Summary
Ilan Pappe argues that what happened in Palestine in 1948 was not a war that incidentally produced Palestinian flight, but a planned ethnic cleansing: the Consultancy around David Ben-Gurion finalised Plan Dalet at the Red House in Tel-Aviv on 10 March 1948, and its systematic implementation over six months uprooted close to 800,000 people — more than half of Palestine’s native population — destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighbourhoods (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15-16). In the Preface and Chapters One to Three, Pappe defines Ethnic Cleansing from encyclopaedia, US State Department, UN, scholarly and popular definitions and concludes that, “from planning stage to final execution, what occurred in Palestine in 1948 forms a clear-cut case” of it (PDF p.25); traces the ideological drive for an exclusively Jewish state and the military and intelligence preparations behind it, above all the Village Files and Plans A-C; and reads UN Resolution 181 as a partition imposed against the will of the indigenous majority, which included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing and which Ben-Gurion accepted and ignored at the same time, telling the Consultancy on 7 October 1947 that there “are no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish State” (PDF p.63). In Chapter Four (part 2), Pappe follows the Consultancy from February 1947 to March 1948: defining a state over eighty per cent of Mandatory Palestine under the tacit Jordanian agreement, building a force of about 50,000 against some 7,000 Palestinian irregulars and a few thousand Arab volunteers, and moving — through the December intimidation campaign, the 31 December 1947–2 January 1948 Long Seminar, and the February 1948 Lamed-Heh operations at Qisarya and Sa’sa — from ‘retaliation’ (tagmul) to ‘initiative’ (yotzma) and to Plan Dalet itself, distributed to twelve brigade commanders as lists of villages and neighbourhoods to occupy, destroy and expel, with exact dates. In Chapter Five (part 3), Pappe follows Plan Dalet into execution: Operation Nachshon on the Jerusalem road, the Deir Yassin massacre, and the urbicide of Tiberias, Haifa, Safad, Jerusalem, Acre, Baysan and Jaffa, with 200 villages occupied and their inhabitants expelled between 30 March and 15 May 1948 — before any regular Arab soldier entered Palestine — while the Arab governments procrastinated, King Abdullah’s Legion stood by under the tacit agreement, the United States trusteeship and armistice offers were defeated, and Britain and the UN stood aside. Chapter Six opens by arguing that the Arab armies’ entry on 15 May changed only the rhetoric — Glubb Pasha’s ‘Phony War’ — while the cleansing, now ordered in the language of tihur, continued unabated, as in the Alexandroni Brigade’s coastal operations and the opening of the Tantura massacre. In the rest of Chapter Six (part 4), Pappe completes the Tantura account — systematic beach executions, mass graves of 230 bodies by the digger Mordechai Sokoler’s count, and Teddy Katz’s suppressed 1999 research — follows the brigades’ trail of blood and the revenge operations in the western Galilee, and closes with Ben-Gurion’s triumphant 24 May diary vision of a Christian state in Lebanon and bombarded Arab capitals, the Consultancy dissolving because the machinery now ran on its own momentum, and the remaining Palestinians in the mixed towns consigned to ghetto neighbourhoods under a military regime. In Chapter Seven (part 4), the cleansing escalates through June to September 1948: demolition during the first truce, Operation Palm Tree in the Galilee, Operation Dani’s expulsion of Lydd and Ramla, Operation Policeman against the coastal villages south of Haifa during the second truce, the exceptional sparing of Nazareth at Ben-Gurion’s order, the start of the Negev Bedouin expulsions, and a second truce violated from its first ten days while the UN watched. Chapter Eight opens (part 4) with Operation Hiram in October 1948, the upper Galilee villages turning into strongholds and falling in a single day at the month’s end, and the question of why Sa’sa and Safsaf were treated with exceptional savagery. In the rest of Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine (part 5), Pappe completes the autumn massacres, the prison and labour camps, the abuse and rape cases, the military regime over the Palestinians who remained, and the dividing of the spoils — 3.5 million dunam taken over, the Custodian and the JNF sales, the desecration of holy sites, and the land laws of 1950-67. Chapter Ten (part 5 opening, completed in its argument there) turns to the Memoricide of the Nakba: the Naming Committee, JNF forests and resort parks over destroyed villages. In Chapter Eleven (part 6), Pappe argues the Nakba and the refugee issue were systematically excluded from the ‘peace process’ — from Lausanne in 1949, torpedoed by Ben-Gurion and Abdullah, through Pax Americana, Israel’s three axioms dating the conflict to 1967, Oslo, and Camp David in 2000, where Arafat’s refusal to sign away the Right of Return was followed by the Second Intifada and Jenin. In Chapter Twelve (part 6), Fortress Israel is maintained against the ‘demographic problem’: the 2003 citizenship law and the Jaljulya deportations, the 2006 election consensus, Olmert’s hitkansut and the Wall, and the claim that rejecting return is a pledge to defend a ‘white’ enclave which can only survive by transforming into a civic democratic state. The Epilogue (part 6), centred on Tel-Aviv University’s Green House in Shaykh Muwannis, lists thirty-one confirmed massacres, charges Israeli academia with serving the hegemonic ideology, and locates hope in the Israelis and Palestinians who commemorate the Nakba and defend return. The Endnotes (PDF p.300-325), Chronology (PDF p.326-331) and Maps and Tables (PDF p.332-339) are read in part 6. The Bibliography (PDF p.340-349) is completed in part 7: an alphabetical list, in the editions Pappe used, of the archival collections, brigade and official histories, diaries, memoirs and scholarship the Endnotes cite. The Index (PDF p.350-377) follows, a finding aid in the book’s printed pagination covering every significant person, place, village, operation, law, work and topic in the narrative, from the Consultancy and Plan Dalet to Memoricide and the Right of Return. Publisher’s advertisements for other Oneworld titles (PDF p.378-383) and a blank final page (PDF p.384) close the file.
What the file is
- The file is the ebook edition (Oneworld Publications, 2011) of Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, first published by Oneworld Publications Limited in October 2006; this paperback edition first published 2007, reprinted 2008 (three times), 2010 and 2011; copyright © Ilan Pappe 2006; ISBN-13: 978-1-78074-056-0 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.6).
- 384 PDF pages, about 126,725 words as delivered. PDF p.1 is blank in the text copy. The text copy supplied from Josh’s memex vault is clean, single-column, with
=== PDF p.N ===markers for all 384 pages; it shows no printed page numbers for the pages read in part 1, so citations in this part are by PDF page only. Occasional encoding slips occur (a replacement character on PDF p.19, noted in the reading notes). - The book as listed in its Contents (PDF p.7-9) comprises a Preface, twelve chapters, Endnotes, Chronology, Maps and Tables, Bibliography and Index, with 19 plate illustrations and 7 maps and 2 tables listed on PDF p.10-11. The plates, maps and tables themselves are not reproduced as text in the text copy; the maps and tables were read in the original PDF in the part 6 spot-check fix round (see the Maps and Tables entry in Section by section).
- The publisher’s praise pages (PDF p.2-4) are publisher’s matter, not Pappe’s text, and are recorded as such in the reading notes.
- The Bibliography ends at the top of PDF p.349, the Index runs PDF p.350-377 and ends part-way down PDF p.377, publisher’s advertisements for other Oneworld titles fill PDF p.378-383, and PDF p.384 is blank. Those sparse and blank pages were checked in the original PDF in part 7 and are sparse or blank there exactly as in the text copy, so nothing is lost in the copy at those pages. The Index’s locators are the book’s printed page numbers, not PDF pages.
Section by section
Preface: The Red House — PDF p.14-21
The Preface opens with two epigraphs: a poem fragment by Taha Muhammad Ali (1988), a refugee from Saffuriyya, and David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938: “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.” (PDF p.14). Its centrepiece is the Red House in Tel-Aviv — the workers’ council building that became the Haganah headquarters at the end of 1947 — where on 10 March 1948 eleven men “put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (PDF p.15). The orders dispatched that evening listed the methods to be used — large-scale intimidation, siege and bombardment, setting fire to homes, expulsion, demolition, and planting mines in the rubble — and each unit received its own list of target villages and neighbourhoods. This was Plan D (Dalet), the fourth and final version of earlier plans, and the first to spell out “clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go” (PDF p.15). Pappe presents the plan as both the inevitable product of the Zionist ideological impulse to an exclusively Jewish presence and a response to developments after the British cabinet decided to end the Mandate; a policy first based on retaliation in February 1947 (as printed) transformed into an initiative to cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948 (PDF p.16).
The Preface then sets out the book’s historiographical and moral claims. The crime has been “erased almost totally from the global public memory” and systematically denied (PDF p.16). The men who sat in the Red House room and the senior officers who executed the orders are familiar figures in the pantheon of Israeli heroism; not so long ago many of them were still alive, playing major roles in Israeli politics and society, and very few are still alive today (PDF p.17). For Palestinians, and anyone else who refused to buy into the Zionist narrative, it was clear long before this book was written that these people were perpetrators of crimes who had successfully evaded justice and would probably never be brought to trial; besides their trauma, their deepest frustration has been that the criminal act has been so thoroughly denied and Palestinian suffering so totally ignored, ever since 1948 (PDF p.17). Palestinian historians in the 1970s, Walid Khalidi foremost, retrieved much of the picture against the Israeli tale of ‘voluntary transfer’; the Israeli ‘new historians’ of the 1980s, Pappe among them, disproved voluntary flight from Israeli military archives but “sidestepped the question of ethnic cleansing” (PDF p.18). Benny Morris, relying exclusively on those archives, is charged with ignoring such atrocities as the poisoning of Acre’s water supply with typhoid, numerous cases of rape and dozens of massacres, and with wrongly insisting there had been no forced evictions before 15 May 1948, when Palestinian sources show almost a quarter of a million Palestinians had already been forcibly expelled before that date (PDF p.18). Pappe’s stated project is “to make the case for the paradigm of ethnic cleansing and use it to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948” (PDF p.19), as his own J’Accuse — while insisting he is himself part of the society that stands condemned. He notes that the term Nakba also leaves out the actor, which may have contributed to denial (PDF p.20), and closes by rejecting the cloak of complexity: “the story of 1948, of course, is not complicated at all” (PDF p.21).
Chapter 1: An ‘Alleged’ Ethnic Cleansing? — PDF p.23-32
The chapter epigraph is Drazen Petrovic’s definition of ethnic cleansing as a well-defined policy to systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin, by means “from discrimination to extermination”, most of whose methods “are grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols” (PDF p.23).
Definitions of Ethnic Cleansing (PDF p.23-27) works through the Hutchinson encyclopedia definition (expulsion by force to homogenise a mixed population), the US State Department’s addition (erasure of a region’s history; depopulation in an atmosphere legitimising retribution and revenge; its Peck, Kosovo, case study of May 1999, which Pappe says happened “in almost the same manner in hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948”, PDF p.24), the UN’s 1993 discussion (imposing ethnic rule on a mixed area; separation of men from women, detention of men, explosion of houses, repopulation with another ethnic group), and Petrovic’s scholarly account, in which the political leadership delegates implementation to the military with no doubt as to the overall objective, after which the machinery of expulsion rolls on “like a huge bulldozer propelled by its own inertia” (PDF p.25). Pappe’s synthesis: ethnic cleansing renders a mixed country homogeneous by expelling a group, turning them into refugees and demolishing their homes; massacres are “a key tactic to accelerate the flight”, not part of a genocidal plan; afterwards the expelled are erased from official and popular history (PDF p.25). A popular-definitions section treats Wikipedia’s entry and its ‘alleged’ qualifier, arguing the tribunal criterion must extend to cases that should have been tried but never were, as with the Armenians in 1915, of whom an estimated one million perished by 1918 with no one brought to trial (PDF p.26-27).
Ethnic Cleansing as a Crime (PDF p.27-29) records the crime’s status in the treaties creating the International Criminal Court and the special tribunals for Yugoslavia (The Hague) and Rwanda (Arusha), then names the perpetrators for Palestine: Ben-Gurion, “in whose private home all early and later chapters in the ethnic cleansing story were discussed and finalised”, and the Consultancy — in one rare document the Consultant Committee, Haveadah Hamyeazet — comprising officers such as Yigael Yadin, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Sadeh and the ‘Orientalists’; regional commanders Moshe Kalman (Safad), Moshe Carmel (the Galilee), Yitzhak Rabin (Lydd, Ramla and Greater Jerusalem) and Shimon Avidan (the south); and the intelligence officers, who “were given the final authority to decide which villages would be destroyed and who among the villagers would be executed”, supervised by Issar Harel (PDF p.27-29). Yitzhak Pundak is quoted from Ha’aretz in 2004: “There were two hundred villages [in the front] and these are gone. We had to destroy them, otherwise we would have had Arabs here” (PDF p.28). Pappe proposes a rule of obsolescence might be applied only on one condition: enforcement of “the unconditional return of the refugees to their homes”, as in UN Resolution 194 of 11 December 1948, which the US supported only briefly before reorienting onto a pro-Israeli track by spring 1949 (PDF p.29).
Reconstructing an Ethnic Cleansing (PDF p.29-32) states the book’s method and debts. The ideology has been dealt with by Walid Khalidi, Nur Masalha, Gershon Shafir and Baruch Kimmerling among others; Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians shows how deeply rooted the concept of Transfer was in Zionist thought, from Theodor Herzl to Leo Motzkin’s 1917 statement that colonisation had to go in two directions, Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and “the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country” (PDF p.30). Pappe will highlight instead “the systematic planning with which they turned an ethnically mixed area into a pure ethnic space”, and reconstruct the methods of the master plan (PDF p.30-31). He relativises the numbers: three-quarters of a million can seem ‘modest’ beside other transfers, but “Half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out, half of their villages and towns were destroyed, and only very few among them ever managed to return” (PDF p.31), and stresses the chasm between reality and representation — a modern crime, committed before foreign reporters and UN observers, “eradicated almost totally from the collective global memory” (PDF p.31).
Chapter 2: The Drive for an Exclusively Jewish State — PDF p.34-53
The chapter epigraph is UN General Assembly Resolution 47/80 of 16 December 1992, rejecting policies and ideologies aimed at promoting ethnic cleansing in any form (PDF p.34).
Zionism’s Ideological Motivation (PDF p.34-39) dates Zionism’s emergence to the late 1880s in central and eastern Europe, its orientation to Palestine fixed after Herzl’s death in 1904. Pappe argues Zionism “secularised and nationalised Judaism”: Eretz Israel had been a place of pilgrimage, never a future secular state, and the Zionist thinkers “claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement” (PDF p.34). Palestine’s inhabitants were ‘strangers’, or the land was ‘empty’: the Palestinians “were largely invisible to them or, if not, were part of nature’s hardship and as such were to be conquered and removed” (PDF p.35). Until 1918 Zionists were no more than five per cent of the population; some Palestinian leaders recognised the aim between 1905 and 1910, and Said al-Husayni claimed in the Ottoman Parliament on 6 May 1911 that “the Jews intend to create a state in the area that will include Palestine, Syria and Iraq”, though his family preached against Zionist colonisation while selling land to the newcomers, and the elite’s sense of catastrophe “was never translated into proper preparations” (PDF p.35-36). The section places the Palestine choice within nineteenth-century Christian millenarianism and European colonialism, including Lloyd George, and treats socialist Zionism’s universalism as quickly substituted by nationalism: “when the main objective became making Palestine exclusively Jewish rather than socialist, it was significantly the Labour movement within Zionism that instituted and implemented the ethnic cleansing” (PDF p.37). The Balfour Declaration of 1917 “opened the door to the endless conflict” (PDF p.37); the 1920s parity episode — Palestinian refusal, Palestinian acceptance in 1928, Zionist rejection, the 1929 uprising as the direct result of Britain’s refusal to implement parity — and the 1936-39 revolt, subdued after three years with the leadership exiled and the fighting units disbanded, which “gave the Jewish forces in 1947 an easy ride into the Palestinian countryside” (PDF p.38), follow. The constant was the objective: acceptance of the Peel Commission partition in 1937 over a modest portion, then the maximalist demand for all of Palestine in 1942 — a state “exclusively Jewish not only in its socio-political structure but also in its ethnic composition” (PDF p.38-39).
Military Preparations (PDF p.39-41) describes the British-allowed independent enclave, the military organisation built with sympathetic British officers, Diaspora finance, and an embryonic diplomatic corps. Charles Orde Wingate, assigned to Palestine in 1936, taught the settlers combat tactics and retaliation methods and transformed the Haganah — established 1920 — into “the military arm of the Jewish Agency” that in the end developed and implemented the plans for military takeover and ethnic cleansing (PDF p.40). During the Arab revolt Hagana troops attached to British forces learned what a ‘punitive mission’ to an Arab village ought to entail, including the joint occupation of a village in June 1938 and bayonet instruction against defenseless villagers recalled by Amatziya Cohen (PDF p.40-41). In the Second World War Hagana members gained experience in British service while others monitored and infiltrated “the 1200 or so Palestinian villages” (PDF p.41).
