Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians, 1949-1965

al-Majdal Asqalan, soon after Israeli forces occupied in Nov. 1948, but before they were expelled to Gaza in 1950. Source

In 1948, Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what became known as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe. But even when the guns fell silent and the armistice agreements were signed, Israel continued to push Palestinians out of the country through violence, intimidation, pressure and bribes. It’s a process known as the "elimination of the native," to borrow Patrick Wolfe's term, the inevitable result of a settler colonial project. This is a brief history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, 1949-1965.

The first thing Israeli forces did after the cessation of hostilities was expel Palestinians from the border areas of the state. Palestinians on both sides of a border, so the logic went, presented an inherent security risk, and so the one’s living on the Israeli side needed to be uprooted, ideally out of the country.

On the northern border, in places like Ghabsiyyeh, Zaytun, Kafr Bir’im, Iqrit, Kafr Anan, al-Mansurah, the Israeli military promised Palestinians in late 1948 evacuation orders were temporary, and return would be permitted in 15 days. After the promises were -- wait for it -- broken, Aziz Shehadeh took the case to the Supreme Court, and won. But the Israeli army ignored the ruling and destroyed the villages instead. To quote Shehadeh’s son, it was “Israeli justice.” Said differently, Israel may have been a democratic state to Jews, but it was a Jewish State to Palestinians.

Israel continued to try to expel Palestinians in the north throughout 1949. In February, the Israeli military loaded hundreds of Palestinians from Kfar Yasif onto trucks, shipped them to the Jordanian border and forced them to cross at gunpoint. Palestinians in the villages of Khasas, Qatiya, and Yanuh were expelled and forced to the Safed area. In December 1949, Israeli forces tried to compel Palestinians in Fassutah, Tarshihah, Mi'ilyah, Jish, Hurfeish, Rihaniyah, to leave for Lebanon, these villages resisted Israeli pressure and steadfastly remained on their land. Palestinians have even coined a term to refer to this form of resistance: Sumud.

In the southern border areas, to be sure, a more violent process unfolded. In March 1949, Israeli forces expelled 3,100 Palestinians in Faluja & Iraq al-Manshiyya through violence. Soldiers entered homes, attacking Palestinians with rifle butts and looting whatever their hearts desired. The result was mass flight. To prevent their return, Jewish establishments such as Kiryat Gat were built on their ruins.

Indeed, the war’s end made it more difficult for Israel to carry out mass expulsions. The period from November 1948 to March 1949 marked a gradual shift from brute force to intimidation and pressure, and from expulsion out of the country to displacement within it. “There was still a desire to see Arabs leave the country and occasionally this was achieved,” historian Benny Morris writes, but selective intimidation, psychological pressure and bribery were increasingly adopted alongside physical violence.

As the historian Hillel Cohen explained to me, Israeli government representatives tried to buy whatever land they could from Palestinians, offered payment in coveted foreign currency, granted exit permits and even assisted with obtaining visas to any country that wasn’t Arab. (For Jews in Israel, the opposite was the case, the state rejected half of exit permit applications from Jews).

In fact, Israeli leader Yosef Weitz went from village to village persuading Palestinians to sell their homes and leave. In August 1949, he succeeded in compelling at least 200 Palestinians in the village of Ar'ara to sell their land and depart the country. They were compensated in Jordanian currency and provided direct transportation to the border. The generosity!

Israel also set up a Council for Arab Affairs to manage the process, including a special subcommittee to explore “options for the exit of Arabs from the country.” Naturally, the committee tasked with determining the future of the Arabs in Israel included a whopping 0 Arabs. Instead, it included the chief operating officer of the Nakba, Yosef Weitz and the head of the military regime over the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, Yitzhak Shani. 

From 1949-1965, Shmuel Toledano, a Mossad operative and advisor on Arab affairs, estimated that about 3,000 Palestinian Arabs had left through these policies designed to encourage “voluntary” flight alone.

Of course, forceful expulsions continued as well. One of the more violent affairs took place in January 1950, when Israel decided to expel the last remaining 2,600 Palestinians in Majdal, a town of 10,000 before the war. For months, Israeli forces loaded Palestinians onto trucks, sending them off to Gaza. Whoever refused to leave was coerced through intimidation and violence. They were replaced by Jews, who called the place Ashkelon.

The expulsions continued unabated in the south through the late spring and early summer of 1950. In May, Israel forced 120 Palestinians in the 'Arava in southern Israel onto 2 crowded trucks to a point near the border with Jordan, at 'Ein Husb, an extremely isolated, desert region. Israeli soldiers fired bursts over their heads and ordered them to cross to Jordan. Several dozen perished from dehydration and starvation along the perilous journey.

