In the rare event that Israelis acknowledge that the Nakba was perpetrated by Zionist militias rather than being the result of some mythical Arab evacuation orders [You can read more about this here], the argument then becomes that it was a byproduct of war and not a deliberate policy. This should not be surprising, as much of the Israeli narrative depends on framing the Zionist colonists as morally superior underdogs who only resorted to violence to defend themselves.
However, like most Zionist talking points, actual scholarship and primary sources paint a completely different picture. The concept of “transferring” the Arab population of Palestine -also known as ethnic cleansing- has a long and robust history within the Zionist movement and its political thought.
From its earliest days, the Zionist movement was well-aware of the existence of the Palestinian natives. Even though the claim was “A land without a people for a people without a land” what they truly meant is that the land had no people worth talking about. This becomes exceedingly clear when reading the discussions of early Zionists, such as Chaim Weizmann, who when asked about the inhabitants of Palestine responded with:
“The British told us that there are there some hundred thousands negroes [Kushim] and for those there is no value.”.
You can clearly see the influence and internalization of racist European colonial rhetoric. This attitude would become a cornerstone of Zionism as a political and colonial movement [You can read more about this here].
Denying the existence of the natives, or their validity or right to exist, is par for the course for many a colonizing movement. This is merely another formulation of the Terra Nullius argument which was used to legitimize settler-colonialism all over the globe [You can read more about this here].
With the arrival of the first Zionist colonists it became apparent that there was no hope of establishing an ethnocracy without first getting rid of the Palestinians already living there. This was encapsulated by an overheard conversation documented by Moshe Smilansky in 1891:
“We should go east, into Transjordan. That would be a test for our movement.”
“Nonsense… isn’t there enough land in Judea and Galilee?”
“The land in Judea and Galilee is occupied by the Arabs.”
“Well, we’ll take it from them.”
“How?” (Silence.)
“A revolutionary doesn’t ask naive questions.”
“Well then, ‘revolutionary,’ tell us how.”
“It is very simple, we’ll harass them until they get out… Let them go to Transjordan.”
“And are we going to abandon all of Transjordan?” asks an anxious voice.
“As soon as we have a big settlement here we’ll seize the land, we’ll become strong, and then we’ll take care of the Left Bank [of the Jordan River], we’ll expel them from there, too. Let them go back to the Arab countries.”
This is hardly the only example of such candid conversations about the colonist’s intentions towards the Palestinians. There was never an intention to settle Palestine and live in peace with the natives.
When asked about the deprivation of Palestinians from their rights as a result of the Zionist project, Moshe Beilinson, close associate of Ben Gurion stated in 1929 that:
“There is no answer to this question nor can there be, and we are not obliged to provide it because we are not responsible for the fact that a particular individual man was born in a certain place, and not several kilometres away from there.”
In 1930, Menahem Ussishkin, Chairman of the Jewish National Fund and a member of the Jewish Agency executive, declared that:
“We must continually raise the demand that our land be returned to our possession….lf there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land. We have a greater and nobler ideal than preserving several hundred thousands of Arab fellahin.”
There are dozens of other examples of such public statements, this is of course not even taking into account what was being said behind closed doors. But it is obvious that for the Zionist movement to succeed, the Palestinians needed to be removed from Palestine. Anything else would not allow for the erection of an exclusivist Zionist ethnocracy.
The idea of removing the Palestinians was rather popular among Zionist leaders decades before any kind of war or conflict, and was even seen as a necessity by many. Naturally, this set the stage for the ethnic cleansing that occurred between 1947-1950 (and beyond).
It is within this context that Plan D (Tochnit Dalet) was developed by the Haganah high command. Although it was adopted in May 1948, the origins of this plan goes back a few years further. Yigael Yadin reportedly started working on it in 1944. This plan entailed the expansion of the borders of the Jewish state, well beyond partition, and any Palestinian village within these borders that resisted would be destroyed and have its inhabitants expelled. This included cities that were supposed to be part of the Arab Palestinian state after partition, such as Nazareth, Acre and Lydda.
Ben Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion wrote that:
“In internal discussions, in instructions to his men, the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] demonstrated a clear position: it would be better that as few a number as possible of Arabs would remain in the territory of the [Jewish] state.”
Although it could be argued that Plan D did not outline the exact villages and cities to be ethnically cleansed in an explicit way, it was clear that the various Yishuv forces were operating with its instructions in mind.
