Summary
The man whose recruitment, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, injected the intelligence work and the organisation of the Village Files with a new level of efficiency from 1943, and who, Pappe writes, would play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Details
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Danin had been taken out of his successful citrus grove business when he was recruited; the re-arrangement of the village files in 1943 to become even more systematic was mainly his work, and the post-1943 files he drove included husbandry, cultivated land, the number and quality of trees and groves, land per family, cars, shops, artisans, clans and their political affiliations, stratification between notables and peasants and the names of Mandatory civil servants (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.44).
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He recruited the German Jew Yaacov Shimoni, later one of Israel’s leading Orientalists, and put him in charge of special projects inside the villages, in particular supervising the informants; Danin and Shimoni nicknamed one key informant the ‘treasurer’ (ha-gizbar), who supervised the network of collaboration for them in 1941-1945 before being exposed in 1945 and killed by Palestinian militants (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.44-45).
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Danin and Shimoni were joined by Yehoshua Palmon and Tuvia Lishanski, who, Pappe writes, “took an active part in preparing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.45).
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At the 10 December 1947 Consultancy meeting Danin proposed destroying Palestinian traffic, fishing boats, shops and factory supplies so the community would be at the Zionists’ mercy; in May 1948 he assumed supervision of post-occupation activities, in which his men, with informants, selected suspected men — ‘military age’ being ten to fifty — who were usually executed on the spot, while the rest were expelled or imprisoned (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.80-82).
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Danin recalled Ben-Gurion’s Long Seminar definition of the new policy: ‘Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.92).
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In Manna, a statement by military intelligence operative Ezra Danin irritated Ben-Gurion a month after the 26 September 1948 cabinet meeting, prompting Ben-Gurion’s comment: “There is only one task left for the Arabs in Israel: to run.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.85).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Village Files, Consultancy, Haganah