Summary
A regional commander of the 1948 operations in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, who operated in Lydd and Ramla as well as in the Greater Jerusalem area, and who by 1992, as Israel’s prime minister, wrote the introduction to a new edition of the book Pappe cites as overshadowing the Palestinian historians.
Details
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Pappe names Rabin among the regional commanders of the cleansing: “Yitzhak Rabin operated both in Lydd and Ramla as well as in the Greater Jerusalem area.” The sentence sits in Pappe’s list of the perpetrators whose names readers should remember while ceasing to think of them only as Israeli war heroes (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.28).
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Dan Kurzman’s Genesis 1948 appeared in 1970 and again in 1992, “now with an introduction by one of the executors of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister” — one of the publications that quickly overshadowed the Palestinian historians of the 1970s who were reassembling the picture (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.17).
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In May 1948 Rabin’s Harel Brigade reported from Beit Masir on 11 May that it was blowing up the houses, 60–70 already blown up; together with Brigade Etzioni the Harel focused on the Greater Jerusalem area (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.172).
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In Operation Dani Rabin was Yigal Allon’s second in command for the attack on Lydd and Ramla, and the commander on the spot in Ramla; he estimated a total of 50,000 people had been ‘transferred’ from the two towns (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.199, p.202).
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Rabin recalled how Ben-Gurion had called him in to discuss the fate of both towns; asked by Allon what was to be done with the population of Lydd and Ramla, Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: “Drive them out!” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.202)
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In Pappe, Chapter 11: Israel’s peace axioms were re-articulated under Rabin, the same Rabin who as a young officer took an active part in the 1948 cleansing, elected prime minister on a platform promising resumption of the peace effort, and assassinated by one of his own people on 4 November 1995. As defence minister in 1987 he ordered troops to break the bones of Palestinians confronting tanks with stones in the first Intifada; as prime minister prior to Oslo he deported hundreds of Palestinians, and he pushed the 1994 Oslo B agreement (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.277-278). See Oslo Accords.
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In Manna, Rabin, commander of the northern region in 1956, took advantage of the outbreak of the Sinai war and ordered the soldiers under his command to expel about two thousand residents who had remained in their villages in the al-Hula region to Jordan and Syria (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.34).
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In Makdisi: as defense minister during the First Intifada Rabin declared “The first priority of the security forces is to prevent violent demonstrations with force, power and blows” and allegedly ordered his men to “break the bones” of demonstrators, a charge the Knesset decided not to investigate (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.126-127).
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Before signing the first Oslo accord in 1993 Rabin told a Labor party meeting, in Makdisi’s quotation: “I prefer the Palestinians to cope with the problems of enforcing order,” since the Palestinian Authority would allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and would keep the Association for Civil Rights out (PDF p.130).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Consultancy, Ethnic Cleansing