Chapter 8: The Fourth Wave: The battles and exodus of October - November 1948

"Bernadotte’s report of 16 September, proposing the award of the Negev to the Arabs in exchange for Jewish sovereignty over Western Galilee, compelled the Israeli political and military leadership to focus attention on the south, where the surrounded, poorly supplied enclave of less than two dozen settlements was cut off from the core of the Yishuv by Egyptian forces holding the Majdal–Faluja–Beit Jibrin–Hebron axis. Contrary to the truce terms, the Egyptians refused to allow Israeli supply of the enclave by land. The threat of an award of the Negev to the Arabs, the untenable geo-military situation and the plight of the besieged settlements made the breakdown of the truce, in the absence of a political settlement, inevitable. In early October, the Cabinet approved an Israeli offensive to link up with the enclave and to rout the Egyptian army."

"On 26 September, he had told the Cabinet that, should the fighting be renewed in the north, the Galilee would become ‘clean’ (naki) and ‘empty’ (reik) of Arabs, and had implied that he had been assured of this by his generals. The Prime Minister had been responding to a statement/question by Sharett, who, addressing the Bernadotte proposal that Israel be awarded the Galilee, had implied that it were better that Israel should not take over the Galilee pocket as it was ‘filled with Arabs’ – ‘we are definitely not getting the Galilee empty, we are getting it full’ – including refugees from Western and Eastern Galilee bent on returning to their villages.3 On 21 October, when Ezra Danin, in a tete- a-tete with Ben-Gurion, tabled the Foreign Ministry Arabists’ pet project at the time of setting up a Palestinian pup- pet state in the West Bank, the prime minister had impatiently declared that he was not interested in new ‘adventures’ and that ‘the Arabs of the Land of Israel [i.e., Palestine] have only one function left – to run away’. 4"

"This attitude was not converted into or embodied in formal government or even IDF General Staff policy. Neither before, during nor immediately after Yoav and Hiram did the Cabinet or any of its committees decide or instruct the IDF to drive out the Arab population from the areas it was about to conquer or had conquered. Nor, as far as the available evidence shows, did the heads of the defence establishment – Ben-Gurion, IDF CGS Dori or Yadin – issue any general orders to the advancing brigades to expel or otherwise harm the civilian populations.

But, clearly, the OCs of northern and southern fronts, respectively Moshe Carmel and Yigal Allon, both hoped and acted to clear their areas of Arab communities. Both were affiliated to Ahdut Ha‘avoda and its leader, Yitzhak Tabenkin, a major proponent of transfer in the Israeli political arena. In the north, at 07:30, 31 October, with the start of the ceasefire scheduled for 11:00, Carmel ordered his brigades and district OCs ‘to continue in the cleansing operations inside the Galilee’. 7 A few hours later, at 10:00 hours, Carmel honed his order as follows: ‘Do all in your power for a quick and immediate cleansing [tihur] of the conquered areas of all the hostile elements in line with the orders that have been issued[.] The inhabitants of the areas conquered should be assisted to leave.’ The order was apparently issued while Carmel and Ben-Gurion – who had come to visit – were meeting in Nazareth, or minutes after their meeting; one may assume that it was authorised, if not actually authored, by the prime minister. 9 Ten days later, Carmel repeated this order, in a somewhat watered down version: ‘[We] should continue to assist the inhabitants who wish to leave the areas we have conquered. This matter is urgent and should be expedited quickly.’ 10

In the south, Allon, in the course of Operation Yoav and its aftermath, apparently never issued such general orders, in writing (at any rate, none have surfaced in the archives). But he most certainly passed on expulsive guidelines orally – and, indeed, almost no Arabs remained in the towns and villages conquered in that campaign. But whereas Allon acted with determination and consistency, and with almost complete success, Carmel, perhaps impeded by moral and political considerations and recalcitrant subordinates, displayed irresolution and belatedness, and many of the Arab communities overrun in Hiram remained in place.

On both fronts, to be sure, most IDF soldiers and officers at this stage in the war were happy – for military and political reasons – to see Arab civilians along their path of advance take flight. Many were also ready to expel communities and some, as we shall see, were even willing to commit atrocities, perhaps in part to induce flight. The exodus, all understood, vastly simplified things. But, as we shall also see, different units acted in different ways, their disparate behaviour governed by the political outlook and character of their commanders, their ‘collective outlook’, circumstances of topography and battle, and the religion and political or military affiliations of the communities encountered."

The South (Yoav)

"In all his previous campaigns Yigal Allon had left no Arab communities in his wake: So it had been in Operation Yiftah in eastern Galilee in the spring, so it had been in Operation Dani in July. Nothing was said in the operational order for Operation Yoav about the prospective fate of the communities to be overrun 11 – but Allon, the OC, no doubt let his officers know what he wanted and most probably they knew (and agreed with) what he wanted without explicit instruction."

