The Urbicide Of Palestine

 

The confidence the Jewish command in early April had in their capacity not only to take over, but also to cleanse the areas the UN had granted to the Jewish state, can be gauged from the way, immediately after operation  Nachshon, they turned their attention to the major urban centres of Palestine. These were systematically attacked throughout the rest of the month, as UN agents and British officials stood by and watched indifferently.

The offensive against the urban centres began with Tiberias. As soon as news of Deir Yassin and the massacre three days later (12 April) in the nearby village of Khirbat Nasr al-Din reached the large Palestinian population in the city, many fled. 11 The people were also petrified by the daily heavy bombardments by the Jewish forces situated in the hills overlooking this historic, ancient capital on the Sea of Galilee, where 6000 Jews and 5000 Arabs and their forbears had for centuries co-existed peacefully. British obstruction meant that the ALA had only managed to supply the city with a force of about thirty volunteers. These were no match for the Hagana forces, who rolled barrel bombs down from the hills and used loudspeakers to broadcast terrifying noises to frighten the population – an early version of the supersonic flights over Beirut in 1983 and Gaza in 2005, which human rights organisations have decried as criminal acts. Tiberias fell on 18 April. 12The British played a questionable role in the attack on Tiberias. At first they offered to protect the Palestinian residents, but soon urged them to negotiate a general evacuation of the town with the Jewish forces. King Abdullah of Jordan was more ‘practical’: he sent thirty trucks to help move women and children. In his memoirs he claimed he was convinced another Deir Yassin was about to occur. 13 British officers later professed to having had similar apprehensions, but documents showing heavy British pressure on the community’s leaders to leave do not reveal any great concern about an impending massacre. Some would say that the British thereby prevented Tiberias’ Arab residents from being massacred; others would argue that they collaborated with the expellers. The role of the British is much clearer, and far more negative, in the next chapters of Palestine’s urbicide, when Haifa and Jaffa were occupied.

The De-Arabisation of Haifa

As mentioned previously, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and welcomed by the Consultancy, although not necessarily initiated by it. The early terrorization of the city’s Arab population the previous December had prompted many among the Palestinian elite to leave for their residences in Lebanon and Egypt until calm returned to their city. It is  hard to estimate how many fell within this category: most historians put the figure at around 15,000 to 20,000. 14On 12 January 1948, a local leader called Farid Sa’ad, the manager of the Arab Bank in Haifa, and a member of the local national committee, telegraphed Dr. Husayn Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, in despair: ‘It is good the Jews do not know the truth.’ 15 The ‘truth’ was that the urban elite in Palestine had collapsed after a month of heavy Jewish shelling and aggression. However, the Jews knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, the Consultancy was well aware that the rich and well-to-do had already left in December, that the Arab arms were not arriving, and the Arab governments did little beyond airing their inflammatory war rhetoric in all directions so as to hide their inaction and unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians.

The departure of the affluent meant that between 55,000 and 60,000 Palestinians in Haifa were leaderless and, given the relatively small number of armed Arab volunteers in the town, at the mercy of the Jewish forces in April 1948. This was despite the presence of British troops in the city, who were theoretically responsible for the locals’ safety and well-being.

This phase of the Jewish operation around the city was given the ominous name of ‘Scissors’ (Misparayim), indicating both the idea of a pincer movement and of cutting the city off from its Palestinian hinterland. Haifa, like Tiberias, had been allocated in the UN plan to the Jewish state: leaving the only major port in the country in Jewish control was yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered in the UN peace proposal. The Jews wanted the port city but without the 75,000 Palestinians who lived there, and in April 1948, they achieved their objective.

As Palestine’s main port, Haifa was also the last station on the trail of the British pull-out. The British had been expected to stay until August, but in February 1948 they decided to bring the date of departure forward to May. Their troops were consequently present in great numbers and they still had the legal and, one could argue, moral authority to impose law and order in the city. Their conduct, as many British politicians were later to admit, forms one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East. 16 The Jewish campaign of terrorization, begun in December, included heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, and went on for the first months of 1948, but it intensified in early April. On 18 April,  the day the Palestinians of Tiberias were put to flight, Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British commander of the Northern Sector seated in Haifa, summoned the Jewish authorities in the city to his office and informed them that in two days the British forces would be removed from locations in which they had been serving as a buffer zone between the two communities. This ‘buffer’ was the only obstacle preventing Jewish forces from a direct assault on, and takeover of, the Palestinian areas, where more than 50,000 people still resided. The road was wide open for the de-Arabisation of Haifa.

