Massacres (10)
The Sabra and Chatila massacre is one of the most barbarous events in recent history. Thousands o
f unarmed and defenseless Palestinian refugees– old men, women and children– were butchered in an orgy of savage killing. On December 16, 1982 the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide.
Background of the massacre
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was an outcome of the alliance between Israel and the Lebanese Phalangists. In its long-standing war against Palestinian nationalism and against the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel found an ally in the Lebanese Phalangists. Despite the fact that Israel was itself responsible for the Palestinian exodus, the common feelings of hostility of Israel and the Phalangists to the Palestinians led to a secret alliance between them. In execution of this alliance Israel supplied the Phalangists with money, arms and equipment to fight the PLO in Lebanon.
Terror had led to the exodus of a large number of Palestinians in 1948. Therefore, the motivation for causing by similar means another exodus of Palestinians, this time from Lebanon, was a common objective of Israeli leaders, and their Phalangist allies. The massacre was not a spontaneous act of vengeance for the murder of Bashir Gemayel, but an operation planned in advance aimed at effecting a mass exodus by the Palestinians from Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. Israel’s participation in prior massacres directed against Palestinian people creates a most disturbing pattern of a political struggle carried on by means of mass terror directed at the civilians, including women, children, and the aged.
Israel moves into West Beirut
The decision to move into West Beirut was taken by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, although it constituted a violation of the cease-fire and the agreement which governed the PLO evacuation. It was also a breach of Israel’s word to President Reagan not to enter West Beirut after the PLOs departure. On the morning of September 15, 1982 the Israel Defense Forces moved into West Beirut and completely occupied it by the following day, notwithstanding the protests of the Lebanese and US Governments. The IDF, however, did not enter the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, but encircled and sealed them off with troops and tanks.
As to the decision for the entry of the Lebanese militiamen into the Sabra and Chatila camps, it appears from the testimony of Rafael Eitan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, before the Israeli Commission of Inquiry that it was taken by him and by Sharon on September 14, 1982. This was followed by meetings between those two military chiefs and the Phalangist commanders to coordinate the operation of the militiamen’s entry into the camps. The decision to allow the militiamen’s entry into the camps was approved by the Israeli Cabinet on September 16 after it began to be put into execution.
The Massacre
Three units of 50 militiamen each stood ready in the afternoon of Thursday, September 16, 1982 at the edge of Sabra and Chatila camps awaiting orders from the Israeli military command. At 5:00 p.m. they were sent into the refugee camps in accordance with the agreed program of action and they then commenced an orgy of killing which lasted until the morning of Saturday, September 18.
According to General Amir Drori, Commander of the Israeli Forces in Lebanon, Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan met the head of the Phalangist forces in East Beirut on Friday afternoon and congratulated the Phalangists on their smooth military operation inside the camps. At this meeting, the Phalangist leader asked for bulldozers. One or more were supplied. The bulldozers were used to dig mass graves into which were heaped the bodies of victims that filled the alleys. A number of houses were also bulldozed to cover up the bodies of the victims.
Description of the scene is given by Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post service on September 23, 1982:
“The scene at the Chatila camp when foreign observers entered Saturday morning was like a nightmare. Women wailed over the deaths of loved ones, bodies began to swell under the hot sun, and the streets were littered with thousands of spent cartridges. Houses had been dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, many with the inhabitants still inside. Groups of bodies lay before bullet-pocked walls where they appeared to have been executed. Others were strewn in alleys and streets, apparently shot as they tried to escape. Each little dirt alley through the deserted buildings, where Palestinians have lived since fleeing Palestine when Israel was created in 1948, told its own horror story.”
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, two American journalists who spent six weeks in Lebanon, gave evidence before the International Commission of Inquiry and the following is an extract from their testimony:
“When we entered Sabra and Chatila on Saturday, September 18, 1982, the final day of the killing, we saw bodies everywhere. We photographed victims that had been mutilated with axes and knives. Only a few of the people we photographed had been machine-gunned. Others had their heads smashed, their eyes removed, their throats cut, skin was stripped from their bodies, limbs were severed, some people were eviscerated. The terrorists also found time to plunder Palestinian property as well as books, manuscripts and other cultural material from the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut.”