"The inhabitants of the areas conquered in Yoav were nervous and largely demoralised before the battle was joined. They were Muslim al- most to a man. Small towns (or oversized villages) like Isdud, Majdal and Hamama contained fairly large refugee populations that had fled from areas to the north in the spring and summer. They had been living under unsympathetic, coercive Egyptian military rule since May. The Egyptians were inefficient and often heavy-handed and were regarded by many locals as foreigner occupiers; they were perennially short of supplies and not generous with them with the locals, whose fields, in many cases, had been ravaged or rendered inaccessible by the hostilities. Moreover, during the long Second Truce, the locals understood that the stalemate would soon be broken, that they would be on the firing line, and that the Egyptian army was weak. They feared the flail of war and dreaded Jewish conquest and rule; they, too, had heard of Deir Yassin."

"A Palmah account, by a woman soldier, Aviva Rabinowitz, of Kibbutz Kabri, of a patrol in the Hebron Hills, near al Jab‘a, in the wake of the Harel offensive, illustrates the immediate fate and condition of the refugees from these hilltop villages:

Scattered in the gully, sitting in craters and caves . . . [were] dozens of refugees . . . We surprised them. A cry of fear cut through the air . . . They began to praise us and dispense compliments about the Jewish army, the State of Israel. With what obsequiousness! Old men bowing, genuflecting, kissing our feet and begging for mercy; young men standing with bowed heads and helpless . . . We tried to persuade them to flee towards Hebron. We fired several shots in the air – and the people were indifferent. ‘Better that we die here than return [to Egyptian-held territory] to die at the hands of the Egyptians.’ We fired again. No one moved. Tiredness and hunger deprived them of any will to live and of any human dignity. These are the Arabs of the Hebron Hills, and it is possible that this youngster, or that man, shed the blood of the 35 or looted the Etzion Bloc [after its fall in May] – but can one take revenge here? You can fight against people of your own worth, but against this ‘human dust’? We turned back and returned [to our base] . . . That evening, for the first time during the whole war, I felt I was tired. My soul has grown weary of this war. 15"

"The upshot of the October–November battles in the south was that the Gaza Strip’s refugee population jumped from the pre-Yoav figure of less than 100,000 to ‘230,000’, according to an official of the United Nations Refugee Relief Project, F.G. Beard. Beard reported that the condition of these refugees ‘def[ies] description . . . Almost all of them are living in the open . . . [and are] receiving no regular rations of food . . . There are no sanitary facilities . . . and conditions of horrifying filth exist.’ Beard said the Egyptian Army and the Arab Higher Refugee Council had been ‘grossly negligent in their handling of the situation’. 72"

Dawayima

"Dawayima was captured by companies of the 89th Battalion, Eighth Brigade, who encountered only ‘light resistance’, on 29 October. 39 The troops, mounted on half-tracks, first laid down a mortar and machinegun barrage and then stormed in, machine-guns blazing.40 Villagers were gunned down inside houses, in the alleyways and on the surrounding slopes as they fled:

As we got up on the roofs, we saw Arabs running about in the alleyways [below]. We opened fire on them . . . From our high position we saw a vast plain stretching eastward . . . and the plain was covered by thousands of fleeing Arabs . . . The machineguns began to chatter and the flight turned into a rout.41

The houses of Dawayima, later wrote one 89th Battalion veteran,

were filled with the loot of the Etzion Bloc . . . The Jewish fighters who attacked Dawayima knew that . . . the blood of those slaughtered cries out for revenge; and that the men of Dawayima were among those who took part in the massacre . . . [in] the Etzion Bloc. 42

The refugees who reached Hebron, according to Yiftah Brigade intelligence, informed UN observers that ‘the Jews had repeated the Deir Yassin massacre in Dawayima’, and Arab officials demanded an investigation. 43 The Egyptian garrison in Bethlehem cabled Egypt that ‘the Jews had massacred 500 men, women and children’. 44 The American consul-general in Jerusalem reported that ‘500 to 1,000’ Arabs had reportedly been ‘lined up and killed by machinegun fire’ after the capture of the village.45 Word of the massacre swiftly reached the Israeli authorities. Ben-Gurion, quoting General Avner, briefly referred in his diary to ‘rumours’ that the army had ‘slaughtered (?) about 70–80 persons’.46 One version of what happened was provided by an Israeli soldier to a Mapam member, who transmitted the information to Eliezer Peri, the editor of the party daily Al Hamishmar and a member of the party’s Political Committee. The party member, ‘Sh.’ (possibly Shabtai) Kaplan, described the witness as ‘one of our people, an intellectual, 100 per cent reliable’. The village, wrote Kaplan, had been held by Arab ‘irregulars’ and was captured by the 89th Battalion without a fight. ‘The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead’, wrote Kaplan. Kaplan’s informant, who arrived immediately afterward in the second wave, reported that the men and women who remained were then shut away in houses ‘without food and water’. Sappers arrived to blow up the houses.