This task was given to the Carmeli Brigade, one of the top units of the Jewish army (there were brigades of ‘lesser quality’ such as Qiryati, made up of Arab Jews who were sent only on looting or less attractive ‘missions’; the definition of Qiryati as possessing a ‘lesser human quality’ can be found in the Israeli documents). 17 The 2000 Carmeli Brigade troops faced a poorly equipped army of 500 local and mainly Lebanese volunteers, who had inferior arms and limited ammunition, and certainly nothing to match the armoured cars and mortars on the Jewish side.

The removal of the British barrier meant Operation Scissors could be replaced by Operation ‘Cleansing the Leaven’ (bi‘ur hametz). The Hebrew term stands for total cleansing and refers to the Jewish religious practice of eliminating all traces of bread or flour from people’s homes on the eve of the Passover, since as these are forbidden during the days of the feast. Brutally appropriate, the cleansing of Haifa, in which the Palestinians were the bread and the flour, began on Passover’s eve, 21 April.

Stockwell, the British commander, knew in advance about the impending Jewish attack, and earlier that same day invited the ‘Palestinian leadership’ in the city for a consultation. He met with a group of four exhausted men, who became the Arab community’s leaders for the hour, as none of the positions they held officially prepared them for the crucial historic moment that unfolded in Stockwell’s office on that morning. Previous correspondence between them and Stockwell shows they trusted him as the keeper of law and order in the city. The British officer now advised them that it would be better for their people to leave the city, where they and most of their families had lived and worked ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Haifa came to prominence as a modern town. Gradually, as they listened to Stockwell and their confidence in him faded, they realised that they would be unable to safeguard their community, and so they prepared for the worst: as the British would not protect them, they were  doomed to be expelled. They told Stockwell they wanted to leave in an organised manner. The Carmeli Brigade made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc. 18On their way to meet the British commander, the four men could already hear the Jewish loudspeakers urging the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late. In other parts of the town, loudspeakers delivered a diametrically opposing message from the town’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levi, a decent person by all accounts, who beseeched the people to stay and promised no harm would befall them. But it was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade, not Levi who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’ (He later became the Israeli army Chief of Staff.) 19When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometres where thousands of Haifa’s defenceless Palestinians were still residing, the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or a boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their houses.

When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier. 20 But this apparently left no lasting mark on her or her associates’ determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbour. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community’s self-appointed leadership tried to instil some order into the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be  organised. ‘The Jews have occupied Stanton road and are on their way’, the loudspeakers blared.

The Carmeli Brigade’s war book, chronicling its actions in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade’s officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port’s gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port – where the Rothschild Hospital stands today – and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace – an architectural gem that dated back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel – they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen. 21Haifa’s market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:

Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers. 22

The scenes were so horrendous that when reports reached London, they spurred the British government into action as some officials, probably for the first time, began to realise the enormity of the disaster their inaction was creating in Palestine. The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was furious with Stockwell’s behaviour, but Field-Marshal Montgomery, the chief of the imperial staff and thus Stockwell’s boss, defended him. 23 The last communication between Haifa’s Palestinian leaders and Stockwell took the form of a letter that speaks volumes:

We feel distressed and profoundly aggrieved by the lack of sympathy on the part of the British Authorities to render aid to the wounded although they have been requested to do so. 24

 Safad is Next 25

By the time Haifa fell, only a few towns in Palestine were still free, among them Acre, Nazareth and Safad. The battle over Safad began in the middle of April and lasted until 1 May. This was not due to any stubborn resistance from the Palestinians or the ALA volunteers, although they did make a more serious effort here than elsewhere. Rather, tactical considerations directed the Jewish campaign first to the rural hinterland around Safad, and only then did they move on the town itself.

