million was passed on to the JNF in 1949.
Then lack of funds put a halt to the JNF’s seemingly insatiable greed. And what the JNF failed to purchase, the three kibbutzim movements, the moshavim movement and private real-estate dealers were happy to divide among themselves. The most avaricious of these proved to be the leftist kibbutz movement, Hashomer Ha-Tza‘ir, that belonged to Mapam, the party to the left of Mapai, Israel’s ruling party. Hashomer Ha-Tza‘ir members were not content only with lands from which the people had already been expelled, but also wanted the lands whose Palestinian owners had survived the onslaught and who were still clinging onto them. Consequently, they now wanted these people to be driven out too, even though the official ethnic cleansing had come to an end. All these contenders had to make way for the Israeli army’s demands to have large tracts of land set aside as training grounds and camps. And yet, by 1950, half of the dispossessed rural lands were still in the hands of the JNF.
In the first week of January 1949, Jewish settlers colonised the villages of Kuwaykat, Ras al-Naqura, Birwa, Safsaf, Sa‘sa and Lajjun. On the lands of other villages, such as Malul and Jalama in the north, the IDF built military bases. In many ways, the new settlements did not look much different from the army bases – new fortified bastions where once villagers had led their pastoral and agricultural lives.
The human geography of Palestine as a whole was forceably transformed. The Arab character of the cities was effaced by the destruction of large sections, including the spacious park in Jaffa and community centres in Jerusalem. This transformation was driven by the desire to wipe out one nation’s history and culture and replace it with a fabricated version of another, from which all traces of the indegenous population were elided.
Haifa was a case in point. As early as 1 May 1948, (Haifa having been taken on 23 April) Zionist officials had written to David Ben-Gurion that an ‘historical opportunity’ had fallen into their hands to metamorphose Haifa’s Arab character. All that was needed, they explained, was ’the destruction of 227 houses.’39 Ben-Gurion visited the city to inspect the scene of the intended destruction himself, and also ordered the destruction of the covered marketplace, one of the most beautiful markets of its kind. Similar decisions were taken with regard to Tiberias, where almost 500 houses were demolished, and a similar number in Jaffa and Western Jerusalem.40 Ben-Gurion’s sensitivity here vis-à-vis the mosques was unusual, the exception that proved the rule. Israel’s official plunder did not spare holy shrines, least of all mosques, that were part of the newly acquired possessions.
9.4 DESECRATION OF HOLY SITES [41]
Until 1948 all Muslim holy sites in Palestine belonged to the Waqf, the Islamic endowment authority recognised by both the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandatory government. They were supervised by the Supreme Muslim Council, a body of local religious dignitaries, at the head of which stood al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. After 1948 Israel confiscated all these endowments, with all the properties incorporated in them, and transferred them first to the Custodian, then to the state, and eventually sold them to Jewish public bodies and private citizens.42
Neither were the Christian churches immune from this land grab. Much of the land that churches owned within destroyed villages was confiscated like the Waqf endowments, although unlike the vast majority of mosques, quite a few of the churches remained intact. Many churches and mosques were never properly destroyed, but left to look like ‘ancient’ historical ruins – vestiges of the ‘past’ to remind people of Israel’s might of destruction. However, among these holy sites were some of Palestine’s most impressive architectural gems, and they disappeared forever: Masjad al-Khayriyya vanished under the city of Givatayim, and the rubble of the church of Birwa now lies beneath the cultivated land of the Jewish settlement of Ahihud. A similar masonry treasure was the mosque in Sarafand on the coast near Haifa (not to be confused with the Sarafand in the heart of Palestine where a huge British base was located). The mosque was a hundred years old when the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to have it bulldozed on 25 July 2000, ignoring a petition addressed to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, beseeching him not to authorise this official act of state vandalism.
In retrospect, however, it was the abuse of their Islamic holy shrines that proved the most painful to a Palestinian community, the large majority of whose members found solace and comfort in the embrace of tradition and religion. The Israelis turned the mosques of Majdal and Qisarya into restaurants, and the Beersheba mosque into a shop. The Ayn Hawd mosque is used as a bar, and that of Zib is part of a resort village: the mosque is still there but owned by the government agency responsible for maintaining the national parks. Some mosques remained intact until the Israeli authorities believed time had released them from the obligation to protect the sanctity of these places. The remains of the Ayn al-Zaytun mosque, for example, were turned into a milk farm as late as 2004: the Jewish owner removed the stone that indicated the founding date of the mosque and covered the walls with Hebrew graffiti. By contrast, in August 2005 the Israeli media, public and politicians castigated their government for its decision to leave in the hands of the Palestinians the synagogues of the settlements Israel evicted in the Gaza Strip that summer. When the inevitable destruction of these synagogues came about – cement structures from which the settlers themselves had removed all religious items prior to their eviction – the general outcry in Israel reached the skies.
