Erased from Space and Consciousness

Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948

Noga Kadman

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253016829
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Preservación histórica en la arquitectura

Hundreds of Palestinian villages were left empty across Israel when their residents became refugees after the 1948 war, their lands and property confiscated. Most of the villages were razed by the new State of Israel, but in dozens of others, communities of Jews were settled—many refugees in their own right. The state embarked on a systematic effort of renaming and remaking the landscape, and the Arab presence was all but erased from official maps and histories. Israelis are familiar with the ruins, terraces, and orchards that mark these sites today—almost half are located within tourist areas or national parks—but public descriptions rarely acknowledge that Arab communities existed there within living memory or describe how they came to be depopulated. Using official archives, kibbutz publications, and visits to the former village sites, Noga Kadman has reconstructed this history of erasure for all 418 depopulated villages.

1	Depopulation, Demolition, and Repopulation of the Village Sites

ON THE EVE of the violent events of 1948, the Arab population of British Mandatory Palestine amounted to 1.2 million, of them 850,000 within the borders of what is today recognized as the State of Israel proper; they constituted the great majority of the population of that area. Arab-Palestinian society of the time was largely agricultural, with some two-thirds of the Palestinian population before the war living in villages. Most of the Arab workforce in 1947 in Palestine worked in agriculture.¹ On their land the Arab villagers cultivated nearly ten thousand acres of orchards, mostly citrus fruit (on the coastal plain) and olives (in the mountainous areas), as well as figs, grapes, deciduous fruits, and bananas. In the rest of the cultivated area the villagers grew vegetables, legumes, and grains.²

Most of the residents of Arab villages in Palestine were Sunni Muslim, with Christian, Druze, and Shi‘ite minorities present. The majority of the villages stood on hilltops, often built on top of, or in continuation of, much older settlements. In the mountain areas the houses were usually made of stone, and in the coastal plain houses were often constructed of mud.³ In the twentieth century, with the citrus boom, quality of life in the plain improved, and more modern houses began to appear. Every village typically had public structures for religious and social purposes, and later on schools were set up, usually in the largest building in the village.⁴

It is difficult to determine exactly how many Palestinians became refugees in 1948, and estimates vary: Israeli official sources maintain the number of 520,000, while official Arab sources insist it was 900,000. Benny Morris concludes that the number of Palestinian refugees displaced was between 600,000 and 760,000.⁵ There is still a debate as to the circumstances and factors that played a role in these Palestinians becoming refugees. According to Morris, the residents of approximately half of the villages and towns that were depopulated fled because of military attacks; the rest were deported or fled out of fear of an attack, due to Israeli conquest of a nearby community, as a result of Israeli psychological warfare, or for reasons presently unknown. In a handful of villages, residents were ordered to leave by various Arab leaders.⁶

Whether they fled, were attacked, or were deported, few Palestinians who found themselves beyond the Israeli borders that were determined at the end of the war were allowed to return to their country and their homes, and these people have remained refugees to this day. Some four hundred thousand of the refugees came from several hundred villages that remained in Israeli hands after the war, ravaged and empty. The Palestinian refugees were made to leave their lands and their homes, as well as all of their possessions, except what they could carry off when they left. Israel took over refugee property, reallocated their lands to existing Jewish communities, built new communities on the appropriated land, settled Jews in emptied Palestinian houses in cities and some villages, and razed most of the depopulated villages altogether.⁷

Approximately twenty thousand Palestinians who were displaced from sixty of the depopulated villages settled in other Arab communities within Israel and received Israeli citizenship. These internally displaced persons are known in Israel as “internal refugees” or “present absentees,” and the property they left behind was expropriated all the same.⁸

Meanwhile, over two thousand Jews living in twenty rural communities in the Jerusalem area, the Jordan valley, the southern coastal plain, and the Galilee were also forced to leave their homes when their communities were attacked and demolished by Jordanian, Egyptian, or Iraqi forces. Eighteen thousand Jews were also displaced from the Jaffa area during the fighting in 1948 and settled in and around Tel Aviv, while some two thousand Jewish residents of the Jewish quarter and other neighborhoods of Jerusalem were deported from their homes and settled in the western part of the city.

The Palestinians displaced beyond Israel’s borders, as well as their descendants, are still recognized as refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), established in 1950. By late 2012 they numbered almost five million. Most Palestinian refugees reside today in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, 1.5 million of them still living in refugee camps.⁹

The Making of the Palestinian Refugees

The Arabs of the land of Israel have only one function left—to run away.

