juli 20, 2025 · 11:55 am

Note 61/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[61]
TOLKIEN GATEWAY
ARISE, ARISE, RIDERS OF THEODEN !

Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Dire deeds awake: dark is it eastward.
Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded!
Forth Eorlingas![1]

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

YOUTUBE.COM

KING THEODEN’S BATTLE SPEECH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POdknqszMDY
WIKIPEDIA
THE LORD OF THE RINGS/THED RETURN OF THE KING

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· 11:53 am

Note 60/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[60]

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION
CONCLUDES: ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE AGAINST
PALESTINIANS IN GAZA

Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today.

The report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.

“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.

“States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.”

Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.

“Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza,” said Agnès Callamard.

“Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co-exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel’s sole intent.”

Amnesty International examined Israel’s acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts.

“Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel’s intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas,” said Agnès Callamard.

“The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage-taking, can never justify Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient.

Amnesty International’s report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication.

Unprecedented scale and magnitude

Israel’s actions following Hamas’s deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza’s population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable.

Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions:

“Here in Deir al-Balah, it’s like an apocalypse… You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here.”

Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment.

Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel’s military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion.

Intent to destroy

To establish Israel’s specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel’s system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57-year-old military occupation of the Palestinian territory.

Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel’s claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas’s actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel’s extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.

In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent.

However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent.

Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them.

Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to “erase” Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities.

Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm

Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective.

In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping.

While these represent just a fraction of Israel’s aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population.

Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction

The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other’s devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass “evacuation” orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza’s population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza.

After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza,  and obstructed the import and delivery of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza’s homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health.

Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip  or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse.

Through its repeated “evacuation” orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians – 90% of Gaza’s population – into ever-shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza’s residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba.

Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate.

They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to.

Accountability for genocide

“The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience,” said Agnès Callamard.

“Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel’s violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel’s allies.

“The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long-overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court’s decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC.

“We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished.”

Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account.

The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law.

Background

On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage-taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report.

Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in-depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire.

For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here.

MNESTY INTERNATIONAL

ISRAEL/OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY:

”YOU FEEL YOU ARE SUBHUMAN”:

ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS IN GAZA

5 DECEMBER 2024

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/

This report documents Israel’s actions during its offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip from 7 October 2023. It examines the killing of civilians, damage to and destruction of civilian infrastructure, forcible displacement, the obstruction or denial of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid, and the restriction of power supplies. It analyses Israel’s intent through this pattern of conduct and statements by Israeli decision-makers. It concludes that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
A stand-alone executive summary is available in English and other languages: ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza: Executive Summary (Index: MDE 15/8744/2024).

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT

YOU FEEL YOU ARE SUBHUMAN

ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS IN GAZA

DECEMBER 2024

file:///C:/Users/Astrid/Downloads/MDE1586682024ENGLISH%20(2).pdf

SEE ALSO

https://www.astridessed.nl/amnesty-international-investigation-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/

APARTHEDID

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH ABOUT
THE ISRAELI APARTHEIDSREGIME

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

ISRAELI APARTHEID: ”A THRESHOLD CROSSED”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/19/israeli-apartheid-threshold-crossed

In April, Human Rights Watch released a 213-page report, “A Threshold Crossed,” finding that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. We reached this determination based on our documentation of an overarching government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians coupled with grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem

In the months since, a growing chorus of voices, from former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa and current Knesset members to the ex-UN Secretary General and the French foreign minister, have referenced apartheid in relation to Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Palestinians, in particular in the occupied territory. Yet many in Germany, including those critical of Israeli human rights abuses, remain hesitant to apply the label to Israeli conduct.

Given history, one can certainly understand Germany’s concern for the welfare of the Jewish people, but that should not carry over to an endorsement of abusive and discriminatory Israeli government conduct, especially in the occupied territory. As recognition grows that these crimes are being committed, the failure to recognize that reality requires burying your head deeper and deeper into the sand.

The problem begins with the Israeli government having exercised primary control for more than a half-century over the land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, encompassing Israel and the occupied territory, where two main groups of people of roughly equal size live. Throughout this area, Israeli authorities methodologically privilege one of the groups, Jewish Israelis, who are governed under the same body of laws with the same rights and privileges wherever they live. At the same time, authorities allocate different baskets of inferior rights to the other, Palestinians, systematically discriminating against them wherever they live and most severely in the occupied territory.

Our sense that our research was not capturing this underlying reality led us to write this report. Reporting on “separate, not equal” schools for Palestinians inside Israel, Palestinians being forced out of their homes in occupied East Jerusalem, the serious rights abuses stemming from the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank, and the crushing closure of the Gaza Strip, we felt that our work captured important dynamics, including entrenched discrimination, in particular areas, but did not capture the full scope of Israel’s discriminatory rule over Palestinians.

We set out in the report to evaluate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. As we do in the nearly 100 countries across the world we work in, we began by documenting the facts—drawing on years of our own research, case studies that compared Palestinian areas with predominantly or exclusively Jewish ones, and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials, and a range of other materials.

Across Israel and the occupied territory, Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities have pursued an intent to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. They have done so by undertaking policies aimed at mitigating what they openly describe as the “demographic threat” Palestinians pose and maximizing the land available for Jewish communities, while concentrating most Palestinian in dense enclaves. The policy takes different forms and is pursued in a particularly severe form in the occupied territory. It includes efforts to, as leading Israelis officials have put it, “Judaize” the Negev and Galilee regions of Israel and to maintain “a solid Jewish majority,” as described in government planning documents, in the Jerusalem municipality, which includes the eastern part of Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed and occupies. It also encompasses efforts to “settle [Jews in] the land between the [Palestinian] minority population centers and their surroundings” in the West Bank, as set out in plans that have guided the government’s settlement, and to pursue “separation” between the West Bank and Gaza. The policy across the board serves the same fundamental goal: maximum land, minimum Palestinians.

Furthermore, we found that Israeli authorities have carried out the grave abuses needed for the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians living in the occupied territory. It has done so through, among other policies, sweeping restrictions on movement in the form of the 14-year generalized closure of Gaza and the discriminatory permit system in the West Bank; the confiscation of more than a third of the land in the West Bank; and denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their relatives. Israel has imposed draconian military rule over millions of Palestinians, suspending their basic civil rights, while Jewish Israelis living in the same territory are governed under the permissive Israeli civil law; and imposed harsh conditions in parts of the West Bank that led to forcing thousands of Palestinians out of their homes.

We then evaluated these facts against the relevant areas of international law—in this case, the established law on discrimination—which includes a universal prohibition against apartheid. While the term was coined in relation to specific practices in South Africa, international treaties define apartheid as a universal legal term referring to a particularly severe form of discriminatory oppression.

International criminal law, including the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court, define apartheid as a crime against humanity consisting of three primary elements: (1) an intent by one racial group to dominate another; (2) systematic oppression by the dominant group over the marginalized group; and (3) particularly grave abuses known as inhumane acts.

Racial group is understood today also to encompass treatment on the basis of descent and national or ethnic origin. International criminal law also identifies a related crime against humanity of persecution. Under the Rome Statute and customary international law, persecution consists of severe deprivation of fundamental rights of a racial, ethnic, or other group with discriminatory intent.

The ratification by the State of Palestine of these two treaties in recent years has strengthened the legal application of these two crimes in its territory. A ruling by a chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) earlier this year confirmed that it has jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity – including apartheid and persecution – committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 2014.