The Village Files (PDF p.41-46) is the chapter’s longest section. The registry of all Arab villages was proposed by Ben-Zion Luria to the Jewish National Fund — “This would greatly help the redemption of the land” (PDF p.41). The JNF, founded in 1901 as the principal Zionist tool for colonisation and custodian of gained land, was directed in this work by Joseph Weitz, whose settlement department evicted Palestinian tenants from purchased land even though a change of ownership had not traditionally meant the farmers had to move; by the end of the Mandate the Jewish community owned around 5.8% of the land, and Weitz proposed making the files a ‘national project’ (PDF p.41-42). Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s letter to Moshe Shertock (Sharett) added exposing each village’s ‘Hebraic origins’ and its date of origin (PDF p.42). Aerial photographic surveys (Sindiyana and Sabbarin as examples shown to Ben-Gurion), Yitzhak Shefer and Margot Sadeh’s secret film laboratory, moved to the Red House in 1947, produced files recording by the late 1930s each village’s topography, roads, land, water, income, composition, mukhtars, men’s ages, an index of ‘hostility’ keyed to participation in the 1936 revolt, and lists of those involved and of people who had allegedly killed Jews — information which in 1948 “fuelled the worst atrocities in the villages, leading to mass executions and torture” (PDF p.42-43). Moshe Pasternak’s recollection makes the purpose explicit: “We had to study the basic structure of the Arab village. This means the structure and how best to attack it.” (PDF p.43-44). From 1943 Ezra Danin systematised the files — husbandry, trees, land per family, clans, officials, then mosques, imams and, finally, guards and arms — with Yaacov Shimoni, Yehoshua Palmon and Tuvia Lishanski, an informant network (the ‘treasurer’, killed in 1945 when exposed), and the Shefeya training base, whose 1944 reconnaissance of Umm al-Zinat Pappe sets against that village’s destruction and expulsion in 1948 “without any provocation on their part whatsoever” (PDF p.44-45). The final 1947 update created ‘wanted’ lists used in 1948 search-and-arrest operations in which picked-out men “were often shot on the spot”; villages of about 1500 usually had twenty to thirty suspects — Umm al-Zinat thirty, Damun twenty-five (PDF p.46). Yadin recalled that this knowledge let the command conclude in November 1947 “that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organise them properly” (PDF p.46).
Facing the British: 1945-1947 (PDF p.46-47) argues that, with the Palestinian leadership and defence capabilities destroyed in 1936 and the Nazi invasion danger removed in 1942, the sole obstacle was the British presence — hence the 1942 Biltmore demand for a Jewish commonwealth over the whole of Mandatory Palestine, and the post-war campaign to push the British out, while planning continued for the Palestinian population, “the country’s seventy-five per cent majority”. Weitz in 1940: “it is our right to transfer the Arabs” and “The Arabs should go!”; Ben-Gurion to his son in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” “The opportune moment came in 1948.” (PDF p.47)
David Ben-Gurion: The Architect (PDF p.47-53) portrays Ben-Gurion — born David Gruen in Plonsk in 1886, in Palestine from 1906, leader from the mid-1920s into the 1960s — exercising complete control over security and defence, accepting the 1937 state offer as a good start while aspiring to as much of Palestine as possible, under the two words that emerged around 1937: “Force and Opportunity” (PDF p.47-48). Moshe Sharett’s 13 December 1938 lecture on the purchase of 2500 dunam in the Baysan Valley — “This purchase was accompanied, interestingly, by transfer of population” — shows even cautious leaders associating settlement with dispossession (PDF p.48-49). The post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin sought a democratic solution based on the people actually living in Palestine; Jewish underground attacks, including the King David Hotel bombing, did not change that policy, and Britain’s 100,000 troops deterred a maximalist move, so Ben-Gurion concluded a ‘reduced’ state over eighty per cent would suffice (PDF p.49-50). At the Paris meeting in the final days of August 1946 he accepted partition’s principle but not its dimensions — “We will demand a large chunk of Palestine” — telling the leadership eighty to ninety per cent was enough provided Jewish predominance was ensured; the Jewish Agency’s 1947 map anticipated “almost to the last dot pre-1967 Israel” (PDF p.50). His preoccupation with security, Bitachon, became an obsession overshadowing all other issues; in 1946 the 22nd Zionist Congress gave him the defence portfolio, and as crucial decisions on the Palestinians’ fate neared he “began to ignore the official structure and started relying on more clandestine formations” (PDF p.51-52). Britain decided in February 1947 to quit and transfer the question to the UN. The strategy prepared for the moment the British were gone became Plan C (Gimel), fusing Plan A (the 1937 ‘Elimelech plan’ of Elimelech Avnir) and Plan B (1946): offensive campaigns to ‘deter’ and retaliate, whose punitive repertoire — killing the political leadership, inciters and their financial supporters, Palestinians who acted against Jews, and senior officers and officials; damaging transportation and livelihoods; attacking villages, clubs and meeting places — drew its data from the village files (PDF p.52-53). “However, within a few months, yet another plan was drawn up: Plan D (Dalet)… Plan Dalet called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland.” (PDF p.53)
Chapter 3: Partition and Destruction: UN Resolution 181 and its Impact — PDF p.55-64
The chapter epigraph is the Summary record of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 6 March 1995, on the former Yugoslavia, identifying ethnic cleansing as the conflict’s most brutal element and its causes as “clearly political” (PDF p.55).
Palestine’s Population (PDF p.55-57) dates the start of the ethnic cleansing operations to early December 1947 and gives the population as a two-third Palestinian majority, “down from ninety per cent at the start of the Mandate”, against one third Jewish newcomers, most arrived since the 1920s (PDF p.55). Palestine was “still very much an Arab country”: only 5.8% of the land was in Jewish ownership in 1947, the adjective ‘mixed’ is “somewhat misleading”, Jewish newcomers overwhelmingly preferred the towns, and the rural colonies were isolated islands “built like military garrisons rather than villages” amid the open Palestinian countryside (PDF p.56). Partition’s problem follows: the countryside — more than three quarters of the territory — should logically remain Palestinian, while the towns were almost equally inhabited; earlier British options of a bi-national state (rejected by the Jews) and cantonisation (refused by both sides) had failed, and in February 1947 London transferred the question to the UN, after which “the interests of the Palestinians were soon almost totally excised from the process” (PDF p.56-57).
The UN’s Partition Plan (PDF p.57-59) charges UNSCOP — a committee of an inexperienced, two-year-old UN, none of whose members had experience in solving conflicts or knew much of Palestine’s history — with sponsoring partition, recommending two states bound by economic unity and Jerusalem as corpus separatum, which on 29 November 1947 became General Assembly Resolution 181 (PDF p.57). The UN “totally ignored the ethnic composition”: correspondence with actual settlement would have entitled the Jews to no more than ten per cent of the land; instead, accepting Zionist nationalist claims and seeking to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust, it gave a state over more than half the country (PDF p.57). The Arab League and the Arab Higher Committee boycotted UNSCOP and the implementation deliberations; into the vacuum the Zionist leadership stepped, demanding over eighty per cent and producing a map of all the land Israel would occupy a year later, before being convinced to accept fifty-six per cent, with Jerusalem internationalised at Catholic countries’ persuasion (PDF p.58). Partition “violated the basic rights of the Palestinians”, and instead of calming the atmosphere the resolution “directly caused the country to deteriorate into one of the most violent phases in its history”; when the vote was learned, law and order collapsed — “the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians had started” (PDF p.58-59).
The Arab and Palestinian Positions (PDF p.59-61) answers the propaganda use of the boycott. The principled objection, in Walid Khalidi’s words: “The native people of Palestine, like the native people of every other country in the Arab world, Asia, Africa, America and Europe, refused to divide the land with a settler community.” (PDF p.59). Palestinian demands that the resolution’s legality be tested in the International Court of Justice were never acted on (PDF p.60). The figures: Jews owned less than six per cent of the land and were no more than one third of the population, yet were handed more than half the territory; within their proposed state they owned only eleven per cent of the land and were a minority in every district, and one per cent of the population in the Negev; the plan also included 400 (of more than 1000) Palestinian villages inside the designated Jewish state (PDF p.60). Khalidi: Resolution 181 was “a hasty act of granting half of Palestine to an ideological movement that declared openly already in the 1930s its wish to de-Arabise Palestine” (PDF p.60). Its “most immoral aspect is that it included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (PDF p.60-61). The final map’s figures: on forty-two per cent, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state including 10,000 Jews; the Jewish state over almost fifty-six per cent was to be shared by 499,000 Jews with 438,000 Palestinians; Jerusalem’s 200,000 were equally divided (PDF p.61). Flapan’s point follows: had the Palestinians gone along with the resolution, the Jewish leadership would have been sure to reject the map (PDF p.61).
The Jewish Reaction (PDF p.61-62) describes Ben-Gurion leading his associates “simultaneously to accept and ignore the UN Partition Resolution” (PDF p.61-62). Already in October 1947 he had clarified that if the map were not satisfactory the Jewish state would not be obliged to accept it; a valid state for him stretched over most of Palestine with no more than a tiny number of Palestinians, if any; he was determined to make all Jerusalem his Jewish capital. Arab rejection let the leadership claim the plan a dead letter apart from the clauses recognising the Jewish state’s legality: its borders “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution” — “As would be the fate of the Arabs living in it.” (PDF p.62)
The Consultancy Begins its Work (PDF p.63-64) gives the formula — the less important the body, the more supportive Ben-Gurion was of the resolution; the more significant the forum, the more scornful his rejection — and the Defence Committee statement of 7 October 1947, before Resolution 181 was adopted, that there “are no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish State” (PDF p.63). The Consultancy was created precisely because these questions could not be aired in public; it was not official, proper minutes do not exist for most meetings, and Pappe reconstructs it from Ben-Gurion’s diary, archival correspondence and the private archive of Israel Galili (Ben-Gurion Archives, Sdeh Boker), Weitz’s diary and Ben-Gurion’s letters, notably to Sharett (PDF p.63). Meetings were held at Ben-Gurion’s Tel-Aviv house and at the Red House, some within the Wednesday High Command (Matkal) meetings; on 15 May 1948 they moved east of Tel-Aviv to the new army headquarters (PDF p.63-64). The Consultancy — security figures plus specialists on ‘Arab affairs’ — met regularly from February 1947 and more frequently from October 1947, knowing its policies would decide the fate of Palestinians both inside the designated Jewish state and in the areas accorded to the Arab state; the next chapter follows its thinking “until it devised a final plan for the dispossession of one million Palestinians, no matter where they happened to be in the country” (PDF p.64). Its first documented meeting, 18 June 1947, has Ben-Gurion telling the High Command the Jewish community would need to “defend not only our settlements, but the country as a whole and Our National Future” — a term he repeated on 3 December 1947 as a code for the demographic balance (PDF p.64).
PDF p.65 is the divider page for Chapter 4, “Finalising A Master Plan”; its text begins in part 2.
Chapter 4: Finalising a Master Plan — PDF p.66-113
The chapter epigraphs are NATO spokesman Jamie Shea on Kosovo (CNN, 30 March 1999) as a “well-organized master plan” of encirclement, separation, expulsion, looting and torching, and the Plan Dalet passage of 10 March 1948 on destroying villages or, on resistance, wiping out the armed forces and expelling the population outside the borders of the state (PDF p.66).
The Methodology of Cleansing (PDF p.66-68) recaps February 1947 to May 1948: cleansing began in early December 1947 and drove out almost 75,000; coerced expulsions in mid-February 1948 emptied five villages in one day; after Plan Dalet’s adoption on 10 March 1948 the urban centres were all occupied by the end of April and about 250,000 Palestinians uprooted, with several massacres, most notably Deir Yassin; the Arab League decided on the last day of April to intervene only after the Mandate ended; and the United States twice offered alternatives — a five-year trusteeship in February 1948 and a three-month cease-fire on 12 May — both rejected out of hand. Pappe gives two impulses behind the strategy: ad-hoc reaction to Palestinian disintegration and Arab disarray, and exploitation of the opportunity for an exclusively Jewish state, so that before March 1948 operations could still be portrayed as retaliation and after March they openly sought “to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force” (PDF p.68).
Defining the Space (PDF p.68-71) makes the coveted territory Palestine as a whole on the 1942 Biltmore demand, qualified by the tacit agreement with King Abdullah of Jordan: the Jewish Agency’s negotiations, resumed in earnest after Resolution 181, left the West Bank to a Greater Jordan in return for Abdullah’s promise not to join all-Arab operations against the Jewish state — an anticipated state of eighty per cent of Mandatory Palestine (the UN’s fifty-six per cent plus twenty-four per cent of the Arab state), which neutralised the Arab Legion, “the strongest army in the Arab world” (PDF p.70-71). The territory was fixed by the most remote Jewish settlements, enveloped by ‘security zones’.
Creating the Means (PDF p.71-75) gives the force balance on the eve of 1948: about 50,000 Jewish troops (30,000 fighting troops) with, by May, a small air force, navy, armour and artillery, and by the end of the summer 80,000, swelled by a large Czechoslovak and Soviet arms shipment, against no more than 7,000 Palestinian irregulars, 1,000–3,000 Arab Liberation Army volunteers from February, and regular Arab armies that never crossed 50,000 (PDF p.71-72). The Haganah, Palmach, Irgun and Stern Group, the Field Guard (Hish) and the intelligence unit that supervised the Village Files are described as the machinery. Ben-Gurion’s private confidence is documented against his public ‘second Holocaust’ discourse, above all his February 1948 reply to Moshe Sharett that with the purchased arms “we will be able not only to defend [ourselves] but also to inflict death blows on the Syrians in their own country – and take over Palestine as a whole” (PDF p.74). The section closes with the ‘Balance’: Ben-Gurion’s 3 December 1947 Mapai speech that “Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state” (PDF p.76), his 2 November 1947 statement that a Palestinian fifth column should be expelled, and the figure of one million Palestinians living in early December 1947 in the territory of the future greater Jewish state, out of 1.3 million in all, against 600,000 Jews (PDF p.77).
Choosing the Means: Worrisome Normality (December 1947) (PDF p.77-80) records that most Palestinians sought normalcy after the three-day strike — intelligence officer Palti Sela’s December report was that “normalcy is the rule and agitation the exception” (PDF p.79-80) — which posed the Consultancy a pretext problem, answered by shifting from tagmul (‘retaliation’) to yotzma (‘initiative’).
The Changing Mood in the Consultancy: From Retaliation to Intimidation and December 1947: Early Actions (PDF p.80-85) centre on the 10 December 1947 Red House meeting: Ezra Danin and Yehoshua Palmon, whose post-occupation units selected men — ‘military age’ defined as ten to fifty — for execution on the spot or imprisonment, proposed destroying Palestinian traffic, boats, shops and factories so the community would be ‘at our mercy’, a phrase Ben-Gurion repeated to Sharett with ‘starving them to death’ (PDF p.81-82); Eliyahu Sasson’s divide-and-rule dissent was rejected for the last time. The approved intimidation campaign — ‘violent reconnaissance’, leaflets threatening “merciless killing, no compassion” (PDF p.84), the night attacks on Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa, and Yigal Allon’s unauthorised attack on Khisas on 18 December 1947, blowing up houses with occupants asleep and killing fifteen villagers including five children, publicly apologised for and later listed as a success — was then aimed at Haifa, whose 75,000 Palestinians were shelled, sniped and terrorised from the morning after the resolution (PDF p.85).
Haifa, the refinery killings and Balad al-Shaykh (PDF p.86-87): Hagana and Irgun methods in Haifa included explosive barrels and steel balls rolled into Arab areas, ignited oil-and-fuel, and booby-trapped cars, run by the Hashahar mistarvim unit; the Irgun refinery bomb and the Palestinian riot killing thirty-nine Jewish workers followed. On 31 December 1947 Balad al-Shaykh was attacked for three hours on orders to kill the largest possible number of men, leaving over sixty dead; Wadi Rushmiyya was expelled and blown up the same night — “the official beginning of the ethnic cleansing operation in urban Palestine” (PDF p.87) — and Hawassa, about 5,000 people, was expelled in January.
January 1948: Farewell to Retaliation and The Long Seminar: 31 December–2 January (PDF p.88-95) record Irgun and Stern attacks (Sarraya house, Jaffa, 26 dead; Samiramis Hotel, Qatamon), High Commissioner Cunningham’s ignored protests, and Ben-Gurion’s own assessment that “The decisive majority of them do not want to fight us” (PDF p.88). At the Long Seminar — the only Consultancy meeting with a protocol — Joseph Weitz urged getting “rid of them” and won a ‘transfer committee’; even Yaacov Tahon concurred that ‘without transfer there will be no Jewish State’; Ben-Gurion gave the green light to provocative, lethal attacks with no distinction between ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’, summarised by Danin as “Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion” (PDF p.91-92); Yigael Yadin proposed abandoning the word ‘retaliation’ for offensive, preemptive strikes under the new term ‘aggressive defense’. The seminar’s working-out covers Jaffa, the complaints of the Tel-Aviv and other municipalities, and Lifta — attacked 28 December 1947, finally expelled and mostly blown up on 11 January 1948 — after which Ben-Gurion ordered Jerusalem’s commander David Shaltiel to settle Jews in every evicted house and, visiting emptied Lifta on 7 February, told the Mapai Council that entering Jerusalem through Lifta and Romema “there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews” (PDF p.96).
The Long Seminar’s aftermath (PDF p.96-100) adds the settlement-belt rationale for connecting the thirty settlements in the UN Arab state, Dayan’s welcome for Khisas having ‘ignited the Galilee’, and Ben-Gurion’s diary summary: harm an accused family “without mercy, women and children included” and make “no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty” (PDF p.97). The Arab Liberation Army’s divided command — Fauzi al-Qawuqji in the north, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni in Jerusalem, Hassan Salameh in Jaffa — is presented as a farce that left Palestinian power ineffective; its 9 January entry, the Kefar Sold and Kefar Etzion attacks and the Lamed-Heh convoy’s thirty-five dead became, in Pappe’s reading following Bar-Zohar, a pretext for operations already contemplated. The word on the High Command’s orders for cleansing was tihur (PDF p.100).