One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house . . . and blow it up . . . The sapper refused . . . The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.

The soldier, according to Kaplan, said that

cultured officers . . . had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of battle . . . but out of a system of expulsion and destruction. The less Arabs remained – the better. This principle is the political motor for the expulsions and the atrocities. Kaplan understood that Mapam was in a bind. The matter could not be publicised; it would harm the State and Mapam would be blamed. But he demanded that the party ‘raise a shout’ in internal debate, launch an investigation and establish disciplinary machinery in the army. 47

Unknown to Kaplan, a number of parallel investigations were under way, the first initiated by Allon himself. On 3 November, Allon cabled OC Eighth Brigade, General Yitzhak Sadeh – his mentor, the founder and first commander of the Palmah – to check the ‘rumours’ that the 89th Battalion had ‘killed many tens of prisoners on the day of the conquest of al Dawayima’, and to respond. 48 (Two days later, perhaps worried about a UN investigation, Allon ordered Sadeh to instruct the unit ‘that is accused of murdering Arab civilians at Dawayima to go to the village and bury with their own hands the corpses of those murdered’.) 49 On 4 November, Yadin informed Dori that there had recently been ‘a number of incidents like Deir Yassin’ – he apparently named Dawayima – and recommended an investigation. 50 The following day, Dori ap- pointed Isser Be’eri, the commander of the IDF Intelligence Service – HIS-AD’s successor organisation – to investigate, and on 13 and 18 November he submitted his interim and final reports. Be’eri concluded that about 80 inhabitants had been killed during the 89th Battalion’s conquest of the site and another ‘22’ had been subsequently captured and murdered. He recommended that the platoon OC who had carried out the massacre (and had confessed) be tried. 51 (Later Arab reports also tended to ‘downgrade’ the massacre: On 7 November, for example, Haj Amin al Husseini was informed by West Bank AHC officials Rafiq Tamimi and Munir Abu Fadl that the initial reports had been ‘exaggerated’; one report spoke of only ‘27’ villagers killed from one Dawayima clan. 52 )

On 7 November, a team of UN observers visited the site. They found several demolished buildings and one corpse but no evidence of a massacre. Nonetheless, they assumed – presumably on the basis of previously heard oral testimony by Arab survivors – that a massacre had taken place. 53 No one, it appears, was ever tried or punished, Be’eri’s recommendation notwithstanding. 54 News of the massacre no doubt reached the village communities in the western Hebron and Judean foothills, possibly precipitating further flight."

The North (Hiram)

"In the north, the IDF’s 60-hour campaign, Operation Hiram, precipitated major civilian flight from the Upper Galilee pocket held by Qawuqji’s forces. Many fled before the approaching battle; some were expelled; many others, to be out of harm’s way, initially left their villages for nearby gullies, orchards and caves. In many cases, Israeli units barred their return or encouraged them to move on to Lebanon. Some may have decided not to return to live under Israeli rule. Of the area’s estimated 50,000–60,000 population (locals and refugees) before 28 October, more than half ended up in Lebanon. On 31 October, Ben-Gurion recorded that roughly half the pocket’s villagers had fled, and a few days later, the army estimated that only some 12,000–15,000 inhabitants had remained, 73 lending credence to the later reports that ‘more than 50,000 new refugees’ had reached Lebanon as a result of Hiram. 74"

"Repeatedly during the operation, Northern Front ordered the units to issue strict prohibitions against looting. 86 No such prohibitions were issued regarding expulsions (or, for that matter, the killing of civilians and POWs87 ). Regarding expulsions, rather the opposite, as we have seen: On 31 October Northern Front instructed all units ‘to assist’ the inhabitants ‘to leave’. But that order came too late, reaching almost all the units after they had completed their initial sweeps and conquests. (The follow-up order, of 10 November, came even later.) It was one thing to order units before they had set out, before they had overrun villages, to expel inhabitants in the midst of battle and conquest; it was quite an- other to instruct them, after the shooting had died down, to go back and expel communities they had already overrun and left in place. Moreover, the order of 31 October was couched in euphemistic, non-imperative terms, avoiding the verb ‘to expel’ (legaresh); this left commanders with a great deal of discretion. As none, subsequently, were held to account for expelling anyone, so no one was tried or reprimanded for failing to expel (so far as the available records show). 88

The demographic upshot of the operation followed a clear, though by no means systematic, religious-ethnic pattern: Most of the Muslims in the pocket fled to Lebanon while most of the pocket’s Christian population remained where they were. 89 Almost all the Druse and Circassian inhabitants remained. Thus, despite the fact that no clear guidelines were issued to the commanders of the advancing IDF columns about how to treat each religious or ethnic group, what emerged roughly con- formed to a pattern as if such ‘instinctive’ guidelines had been followed by both the IDF and the different conquered communities.