Applying the facts to the laws, Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. We found that the elements of the crimes come together in the occupied territory as part of a single Israeli government policy. That policy is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. It is coupled in the occupied territory with systematic oppression and inhumane acts against Palestinians living there.

Sometimes the most important thing someone who cares deeply about you can do is to share hard truths and push you to confront them. The late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and leaders of Israel’s closest ally, the US, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State John Kerry, warned of the prospect of apartheid if things did not change.

Today, apartheid is not a hypothetical or future scenario. A 54-year-occupation is not temporary. The threshold has been crossed. Apartheid, and parallel persecution, is the reality for millions of Palestinians. Recognizing and correctly diagnosing a problem is the first step to solving it and ending apartheid is vital to the future of both Palestinians and Israelis and the cause of peace. It is by extension Germany’s special relationship with Israel and history that should prompt them to recognize the reality of apartheid and persecution and bring to bear the sorts of tools needed to end these crimes against humanity.

END

REORT HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

A TRESHOLD CROSSED

27 APRIL 2021

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Note 60/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

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· 11:51 am

Note 59/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[59]
DISASTER OVER PALESTINE/THE REFUGEE PROBLEM AND
THE IDEOLOGY OF TRANSFER
ASTRID ESSED
OR
BOOK OF ILAN PAPPE
THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE
JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
THE 1948 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE
ARTICLE OF ILAN PAPPE
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT OF THE ARTICLE, NOTE 58
SEE FOR MORE BACKGROUND INFORMATION
PALESTINE REMEMBERED
IF AMERICANS KNEW
WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT ISRAEL-PALESTINE

