Part 1:-  The beginning  of the Nakba . Jan – March  1948

 

From 1918 until May 1948 Britain held a mandate to rule Palestine as a colony. The British aim was to create an integrated Arab/Jewish society, yet from 1917 it had also declared its support for the creation of a national home for the Jewish people. At the same time it had promised Palestinian self government within 10 years. Britain allowed large scale Jewish immigration, leading inevitably to deteriorating relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews.  Britain soon concluded that peaceful coexistence was impossible and in November 1947 the UN decided to partition Palestine, a plan that was rejected by the  Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinians began sporadic attacks on the Jewish settlers; this was met by Jewish reprisals, gradually escalating to indiscriminate attacks on Palestinian villages and traffic. In January the Jewish forces blew up a Palestinian hotel in Jerusalem and in turn the Palestinians began to explode bombs in Jewish centres. An “Arab Liberation Army” was formed and carried out attacks on Jewish settlements.  Military action increased as the British Mandate forces prepared to withdraw and for a while it looked as if the Arab forces would prevail. However, by the end of March, over 100,000 Palestinians had fled their homes, expecting to be able to return when hostilities subsided. However, the Jews realised that they had a problem; if the UN plan was implemented the Jewish state would contain 400,000 Palestinian Arabs and 500,000 Jews – a bare majority. The Arab population had to be reduced.

 

Nakba is the Arabic word for Catastrophe.

 

 

Contemporary Zionists wrote:-

 

“In my heart there was joy mixed with sadness. Joy that the peoples [of the world] had at last acknowledged that we were a nation with a state and sadness that we lost half the country…and…that  we have  400,000 Arabs… “

Yosef Nahmani

 

“[The Jewish state] would not be able to exist with a large Arab minority. It must not amount to more than 12-15% [of the population]”. 

Yosef Weitz.

 

 

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A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 2 :-  The massacre at Deir Yassin,  April  9^th , 1948

 

Deir Yassin  was a pastoral Palestinian village just to the West of Jerusalem, situated in an area that was designated for ethnic cleansing. On April 9^th, 1948, without any warning, Zionist forces that included the notorious Stern Gang and Irgun terrorist units, entered the village, spraying the houses with machine-gun fire. Many of the inhabitants were killed. The survivors were then collected together and murdered in cold blood. Some of the women were raped and then killed. The death role included 30 babies. Between 100 and 200 Palestinians were murdered at Deir Yassin and their village was blown up and razed to the ground. The scale of this operation was loudly (and proudly) proclaimed by the Zionist forces in order to demonstrate to other Paletinians just what would happen to them if they did not take flight. As news of the massacre spread there was a mass exodus of  Palestinians from other villages that feared the same fate.

 

 

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A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 3 :-  The complete ethnic cleansing  of  Safad.  April  – June 1948

 

The town of Safad in north east Galilee had been  home to 12,000 Arabs, almost all  Muslim,  and to 1,500 Jews. Despite the overwhelming Arab majority the town was allocated to the  Jewish State in the United Nations partition plan of 1947.  When the protective British Mandate forces left Safad on April 16^th, hostilities immediately ensued. On that same day, Zionist forces bombed the Arab area of Safad, killing 13 people, mostly children. Sporadic fighting continued until May 1^st  when the main battle  started with the destruction of surrounding villages in preparation for a direct attack on Safad. Each village attack started with a mortar barrage followed by a ground assault. Relatively few Palestinians were killed in these initial attacks but hundreds were taken prisoner and later many of these were murdered in cold blood. Others were driven from their homes which were then blown up and burned, leaving the people to flee towards Lebanon or Syria.  Elimination  of the surrounding villages prepared conditions  for the Zionist forces to attack Safad  itself. On May 2^nd they reached the Jewish quarter and proceeded to shell the Arab areas. The ground attack on the Arab areas started on May 6^th. The Palestinians fought back strongly but were no match for the well trained and well equipped Zionist forces. Terrified Palestinians fled on foot carrying small children and such possessions as they could manage. On May 10^th, Zionist aircraft  bombed and mortared the columns of escaping refugees. By May 11^th the Zionist troops had secured the now almost empty Arab quarter. They found about 100  Muslim Arabs with an average age of 80 still living there. They pleaded to be allowed to stay but were expelled to Lebanon. Only 45 Christian Arabs, also 70 – 80 years old,  remained but  these were expelled to Haifa on June 13^th, never to be allowed back.

 

Safad was totally ethically cleansed, the Palestinian population having been reduced from twelve thousand  to zero in just two months.