At the same time, the demographic outcome generally corresponded to the circumstances of the military advance. Roughly, villages which had put up a stiff fight against IDF units were depopulated: Their inhabitants, fearing retribution, or declining to live under Jewish rule, fled or, in some cases, were expelled. The inhabitants of villages that surrendered quietly generally stayed put and usually were not harmed or expelled by the IDF. They did not fear (or little feared) retribution. This apparently was the main reason why the inhabitants of the half-Muslim, half- Christian village of Fassuta decided to stay: ‘The majority argued that the Jews had no reason to vent their wrath on Fassuta’, which had not fought against the Haganah or the IDF. Only a few fled to Lebanon. 90 The facts of resistance or peaceful surrender, moreover, roughly corresponded to the religious-ethnic divide. In general, wholly or largely Muslim villages tended to put up a fight or to support units of Qawuqji’s army that fought. But there were Muslim villages that surrendered without a fight. Christian villagers tended to surrender without a fight or without assisting Qawuqji. In mixed villages where the IDF encountered resistance, such as Tarshiha and Jish, the Christians by and large stayed put while the Muslims fled or were forced to leave. Druse and Circassian villagers nowhere resisted the IDF advance (except in (Druse) Yanuh)."

"Apart from these general patterns, the campaign was characterised by vagaries of time and place. Much depended on the circumstances surrounding the capture of a given village and on the character of middle- echelon IDF commanders. The history of each village, whether in the past ‘friendly’ or hostile towards the Yishuv, also affected IDF (and the villagers’ own) behaviour as, apparently, did its behaviour after being conquered: In all the villages, the IDF assembled the villagers, sorted out non-locals from locals and young adult males from the old, women and children and usually sent for questioning or to PoW camps the non-local and local army-age males. The units also collected the villages’ arms. Some villages were more cooperative than others in these detention and arms collection sweeps."

"Christian villages, traditionally friendly or not unfriendly towards the Yishuv, were generally left in peace. An exception was ‘Eilabun, a mainly Maronite community, which fell to Golani’s 12th Battalion on 30 October after a battle on its outskirts with the ALA, in which the Israelis suffered six injured and four armoured cars knocked out. 106 The villagers hung out white flags and the Israelis were welcomed by four priests. The inhabitants huddled inside the churches while the priests surrendered the village. But the troops were angered by the battle just concluded and by reports of a procession in the village, a month before, in which a large number of inhabitants had participated, in which the heads of two IDF soldiers who had gone missing after the attack on 12 September on a nearby hilltop – ‘Outpost 213’107 – were carried through the streets, or by the actual discovery in a house of one of the rotting heads.

What happened next is described in a letter from the village elders to Shitrit: The villagers were ordered to assemble in the square. While assembling, one villager was killed and another wounded by IDF fire.

Then the commander selected 12 young men 108 and sent them to another place, then he ordered that the assembled inhabitants be led to [the neighbouring village of] Maghar and the priest asked him to leave the women and babies and to take only the men, but he refused, and led the assembled inhabitants – some 800 in number – to Maghar preceded by military vehicles . . . He himself stayed on with another two soldiers until they killed the 12 young men in the streets of the village and then they joined the army going to Maghar . . . He led them to Farradiya. When they reached Kafr ‘Inan they were joined by an armoured car that fired upon them . . . killing one of the old men, Sam‘an ash Shoufani, 60 years old, and injuring three women . . . At Farradiya [the soldiers] robbed the inhabitants of I£ 500 and the women of their jewelry, and took 42 youngsters and sent them to a detention camp, and the rest the next day were led to Meirun, and afterwards to the Lebanese border. During this whole time they were given food only once. Imagine then how the babies screamed and the cries of the pregnant and weaning mothers.