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· 11:48 am

Note 58/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[58]
DISASTER OVER PALESTINE/THE REFUGEE PROBLEM AND
THE IDEOLOGY OF TRANSFER
ASTRID ESSED
OR
BOOK OF ILAN PAPPE
THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE
”The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a book authored by New Historian Ilan Pappé and published in 2006 by Oneworld Publications. The book is about the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, which Pappe argues was an ethnic cleansing.”
WIKIPEDIA
THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE
WIKIPEDIA
ILAN PAPPE
JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
THE 1948 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE
ARTICLE OF ILAN PAPPE
  The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic and political developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year “Village Files” project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner “caucus” of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. The article ends with a statement of one of the author’s underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. ILAN PAPPÉ, an Israeli historian and professor of political science at Haifa University, is the author of a number of books, including The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (I. B. Tauris, 1994) and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The current article is extracted from early chapters of his latest book,
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld
Publications, Oxford, England, forthcoming in October 2006).
THE 1948 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE ILAN PAPPÉ
  This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic and political developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year “Village Files” project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner “caucus” of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought.
The article ends with a statement of one of the author’s underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948.
  ON A COLD WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine1. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to
PAGE 2
units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country2. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine3. The previous three plans had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership intended to deal with the presence of so many Palestinians on the land the Jewish national movement wanted for itself. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.
The plan, which covered both the rural and urban areas of Palestine, was the inevitable result both of Zionism’s ideological drive for an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine and a response to developments on the ground following the British decision in February 1947 to end its Mandate over the country and turn the problem over to the United Nations. Clashes with local Palestinian militias, especially after the UN partition resolution of November 1947, provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.
Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants. The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear case of what is now known as an ethnic cleansing operation.
DEFINING ETHNIC CLEANSING
Ethnic cleansing today is designated by international law as a crime against humanity, and those who perpetrate it are subject to adjudication: a special international tribunal has been set up in The Hague to prosecute those accused of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and a similar court was established in Arusha, Tanzania, to deal with the Rwanda case. The roots of ethnic cleansing are ancient, to be sure, and it has been practiced from biblical times to the modern age, including at the height of colonialism and in World War II by the Nazis and their allies. But it was especially the events in the former Yugoslavia that gave rise to efforts to define the concept and that continue to serve as the prototype of ethnic cleansing. For example, in its special report on ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the U.S. State Department defines the term as “the systematic and forced removal of the members of an ethnic group from communities in order to change the ethnic composition of a given region.” The report goes on to document numerous cases, including the depopulation within twenty-four hours of the western Kosovar town of Pec in spring 1999, which could
PAGE 3
only have been achieved through advanced planning followed by systematic execution.4 Earlier, a congressional report prepared in August 1992 for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee had described the “process of population transfers aimed at removing the nonSerbian population from large areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” noting that the campaign had “substantially achieved its goals: an exclusively Serb-inhabited region . . . created by forcibly expelling the Muslim populations that had been the overwhelming majority.” According to this report, the two main elements of ethnic cleansing are, first, “the deliberate use of artillery and snipers against the civilian populations of the big cities,” and second, “the forced movement of civilian populations [entailing] the systematic destruction of homes, the looting of personal property, beatings, selective and random killings, and massacres.”5 Similar descriptions are found in the UN Council for Human Rights (UNCHR) report of 1993, which was prepared in follow-up to a UN Security Council Resolution of April 1993 that reaffirmed “its condemnation of all violations of international humanitarian law, in particular the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing.’” Showing how a state’s desire to impose a single ethnic rule on a mixed area links up to acts of expulsion and violence, the report describes the unfolding ethnic cleansing process where men are separated from women and detained, where resistance leads to massacres, and where villages are blown up, with the remaining houses subsequently repopulated with another ethnic group.6
In addition to the United States and the UN, academics, too, have used the former Yugoslavia as the starting point for their studies of the phenomenon. Drazen Petrovic has published one of the most comprehensive studies of ethnic cleansing, which he describes as “a well-defined policy of a particular group of persons to systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin. Such a policy involves violence and is very often connected with military operations.”7 Petrovic associates ethnic cleansing with nationalism, the creation of new nation-states, and national struggle, noting the close connection between politicians and the army in the perpetration of the crime: the political leadership delegates the implementation of the ethnic cleansing to the military level, and although it does not furnish systematic plans or provide explicit instructions, there is no doubt as to the overall objective.
These descriptions almost exactly mirror what happened in Palestine in 1948: Plan D constitutes a veritable repertoire of the cleansing methods described in the various reports on Yugoslavia, setting the background for the massacres that accompanied the expulsions. Indeed, it seems to me that had we never heard about the events in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s and were aware only of the Palestine case, we would be forgiven for thinking that the Nakba had been the inspiration for the descriptions and definitions above, almost to the last detail.
Yet when it comes to the dispossession by Israel of the Palestinians in 1948, there is a deep chasm between the reality and the representation. This is most bewildering, and it is difficult to understand how events perpetrated in modern times and witnessed by foreign reporters and UN observers could be systematically denied, not even recognized as historical fact, let
PAGE 4
alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted, politically as well as morally. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has been almost entirely eradicated from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.
SETTING THE STAGE
When even a measure of Israeli responsibility for the disappearance of half the Arab population of Palestine is acknowledged (the official government version continues to reject any responsibility whatsoever, insisting that the local population left “voluntarily”), the standard explanation is that their flight was an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product of war. But what happened in Palestine was by no means an unintended consequence, a fortuitous occurrence, or even a “miracle,” as Israel’s first president Chaim Weitzmann later proclaimed. Rather, it was the result of long and meticulous planning.
The potential for a future Jewish takeover of the country and the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian people had been present in the writings of the founding fathers of Zionism, as scholars later discovered. But it was not until the late 1930s, two decades after Britain’s 1917 promise to turn Palestine into a national home for the Jews (a pledge that became enshrined in Britain’s Mandate over Palestine in 1923), that Zionist leaders began to translate their abstract vision of Jewish exclusivity into more concrete plans. New vistas were opened in 1937 when the British Royal Peel Commission8 recommended partitioning Palestine into two states. Though the territory earmarked for the Jewish state fell far short of Zionist ambitions, the leadership responded favorably, aware of the signal importance of official recognition of the principle of Jewish statehood on even part of Palestine. Several years later, in 1942, a more maximalist strategy was adopted when the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, in a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, put demands on the table for a Jewish commonwealth over the whole of Mandatory Palestine.9 Thus, the geographical space coveted by the movement changed according to circumstances and opportunities, but the principal objective remained the same: the creation in Palestine of a purely Jewish state, both as a safe haven for Jews and as the cradle of a new Jewish nationalism. And this state had to be exclusively Jewish not only in its sociopolitical structure but also in its ethnic composition.
That the top leaders were well aware of the implications of this exclusivity was clear in their internal debates, diaries, and private correspondence. Ben-Gurion, for example, wrote in a letter to his son in 1937, “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”10 Unlike most of his colleagues in the Zionist leadership, who still hoped that by purchasing a piece of land here and a few houses there they would be able to realize their objective on the ground, Ben-Gurion had long understood that this would never be enough. He recognized early on that the Jewish state could be won only by force but that it was necessary to bide one’s time until the opportune moment arrived for dealing militarily with the demographic reality on the ground: the
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presence of a non-Jewish native majority
The Zionist movement, led by Ben-Gurion, wasted no time in preparing for the eventuality of taking the land by force if it were not granted through diplomacy. These preparations included the building of an efficient military organization and the search for more ample financial resources (for which they tapped into the Jewish Diaspora). In many ways, the creation of an embryonic diplomatic corps was also an integral part of the same general preparations aimed at creating by force a state in Palestine.
The principal paramilitary organization of the Jewish community in Palestine had been established in 1920 primarily to defend the Jewish colonies being implanted among Palestinian villages. Sympathetic British officers, however, helped transform it into the military force that eventually was able to implement plans for the Zionist military takeover of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its native population. One officer in particular, Orde Wingate, was responsible for this transformation. It was he who made the Zionist leaders realize more fully that the idea of Jewish statehood had to be closely associated with militarism and an army, not only to protect the growing number of Jewish colonies inside Palestine but also—more crucially—because acts of armed aggression were an effective deterrent against possible resistance by local Palestinians. Assigned to Palestine in 1936, Wingate also succeeded in attaching Haganah troops to the British forces during the Arab Revolt (1936–39), enabling the Jews to practice the attack tactics he had taught them in rural areas and to learn even more effectively what a “punitive mission” to an Arab village ought to entail. The Haganah also gained valuable military experience in World War II, when quite a few of its members volunteered for the British war effort. Others who remained behind in Palestine, meanwhile, continued to monitor and infiltrate the 1,200 or so Palestinian villages that had dotted the countryside for hundreds of years.
THE VILLAGE FILES
Attacking Arab villages and carrying out punitive raids gave Zionists experience, but it was not enough; systematic planning was called for. In 1940, a young bespectacled Hebrew University historian named Ben-Zion Luria, then employed by the educational department of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist governing body in Palestine, made an important suggestion. He pointed out how useful it would be to have a detailed registry of all Arab villages and proposed that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) conduct such an inventory. “This would greatly help the redemption of the land,” he wrote to the JNF.11 He could not have chosen a better address: the way his initiative involved the JNF in the prospective ethnic cleansing was to generate added impetus and zeal to the expulsion plans that followed.
Founded in 1901 at the fifth Zionist Congress, the JNF was the Zionists’ principal tool for the colonization of Palestine. This was the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land on which it then settled Jewish immigrants and that spearheaded the Zionization of Palestine throughout the Mandatory years. From the outset, it was designed to become the
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“custodian” on behalf of the Jewish people of the land acquired by the Zionists in Palestine. The JNF maintained this role after Israel’s creation, with other missions being added to this primordial task over time.12
Despite the JNF’s best efforts, its success in land acquisition fell far short of its goals. Available financial resources were limited, Palestinian resistance was fierce, and British policies had become restrictive. The result was that by the end of the Mandate in 1948 the Zionist movement had been able to purchase no more than 5.8 percent of the land in Palestine.13 This is why Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department and the quintessential Zionist colonialist, waxed lyrical when he heard about Luria’s village files, immediately suggesting that they be turned into a “national project.”14