As for the Muslim shrines and Christian churches that survived, these are not always accessible. The church and mosque of Suhmata are still visible today, but if you want to pray there or simply wish to visit these sites you have to cross Jewish farms and risk being reported to the police for trespassing. This is also the case if you attempt to visit the Balad al-Shaykh mosque near Haifa and, equally, Muslims are denied access to the mosque of Khalsa located today in the development town of Qiryat Shemona. The people of Kerem Maharal still refuse to allow access to the beautiful nineteenth-century mosque at the centre of what used to be the village of Ijzim, one of the wealthiest villages in Palestine.
Sometimes access is denied by official manipulation rather than force, as in the case of the Hittin mosque. According to tradition Salah al-Din built this amazing structure in the middle of the village in 1187 to commemorate his victory over the Crusaders. Not too long ago, 73-year-old Abu Jamal from Deir Hanna hoped that through a summer camp for Palestinian children he could help restore the place to its past glory and re-open it for worship. But the Ministry of Education tricked him: its senior officials promised Abu Jamal that if he cancelled the camp, the ministry would donate money for the restoration work. However, when he accepted the offer the ministry sealed the site with barbed wire as if it were a high-security installation. All the stones, including the foundation stone, were then removed by the nearby kibbutzniks who use the land to graze their sheep and cows.
The following is a short registry covering the last decade or so. In 1993 the Nabi Rubin mosque was blown up by Jewish fanatics. In February 2000 the Wadi Hawarith mosque was ruined, two weeks after Muslim volunteers had finished restoring the building. Some restored mosques were the target of sheer vandalism. The Maqam of Shaykh Shehade, in the destroyed village of Ayn Ghazal, was burned down in 2002, and the Araba’in mosque of Baysan was ruined by an arson attack in March 2004. The al-Umari and al-Bahr mosques in Tiberias escaped two similar attacks in June 2004 in which they were badly damaged. The Mosque of Hasan Beik in Jaffa is assaulted regularly by people throwing stones at it, and it was desecrated once when the head of a pig with the name of the prophet written on it was tossed into its yard. In 2003, bulldozers erased out all traces of the al-Salam (‘Peace’) mosque in Zarughara, half a year after the mosque had been re-erected, while the Maqam of Shaykh Sam’an near Kfar Saba was demolished by unknown assailants in 2005.
Other mosques were turned into Jewish places of worship, as in the iconoclastic days of medieval times. The mosques of Wadi Unayn and Yazur are today synagogues, as is the mosque in the maqam of Samakiyya in Tiberias and in the two villages of Kfar Inan and Daliyya. The mosque of Abassiyya, near Ben-Gurion Airport, was turned into a synagogue, too, but has since been abandoned. It is decorated today with graffiti saying ‘Kill the Arabs!’ The Lifta mosque at the western entrance to Jerusalem has become a mikweh (Jewish ritual bath for women).
Recent targets are the mosques of the so-called ‘unrecognised villages’ in Israel; this is the most recent aspect of the dispossession that first began during the Nakba. Since, according to Israeli law, most of the land in Israel belongs to the ‘Jewish people’ from which Palestinian citizens are barred, Palestinian farmers are left with very little space to expand or build new villages. In 1965 the government abolished all infrastructure plans for the urban and rural development of the Palestinian areas. As a result Palestinians, and especially the Bedouin in the south, began to establish ‘illegal’ villages with, of course, mosques in them. Both houses and mosques in these villages are under constant threat of demolition. The Israeli authorities play a highly cynical game with the residents: they are given the option between their houses or their mosque. In one such village, Husayniyya (named after a 1948 destroyed village), a long battle in court saved the mosque but not the village. In October 2003, the authorities offered to leave 13 houses in Kutaymat standing instead of the mosque, which they demolished.