 

 

 

Some contemporary observations

 

“Panic took hold of the Safad inhabitants and long columns of Arabs began to

 leave the town in the direction of …the Jordan river”

Palmah  records

 

           The “Jews were following a perfectly clear  and ruthless plan. …they were now

           driving out the inhabitants of Arab villages along the Syrian

           and Lebanese frontiers“
           Azzam Pasha

 

 

Part 5 :-  The siege and capture of Jaffa.  April - May   1948

 

Jaffa was a Palestinian city of some 75,000 inhabitants that had been assigned to the Palestinian state in the 1947 UN partition plan.  Starting in December 1947, hostilities between Arabs and Jews gradually increased resulting in the exodus of many Palestinians and deterioration of conditions for those who remained.  Jewish terrorist bombings of civilians contributed to panic among the Palestinians. Early on April 25^th,  the Irgun began a major terrorist assault on Jaffa .The continuous mortar attacks on civilian targets greatly demoralised the Palestinian population. There was a sustained resistance and this was assisted by the British forces who had been instructed to retain Jaffa for the Palestinians - but to little avail. By early May,  Jaffa was a ghost town - anarchy was complete and only 5,000 inhabitants were left.  On May 13^th, 5,000 Zionist troops began their final attack. The city  was defended by only 1,500 poorly equipped volunteers and inevitably Jaffa fell to the  enormously more powerful Zionist forces. Virtually the entire Arab population was exterminated or expelled.

 

 

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A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 6 :-  The Declaration of Independence of Israel,  May 14^th  1948

 

At 4pm on the afternoon of May 14^th 1948,  the day that the British Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion read out the unilateral Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. He stated that it would uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter: he also promised equal rights to the Arab inhabitants of Israel.

 

In the period 1967 to 1989, the UN General Assembly has censured Israel 321 times . In the same period the Security Council has passed 88 resolutions critical of Israel, many of them severely critical. Israel ignored them all. Israel denies equal rights to the its own Arab citizens and since 1967 it has conducted a continuous and increasingly brutal occupation of  Palestinian territory.  It has committed countless war crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.

 

May 14^th 1948 was the worst day of the Nakba: the Declaration legitimised all the horrendous actions against Palestinians that had been taken by the Zionists before May 14^th and it set  the stage for subsequent atrocities.

 

 

Extracts from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights  Dec 10^th 1948

 

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

 

“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

 

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”

 

 

 

 

Extract (Clause 11) from UN Resolution 194, Dec 11^th 1948

 

“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

 

A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 7 :-  The massacre at Tantura.  May 22 -23^rd  1948

 

Tantura was a large coastal village, close to Haifa, with  around 1,500 Palestinian inhabitants. On the night of May 22 – 23^rd  Zionist forces surrounded the village completely, leaving no route for the escape of its inhabitants. The Palestinians surrendered by waving  white flags but the Zionists continued to fire at them at random. Women and children  were expelled to a nearby village but the surviving men and youths were taken away in groups and executed by shots to the head. Two Palestinians were then ordered to dig mass graves, in which 230 male Palestinians were buried. But before the corpses were covered with earth, the  women and children were brought to view the pile of  dead husbands, fathers and brothers.

 

 

“Prisoners were led in groups to a distance of 200 metres and there they were shot. Soldiers would…say, “My cousin was killed in the war.” His commander heard that and instructed the troops to take a group of five to seven people aside and execute them. Then a soldier…said his brother had died in one of the battles. For one brother the retribution was higher. The commander ordered the troops to take a larger group and they were shot, and so on.”

A  Jewish Military Officer

 

 

 

A side note:- In his book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” The Zionist historian Benny Morris concluded that there was no evidence that this massacre ever took place. He was disproved when an Israeli research student from Haifa University  uncovered the documentary evidence in 1999. For his diligence,  the student  was ‘rewarded’ by having his MA degree withdrawn by the University.

 

A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 8 :-  The re-invigorated  tide of ethnic cleansing.  June & July, 1948

 

In a ferocious storm, fed by greater confidence following the Declaration of Independence and in the face of relatively weak resistance from the Arab forces,  the Zionist military destroyed Palestinian village after village, blowing up and  burning indiscriminately and preventing those Palestinians who had fled from returning. However the Arab forces did have sufficient success to cause the Israelis to accept a UN-brokered truce. It lasted 4 weeks from June 11^th to July 8^th during which time the Zionists razed  to the ground many of the Arab villages they had already cleansed of people. Then frank hostilities resumed. The pace of destruction was particularly fast in the Galilee where 13 villages were overrun in just 10 days. But some  villages did survive: in one of these the population consisted of Christians, Muslims and Druze: the Israeli commander decided that only Muslims were to be expelled, so he executed several Muslims in the village square to persuade the other Muslims to flee. They did. It was at this stage that the Israelis increased the use of air attacks, dropping bombs on civilian homes and fleeing people. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed and expelled. A few pockets of Palestinian resistance continued until the end of July but were eventually overcome with  many hundreds of Palestinians killed.