The number of victims
The precise number of victims of the massacre may never be exactly determined. The International Committee of the Red Cross counted 1,500 at the time but by September 22 this count had risen to 2,400. On the following day 350 bodies were uncovered so that the total then ascertained had reached 2,750. Kapeliouk points out that to the number of bodies found after the massacre one should add three categories of victims: (a) Those buried in mass graves whose number cannot be ascertained because the Lebanese authorities forbade their opening; (b) Those who were buried under the ruins of houses; and (c) Those who were taken alive to an unknown destination but never returned. The bodies of some of them were found by the side of the roads leading to the south. Kapeliouk asserts that the number of victims may be 3,000 to 3,500, one-quarter of whom were Lebanese, while the remainder were Palestinians.
* Dr Ahmed Tell is a Jordanian university professor, and is Dean of Zarka Private National Community College in Zarka, Jordan. In 1980 he received an Award of Distinction from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He is the author of several books and publications: Higher Education in Jordan , published in 1997, including Abdullah Tell, the Hero and Why Did the Arabs Fail?, both of which are currently under print. Dr. Tell also wrote a research paper about the former Prime Minister Samir Rifai and the Palestinian cause in 1997.
He was an officer in the Arab Legion from 1946-1950 and fought in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
References
Cattan, Henry, The Palestine Question, Croom Helm, London, New York, 1998.
This article was published in 2000.
All civilized nations use air forces in time of war to defend their homelands. But colonia land imperial powers
have had no limits in using warplanes to suppress revolutionary movements of the third world. For example, the United States leaned heavily on its Air Force in Vietnam in the second half of the last century. American military aircrafts were active in 1960s and 1970s not only in bombarding major Vietnamese cities and harbors like Hanoi and Hyphong, but also in spraying chemicals to transform forests into wasteland.
Israel, as Washington’s strategic ally in the Middle East, has pioneered in capitalizing on its air force as an effective means for mass destruction and implementing horrible massacres against Arabs and Palestinians. Many Egyptian civilian targets were hit by Israeli warplanes and gross massacre ensued during the war of attrition in the late years of 1960s. Bahr Al Baqar School and Abu Za’abal Prison in Upper Egypt have entered history as two massacres conducted by the Israel Air Force.
Israel used to dispatch its American made advanced jets to bomb and rocket Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries on the pretext that “ terrorist bases” existed there. Shortly after the eruption of the second Intifada two years ago, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, ordered the bombing of a Palestinian Security Compound in Nablus by F-16. More than a dozen of young police officers in their early twenties were massacred when the F-16 dropped its one ton-bomb at the Palestinian compound.
His Successor, Ariel Sharon, dispatched the F-16s many times against Palestinian public and private institutions. Later on, he enlarged the scope of the F-16’s deadly missions so as to in include residential buildings. 17 Palestinians, including nine children and mother, vanished under the debris of their building in Gaza when Sharon ordered the one-ton bomb to be dropped (June 26) at the heavily populated neighborhood of Al Mawasi Ben-Gurion was the first Israeli leader who conceived the idea of “retaliatory” air strikes against Palestinian civilians. He ordered in 1953 the air and land attack on the village of Kibya. Moshe Sharit, then the Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in his Diary:
“I told Lavon that this attack [on Kibya] would be a grave error…Lavon smiled. Ben- Gurion, he said, didn’t share my view.”
Ezer Weizman, former chief of the Israeli Air Force, glorified the massacres implemented by the Air Force saying:
“The talent of the nation is to be found in the Israeli Air force…Here, the Jewish people stands out more in its talent, and therefore we are more capable than the enemy.”
On November 20,1967 Israeli war plane bombarded Al Karama refugee camp, near the Jordan River, killing 14 –some of them were children–and wounding 28 Palestinians.
It was published in 2000.