February 1948: Shock and Awe (PDF p.100-108) contrasts public ‘second Holocaust’ rhetoric — 400 Jewish settlers dead by the end of January against 1,500 Palestinians killed — with the enlarged Consultancy’s arms and recruitment achievements, the flame-thrower project and Ephraim Katzir’s biological unit experimenting with a blinding agent (“We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff”, PDF p.102), and Sasson’s report of no more than 3,000 poorly trained volunteers. Yadin’s 9 February ‘deep invasions’ plan was shelved, but the Lamed-Heh operations approved from 13 February dynamited houses in Jaffa with people inside and attacked Sa’sa and the villages around Qisarya: Qisarya itself, the first village expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948, with four more villages evacuated and destroyed the same day; Barrat Qisarya and Khirbat al-Burj destroyed; Atlit and Daliyat al-Rawha expelled on Weitz’s initiative; and Sa’sa on the night of 14–15 February, on Allon’s order to Moshe Kalman — “You have to blow up twenty houses” and kill as many ‘warriors’ as possible, Pappe glossing ‘warriors’ as villagers (PDF p.105-106), leaving 35 demolished houses and 60–80 dead. The 19 February meeting — all experts reporting rural Palestine showed no wish to fight — concluded to retaliate for every Arab act regardless of neutrality and, in Ben-Gurion’s words, “Destroy a neighborhood, and you begin to make an impression!” (PDF p.106). February ended with Qira and Qamun, and Pappe’s rebuttal of Morris on Weitz: the Hagana command authorised all expulsions, before 10 March not always in advance, always in retrospect (PDF p.108).
March: Putting the Finishing Touches to the Blueprint (PDF p.108-113) treats March 1948’s reputation as the hardest month as resting only on ALA convoy attacks, which the Consultancy did not even discuss; instead it revised Plans B and C into Plan Dalet, finalised at the 10 March meeting (the draft first discussed in the second half of February — Ben-Gurion’s diary gives Sunday 29 February, one military historian 14 February). The plan, officially the Yehoshua plan for Yehoshua Globerman, was sent to twelve brigade commanders — expanded from four — each with a list of villages or neighbourhoods to be occupied, destroyed and expelled, with exact dates; the IDF-archive documents show, against Morris, “clear-cut operational orders”, not vague guidelines (PDF p.111). The military version omitted the political draft’s surrender provision and its activation only after the Mandate; officers were ordered to start within days. By then thirty villages were already gone; the rule that followed was the 531 villages and eleven urban neighbourhoods of the Preface. Yadin’s address to the intelligence officers at the Kupat Holim headquarters — “Today we have all the arms we need” (PDF p.112) — and the closing rebuttal of the April ‘turning point’ version complete the chapter: between December 1947 and the end of March 1948 the first stage of the cleansing was already complete, and April’s shift was to “the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed” (PDF p.113).
PDF p.114 is the divider for Chapter 5, “The Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing: Plan Dalet”; its text begins on PDF p.115 (part 2) and continues in part 3.
Chapter 5: The Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing: Plan Dalet — PDF p.115-157
The epigraph is GlobalSecurity.org (2000–2005) on the Serbs and General Ratko Mladic’s policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Muslims in Republika Srpska (PDF p.115). The opening contrasts Ben-Gurion’s diary for 1 April–15 May 1948 — preoccupied with domestic Zionist politics and state organisation, with no sense of looming catastrophe — with his public ‘second Holocaust’ pathos and his private language: listing occupied Arab villages proudly to Mapai members in early April, and on 6 April rebuking Histadrut figures who questioned attacking peasants rather than effendi landlords: “our enemies are the Arab peasants!” (PDF p.115). When Plan Dalet was put into effect the Haganah had more than 50,000 troops, half trained by the British army in the Second World War, and ‘seizing’ the areas allocated to the Jewish state meant only one thing: the massive expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes, businesses and land (PDF p.116).
Operation Nachshon: The First Plan Dalet Operation (PDF p.116-120) takes the rural hills on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains, halfway along the road to Tel-Aviv, as the model operation. Each brigade was ordered to move to State Dalet (Mazav Dalet) and told that “the villages which you will capture, cleanse or destroy will be decided according to consultation with your advisors on Arab affairs and the intelligence officers” (PDF p.117); whereas the official plan gave villages the option to surrender, the operational orders exempted no village for any reason. The Palmach orders of 1 April 1948, finalised the night before at Ben-Gurion’s house, made “the principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages” and the eviction of the villagers so that they would become an economic liability for the general Arab forces (PDF p.117). Nachshon was also the first operation in which all the Jewish military organisations acted together as a single army, the basis of the future IDF. Al-Husayni’s units had been retaliating for earlier Jewish attacks by firing randomly at Jewish traffic on the road, wounding and killing passengers (PDF p.118). Qastal fell on 9 April; Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was killed defending it, his troops demoralised, and the other villages of Greater Jerusalem swiftly fell, were expelled and demolished (PDF p.118-119). See Operation Nachshon.
Deir Yassin (PDF p.119-120): the pastoral village had reached a non-aggression pact with the Hagana, but was doomed because it lay within the areas Plan Dalet designated to be cleansed; because of the pact the Hagana sent Irgun and Stern Group troops, to absolve itself of accountability. On 9 April 1948 the attackers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, gathered the remaining villagers and murdered them in cold blood; Fahim Zaydan, twelve at the time, recalled seeing his family shot one after the other, and was himself shot in a row of children lined up against a wall. Recent research, Pappe reports, has brought the accepted number massacred down from 170 to ninety-three, with dozens of others killed in the fighting and thirty babies among the slaughtered — Pappe calls the whole ‘quantitative’ exercise over the numbers “insignificant”; the Jewish leadership at the time proudly announced a high number so as to make Deir Yassin a warning to all Palestinians (PDF p.120). The spared villages were a rare exception: “hundreds of villages suffered the same fate as Qalunya and the Qastal” (PDF p.120). Qalunya, Saris, Beit Surik and Biddu were next, blown up and expelled within an hour or so each; Abu Ghawsh and Nabi Samuil were a rare exception, spared through their mukhtars’ relations with the local Stern Gang commanders (PDF p.120). See Deir Yassin.
The Urbicide of Palestine (PDF p.121-133) follows the systematic attack on the urban centres through April and into May, as UN agents and British officials watched. Tiberias fell on 18 April, after news of Deir Yassin and of the 12 April massacre at Khirbat Nasr al-Din, daily bombardment, barrel bombs and loudspeaker terror — tactics Pappe compares to the supersonic flights over Beirut in 1983 and Gaza in 2005, “which human rights organisations have decried as criminal acts”; the British first offered protection, then urged a negotiated general evacuation, and King Abdullah sent thirty trucks for women and children (PDF p.121-122). In Haifa — leaving the country’s only major port in Jewish control was, Pappe writes, “yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered” in the UN peace proposal (PDF p.122-123) — where the December terror had already driven 15,000-20,000 of the elite to leave and 55,000-60,000 Palestinians remained leaderless, Operation Scissors cut the city off from its hinterland; on 18 April Major General Hugh Stockwell told the Jewish authorities the British buffer would be removed in two days, and on 21 April, Passover’s eve, Operation ‘Cleansing the Leaven’ (bi’ur hametz) began, Stockwell advising the four Palestinian leaders who came to him that it would be better to leave (PDF p.122-124). Mordechai Maklef’s orders were: “Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” (PDF p.124). At dawn on 22 April the Carmeli Brigade mortared the crowds its own loudspeakers’ advice had gathered in the old marketplace by the port, and the people stormed the boats, many of which overturned and sank (PDF p.125-126); Golda Meir, visiting days later, entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables (PDF p.124-125). See Haifa, Golda Meir. Safad — 9,500 Arabs against 2,400 Jews, defended by more than 400 volunteers of whom only half were armed with rifles — was taken after its rural hinterland, the Palmach concentrating on the town on 29 April; the able Syrian officer Ihasn Qam Ulmaz had been replaced by Adib Shishakly with an incompetent, and the 1,000 Palmach troops drove most of the people out, leaving only 100 old people, whom Ben-Gurion’s diary of 5 June records expelled to Lebanon (PDF p.126-127). See Safad. In Jerusalem the western neighbourhoods were shelled and cleansed from January; Shaykh Jarrah alone was saved, except for 20 houses, by a local British commander against the order to “Occupy the neighbourhood and destroy all its houses”, while in western Jerusalem the British, in Pappe’s words, “played a truly diabolical role”, disarming Palestinian residents on a promise of protection they instantly reneged on; Qatamon fell in the last days of April amid pillage recalled by intelligence chief Itzhak Levy, and in all eight neighbourhoods and thirty-nine villages were cleansed in Greater Jerusalem (PDF p.127-129). Acre fell after its Kabri-springs aqueduct was, in the Red Cross reports Pappe cites, poisoned with typhoid: a 6 May meeting of British medical officers and the Red Cross delegate counted seventy casualties, fifty-five of them British soldiers, and concluded the infection was undoubtedly water-borne; loudspeakers then called “Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.” (PDF p.129-130). A similar attempt to poison Gaza’s wells on 27 May was foiled, and Pappe traces the Hagana Science Corps, renamed HEMED in May 1948 under Ephraim Katzir, as the team behind Israel’s biological-warfare capability (PDF p.130-131). Baysan, seized in Operation Gideon after an ultimatum to leave within ten hours was refused, surrendered on 11 May to a committee of the qadi, the priest, the municipal secretary and the richest merchant, and Palti Sela oversaw its ‘orderly expulsion’, most driven across the Jordan; those who slipped back were loaded at gunpoint onto trucks in mid-June and driven across again (PDF p.131-132). See Baysan. Jaffa, defended by 1,500 volunteers — the largest Palestinian defence force in any locality — against 5,000 troops, fell on 13 May after a three-week siege, and its entire population of 50,000 was expelled, people pushed into the sea to board the far-too-small fishing boats for Gaza (PDF p.132-133). See Jaffa.
The Cleansing Continues (PDF p.133-145) returns to the countryside. Under a tacit Hagana-Irgun division of labour the Irgun expelled Shaykh Muwannis on 30 March — Tel-Aviv University’s campus now sprawls over its ruins — although the village’s heads had cultivated a cordial relationship with the Hagana (PDF p.133). On 7 April 1948 the Consultancy decided to destroy and expel all the villages on the Tel-Aviv-Haifa, Jenin-Haifa and Jerusalem-Jaffa roads; by 10 April Khirbat Azzun, Khirbat Lid, Arab al-Fuqara, Arab al-Nufay’at and Damira were cleansed, Cherqis on the 15th, and Khirbat al-Manshiyya, Biyar ‘Adas and Miska by the month’s end (PDF p.134). Pappe’s tally is explicit: “Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled” (PDF p.134), before a single regular Arab soldier had entered Palestine, and another ninety were wiped out between 15 May and 11 June. The village of Sirin, occupied on 12 May, had been promised immunity because its main Zu’bi clan collaborated, and its mukhtar was a friend of Haifa’s mayor Shabtai Levi; its 1943 village file, noting the rival Abu al-Hija clan’s ten rifles and 1936 participation, doomed it, and its Muslims and Christians were ordered across the Jordan and its mosque, church, monastery and houses demolished (PDF p.135-136). In Marj Ibn Amir, Qawuqji’s attack on Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek of 4 April — in direct response to the mass expulsions begun around 15 March, in which a direct hit killed three children — fuelled the expulsion of Abu Shusha, Kafrayn, Abu Zurayq, Mansi and Naghnaghiyya; the Irgun took Sabbarin, Sindiyana, Barieka, Khubbeiza and Umm al-Shauf, confining Sabbarin’s women, old men and children within barbed wire and executing seven young men found carrying arms (PDF p.137-138). Operation ‘Broom’ (matateh) cleansed the Tiberias-Safad highway villages, beginning with Ghuwayr, where the selection pattern that became the model for later expulsions — Druze allowed to stay, young men of ten to thirty separated, forty men held in pens for eighteen months — was applied under the eyes of UN observers (PDF p.138-139). Fifteen villages in the Haifa sub-district are listed as wiped off the map (PDF p.139-140). Pappe sets two Jewish responses to the moral implications beside each other: the ‘shoot and cry’ documents of complaint, and dehumanisation — Joseph Weitz: “Our army marches forward and conquers Arab villages and their inhabitants flee like mice” (PDF p.140). Military orders distinguished cleansing (le-taher) from harassing (le-hatrid), random shelling and hit-or-miss fire on civilian traffic; and in villages near urban centres groups of ‘males between the age of 10 and 50’ were executed to precipitate urban flight, at Nasr al-Din, Tirat Haifa and Ayn al-Zaytun (PDF p.140-141). At Ayn al-Zaytun on 2 May 1948 Moshe Kalman’s Palmach troops herded the surrendered villagers into the centre; a hooded informer picked out the men on the intelligence officers’ pre-prepared list to be shot, thirty-seven teenagers were shot with their hands tied behind their backs after Yusuf Ahmad Hajjar protested that the surrendered “expected to be treated humanely”, and Hans Lebrecht, ordered at the end of May to divert the village’s stream, found many bodies of women, children and babies near the mosque; the military documents report seventy shot in all, other sources and Netiva Ben-Yehuda’s fictionalised account give several hundred (PDF p.141-143). In completing the mission in the east, intelligence officers restricted the operations to spare the collaborating Zu’bi clan, leaving villages with a large Zu’biyya share intact while Sirin, with only a few, was expelled on Palti Sela’s written suggestion to leave for Jordan (PDF p.143-144). The section Succumbing to a Superior Power (PDF p.144-145) reads the defection of minorities as proof of Jewish superiority: 500 Druze of the Arab Liberation Army deserted in early April after a phony battle near Shafa’Amr and a ‘treaty of blood’, becoming the main vehicle for the cleansing of the Galilee, and 350 Circassians joined in April; together they formed the nucleus of Israel’s future Border Police. See Druze.
Arab Reactions (PDF p.145-155): Qawuqji, commanding 2,000 men dispersed in inadequate small units, sought a truce from January and at the end of March offered Yehoshua Palmon a non-aggression pact and cantonisation, which was rejected; Palmon was sent more as a spy than a delegate, and reported the ALA’s poor equipment and lack of motivation (PDF p.146). The Arab League’s Azzam Pasha hoped the UN would re-intervene; the Arab governments procrastinated, transferred the decision to the ineffective League Council, and only at the end of April decided to send troops, by which time a quarter of a million Palestinians had already been expelled and two hundred villages destroyed (PDF p.147-148). Abdullah used the situation to intensify his negotiations: in January the unwritten agreement was cemented and in early February his prime minister reported the tacit alliance to London — annexation of most of the Arab-state area in return for not joining operations against the Jewish state, with British blessing; the Legion, the best-trained Arab army, was confined by Abdullah and Glubb Pasha to East Jerusalem and the West Bank (PDF p.149). On 2 May Shlomo Shamir told Colonel Goldie and Major Crocker that the UN Arab state had shrunk to the West Bank alone, rejecting partition of Jerusalem, and on 13 May Kirkbride reported the Legion-Hagana negotiations to Bevin, who replied that he was reluctant to prejudice negotiations aiming “at avoiding hostility between the Arabs and the Jews” and would not withdraw the Legion’s British officers (PDF p.149-151). The agreement side of Abdullah’s double game, Pappe writes, “became decisive for the course of action he would take”: in practice his main objective was to secure Israeli consent for the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank (PDF p.150). Pappe adds the other angle: by annexing the West Bank the Jordanians saved 250,000 Palestinians from being ousted — until 1967 (PDF p.151). The Palestinian leadership that remained — Emil Ghori, Ahmad Hilmi, Rafiq Tamimi, Mu’in al-Madi and Husayn al-Khalidi of the Arab Higher Committee — stood by its communities almost to the end, but the community was leaderless, and neither the volunteers nor Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni’s Holy War Army nor Hasan Salameh’s Jaffa effort put the Jewish community at serious risk (PDF p.151-152). Towards the ‘Real War’ (PDF p.153-155) treats the American alternatives: the State Department’s 12 March 1948 proposal of a five-year international trusteeship — Warren Austin: “The USA position is that the partition of Palestine is no longer a viable option” (PDF p.153) — defeated by Zionist-lobby pressure on Truman, and the three-month armistice offered and rejected at the People’s Board meeting of 12 May; Egypt’s Senate decided only on 12 May, leaving its army less than three days to prepare for an effort its leaders knew would end in a fiasco, under a supreme commander — Abdullah, named as the League’s supreme-commander appointee at PDF p.161 — whom most Arab leaders knew had a secret agreement with the Jews (PDF p.154-155). British Responsibility (PDF p.155-156) argues Britain announced after Plan Dalet’s adoption that it was no longer responsible for law and order where its troops were stationed, leaving Haifa, Jaffa and the coast an open space for Plan Dalet’s implementation, and assisted directly with ownership deeds and data photocopied before destruction, which added to the Village Files the final details needed for the depopulation. UN Betrayal (PDF p.156-157) closes the chapter: the UN, whose resolution had pledged to prevent confiscation of the other group’s land, took no action beyond watching and reporting, its presence on the ground forbidden by the British; after 15 May “there was no excuse for the way the UN abandoned the people whose land they had divided” (PDF p.157).
PDF p.158 is the divider page for Chapter 6, “The Phony War and the Real War Over Palestine: May 1948”; its text begins on PDF p.159.
Chapter 6: The Phony War and the Real War Over Palestine: May 1948 — opening — PDF p.159-166
The epigraph is Eli Shimoni, senior officer in the Alexandroni Brigade, in Maariv, 4 February 2001: “I have no doubt a massacre took place in Tantura.” (PDF p.159). Within weeks of the Mandate’s end the Jewish troops had reached the vast majority of the isolated settlements; only two were lost to the Legion, in the West Bank area both sides had agreed Jordan would occupy and annex, and Jerusalem — for which there was no prior agreement — was the only place the two sides actually engaged in battle, in complete contrast to the Legion’s inaction near the Palestinian towns being cleansed (PDF p.159). At the Consultancy meeting of 11 May Ben-Gurion’s letter to the brigade commanders insisted that “the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet”, using the noun bi’ur (PDF p.159).