In Safad there were 9500 Arabs and 2400 Jews. Most of the Jews were Ultra-Orthodox and had no interest at all in Zionism, let alone in fighting their Arab neighbours. This, and the relatively gradual way the Jewish takeover developed, may have given the eleven members of the local national committee the illusion that they would fare better than other urban centres. The committee was a fairly representative body that included the town’s notables, ulama (religious dignitaries), merchants, landowners and ex-activists from the 1936 Revolt, of which Safad had been a major centre. 26 The false sense of security was reinforced by the relatively large presence of Arab volunteers in Safad, totaling more than 400, although only half of them were armed with rifles. Skirmishes in the town had begun in early January, triggered by an aggressive reconnaissance incursion by some Hagana members into the Palestinian neighbourhoods and market. A charismatic Syrian officer, Ihasn Qam Ulmaz, held the defences against repeated attacks by the Hagana’s commando unit, the Palmach.

At first, these Palmach attacks were sporadic and ineffective, as its units focused their actions on the rural area around the town. But once they were through with the villages in Safad’s vicinity (described later in this chapter) they could concentrate fully on the town itself, on 29 April 1948. Unfortunately for the people of Safad, at precisely the moment they needed him most, they lost the able Ulmaz. The volunteers army’s new commander in the Galilee, Adib Shishakly (to become one of Syria’s rulers in the 1950s) replaced him with one of the ALA’s more incompetent officers. However, it is doubtful whether even Ulmaz would have fared better in view of the imbalance of power: 1000 well-trained Palmach troops confronting 400 Arab volunteers, one of many local imbalances that show the falsity of the myth of a Jewish David facing an Arab Goliath in 1948. 27 The Palmach troops drove most of the people out, only allowing 100 old people to stay on, though not for long. On 5 June, Ben-Gurion noted dryly in his dairy: ‘Abraham Hanuki, from [Kibbutz] Ayelet Hashahar, told me that since there were only 100 old people left in Safad they were expelled to Lebanon.’ 28The Phantom City of Jerusalem

The urbicide did not skip Jerusalem, which quickly changed from the ‘Eternal City’, as a recent book by Salim Tamari puts it, into a ‘Phantom City’. 29 Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied the western Arab neighbourhoods in April 1948. Some of the richer Palestinian inhabitants of these more affluent sections had left town a few weeks before. The rest were expelled from houses that still testify to the architectural beauty of the neighbourhoods the Palestinian elite had started building outside the walls of the Old City by the end of the nineteenth century. In recent years some of these masterpieces have begun to disappear: real estate fervour, architectural eccentricism and constructors’ greed have combined to transform these elegant residential areas into streets of monstrous villas and extravagant palaces for rich American Jews who tend to flock to the city in their old age.

The British troops were still in Palestine when these areas were cleansed and occupied, but they remained aloof and did not intervene. Only in one area, Shaykh Jarrah – the first Palestinian neighborhood built outside the Old City’s walls, where the leading notable families such as the Husaynis, the Nashashibis and the Khalidis had their domicile – did a local British commander decide to step in.

The instruction to the Jewish forces was very clear in April 1948. ‘Occupy the neighbourhood and destroy all its houses.’ 30 The cleansing attack began on 24 April 1948 but was halted by the British before it could be fully implemented. We have vital testimony of what happened in Shaykh Jarrah from the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, Dr Husayn Khalidi, who lived there: his desperate telegrams to the Mufti were often intercepted by the Israeli intelligence and are kept in the Israeli archives. 31 Khalidi reports how the British commander’s troops saved the neighbourhood, with the exception of the 20 houses the Hagana succeeded in blowing up. This confrontational British stance here indicates how very different the fate of many Palestinians would have been had British troops elsewhere  intervened, as both the imperatives of the Mandatory charter and the terms of the UN partition resolution required them to do.

British inaction was the rule, however, as Khalidi’s frantic appeals highlight as regards the rest of the Jerusalemite neighbourhoods, especially in the western part of the city. These areas had come under repeated shelling from the first day of January and here, unlike in Shaykh Jarrah, the British played a truly diabolical role, as they disarmed the few Palestinian residents who had weapons, promising to protect the people against Jewish attacks, but then instantly reneged on that promise.

