Read Palestine

Operation Palm Tree

Properties2
tags
aliasesOperation Dekel

2 min read

Summary

Operation ‘Dekel’, Hebrew for palm tree, the July 1948 operation that took Nazareth and the villages around it and completed the take-over of the Western Galilee, in Pappe’s account; supervised by Brigade Seven with the Carmeli and Golani, remembered in Palestinian oral histories as ‘terrorists’ and ‘barbarous’.

Details

  • The name switched from the ‘cleansing’ synonyms of earlier operations (‘Broom’, ‘Scissors’) to trees: ‘Palm’ (Dekel) for the Nazareth area and ‘Cypress’ (Brosh) for the Jordan Valley area (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.191).

  • The order of 6 July 1948 to the three northern brigades was: “Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages” — Jewish soldiers automatically understood ‘enemy’ to mean defenceless Palestinian villagers and their families (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.191).

  • Large villages not taken in May were quickly captured: Amqa, Birwa, Damun, Khirbat Jiddin and Kuwaykat each had more than 1500 inhabitants and yet were easily forced out; at Amqa the Muslims were deported and the Druze allowed to join other Druze villages (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.191).

  • The operation completed the take-over of the Western Galilee; some mixed villages — Kfar Yassif, Iblin and Shafa’Amr — were left intact, though many inhabitants of the ‘wrong’ origin or affiliation were deported, and Christian refugees from emptied villages were resettled in places from which Muslims had been expelled (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.192).

  • Its exceptional outcomes were Nazareth, whose eviction Ben-Gurion countermanded, and the brutal cleansing of Hittin by Brigade Seven on 17 July 1948, which brought the operation to an end (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.204-205).

  • The destroyed village of Lubya, covered by a Jewish National Fund pine forest, was taken in this operation; sixty people lost their lives there (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.187-188).

  • Manna calls the July fighting the Battles of the Ten Days (the so-called Operation Palm Tree, between the first and second truce, 8–18 July 1948) and treats it as the first cluster of Non-expulsion cases: first the Druze villages, then Nazareth and the villages in its district, with Abu Snan, Kufr Yasif and Yarka surrendering without a battle on 15 July 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.26).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Nazareth, Saffuriyya, Hittin, Dalet Plan

Graph View

Backlinks