All involved became fervent supporters of the idea. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a historian and prominent member of the Zionist leadership (later to become Israel’s second president), wrote to Moshe Shertock (Sharett), the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency (and later Israel’s prime minister), that apart from topographically recording the layout of the villages, the project should also include exposing the “Hebraic origins” of each village. Furthermore, it was important for the Haganah to know which of the villages were relatively new, as some of them had been built “only” during the Egyptian occupation of Palestine in the 1830s.15
But the main endeavor was mapping the villages, and to that end a Hebrew University topographer working in the Mandatory government’s cartography department was recruited to the enterprise. He suggested preparing focal aerial maps and proudly showed Ben-Gurion two such maps for the villages of Sindyana and Sabarin. (These maps, now in the Israeli State Archives, are all that remains of these villages after 1948.) The best professional photographers in the country were also invited to join the initiative. Yitzhak Shefer, from Tel Aviv, and Margot Sadeh, the wife of Yitzhak Sadeh, the chief of the Palmah (the commando units of the Haganah), were recruited as well. The film laboratory operated in Margot’s house with an irrigation company serving as a front: the lab had to be hidden from the British authorities who could have regarded it as an illegal intelligence effort directed against them. Though the British were aware of the project, they never succeeded in locating the secret hideout. In 1947, this whole cartographic department was moved to the Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv.16
The end result of the combined topographic and Orientalist efforts was a large body of detailed files gradually built up for each of Palestine’s villages. By the late 1940s, the “archive” was almost complete. Precise details were recorded about the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of its mukhtars, its relationship with other villages, the age of individual men (16–50), and much more. An important category was an index of “hostility” (toward the Zionist project, that is) as determined by the level of the village’s participation in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt. The
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  material included lists of everyone involved in the revolt and the families of those who had lost someone in the fight against the British. Particular attention was given to people alleged to have killed Jews. That this was no mere academic exercise in geography was immediately obvious to the regular members of the Haganah who were entrusted with collecting the data on “reconnaissance” missions into the villages. One of those who joined a data collection operation in 1940 was Moshe Pasternak, who 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. In the military schools, I had been taught how to attack a modern European city, not a primitive village in the Near East. We could not compare it [an Arab village] to a Polish, or an Austrian one. The Arab village, unlike the European ones, was built topographically on hills. That meant we had to find out 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.17
Indeed, the difficulties of “working with informants” and creating a collaborationist system with the “primitive” people “who like to drink coffee and eat rice with their hands” were noted in many of the village files. Nonetheless, by 1943, Pasternak remembered, there was a growing sense that finally a proper network of informants was in place. That same year, the village files were rearranged to become even more systematic. This was mainly the work of one man, Ezra Danin,18 who was to play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In many ways, it was the recruitment of Ezra Danin, who had been taken out of his successful citrus grove business for the purpose, that injected the intelligence work and the organization of the village files with a new level of efficiency. Files in the post-1943 era included for each village detailed descriptions of the husbandry, cultivation, the number of trees in plantations, the quality of each fruit grove (even of individual trees!), the average land holding per family, the number of cars, the names of shop owners, members of workshops, and the names of the artisans and their skills.19 Later, meticulous details were added about each clan and its political affiliation, the social stratification between notables and common peasants, and the names of the civil servants in the Mandatory government. The antlike labor of the data collection created its own momentum, and around 1945 additional details began to appear such as descriptions of village mosques, the names of their imams (together with such characterizations as “he is an ordinary man”), and even precise accounts of the interiors of the homes of dignitaries. Not surprisingly, as the end of the Mandate approached, the information became more explicitly military orientated: the number of guards in each village (most had none) and the quantity and quality of arms at the villagers’ disposal (generally antiquated or even nonexistent).20
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Danin recruited a German Jew named Yaacov Shimoni, later to become one of Israel’s leading Orientalists, and put him in charge of “special projects” in the villages, in particular supervising the work of the informants.21 (One of these informants, nicknamed the “treasurer” (ha-gizbar) by Danin and Shimoni, proved a fountain of information for the data collectors and supervised the collaborators’ network on their behalf until 1945, when he was exposed and killed by Palestinian militants.22) Other colleagues working with Danin and Shimoni were Yehoshua Palmon and Tuvia Lishanski, who also took an active part in preparing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Lishanski had already been busy in the 1940s orchestrating campaigns to forcibly evict tenants living on lands purchased by the JNF from present or absentee landlords
Not far from the village of Furiedis and the “veteran” Jewish settlement, Zikhron Yaacov, where today a road connects the coastal highway with Marj Ibn Amr (Emeq Izrael) through Wadi Milk, lies a youth village called Shefeya. It was here that in 1944 special units employed by the village files project received their training, and it was from here that they went out on their reconnaissance missions. Shefeya looked very much like a spy village in the cold war: Jews walking around speaking Arabic and trying to emulate what they believed were the customs and behavior of rural Palestinians.23 Many years later, in 2002, one of the first recruits to this special training base recalled his first reconnaissance mission to the nearby village of Umm al-Zaynat in 1944. The aim had been to survey the village and bring back details of where the mukhtar lived, where the mosque was located, where the rich villagers lived, who had been active in the 1936–39 revolt, and so on. These were not dangerous missions, as the infiltrators knew they could exploit the traditional Arab hospitality code and were even guests at the home of the mukhtar himself. As they failed to collect in one day all the data they were seeking, they asked to be invited back. For their second visit they had been instructed to make sure to get a good idea of the fertility of the land, whose quality seemed to have highly impressed them: in 1948, Umm al-Zaynat was destroyed and all its inhabitants expelled without any provocation on their part whatsoever.24
The final update of the village files took place in 1947. It focused on creating lists of “wanted” persons in each village. In 1948, Jewish troops used these lists for the search-andarrest operations they carried out as soon as they had occupied a village. That is, the men in the village would be lined up and those whose names appeared on the lists would be identified, often by the same person who had informed on them in the first place, but now wearing a cloth sack over his head with two holes cut out for his eyes so as not to be recognized. The men who were picked out were often shot on the spot. Among the criteria for inclusion in these lists, besides having participated in actions against the British and the Zionists, were involvement in the Palestinian national movement (which could apply to entire villages) and having close ties to the leader of the movement, the Mufti Haj Amin alHusayni, or being affiliated with his political party.25 Given the Mufti’s dominance of Palestinian politics since the establishment of the Mandate in 1923, and the prominent positions held by members of his party in the Arab Higher Committee that became the embryo government of the Palestinians, this offense too was very common. Other reasons
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for being included in the list were such allegations as “known to have traveled to Lebanon” or “arrested by the British authorities for being a member of a national committee in the village.”26 An examination of the 1947 files shows that villages with about 1,500 inhabitants usually had 20–30 such suspects (for instance, around the southern Carmel mountains, south of Haifa, Umm al-Zaynat had 30 such suspects and the nearby village of Damun had 25).27
Yigael Yadin recalled that it was this minute and detailed knowledge of each and every Palestinian village that enabled the Zionist military command in November 1947 to conclude with confidence “that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organize them properly.” The only serious problem was the British: “If not for the British, we could have quelled the Arab riot [the opposition to the UN Partition Resolution in 1947] in one month.”28
GEARING UP FOR WAR
As World War II drew to a close, the Zionist movement had obtained a much clearer general sense of how best to go about getting its state off the ground. By that time, it was clear that the Palestinians did not constitute a real obstacle to Zionist plans. True, they still formed the overwhelming majority in the land, and as such they were a demographic problem, but they were no longer feared as a military threat. A crucial factor was that the British had already completely destroyed the Palestinian leadership and defense capabilities in 1939 when they suppressed the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, allowing the Zionist leadership ample time to set out their next moves. The Zionist leadership was also aware of the hesitant position that the Arab states as a whole were taking on the Palestine question. Thus, once the danger of Nazi invasion into Palestine had been removed, the Zionist leaders were keenly aware that the sole obstacle that stood in the way of their seizing the country was the British presence.
As long as Britain had been holding the fort against Nazi Germany, it was impossible, of course, to pressure them. But with the end of the war, and especially with the postwar Labor government looking for a democratic solution in Palestine (which would have spelled doom for the Zionist project given the 75-percent Arab majority), it was clear that Britain had to go. Some 100,000 British troops remained in Palestine after the war and, in a country with a population under two million, this definitely served as a deterrent, even after Britain cut back its forces somewhat following the Jewish terrorist attack on it headquarters in the King David Hotel. It was these considerations that prompted Ben-Gurion to conclude that it was better to settle for less than the 100 percent demanded under the 1942 Biltmore program and that a slightly smaller state would be enough to allow the Zionist movement to fulfill its dreams and ambitions.29
This was the issue that was debated by the movement in the final days of August 1946, when Ben-Gurion assembled the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Royal Monsue hotel in Paris. Holding back the more extremist members, Ben-Gurion told the gathering that 80 to 90 percent of Mandatory Palestine was plenty for creating a viable state, provided
PAGE 10
they were able to ensure Jewish predominance. “We will demand a large chunk of Palestine” he told those present. A few months later the Jewish Agency translated Ben-Gurion’s “large chunk of Palestine” into a map which it distributed to the parties relevant to deciding the future of Palestine. Interestingly, the Jewish Agency map, which was larger than the map proposed by the UN in November 1947, turned out to be, almost to the last dot, the map that emerged from the fighting in 1948–49: pre-1967 Israel, that is, Palestine without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.30
The major topic on the Zionist agenda in 1946, the struggle against the British, resolved itself with Britain’s decision in February 1947 to quit Palestine and to transfer the Palestine question to the UN. In fact, the British had little choice: after the Holocaust they would never be able to deal with the looming Jewish rebellion as they had with the Arab one in the 1930s. Moreover, as the Labor party had made up its mind to leave India, Palestine lost much of its attraction. Fuel shortages during a particularly cold winter in 1947 drove the message home to London that the empire was soon to be a second-rate power, its global influence dwarfed by the two new superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) and its postwar economy crippled. Rather than hold onto remote places such as Palestine, the Labor party saw as its priority the building of a welfare state at home. In the end, Britain pulled out in a hurry, and with no regrets.31
By the end of 1946, even before Britain’s decision, Ben-Gurion had already realized that the British were on their way out and, with his aides, began working on a general strategy that could be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone. This strategy became Plan C, or Gimel in Hebrew. Plan C was a revised version of two earlier plans. Plan A was also named the “Elimelech Plan,” after Elimelech Avnir, the Haganah commander in Tel Aviv who in 1937, at Ben-Gurion’s request, had set out possible guidelines for the takeover of Palestine in the event of a British withdrawal. Plan B had been devised in 1946. Shortly thereafter, the two plans were fused to form Plan C.
Like Plans A and B, Plan C aimed to prepare the Jewish community’s military forces for the offensive campaigns they would be waging against rural and urban Palestine after the departure of the British. The purpose of such actions would be to “deter” the Palestinian population from attacking Jewish settlements and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses, roads, and traffic. Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions of this kind would entail:
Striking at the political leadership.
Striking at inciters and their financial supporters
Striking at Arabs who acted against Jews.
Striking at senior Arab officers and officials [in the Mandatory system].
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Hitting Palestinian transportation.
Damaging the sources of livelihood and vital economic targets (water wells, mills, etc.)
Attacking villages, neighborhoods, likely to assist in future attacks.
Attacking clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.
Plan C added that the data necessary for the successful performance of these actions could be found in the village files: lists of leaders, activists, “potential human targets,” the precise layout of villages, and so on.32