The Arab armies (PDF p.160-162): the Jordanian army, the strongest Arab force, was neutralised from the first day by Abdullah’s tacit alliance, and Glubb Pasha dubbed the war the ‘Phony War’, knowing the other Arab armies’ groundwork was ‘pathetic’ (PDF p.160). Egypt decided only two days before the Mandate ended and sent 10,000 troops, almost fifty per cent untrained Muslim Brotherhood volunteers released from prison for the expedition; Syria’s few troops performed so badly that before the end of May the Consultancy considered annexing the Golan Heights; Lebanon’s units mostly stayed on their side of the border (PDF p.160-161). The Iraqi troops, a few thousand ordered only to defend the West Bank, defied their politicians and held the northern West Bank, which let fifteen Wadi Ara villages hold out and escape expulsion, until Jordan ceded them to Israel in the summer of 1949 (PDF p.161). Over-stretched supply lines, antiquated arms, the British-French arms embargo — which hardly affected the Jewish forces, supplied by the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc — and Abdullah’s appointment as supreme commander left the Arab armies uncoordinated; heroic Israeli stories originate in these first three weeks, around the isolated settlements Ben-Gurion had strategically left to fend for themselves, but the Arab presence was never enough to stop the cleansing, which continued uninterrupted across 15 May (PDF p.161-162). Pappe’s conclusion: the foundational myth of a voluntary flight in response to Arab leaders’ calls “holds no water”, and for most Palestinians 15 May 1948 was of no special significance — “just one more day in the horrific calendar of ethnic cleansing that had started more than five months earlier” (PDF p.162-163).
Days of Tihur (PDF p.163-165): after the state was declared on the evening of 14 May the field orders used tihur, ‘purifying’, frequently and explicitly; the rhetoric was the only obvious change. The Consultancy met less regularly — the master plan was working and needed no further direction — worried briefly whether it had troops for two fronts, against the Arab armies and against the one million Palestinians who had become Israeli citizens on 15 May, and moved to the new Matkal headquarters on the hill overlooking the evicted Shaykh Muwannis (PDF p.163). The Alexandroni Brigade’s orders of 12 May named villages to occupy and destroy on 14-15 May — Tira, Qalansuwa, Qaqun, Irata, Danba, Iqtaba and Shuweika, with Qalqilya to be occupied but not destroyed — and two days later Tirat Haifa, Ayn Ghazal, Ijzim, Kfar Lam, Jaba, Ayn Hawd and Mazar to attack and cleanse; in Qaqun the takeover involved a case of rape the UN claimed and Jewish troops corroborated (PDF p.163-164). Of the sixty-four villages in the 100-kilometre rectangle between Tel-Aviv and Haifa only Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa were spared, because neighbouring Jewish settlers claimed they needed the villagers for unskilled labour; in the second half of May the brigade cleansed Manshiyya, Butaymat, Khirbat al-Manara, Qannir, Khirbat Qumbaza and Khirbat al-Shuna, with resistant villages finally cleansed in July (PDF p.164-165).
The Massacre at Tantura — opening (PDF p.165-166): Tantura, an ancient coastal village of around 1,500, rejected surrender terms on 15 May, suspecting surrender meant expulsion, and was attacked at night on 22 May — Pappe also dates the Alexandroni capture of Tantura to 21 May (PDF p.165). Attacked from all four flanks, with no ‘open gate’ left, its villagers were herded to the beach, the women and children expelled to Furaydis, and the intelligence officer Shimshon Mashvitz, with a hooded collaborator as at Ayn al-Zaytun, picked out men — all males of ten to fifty — from the pre-prepared Village Files list, including all who had participated in the 1936 Revolt, to be taken away in small groups and executed; before that selection the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree in the houses and streets after the villagers waved a white flag, which members of nearby Zikhron Yaacov arrived too late to stop, and on the beach men who could not reveal a non-existent ‘huge cache’ of weapons were shot on the spot (PDF p.165-166). The account continues in part 4. See Tantura.
The Massacre at Tantura — conclusion (PDF p.167-169): the officer’s description quoted by Pappe has prisoners led in groups 200 metres aside and shot, with larger groups executed in retribution for a soldier’s brother than for a cousin. Eyewitnesses give their own counts: Abu Mashaykh saw eighty-five young men executed in groups of ten in the cemetery and the nearby mosque, with Mashvitz supervising with a Sten gun, and estimated 110 in all; Fawzi Muhammad Tanj and Mahmud Abu Salih each reported ninety killed; Abu Jamil recalled 125 killed in summary executions. Two Palestinians dug the mass graves under Mordechai Sokoler of Zikhron Yaacov, who in 1999 said he remembered burying 230 bodies: “I lay them one by one in the grave.” (PDF p.168); Abu Fihmi, ordered to list the bodies, counted ninety-five. Most survivor interviews were done in 1999 by the Haifa University research student Teddy Katz, whose thesis the university retroactively disqualified after Alexandroni veterans sued him for libel; his senior interviewee, the later general Shlomo Ambar, refused details: “I want to forget what happened there.” (PDF p.168). The story had in fact been told as early as 1950 in Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib’s memoirs, recording executions on the beach and in the village square: “We are taking revenge for our dead.” (PDF p.169). After the coast, the Alexandroni were ordered to the Upper Galilee: Qadas to be destroyed, Mayrun, Nabi Yehoshua and Malkiyye to be occupied and handed to the Golani (PDF p.169).
The Brigades’ Trail of Blood (PDF p.170-173): Pappe warns the worst massacres would come in the autumn, when Palestinian resistance stiffened. The Golani mopped up missed pockets — Umm al-Zinat and Lajjun, giving Jewish control of the western flank of Marj Ibn Amir and Wadi Milk — but failed in May against Sa’sa, which Lebanese and local volunteers defended; its Golani order was destruction and mining, not permanent occupation, and even the Golani were authorised to limit the cleansing temporarily if short of soldiers (PDF p.170). Orders now distinguished explicitly between ‘le-taher’, to cleanse — houses intact, people expelled — and ‘le-hashmid’, to destroy — houses dynamited after expulsion and the rubble mined; there were no direct orders for massacres, but neither were these fully and genuinely condemned (PDF p.171). The Carmeli failed to enter Wadi Ara, whose fifteen villages were only ceded by Abdullah in the summer of 1949; the Irgun, now in the army, completed Operation Hametz around Jaffa (29 April); the Qiryati commander asked on 22 May whether he could use bulldozers instead of explosives to destroy his villages, which Pappe takes as a measure of how phony ‘the war’ was; Rabin’s Harel reported from Beit Masir on 11 May: “we are currently blowing up the houses. We have already blown up 60–70 houses.” (PDF p.172); and the ‘Bulgarian’ Brigade’s success fed a High Command belief that it could seize the northern West Bank despite the Abdullah agreement and invade southern Lebanon — “the cynicism behind the myth that Israel was fighting a ‘war of survival’” (PDF p.172-173).
Campaigns of Revenge (PDF p.173-176): the price of the pace was exposed settlements and convoys — more than two hundred Jewish troops died in convoy attacks, and the troops sent into Operation ‘Ben-Ami’ in May were told the villages had to be eliminated in revenge for the Yechiam convoy: “Our mission: to attack for the sake of occupation … to kill the men, destroy and set fire to Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr.” (PDF p.174). Within twenty-nine hours of the Mandate’s end almost all the north-western Galilee villages — all in the designated Arab state, in a district ninety-six per cent Palestinian — were destroyed, and Ben-Gurion announced “The Western Galilee has been liberated” (PDF p.174). Bassa, with 3,000 inhabitants, resisted with its militiamen and ALA volunteers and was ‘punished’: Nizar al-Hanna’s grandmother watched her two brothers, 21 and 22, executed in front of one of the churches (PDF p.174-175). The expulsion went unnoticed by the UN; by the end of May Ben-Gurion and his advisers judged the all-Arab force as ineffective as the volunteers, and the euphoria produced his diary entry of 24 May: “We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight – we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.” (PDF p.176). That same day a large Eastern-bloc shipment of 0.45-calibre cannons, arranged with the Israeli Communist Party’s help, gave Israel artillery unmatched by all the Arab armies together (PDF p.176).
Chapter Six closes (PDF p.177) with the Orientalist section’s solution for the small Palestinian communities left in the mixed towns — move them into one neighbourhood in each town, deprive them of freedom of movement and put them under a military regime — and with the May decisions that fixed the IDF’s definitive infrastructure, including the central place of the military regime (Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzvai) and the Shabak: “The Consultancy was no longer needed. The machinery of ethnic cleansing was working on its own, propelled by its own momentum.” A final Arab attempt on the last day of May to retake villages in the designated Arab state failed; the Legion held the West Bank parts Abdullah wanted as his trophy, paying its heavy price in eastern Jerusalem.
PDF p.178 is the divider page for Chapter 7, “The Escalation of the Cleansing Operations: June–September 1948”; its text begins on PDF p.179.
Chapter 7: The Escalation of the Cleansing Operations: June–September 1948 — PDF p.179-211
The epigraph is Articles 9, 13/2 and 17/2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted 10 December 1948, the day before Resolution 194 declared the refugees’ unconditional right of return (PDF p.179).
The chapter opens (PDF p.179-181) with villages in the Gaza district that nearby kibbutzim had protected — Najd, Burayr, Simsim, Kawfakha, Muharraqa and Huj — savagely assaulted and expelled in early June (on Huj’s land Ariel Sharon later built his 5000-dunam ranch); with Ben-Gurion’s 5 June diary, “Here the cleansing [tihur] operation continues”, and his meticulous Weitz-assisted list of “the occupied and evicted [mefunim] villages”, a meeting on looted Arab bank money and confiscated citrus groves, and Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan’s authorisation of confiscation of all Palestinian property already taken; with a TNT shortage caused by the number of houses ordered blown up, and troops burning houses and fields where dynamite ran out; and with the reduced Consultancy’s 1 June decision — reported to Ben-Gurion, who demanded and on 16 June received his government’s carte blanche — to instruct the army to prevent returning villagers “at all costs” (PDF p.180). A brief Arab spurt in early June (an Egyptian air raid hitting Ben-Gurion’s home on 4 June) faded; the Muslim Brotherhood volunteers held their Negev lines tenaciously and Egypt held Isdud and enclaves, and the Israelis accepted Bernadotte’s truce.
The First Truce (PDF p.181-183): demolition was a core activity during the truce (in practice 11 June–8 July): Mazar, Fayja, Biyar ‘Adas, Misea, Hawsha, Sumiriyya and Manshiyya near Acre destroyed, and huge villages such as Daliyat al-Rawha, Butaymat and Sabbarin “destroyed in one day” (PDF p.181). June preparation showed confidence in extending the state beyond the seventy-eight per cent already occupied, reinforced by a sizable shipment of aeroplanes; Operation ‘Yitzhak’ (1 June) attacked Jenin, Tul-Karem and Qalqilya and failed against the Iraqi defenders of Jenin, and from July aeroplanes were used “remorselessly” in the cleansing, indiscriminately targeting anyone unable to take cover (PDF p.181-182). In the Galilee the ALA’s 2000 volunteers were crippled by dirt-ruined equipment and a single blocked supply line from Syria — a Hittin battalion telegram of 29 June, intercepted by Israeli intelligence, reported no fuel to move supplies — while the villages’ own resistance stiffened, “which is one reason there are still Palestinian villages in the Galilee today” (PDF p.182). At Mi’ar on 20 June, witnessed by the seventeen-year-old Taha Muhammad Ali of nearby Saffuriyya, troops shot indiscriminately at villagers collecting dura in the fields and destroyed the houses; forty people were killed, and the returnees were re-occupied and expelled for good in mid-July (PDF p.183). By 29 June a target list of large Galilee villages — Kuwaykat, Amqa, Lubya, Majd al-Krum, Mghar, Malkiyya, Saffuriyya and others — had all been taken within ten days; in Majd al-Krum an intelligence officers’ row let half the village return from exile, while at Mghar the commander, interpreting Plan Dalet as requiring expulsion of only the Muslims, executed several Muslims on the piazza to ‘persuade’ the rest to flee; from then on selection in mixed villages was reserved to the intelligence officers, the Druze fully collaborating and Christians in part-Druze villages generally spared (PDF p.183-184).
Saffuriyya (PDF p.184-186) was one of the first villages bombarded from the air; Abu Salim, twenty-seven, stayed to fight after the ALA officer advised flight, saw his mother killed entering the Church of Annunciation, and in 2001, at eighty, still wanted to buy his old house back but could not rebuild his family. Its people fled to Nazareth — today sixty per cent of whose residents are internal refugees — and built the Safafra neighbourhood facing their old village, watching settlers turn it into the moshav Zippori. The neighbouring Mujaydil (PDF p.186-187), 2,000 people, is given a full local history — its 1925 elected council, its churches, schools, clinic and eighteenth-century mill that even Nahalal used — to show that what the Nakba destroyed was not only houses or fields but a whole community; in 1950 its Christians refused a papally-brokered return without their Muslim neighbours, after which Israel destroyed half the houses and a mosque.
Operation Palm Tree (PDF p.187-188): Mujaydil fell in Operation ‘Dekel’ (Palm Tree) for Nazareth and its villages; Jewish National Fund pine forests now cover many destroyed villages, Lubya among them, where sixty people lost their lives. At Qaqun, retaken by the Iraqis after its May occupation, Operation ‘Kippa’ (3 June) introduced another cleansing synonym, nikkuy (‘cleaning’), and was the first assault for which the Military Police had set up prison camps nearby for the expelled — to avoid ending up, as at Tantura and Ayn al-Zaytun, with too many men of ‘military age’ (ten to fifty) on their hands, “many of whom they therefore killed” (PDF p.188).
In Between Truces (PDF p.189-192): the truces, like 15 May, were landmarks for the ‘real war’ but irrelevant to the cleansing — easier, indeed, during the fighting, when Lydd and Ramla’s 70,000 were expelled. Between 9 and 18 July hundreds of thousands were expelled; scores of UN observers roamed the country “‘observing’ the barbarisation and killings” without acting (PDF p.189). The exception was Count Folke Bernadotte, who arrived 20 May, demanded the refugees’ unconditional return, repeated it in his final report, and was murdered by Jewish terrorists in September; the December Resolution 194 is his posthumous legacy (PDF p.189-190). From July the Foreign Ministry and intelligence worked together on a PR campaign for “a liberal democracy in the making”, with Yaacov Shimoni as liaison, urging a faster pace while the world’s attention was elsewhere (PDF p.190-191). The 6 July order to the Carmeli, Golani and Brigade Seven was “Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages”, ‘enemy’ being understood as defenceless villagers; Operation Palm Tree took Amqa, Birwa — Mahmoud Darwish, Safsaf, Iqrit, Kfar Bir’im, Dawaymeh, Beersheba, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, Palestine Conciliation Commission’s birthplace — Damun, Khirbat Jiddin and Kuwaykat, each over 1500 people, with Brigade Seven remembered in oral histories as ‘terrorists’ and ‘barbarous’; in mixed villages half the population, mostly Muslims, was expelled and Christian refugees resettled in their places, while Shafa’Amr, occupied 16 July, was exceptionally left alone by its local commander — to Yigael Yadin’s bewilderment when he visited: “The people of the town roam about freely” (PDF p.191-192).
Operation Policeman (PDF p.192-199): the six coastal villages south of Haifa resisted for ten days of fighting; the first three fell before the second truce, the other three after it took effect, in an operation the High Command told UN observers was a ‘policing activity’. Tirat Haifa (5,000 people, Tirat al-Lawz, ‘Tira of the almonds’), bombarded by the Irgun as early as December 1947, had its women and children bused to the West Bank under British ‘mediation’ between 23 April and 3 May and fell to combined elite troops on 16 July (PDF p.193-194). Kfar Lam fell the same day; its intelligence file’s note that some villagers were Samaritans originally Jews fed Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s continuity thesis, which in July 1948 meant not that its people could stay but that their village was “rightfully returned” (PDF p.194-195). Ayn Hawd, also taken 16 July, was left intact by Bohemian soldiers who recognised its beauty and later turned it into the artists’ colony Ein Hod; one Abu al-Hija family held out in the nearby canyons, built a new Ayn Hawd the state refused to recognise until semi-recognition in 2005, and the colony’s coffee bar ‘Bonanza’ sits in the original village mosque (PDF p.195-197). Ben-Gurion ordered the effort against the last three villages to continue into the second truce; Operation Policeman (Shoter) began 25 July, and Ijzim (3,000) held out three more days against hundreds of soldiers and the air force — Israeli intelligence reported on entering on 28 July: “our forces collected 200 corpses, many of them civilians killed by our bombardment”, while survivors recall 130 villagers died, and the population was expelled to Jenin (PDF p.197-198). Ayn Ghazal was bombed on 26 July as its people broke the Ramadan fast in the street; seventeen men selected, largely for 1936 Revolt participation, were killed on the spot and the rest expelled, as at Jaba the same day (PDF p.198-199).