This article examines the academic and legal controversy that has arisen in Israel over a graduate thesis using 
oral history–the taped testimonies of both Arab and Jewish witnesses -to document a massacre carried out by Israeli forces against the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura in late May 1948. Though the researcher, Teddy Katz, is himself a Zionist, the case sheds light on the extent to which mainstream Zionism is prepared to go in discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the 1948 war as “ethnic cleansing.” The article also discusses the research itself and summarizes the actual massacre as it can be reconstructed from the available sources. It is followed by excerpts from some of the transcripts.
ON 21 JANUARY 2000, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv published a long article on the massacre of Tantura. Written by journalist Amir Gilat, the article was based mainly on a master’s thesis by Teddy Katz, a student in the department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University. The thesis, entitled “The Exodus of the Arabs from Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel,” had been awarded the highest possible grade for a master’s thesis several months earlier. (It had been submitted in March 1998, but for complications having nothing to do with the case itself, was examined only at the end of 1999.)(n1) The thesis is micro historical research on the 1948 war focusing on five Palestinian coastal villages between Hadera and Haifa, particularly on the villages of Umm Zaynat and Tantura.
The testimonies reproduced by Katz in his fourth chapter tell a chilling tale of brutal massacre, the gist of which is that on 22-23 May 1948, some 200 unarmed Tantura villagers, mostly young men, were shot dead after the village had surrendered following the onslaught of Haganah troops.
*Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.
This article was published in 2000.
Tantura District of Haifa.
An Israeli historian said on Wednesday that he had uncovered credible evidence that troops massacred 200
Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel came into being in 1948. Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village of Tantura for a masters degree, said he had spoken to witnesses including soldiers who were present to support his findings. “It started at night and was over in a few hours,” Katz said of the attack on May 15, 1948. “From testimonies and information I got from Jewish and Arab witnesses and from soldiers who were there, at least 200 people from the village of Tantura were killed by Israeli troops… “From the numbers, this is definitely one of the biggest massacres,” he told Reuters.
Katz said 14 Israeli soldiers were killed in the ambush on the village. The man who led the assault was quoted as saying the villagers’ deaths were a consequence of war and that reports of a massacre were “just stories.” Katz said the attack was mentioned in only a handful of Palestinian history books and in the Israeli army archives. Tantura, near Haifa in northern Israel, had 1,500 residents at the time. It was later demolished to make way for a parking lot for a nearby beach and the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm.
Worse than Deir Yassin Katz said the killing spree in Tantura was more tragic and bigger than in the village of Deir Yassin just west of Jerusalem, where more than 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred on April 9, 1948, in an assault by Jewish armed groups. Reports just after the Deir Yassin killings spoke of some 240 deaths though Israeli and Palestinian historians now accept that the number of fatalities was probably no more than 120. Deir Yassin has long stood as the defining symbol of what Palestinians call Al Nakba (The Great Catastrophe).
They use the term to refer to their dispossession and exile when up to 700,000 Palestinians fled from their towns and villages or were driven out by Jewish troops in the conflict between Arab and Jew that surrounded Israel’s creation. Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a camp in the West Bank, is from Tantura and worked until May 1948 as a guard for the army in British Mandate Palestine. He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops took over the village, lined men up against a cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men were killed at the cemetery. “I was 21 years old then. They took a group of 10 men, lined them up against the cemetery wall and killed them. Then they brought another group, killed them, threw away the bodies and so on,” Tanji said. “I was waiting for my turn to die in cold blood as I saw the men drop in front of me.” Tanji said the killing stopped when a Jew from the nearby settlement of Zichron Yaacov arrived at the scene, took out a pistol and threatened to shoot himself unless the soldiers stopped the executions. Katz said other Palestinians were killed inside their homes and in other parts of the village. At one point, he said, soldiers shot at anything that moved. Villagers resisted with the few guns they had, but they were soon taken over. The Israeli newspaper Maariv, which reported Katz’s findings on Wednesday, quoted the commander of the Tantura attack as saying his troops had no grounds to ask questions or spare lives.
“It was war…When you see the enemy opposite you, he doesn’t have a note saying he doesn’t mean to shoot you. When you see him, you shoot him,” retired colonel Bentz Pridan said. “That’s how we went, from street to street, and that explains why a lot of people were killed,” he told Maariv.