The plan lacked operational specifics, however, and within a few months, a new plan was drawn up, Plan D (Dalet). This was the plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. Unlike Plan C, it contained direct references both to the geographical parameters of the future Jewish state (the 78 percent provided for in the 1946 Jewish Agency map) and to the fate of the one million Palestinians living within that space:
These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and 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.33
No village within the planned area of operations was exempted from these orders, either because of its location or because it was expected to put up some resistance. This was the master plan for the expulsion of all the villages in rural Palestine. Similar instructions were given, in much the same wording, for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centers.
The orders coming through to the units in the field were more specific. The country was divided into zones according to the number of brigades, whereby the four original brigades of the Haganah were turned into twelve so as to facilitate implementing the plan. Each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighborhoods in his zone that had to be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled, with exact dates. Some commanders were overly zealous in executing their orders, adding other locations as the momentum of their operation carried them forward. Some of the orders, on the other hand, proved too ambitious and could not be implemented within the expected timetable. This meant that several villages on the coast that had been scheduled to be occupied in May were destroyed only in July. And the villages in the Wadi Ara area—a valley connecting the coast near Hadera with Marj Ibn Amr (Emeq Izrael) and Afula (today’s Route 65)—somehow
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  succeeded in surviving all the Jewish attacks until the end of the war. But they were the exception. For the most part, the destruction of the villages and urban neighborhoods, and the removal of their inhabitants, took place as planned. And by the time the direct order had been issued in March, thirty villages were already obliterated.
A few days after Plan D was typed out, it was distributed among the commanders of the dozen brigades that now comprised the Haganah. With the list each commander received came a detailed description of the villages in his field of operation and their imminent fate— occupation, destruction, and expulsion. The Israeli documents released from the IDF archives in the late 1990s show clearly that, contrary to claims made by historians such as Benny Morris, Plan Dalet was handed down to the brigade commanders not as vague guidelines, but as clear-cut operative orders for action.34
Unlike the general draft that was sent to the political leaders, the instructions and lists of villages received by the military commanders did not place any restrictions on how the action of destruction or expulsion was to be carried out. There were no provisions as to how villages could avoid their fate, for example through unconditional surrender, as promised in the general document. There was another difference between the draft handed to the politicians and the one given to the military commanders: the official draft stated that the plan would not be activated until after the Mandate ended, whereas the officers on the ground were ordered to start executing it within a few days of its adoption. This dichotomy is typical of the relationship that exists in Israel between the army and politicians until today —the army quite often misinforms the politicians of their real intentions, as Moshe Dayan did in 1956, Ariel Sharon did in 1982, and Shaul Mofaz did in 2000.
What the political version of Plan Dalet and the military directives had in common was the overall purpose of the scheme. In other words, even before the direct orders had reached the field, troops already knew exactly what was expected of them. The venerable and courageous Israeli fighter for civil rights, Shulamit Aloni, who was an officer at the time, recalls how special political officers would come down and actively incite the troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operation ahead, often planned for the day after the indoctrination had taken place.35
THE PARADIGM OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
In my forthcoming book, I want to explore the mechanism of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 as well as the cognitive system that has allowed the world to forget and the perpetrators to deny the crime committed by the Zionist movement against the Palestinian people.
In other words, I want to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. I have no doubt that the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing is one reason why the denial of the catastrophe has gone on for so long. It is not that the Zionist
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movement, in creating its nation-state, waged a war that “tragically but inevitably” led to the expulsion of “parts of the indigenous population.” Rather, it is the other way round: the objective was the ethnic cleansing of the country the movement coveted for its new state, and the war was the consequence, the means to carry it out. On 15 May 1948, the day after the official end of the Mandate and the day the State of Israel was proclaimed, the neighboring Arab states sent a small army—small in comparison to their overall military capability—to try to stop the ethnic cleansing operations that had already been in full swing for over a month. The war with the regular Arab armies did nothing to prevent the ongoing ethnic cleansing, which continued to its successful completion in the autumn of 1948.
To many, the idea of adopting the paradigm of ethnic cleansing as the a priori basis for the narrative of 1948 may appear no more than an indictment. And in many ways, it is indeed my own J’Accuse against the politicians who devised the ethnic cleansing and the generals who carried it out. These men are not obscure. They are the heroes of the Jewish war of independence, and their names will be quite familiar to most readers. The list begins with the indisputable leader of the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion, in whose private home all the chapters in the ethnic cleansing scheme were discussed and finalized. He was aided by a small group of people I refer to as the “Consultancy,” an ad-hoc cabal assembled solely for the purpose of planning the dispossession of the Palestinians.36 In one of the rare documents that records the meeting of this body, it is referred to as the Consultant Committee—Haveadah Hamyeazet; in another document the eleven names of the committee appear.37 Though these names were all erased by the censor, it has been possible to reconstruct them.
This caucus prepared the plans for the ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution until the job of uprooting half of Palestine’s native population had been completed. It included first and foremost the top-ranking officers of the future state’s army, such as the legendary Yigael Yadin and Moshe Dayan. They were joined by figures little known outside Israel but well grounded in the local ethos, such as Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Sadeh, followed by regional commanders, such as Moshe Kalman, who cleansed the Safad area, and Moshe Carmel, who uprooted most of the Galilee. Yitzhak Rabin operated both in al-Lyyd and Ramleh, as well as in the Greater Jerusalem area. Shimon Avidan cleansed the south; many years later Rehavam Ze’evi, who fought with him, said admiringly that he “cleansed his front from tens of villages and towns.”38 Also on the southern front was Yitzhak Pundak, who told Ha’Aretz in 2004, “There were two hundred villages [in the front] and they are gone. We had to destroy them, otherwise we would have had Arabs here [namely in the southern part of Palestine] as we have in Galilee. We would have had another million Palestinians.”39
These military men commingled with what nowadays we would call the “Orientalists”: experts on the Arab world at large, and the Palestinians in particular, either because they themselves came from Arab lands or because they were scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies. Some of these were intelligence officers on the ground during this crucial period. Far from being mere collectors of data on the “enemy,” intelligence officers not only
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played a major role in preparing for the cleansing, but some also personally took part in some of the worst atrocities that accompanied the systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. It was they who were given the final authority to decide which villages would be ground to dust and which villagers would be executed.40 In the memories of Palestinian survivors, they were the ones who, after a village or neighborhood had been occupied, decided the fate of its peasants or town dwellers, which could mean imprisonment or freedom or spell the difference between life and death. Their operations in 1948 were supervised by Issar Harel, who later became the first head of Mossad and the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret services.
I mention their names, but my purpose in doing so is not that I want to see them posthumously brought to trial. Rather, my aim here and in my book is to humanize the victimizers as well as the victims: I want to prevent the crimes Israel committed from being attributed to such elusive factors as “the circumstances,” “the army,” or, as Benny Morris has it, “la guerre comme la guerre,” and similar vague references that let sovereign states off the hook and give individuals a clear conscience. I accuse, but I am also part of the society that stands condemned. I feel both responsible for, and part of, the story. But like others in my own society, I am also convinced that a painful journey into the past is the only way forward if we want to create a better future for us all, Palestinians and Israelis alike.
NOTES
1. The composition of the group that met is the product of a mosaic reconstruction of several documents, as will be demonstrated in my book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006). The document summarizing the meeting is found in the Israel Defense Force Archives [IDFA], GHQ/Operations branch, 10 March 1948, File no. 922/75/595, and in the Haganah Archives [HA], File no. 73/94. The description of the meeting is repeated by Israel Galili in the Mapai center meeting, 4 April 1948, found in the HA, File no. 80/50/18. Chapter 4 of my book also documents the messages that went out on 10 March as well as the eleven meetings prior to finalizing of the plan, of which full minutes were recorded only for the January meeting.
2. The historian Meir Pail claims, in From Haganah to the IDF [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Zemora Bitan Modan, n.d.), p. 307, that the orders were sent a week later. For the dispatch of the orders, see also Gershon Rivlin and Elhanan Oren, The War of Independence: Ben-Gurion’s Diary, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1982), p. 147. The orders dispatched to the Haganah brigades to move to State D—Mazav Dalet—and from the brigades to the battalions can be found in HA, File no. 73/94, 16 April 1948.
3. On Plan Dalet, which was approved in its broad lines several weeks before that meeting, see Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Emergence of Israeli Militarism, 1936–1956 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1995), p. 253: “Plan Dalet aimed at cleansing of villages, expulsion of Arabs from mixed towns.”
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  4. State Department Special Report, “Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo,” 10 May 1999.
5. “The Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations,” U.S. Senate, August 1992, S.PRT. 102–103.
6. United Nations, “Report Following Security Council Resolution 819,” 16 April 1993.
7. Drazen Petrovic, “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology,” European Journal of International Law 5, no. 3 (1994), pp. 342–60.
8. On Peel, see Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New York: Beford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), pp. 135–37.
9. Smith, Palestine, pp. 167–68.
10. Ben-Gurion Archives [BGA], Ben-Gurion Diary, 12 July 1937.
11. “The Inelegance Service and the Village Files, 1940–1948” (prepared by Shimri Salomon), Bulletin of the Haganah Archives, issues 9–10 (2005).
12. For a critical survey of the JNF, see Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (London: Zed Books, 2004).
13. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
14. Teveth, Ben-Gurion.
15. HA, File no. 66.8
16. Testimony of Yoeli Optikman, HA, Village Files, File 24/9, 16 January 2003
17. HA, File no. 1/080/451, 1 December 1939
18. HA, File no. 194/7, pp. 1–3, given on 19 December 2002
19. John Bierman and Colin Smith, Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion (New York: Random House, 1999).
20. HA, Files no. S25/4131, no. 105/224, and no. 105/227, and many others in this series, each dealing with a different village.
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21. Hillel Cohen, The Shadow Army: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hozata Ivrit, 2004).
22. Interview with Palti Sela, HA, File no. 205.9, 10 January 1988.
23. Interview, HA, File no. 194.7, pp. 1–3, 19 December 2002.
24. HA, Village Files, File no. 105/255 files from January 1947.
25. IDFA, File no. 114/49/5943, orders from 13 April 1948.
26. IDFA, File no. 105.178.
27. HA, Village Files, File no. 105/255, from January 1947.
28. Quoted in Harry Sacher, Israel: The Establishment of a State (London: Wiedenfels and Nicloson, 1952), p. 217.
29. On British policy, see Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951 (London: St. Antony’s/Macmillan Press, 1984).
30. Moshe Sluzki interview with Moshe Sneh in Gershon Rivlin, ed., Olive Leaves and Sword: Documents and Studies of the Haganah [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: IDF Publications, 1990), pp. 9– 40.
31. See Pappé, Britain.
32. Yehuda Sluzki, The Haganah Book, vol. 3, part 3 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: IDF Publications, 1964), p. 1942.
33. The English translation is in Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–20.
34. See discussion of State D (Mazav Dalet)—that is, the transition from Plan D to its actual implementation—in chapter 5 of Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing.
35. The plan distributed to the soldiers and the first direct commands are in IDFA, File no. 1950/2315 File 47, 11 May 1948.
36. The most important meetings are described in chapter 3 of Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing.
PAGE 17
37. “From Ben-Gurion to Galili and the Members of the Committee,” BGA, Correspondence Section, 1.01.1948–07.01.48, documents 79–81. The document also provides a list of forty Palestinians leaders that are target for assassination by the Haganah forces
38. Yedi’ot Aharonot, 2 February 1992.
39. Ha’Aretz, 21 May 2004.
40. For details, see Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing. The authority to destroy can be found in the orders sent on 10 March to the troops and specific orders authorizing executions are in IDFA, File no. 5943/49 doc. 114, 13 April 1948.
Source : Institute for Palestine Studies URL : http://www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/abstract.php? id=7175

