Part 2. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted on: June 22, 2018
Part 2. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
The Debate
It started when Daniel Blatman, an Israeli historian and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, penned an op-ed for the Israeli daily Haaretz stating that ethnic cleansing “is exactly what happened in 1948.”
To support this, Blatman cited Benny Morris: the Israeli historian, Blatman wrote, “determined that most of the Arabs in the country, over 400,000, were encouraged to leave or expelled in the first stage of the war—even before the Arab nations’ armies invaded.”[2]
Benny Morris, October 30, 2007 (Aude/CC BY-SA 2.0)
That prompted a response from Morris, who wrote an op-ed of his own titled “Israel Conducted No Ethnic Cleansing in 1948”.
In it, he contends that Blatman “distorts history when he says the new State of Israel, a country facing invading armies, carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs.” And Blatman “betrayed his profession”, Morris further charged, “when he attributed to me things I have never claimed and distorted the events of the 1948 war.”
Central to Morris’s argument is that “Blatman ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war when they rejected the UN compromise plan and embarked on hostile acts in which 1,800 Jews were killed between November 1947 and mid-May 1948.” (wrong statement)
Moreover, the neighboring Arab states had “threatened to invade even before the UN resolution was passed on November 29, 1947, and before a single Arab had been uprooted from his home.”
Even prior to the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, the Arab states had continuously declared their intent “to attack the Jewish state when the British left.”
He acknowledges that prior to the Zionists’ declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, and the subsequent introduction of Arab states’ regular armies into the conflict, a few hundred thousand Arabs (though a number “apparently smaller” than the figure of 400,000 cited by Blatman) “were expelled from their homes and forced to flee”.
How can it be true that, on one hand, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and never allowed to return, yet also true, on the other, that there was no ethnic cleansing?
Morris attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction by arguing that “at no stage of the 1948 war was there a decision by the leadership of the Yishuv [the Jewish community] or the state to ‘expel the Arabs’”. In other words, it’s true that many Arabs were indeed expelled, but this was not the result of an official policy of the Zionist leadership.
“It’s true that in the 1930s and early ‘40s”, Morris further acknowledges, “David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann supported the transfer of Arabs from the area of the future Jewish state. But later they supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place.
“It’s also true that from a certain point during the war, Ben-Gurion let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country, but he never gave them an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’”
And, true, there was an “atmosphere of transfer that prevailed in the country beginning in April 1948”, but this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t. Neither group was reprimanded or punished.
“In the end, in 1948 about 160,000 Arabs remained in Israeli territory—a fifth of the population.”
Furthermore, “on March 24, 1948, Israel Galili, Ben-Gurion’s deputy in the future Defense Ministry and the head of the Haganah, ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state. Things did change in early April due to the Yishuv’s shaky condition and the impending Arab invasion. But there was no overall expulsion policy—here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” (After committing genocide in a couple of towns, like Deir Yassin)
Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership in mid-1948 “adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees”, but asserts this was “logical and just” on the grounds that these were the “same refugees who months and weeks earlier had tried to destroy the state in the making.”
What happened in 1948 does not fit the definition of “ethnic cleansing”, Morris concludes. The Arab states, on the other hand, “carried out ethnic cleansing and uprooted all the Jews, down to the last one, from any territory they captured in 1948”, while the Jews “left Arabs in place in Haifa and Jaffa”, among other places.[3]
(Haifa was predominantly Palestinians. The British mandated power, before vacating Haifa, closed all access to Haifa and opened the port for Palestinians to leave by the sea)
Arabs leaving Haifa as Jewish forces enter the city (Public Domain)
That wasn’t the end of the discussion.
Blatman responded in turn with an op-ed titled “Yes, Benny Morris, Israel Did Perpetrate Ethnic Cleansing in 1948”. In it, he writes that, “On March 10, 1948, the national Haganah headquarters approved Plan Dalet, which discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state.”
With regard to Morris’s denial that what occurred fits the definition of “ethnic cleansing”, Blatman quotes the prosecutor in the trial of Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian-Serb leader convicted for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia:
In ethnic cleansing . . . you act in such a way that in a given territory, the members of a given ethnic group are eliminated. . . . You have massacres.
Everybody is Not massacred, but you have massacres in order to scare those populations. . . . Naturally, the other people are driven away. They are afraid . . .
And, of course, in the end these people simply want to leave. . . . They are driven away either on their own initiative or they are deported. . . .
Some women are raped and, furthermore, often times what you have is the destruction of the monuments which marked the presence of a given population . . . for instance, Catholic churches or mosques are destroyed.
In other words, contrary to Morris’s argument, it doesn’t follow that, since there is No document in which the Zionist leadership explicitly outlined a plan to expel all Arabs or in which military commanders were instructed to do so, therefore what occurred was not ethnic cleansing. What the prosecutor describes is exactly what happened in 1948,
Blatman notes: “Implied instructions, silent understandings, sowing fear among the population whose flight is the objective; the destruction of the physical presence left behind.”
Blatman quotes from Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949:
The attacks of the Haganah and the Israel Defense Forces, expulsion orders, the fear of attacks and acts of cruelty on the part of the Jews, the absence of assistance from the Arab world and the Arab Higher Committee, the sense of helplessness and abandonment, orders by Arab institutions and commanders to leave and evacuate, in most cases was the direct and decisive reason for the flight—an attack by the Haganah, Irgun, Lehi or the IDF, or the inhabitants’ fear of such an attack.