Subsequently, troops looted ‘Eilabun. 109

Not all the villagers were taken on the trek to Lebanon. The four priests were allowed to stay. Hundreds fled to nearby gullies, caves and villages, and during the following days and weeks infiltrated back. The affair exercised the various Israeli bureaucracies for months, partly because the ‘Eilabun case was taken up and pleaded persistently by Israeli and Lebanese Christian clergymen. The villagers asked to be allowed back and receive Israeli citizenship. They denied responsibility for severing the soldiers’ heads, blaming one Fawzi al Mansur of Jenin, a sergeant in Qawuqji’s army. 110

The affair sparked a guilty conscience and sympathy within the Israeli establishment. Shitrit ruled that former inhabitants still living within Israeli-held territory must be allowed back to the village. But Major Sulz, Military Governor of the Nazareth District, responded that the army would not allow them back. He asserted, ambiguously, that ‘Eilabun had been ‘evacuated either voluntarily or with a measure of compulsion’. A fortnight later, he elaborated, mendaciously: ‘The village was captured after a fierce fight and its inhabitants had fled.’ The Foreign Ministry opined that even if an ‘injustice’ had been committed, ‘injustices of war cannot be put right during the war itself’. 111

However, Shitrit, supported by Mapam’s leaders and egged on by the village notables and priests, persisted. Cisling suggested that the matter be discussed in Cabinet. Shitrit requested that the villagers be granted citizenship (relieving them of the fear of deportation as illegal infiltrees), that the ‘Eilabun detainees be released and that the villagers be supplied with provisions. 112 Within weeks, Shitrit was supported by General Carmel, who wrote that ‘in light of the arguments [about their mistreatment]’ and of the fact that the area was not earmarked for Jewish settlement, the inhabitants should be left in place ‘and accepted as citizens’.113 Within weeks, the inhabitants received citizenship and provisions, and the detainees were released. At the same time, Shitrit, as Minister of Police, persuaded Yadin, to initiate an investigation of the massacre. 114 During the summer of 1949, the ‘Eilabun exiles in Lebanon who wished to return were allowed to do so, as part of an agreement between Palmon, head of the Arab Section of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, and Archbishop Hakim, concerning the return of several thousand Galilee Christians in exchange for that cleric’s future goodwill towards the Jewish State. Hundreds returned to ‘Eilabun.115

The abortive attack on ‘Outpost 213’, bizarrely enough, triggered a second atrocity four days after the first massacre. On 2 November, two squads of the 103rd Battalion were sent on a search operation to Khirbet Wa‘ra as Sauda, a village inhabited by the ‘Arab al Mawasi beduins, three kilometres east of the outpost. While one squad kept guard over the villagers, the other – led by Lt. Haim Hayun, veteran of the September assault – climbed up to the outpost, where it discovered ‘the bones of the soldiers lost in the previous action’. The bodies were ‘headless’. The troops then torched the village (and presumably expelled the inhabitants), taking with them to their HQ in Maghar 19 adult males. There, the prisoners were sorted out and 14 were determined to have ‘taken part in enemy activity against our army’. They were taken away and ‘liquidated’ (huslu). The remaining five were transferred to a POW camp. 116

‘Eilabun and ‘Arab al Mawasi were only two of the atrocities committed by the IDF during Hiram, which saw the biggest concentration of atrocities of the 1948 war. Some served to precipitate and enhance flight; some, as in ‘Eilabun, were part and parcel of an expulsion operation; but in other places, the population remained in situ and expulsion did not follow atrocities."

"These atrocities, mostly committed against Muslims, no doubt precipitated the flight of communities on the path of the IDF advance. A community already nervous at the prospect of assault and probable conquest would doubtless have been driven to panic by news, possibly embellished by exaggeration, of atrocities in a neighbouring village. What happened at Safsaf and Jish no doubt reached the villagers of Ras al Ahmar, ‘Alma, Deishum and al Malikiya hours before the Seventh Brigade’s columns. These villages, apart from ‘Alma, seem to have been completely or largely empty when the IDF arrived. If the memory of a former inhabitant of Sa‘sa is to be believed, the Safsaf atrocity, rather than the battle for Sa‘sa, was what precipitated the exodus from the village. 127

But the atrocities were limited in size, scope and time. And as, immediately after Hiram, movement by inhabitants between villages was curtailed, news of massacres probably moved slowly. Moreover, atrocities did not occur in many, perhaps most, of the villages captured. In most, the primary causes of flight were those that had precipitated previous waves: Fear of being caught up and hurt in battle, fear of the conquerors and of revenge for past misdeeds or affiliations, a general fear of the future and of life under Jewish rule, and confusion and shock. A year or so after Hiram, Moshe Carmel described the panic flight of some of the villagers:

They abandon the villages of their birth and that of their ancestors and go into exile . . . Women, children, babies, donkeys – everything moves, in silence and grief, northwards, without looking to right or left. Wife does not find her husband and child does not find his father . . . no one knows the goal of his trek. Many possessions are scattered by the paths; the more the refugees walk, the more tired they grow – and they throw away what they had tried to save on their way into exile. Suddenly, every object seems to them petty, superfluous, unimportant as against the chasing fear and the urge to save life and limb.