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· 11:46 am

Notes 54 T/M 57/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[54]
”A popular uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration, later known as the Great Revolt,[a][10] the Great Palestinian Revolt,[b][11] or the Palestinian Revolution,[c] lasted from 1936 until 1939. The movement sought independence from British colonial rule and the end of British support for Zionism, including Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews”
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
[55]
The Haganah (Hebrew for “defence”), a Jewish paramilitary organisation, actively supported British efforts to suppress the uprising, which reached 10,000 Arab fighters at their peak during the summer and fall of 1938. Although the British administration did not officially recognise the Haganah, the British security forces cooperated with it by forming the Jewish Settlement Police, Jewish Supernumerary Police, and Special Night Squads. The Special Night Squads engaged in activities described by colonial administrator Sir Hugh Foot, as ‘extreme and cruel’ involving torture, whipping, abuse and execution of Arabs”
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE/BRITISH AND JEWISH COOPERATION
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
WIKIPEDIA
HAGANAH
WIKIPEDIA
JEWISH SETTLEMEMT POLICE
WIKIPEDIA
JEWISH SUPERNUMERARY POLICE
WIKIPEDIA
SPECIAL NIGHT SQUADS
”The Special Night Squads engaged in activities described by colonial administrator Sir Hugh Foot, as ‘extreme and cruel’ involving torture, whipping, abuse and execution of Arabs.[1]”
 
 
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE/BRITISH AND JEWISH COOPERATION
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
WIKIPEDIA
HUGH FOOT, BARON CARADON
[56]
”The British authorities maintained, financed and armed the Jewish police from this point onward until the end of the Mandate,[144] and by the end of September 1939 around 20,000 Jewish policeman, supernumeraries and settlement guards had been authorised to carry arms by the government,[3] which also distributed weapons to outlying Jewish settlements,[145]and allowed the Haganah to acquire arms”
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE/BRITISH AND JEWISH COOPERATION
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
[57]
WIKIPEDIA
JEWISH RESISTANCE MOVEMENT