To further reinforce my argument that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not some byproduct of warfare, but rather deliberate policy -regardless of degree of central organization- I would like to share some rather explicit and deliberate examples of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Deir Yassin was a small, pastoral village west of Jerusalem. The village was determined to remain neutral, and as such refused to have Arab soldiers stationed there. Not only were they neutral, they also had a non-aggression pact signed with the Haganah. This, however, did not save it from its fate, as it was in the territory of the Jewish state lined out in Plan D.
This meant that not only was it to be destroyed and have its population ethnically cleansed, an example needed to be made of it as to inspire terror in the surrounding villages. As a result this massacre was particularly monstrous.
On April 9th 1948, Zionist forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin under the cover of darkness. The Zionist forces shot indiscriminately and killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in their own homes. The number of those murdered ranges from roughly 100 to over 150, depending on estimation.
Perhaps one of the most graphic witness testimonials comes from Othman Akel:
[Warning: Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click to skip]
“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. the father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”.
Other stories include tying a villager to a tree before burning him, rape and disembowelment. Dead villagers were thrown into pits by the dozen. Many were decapitated or mutilated. Houses were looted and destroyed. A number of prisoners were taken, put in cuffs, and paraded around West Jerusalem as war trophies, before being executed and dumped in the village quarry.
[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]
It is important to note that this massacre was carried out before the 1948 war. It posed no threat and was not part of any military action. More recently, Zionist revisionists have tried to frame the massacre as a battle because the village guards put up resistance to the invading militias. In typical Zionist fashion, I’m certain that even had the villagers lain on the ground and died without resistance, they would have found a way to blame them for their deaths anyway.
It is also noteworthy that because the village had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, it was the Stern and Lehi that carried out this massacre. The Yishuv offered a few words of condemnation, but later the name of Deir Yassin would be seen listed next to successful operations. In the future, there would not even be the charade of caring about non-aggression pacts or the neutrality of villages that were designated for ethnic cleansing.
Al Faluja and Iraq al Manshiyya were Palestinian villages east of Gaza. They were both home to a pocket of Egyptian troops who were assigned to defend the villages, and were besieged since October 1948. On February 1949, an armistice agreement was reached between Egypt and Israel, where the Egyptian troops and all military personnel would evacuate the pocket and hand it over to Israel.
One of the conditions of this armistice agreement was that the civilians of these villages were to remain safe and unharmed. Israel agreed to this. However, as soon as the villages were under Israeli control they were subjected to a merciless campaign of intimidation to push the villagers to leave, which included beatings, looting, attempted rapes, threats, and the employment of the so called “whispering campaigns”. It is speculated by Benny Morris that the decision was most likely approved by high ranking Israeli officials, but of course, as with Deir Yassin they feigned outrage without doing anything about it.
Al Dawayma was a Palestinian village that lay west of Al-Khalil (Hebron). According to Haganah records, the village was considered “Very friendly”. Meaning it had not hosted or participated in any attacks against the Yishuv. This, like Deir Yassin, did not spare them the brutality of the Zionist militias.
On October 8th 1948, the village was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight, who committed some depraved acts upon the villagers. 20 armored cars invaded the village while soldiers attacked from another flank. The village guards couldn’t even respond, and the village fell with very little resistance.
The soldiers got out of their vehicles and started indiscriminately shooting villagers to force a panic and hurried depopulation of the village. Hundreds were killed, many of which were women and children. Villagers attempted to seek refuge in mosques and a close by shrine were shot by the dozens. Acts of barbarity were also reported by Zionist troops:
[Warning: Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click to skip]
Babies skulls cracked open, women raped and burned alive in houses, villagers stabbed to death.
[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]
The village posed no threat, and was merely in the way of the expanding Jewish state that necessitated a Jewish demographic majority. So it had to be eradicated.
These are just only a few of the examples of Palestinian villages that were destroyed and depopulated outside the context of combat or war. As a matter of fact, ethnic cleansing operations continued well into the 1950s, a long time after the war was over.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was deliberate and necessary for the creation of Israel. The evidence that it was planned and not simply a byproduct of the fighting is overwhelming. Israel was not born in a vacuum, its birth was preconditioned on making the native Palestinians disappear.
- Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
- Khalidi, Walid (ed.), Sharif S. Elmusa, and Muhammad Ali Khalidi. All that remains: The Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
- Masalha, Nur. “Expulsion of the Palestinians.” Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies
- (1992).
- Pappe, Ilan. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster, 2007.
- Said, Edward W., and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the victims: Spurious scholarship and the Palestinian question. Verso, 2001.
- Finkelstein, Norman G. Image and reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Verso, 2003.
- Flapan, Simha. The birth of Israel: Myths and realities. London: Croom Helm, 1987.