In June 1950, Israel forcibly depopulated some 190 Palestinians in the village of Zakariyya, mostly to Jordan, some to Ramla. To convince Ben-Gurion to issue expulsion orders, Israeli officials pointed out “in the village there are many good houses, and it is possible to accommodate several hundred new immigrants.” By settling the Jewish immigrants in the homes of Palestinians, Israel was able to simultaneously solve for its own absorption problems, lighten the burden of the “transit camps,” all the while making it impossible for Palestinians to return. It was a double whammy.

It wasn’t just border areas that created a problem for Israel, but any area of the state with a large concentration of Palestinians. The logic was security via “thinning out the population,” to use historian Shira Robinson’s description of Israeli policy. 

Thus, in February 1951, the inhabitants of 13 small Arab villages in Wadi Ara, in the so-called “Triangle,” the most densely populated Palestinian area of the newfound state, were forced into the West Bank, occupied by Jordan. Similarly, in November 1951, Israeli forces surrounded the village of Khirbet Buweishat, near Umm al Fahm, expelled the inhabitants, and dynamited their homes. The idea was security through dispersion and diffusion, the result was the elimination of the native.

But there were still “too many Arabs” within the borders of the state for Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharret. 

That’s why Israeli leaders continued to support Operation Yohanan from its origins in 1949 until as late as 1953. It was an attempt to drive Israel’s Arab citizens to Brazil and Argentina, and when that failed, to Libya. Another idea was to send Israel’s Christian Palestinians to Lebanon and Muslim Palestinians to Egypt, which also failed. Israel did manage to force out some 2,000 Palestinian residents from two village northern villages into Syria as late as 1956.

Israel’s plans to push Palestinians out of historic Palestine also involved trying to cleanse Gaza, even though the enclave was under Egyptian occupation. In 1953, the Israeli military attacked the al-Bureij Camp, killing 50 civilians, seeking to dismantle the refugee camp altogether to disperse in residents. Another Egyptian-UNRWA plan, supported by Israel, was to expel some 60,000 Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, where land and Nile River water for irrigation was apparently going to be provided. But the project failed when Palestinians demonstrated en masse on 1 March 1955. Palestinians descended to the Official Palestine School in Gaza City​, chanting, “No relocation, no settlement” and “they drafted the Sinai project in ink, we'll erase it with blood.”

The fall of 1956 presented itself with a historic opportunity after Israel partnered with Britain and France in an offensive war known as the Suez Crisis. Israel wanted Gaza, Britain and France wanted the Canal. Israel invaded Gaza in October 1956 and occupied it until March 1957. During this period, Israel rounded up men above the age of 15 in Khan Younis and Rafah, and  executed hundreds of then. One of the goals of the massacres was to incentivize flight, as had been the case with the 1948 massacres.

Initially, the plan appeared to be working, and some 1000 Palestinians fled Gaza to Egypt to escape death by execution. Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion was thrilled by the early reports but dismayed when it soon became clear that 1956 was not 1948. Palestinians were not leaving en masse. So Ben-Gurion set up a committee to consider proposals for emptying Gaza of its refugees. 

Israel’s Foreign Ministry tried to buy land from former Italian settlers in Libya, considering the Sinai, Iraq, the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere. In the end, though, US President Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza after five months, and so plans to depopulate Gaza were shelved, although not forgotten.

But, it was not until after the Kafr Qasim massacre, perhaps as late as 1957-8, that Israeli leaders gave up on their plans to expel the remaining Arabs from the state. To be sure, this was as a practical matter, according to Israeli historian Yair Boymel. Thus Israeli policy shifted from depopulation to control and surveillance.

But, when it came to Bedouins, the rules were always different. 75% of them were expelled from the borders during the 1948 War, and the remaining ones were forced into the northeastern corner of the Negev where they were confined to an area just 10% of the area previously under their domain.

Meanwhile, between 1949-1953, Israel expelled another 17,000 Bedouins into either the West Bank, occupied by Jordan, or into the Sinai, controlled by Egypt. Some of the El-Azazmeh sub-tribes were expelled in 1954, after a murderous massacre of civilians carried out by the notorious 'Unit 101' of the Israeli army. As late as 1959, Israel deported hundreds of Bedouins from the al-’Azazma tribe to Jordan and Egypt and only stopped after significant pressure from the UN.

As late as 1964, the then-head of the army’s Northern Command, Ariel Sharon, asked his staff to determine the number of vehicles that would be required to transport Israel’s 300,000 Palestinian citizens out of the country in the event of a war.

In short, from November 1948 through the final armistice agreements were signed with Syria and Lebanon in the summer of 1949, Israeli forces emptied 36 villages by force. Altogether, from 1949-1959, Israel pushed out some 30,000–40,000 Palestinians out of a population that was only 150,000 at the end of 1948. The incentives determined the outcome. The Zionist idea meant Palestinians were at best an inherent demographic problem, unless they lived in a border area or in an area highly concentrated with Palestinians, in which case they were an inherent security problem. The Zionist idea meant the elimination of the native.

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