Operation Dani (PDF p.199-203): the ‘innocent-sounding’ codename for Lydd and Ramla. Lydd — the ‘city of the mosques’, today Lod — was bombarded from the air on Yigal Allon’s order, the first city attacked that way, after Glubb Pasha withdrew the Legion units stationed nearby although both towns lay in the designated Arab state; the men who surrendered from the Dahamish Mosque were massacred inside it, and Palestinian sources count 426 killed in the mosque and nearby streets, 176 bodies found in the mosque (PDF p.199-200). On 14 July about 50,000 people were marched out towards the West Bank, more than half already refugees, systematically robbed at roadblocks of gold jewellery, money and belongings — the account relies on Salim Tamari’s 1998 Journal of Palestine Studies study of the eyewitness Spiro Munayar, who worked in the hospital alongside Dr George Habash — while two embedded American correspondents reported the corpses and called the charge ‘ruthlessly brilliant’ without probing the Palestinian toll (PDF p.200-201). Ramla (17,000) fell after Lydd despite notables’ agreement that its people could stay: 3,000 were rounded up to a prison camp and the city looted on 14 July, and Yitzhak Rabin, the commander on the spot, recalled Ben-Gurion answering Allon’s question about the population of both towns by waving his hand in a gesture that said: “Drive them out!” (PDF p.202). Rabin estimated 50,000 people were ‘transferred’ from the two towns in all. The Legion’s tenacious defence of Latrun — Israel’s biggest defeat of the war — bred a revenge taken in June 1967 not on the Jordanians but on the Latrun valley villages Beit Nuba, Yalu and Imwas, expelled and wiped out then (PDF p.202-203).
Operation Palm Tree continues (PDF p.203-206): Ben-Gurion’s 11 July diary ordered Nablus occupied and heavy bombardment of Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and Beirut; Nablus was not taken, but Nazareth was. Its 500 ALA volunteers under Madlul Bek first turned back fleeing residents — the Arab governments wanted no more refugees — then surrendered the city at 10pm on 16 July; the supreme commander Moshe Karmil ordered total eviction of the 16,000 remaining, 10,000 of them Christians, and Ben-Gurion countermanded it because “Here the world is watching us”, leaving Nazareth the only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel — though intelligence officers still seized listed ‘undesirables’ house to house, Palti Sela carrying seven ‘good notebooks’ of people allowed to stay, 1600 by his 2002 account (PDF p.203-204). Hittin, defended by 25 poorly equipped volunteers above the Sea of Galilee, was cleansed brutally by Brigade Seven on 17 July, ending Operation Palm Tree (PDF p.204-205). July also brought ethnic cleansing from the air as a major tool — a Northern Command report of 17 July reads: “Our forces began harassing the only road leading out of Sejra where a throb of refugees were making their way.” (PDF p.205-206) — and the first extension to the Negev: of 90,000 Bedouin in 96 tribes, eleven tribes were expelled at once and nineteen forced into closed-military-area reservations; the Jubarat were partly expelled in July, wholly transferred in mid-October, and uprooted again to the east bank in 1967, and the Bedouin expulsion continued until 1959 (PDF p.206).
The Truce That Wasn’t (PDF p.206-211): news of the second truce (from 18 July) sped up operations — Qula and Khirbat Shaykh Meisar taken, bringing the tally to two towns and sixty-eight villages added to the 290 already occupied and cleansed — and the truce “was violated the moment it came into effect”: Damun, Imwas, Tamra, Qabul and Mi’ar taken in its first ten days, completing the Western Galilee (PDF p.207). In the south the Egyptians held the Faluja pocket until the end of the year while the northern Negev villages were stormed in quick succession; only Egyptian-held Gaza and Jordanian-held West Bank were protected. Through August, isolated villages were cleansed in front of the UN observers, and modifications were made inside occupied areas — at Isfiya the Druze notables’ request to expel ‘their’ Bedouin was declined only because the commander had no time, the Bedouin remaining as a discriminated ‘lesser’ community (PDF p.208). The occupied Arab-state lands were obfuscated as ‘administered areas’ until May 1949, when all distinctions disappeared, “along with the villages, the fields and the houses – all ‘dissolved’ into the Jewish State of Israel” (PDF p.208-209).
The Collapse of the Second Truce (PDF p.209-211): the UN averted an attack on Qunaitra, for which Yadin’s order was: “Your orders … are to destroy the city” (PDF p.209); the order was implemented literally in 1974, when Israel destroyed Qunaitra before returning it a ghost town. Three areas Ben-Gurion still deemed essential remained in August — Wadi Ara, the western upper Galilee and the southern Negev. September’s Operation Autumn, a third attempt on Wadi Ara with Qalqilya and Tul-Karem, was repelled by all fifteen Wadi Ara villages aided by Iraqi officers who stayed behind — Captain Abu Rauf Abd al-Raziq at Taytaba and Qalansuwa, Major Abd al-Karim and Captain Farhan at Zayta and Jat, Khalid Abu Hamud at Attil — and the area was annexed only when Abdullah ceded it in the spring of 1949 (PDF p.209-210). Operation Snir against the Golan was trimmed to the failed ‘Bereshit’ attack on Outpost 223. In the central Galilee, Ilabun was raided and emptied but not yet taken, while mostly-Christian Tarshiha’s decision to stay saved it — although the 19 September orders for Operation Alef Ayn read: “Tarshiha has to be evicted to the north.” (PDF p.211).
PDF p.212 is the divider page for Chapter 8, “Completing the Job: October 1948–January 1949”; its text begins on PDF p.213.
Chapter 8: Completing the Job: October 1948–January 1949 — PDF p.213-232
The epigraphs are the US State Department’s 1999 Kosovo report — over 1.5 million ethnic Albanians, at least 90% of the province’s Kosovo population, forcibly expelled — and the Badil Resource Centre’s figures: “In 1948, 85% of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees”, and more than 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons at the beginning of 2003 (PDF p.213).
October opens (PDF p.213-214) with the upper Galilee still held by Palestinian volunteers reinforced by al-Qawqji’s ALA in villages all within the UN-designated Arab state, Lebanon’s final futile gesture of shelling the Manara settlement, and the lower Galilee volunteers left with one artillery gun in Ilabun; whatever resistance remained was wiped out by Operation Hiram in the middle of the month — named for the biblical king of Tyre, one of its targets in an expansionist scheme for the upper Galilee and southern Lebanon, both captured within two weeks.
Operation Hiram (PDF p.214-216): the Israeli air force dropped about 10,000 leaflets calling on the villagers to surrender without promising immunity from expulsion; none did, and the villages turned themselves into strongholds — fifty men defending Ramaysh, Saffuriyya refugees under the ALA’s Abu Hammud defending Deir al-Qasi, Abu Ibrahim defending Kfar Manda. The ALA volunteers withdrew only after desperately fighting, often disobeying orders to leave; four hundred lost their lives in those October days. Massive air bombardment left Rama, Suhmata, Malkiyya and Kfar Bir’im heavily pounded; only Rama was left intact. Most upper Galilee villages 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 (PDF p.215). The question is now why some were allowed to remain — “obviously almost always as a result of the decision made by a local commander”: Rama’s size and large Druze community probably saved it, while tihur in October could also mean selective search-and-expulsion; Christians, first deported with Muslims, were offered return for a vow of allegiance, most refused, and the army then treated Christian and Muslim villages alike where there was no Druze population; waning ‘cleansing stamina’ in the last days may explain why Tarshiha, Deir Hanna and Ilabun survive (PDF p.215-216).
Ilabun (PDF p.216-217): half its people live today in refugee camps in Lebanon. The community had taken refuge in its two churches; the commander, blaming them for the mutilation of two Jewish bodies, mowed down several young men in front of the congregation, evicted the rest and led the men of ten to fifty away as prisoners of war; then, after the column had set out for the Lebanese border with several dying on the way, he changed his mind and ordered the Christians — half the deportees — to turn back: 750 people returned (PDF p.216-217).
War Crimes During the Operation — opening (PDF p.217): Pappe asks why, of all the villages conquered in the final days of October, Sa’sa and Safsaf were exposed to such barbarity while others were exempted. At Sa’sa, after occupation, Brigade Seven soldiers ran amok firing randomly in houses and streets, killing fifteen villagers and wounding many, then demolished all the houses except a few taken over by members of Kibbutz Sasa, built on the village’s ruins; its survivors, mostly in the Naher al-Barid and Rashidiyya camps in Lebanon, preserve their testimonies, but the chronicle “cannot easily be constructed from the archival material” (PDF p.217). The account continues in part 5. See Sa’sa.
War Crimes During the Operation — continuation (PDF p.218-219): Safsaf, taken 29 October 1948 by a mixed Jewish and Druze unit, saw seventy men blindfolded and summarily shot — a case Israeli archival documents confirm — while the oral testimonies tell of four women and a girl raped in front of the villagers and a pregnant woman bayoneted; the rest were driven to the Lebanese border, leaving elderly men and five boys to bury the dead. Bulayda, the last village taken in Operation Hiram, held out ten days with Lebanese soldiers fighting alongside its people, who fled before the entry rather than undergo Safsaf’s horrors; by 31 October the Galilee was occupied in its entirety (PDF p.218-219).
Mopping-Up Operations (PDF p.219-221): November-December ‘second-thought’ cleansing of villages not originally targeted, added to eradicate the Galilee’s ‘Arabic’ character — Arab al-Samniyya (200 people) and Deir al-Qasi (2,500) among them. Iqrit (PDF p.220-221): occupied without a fight 31 October 1948, its Maronite people evicted 6 November on a promise of return in two weeks; the Israeli Supreme Court declared the eviction illegal on 31 July 1951, the IDF fabricated a formal expulsion order dated 6 November 1948, and on Christmas Eve 1951 the army demolished the village, sparing only church and cemetery — the same treatment given Kfar Bir’im and Ghabisiyya, which had also won court rulings. Mopping-up ran into April 1949 and included a further massacre at Khirbat Wara al-Sawda, where Battalion 103 burned the al-Mawassi Bedouin village’s houses and executed fourteen people in November 1948 (PDF p.221).
Israel’s Anti-Repatriation Policy (PDF p.221-225): demolition of all evicted villages from August 1948, deliberately accelerated so no houses would remain to return to, against the Palestine Conciliation Commission’s call and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (11 December 1948), which gave refugees the choice of unconditional return and/or compensation. A third effort was demographic control by the Minority Unit, established 12 January 1949 from Druze, Circassians and Bedouin, whose arrest-and-deport operations and shooting of ‘infiltrators’ — often farmers trying to harvest their fields — are quoted from its own reports; UN observers reported to the Secretary General (who did not publish it) that Israeli policy was ‘uprooting Arabs from their native villages in Palestine by force or threat’ (PDF p.222-225).
A Mini Empire in the Making (PDF p.225-227): plans, December 1948-March 1949 (best known Operation ‘Snir’), to take Jenin and Nablus and southern Lebanon, set aside at the Jordanian armistice; Ben-Gurion’s committee of five heard Yitzhak Greenbaum argue a West Bank takeover was impossible because ‘It would be impossible to do there what was done in the rest of Palestine’. In southern Lebanon thirteen villages were captured and executions followed — over eighty villagers in Hula on 31 October 1948, more than 100 in Saliha; Shmuel Lahis, who single-handedly executed thirty-five people, got seven years, was pardoned and rose high in government. The Red Cross in November 1948 found the Galilee devastated: able men imprisoned, crops rotting, malaria, typhoid, rickets, diphtheria and scurvy spreading (PDF p.225-227).
Final Cleansing of the South and the East (PDF p.228-229): the Negev reached in November 1948, Umm Rashrash (today Eilat) in March 1949; Isdud and Majdal taken and expelled to Gaza, Majdal’s remaining several thousand expelled in December 1949. December cleansed the Negev Bedouin — Tarabins expelled to Gaza (1,000 allowed to remain), Tayaha split between Gaza and Jordan, al-Hajajre pushed to Gaza, al-Azazmeh returning only to be driven out again 1950-54 by Ariel Sharon’s Unit 101 — completing the Beersheba district’s depopulation at ninety per cent. A fifth attack on Wadi Ara failed against the villages’ ‘Army of Honour’. Operation ‘Python’ took Beersheba (21 October; its mayor told ‘We need land, not slaves’) and Qubayba and Dawaymeh (PDF p.228-229).
The Massacre in Dawaymeh (PDF p.230-232): see Dawaymeh. Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight, on Yigael Yadin’s order to include psychological warfare and ‘treatment’ (tipul) of citizens, killed 455 missing by the mukhtar’s count (around 170 of them children and women) on 28 October 1948; participating soldiers’ own reports to the High Command describe babies’ skulls cracked open, women raped or burned alive, men stabbed to death. Pappe: “Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchering”, and none of the Israelis was ever tried for war crimes. From November 1948 to the summer 1949 agreements another eighty-seven villages were occupied, thirty-six emptied by force (PDF p.230-232).
Chapter 9: Occupation and its Ugly Face — PDF p.234-259
Epigraphs (PDF p.234) set the US State Department’s 1999 Kosovo report on separating ‘military aged’ Albanian men beside the IDF order of 13 April 1948 to take captive any suspicious Arab of military age, between ten and fifty, and figures for Palestinian children arrested since 2000 and 670,000 Palestinians detained since 1967. About 8,000 Palestinians spent the whole of 1949 in prison camps (PDF p.234-235).
Inhuman Imprisonment (PDF p.235-238): routine search-and-arrest operations (‘Operation Comb’, ‘Distillation’) held males from ten to fifty in huge pens, then five centralised prison camps — the largest at Jalil, a second at Atlit; Ben-Gurion’s diary gives 9,000 prisoners. Haifa’s first operation hunted ‘returnees’ and undefined ‘suspicious Arabs’ from the dreaded Hadar headquarters at 11 Daniel Street; lacking a new ID card could bring a year and a half in prison. The February 1948 Hagana guidelines already ran a selection: ‘Releasing a captive or eliminating him needs an approval of the intelligence officer.’ Three labour camps (Sarafand, Tel-Litwinski, Umm Khalid) used prisoners as forced labour to ‘strengthen the Israeli economy’, as the Red Cross dryly reported on 11 November 1948; some inmates were kept until 1955. A Tantura survivor’s testimony, transcribed by Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, describes three days without food, quarrying on a potato and half a dried fish, and Tantura men put in a cage with oil poured on their clothes after twenty escaped (PDF p.235-238).
Abuses Under Occupation (PDF p.239-246): Red Cross reports depict collective abuse worst in Jaffa — bodies of curfew-breakers shot under orders, systematic official looting of the British food stores (100 truckloads a day out of Jaffa from 15 May 1948), mosques and churches profaned despite guarantees, and military governor Yitzhak Chizik’s complaints (‘They do not stop beating people’) ending in his July 1948 resignation. Haifa’s remaining 3-5,000 Palestinians were ordered on 1 July 1948 into Wadi Nisnas by 5 July — ‘ghettoising’, in Bulus Farah’s word at the meeting — and continued to be robbed and abused there. The Rape section (PDF p.244-246) works from three sources — Red Cross/UN case reports (including a Brigade Seven kidnapping of an eighteen-year-old for seventeen days from 9 December 1948), Israeli archives and Ben-Gurion’s diary ‘Rape Cases’ sub-sections, and oral history, including the platoon at Kibbutz Nirim that on 12 August 1949 captured a twelve-year-old girl, gang-raped her over days and murdered her, twenty-two soldiers taking part, the severest sentence two years for the killer (publicised by Ha’aretz 29 October 2003).
Dividing the Spoils (PDF p.246-251): the Committee for Arab Affairs (August 1948) chose a resettlement programme for Syria, Jordan and Lebanon to pre-empt repatriation pressure, leaving unaddressed the money and property expropriated from 1,300,000 Palestinians; committee member David Horowitz estimated the property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds and suggested ‘Maybe we can sell it to American Jews?’ Joseph Weitz demanded all village land — ‘400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam’ to prevent return — and Ben-Gurion moved final decisions to a committee of two, Weitz and Ezra Danin. The US State Department’s May 1949 pressure (repatriation as precondition for peace, sanctions threatened, loan withheld) met offers of 75,000 returnees plus 25,000 family reunifications, then of taking in the Gaza Strip, and died with a spring 1949 personnel reshuffle, while Ben-Gurion intensified settling immigrants in the confiscated homes. Israel had taken over 3.5 million dunam; the Custodian device turned confiscated property into state lands belonging to the Jewish nation, sold a million dunam to the Jewish National Fund in December 1948 and a further quarter million in 1949 (PDF p.246-251).
Desecration of Holy Sites (PDF p.252-255): all Waqf endowments were confiscated via the Custodian to the state and sold on; church lands in destroyed villages likewise. A registry follows: Majdal and Qisarya mosques turned into restaurants, Beersheba’s into a shop, Ayn Hawd’s into a bar; Sarafand’s hundred-year-old mosque bulldozed 25 July 2000 despite a petition to Ehud Barak; Ayn al-Zaytun’s remains made a milk farm in 2004; Hittin’s mosque sealed with barbed wire and its stones removed; Nabi Rubin blown up 1993, Wadi Hawarith ruined 2000, Ayn Ghazal’s maqam burned 2002, Baysan’s Araba’in mosque arsoned 2004, al-Salam mosque in Zarughara bulldozed 2003; Wadi Unayn, Yazur, Samakiyya, Kfar Inan, Daliyya and Abassiyya mosques turned into synagogues, Lifta’s into a mikweh; mosques of ‘unrecognised villages’ still threatened (PDF p.252-255).
Entrenching the Occupation and The Land Robbery: 1950-2000 (PDF p.255-259): the remaining about 150,000 Palestinians, now citizens, were put under military rule on the British emergency regulations until 1966; massive expulsions continued until 1953 (last village at gunpoint Umm al-Faraj), Negev Bedouin expulsions to 1962. The JNF’s Settlement Department decided each flattened village’s fate — settlement or forest (‘making the desert bloom’); the Law for Absentee Property (1950), JNF Law (1953), the 1960 land laws and the Law of Agricultural Settlement (1967) barred non-Jews from buying, leasing or sub-letting over ninety per cent of Israel’s land. The Palestinian minority, seventeen per cent of the population, was left three per cent of the land, only two per cent buildable, holding today 1.3 million people; one study estimates seventy per cent of their land confiscated or made inaccessible. The JNF’s early-1960s Operation ‘Finally’ (Sof-Sof) mostly failed against Galilee villagers’ steadfastness (PDF p.255-259).