In one of his telegraphs in early January, Dr Khalidi reported to Al-Hajj Amin, in Cairo, how almost every day a crowd of angry citizens would demonstrate in front of his house seeking leadership and calling for help. Doctors in the crowd told Khalidi that the hospitals were overcrowded with the injured and that they were running out of shrouds to cover the dead bodies. There was total anarchy and people were in a state of panic.

But worse was to come. 32 A few days after the aborted attack on Shaykh Jarrah, with the help of the same three-inch mortar bombs used in Haifa, Palestinian Northern and Western Jerusalem were hammered by endless shelling. Only Shu’fat held on and refused to surrender. Qatamon fell in the last days of April. Itzhak Levy, the head of the Hagana intelligence in Jerusalem, recalls: ‘While the cleansing of Qatamon went on, pillage and robbery began. Soldiers and citizens took part in it. They broke into the houses and took from them furniture, clothing, electric equipment and food.’ 33

The entry of the Jordanian Arab Legion into the fighting changed the picture, and the cleansing operations were halted in the middle of May 1948. Some Jordanians were involved in the fighting before, as volunteers, and their contribution had helped slow down the Jewish advance, especially during the takeover of Qatamon, which involved intensive fighting with Jewish troops in the monastery of San Simon. But despite their heroic – in the description of Levy and his friends – attempt to defend the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the west, they failed. All in all, eight Palestinian neighbourhoods and thirty-nine villages were ethnically cleansed in the Greater Jerusalem area, their population transferred to the eastern part of the city. The villages are all gone today, but some of Jerusalem’s most beautiful houses are still standing, now inhabited by Jewish families who took them over immediately after their eviction – silent reminders of the tragic fate of the people who used to own them.

 Acre and Baysan

The urbicide continued into May with the occupation of Acre on the coast and Baysan in the east on 6 May 1948. In the beginning of May, Acre proved once again that it was not only Napoleon who found it hard to defeat it: despite severe overcrowding due to the huge influx of refugees from the neighbouring city of Haifa, heavy daily shelling by the Jewish forces failed to subdue the Crusader city. However, its exposed water supply ten kilometres to the north, from the Kabri springs, via an almost 200-year old aqueduct, proved its Achilles’ heel. During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak. 34On 6 May 1948, in Acre’s Lebanese hospital, which belonged to the Red Cross, an emergency meeting was convened. Brigadier Beveridge, chief of the British medical services, Colonel Bonnet of the British army, Dr Maclean of the Medical Services, and Mr de Meuron, the Red Cross delegate in Palestine, met with city officials to discuss the seventy casualties the epidemic had already claimed. They concluded that the infection was undoubtedly water-borne, not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions, as the Hagana claimed. Tellingly, it had affected fifty-five British soldiers who were transferred to Port Said hospital in Egypt. ‘Nothing like that ever happened in Palestine,’ Brigadier Beveridge told de Meuron. The minute they had identified the aqueduct as the source, they switched to artesian wells and water from the agricultural station north of Acre. The refugees from Acre already in camps in the north were also examined in order to prevent the epidemic from spreading.

With their morale weakened by both the typhoid epidemic and the intensive shelling, residents heeded the call from loudspeakers that shouted at them: ‘Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.’ 35 Lieutenant Petite, a French UN observer, reported that after the city fell into Jewish hands, there was widespread and systematic looting by the army, including furniture, clothes, and anything that might be useful to the new Jewish immigrants, and the removal of which might discourage the refugees’ return.