* Wafa Amr is a journalist, former Senior Regional Public Information Officer at UNHCR, formerly Reuters senior correspondent.
It was occupied on 30th of October 1948. On 15 of February 1948, the Palmach Third Battalion killed 15 villagers
including 5 children and the destruction of 15 village houses. Another unknown massacre occurred in Sa’as’ during occupation on the handed of the terror gangs of Sheva’ (Seventh) Brigade.
The village has been mostly destroyed with the exception of few houses, some are deserted, and some are used by Jewish settlers. The refugees are mostly living in Naher al-Barid refugee camp near Tripoli (Lebanon), some are in al-Rashidyah refugee camp near Sour/ Tyre (Lebanon), and few refugees living in the village of al-Ghaziyah (mostly from al-Sayid clan) near ‘Ayn al-Hilwah refugee camp. The village had two elementary school, one school was for boys, and the other school for girls, one mosque. Some of the olive trees remain and a number of walls and houses are presently used by the settlement, one of them has an arched entrance and arched windows.
The population in 1945 was 1,130. The Arabs own 12,822 dunums meanwhile the Jews didn’t own anything.
Source: palestineremembred.com
Following are details on the massacre recounted by the distinguished former U.S. Congressman from Illinois, Paul Findley: 
The day of the attack began in routine fashion, with the ship first proceeding slowly in an easterly direction in the eastern Mediterranean, later following the contour of the coastline westerly about fifteen miles off the Sinai Peninsula.
On the mainland, Israeli forces were winning smashing victories in the third Arab-Israeli war in nineteen years. Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, announcing that the Israelis had taken the entire Sinai and broken the blockade on the Strait of Tiran declared: “The Egyptians are defeated.” On the eastern front the Israelis had overcome Jordanian forces and captured most of the West Bank.
At 6 a.m. an airplane, identified by the Liberty crew as an Israeli Noratlas, circled the ship slowly and departed. This procedure was repeated periodically over an eight-hour period.
At 9.a.m a jet appeared at a distance, then left. At 10 a.m. two rocket-armed jets circled the ship three times. They were close enough for their pilots to be observed through binoculars. The planes were unmarked. An hour later the Israeli Noratlas returned, flying not more than 200 feet directly above the Liberty, and clearly marked with the Star of David. The ship’s crewmembers and the pilot waved at each other. This plane returned every few minutes until 1 p.m. By then, the ship had changed course and was proceeding lmost due west.
At 2.00 p.m. all hell broke loose. Three Mirage fighter planes headed straight for the Liberty, their rockets taking out the forward machine guns and wrecking the ship’s antennae. The mirages were joined by Mystere fighters, which dropped napalm o the bridge and deck and repeatedly strafed the ship. The attack continued for over 20 minutes. In all, the ship sustained 821 holes in her sides and decks. Of these, more tan 100 were rocket size.
As the aircraft departed, three torpedo boats took over the attack, firing five torpedoes, one of which tore a 40-foot hole in the hull, killing 25 sailors. The ship was in flames, dead in the water, listing precariously, and taking water. The crew was ordered to prepare to abandon ship. As life rafts were lowered into the water, the torpedo boats moved closer and shot them to pieces. One plane concentrated machine-gun fire on rafts still on deck as crewmembers there tried to extinguish the napalm fire. Petty Officer Charles Rowley declares, “They didn’t want anymore to live.”
Source: Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem by Issa Nakhleh
We were awakened in the middle of the night by heavy gunfire. The women began to scream and run out of the houses, 
carrying their children, and gathered in several places in the village. I went out of the house too and began running around the streets to see what was going on. Suddenly a woman shouted to me: “Your uncle is wounded! Quick, bring some alcohol!” I saw my uncle bleeding heavily from the shoulder. Being young, I was unconscious of danger. I grabbed an empty bottle and ran to the dispensary nearby.
Zahabiyya, the nurse, was there. She was one of the Christians of the village. She filled the bottle with alcohol and I ran back to my uncle. The women cleaned the wound and took my uncle to our house where he hid from the soldiers in the grain attic. But the soldiers saw the trail of blood and soon burst in, asking my grandfather where my uncle was. My grandfather said he didn’t know. They left but came back several times with the same question. At some point my uncle, who was in pain, asked for a cigarette and my grandmother gave him one.
