Summary
The October 1948 operation, named for the biblical king of Tyre, by which Israeli forces took the upper Galilee and southern Lebanon within two weeks, in Pappe’s account; the villages turned themselves into strongholds, most were seized in a single day at the end of October, and the operation frames Chapter 8’s account of the war crimes that accompanied it.
Details
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Hiram was the name of the biblical king of Tyre, one of the targets of the scheme, which Pappe calls ambitious and expansionist: Israel’s takeover of the upper Galilee and southern Lebanon, achieved with intensive artillery and air force attacks in a matter of two weeks (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.213-214).
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The Israeli air force dropped about 10,000 leaflets calling upon the villagers to surrender, although not promising them any immunity from expulsion; none of the villages surrendered, and almost as a whole they came out to confront the Israeli forces (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.214).
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The Arab Liberation Army volunteers withdrew only after desperately fighting to defend the villages, quite often disobeying orders from their headquarters to leave; four hundred such volunteers lost their lives in those days in October (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.215).
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Most of the villages in the upper Galilee were seized in a single day at the end of October — Deir Hanna, Ilabun, Arraba, Iqrit, Farradiyya, Mi’ilya, Khirbat Irribin, Kfar Inan, Tarbikha, Tarshiha, Mayrun, Safsaf, Sa’sa, Jish, Fassuta and Qaddita among them; some villagers were evicted and some allowed to stay, usually by a local commander’s decision (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.215).
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In October the Hebrew noun tihur, ‘cleansing’, assumed new meanings: it could still describe total expulsion and destruction, but could now also represent selective search-and-expulsion operations (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.215-216).
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Safsaf, taken on 29 October 1948, saw seventy captured men blindfolded and summarily shot, a case Pappe says Israeli archival documents confirm, and the rest of its people driven to the Lebanese border (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.218).
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Bulayda was the last village taken during Operation Hiram; it withstood repeated assaults for ten days, with Lebanese soldiers fighting alongside the villagers, before its population fled ahead of the Israeli entry, and by 31 October 1948 the Galilee was occupied in its entirety (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.219).
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In the thirteen villages captured in southern Lebanon, executions took place: on 31 October 1948 more than eighty villagers were executed in Hula alone, and in Saliha Israeli troops butchered more than 100 people (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.226).
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In Manna, Israel had completed the occupation of the Galilee through Operation Hiram by the time of the November 1948 census, yet the Palestinians who had remained in the recently occupied territory were not included in that census (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.31).
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Manna’s Chapter 2 follows the operation and the role of the residents and the conditions which allowed them to foil the Israeli army’s policies of uprooting the population in the region (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.41).
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Manna’s Chapter 1 closes with Operation Hiram’s opening: the bombing of al-Rama on the night the Srouji family arrived there, 25-27 October 1948, signalled the end of a hundred-day cease-fire, and all of central and upper Galilee were occupied quickly and easily (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.81-82).
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Chapter 2’s opening (part 2) gives the cabinet background: Ben-Gurion’s 26 September 1948 proposal to ‘clean’ central Galilee ‘in one stroke’ was voted down by a majority of ministers, but, as Tom Segev writes in Manna’s citation, the expulsion was merely postponed, not cancelled (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.85).
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Sixty thousand people lived in the central Galilee ‘pocket’ — fifty villages between Majd al-Krum, ‘Ilabun, al-Battuf and the Lebanese border — occupied in sixty hours; the population did not resist, hoping for a Nazareth-like fate, yet hundreds were executed and thousands forced to migrate during and after the occupation, and the army perpetrated a number of massacres at a time when a government and organized state institutions were already in place (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.84-85).
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In Manna’s Chapter 2 in full (part 3), the operation opened with aerial bombardment of several villages — Tarshiha among them, where dozens were killed — although Ben-Gurion had issued strict orders protecting Nazareth’s population and holy places a hundred days earlier, and now wanted upper Galilee totally void of its Arab inhabitants (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.86).
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Of the occupied area’s approximately 60,000 residents, about half remained, per Moshe Carmel’s report of 31 October 1948 recorded in Ben-Gurion’s diary; that morning Carmel telegraphed all unit commanders to achieve “a quick and immediate purification of the occupied areas of all enemy elements” and to help the residents leave (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.102).
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Manna counts fifteen massacres perpetrated by the army during a single week after occupying the Galilee, and more than thirty Arab villages whose inhabitants were forced to leave during the operation to complete the Galilee’s occupation, while about half the villages occupied in the operation escaped uprooting and destruction (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.100-101).
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The army history officer Yitzhak Moda’i concluded in the late 1950s, from military documents, that most Galilee residents remained “not because our forces did not try to expel them, quite often through means that were neither legal nor nice” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.102-103).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilabun, Sa’sa, Arab Liberation Army