Note: Patriotic Syrians who volunteered to rescue the Fleeing Palestinians were denied arms and ammunition. USA was exercising undue pressures on the existing neighboring new independent States Not to intervene. Actually, Jordan was created for that purpose: defending Israel and welcoming transferred Palestinians
Blatman adds, “The expulsions were not war crimes, says Morris, because it was the Arabs who started the war. In other words, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who belong to the side that began the fighting have to be expelled. Maybe Morris would agree that the genocide carried out by the Germans against the Herero in 1904–1908 was justified since, after all, the Herero began the rebellion against German colonialism in Namibia.”[4]
Next to weigh in on the debate was Steven Klein, a Haaretz editor and adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University’s International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation.
Klein notes how Morris himself, in a 1988 essay titled “The New Historiography”, had explained how under Plan D, the Zionist forces “cleared various areas completely of Arab villages”, and how “Jewish atrocities . . . and the drive to avenge past misdeeds also contributed significantly to the exodus.”
(The Zionists attach the term “Arab” in order to deny an identity for the Palestinians)
A Palestinian woman and child (Source: Hanini.org/CC BY 3.0)
And in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001, “Morris observed that Ben-Gurion’s views on ‘transfer as a legitimate solution to the Arab problem’ did not change after he publicly declared support for forced expulsions in the 1930s, but that ‘he was aware of the need, for tactical reasons, to be discreet.’
Thus, so it seemed, he explained how Ben-Gurion could be responsible for the expulsion of many of the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs without ever issuing an order to that effect.”
Then in a 2004 Haaretz interview with journalist Ari Shavit, Morris had said, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.”
“Morris, of course, is welcome to change his political view”, Klein continues. “But he, like any other historian, must understand that he has left a paper trail that tells a substantially different narrative than the one he now advocates. The Benny Morris of 2016 seems to be doing what he once accused the ‘old historians’ of doing—interpreting history and downplaying Israeli misdeeds in order to defend Israel’s legitimacy.”[5]
Next to chime in on the debate was Ehud Ein-Gil, who points out in his own Haaretz op-ed that among the Arabs who were allowed to remain were “15,000 Druze who had allied with Israel, 34,000 Christians, whom Israel treated decently so as not to anger its Western allies, and some Bedouin Muslim villages, whose leaders had allied with Israel or with their Jewish neighbors.
“Of the 75,000 Muslims who remained (less than 15% of the prewar number), tens of thousands were internally displaced—people who had fled their villages or were expelled from them and have not been allowed to return to their homes to this day.”
“Morris is right”, Ein-Gil continues, “when he mentions the ‘atmosphere of transfer’ that gripped Israel from April 1948, but he errs when he claims that this atmosphere was never translated into official policy.”
He quotes the orders given to commanders in Plan D to either destroy villages or encircle and then mount “search-and-control operations” within them and, in the event of resistance, to expel all inhabitants.[6]
Finally, Morris responded once more to his critics with a Haaretz article titled “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and pro-Arab Propaganda”, in which he characterizes their articles as not reflecting “a serious way of writing history.”
His own “opinions about the history of 1948 haven’t changed at all”, Morris asserts.
He maintains that “Some Palestinians were expelled (from Lod and Ramle, for example), some were ordered or encouraged by their leaders to flee (from Haifa, for example) and most fled for fear of the hostilities and apparently in the belief that they would return to their homes after the expected Arab victory.
“And indeed, beginning in June, the new Israeli government adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees—those same Palestinians who fought the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish community, and tried to destroy it.”
Morris contends, “In 1947–1948 there was No a priori intention to expel the Arabs, and during the war there was no policy of expulsion. There are clearly Israel-hating ‘historians’ like Ilan Pappe and Walid Khalidi, and perhaps also Daniel Blatman, going by what he has said, who see the Haganah’s Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948, as a master plan for expelling the Palestinians. It isn’t.”
Rather, Plan D “was intended to craft strategy and tactics for the Haganah to maintain its hold on strategic roads in what was to become the Jewish state. It also sought to secure the borders in the run-up to the expected Arab invasion following the departure of the British.
Blatman’s contention that Plan Dalet ‘discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state’ is a malicious falsification. These are the words of a pro-Arab propagandist, not of a historian.”
Furthermore, Plan D “explicitly states that the inhabitants of villages that fight the Jews should be expelled and the villages destroyed, while neutral or friendly villages should be left untouched (and have forces garrisoned there).
“As for Arab neighborhoods in mixed cities, the Haganah field commanders ordered that the Arabs of the outlying neighborhoods be transferred to the Arab centers of those cities, like Haifa, not expelled from the country.”
Morris contends that, “if there had been a master plan and a policy of ‘expelling the Arabs,’ we would have found indications of this in the various operational orders to the combat units, and in the reports to the command headquarters, like ‘We carried out the expulsion in accordance with the master plan’ or ‘with Plan Dalet.’ There are no such mentions.”
True, “there was an ‘atmosphere of transfer,’” but this was “understandable in light of the circumstances: constant attacks by Palestinian militias over four months and the expectation of an impending invasion by the Arab armies aimed at annihilating the Jewish state to be and perhaps the people as well.”
This “necessitated occupation and the expelling of villagers who ambushed, sniped at and killed Jews along the borders and the main roads.”
Moreover, “the vast majority of Arabs fled, and the officers of the Haganah/IDF had no need to face the decision of whether to expel them.”[7]
On the night of April 7-8, under the command of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, Palestinian irregulars counterattacked the Haganah occupiers of Castel. The Palestinians are seen here moving to the counterattack. From Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora, page 334. (Public Domain)
Note: Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini was one of many leaders who believed that Palestine is part of the Syrian nation and constitute one people.
Adonis Diaries 
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