9.5 ENTRENCHING THE OCCUPATION
When the international pressure subsided and Israel had put in place clear rules for dividing the spoils, the Committee for Arab Affairs also formalised the official governmental attitude towards the Palestinians left within the territory of the new state, who were now citizens of Israel. Totalling about 150,000, these became the ‘Israeli Arabs’ – as if it made sense to talk about ‘Syrian Arabs’ or ‘Iraqi Arabs’ and not ‘Syrians’ or ‘Iraqis’. They were put under a military regime based on British Mandatory emergency regulations which, when they were issued in 1945, none other than Menachem Begin had compared to Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. These regulations virtually abolished people’s basic rights of expression, movement, organisation, and equality before the law. They left them the right to vote for and be elected to the Israeli parliament, but this too came with severe restrictions. This regime officially lasted until 1966, but, for all intents and purposes, the regulations are still in place.
The Committee for Arab Affairs continued to meet, and as late as 1956 some of its more prominent members seriously advocated plans for the expulsion of the ‘Arabs’ from Israel. Massive expulsions continued until 1953. The last village to be depopulated at gunpoint was Umm al-Faraj, near Nahariyya. The army went in, drove out all the inhabitants and then destroyed the village. The Bedouin in the Negev were subjected to expulsions up to 1962, when the tribe of al-Hawashli was forced to leave. In the dead of night 750 people were put on trucks and driven away. Their houses were demolished and the 8000 dunam they owned were confiscated and then given to families who were collaborating with the Israeli authorities. Most of the plans the Committee discussed were never implemented for various reasons. They have come to light thanks to the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha.
Had it not been for some liberal-minded Israeli politicians who objected to the schemes, and the Palestinian minority’s own steadfastness in several cases where such plans to expel them were set in motion, we would long ago have witnessed the ethnic cleansing of the ‘remnant’ of the Palestinian people now living within the borders of the Jewish state. But if that final danger seemed to have been averted, the ‘price’ they paid for living in relative physical safety was incalculable – the loss not only of their land, but with it the soul of Palestine’s history and future. The appropriation of Palestinian lands by the government continued from the 1950s onwards under the auspices of the JNF.
9.5.1 The Land Robbery: 1950–2000
It was the Settlement Department in the JNF that decided the fate of the destroyed villages once they had been flattened: whether a Jewish settlement or a Zionist forest would take its place. Back in June 1948, the head of the department, Yossef Weitz, had reported to the Israeli government: ‘We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the villages for cultivation and settlement. Some of these will become parks.’ As he observed the ongoing destruction, Weitz had proudly reported that he remained unmoved by the sight of tractors destroying whole villages.43 But to the public at large, a very different picture was portrayed: ‘creating’ new Jewish settlements was accompanied by such slogans as ‘making the desert bloom’, while the JNF’s forestation activities were marketed as an ecological mission designed to keep the country green.
Forestation was not a first choice. The selection process did not actually rest on any clear strategy but consisted of ad-hoc decisions. First there were the abandoned cultivated lands that could immediately be harvested; then there were tracts of fertile land that could potentially yield crops in the near future that went to ‘veteran’ Jewish settlements or were set aside for the establishment new ones. As we saw, the JNF had a hard time fending off the competition which came from the kibbutzim movements. They would start cultivating the lands of neigbhouring villages even before they had been given permission to take them over, and then on the basis of the work already carried out would demand ownership. As a rule the feeling in the government was that land first had to be allotted to existing Jewish settlements, then to the building of new ones, and only in the third place be made available for forestation.
In 1950, the Knesset passed the Law for Absentee Property, while the Custodian introduced some order into the way it dealt with the booty, but had not yet made the JNF sole owner. On the way to becoming the exclusive proprietor of Israel’s new forests – almost all planted over the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 – the JNF defeated the Ministry of Agriculture, which naturally sought control over the forestation issue. The state, however, recognised the advantage of giving the JNF a full mandate not only as Israel’s forest-keepers but also as the principal custodian of the lands as a whole on ‘behalf of the Jewish people’. From now on, even on land it did not own, the JNF was responsible for safeguarding its ‘Jewishness’ by prohibiting all transactions with non-Jews, namely Palestinians.