I saw a boy aged eight walking northwards pushing along two asses in front of him. His father and brother had died in the battle and his mother was lost. I saw a woman holding a two-week-old baby in her right arm and a baby two years old in her left arm and a four-year-old girl following in her wake, clutching at her dress.

[Near Sa‘sa] I saw suddenly by the roadside a tall man, bent over, scraping with his fingernails in the hard, rocky soil. I stopped. I saw a small hollow in the ground, dug out by hand, with fingernails, under an olive tree. The man laid down the body of a baby who had died in the arms of his mother, and covered it with soil and small stones. [Near Tarshiha, Carmel saw a 16-year-old] sitting by the roadside, naked as the day he was born and smiling at our passing car.

Carmel described how some of the Israeli soldiers, regarding the refugee columns with astonishment and shock and ‘with great sadness’, went down into the wadis and gave the refugees bread and tea. ‘I knew [of] a unit in which no soldier ate anything that day because all [the food] sent it by the company kitchen was taken down to the wadi ’, he recalled. 128

But usually, it appears, IDF behaviour in the days after Hiram was less humane. In general, the units along the Lebanese border made sure that the refugee columns continued on their way to Lebanon and often prevented with live fire any attempt to return to Israeli territory. And in the interior of the Galilee, the IDF made sure that villages that had been depopulated would stay empty. For example, on 3 November the 11th Battalion reported that a squadron of its armoured cars had encountered ‘columns of refugees returning [to Israel] from Lebanon’ on the Sa‘sa-Malikiya road. ‘A number of bursts were fired at them and they vanished.’ 129"

"By mid-November, once the dust of battle had settled, the Military Government in the Occupied Territories was demanding that Northern Front hand over control of the internal areas of the Galilee. General Avner wrote that already on 11 November, Yadin had assured him that ‘these areas would be handed over in the coming days’. The events in Majd al Kurum had only highlighted the need to transfer authority from the regular army to the Military Government. Or as Komarov put it: ‘The situation in the central Galilee is awful, and causes us great [diplomatic–political] harm. The [UN] observers are still [out there and] gunning for us. Please rush the transfer of governance.’ Yadin minuted: ‘Write the Military Government that they can immediately receive control of the Galilee areas in coordination with OC Northern Front.’ 137

But it was precisely the chaotic situation – with IDF troops having committed atrocities, inhabitants streaming out of the country and from Lebanon back into Israel, ex-irregulars on the loose and hiding in the villages, and arms caches still undiscovered in many places – that prevented Carmel from handing over the area, he explained later that month. He would be happy to transfer control ‘the moment it was possible in light of security [considerations]’. 138"

"Ben-Gurion’s views were also fairly clear. Soon after Hiram, he travelled to Tiberias for a holiday weekend. He jotted down in his diary: ‘. . . [it’s] almost unbelievable: On the way from Tel Aviv to Tiberias there are almost no Arabs.’ 143 The passage echoed, almost word for word, his thoughts in February (see above), when he had travelled from Tel Aviv through west Jerusalem to the Jewish Agency building, encountering no Arabs on the way. But then his observation had expressed a mixture of astonishment and satisfaction; now, it was pure satisfaction."

Atrocities

"The Hiram atrocities, like a brushfire, triggered rumours and reports, accurate and inaccurate, that sped up and down the various IDF chains of command and sideways, through Arab survivors and conscience-stricken soldiers, to civilian officials and party politicians. Key in the transmission of the rumours and reports were Arab radio broadcasts and complaints and old HIS hands and kibbutz mukhtars in the Galilee, such Emmanuel Friedman, of Rosh Pina, and Benjamin Shapira, of Kibbutz ‘Amir. 144 By 4 November, Yadin had heard of the atrocities committed by the 89th Battalion in Dawayima and by the Seventh Brigade in the Galilee, and was demanding an investigation. 145 A handful of internal IDF investigations were set in motion. These were quickly followed by what was slated to be a major, external probe by the country’s attorney- general, Ya‘akov Shimshon Shapira. Until then, through the war Ben-Gurion had consistently protected and defended the men in uniform and their actions against all outside criticism and investigation (save in the matter of looting). Maltreatment of civilians and POWs went almost completely uninvestigated and unpunished: It was a war for survival and the Haganah and IDF had to be allowed to get on with the job. And all were aware that the Arabs, viewed as barbaric and mendacious, had (a) launched the war and (b) had themselves committed countless atrocities before 1948 and a number of major ones during the war (which, needless to say, they had never apologised for, investigated, or atoned for through punishment of the guilty). So they were to blame for what had happened.