 A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled. The Egyptians caught two Jews, David Horin and David Mizrachi, trying to inject typhoid and dysentery viruses into Gaza’s wells. General Yadin reported the incident to Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s Prime Minister, who duly entered it in his diary, without comment. The two were later executed by the Egyptians without any official Israeli protestations. 36Ernest David Bergman, together with the Katzir brothers mentioned earlier, was part of a team working on Israel’s biological warfare capability set up by Ben-Gurion in the 1940s, euphemistically called the Science Corps of the Hagana. Ephraim Katzir was appointed its director in May 1948, when the outfit was renamed ‘HEMED’ (Sweetness, the acronym of Hayl Mada – the Science corps). It did not contribute in any major way to the 1948 campaigns but its early input was indicative of the unconventional aspirations the state of Israel would pursue in the future. 37

Roughly at the same time that Acre was occupied, the Golani Brigade seized the town of Baysan in Operation Gideon. As in Safad, after occupying several villages in the vicinity, they moved in on the town. The Jewish forces, with the successful takeovers of Haifa, Tiberias and Safad behind them, were confident and highly effective. Experienced now in mass evictions, they tried to force a swift departure in Baysan by issuing an ultimatum to the people to leave their homes within ten hours. The ultimatum was delivered to the ‘city notables’, namely a fraction of the local national committee. These notables declined and hastily tried to accumulate food stocks for a long siege; they organised some weapons, mainly two cannons brought in by volunteers, in order to repel the impending assault. Nahum Spigel, the commander of the Golani Brigade, wanted a swift offensive and to take a number of prisoners of war in order to exchange them for some Jewish prisoners the Jordanian forces had captured earlier in their successful bid for both the Jewish quarter in the Old City and the Zionist settlement of Gush Etzion. In fact, the Legion rescued the Gush Etzion settlers from the hands of angry Palestinian paramilitary groups that had attacked the isolated Jewish colony and the convoy that had come to save it. 38 (Today, Gush Etzion is a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank.) These settlers, together with the residents of the old Jewish quarter, were among the few Jewish POWs captured during the war. They were treated fairly and released soon after, unlike the thousands of Palestinians who were now, according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel, but on becoming prisoners were caged in pens.

 After heavy daily bombardments, including from the air, the local committee in Baysan decided to surrender. The body that took the decision consisted of the qadi, the local priest, the municipal secretary and the richest merchant in town. They met Palti Sela and his colleagues to discuss the terms of surrender (before the meeting, the members asked permission to travel to Nablus to discuss capitulation, but this was refused). On 11 May, the town passed into Jewish hands. Palti Sela remembered particularly the two pathetic old artillery guns that had been meant to protect Baysan: two French anti-air cannon from the First World War, antiquated weaponry representative of the overall level of the arms the Palestinians and the volunteers possessed, on the eve of the regular Arab armies’ entrance into Palestine.

Immediately after, Palti Sela and his colleagues were able to oversee the ‘orderly expulsion’ of the town’s people. Some were transferred to Nazareth – still a free Palestinian city in May, but not for much longer – some to Jenin, but the majority were driven across the nearby Jordan River onto the opposite bank. 39 Eyewitnesses remember the hordes of people from Baysan as particularly panic-stricken and cowed, hurriedly making their way in the direction of the Jordan River and from there inland to makeshift camps. While the Jewish troops were busy with other operations nearby, however, quite a few of them succeeded in returning; Baysan is very close to both the West Bank and the River Jordan and therefore slipping back unnoticed was relatively easy. They succeeded in staying on until mid-June when the Israeli army loaded the people at gunpoint onto trucks and drove them across the river once again.

The Ruination of Jaffa

Jaffa was the last city to be taken, on 13 May, two days before the end of the Mandate. Like so many of Palestine’s cities, it had a long history going back as far as the Bronze age, with an impressive Roman and Byzantine heritage. It was the Muslim commander, Umar Ibn al-‘Aas, who took the town in 632 and imbued it with its Arab character. The Greater Jaffa area included twenty-four villages and seventeen mosques; today one mosque survives, but not one of the villages is left standing.

On 13 May, 5000 Irgun and Hagana troops attacked the city as Arab volunteers headed by Michael al-Issa, a local Christian, tried to defend it.  Among them was an extraordinary unit of fifty Muslims from Bosnia as well as members of the second generation of the Templars, German colonists who had come in the mid-nineteenth century as religious missionaries and now decided to try and defend their colonies (other Templars in the Galilee surrendered without a fight, and were swiftly driven out of their two pretty colonies, Waldheim and Beit Lehem, west of Nazareth).