Chapter 10: The Memoricide of the Nakba — opening — PDF p.261-270
Chapter 10 (divider PDF p.260) argues the dispossession was compounded by erasure of memory — see Memoricide. The Reinvention of Palestine (PDF p.261-263): the Naming Committee (in place 1920, reconvened by Ben-Gurion July 1949 as a JNF sub-division) Hebraized the geography of the seized villages on an ideological, not scholarly, basis; JNF land in Greater Jerusalem passed in the early 1980s to the Elad settlers’ NGO for the ‘Judaization’ of Silwan. Virtual Colonialism and the JNF (PDF p.263-265): conifer planting made the country look European and hid the villages — eleven per cent indigenous species in Israel’s forests, ten per cent pre-1948 — while at Mujaydil olive trees split the pines planted over them and popped up in defiance; JNF signs present Palestinian fig, almond and olive trees as ‘wild’, and the parks’ mission is concealment and denial. The JNF Resort Parks in Israel (PDF p.265-270): the Birya Forest (20,000 dunam, Safad region) never mentions the six villages it conceals, and presents Ayn al-Zaytun as a medieval Jewish site; Ramat Menashe Park covers ten villages, its Arabic village names presented as natural features; the Jerusalem Forest (one million trees, 4,500 dunam, planted 1967) covers Ayn Karim, Beit Mazmil, Beit Horish, Deir Yassin, Zuba, Sataf, Jura and Beit Umm al-Meis, its Palestinian terraces always ‘ancient’; at Sataf the JNF invented ‘bustanof’ for Palestinian agriculture marketed as biblical. Pappe quotes Walid Khalidi: ‘It is a platitude of historiography that the victors in war get away with both the loot and the version of events’, and closes the part read: two factors defeat an equitable solution — the Zionist ideology of ethnic supremacy and the ‘peace process’ (PDF p.261-270). Chapter 11 begins in part 6.
Chapter 11: Nakba Denial and the ‘Peace Process’ — PDF p.272-284
The epigraphs are UN GA Resolution 194 (11 December 1948) on return and compensation, and the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (2003) supporting return of refugees (PDF p.272).
The opening (PDF p.272-273) sets the post-1948 dispersal and argues the UN created UNRWA in 1950 instead of involving the International Refugee Organization — at Israel’s and Zionist organisations’ urging, to prevent comparison with Jewish refugees in Europe and because the IRO recommended repatriation first. UNRWA was not committed to return, but to employment, subsidies, camps, schools and medical centres for approximately one million refugees. Palestinian nationalism re-emerged centred on the Right of Return, embodied in 1968 in the Palestine Liberation Organization, and had to confront two denials: peace brokers sidelining the Palestinian cause, and Israel’s categorical refusal to acknowledge the Nakba or accept legal/moral accountability.
First Attempts at Peace (PDF p.274): the Lausanne conference of spring 1949, based on Resolution 194 and centred on return, with the Palestine Conciliation Commission holding unconditional return, an equal two-state division and internationalised Jerusalem as the basis for peace. Everyone accepted — the US, UN, Arab world, Palestinians, and Sharett — except Ben-Gurion and King Abdullah, who “deliberately torpedoed” it to partition what was left between them; Pappe calls it the only comprehensive peace attempt in the conflict’s history.
Towards Pax Americana (PDF p.274-275): after a lull to 1967, the US took the reins to exclude the Russians, and based peace on the balance of power, i.e. on the Israeli ‘Peace Camp’s’ guidelines. Israel drafted new guidelines after 1967, taking advantage of the new geopolitical reality its June war had created, but also mirroring the internal political debate that emerged inside Israel itself, following what Israeli PR quickly dubbed the “6-Day War” (purposely invoking biblical overtones). The internal Israeli debate between ‘redeemers’ (Greater Israel) and ‘custodians’ (Peace Now) is described, with the custodians accepting settlements in Greater Jerusalem and the blocs, so the areas offered shrank as building progressed; the US paraded this as concessions — one jaw of a pincer, the other portraying the Palestinian viewpoint as ‘terrorist, unreasonable and inflexible’.
The Exclusion of 1948 from the Peace Process (PDF p.276-277): Israel’s three axioms — the conflict began in 1967, so only the West Bank and Gaza (twenty-two per cent) are at issue; everything there is further divisible, including people and resources; and nothing before 1967, including the Nakba, is negotiable, which removes the refugees and makes return a ‘non-starter’. The Jordanian option (negotiating the territories with King Hussein via Kissinger, on the stated Labour view that “the Palestinians as non-existent”), Anwar al-Sadat’s 1977 autonomy version under Menachem Begin, the First Intifada of 1987, and the stalled 1991 Madrid conference follow. The axioms were re-articulated by Yitzhak Rabin — assassinated 4 November 1995 — whose record Pappe lists from 1948 through the 1987 ‘break bones’ order, deportations, and Oslo B’s “several Bantustans”.
Oslo and the Right of Return (PDF p.278-281): the Oslo Accords from September 1993, whose architects were Peace Camp intellectuals, totally absenting the Nakba, seemed to find a partner in Yasir Arafat; the sequel was a vicious circle of suicide attacks and harsher retaliation, Netanyahu (1996-1999), and Barak’s Labour return in 1999. At Camp David in summer 2000 the Palestinians expected the promised final-phase discussion of the three essentials — return, Jerusalem, settlements — and, advised by the Adam Smith Institute, put the Nakba at the top; only the Israeli plan, endorsed by the Americans, was on the table: about fifteen per cent of original Palestine in cantons bisected by highways, settlements, camps and walls, no Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, no refugee solution. Arafat refused to sign and was depicted as a warmonger. The humiliation, compounded by Sharon’s Haram al-Sharif visit in September 2000, triggered the Second Intifada. Pappe quotes at length, from Baroud’s Searching Jenin, Rafidia al-Jamal’s testimony on her sister Fadwa, a nurse in a white uniform, shot from a mosque rooftop during the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp on 3-15 April 2002 (PDF p.280-281); the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1405 fact-finding mission was abandoned after Israel refused cooperation. Camp David’s one positive, for Pappe, was briefly bringing 1948 to attention — Israelis felt a Pandora’s box had opened.
The conclusion (PDF p.282-284): the Knesset’s wall-to-wall consensus and law barring any discussion of return (the Law for Safeguarding the Rejection of the Right of Return, 2001, per endnote 4), Barak’s public commitment to it en route to Camp David, and the underlying fear that debating 1948 questions the moral legitimacy of Zionism itself and Israeli victimhood — Palestinians demand recognition as victims of “an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel”. After 9/11 and the Second Intifada, denial “re-emerged with a vengeance”. The 2003 Road Map, product of the Quartet as Pappe lists it (US, UN, Britain and Russia), adopted Sharon’s position and did not mention the 1948 refugees; the Geneva Accord, the peace camp’s best early-21st-century offer, confined ‘return’ to the West Bank and Gaza, did not acknowledge the cleansing, and secured Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state — endorsing, Pappe argues, Fortress Israel.
Chapter 12: Fortress Israel — PDF p.286-294
The epigraphs are Dov Weissglas in Ha’aretz, 6 October 2004 — the Gaza disengagement’s significance is “freezing of the peace process” and removing the Palestinian state package, including refugees, indefinitely, with US presidential and congressional blessing — and Arnon Soffer in the Jerusalem Post, 10 May 2004: “we have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day” (PDF p.286).
The chapter opens with the night raid of 24 January 2006 on Jaljulya, in which border police dragged out thirty-six women and deported eight to the West Bank, backed by government, courts and media (PDF p.286). The raid was ‘legal’ under the 31 July 2003 Knesset law barring Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from citizenship or residency, initiated by the liberal Zionist Avraham Poraz as a ‘defence measure’, passed with only twenty-five of 120 MKs opposed, and upheld by the Supreme Court on appeal (PDF p.287).
The ‘Demographic Problem’ (PDF p.287-294): all Zionist parties in the 2006 election centred countering the demographic problem — Sharon by the Gaza pullout, Labour by the Segregation Wall, right parties such as Yisrael Beytenu openly by ‘voluntary transfer’. Pappe traces the problem to Herzl’s 1895 diary (“We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed”) and Ben-Gurion’s December 1947 position that a state with only sixty per cent Jews could not be stable, and to Netanyahu’s December 2003 recycling: at forty per cent Arabs “this is the end of the Jewish state”, and at twenty per cent, if the relationship “becomes problematic, the state is entitled to employ extreme measures” (PDF p.288). Two million-scale Jewish immigrations (1949 and the 1980s) kept Palestinians near twenty per cent excluding the Occupied Territories. Olmert’s hitkansut — annexing large West Bank parts while leaving populous Palestinian areas outside — is “the core of Zionism in a slightly different garb: to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible”, explaining the 670-km Wall, more than twice the 315-km Green Line (PDF p.289). The recasting of Palestinians as ‘Muslims’ after 9/11 (Ma’ariv, 2 February 2003: “A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims”, a ‘ticking bomb’), Ruth Gabison’s “Israel has the right to control Palestinian natural growth”, and the shift from ‘problem’ to ‘danger’ — the point at which Mandate emergency policies become available — follow (PDF p.289-290). Return, Pappe argues, is anchored in international law and is realpolitik: without acknowledgement of the cleansing, settlement attempts are bound to fail, as Oslo did in 2000. Rejecting it pledges defence of a ‘white’ (Western) fortress in a ‘black’ (Arab) world, compared to the Crusaders’ Latin Kingdom and Apartheid South Africa (PDF p.291). The enclave’s construction from around 1922, the reluctant import of one million Arab Jews and the Mizrahim’s de-Arabisation (Shohat, Shitrit, Shenhav), the 1967 conquest of the rest of Palestine, and the 2000/2005 withdrawals shifting defence to nuclear capability, US support and the army, lead to a consensus for borders including about ninety per cent of Palestine, holding about 2.5 million Palestinians alongside six million Jews, with another 2.5 million in Gaza and the unwanted West Bank areas (PDF p.292-293). The majority claim is itself shaky — Soviet Christian influx, guest workers, secular Jewishness — but the goal, Pappe writes, is to keep the population ‘white’, i.e. non-Arab (PDF p.293). He closes: “Apartheid is particularly popular among Mizrahi Jews”, and the solution is for the last postcolonial European enclave to transform willingly into a civic and democratic state — possible, as Palestinian-Jewish relationships and most Palestinians’ refusal of de-humanisation show, but the window will not stay open forever (PDF p.293-294).
Epilogue: The Green House — PDF p.295-299
Tel-Aviv University’s Faculty Club, the Green House, was the Shaykh Muwannis mukhtar’s house; its menu invents a rich ‘Shaykh Munis’ — “the epitome of the denial” of the master plan finalised nearby in the Red House (PDF p.295). Pappe lists what the university’s economists, geographers and philosophers might have established: the confiscated Palestinian businesses, banks and positions; millions of dunams of cultivated refugee land, almost another ten million set aside by international law for a Palestinian state, and an additional four million dunam expropriated from Palestinian citizens; and the moral implications of thirty-one confirmed massacres listed by Palestinian sources from Israeli archives and oral histories — from Tirat Haifa, 11 December 1947, to Khirbat Ilin, 19 January 1949 — with at least another six possible (PDF p.295-296). The killings never ended: Kafr Kassim (forty-nine villagers, 29 October 1956), Qibya, Samoa (as printed), the Galilee in 1976, Sabra and Shatila 1982, Kfar Qana 1999 (as printed), Wadi Ara 2000, Jenin 2002 (PDF p.296). TAU historians mostly serve the hegemonic ideology, describing 1948 as a ‘war of independence’. Against them, growing numbers of Israelis join almost half a million ‘internal’ refugees in annual pilgrimages to destroyed villages on Independence Day, in Zochrot’s signage work, and in the Conferences for the Right of Return and Just Peace from 2004 (PDF p.296-297). The price of forgetting is that the 1948 ideology “continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes indiscernible, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today”, camouflaged by euphemisms (‘pullouts’, ‘redeployment’, ‘occupation’ for about fifteen per cent) — Greater Jerusalem’s Palestinians are undergoing cleansing as the book goes to print, those near the half-completed apartheid wall are likely next, and sixty-eight per cent of Israeli Jews in a recent poll wished the Palestinians of Israel ‘transferred’ (PDF p.297-298). The problem “was never its Jewishness” but “its ethnic Zionist character”; Palestinians “can never be part of the Zionist state and space” and will keep fighting, hopefully peacefully, otherwise as a whirlwind sucking in the Arab and Muslim worlds and Britain and the US (PDF p.298-299). The book closes with the summer 2006 attacks on Gaza and Lebanon: Hizbullah and Hamas withstanding, Iran and Syria possible future targets, “the risk of even more devastating conflict and bloodshed has never been so acute” (PDF p.299).
Endnotes — PDF p.300-325
The Endnotes, read in this part for the Preface and Chapters 1-12 and the Epilogue, are predominantly the archival and published citations behind the narrative — Ben-Gurion’s diary and archives, the Hagana and IDF archives, Weitz’s diary, Red Cross archives, brigade books, and the work of Khalidi, Morris, Flapan, Masalha, Palumbo and others — and are recorded chapter by chapter in the reading notes. Substantive endnote material not in the narrative includes: the list of forty Palestinian leaders targeted for assassination in the Ben-Gurion Archives correspondence of 1-7 January 1948 (Chapter 1, note 6, PDF p.302); the full Consultancy roster and the diary’s meeting list (Chapter 3, notes 16-18, PDF p.306-307); Cunningham’s testimony that the initial Arab outbreaks were spontaneous and that Jewish recourse to firearms may have prevented their subsiding (Chapter 4, note 1, PDF p.307-308); the Czechoslovak deal of $12,280,000 for 24,500 rifles, 5,200 machine guns and 54 million rounds (Chapter 4, note 10, PDF p.308); the Deir Yassin figures as endorsed contemporaneously (254; the Einstein letter’s 240) and Pappe’s gloss that the figure was likely deliberately inflated to sow panic, with Begin’s The Revolt on the stampede (Chapter 5, note 8, PDF p.312-313); the Acre typhoid sourcing and Sara Leibovitz-Dar’s conclusion, “What was done then with deep conviction and zealotry is now concealed with shame” (Chapter 5, note 35, PDF p.314); Palumbo’s finding from UN archives that the UN was aware of the summary-execution method (Chapter 7, note 8, PDF p.319); the psychological-warfare repertoire of Arabic radio broadcasts and loudspeaker trucks warning of poison gas and atomic weapons and playing recorded horror sounds (Chapter 8, note 27, PDF p.320-322); the literal name of the 2001 law, ‘The Law for Safeguarding the Rejection of the Right of Return’ (Chapter 11, note 4, PDF p.324); ‘disengagement’ glossed as Zionist newspeak, and the position of Ethiopia’s ‘black’ Jews (Chapter 12, notes 5 and 8, PDF p.325); and the Ha’aretz poll source of 9 May 2006 for the sixty-eight per cent ‘transfer’ figure (Epilogue, note 1, PDF p.325).
Chronology of Key Dates — PDF p.326-331
The book’s own chronology runs from Petah Tikva (1878) through the 1949 armistices, and is recorded entry by entry in the reading notes. Its framing follows the narrative: 1897 Syrkin’s pamphlet says Palestine “must be evacuated for the Jews”; 1919 Weizmann calls for a Palestine “as Jewish as England is English” and Churchill writes that introduced Jews take it for granted “the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience”; 1937 Peel proposes partition with part of the Palestinian population to be transferred; November 1947 “Mass expulsion by the Jews of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs begins”; 10 March 1948 Plan Dalet finalised; 30 March-15 May 1948 the coastal “clearing” operation; 22 April 1948 “Haifa cleansed of its Palestinian population”; October 1948 thousands expelled in Operation Hiram; end of February 1949, 2,000-3,000 villagers expelled from the Faluja pocket (PDF p.326-331).
Maps and Tables — PDF p.332-339
Seven maps (read in the original PDF in the part 6 spot-check fix round, because the text copy reproduces only their captions): (1) the area claimed by the World Zionist Organisation, presented at the Paris Peace Conference 1919 — the dashed proposed borders of the new Jewish state shade all of Palestine and extend beyond it, north to between Sidon and Tyre, east to Quneitra, Lake Tiberias and a strip east of the Jordan, and south-west from Rafah to al-Arish and in a triangle to Aqaba (PDF p.332); (2) the Peel Commission Partition Plan 1937, which became Partition Commission Plan A the following year — Jewish State (dotted) in eastern Galilee and on the Acre-Haifa coast, Mandated Territory (grey) as the Jaffa-Jerusalem corridor, Arab State (hatched) the hills, the south and the Negev (PDF p.333); (3) Plan B, 1938 — Mandated Territory (dotted) now Galilee and the Jerusalem Enclave, Jewish State (diagonal) the coastal strip to Tel Aviv/Jaffa, Arab State (horizontal) the Tulkarm/Nablus hills and the whole south (PDF p.334); (4) Plan C, 1938 — Mandated Territory in three blocks (Northern, Jerusalem Enclave, Southern/Beersheba), the Jewish State reduced to coastal strips, the Arab State the hills and the Gaza/inland strip (PDF p.335); (5) the UN Partition Plan, adopted as Resolution 181 (29 November 1947) — Jewish State (dotted) on the coast, around Nazareth and in the Negev block, Arab State (hatched) in the hills, the Safad block and the Gaza-Rafah strip, Jerusalem the grey UN corpus separatum (PDF p.336); (6) the 1949 Armistice Agreement — Israel (dotted), the West Bank under Jordanian control (hatched), the Gaza strip under Egyptian control (cross-hatched), demilitarized zones (grey) east of Lake Tiberias and on the Egyptian border (PDF p.337); (7) Palestinian villages depopulated, 1947-1949, the villages marked as unlabelled dots across the country, densest in Galilee, the coastal plain and the centre, with only towns named and no total printed (PDF p.338). Table 1, Palestinian and Jewish land ownership in percentages by district, 1945 (Palestinian/Jewish/Public & Other): Acre 87/3/10; Baysan 44/34/22; Beersheba 15/<1/85; Gaza 75/4/21; Haifa 42/35/23; Hebron 96/<1/4; Jaffa 47/39/14; Jerusalem 84/2/14; Jenin 84/<1/16; Nablus 87/<1/13; Nazareth 52/28/20; Ramla 77/14/9; Ramallah 99/<1/1; Safad 68/18/14; Tiberias 51/38/11; Tul-Karem 78/17/5 — sourced to Village Statistics (1945), with a note that “public ownership” derived from the Ottoman land-tenure system. Table 2, distribution of population by district, percentages of Palestinians and Jews, 1946 (Palestinian/Jewish): Acre 96/4; Baysan 70/30; Beersheba 99/<1; Gaza 98/2; Haifa 53/47; Hebron 99/<1; Jaffa 29/71; Jerusalem 62/38; Jenin 100/0; Nablus 100/0; Nazareth 84/16; Ramla 78/22; Ramallah 100/0; Safad 87/13; Tiberias 67/33; Tul-Karem 83/17 — sourced to the Supplement to a Survey of Palestine (June 1947) (PDF p.338-339).