When the soldiers came back again the smell of the tobacco guided them to him. They took him away. On their way out they insulted my grandfather and called him a liar, and he answered back that anyone would protect his own son. My uncle survived thanks to the intervention of the mukhtar of the Jewish colony Zichron Yaacov. He had good relations with my grandfather, who was the mukhtar of Tantura. At 9 in the morning, the shooting stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach.
They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads. Female soldiers searched the women and took all their jewelry, which they put in a soldier’s helmet.
They didn’t give them back when they expelled us towards Fraydiss. During the entire operation, military boats were offshore. On the beach, the soldiers led groups of men away and you could her gunfire after each departure. Towards noon we were led on foot to an orchard to the east of the village and I saw a bodies piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura, who emptied their cargo in a big pit.
Then trucks arrived and women and children were loaded onto them and driven to Fraydiss. On the road, near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about.
Source: palestineremembered.com
Occupation date: 29th of October 1948. The massacre of 70 blind folded men, also three cases of rape,
including the rape of 14 years old girl. The girl was raped while getting water for the soldiers.
The village has been mostly destroyed with the exception of few houses (some are inhabited by Jewish settlers). Its villagers fled to Lebanon after the Safsaf massacre in October 1948, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Some made it to Syria: Nahr El-Bared, Burj Al-Barajneh, Badawi, Ein Al-Helweh, Sabra/Shatila, Ghoro- Ba’labak, Wihdat (Amman-Jordan), Ein Elma, Burj Al-Shamali, Tal Al-Za’atar, Yarmouk (Syria), and Homs (Syria).
The Romans referred to the village by safsofa. Safsaf had an elementary school for boys founded during the British Mandate period. There was one mosque and the shrine of al-Ajami located in the southern borders of Safsaf. Nowadays, we can see in Safsaf an Israeli settlement named ha-Shahar and Bar Yochay. In 1596 the population was (138), in the 19th century (100), in 1931 (662) and in 1945 (910). The Arab’s land ownership was 5,344 dunums, Jewish 0 dunums, and public 2,047 dunums.
Source:palestineremembered.com
Occupation date: 22nd of April 1948. Kirad al-Ghannama was mostly ethnically cleansed and terrorized soon after the massacre 
committed at the nearby village of al-Husayniyya.
In mid-March 1948, a Haganah massacre in the neighboring village of al-Husayniyya “left dozens of dead,” according to Israeli sources, and led to the temporary evacuation of Kirad al-Ghannama. The following month, it was temporarily (or partially) evacuated again during Operation Yiftach (see Abil al-Qamh, Salad District). On 22 April the villagers reportedly left during that operation under the influence of a direct military assault on a nearby village, perhaps al-’Ulmaniyya (which was attacked on 20 April). In July 1949, Israel signed an armistice agreement according to which Kirad aI-Ghannama was to be located within a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the inhabitants of the area were to be protected. However, the Israeli authorities were determined to drive out those villagers who had remained, and deployed a variety of means over the following seven years to do so (see Kirad al-Baqqara, Salad District). By 1956, the DMZ’s 2,200 inhabitants had been pushed out, and Kirad al-Ghannama was evacuated for the third time.
Land ownership before occupation
| Ethnic Group | Land Ownership (Dunums) |
|---|---|
| Arab | 3,795 |
| Jewish | 175 |
| Public | 5 |
| Total | 3,975 |
Source: palestineremembered.com
Upon Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation on July 11-12, 1948, the Israelis were surprised to find that over 60,000
Palestinian civilians didn’t flee their homes. Subsequently, Ben-Gurion ordered the wholesale expulsion of all civilians (including man women, children, and old people), in the middle of the hot Mediterranean summer. The orders to ethnically cleanse both cities were signed the future Prime Minister of Israel, by Yitzhak Rabin. Many of the refugees died (400+ according to the Palestinian historian ‘Aref al-‘Aref) from thirst, hunger, and heat exhaustion after being stripped of their valuables on the way out by the Israeli soldiers.
