Summary
One of the top-ranking officers of the future Jewish state’s army in the Consultancy, who in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine recalled that the Village Files knowledge let the Zionist military command conclude in November 1947 that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organise them properly.
Details
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Yadin is named among the members of the Consultancy, the group around David Ben-Gurion that prepared the plans for the ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution: “the top-ranking officers of the future Jewish State’s army, such as the legendary Yigael Yadin and Moshe Dayan” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.27).
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“Yigael Yadin recalled that it was this minute and detailed knowledge of what was happening in each single Palestinian village that enabled the Zionist military command in November 1947 to conclude ‘that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organise them properly.’ The only serious problem was the British: ‘If not for the British, we could have quelled the Arab riot [the opposition to the UN Partition Resolution in 1947] in one month.’” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.46)
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In Pappe’s Chapters Five and Six, Yadin in April 1948 demanded a more determined effort to depopulate the Marj Ibn Amir and the plains to Baysan and Nazareth, writing directly to kibbutzim members to check the troops had destroyed the villages they were ordered to eliminate (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.143); he also reported to Ben-Gurion the foiled Gaza well-poisoning attempt of 27 May 1948, in which two Jews were caught injecting typhoid and dysentery viruses (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.130).
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Visiting Shafa’Amr in July 1948 as Acting Chief of Staff, Yadin was taken aback to find an Arab town with all its inhabitants still there: “The people of the town roam about freely,” he reported to Ben-Gurion, and immediately ordered a curfew and a search-and-arrest campaign, with particular instructions to leave the town’s Druze alone (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.192).
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Yadin’s order for the attack on Qunaitra, averted by the UN at the end of the second truce, was that the commander’s orders “are to destroy the city”; Pappe records the order was implemented literally in 1974, when Israeli forces destroyed Qunaitra before returning it to the Syrians a complete ghost town (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.209).
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In Manna’s Chapter 4, chief of staff Yadin supported transfer in 1950, declaring in a consultation with Ben-Gurion on 8 February 1950 that “an Arab minority in our midst constitutes a danger in times of war as in times of peace” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.181).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Consultancy, Village Files, David Ben-Gurion