 

 

Part 9 :- Operation Dani - the taking of Lydd and Ramla  July 10^th – 12^th ,1948

 

On July 10^th the town of Lydd, roughly half way between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, was bombed and this was  followed by a ground assault that killed 426 men, women and children, 176 of whom were sheltering in a mosque. 50,000 were expelled from the town and were made to march towards the West Bank

 

 

“During the night the soldiers began going into the houses in areas they had occupied, rounding up the population and expelling them from the city. Some…soldiers said, ‘Go to King Abdullah, to Ramallah’. The streets were filled with people setting out for indeterminate destinations…The occupying soldiers…were searching the refugees , particularly the women, stealing their gold jewellery from their necks, wrists, fingers and whatever was hidden in their cloths,  as well as money…”

A survivor, Spiro Munayar

 

 

 

“Practically everything in [the Israeli forces’] way died. Riddled corpses lay by the roadside” 

 

“The corpses of Arab men, women and even children [were] strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge”

 

“The Arab refugees were systematically stripped of all their belongings before they were sent on their trek to the frontier. Household belongings, stores, clothing, all had to be left behind”

 

Eye witness accounts by western newspaper reporters

 

 

On July 14^th, knowing what had happened at Lydd, the inhabitants of nearby Ramla surrendered but were then compelled to walk all the way to the West Bank. Many died on the way. Only a few hundred Palestinians were allowed to stay - altogether 50,000 were expelled. The Israeli commander of this operation was Yitzhak Rabin, later to be Prime Minister. A second truce was supposed to came into effect on July 18^th  by which time the Israelis had taken 369 Palestinian villages and towns but the Israeli onslaught continued unabated.

 

A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 10 :-  The murder of the UN envoy Count Folke Bernadotte.   Sept 17^th  1948

 

Count Folke Bernadotte was the United Nations envoy charged with mediating between the Zionists and the Arab forces. During the World War  he had been President of the Swedish Red Cross which had enabled many European Jews to escape Nazi persecution. But the Zionists did not expect him to do the same for the Palestinians. In fact he worked hard to achieve justice for the Palestinians, calling for a division of the land into two halves and demanding  the return and compensation of  Palestinian refugees. He was responsible for UN Resolution  194.  But his fate was assassination by the Zionist Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who like Rabin, would subsequently become a Prime Minister of Israel.

 

 

 

The General Assembly of the United Nations. December 11^th 1948,

”Having considered further the situation in Palestine…..expresses its deep appreciation of the progress achieved through the good offices of the late United Nations Mediator [Count Folke Bernadotte] in promoting a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine, for which cause he sacrificed his life….”

 

 

 

 

“Bernadotte’s assassins were never brought to justice”

 

Avi Shlaim, ”The Iron Wall”,  Published by Penguin Books,  2000,  p37

 

 

 

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A  NAKBA DIARY - THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE

 

Part 11 :-  Completing  the Nakba – the massacre at Dawaymeh.  October 28^th 1949

 

By mid-October there were a few areas of Palestinian resistance left, mostly in the Galilee. Some of these held out for several weeks against vastly superior Israeli forces but eventually succumbed. Perhaps the Israeli forces lost some of their appetite for ethnic cleansing: in any event several largely Arab villages in the north were allowed to remain. But brutalities continued. In the village of Ilabun, the inhabitants, taking refuge in a church,  were forced to witness the assassination of several of their young men. The villagers were then expelled towards Lebanon but for some unknown reason 750 of them were then allowed to return.  Throughout  the period from October to January, the Israelis continued to drive out many of the remaining Palestinians. In the south there continued to be significant resistance, assisted by Egyptian volunteers. The village of Dawaymeh, between Beersheba and Hebron, was the site of probably the worst Nakba atrocity of all. The village normally had a population of 2,000 but this had been swollen by refugees to 6,000  in October. At midday on October 28^th , 20 armoured cars entered the village and opened fire with machine guns and mortars. Many fled to the mosque where they were killed. It is estimated that 455 people were killed, 170 of whom were women and children.

 

 

“[There were]  horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in their houses and men stabbed to death”

Reported by Israeli soldiers who took part. Recorded by Ilan Pappe

 

 

 

“In 1948, 85% of the Palestinians living in areas that became the state of Israel became refugees.”

“It is estimated that there were more than 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons at the beginning of 2003.”

Badil Resource Centre: Facts and Figures

 

 

By the cease fire on January 7^th  Israel had taken control of  78% of  the land, 23% more  than the 55% that the UN had allocated to the Jewish state.  Israel had destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and had driven  750,000  Palestinians out of their homes, stealing their land and possessions. At least 10,000 Palestinians had been killed and 30,000 injured. In defiance of UN Resolution 194 and international law, Israel has, to this day, absolutely denied the legal right of any Palestinian refugee to return.