Bibliography — PDF p.340-349
The alphabetical Bibliography runs Baroud through Yahav, in the editions Pappe used. Its opening (PDF p.340-345, read in part 6) lists among others Bar-Zohar’s Ben-Gurion biography, Begin’s The Revolt, Ben-Gurion’s Diary, In the Battle and Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, Dinur’s History of the Hagana, Flapan, both of Morris’s Birth volumes and Correcting A Mistake, Masalha’s three books, Khalidi’s All That Remains and Palestine Reborn, al-Khatib’s Palestine’s Nakba, and McGowan and Hogan on Deir Yassin. The remainder (PDF p.346-349, read in part 7) continues Palumbo’s The Palestinian Catastrophe; Pappe’s own earlier works, from Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 and The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 to A History of Modern Palestine; Porath; Prior (ed.), Speaking the Truth about Zionism and Israel; the Rivlin/Oren War of Independence: Ben-Gurion’s Diary and Rivlin (ed.), Olive-Leaves and Sword; Rogan and Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine; Sacher; Schölch; Segev’s 1949 — The First Israelis; Shafir; Shahak; the Alexandroni Brigade history; Salman Abu Sitta’s Atlas of the Nakbah (as printed); Sluzki’s Hagana Book and its Summary; Barbara and Charles D. Smith; Stein; Tal’s War in Palestine, 1948; Tamari; Teveth; Weitz’s My Diary, listed as a manuscript in the Central Zionist Archives (A246); and Yahav’s Purity of Arms, whose entry completes the Bibliography at the top of PDF p.349. The full entry-by-entry list is in the reading notes.
Index — PDF p.350-377
The Index is alphabetical, with locators in the book’s printed pagination, and is recorded entry by entry, in order, in the reading notes (PDF p.350-377). It covers the narrative, the Preface and the Endnotes alike: people (Ben-Gurion with the fullest entry, Abdullah, Weitz, Danin, Morris, Khalidi), villages and towns (Tantura, Lydd, Safsaf, Iqrit, Kfar Bir’im, Dawaymeh), brigades and operations (Plan D with a sub-entry on British responsibility, Operations Nachshon, Dani, Palm Tree, Policeman and Hiram), laws (the Law for Absentee Property and the land laws), topics (ethnic cleansing with sub-entries ‘as crime’, ‘definition’ and ‘methodology’; imprisonment, rape, war crimes, forestation, resort parks, the peace process and Nakba denial), and the works cited. It ends at Zu’biyya clan, part-way down PDF p.377.
Publisher’s advertisements — PDF p.378-383
Publisher’s matter, not Pappe’s text: advertisements for Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage; Kenizé Mourad, Our Sacred Land (heading as printed; the blurb calls it Our Sacred Earth); Mark LeVine, Why They Don’t Hate Us; Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami, The Palestine-Israeli Conflict: A Beginner’s Guide; and Lord Joel Joffe, The State vs. Nelson Mandela, each with blurb, praise quotations, format, price and ISBN as printed (PDF p.378-383). PDF p.384 is blank.
Key passages
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“In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15)
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“Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.16)
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“I want to make the case for the paradigm of ethnic cleansing and use it to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.19)
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“From planning stage to final execution, what occurred in Palestine in 1948 forms a clear-cut case, according to these informed and scholarly definitions, of ethnic cleansing.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.25)
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“Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.” — David Ben-Gurion to Mapai, 3 December 1947, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.76)
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“When I come now to Jerusalem, I feel I am in a Jewish (Ivrit) city.” — David Ben-Gurion to the Mapai Council, 7 February 1948, on entering through Lifta and Romema, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.96)
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“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris)” — Plan Dalet, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.66, p.110)
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“Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” — Mordechai Maklef’s orders to the Carmeli Brigade in Haifa, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.124)
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“Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.” — loudspeaker call to the people of Acre, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.130)
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“Our army marches forward and conquers Arab villages and their inhabitants flee like mice” — Yossef Weitz, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.140)
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“the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet” — Ben-Gurion to the Hagana brigade commanders, 11 May 1948, as summarised by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.159)
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“I lay them one by one in the grave.” — Mordechai Sokoler, who supervised the digging of Tantura’s mass graves, in 1999, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.168)
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“We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River.” — David Ben-Gurion, diary, 24 May 1948, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.176)
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“Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages” — order to the Carmeli, Golani and Brigade Seven, 6 July 1948, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.191)
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“Drive them out!” — what Ben-Gurion’s hand-wave gesture said, in Yitzhak Rabin’s recollection of the decision on Lydd and Ramla, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.202)
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“our forces collected 200 corpses, many of them civilians killed by our bombardment.” — Israeli intelligence officers of the northern front on entering Ijzim, 28 July 1948, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.198)
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“Half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out, half of their villages and towns were destroyed, and only very few among them ever managed to return.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.31)
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“We had to study the basic structure of the Arab village. This means the structure and how best to attack it.” — Moshe Pasternak, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.43-44)
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“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” — David Ben-Gurion, writing to his son in 1937, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.47)
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“It is clear, therefore, that the rejection or acceptance of the plan by the Palestinians would not have changed Ben-Gurion’s assessment of the plan’s deficiencies where he was concerned.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.62) — see the Section by section entry for Chapter 3 in the reading notes for the surrounding argument.
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“We need land, not slaves” — the occupying officer’s answer to Beersheba’s mayor beseeching him not to deport the people, recalled by Habib Jarada and quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.229)
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“Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchering.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.231)
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“We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the villages for cultivation and settlement. Some of these will become parks.” — Yossef Weitz to the Israeli government, June 1948, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.256)
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“It is a platitude of historiography that the victors in war get away with both the loot and the version of events.” — Walid Khalidi, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.270)
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“We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country” — Theodor Herzl, diary, 1895, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.288)
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“If the Arabs in Israel form 40 per cent of the population” — Binyamin Netanyahu, December 2003, quoted by Pappe, continuing “this is the end of the Jewish state” after the attribution in the original (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.288)
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“Israel has the right to control Palestinian natural growth” — Ruth Gabison, quoted by Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.290)
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“continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes indiscernible, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today” — Pappe, on the 1948 ideology in the Epilogue (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.297)
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“The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness” — Pappe’s Epilogue diagnosis, in full: the problem was never Jewishness, “it is its ethnic Zionist character” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.298-299)
Evidence the work relies on
For the whole book, as Pappe presents it in the text (the Endnotes for the Preface, Chapters 1-12 and the Epilogue were read in part 6, PDF p.300-325; the Bibliography was completed and the Index read in part 7, PDF p.346-377):
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Definitions and legal materials: the Hutchinson encyclopedia; US State Department experts and their Peck, Kosovo, case study; the UN’s 1993 discussion and the UN Council for Human Rights report as Pappe names it; Drazen Petrovic, ‘Ethnic Cleansing – An Attempt at Methodology’, European Journal of International Law 5/3 (1994); Wikipedia’s entry; the treaties creating the ICC; UN General Assembly Resolution 47/80 (1992) and Resolution 194 (1948); the Summary record of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 6 March 1995 (all PDF p.23-29, p.34, p.55).
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Prior scholarship Pappe builds on: Walid Khalidi, All That Remains; Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Gershon Shafir and Baruch Kimmerling on Zionism and colonialism; Walid Khalidi and Samih Farsoun on transfer and the end of the Mandate; Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe (1987); Dan Kurzman’s Genesis 1948 as a counter-example; Benny Morris’s archive-based work as the partial picture to be gone beyond (PDF p.17-19, p.29-30).
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Israeli archival and diary sources named in the text for the Consultancy and the plans: Ben-Gurion’s diary and published memoirs; the private archive of Israel Galili; Yossef Weitz’s diary; Ben-Gurion’s letters, notably to Moshe Sharett; the formal parts of the High Command (Matkal) meetings in the IDF archives; later interviews with, and autobiographies and memoirs by, Consultancy members (PDF p.63).
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The village files themselves and their products: the aerial maps of Sindiyana and Sabbarin, now in the Israeli State Archives; the files’ categories, ‘hostility’ index and 1947 ‘wanted’ lists; the recollections of Moshe Pasternak (1940 excursion; recalled later) and of a Shefeya recruit in 2002; Amatziya Cohen’s recollection of June 1938 (PDF p.40-46).
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Chapter 4 materials: the Hagana-archive protocol of the Long Seminar (the only Consultancy meeting with a protocol); Ben-Gurion’s diary entries and letters to Sharett for December 1947–March 1948, including the 19 February 1948 meeting recorded almost verbatim; Palti Sela’s December 1947 monthly intelligence report; the IDF-archive brigade orders and village lists for Plan Dalet released in the late 1990s; Moshe Kalman’s later account of Sa’sa; Shulamit Aloni’s recollection of political-officer indoctrination; and the New York Times reporting on Khisas and Sa’sa as Pappe cites it (PDF p.79-85, p.90, p.106, p.111-112).
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Chapter 5-6 materials: Uri Ben-Ari’s memoirs; the Carmeli Brigade’s war book and the Haifa survivors’ recollections; Dr Husayn Khalidi’s telegrams intercepted by Israeli intelligence and kept in the Israeli archives; the International Red Cross reports on the Acre typhoid epidemic and the 6 May 1948 Acre meeting minutes as Pappe presents them; the Hagana Archives testimony of Palti Sela; the Hagana military reports on Ayn al-Zaytun, Netiva Ben-Yehuda’s semi-fictional novella Between the Knots and Hans Lebrecht’s book; Ben-Gurion’s diary for April-June 1948, including the 5 June Safad entry and the Gaza poisoning report; the Kirkbride-Bevin correspondence of 13 May 1948; and the Alexandroni Brigade’s official war book on Tantura (PDF p.118, p.125, p.128, p.130, p.134-135, p.142-143, p.150-151, p.165).
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Chapter 6 (rest) – Chapter 8 (opening) materials: Teddy Katz’s 1999 survivor interviews on Tantura and his interview with Shlomo Ambar; Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib’s 1950 memoir account of Tantura; the brigade orders quoted for the Alexandroni’s move to the Upper Galilee, the Golani’s second Sa’sa attack, Operation Ben-Ami and Operation Hiram; the June 1948 supervising officer’s report on the brigades and the Qiryati commander’s 22 May 1948 bulldozer query in the Israeli military archives; Ben-Gurion’s diary for May-July 1948, including the 24 May Lebanon entry, the 5 June ‘tihur’ entry and the Weitz-assisted list of occupied and evicted villages, and the 11 July Nablus and bombardment order; the intercepted Hittin battalion telegram of 29 June 1948 and the intercepted Madlul Bek telegrams on Nazareth; Salim Tamari’s 1998 Journal of Palestine Studies account drawing on Spiro Munayar’s eyewitness testimony on Lydd, the contemporary reports of Keith Wheeler (Chicago Sun Times), Kenneth Bilby (New York Herald Tribune) and the London Economist, and Yitzhak Rabin’s recollection of the ‘Drive them out’ gesture; the Northern Command report of 17 July 1948 on Sejra; Palti Sela’s 2002 account of the Nazareth ‘good notebooks’; Mahmoud Issa’s work on Lubya’s remains; the survivor communities’ testimonies on Sa’sa; and the US State Department’s 1999 Kosovo report and the Badil Resource Centre’s figures as Chapter 8’s epigraphs (PDF p.167-176, p.179-183, p.188, p.198, p.200-202, p.204, p.206, p.213, p.217).
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Quoted contemporary statements: Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938, and to his son, 1937; Yossef Weitz’s 1940 diary entries; Moshe Sharett’s lecture of 13 December 1938; Leo Motzkin in 1917; Said al-Husayni in the Ottoman Parliament, 6 May 1911; Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s letter to Moshe Shertock (Sharett); Ben-Zion Luria’s letter to the JNF; Yitzhak Pundak to Ha’aretz in 2004; Rehavam Zeevi on Shimon Avidan (PDF p.14, p.28, p.35, p.41-42, p.47-49).
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Chapter 8 (rest) – Chapter 10 (opening) materials: Muhammad Abdullah Edghaim’s Safsaf testimony and the Israeli archival confirmation Pappe cites; the Iqrit court record as Pappe presents it (Supreme Court ruling of 31 July 1951 and the fabricated expulsion order); Battalion 103’s commanding officer’s report on Khirbat Wara al-Sawda; the Minority Unit’s Operation Number 10 report of 25 February 1949 and the Israeli intelligence reports of 4 December 1948 on shooting returnees; the UN observers’ unpublished October 1948 report to the Secretary General; the UN PCC’s Dawaymeh report of 14 June 1949, based on mukhtar Hassan Mahmoud Ihdeib’s testimony and corroborated by Israeli military archives, Amos Keinan’s late-1990s confirmation to Muhammad Bakri, and the participating soldiers’ own reports to the High Command; Habib Jarada’s Beersheba recollections; the Committee for Arab Affairs’ minutes as Pappe quotes them (Horowitz, Shitrit, Weitz, Shimoni); the Red Cross reports of November 1948 on the Galilee and on POW labour; Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib’s 1950 transcription of a Tantura survivor’s camp testimony; Yitzhak Chizik’s archived, partly censored reports and letters of June-July 1948; the transcribed 1 July 1948 Haifa meeting; Ben-Gurion’s diary ‘Rape Cases’ entries and the Ha’aretz report of 29 October 2003 on the Nirim case; Nur Masalha’s work on the post-1948 expulsion plans; and the JNF website and park signage as Pappe reads them for Birya, Ramat Menashe, the Jerusalem Forest and Sataf (PDF p.218, p.221-223, p.227, p.229-230, p.236-238, p.240-249, p.256, p.263-270).
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Chapters 11-12, Epilogue and Endnotes materials (PDF p.300-325): the Endnotes give the citations behind the whole narrative (see the Endnotes entry in Section by section). For Chapters 11-12 and the Epilogue specifically, Pappe’s text relies on Baroud (ed.), Searching Jenin for the Jenin testimony (Chapter 11, notes 2-3); the 2001 Right of Return law’s literal name (Chapter 11, note 4); Prior’s translation of Herzl’s 12 June 1895 diary entry and Ben-Gurion’s 3 December 1947 Mapai Centre speech in As Israel Fights p.255 (Chapter 12, notes 2-3); Netanyahu in Yediot Achronot, 17 December 2003 (Chapter 12, note 4); Gabison in Ha’aretz, 1 December, quoted in Hebrew (Chapter 12, note 6); Shohat on ‘Mizrahim’ (Chapter 12, note 7); and Ha’aretz, 9 May 2006 for the Epilogue’s sixty-eight per cent poll (Epilogue, note 1). The Chronology, Maps and Tables draw on Village Statistics (1945) and the Supplement to a Survey of Palestine (June 1947) (PDF p.339).
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Bibliography and Index (PDF p.340-377): the Bibliography gathers, alphabetically and in the editions used, every class of source above — the Ben-Gurion, Hagana, IDF, Central Zionist, Red Cross and UN archival material as cited in the Endnotes, the brigade and official histories, the diaries and memoirs, Palestinian testimony collections and village books, and the prior scholarship of Khalidi, Morris, Flapan, Masalha, Palumbo, Shlaim and others, together with Pappe’s own earlier books. The Index adds no evidence; it is a finding aid whose printed-page locators cover the narrative, Preface and Endnotes.
Analysis
Pappe’s method, across the whole book, is to fix a definition first and then measure a named, dated planning process against it. Chapter One assembles Ethnic Cleansing from encyclopaedia, US State Department, UN, scholarly and popular definitions before any narrative begins (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.23-29), so that the claim that 1948 is a ‘clear-cut case’ is a conclusion drawn against stated criteria, not a label applied afterwards. The narrative that follows is organised as a chain of agency: an ideology of exclusivity and Transfer, a surveillance apparatus (the Village Files), successive plans (A to Dalet), a decision-making body (the Consultancy), brigade-level orders, and then execution village by village and town by town. Individuals are named throughout — planners, commanders, and the officers who carried out or recorded particular expulsions and massacres — rather than left as abstractions, and dates, force strengths and population figures are given at each stage so the sequence can be checked against the Endnotes.