But by Hiram, it was no longer, palpably, a war for survival, from Israel’s perspective; the danger to the State’s existence, at least in the short term, had passed. And the October–November atrocities were simply too concentrated, widespread and severe to be ignored. Even Ben-Gurion could no longer keep the lid on. On 12 November, Major Emmanuel Yalan (Vilensky) was appointed by Be’eri (at Dori’s behest) to investigate what had happened in Safsaf, Jish, Sa‘sa and ‘Eilabun (and Kafr Bir‘im, whose inhabitants were about to be expelled). A week earlier, Haim Laskov, the IDF’s new head of training, began investigating what had happened at Saliha; already on 7 and 8 November he had begun questioning 79th Battalion officers. 146 At about the same time, an IDF Intelligence Service\Field Security unit cursorily investigated the atrocities and submitted a report. On 16 November, Laskov presented CGS Dori with a ‘file’ – apparently of depositions though it may also have contained a report with conclusions – concerning Saliha, which the CGS duly passed on to the Defence Minister. 147 Meanwhile, Yalan questioned 79th Battalion senior officers 148 and on the 18th submitted a very confused and undefinitive report of his own. Yalan concluded that the atrocities were committed deliberately and with aforethought, mainly in order to promote flight and secondarily as expressions of revenge. It may have been the inadequacy of Yalan’s report that prompted Carmel to appoint, on 20 November, yet another investigative team to look into Northern Front’s atrocities. The team was composed of Captain Nahum Segal, Captain Moshe Taflas and First Lieutenant Isser Perlman. It was instructed to start work on 22 November and submit its findings – on the accuracy of the rumours regarding the atrocities committed in the course of Operation “Hiram”’, as the letter of appointment put it – by the 25th. 149 The team questioned 79th Battalion officers – ‘regarding atrocities in Jish and Safsaf’ – on 24 November. 150 At the end of November, it submitted an interim report which determined, according to Carmel, that ‘there is a basis for charging soldiers and officers for committing unjustified killings outside the framework of military necessity, in Safsaf, Jish and Saliha’. Carmel ordered the Front’s adjutant-general to ‘immediately’ put these people on trial – and informed the CGS that one officer, presumably Captain Shmuel Lahis, a company OC, was to be tried on 2 December for the massacre in Hule. Meanwhile, the investigative team continued work.151

The atrocities, given their number and lethality, almost inevitably generated political fallout. But as not a word about them was published in the media, probably due to a combination of internal and external censorship, 152 the fallout was limited to closed meetings of senior political bodies, such as the Cabinet and Mapam’s Political Committee. Large parts of the Cabinet meetings of November and December were devoted to the atrocities and their repercussions. 153 At the Cabinet meeting of 7 November, the criticism was led off by Immigration and Health Minister Shapira. He was followed by Interior Minister Gruenbaum and Justice Minister Rosenblueth. Labour and Construction Minister Bentov also spoke up. Mapai’s ministers apparently kept their peace, but Ben-Gurion beat a tactical retreat. The Cabinet appointed a three-man (Bentov, Rosenblueth and Shapira) ministerial committee of inquiry to investigate ‘the army’s deeds in the conquered territories’. Bentov later reported that only Ben-Gurion and Sharett appeared not to have been ‘shocked’ by what had happened.154

The atrocities, and the start of the ministerial probe, were discussed in Mapam’s executive bodies on 11 November. The party faced its usual problem: Ideologically, it was motivated to lead the clamour; in practice, caution had to be exercised as its ‘own’ generals, party members Sadeh and Carmel, were involved if not implicated. Aharon Cohen demanded that the party set up its own, internal inquiry. Benny Marshak asked that the party executives – he was referring to Cisling – refrain from using the phrase ‘Nazi actions’ and said that the Palmah had already tried a number of soldiers for killing Arabs not during battle. Riftin asserted that there was ‘no connection’ between the atrocities and the expulsion of Arabs (in effect, justifying the expulsions while condemning the atrocities). He called for death sentences for those guilty of atrocities. Galili warned against ‘rushing to attribute responsibility to our officer comrades’ before investigation. But Bentov feared that the soldiers would decline to testify before the ministerial committee and that the ministers lacked an effective investigative apparatus. The Political Committee decided to hold formal ‘clarification’ sessions with the Mapam officers involved and to urge its members to testify before the ministerial committee. 15