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Notes 54 T/M 57/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

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· 11:33 am

Note 53/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[53]
WIKIPEDIA
AL-BASSA MASSACRE
”Desmond Woods, an officer of the Royal Ulster Rifles, described the massacre at al-Bassa as follows:

Now I will never forget this incident … We were at al-Malikiyya, the other frontier base and word came through about 6 o’clock in the morning that one of our patrols had been blown up and Millie Law [the dead officer] had been killed. Now Gerald Whitfeld [Lieutenant-Colonel G.H.P. Whitfeld, the battalion commander] had told these mukhtars that if any of this sort of thing happened he would take punitive measures against the nearest village to the scene of the mine. Well the nearest village to the scene of the mine was a place called al-Bassa and our Company C were ordered to take part in punitive measures. And I will never forget arriving at al-Bassa and seeing the Rolls-Royce armoured cars of the 11th Hussars peppering Bassa with machine gun fire and this went on for about 20 minutes and then we went in and I remembered we had lighted braziers and we set the houses on fire and we burnt the village to the ground … Monty had him [the battalion commander] up and he asked him all about it and Gerald Whitfeld explained to him. He said “Sir, I have warned the mukhtars in these villages that if this happened to any of my officers or men, I would take punitive measures against them and I did this and I would’ve lost control of the frontier if I hadn’t.” Monty said “All right but just go a wee bit easier in the future.”

WIKIPEDIA

AL-BASSA MASSACRE/DESC RIPTION OF EVENTS BY A RUR SOLDIER

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Bassa_massacre#Description_of_events_by_a_RUR_soldier

ORIGINAL SOURCE

WIKIPEDIA

AL-BASSA MASSACRE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Bassa_massacre

WIKIPEDIA

ROYAL ULSTER RIFLES

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Ulster_Rifles

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· 11:32 am

Notes 51 AND 52/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[51]
”‘The main form of collective punishment employed by the British forces was destruction of property. Sometimes entire villages were reduced to rubble, as happened to Mi’ar in October 1938; more often several prominent houses were blown up and others were trashed inside.[1][85] The biggest single act of destruction occurred in Jaffa on 16 June 1936, when large gelignite charges were used to cut long pathways through the old city, destroying 220–240 buildings and rendering up to 6,000 Arabs homeless.””
WIKIPEDIA
RESPONSE/1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
”Mi’ar (Arabic: ميعار), was a Palestinian village located 17.5 kilometers east of Acre. Its population in 1945 was 770. The Crusaders referred to it as “Myary”. By the 19th century, during Ottoman rule, it was a large Muslim village. The village was a center of Palestinian Arab rebel operations during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine against British rule and consequently the village was completely dynamited by the British. Mi’ar was later restored, but it was depopulated by Israeli forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Jewish communities of Atzmon, Ya’ad and Manof are located on former village land.”
WIKIPEDIA
MI’AR
”The biggest single act of destruction occurred in Jaffa on 16 June 1936, when large gelignite charges were used to cut long pathways through the old city, destroying 220–240 buildings and rendering up to 6,000 Arabs homeless.”
[52]
”Villages were also frequently punished by fines and confiscation of livestock”
WIKIPEDIA

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· 11:30 am

Notes 49 AND 50/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[49]
MARTIAL LAW
The Arabs rejected the proposal and the revolt was stepped up during 1937 and 1938. In the face of the continued uprising, the British declared martial law, dissolving the Arab High Committee, and arresting officials of the organisation behind the revolt, the Supreme Muslim Council.

ALJAZEERA

THE HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN REVOLTS

9 DECEMBER 2003

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/12/9/the-history-of-palestinian-revolts

SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT OF THE ARTICLE,

NOTE 48

”Military law allowed swift prison sentences to be passed.[111] Thousands of Arabs were held in administrative detention, without trial, and without proper sanitation, in overcrowded prison camps.[”

WIKIPEDIA

1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE/RESPONSE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine#Response

ORIGINAL SOURCE

WIKIPEDIA

1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine

”The British had already formalised the principle of collective punishment in Palestine in the 1924–1925 Collective Responsibility and Punishment Ordinances and updated these ordinances in 1936 with the Collective Fines Ordinance.[1] These collective fines (amounting to £1,000,000 over the revolt[112]) eventually became a heavy burden for poor Palestinian villagers, especially when the army also confiscated livestock, destroyed properties, imposed long curfews and established police posts, demolished houses and detained some or all of the Arab men in distant detention camps”

WIKIPEDIA

WIKIPEDIA

1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE/RESPONSE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine#Response

ORIGINAL SOURCE

WIKIPEDIA

1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine

[50]

WIKIPEDIA

ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_detention

”Military law allowed swift prison sentences to be passed.[111] Thousands of Arabs were held in administrative detention, without trial, and without proper sanitation, in overcrowded prison camps.”

WIKIPEDIA

1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE/RESPONSE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine#Response

ORIGINAL SOURCE

WIKIPEDIA

1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine

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· 11:27 am

Note 48/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[48]
WIKIPEDIA
1936-1939 ARAB REVOLT IN PALESTINE
FULL-SCALE UPRISING
In 1936, the first sustained revolution by Palestinian Arabs for more than a century started. Thousands of Palestinians and non-Palestinian Arabs were mobilised.
Jaffa once again proved a focus for dissent. The followers of Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam – killed by the British in 1935 – initiated a general strike there and in Nablus, and launched attacks on Jewish and British installations. Also instrumental in the national uprising was Haj Amin al-Husayni, the president of the newly formed Arab High Committee, a coalition of political parties.

The committee called for a general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the shutting of municipal governments. It demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban on land sales to Jews. By the end of the year, the movement had become a national revolt.

Britain again sent a royal fact-finding committee. In July 1937, it reported that the revolt was caused by the Arab desire for independence and concern over the idea of a Jewish national home. The committee advised the partition of Palestine.

Additionally, it recommended the compulsory transfer of the Arab Palestinians from the territories earmarked for the Jewish state.

Martial law

The Arabs rejected the proposal and the revolt was stepped up during 1937 and 1938. In the face of the continued uprising, the British declared martial law, dissolving the Arab High Committee, and arresting officials of the organisation behind the revolt, the Supreme Muslim Council.

Five thousand Palestinians were killed in the revolts of 1935 to 1939 and more than 15,000 were wounded.

Although the uprising did not achieve its goals, it is credited with signifying the birth of the Arab Palestinian identity, which is based on achieving independence within a free, powerful and united Arab homeland.”

ALJAZEERA

THE HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN REVOLTS

9 DECEMBER 2003

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/12/9/the-history-of-palestinian-revolts

It can be argued that one root cause for Palestine’s succession of revolts was the carve up of land by the colonial powers in the early 19th century.

In 1916, land in the Middle East was divided up under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This was a secretly conceived treaty drawn up between Britain and France marking out which country they would have control over in the region.

 

The two colonial powers divided the areas that had previously been ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Little consideration was given to the indigenous population, provoking widespread discontent.

Frustrations were compounded by the fact that in 1917 Britain backed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a further insult, the Arab community was deceived into believing that it would be supported in its desire for self-rule.

Talks at San Remo

The decisions of 1916 and 1917 were reinforced at the San Remo Conference of 1920 and finally ratified by the council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922.

During the First World war the Ottoman Turks backed Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. The Arabs, led by the Hashemite dynasty of Mecca, fought against the Ottomans in a bid to shake off their rulers and in an early show of Arab nationalism.

