Summary
The detailed registry of Palestine’s Arab villages built up by the Zionist movement from the late 1930s to 1947 — topography, roads, land, people, an index of ‘hostility’ and, in its final update, lists of ‘wanted’ persons — which in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine supplied Plan C with its data and was used in 1948 in the search-and-arrest operations in which picked-out men were often shot on the spot.
Details
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Origin: the suggestion came from Ben-Zion Luria, a young historian at the Hebrew University then employed in the Jewish Agency’s educational department, who proposed a detailed registry of all Arab villages and that the Jewish National Fund conduct the inventory: “This would greatly help the redemption of the land” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.41).
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Joseph Weitz, head of the JNF’s settlement department, waxed lyrical at the idea and suggested turning the files into a ‘national project’; Yitzhak Ben-Zvi explained in a letter to Moshe Shertock (Sharett) that the project should also expose the ‘Hebraic origins’ of each village and record which villages were relatively new, some built only during the Egyptian occupation of Palestine in the 1830s (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.42).
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Survey machinery: a topographer from the Hebrew University in the Mandatory cartography department suggested aerial photographic surveys, showing Ben-Gurion maps of Sindiyana and Sabbarin — now in the Israeli State Archives, “all that remains of these villages after 1948”; photographers Yitzhak Shefer and Margot Sadeh, wife of Yitzhak Sadeh, ran a film laboratory in her house under cover of an irrigation company; in 1947 the cartographic department moved to the Red House (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.42-43).
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Contents by the late 1930s, when the ‘archive’ was almost complete: topographic location, access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of mukhtars [printed “muhktars”], relations with other villages, the ages of individual men (sixteen to fifty), an index of ‘hostility’ decided by the village’s participation in the revolt of 1936, lists of everyone involved in the revolt and of the families of those who had lost someone fighting the British, and particular attention to people who had allegedly killed Jews — information which in 1948 “fuelled the worst atrocities in the villages, leading to mass executions and torture” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.43).
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Purpose, in Moshe Pasternak’s recollection of a 1940 reconnaissance excursion: “We had to study the basic structure of the Arab village. This means the structure and how best to attack it.” The files’ collectors also had to train their ‘Arabists’ to work with informants among people they regarded as primitive and barbaric (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.43-44).
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From 1943 Ezra Danin rearranged the files even more systematically: husbandry, cultivated land, number of trees, quality of each fruit grove, land per family, cars, shop owners, artisans and their skills, then each clan and its political affiliation, stratification between notables and peasants, and the names of Mandatory civil servants; around 1945, descriptions of mosques and imams and accounts of dignitaries’ living rooms; towards the end of the Mandate, explicitly military information — number of guards (most villages had none) and quantity and quality of arms (generally antiquated or non-existent) (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.44).
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The informant network was supervised by Danin and Yaacov Shimoni; one informant nicknamed the ‘treasurer’ (ha-gizbar) supervised the collaboration network in 1941-1945, was exposed in 1945 and killed by Palestinian militants; Yehoshua Palmon and Tuvia Lishanski also joined the work (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.44-45).
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Training for the project took place at the Shefeya youth village in 1944, from which reconnaissance missions went out; a recruit recalled in 2002 a 1944 mission to Umm al-Zinat, whose party were guests of the mukhtar under the Arab hospitality code — “In 1948, Umm al-Zinat was destroyed and all its inhabitants expelled without any provocation on their part whatsoever.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.45)
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Final update, 1947: lists of ‘wanted’ persons in each village, on criteria including involvement in the Palestinian national movement — very liberally defined — ties to the Mufti al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, participation in actions against the British and the Zionists, and allegations such as having travelled to Lebanon; villages of about 1500 inhabitants usually had between twenty and thirty suspects (Umm al-Zinat thirty, Damun twenty-five). In 1948 Jewish troops used the lists as soon as they occupied a village: men were lined up, those listed identified often by an informer wearing a cloth sack over his head, and “the men who were picked out were often shot on the spot” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.46).
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Plan C drew on the files expressly: all data required for its punitive actions could be found in the village files — “lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.53).
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In Pappe’s Chapter Five the files were used in execution: at Sirin the 1943 file’s note of the Abu al-Hija clan’s ten rifles and 1936 participation doomed the village despite its immunity promise (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.136); at Ayn al-Zaytun and Tantura the intelligence officers’ pre-prepared lists, drawn from the files, selected the men to be executed (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.142; PDF p.166).
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Britain added to the files at the end by providing the Jewish leadership with ownership deeds and other vital data photocopied before destruction — the final details needed for the massive depopulation (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.156).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ezra Danin, Ben-Zion Luria, Jewish National Fund, Joseph Weitz, Plan C, Dalet Plan, Haganah