—David Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister]
October 21, 1948 (Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited)

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly endorsed a call to partition Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab. The next day Arab residents began attacking Jews in cities and on the roads. In January 1948 units of volunteer irregulars began arriving from Arab states in a bid to join the fighting. The Arab military force was inferior to the Jewish one in numbers, munitions, coordination, and professionalism. The Haganah militia—the bulk of the Jewish fighting force—adopted a policy of defense and counterattack. Up to March 1948, most Haganah attacks—conducted by its fighting force, the Palmach—were retaliatory actions, limited to areas where Arab attacks had occurred earlier.¹⁰

As the conflict flared, Arab residents began leaving their cities—Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem—following shooting and bombing attacks by the Haganah and the more radical militias of the Irgun (Etzel) and the Stern Gang (Leḥi). The departure was also due to threats and fear of retaliatory assaults by Jewish paramilitaries. This exodus can in part also be attributed to food shortages, unemployment, robberies committed by Arab forces, and general fear of the aftermath of the British mandate’s approaching end.¹¹

Villagers began to flee at around the same time, usually in direct response to attacks by Jewish forces or fear of such attacks. In some villages the Haganah expelled the residents, while in others residents left on the instructions of Arab combatants.¹² Yossef Weitz, head of the land department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) at the time, took a direct and active part in forcing Arab sharecroppers living on lands acquired by JNF in the Menashe hills to flee; later on, Weitz ensured the demolition of their dwellings and successfully lobbied the Haganah to evict Arabs from other places, especially the Bedouin of the northern Jordan valley.¹³ By March 1948, some hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, mostly city dwellers, had left for Lebanon, Jordan, and the Jordan-occupied West Bank.¹⁴

In March 1948 attacks by Arabs and resultant Jewish casualties escalated, and in many areas Arabs began blockading roads to Jewish communities. In response, the Haganah prepared Plan D, meant to prevent armed Arab forces from operating in Palestinian communities adjacent to Jewish ones.¹⁵ The plan stipulated that as the need arose, the Jewish forces should disarm combatants, occupy communities, expel the residents, and raze the villages—especially those that could not be permanently held.¹⁶

The implementation of the plan began in April 1948 in a sequence of offensives by the Haganah, meant to purge entire areas of Palestinian villages before May 15, 1948, the end date of the British Mandate, when it was widely anticipated that war would begin. In most cases, villages found themselves facing sustained, coordinated, and well-organized attacks by the Haganah, with no organized military defense of their own or coordination with other villages. Most of the residents fled during the attacks or as the attacks loomed.¹⁷

The attacks soon whipped up the sporadic incidents of flight into a tidal wave. On April 9, Irgun and Stern Gang paramilitaries killed more than a hundred residents of the village of Dayr Yasin, most of them noncombatants, including women and children. Based on the accounts of witnesses, both Palestinians and Jews, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé concludes that later, on the night between May 22 and 23, Israel carried out a massacre in the village of al-Tantura on the shore under Mount Carmel, which was “far worse than the infamous case of that at Dayr Yasin.” He describes how 200–250 residents were killed there, in a raging spree by the Israeli forces after they occupied the village and also by a systematic summary execution of boys and men on the beach.¹⁸

Salman Abu Sitta lists ten more villages in which massacres by Israeli forces took place around the same time, including Balad al-Shaykh near Haifa and ‘Ayn al-Zaytun near Safad.¹⁹ News of the massacres, especially in Dayr Yasin, increased the fear among Palestinian villagers and contributed to their flight, as did the Haganah’s custom of spreading rumors of impending attacks and advising residents to evacuate.

The villages fell one by one. When fighting died down in a village, the occupying forces would usually chase out the remaining residents. In some villages standing by important roads, especially in the Jerusalem corridor and around kibbutz Mishmar Ha‘Emek at the mouth of the Jezreel Valley, the Haganah conducted premeditated expulsions.²⁰

The depopulation of the villages was influenced by, and influenced in its turn, the flight of the Palestinian city dwellers. The flight from the cities continued also owing to the collapse of law and order there, the escape of the local leaders, and the poverty and overcrowding created by the arrival of refugees from other areas. In some places, cities were forcibly depopulated of their remaining Palestinian residents by the Haganah militia.²¹

On May 15, 1948, the British Mandate ended and the State of Israel was established. The next day, military units from five Arab countries joined the fray, and this phase lasted until the cease-fire on June 11. The period between April and June 1948 saw the greatest exodus of Arabs from Palestine: 250,000–300,000 from the center and north of the country became refugees in the West Bank, Egypt-occupied Gaza, and neighboring states. The scale of the flight of the Arab residents took the Jewish leadership by surprise in the beginning but was soon perceived as something desirable that should be encouraged. Military commanders were increasingly acting accordingly, by intimidation, attacks, and deliberate expulsions.²²

In spring 1948 the Palestinian refugees, encouraged and supported by the Arab States, began lobbying for a return to their homes. On the other side, the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine—and later, the leadership of the State of Israel—tried rallying support against the return of the refugees. At a cabinet meeting in June, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok (later Sharet) spoke forcefully against allowing the return. Ben-Gurion declared, “I believe we should prevent their return. . . . I will be for them not returning also after the war,” and Shertok said, “This is our policy: that they are not returning.” Members of the left-leaning Mapam party, a part of the governing coalition, opposed that view, objected to the expulsion of Arab residents from the newly founded state, and spoke in favor of allowing the refugees to return after the war. As the first cease-fire of the war came into force in June 1948, growing international pressure was put on Israel to resolve the problem of the Palestinian refugees. In July Israel announced that no refugees would be allowed to return while the war continued, and that any decision on the matter would have to come within the framework of a peace agreement with the Arab States.²³

The Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang militias were amalgamated into one force, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), which was boosted by new recruits. On July 9, 1948, fighting resumed and the IDF launched assaults on several fronts. By July 18, Israel had conquered vast swaths ...