All in all, Jaffa enjoyed the largest defense force available to the Palestinians in any given locality: a total of 1500 volunteers confronted the 5000 Jewish troops. They survived a three-week siege and attack that began in the middle of April and ended in the middle of May. When Jaffa fell, its entire population of 50,000 was expelled with the ‘help’ of British mediation, meaning that their flight was less chaotic than in Haifa. Still, there were scenes reminiscent of the horrors that took place in the northern harbour of Haifa: people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion.

With the fall of Jaffa, the occupying Jewish forces had emptied and depopulated all the major cities and towns of Palestine. The vast majority of their inhabitants – of all classes, denominations and occupations – never saw their cities again, while the more politicised among them would come to play a formative role in the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO, demanding first and foremost their right to return.

11. Filastin, 14 April 1948.

12. Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, pp. 107–8.

13. Ibid., p. 107.

14. See a summary in Flapan, The Birth of Israel, pp. 89–92.

15. This telegraph was intercepted by the Israeli intelligence and is quoted in Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 12 January 1948.

16. See Rees Williams, the Under Secretary of States statement to Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 461, p. 2050, 24 February 1950.

17. Arnan Azariahu, who was Israel Galili’s assistant, recalled that when the new Matkal was moved to Ramat Gan, Yigael Yadin demanded that the Qiryati people not be put in charge of protecting the site. Maqor Rishon, interview, 21 May 2006.

18. Walid Khalidi, ‘Selected Documents on the 1948 War’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 107, Vol. 27/3 (Spring 1998), pp. 60–105, uses the British as well as the Arab committee’s correspondence.

19. Hagana Archives, 69/72, 22 April 1948.

20. Central Zionist Archives, 45/2 Protocol.

21. Zadok Eshel (ed.), The Carmeli Brigade in the War of Independence, p. 147

22. Walid Khalidi, ‘Selected Documents on the 1948 War’.

23. Montgomery of Alamein, Memoirs, pp. 4534.

24. Walid Khalidi, ‘The Fall of Haifa’, Middle East Forum, XXXV, 10 (December 1959), letter by Khayat, Saad, Mu’ammar and Koussa from 21 April 1948.

25. The information on the Palestinian side is taken from Mustafa Abasi, Safad During the British Mandate Period: A Social and Political Study, Jerusalem: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005 (Arabic); a version of it appeared as ‘The Battle for Safad in the War of 1948: A Revised Study, International Journal for Middle East Studies, 36 (2004), pp. 21–47.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 7 June 1948.

29. Salim Tamari, Jerusalem 1948.

30. The reconstruction of the orders was done by Itzhak Levy, the head of the Hagana intelligence in Jerusalem in 1948, in his book Jerusalem in the War of Independence, p. 207 (these interviews were later incorporated into the IDF archives).

31. Fourteen of these telegrams are quoted by Ben-Gurion in his diary, see Rivlin and Oren, The War of Independence, pp. 12, 14, 27, 63, 64, 112, 113, 134, 141, 156, 169, 170, 283.

32. Mentioned in Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 15 January 1948.

33. Levy, Jerusalem, p. 219.

34. Red Cross Archives, Geneva, Files G59/1/GC, G3/82 sent by the international Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegate de Meuron on 6–19 May 1948 describe a sudden typhoid epidemic.

35. All the information is based on the Red Cross sources and on Salman Abu Sitta, ‘Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present’, Between the Lines, 15–19 March 2003. Abu Sitta also quotes Sara Leibovitz-Dar’s article in Hadahsot, 13 August 1993, where she traces, from a clue from the historian Uri Milstein, ‘those who were responsible for the Acre operation, but who refused to answer her questions. She concluded her article by saying: ‘What was done then with deep conviction and zealotry is now concealed with shame’.

36. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 27 May 1948.

37. Ibid., 31 January 1948 and his notes on the history of HEMED.

38. Levy, Jerusalem, p. 113, although he does accuse the Legion of joining earlier in attacks on those who had already surrendered. See pp. 109–12.

39. Interview with Sela (see chapter 2, note 31).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappepe