Pappe Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel

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in 1948, recalled: ‘Jewish soldiers broke down the doors to my church

and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the

statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.’ He was aware of the

repeated promises by the government and the local military governors

to respect the sanctity of mosques and churches but noted ‘their deeds

did not correspond to their words’.

Churches as a rule were more

respected than mosques, which disappeared in huge numbers from the

Palestinian landscape in the new Jewish state of Israel.

The destructive transformation of the past into the new reality was

particularly difﬁcult to comprehend for the elite in the urban centres.

In Haifa the leading Palestinians were called to a meeting with the

city’s Jewish military governor on the evening of 1 July 1948. These

notables represented the few thousand Palestinians left after more than

70,000 other citizens had been expelled. The purpose of the meeting

was to order them to facilitate the transfer of the Arabs in the city into

one neighbourhood, in Wadi Nisnas, the poorest section of the city.

Some of those ordered to move had lived for a long time on the upper

slopes of Mount Carmel, or on the mount itself.

The citizens were ordered to complete the move by 5 July 1948.

Their leaders were shocked. Many of them belonged to the Communist

Party, which had supported partition, and hoped that now that the

ﬁghting was over they could begin normal life again. ‘I do not under-

stand: is this a military command?’ protested Tawﬁq Tubi, later a

member of the Knesset for the Communist Party. ‘Let us look on the

condition of these people. I cannot see any reason, even a military one

that justiﬁes such a move.’ He ended his speech with the words: ‘We

demand that the people will stay in their homes.’ Another participant,

Bulus Farah, cried, ‘This is racism’ and called the move ‘ghettoizing the

Palestinians in Haifa’.

Even the dry document cannot hide the reaction of the Israeli

military commander: frosty and metallic.

‘I can see that you are sitting here and advising me, while you

were invited to hear the orders of the High Command and assist

it! I am not involved in politics and do not deal with it. I am just

obeying orders ...I am just fulﬁlling orders and I have to make sure

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this order is executed until the ﬁfth . . . If this is not done, I will

do it myself. I am a soldier.’

After the commander’s long monologue ended, Shehada Shalah

asked: ‘And if a person owns a house, does he have to leave?’

The commander: ‘Everyone has to leave.’

Then came the question of expenses. The notables learned that the

expellees would have to pay for the cost of their enforced removal

themselves. Victor Hayat tried to reason with the commander that it

would take more than a day for people to be notiﬁed, and that that

would not leave them much time. The commander replied that four

days was plenty of time. The person who transcribed the meeting

recorded: ‘All the Arab representatives cried out, “But it is a very short

time”, and the commander replied, “I cannot change it.” ’

Not everyone complied with the order. Wadi Bustani, a lawyer, poet

and writer living in the beautiful avenue leading to the sea from the

mountain (today Ben-Gurion Avenue connecting the Bahai Temple to

the port) could not bear the thought of leaving. He was arrested and

detained but, since he did not give in, he was eventually allowed to stay

in his home. Less fortunate was the spiritual head of the Orthodox

Church, a member of the sizeable Greek community that also left

in 1948, who was ordered to forsake his church and monastery and

move to Wadi Nisnas. He was obliged to celebrate liturgies in an

‘inconvenient hall, facing north to south instead of east to west,

contrary to the Church’s rites and traditions’.

Other just left, as did Emil Habibi’s mother. As the famous writer

and poet recollected, his mother’s generation could not bear staying in

Haifa under such circumstances:

Umm Wadie [Habibi’s mother] was unable to overcome the shock

of those days [1948; she was in East Jerusalem when Haifa was

occupied by the Jewish forces in April]. By then her life was behind

her, and most of her sons and grandchildren were scattered in the

Diaspora. Once she came down to the premises of our old political

club in Wadi Al-Nisnass to participate in a joint Arab-Jewish

women’s meeting. Those were days of a raging general election

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campaign. The Jewish speaker was emphasising our struggle for the

rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Umm

Wadie interrupted her saying: ‘Will my sons and daughters return?’

Taken aback, the Jewish-Hungarian speaker replied: ‘They will

return when peace is achieved.’ ‘Lies,’ shouted Umm Wadie, ‘my

son Emile never lies to me. He told me that their return – if ever

they return – will take a long time. By then I won’t be here to see

them: I’ll be in my grave.’

Ever since that meeting, and without me knowing, it became

her custom to go secretly to a corner of Abbas Garden near our

house. She would lean against a stone shaded by an olive tree and

bemoan her destiny – lonely and separated from children, espe-

cially her youngest son Naim.

At the end of 1949, those who stayed ofﬁcially became the ‘Arab

minority of Israel’. On their ID cards, under the rubric of nationality

appeared their religious afﬁliation and not their national one. According

to these documents there were no Palestinians or atheists among these

citizens of the Jewish state. In the legal and ofﬁcial jargon of the state they

appeared as beni miutim, members of the minorities – note ‘minorities’ in

plural, as if there were other minorities apart from the Palestinians. But

for all intents and purposes they were Arabs; their identity was the

clearest signiﬁer of the identity of the Jew in Israel. In Europe Jews were

those who were not Christians, and in the Arab world Jews were those

who were not Christians or Muslims. It was a religious deﬁnition. In the

new Jewish state a Jew became an ethnic identity and a Jew was, appar-

ently, someone who was not an ‘Arab’ – not any Arab but someone who

was not a Palestinian. Without such a deﬁnition the question of who was

a Jew, a permanent source of trouble in the history of Israeli law-making

and administration, would have remained an insoluble issue between reli-

gious and national deﬁnitions. There were of course Arab Jews, or Jews

who came from Arab countries, but they were de-Arabized, voluntarily

and by a policy from above: coached to Hebraicize their Arabic names,

distance themselves from their Arabic language, history and roots, and

adopt strong anti-Arab positions as the best means of integrating into the

veteran Ashkenazi, namely European, society.

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GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

The new minority lived in six geographical areas in the state. The ﬁrst

was a scattered existence in Israel’s urban centres. These metropoles

were transformed dramatically during 1948. Covered markets that had

existed for centuries were demolished, whole quarters were removed

with the intent of de-Arabizing the urban scene and only the houses of

the upper class remained intact as they were coveted by the new Jewish

dwellers. The skyline that used to be dominated by church spires and

minarets was now taken over by cubic high-rise monstrosities built for

the many immigrants with little care for the landscape or the humans

living in them.

Very small groups were left in the urban spaces that had been cleansed

in the operations of the spring and summer of 1948: a few hundred in

Haifa and Jaffa, a few thousand in Shefa-‘Amr in the western Galilee,

who were nearly expelled as well but eventually allowed to stay, and ten

thousand or so in Nazareth, again a population that was doomed at

ﬁrst to be cleansed but was allowed to stay after the Israeli political

leadership retracted its early decision and left the people there intact.

The commander of the Brigade, Brigade 7, that occupied the town

telegraphed on 17 July 1948: ‘Should we expel the people from the town

of Nazareth? I think we should expel everyone apart from the clergymen’;

Ben-Gurion replied: ‘Don’t expel people from Nazareth.’

Many of those who were ‘allowed’ to stay by Ben-Gurion were

internal refugees from the villages around Nazareth. In other places

too, those who became the ‘Arabs’ of Haifa and Shefa-‘Amr were

internal refugees from villages nearby who arrived there in 1948 after

the expulsion and ﬂight, or later on in a process of internal immigra-

tion. Very few were the original city dwellers. The houses they moved

into, usually rented as most houses were not for sale to Arabs, had

quite often previously been owned by Palestinians. This was the

troubled beginning of life for the urban Palestinians in Israel.

The second group was the rural population in the lower and upper

Galilee who survived the ethnic cleansing operations, for reasons that

still have to be properly researched. We presume, in the absence of a

better explanation, that it was due to their own resistance and because

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of the fatigue of the Israeli army that tens of thousands of Palestinians

still inhabited the Galilee in 1949. Today, despite governmental efforts

in the 1970s and 1980s to Judaize these areas, the scenery is still ‘Arab’,

as are more than 60 per cent of the people living in the region. When

you drive through these areas you see mostly large Arab villages,

in their traditional locations on the mountain slopes, with minarets

and churches being the highest buildings piercing the skyline. And

although, unlike in 1948, there are now new Jewish settlements on the

top of mountains, these have not yet (for the most part) transformed

this more pastoral Middle Eastern view.

The third group were the people living in Wadi Ara, the valley

connecting the Mediterranean Jewish town of Hadera with the inner

eastern valleys of the land, south of Nazareth and west of Jenin. Those

who know the area recognize its peculiarity. In the past the villages

were comfortably scattered at a fair distance from each other on the

hills overlooking this major and ancient route from the sea to the inner

plains and further into the Jordan and Syria of yesteryear. This is

where the crusaders’ army marched before they were crushed by Salah

al-Din’s troops in medieval times. Now it is enclaved by Jewish settle-

ments around it, with the villages almost fusing one into the other,

seeking space to grow in a state that does not allow any spatial growth

for the Arab municipal and rural localities.

This area was originally occupied by the Jordanian Arab Legion

in the 1948 war. There was a tacit understanding between this army

and the Jewish forces that parts of the state which the UN accorded

to the Palestinians in the 1947 partition resolution would be annexed

to Jordan in return for the Jordanians limiting their role in the all-Arab

operations against the Jewish state. Whether this part was included in

that tacit understanding was not clear and hence the Israelis threatened

the Jordanians with an additional war if that valley was not given

to them. Intimidated by this threat, the Hashemite negotiators decided

to allow Israel to take over Wadi Ara as part of an overall armistice

agreement between the two states, which was signed in April 1949 and

executed in June of that same year. About 15,000 Palestinians became

Israeli citizens as a result. The segregation wall and fences which Israel

built in 2001 are today the only barriers that separate these villages

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from those with which they shared land up until 1948. In several cases,

such as that of the village of Barta, the village was divided into two by

the armistice line and was not, for political reasons, reunited after

1967, although both parts of the village came under Israeli rule.

Similar cases are to be found in the fourth location, the southern

Triangle, which consists of a number of Palestinian villages bordering

the West Bank, located between the northern part of the Tel Aviv

metropolis and the Green Line of 1967. Baqa al-Sharqiyya, the eastern

Baqa and Baqa al-Gharbiyya, the western one, is the most famous

divided village, with a similar experience to Barta.

This is a more ﬂatland area, closer to the sea, which gradually, due to

its proximity to the Tel Aviv metropolis, became the main provider of

unskilled labour in the 1960s and 1970s. Economically it is worse off

and, apart from one new high-rise complex built in one of the towns in

2010, it is dense and overpopulated due to Israel’s spatial policy that

prevents the geographical expansion of the villages, thus offering very

little hope of economic development and socio-economic prosperity in

the near future. It is now bisected by a new highway, Road No. 6, but

not connected – apart from one spot – directly to that road (the highway

passes within the ﬁelds of the villages and towns, but its various exits do

not allow these residents to enjoy a better or speedy access to it).

The ﬁfth location is in the south, in the Negev, or al-Naqb in Arabic,

where mostly the semi-nomadic Palestinians, the Bedouin, live. They

dwell mostly in villages which were not recognized as legal settlements

by the state for the duration of the period covered by this book. In

1948, not all of the Bedouin were leading a semi-sedentary life;

some of them were inhabitants of the ancient town of Bir Saba (today

Beer Sheva) and other villages; but they were expelled with tens of

thousands of other Bedouin between the years 1948 and 1950.

Finally, there is a group of several villages on the western slopes of the

Jerusalem mountain which survived one of the early Israeli operations of

ethnic cleansing, the Harel operation of April 1948 which dispossessed

thirty or more villages in that area in a few days.

The best-known today

is Abu Gosh – the seat of a famous mountain strongman who controlled

the Jaffa to Jerusalem road in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Today it is where the Jewish secular Jerusalemites escape to on Saturdays

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and holidays, when life comes to a standstill in the increasingly religious

West Jerusalem and less secure East Jerusalem.

Here too there are divided villages due to the demarcation of

the Israeli–Jordanian armistice line. The village of Beit Safafa, in a valley

to the south-west of Jerusalem, was cynically divided by Jordanian and

Israeli negotiators in the 1949 armistice negotiations. A ruthless hand

drew the border in the middle of the village and it was divided by barbed

wire. In 1956, a correspondent of Time magazine reported an emotional

wedding of a bride and groom from the two sides of the divide. The

bride, Fatma Bint from the Jordanian side, married Moussa Ayasha from

the Israeli side. The bride, as was traditional, left for the groom’s house;

namely, to the fence and beyond.

Sisters and brothers and cousins and uncles stretched out their

arms across the wire to embrace, to bless and be blessed. The

wedding party, silent now, turned toward the bridegroom’s home,

and the Arabs on the Jordan side watched until Fatma and her

bridegroom were over the hill.

Then the border guards straightened up the wire barricade,

and, guns ever ready, resumed their patrolling beside the barbed

wire that since 1949 divided Beit Safafa.

Israel is thus a matrix of intertwined ethnic communities and there

are no coherent homogenous areas; this accentuates the tension

between attempts from above to create physical segregation (as has

been done with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and the reality on

the ground.

JEWISH REACTIONS

For the Jewish side the new reality was less traumatic, deﬁnitely not as

painful, but nonetheless similarly hard to digest. The presence of a

Palestinian minority inside the Jewish state was not envisaged by the

leaders of the Zionist movement. Conventional historiography would

be quick to disagree: such historians would point out that Israel’s

Declaration of Independence, issued on 14 May 1948, promised equal

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rights to all its citizens, regardless of their religion or race. But, while

these noble aspirations were expressed, the Israeli army was deeply

engaged in the ethnic cleansing of these very future citizens of the

Jewish state. From oral testimonies given by Palestinian villagers living

near the coast, who had no connections with Palestinian paramilitary

groups, we know that some were ready to become citizens of the

Jewish state on the basis of this declaration, and were surprised when

they were ordered to leave.

The gap between the promises and the actual policies on the ground

was obfuscated by the war that raged at the time between the nascent

Jewish state and the Arab armies that entered Palestine in an attempt to

prevent the establishment of the state and to stop the ongoing Israeli

expulsion of the indigenous people. The military power of the new state

was sufﬁcient, we know in hindsight, to repel the general Arab attack

while at the same time conducting a systematic ethnic-cleansing opera-

tion on the ground. Before the military operations during the months of

October and November 1948, when the north and south of Palestine

were still free from Israeli occupation, there were hardly any Palestinians

within the space taken over by the Jewish army. Eretz Israel was, or so it

seemed at ﬁrst sight, cleansed of any ‘strangers’ (Zarim in Hebrew, in the

language of Ben-Gurion) or ‘invaders’, as the Palestinians appeared in

the ﬁnal triumphant declarations of the various commanders of the army

when the ﬁghting was over.

Given the expulsion plans devised before May 1948 and the constant

preoccupation with the possibility of transferring the Palestinians

still remaining after the war of 1948, it is clear that the leaders of

the Jewish state were not prepared for the possibility of a bi-national

state. It was only in the 1960s that the Israeli political elite began to

accept the presence of such a minority and began seriously strate-

gizing a possible modus vivendi with the Palestinians inside the

state.

Thus, not much thought had been given to the nature of the

Arab–Jewish relationship in the new state; however, there were very

clear ideas about the nature of the state itself. It was to be a liberal-

democratic nation-state based on Western European models. But was

it possible to maintain such a state with a national minority in it?

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The strategists of the policy towards the Palestinian minority in

1949 were probably aware that their decisions could have a signiﬁcant

impact on the nature of the state and on the orientation of the Zionist

project. However, despite the enormity of the issue, or maybe because

of it, they preferred not to mention this predicament in their decisions

and to keep it very much in the background. Their opinions on the

subject can be mostly inferred from their policies rather from their

writings or speeches; however, this material is extensive enough to

enable us to reconstruct their vision and overall strategy.

Let us ﬁrst see who were the people making these crucial decisions.

The ofﬁcial policy in the ﬁrst years of statehood was formulated by a

small group of leaders who represented what today we would call the

more ‘hawkish’ side of the Israeli mainstream political elite. There

were more liberal-minded members of that elite who wished to have

an input into the policy, but they were marginalized and their input

was inconsequential. This debate was within the Zionist framework

and the best way of describing it is to see the ideological spectrum of

the time as stretching between democracy and ethnicity. The liberal

ones, now known as ‘doves’, were willing to ‘sacriﬁce’, albeit in a

limited way, the ethnicity of the state for the sake of its democracy. The

‘hawks’ deemed the ethnic purity of the state to be a supreme value

which superseded any other.

The group depicted here as the ‘hawks’ were mainly the ofﬁcial

advisors on Arab affairs in the Prime Minister’s Ofﬁce. The ﬁrst person

to hold this position, Yehoshua Palmon, epitomized the ‘hawkish’

point of view in his career and his attitudes. In the very few photos

from that period, he appears as an angry, square-built person with a

piercing gaze. A former member of the Arabic unit of the Haganah,

which comprised Jews who were ﬂuent in Arabic and spied on the

Palestinian side, he later became the head of the Arab Section of the

Jewish Agency before becoming the ﬁrst prime-ministerial advisor on

the subject. He was born in Palestine to two Jewish settlers who came

from Russia and he grew up with Palestinians; it was only in 1948, and

even more so in the early 1950s, that he became an ardent advocate

of a harsh and inﬂexible policy towards the Palestinian indigenous

population, ﬁrst by taking part in their ethnic cleansing in 1948, then

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by regarding almost all the Palestinians left in Israel as a hostile and

undesirable group of people.

Palmon was behind the expulsion of the

people of Majdal in the southern plains (today Askhelon) in 1949; they

had been Israeli citizens, according to the UN charter, for almost a

year. With his prodding, David Ben-Gurion, the ﬁrst Prime Minister,

authorized the enforced eviction of the people of this town and made

them refugees in the Gaza Strip. It was only in 1958 that he conceded

in an ofﬁcial document that the option for transfer was not applicable

any more.

In the ofﬁcial daily of the ruling party, Davar, he recom-

mended constantly that the Palestinians should not be given equal

rights, which included not being given the right to vote or to be

elected, due to their cultural backwardness.

Palmon’s successor in the ofﬁce in 1955 was Shemuel Divon, a former

ofﬁcial of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Divon’s ﬁrst ofﬁcial

paper was very clear:

There is no way the Arabs of Israel will be loyal to the state. It

would have been advantageous if the state could either expel them

or convert them to Judaism, but these are now not realistic

options . . . [we should therefore] limit this sore evil [r’aah hola in

Hebrew] by uprooting their [the Arabs’] bitterness and at the

same time be most painstaking about security considerations.

The most famous among the more liberal Israeli politicians who did

not share these views included two who, like Palmon, had been born in

Palestine. The ﬁrst was Moshe Sharett, the Foreign Minister, who grew

up in a Palestinian village and, although he was not particularly inter-

ested in the fate of the Palestinians who were still left in the state, he

supported granting them equal rights and rejected the idea of imposing

military rule on them. This view was shared by Bechor Shitrit, who,

although he was born in Tiberias in Palestine, was regarded as the

only Mizrahi Jew (namely one who came from an Arab country) and the

token Sephardic Jew in an Ashkenazi government, because his parents

came from Morocco, whereas Sharett’s parents came from Russia. He

served as a judge under Mandatory Palestine rule and believed in the

possibility of joint Arab–Jewish life from very early on, suggesting that

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