From the quotes below, it shall be conclusively proven that the Palestinian version of the events (at least in the cases of Lydda and Ramla) is the true version. It should be noted the Zionist account of this war crime was intentionally suppressed until Yitzhak Rabin reported it in his biography and in a New York Times interview (which was censored in Israel at the time), however, it was later confirmed in the declassified Israeli and Zionist archives.
Famous Quotes
Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his diary soon after Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation on 10th-11th of July 1948:
“After attacking Lydda [later called Lod] and then Ramla, …. What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities ….. Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution …. and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he [Ben-Gurion] remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave [Lydda’s] hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endangered the supply route [to the troops who were] advancing eastward.
Ben-Gurion would repeat the question: What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out! [garush otam in Hebrew]. ‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring, …. Psychologically, this was on of the most difficult actions we undertook“. (Soldier Of Peace, p. 140-141 & Benny Morris, p. 207) .Later, Rabin underlined the cruelty of the operation as mirrored in the reaction of the soldiers, he stated during an interview (which was censored in Israeli publications) with David Shipler from the New York Times on October 22, 1979:
“Great Suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. [They] included youth-movement graduates who had been inculcated with values such as international brotherhood and humaneness. The eviction action went beyond the concepts they were used to. There were some fellows who refused to take part. . . Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action . . . to explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action.” (Simha Flapan, p. 101)
It should be noted that just before the outbreak of the war in 1948, the residents of the two cities, Lydda and Ramla, constituted close to 20% of the total urban population in central Palestine, including Jewish Tel-Aviv. Currently, these people and their descendants number nearly half a million, and they mostly live in deplorable refugee camps around Amman (Jordan) and Ramallah (West Bank). Based on Rabin’s personal account of events, the decision to ethnically cleanse the two cities was not an easy one, however, that did not stop him from giving a similar order, 19 years later, to ethnically cleanse and destroy the villages of ‘Imwas, Yalu, and Bayt Nuba. The exodus from these cities was portrayed firsthand by Ismail Shammout, the renowned Palestinian artist from Lydda, click here to view his exodus gallery. Similarly, Mr. Youssif Munayyer have a written on this subject part of the 64 anniversary of Nakba in an OP-ED article to the NY Time, click here for details
On July 24, 1948 the Mapai Center held a full-scale debate regarding the Palestinian Arab question against the background of the ethnic cleansing of Ramla and Lydda. The majority apparently backed Ben-Gurion’s policies of population transfer or ethnic cleansing. Shlomo Lavi, one of the influential leaders of the Mapai party, said that:
“the … transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs out of the country in my eyes is one of the most just, moral, and correct that can be done. I have thought of this for many years.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 192)
When the First Truce ended, Operation Dani headquarters (near Ramle and Lydda) informed the Israeli General Staff on July 10 1948:
“a general and considerable [civilian] flight from Ramle. There is great value in continuing the bombing.” During the afternoon, the headquarters asked the General Staff for renewed bombing, and informed one of the brigades: “Flight from the town of Ramle of women, the old, and children is to be facilitated. The [military age] males are to be detained.” (Benny Morris, p. 204)
Soon after the Lydda massacre was carried out by the Israeli Army Yiftah Brigade on July 10, 1948, Mula Cohen (the brigade’s commander) wrote of his experience when expelling the 50,000-60,000 Palestinians who inhabited Ramle and Lydda:
“There is no doubt the Lydda-Ramle affair and the flight of the inhabitants, the uprising and the expulsion [geirush in Hebrew] that followed cut deep grooves in all who underwent [these experiences].” (Benny Morris, p. 206)
Yitzhak Rabbin, the commander of Operation Dani in Ramle area, communicated the following explicit orders at 1:30 PM on July 12, 1948 to Yiftah Brigade (see above quote):
“1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed towards Beit Nabala. Yiftah [Brigade headquarters] must determine the method and inform [Operation] Dani HQ and the 8th Brigade.
2. Implement immediately.” The order was signed “Yitzhak R[abin].” A similar order, concerning Ramle, was apparently communicated to Kiryati Brigade headquarters at the same time. (Benny Morris, p. 207)
On July 16 1948 Aharon Cizling, the 1st Israeli Agriculture Minister, cautioned the Israeli cabinet (a few weeks after the ethnic cleansing of 60,000 people from Lydda and Ramla):
“We are embarking on a course that will most greatly endanger any hope of peaceful alliance with forces who could be our allies in the Middle East …. Hundreds of thousands of [Palestinian] Arabs who will be evicted from Palestine, even if they are to blame, and left hanging in the midair, will grow to hate us. If you do things in the heat of the war, in the midst of the battle, it’s one thing. But if after a month, you do it in cold blood, for political reason, in public, that is something altogether different.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 191)
And on the same subject, Cizling also said during a Cabinet meeting:
“I have to say that this phrase [regarding the treatment of Ramla’s inhabitants] is a subtle order to expel the [Palestinian] Arabs from Ramla. If I’d receive such an order this is how I would interpret it. An order given during the conquest which states that the door is open and that all [Palestinian] Arabs may leave, regardless of age, and sex, or they may stay, however, the army will not be responsible for providing food. When such things are said during actual conquest, at the moment of conquest, and after all that has already happened in Jaffa and other places. . . . I would interpret it as a warning: save yourself while you can get out.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 27)
And also went on to describe his dismay at the looting of the Palestinian Ramla City (but not at the raping of Palestinian women), Cizling stated:
“. ..It’s been said that . ‘there were cases of rape in Ramla. I can forgive rape, but I will not forgive other acts which seem to me much worse. When they enter a town and forcibly remove rings from the fingers and jewelry from someone’s neck, that’s a very grave matter. … Many are guilty of it.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 71-72)
All the Israelis who witnessed the events agreed that the expulsion of the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle, under the hot July sun, was an extended episode of suffering for the Palestinian refugees, especially those from Lydda. Some were stripped by Israeli soldiers of their valuables as they left the town or at checkpoints along the way. An Israeli archeologist, known by Guttman, subsequently described the trek of the Palestinian refugees out of Lydda:
“A multitude of inhabitants walked one after another. Women walked burdened with packages and sacks on their heads. Mothers dragged children after them . . . Occasionally, warning shots were heard . . . Occasionally, you encountered a piercing look from one of the youngsters . . . in the column, and the look said: We have not yet surrendered. We shall return to fight you.” For Guttman, an Israeli archeologist, the spectacle conjured up “the memory of the exile of Israel [a the end of the Second Commonwealth, at Roman hands.]” (Benny Morris, p. 207)
A Palmach (the Israeli strike force) report, probably written by Yigal Allon soon after Operation Dani, stated that the expulsion of the Lydda and Ramla Palestinian inhabitants, besides relieving Tel Aviv of a potential, long-term threat, had:
“clogged the routes of the advance of the [Transjordan Arab] Legion and had foisted upon the Arab economy the problem of “maintaining another 45,000 souls . . . Moreover, the phenomenon of the flight of tens of thousands will no doubt cause demoralisation in every Arab area [the refugees] reach . . . This victory will yet have great effect on other sectors.” (Benny Morris, p. 211 & Israel: A History, p. 218)
And in response to report above, the Israeli MAPAM party co-leader, Meir Ya’ari, criticized Allon’s use of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees to achieve a military strategic goal, he stated:
“Many of us are LOSING their [human] image . . How easily they speak of how it is possible and permissible to take women, children, and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say, the members of Hashomer Hatzair, who remember who used this means against our people during the Second World] war. . . . I am appalled.” (Benny Morris, p. 211)
Related Links
- The Washington Report: Expulsion of the Palestinians- Lydda and Ramlehin 1948
- Zionist FAQ: Palestinian people in 1948 left their homes based on the orders of their leaders
- “Our exodus from Lydda depicted in a series of art paintings” By Ismail Shammout
- Cleansing Jaffa: Detailed eyewitness account By Shukri Salameh
Source: Palestineremembered.com
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