This is not the place to expand on the complex trajectory the JNF followed in its struggle to keep its spoils. Its primary tool, however, was the use of government legislation. The JNF Law was passed in 1953 and granted the agency independent status as land-owner on behalf of the Jewish state. This law, and a host of others that followed, such as the Law of the Land of Israel and the Law of the Israel Land Authority (ILA), both passed in 1960, all reinforced this position. These were all constitutional laws determining that the JNF was not allowed to sell or lease land to non-Jews. They finalised the JNF’s share in the overall state lands (thirteen per cent) but hid a much more complex reality that enabled the JNF to implement its policy of ‘guarding the nation’s land’ in areas beyond its direct control, simply because it had a decisive role in, and impact on, the directorship of the ILA, which became the owner of eighty per cent of all state lands (the rest being owned by the JNF, the army and the government).
The legislative takeover of the land and the process of turning it into JNF property was completed in 1967 when the Knesset passed a final law, the Law of Agricultural Settlement, that also prohibited the sub-letting of the Jewish-owned land of the JNF to non-Jews (until then only sale and direct lease were prohibited). The law furthermore ensured that water quotas set aside for the JNF lands could not be transferred to non-JNF lands (water is scarce in Israel and hence sufficient quotas are vital for agriculture).
The bottom line of this almost two-decade-long bureaucratic process (1949–1967) was that the legislation regarding the JNF, barring the selling, leasing and sub-letting of land to non-Jews, was put into effect for most of the state lands (more than ninety per cent of Israel’s land, seven per cent having been declared as private land). The primary objective of this legislation was to prevent Palestinians in Israel from regaining ownership, through purchase, of their own land or that of their people. This is why Israel never allowed the Palestinian minority to build even one new rural settlement or village, let alone a new town or city (apart from three Bedouin settlements in the early 1960s, which actually represented recognition by the state of the permanent residence sedentary tribes had taken up there). At the same time, Israel’s Jewish population, with a much lower natural growth, was able to build on these lands – apart from those destined for forestation – as many settlements, villages and cities as they wished, and wherever they wanted.
The Palestinian minority in Israel, seventeen per cent of the total population after ethnic cleansing, has been forced to make do with just three per cent of the land. They are allowed to build and live on only two per cent of the land; the remaining one per cent was defined as agricultural land which cannot be built upon. In other words, today 1.3 million people live on that two per cent. Even with the privatisation of land that began in the 1990s, the JNF policy remains in place, thus excluding the Palestinians from the benefit that opening up the land market would provide for the public at large; that is, Israel’s Jews. However, not only have they been prevented from expanding over the land that was theirs, but also much of the land they owned before the 1948 war was confiscated from them, in the 1970s, for the building of new Jewish settlements in the Galilee and again, in the early 2000s, for the construction of the Segregation Wall and a new highway. One study has estimated that seventy per cent of the land belonging to the Palestinians in Israel has been either confiscated or made inaccessible to them.44
The final dispossession in the Galilee – so far – which parallels the confiscation of land in the West Bank for the two-fold purpose of building Jewish settlements and slowly, but surely, driving the Palestinians out of these areas, began after 1967.
In the early 1960s, before the final division of land between the ILA and the JNF, the latter launched Operation ‘Finally’ (Sof-Sof), which sought to further dispossess the Palestinians of land in the Galilee that was still in the villagers’ possession. The JNF offered to buy those lands or exchange them with lesser quality land elsewhere. But the villagers refused – their steadfastness forms one of the truly heroic chapters in the struggle against the Zionist ethnic cleansing operations. The JNF then began erecting special military outposts at the entrances to the ‘stubborn’ villages in an effort to exert psychological pressure on the inhabitants. Even with such callous means, the JNF only achieved its goal in a few cases. As Arnon Soffer, a professor of geography at Haifa University, who is closely connected with the government, explains:
We were murderous, but it was not malice for the sake of malice. We acted out of a sense of being exposed to an existential threat. And there were objective reasons for this feeling. We were convinced that without Jewish territorial continuity, especially along the national water carrier [the aqueduct that runs from the Lake of Galilee to the south of the coutry], the Arabs would poison the water.45
That there are no fences or guard posts along the entire route of the aqueduct raises doubts about the sincerity of the concern expressed here. The need for ‘territorial continuity’, on the other hand, does sound sincere: it was, after all, the main inspiration in 1948 for Israel’s massive operations of expulsion.
The dispossession of Palestinian lands did not only entail the expulsion of their legal owners and the prevention of their repatriation and regaining ownership. It was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or ‘Ancient’ Hebrew places.