Turkish defeat left the European allies free to control its lands. The French were given the mandate for Syria, which included present day Lebanon, and the British were mandated Palestine, and also control over Iraq and Jordan.

The decision shattered any hopes the Arabs had of founding Palestine within a federal Syrian state. In 1920 the first High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a British Jew, arrived marking the end of 400 years of Turkish rule and the start of Britain’s 30-year ascendancy.

Uprisings in Jerusalem

Palestinians, who were already resentful because of the increasing number of immigrant Jewish settlers, demonstrated in Jerusalem in February 1920. Approximately 1,500 people came on to the streets after the British general, Louis Bols, declared the enforcement of the Balfour Declaration.

A month later a second demonstration was followed by bloody outbursts, with Arabs attacking Jewish interests. Bols banned all demonstrations.

But in May 1921 an anti-Zionist riot broke out in Jaffa. Dozens of Arabs and Jews were killed in the confrontations.

Al-Buraq Wall – a flashpoint

September 1929 saw further serious unrest, this time centring on al-Buraq Wall. This site in the heart of old Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Wailing Wall, forms part of the western wall of the al-Aqsa mosque and is therefore viewed by Muslims as a sacred site not to be bought or sold.

But at the end of the 1920s, a group of rabbis urged Jewish immigrants to gather at the wall to perform a public prayer. The aim after the call was to seize the wall, and declare it as a sacred place for Jews.

Muslim Palestinians were outraged and clashes erupted. These confrontations swiftly turned into an uprising that spread across the country. Fights between Arab Palestinians and Jews backed by British occupation forces, continued for two weeks. Hundreds of Arab Palestinians and Jews were killed in the confrontations.

In June 1930 the League of Nations sent a fact-finding committee, the International Commission for the Wailing Wall, to investigate the reasons behind the uprising. After five months of investigations, the committee concluded that the area around the wall was an Islamic endowment, but that the Jews could continue their prayers at the wall with certain restrictions.

Jewish immigration intensifies

In the 1930s, after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, Jewish immigration intensified, reaching its peak in 1935 when 61,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine. By 1936 Jews from outside Palestine made up more than a third of the population of Arab Palestine.

Such huge numbers meant more land was obtained and tension between Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish newcomers escalated. Both sides realised that by the end of the British mandate, population figures and land ownership would determine the future political control of the country.

As early as 1929 a British inquiry investigated the destabilising effect of mass immigration, concluding that civil unrest was the likely outcome of making the indigenous population landless.

Full-scale uprising

In 1936, the first sustained revolution by Palestinian Arabs for more than a century started. Thousands of Palestinians and non-Palestinian Arabs were mobilised.

Jaffa once again proved a focus for dissent. The followers of Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam – killed by the British in 1935 – initiated a general strike there and in Nablus, and launched attacks on Jewish and British installations. Also instrumental in the national uprising was Haj Amin al-Husayni, the president of the newly formed Arab High Committee, a coalition of political parties.

The committee called for a general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the shutting of municipal governments. It demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban on land sales to Jews. By the end of the year, the movement had become a national revolt.

Britain again sent a royal fact-finding committee. In July 1937, it reported that the revolt was caused by the Arab desire for independence and concern over the idea of a Jewish national home. The committee advised the partition of Palestine.

Additionally, it recommended the compulsory transfer of the Arab Palestinians from the territories earmarked for the Jewish state.

Martial law

The Arabs rejected the proposal and the revolt was stepped up during 1937 and 1938. In the face of the continued uprising, the British declared martial law, dissolving the Arab High Committee, and arresting officials of the organisation behind the revolt, the Supreme Muslim Council.

Five thousand Palestinians were killed in the revolts of 1935 to 1939 and more than 15,000 were wounded.

Although the uprising did not achieve its goals, it is credited with signifying the birth of the Arab Palestinian identity, which is based on achieving independence within a free, powerful and united Arab homeland.

END

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· 11:26 am

Note 47/THIEVES AND VILLAINS

[47]

”In the 1880s, Jews, predominantly Ashkenazi,[2][3] began purchasing land and properties across Ottoman Palestine in order to expand the collective territorial ownership of the Yishuv. Large Jewish corporations and private Jewish buyers led this effort through multiple intermittent transactions that continued after Mandatory Palestine was established in 1918. The largest of these arrangements, known as the Sursock Purchases, resulted in the procurement of the Jezreel Valley and the Bay of Haifa by the 1930s. The purchase of land was often accompanied by the eviction of the Arab tenants”
WIKIPEDIA
JEWISH LAND PURCHASE IN PALESTINE
”Director of Development Lewis French established a register of landless Arabs in 1931.[24] Out of 3,271 applicants, only 664 were admitted and the remainder rejected.[24] Porath suggests that the number of displaced Arabs may have been considerably larger, since French’s definition of “landless Arab” excluded those who had sold their own land, those who owned land elsewhere, those who had since obtained tenancy of other land even if they were unable to cultivate it due to poverty or debt, and displaced persons who were not cultivators but had occupations such as ploughman or laborer.”
WIKIPEDIA
JEWISH PURCHASE OF LAND IN PALESTINE/IMPACT
ON THE LOCAL ARAB POPULACE
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
JEWISH PURCHASE OF LAND IN PALESTINE
Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords.”
ALJAZEERA
THE NAKBA DID NOT START OR END IN 1948
23 MAY 2017
SEE FOR THE WHOLE ARTICLE, NOTE 40

ART. 2.

The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

THE PALESTINE MANDATE

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/Palmanda.Asp

WIKIPEDIA

JAFFA RIOTS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_riots

”The report noted that the violence by Arabs on the Jews was apparently triggered by a clash between the MPS (Miflagah Po’alim Sotzialistim) or Bolsheviks and the authorized Jewish Labour Party but that this “could not have been sufficient to give rise to more than a street riot of the ordinary kind”.

In the summary of the report the grievances of the Arabs were listed as follows:

  1. The British in Palestine, now led by a Zionist, had adopted “a policy mainly directed towards the establishment of a National Home for the Jews, and not to the equal benefit of all Palestinians”.
  2. An official advisory body to the government in Palestine, the Zionist Commission, placed the interests of the Jews above all others.
  3. There was an undue proportion of Jews in the government.
  4. Part of the Zionist program was to flood the country with people who possessed “greater commercial and organizing ability” which would eventually lead to their gaining the upper hand over the rest of the population.
  5. The immigrants were an “economic danger” to the country because of their competition, and because they were favored in this competition.
  6. Immigrants offended the Arabs “by their arrogance and by their contempt of Arab social prejudices”.
  7. Owing to insufficient precautions, Bolshevik immigrants were allowed into the country leading to social and economic unrest in Palestine.”
 
HAYCRAFT COMMISSION/CONCLUSIONS
 
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
HAYCRAFT COMMISSION
”As colonial overlords, the British were exceptional record-keepers. Backed by empirical data, they compiled report after report in an attempt to monitor the tensions erupting all over Palestine. These reports showed that the distrust between the Palestinian and Zionist populations intensified after the British military administration of Palestine and the issuance of the Balfour declaration. The Haycraft report, for example, concluded that despite Zionist accusations the actions of the Palestinians were not at all motivated by antisemitism, but rather by the British military administration favoring the Zionist settlers to the detriment of the Palestinians”
INTRODUCTION TO PALESTINE
THE MANDATE AND THE NAKBA
SEE FOR THE WHOLE ARTICLE, NOTE 43

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