His evidence is presented in three layers, all now read. The narrative layer rests chiefly on Israeli archival and diary material as he presents it — Ben-Gurion’s and Weitz’s diaries, Hagana and IDF archive orders and reports, brigade books, and the Consultancy’s one surviving protocol — supplemented by Palestinian testimony and memoir (al-Khatib, survivor communities, refugee and village-book accounts), Red Cross and UN records, and contemporary press reporting. The Endnotes layer (PDF p.300-325) ties almost every episode to a file, diary entry or published work, and at several points carries substantive material the narrative does not, including the Czechoslovak arms figures, the Deir Yassin toll as endorsed contemporaneously, and the psychological-warfare repertoire. The Bibliography layer (PDF p.340-349) shows the breadth of that base in the editions used, from official and brigade histories in Hebrew to Palestinian, Israeli and international scholarship. Where his witnesses disagree — Tantura’s dead, Lydd and Ramla’s expelled, the prison-camp totals — Pappe generally prints the competing figures rather than settling on one; every such conflict found in the book is recorded under Open questions on this page.
His perspective is declared, not hidden. The book is written as an indictment by an author who says he is part of the society that stands condemned, is addressed first to the Palestinian victims, and argues a paradigm — ethnic cleansing in place of war — that he wants to govern both scholarship and public debate about 1948. That declared stance shapes selection and language throughout: Israeli operations are described in the vocabulary of the definition fixed in Chapter One, the Arab armies’ intervention is treated as a response to a cleansing already under way, and the later chapters read the ‘peace process’, the demographic debate and Memoricide as continuations of the same structure rather than as separate stories. The limits follow from the same choices, as the book itself presents them: the work is an argument built to replace a paradigm, its counter-positions (above all Benny Morris’s archive-based account) appear mainly as the partial picture to be gone beyond, and a number of its key quantities are given in more than one form in different chapters without reconciliation. Critiques of the book by others are not recorded here, because under this wiki’s rules they enter only when they are themselves ingested sources.
People, organizations, places and events
Ilan Pappe, David Ben-Gurion, Yehoshua Palmon, Eliyahu Sasson, Yossef Nachmani, Arab Liberation Army, Lifta, Balad al-Shaykh, Khisas, Qisarya, Amir Abdullah, Fauzi al-Qawuqji, Joseph Weitz, Moshe Sharett, Theodor Herzl, Charles Orde Wingate, Ben-Zion Luria, Ezra Danin, Yigael Yadin, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Sadeh, Yitzhak Rabin, Issar Harel, Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, Simcha Flapan, Consultancy, Haganah, Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund, UNSCOP, Arab Higher Committee, Red House, Village Files, Plan C, Dalet Plan, Balfour Declaration, Peel Commission, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, Operation Nachshon, Tantura, Ayn al-Zaytun, Sirin, Tiberias, Safad, Baysan, Golda Meir, Mordechai Maklef, Hugh Stockwell, Adib Shishakly, John Glubb, Amin al-Hussaini, Druze, Muslim Brotherhood, Bassa, Sa’sa, Lydd, Ramla, Nazareth, Saffuriyya, Tirat Haifa, Ayn Hawd, Ijzim, Ayn Ghazal, Hittin, Ilabun, Wadi Ara, Operation Palm Tree, Operation Dani, Operation Hiram, Folke Bernadotte, George Habash, Mahmoud Darwish, Safsaf, Iqrit, Kfar Bir’im, Dawaymeh, Beersheba, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, Palestine Conciliation Commission, UNRWA, Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat, Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin, Arik Sharon, Kafr Kassim, Oslo Accords, Peace Now, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Jenin, Zochrot
Concepts
Ethnic Cleansing, Nakba, Transfer, Bitachon, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Eretz Israel, Judaization, Memoricide, Right of Return, Fortress Israel, Apartheid
How it relates to other sources
Pappe’s account of Joseph Weitz and transfer extends the Weitz diaries at the centre of The Question of Palestine’s second chapter, and his description of Dalet Plan — a master plan for systematic and total expulsion, finalised 10 March 1948 — goes well beyond the Kimches’ description quoted by Said, of capturing strategic heights and filling the vacuum left by the departing British to create a contiguous Jewish-held area (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.122). His treatment of Zionism as a settler-colonial project whose logic was exclusivity and transfer is in agreement with Zionist Colonialism in Palestine’s account of Zionist colonisation as incompatible with the continued existence of the native population, and with The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine on the military society built under British sponsorship in 1936-39, including Charles Orde Wingate. Pappe carries both frames to their 1948 conclusion: where Sayegh’s five stages end at dispossession and Kanafani’s account ends with the Haganah apparatus that made 1947-48’s defeat possible, Pappe documents the apparatus in operation — village files, Plans A-D, the Consultancy and the brigade orders — and then follows its consequences, in the prison camps, land laws, Memoricide and Nakba denial, through to the 2006 present of his final chapters and Epilogue. On the post-1948 order he and Said converge from different starting points: Said’s account of the machinery that kept the refugees out and of a separate legal existence for the Arabs who stayed is given a pre-history and an operational history in Pappe’s anti-repatriation policy, Custodian and land-law chapters. The points of agreement and disagreement are recorded on the pages concerned, with attribution to each source.
Open questions
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The Preface dates the Zionist policy “first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks” to February 1947 (PDF p.16). The narrative in the parts so far read associates the retaliation policy with the period after the British decision of February 1947 but does not elsewhere in this part give February 1947 as its start; whether later chapters date the shift differently is to be checked as the ingest proceeds.
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The outcome is stated as “close to 800,000 people” uprooted with 531 villages destroyed (PDF p.16), as “three-quarters of a million uprooted Palestinians” (PDF p.31), and the Consultancy is said to have devised a plan for “the dispossession of one million Palestinians” (PDF p.64). The first two are the same outcome rounded differently; the third is the population whose fate the Consultancy’s policies were said to affect, including Palestinians in the area accorded to the Arab state. Recorded here so the final part can check the book’s closing figures against all three.
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Jewish land ownership is given as “around 5.8% of the land in Palestine” by the end of the Mandate (PDF p.42), “around six per cent” purchased by the end of the Mandate (PDF p.48), “only 5.8% was in Jewish ownership in 1947” (PDF p.56) and “less than six per cent of the total land area” (PDF p.60) — consistent roundings of the same figure as Pappe presents it, recorded for completeness.
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Pappe names the 1993 UN body the “UN’s Council for Human Rights (UNCHR)” (PDF p.24). The notes record the name as printed; the body’s exact identity is not established from the text read so far (the Endnotes fall in part 7).
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Ben-Gurion’s Paris hotel in August 1946 is printed “the Royal Monsue” (PDF p.50), apparently a slip in the text or its copy; recorded as printed, not corrected.
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The June 1938 joint village occupation is located by Pappe “on the border between Israel and Lebanon” (PDF p.40), a present-day phrasing for a 1938 event, before the State of Israel existed; recorded as printed.
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Plan Dalet’s draft is dated by Ben-Gurion’s diary to Sunday, 29 February 1948, while one Israeli military historian puts the first Consultancy discussion at 14 February 1948 (PDF p.108); both dates are recorded as Pappe gives them.
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The coveted territory is given as eighty per cent of Mandatory Palestine in the Jordan-agreement calculation (PDF p.70-71) and as seventy-eight per cent in the Plan D draft passage (PDF p.110); recorded as printed in both places.
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The New York Times report of the Sa’sa attack (night of 14–15 February 1948) is dated by Pappe to 16 April 1948 (PDF p.106); recorded as printed.
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Early-December exodus is given as almost 75,000 (PDF p.67) and, for Haifa alone, an exodus of about 15,000 of the elite at this time in January (PDF p.89) within a city population of 75,000 Palestinians (PDF p.85); the figures are different measures as presented and are recorded for the final part’s check.
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Printed page numbers are not shown in the text copy for part 1; if a later part’s copy shows them, citations should be completed retroactively where possible.
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Haifa’s Palestinians are given as 75,000 for the population the Jews wanted the port without (PDF p.122-123) and as 55,000-60,000 remaining after the elite’s departure (PDF p.122), with more than 50,000 still residing when the buffer was removed (PDF p.123); the figures measure different moments as Pappe presents them and are recorded for the final part’s check.
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The urbicide into May is introduced as “the occupation of Acre on the coast and Baysan in the east on 6 May 1948” (PDF p.129), while the Baysan narrative gives its surrender and passage into Jewish hands on 11 May (PDF p.131-132); both dates are recorded as printed.
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Tantura is said to have been captured by the Alexandroni Brigade on 21 May 1948 (PDF p.165) and, in the massacre narrative that follows, attacked on 22 May with “Tantura’s day came on 22 May” (PDF p.165); recorded as printed.
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The Haifa sub-district villages wiped off the map are introduced as fifteen, with fourteen names listed (PDF p.139-140); recorded as printed.
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The Tantura sapper is named Joel Skolnik and then Joel Solnik on the same page (PDF p.166); both spellings are recorded as printed.
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The selection age range at Ghuwayr is given as young men of ten to thirty taken to prison camps (PDF p.139), against the Hagana’s usual ‘males between the age of 10 and 50’ in the massacre villages (PDF p.140) and at Tantura (PDF p.166); recorded as printed in each place.
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Tantura’s dead are counted differently by each witness Pappe quotes: eighty-five seen executed, estimated 110 in all (Abu Mashaykh, PDF p.167); ninety witnessed (Fawzi Muhammad Tanj and Mahmud Abu Salih, PDF p.167); ninety-five bodies listed (Abu Fihmi, PDF p.168); 125 killed in summary executions (Abu Jamil, PDF p.167-168); and 230 bodies buried (Mordechai Sokoler, PDF p.168). The figures measure different things — executions witnessed against bodies buried — as Pappe presents them, and are recorded for the final part’s check.
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Tantura’s intelligence officer is spelled Shimshon Mashvitz (PDF p.166-167), Shimson Mashvitz (PDF p.168) and Shimon Mashvitz (PDF p.168); all spellings are recorded as printed.
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The al-Khatib testimony quoted at PDF p.169 has the Jews attacking Tantura “from 3 sides” and landing in boats from the seaside, against Pappe’s own narrative of an attack from all four flanks with no ‘open gate’ (PDF p.165); the testimony is quoted matter and the difference is recorded as printed in each place.
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Lydd and Ramla’s expelled are given as “altogether 70,000 people” for the two towns between the truces (PDF p.189), as about 50,000 marched out of Lydd alone on 14 July, more than half already refugees (PDF p.200), and as a total of 50,000 ‘transferred’ from both towns in Rabin’s estimate (PDF p.202); the three figures cannot all measure the same set and are recorded as printed for the final part’s check.
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Ijzim’s dead in the battle are given as 130 villagers by the survivors’ recollection and as 200 corpses collected by the entering Israeli intelligence officers, “many of them civilians killed by our bombardment” (PDF p.197-198); both figures are recorded as printed.
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Chapter 8’s opening (PDF p.217) says the February 1948 Sa’sa massacre “ended in the killing of fifteen villagers, including five children” — the figures Chapter 4 gives for Khisas in December 1947 (PDF p.85) — whereas Chapter 4’s own February Sa’sa account gives 35 demolished houses and 60–80 dead (PDF p.105-106). Chapter 8 gives the same fifteen killed for Sa’sa’s October occupation (PDF p.217). Recorded as printed in each place; whether the February figure at PDF p.217 is a slip for Khisas cannot be settled from the text read so far.
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Lydd is spelled “Lyyd” once in the Operation Dani narrative (PDF p.199), Ramla’s people are “defendants” where defenders is meant (PDF p.199-200), the Negev Bedouin follow their “semi-nomadic away of life” (PDF p.206) and an Iraqi officer is a “Sargent” (PDF p.210); all recorded as printed, not corrected.
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About 8,000 Palestinians are said to have spent the whole of 1949 in the prison camps (PDF p.234-235), while the prison-camps passage gives 9,000 prisoners according to Ben-Gurion’s diary (PDF p.236); the figures may measure different sets (whole-year inmates against total prisoners), recorded as printed for the final part’s check.
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The Safsaf witness is named Muhammad Abdullah Edghaim at his introduction and Mahmoud Abdulah Edghaim later on the same page (PDF p.218); both spellings recorded as printed.
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Haifa is said in Chapter 9 to have been cleansed on 23 April 1948 (PDF p.242) and elsewhere in the chapter ‘Haifa having been taken on 23 April’ (PDF p.252), against Chapter 5’s cleansing of 21-22 April 1948 (PDF p.122-124); recorded as printed.
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Iqrit’s fabricated order is said to have made it “just another depopulated village, like the other 530 Palestinian villages” (PDF p.220), against the Preface’s 531 villages destroyed (PDF p.16); recorded as printed.
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The Dawaymeh UN report as quoted speaks of the effect on “the moral of the peasantry” (PDF p.230), apparently morale as printed; recorded, not corrected.
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The Ministry of Interior official is spelled Israel Koening at PDF p.221, against Israel Koenig in the Koenig Report material read earlier; recorded as printed in each place.
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Deir Yassin’s toll is given in the narrative as ninety-three by recent research, with 170 as the earlier accepted number (PDF p.120), while the Endnotes give 254 as the contemporary figure endorsed at the time and 240 in the Einstein letter of 4 December 1948 (PDF p.312-313); Pappe’s endnote gloss is that the contemporary figure was likely deliberately inflated to sow panic. All figures recorded as printed in each place.
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The two million-scale Jewish immigrations are dated 1949 and “again in the 1980s” (PDF p.288-289), and Chapter 12 also speaks of the influx “in the 1980s of Christians from former Soviet Union countries” (PDF p.293); both passages are recorded as printed. The Quartet behind the 2003 Road Map is listed once, as “the US, the UN, Britain and Russia” (PDF p.283), with no other listing in the book; recorded as printed in the Chapter 11 entry above.
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The Chronology places “UN adopts Resolution 194 on Palestinian refugee right of return” under its November 1948 heading (PDF p.331), against the text’s consistent date of 11 December 1948 for the resolution (PDF p.222, p.272); recorded as printed in the Chronology.
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Forms recorded as printed in this part, with no different form given elsewhere in the book for them: the Chronology’s “1907” for the first kibbutz (PDF p.326) and “Istliqlal” (PDF p.328); the Epilogue’s “Samoa” and “Kfar Qana 1999” (PDF p.296); the Endnotes’ “pp. 4534” for Montgomery’s Memoirs (PDF p.314), “Sternahal” (PDF p.303) and “Yediot Achrinot” (PDF p.324); and the Bibliography’s “California University Press” (PDF p.344). All are recorded as printed, not corrected.
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The Maps and Tables (PDF p.332-339) were read in the original PDF in the part 6 spot-check fix round; their contents are recorded in the reading notes and in the Maps and Tables entry above. The one element that cannot be read from them is the identity of the individual depopulated villages on the PDF p.338 map, because the villages are marked there as unlabelled dots, with only towns named and no total printed.
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In the 90% of Palestine Israel covets in 2006 there are said to be about 2.5 million Palestinians with six million Jews, plus another 2.5 million in Gaza and the unwanted West Bank areas (PDF p.292-293), against the Epilogue’s almost half a million ‘internal’ refugees (PDF p.297) and Chapter 9’s about 150,000 Palestinians remaining in 1948 (PDF p.255-259, part 5); the figures measure different sets and dates as presented and are recorded for the final part’s check.
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Part 7 check of the questions left open for the final part: the Bibliography remainder (PDF p.346-349) and the Index (PDF p.350-377) were read in full and give no new or reconciling figures, dates or spellings for the conflicts recorded above — the Index is a finding aid in printed pagination and lists no totals for the uprooted, the villages destroyed, Tantura’s dead, Lydd and Ramla’s expelled or the prison camps, and the Bibliography adds no narrative. All of those conflicts therefore stand as printed in their several places, as recorded above.
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The name at the centre of The Founding Myths of Israel is printed in three forms in the book’s apparatus: ‘Sternahal’ in the Endnotes (PDF p.303) and in the Bibliography (PDF p.348), and ‘Sternhal’ in the Index (PDF p.373); all recorded as printed, not corrected.
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Bibliography forms recorded as printed in part 7, with no different form given for them elsewhere in the apparatus: Salman Abu Sitta’s Atlas of the Nakbah (PDF p.347, against ‘Nakba’ and ‘Nakbah’ forms in the narrative and Endnotes); Charles D. Smith’s publisher ‘Beford/St. Martin’s’ (PDF p.348); and Tamari’s Jersualem 1948 (PDF p.348). All are recorded as printed, not corrected.
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Index forms recorded as printed in part 7: ‘Yassir’ for Arafat (PDF p.351, against Yasir in the narrative); ‘Koening, Israel’ (PDF p.363, the same variant as at PDF p.221, against Koenig elsewhere); the Kfar Lam locators printed out of order, 162 then 161 (PDF p.361); an ‘Operation Bereshit’ entry with no locators at all (PDF p.367); Louis’s work listed in the Index as The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (PDF p.364, the title the Bibliography gives to Pappe’s own book, PDF p.346, where Louis and Stookey are listed as editors of End of Palestine Mandate); and ‘Skolnik, Joel’ (PDF p.373), one of the two Tantura spellings recorded above. All are recorded as printed, not corrected.
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The publisher’s advertisements (PDF p.378-383) call Mourad’s book Our Sacred Land in their heading and Our Sacred Earth in their blurb (PDF p.379), and print LeVine’s surname ‘Levine’ in a heading and ‘LeVine’ in the body (PDF p.380); these are publisher’s matter, recorded as printed.
Coverage
PDF p.1-384 of 384, read in full in parts 1-7 of 7. The Preface, Chapters 1-12 and the Epilogue are read in full; the Endnotes, Chronology, Maps and Tables, the complete Bibliography (PDF p.340-349) and the Index (PDF p.350-377) are read, as are the publisher’s advertisements (PDF p.378-383); PDF p.384 is blank. Nothing remains.