The doings – or, more accurately, the non-doings – of the ministerial ‘Committee of Three’ preoccupied the Cabinet and some of the political parties for weeks. On 12 November, Kaplan, urged the three – in light of details he had heard about what had happened in the Galilee – to push on with their work. 156 But the committee encountered evasiveness, delays and silence from the IDF; the officers refused to cooperate and testify. Rosenblueth and Shapira complained to Ben-Gurion and demanded wider powers; Ben-Gurion refused. 157 The committee then raised the matter in Cabinet, on 14 November. Rosenblueth asked for increased powers, to be anchored in new emergency regulations; Gruenbaum suggested that a senior IDF officer be added to the committee and that the defence minister issue an order compelling all officers summoned to appear before the committee ‘and answer all questions’. Ben-Gurion parried manipulatively by taking the committee to task for doing nothing and wasting a week; ‘[and] after a week it is much harder to investigate than immediately after a deed’, he added. He turned down Rosenblueth’s proposal that the committee be given judicial powers and avoided response to the suggestion that he issue an order compelling officers to cooperate. The exchange led to a further week’s delay. 158 Three days later, in the Cabinet meeting of 17 November, Cisling charged that for over half a year, Ben-Gurion had avoided the problem of Jewish behaviour toward the Arabs, had pleaded ignorance of abuses and had consistently deflected criticism of the army. Cisling referred to a letter he had received about the atrocities – possibly Shabtai Kaplan’s on Dawayima – and declared: ‘I couldn’t sleep all night . . . This is something that determines the character of the nation . . . Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’ Cisling agreed that outwardly Israel, to preserve its good name and image, must admit nothing; but the matter must be thoroughly investigated, he insisted. Dori, said Cisling, had repeatedly postponed appearing before the ‘Committee of Three’, arguing that he did not yet have the information required, while a subordinate officer had delayed appearing on the grounds that the committee should first hear the CGS.159

The Cabinet, at Ben-Gurion’s insistence, refused to increase the committee’s powers and Shapira resigned (from the committee). Ben-Gurion then proposed that the committee be replaced by a one-man probe, and accompanied this with a statement apparently threatening, or implying a threat of, resignation from the Defence Ministry if he did not get his way. The ministers caved in and voted that ‘the Prime Minister investigate the charges concerning the army’s behaviour . . .’. 160 Ben-Gurion appointed Attorney-General Ya‘akov Shimshon Shapira as sole investigator, and proposed that three IDF officers help him. Ben-Gurion’s letter of instruction to Shapira read:

You are requested herein . . . to investigate if there were depredations [p’gi‘ot ] by . . . the army against Arab inhabitants in the Galilee and the South, not in conformity with the accepted rules of war . . . What were the attacks . . .? To what degree was the army command, low and high, responsible for these acts, and to what degree was the existing discipline in the army responsible for this and what should be done to rectify matters and to punish the guilty?

Ben-Gurion added that orders would be issued to the troops to provide all the necessary evidence and aid to the investigation. 161 In consequence, on 25 November, Carmel issued a stern warning to his troops against further atrocities and ordered ‘every battalion’ OC to ‘help uncover the atrocities and put the criminals on trial’. He said the battalion OCs were ‘personally responsible’ for bringing the perpetrators to justice. 162 In a masterly political stroke, Ben-Gurion then switched from a manipulative, stonewalling defence to the offensive, outflanking Mapam on its own turf. On 21 November, he wrote to the nation’s leading poet, Natan Alterman, praising his poem ‘Al Zot’ (on this). The poem, critical of the atrocities, had appeared in the Histadrut daily, Davar, two days before. Ben-Gurion requested the poet’s permission for the Defence Ministry to reprint and distribute it throughout the IDF. The poem, apparently about the 89th Battalion’s July raid on Lydda, was duly reprinted and distributed, along with Ben-Gurion’s letter to Alterman. Ben-Gurion later read out the poem at a meeting of the Provisional Council of State. The poem describes a young, jeep-mounted soldier ‘trying out’ his machinegun on an old Arab in a street in a conquered town. More generally, it castigates ‘the insensitivity of the Jewish public’ to the atrocities. Its publication in Davar was an ‘event.’ 163

On 5 December, Ben-Gurion submitted the Attorney General’s (bland, unilluminating) report to the Cabinet and promised that the IDF was continuing its own investigations. The Cabinet set up a standing committee of five ministers to continue probing past IDF misdeeds and to look into future ones, should these occur, and a second committee to formulate guidelines geared to preventing atrocities. 164

The major outcome of the simultaneous Mapam, IDF and Shapira investigations was the publication in the IDF of strict rules on the treatment of civilians. 165 On 23 December, Ben-Gurion instructed General Avner to take severe measures to protect the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip – which the Prime Minister believed was about to fall into Israeli hands – and to avoid expulsions (‘The policy [is] – to leave the inhabitants in place, to prevent any attempt at robbery’). 166 A few days before, on 17 December, Allon, just before the start of Operation Horev, which he commanded and in which the IDF conquered Abu Ageila and reached the outskirts of El Arish, issued a detailed appendix to the operational orders setting out guidelines for the treatment of captured soldiers and overrun civilian populations. The preamble referred to the ‘disgraceful incidents’ that had occurred in the past. The appendix stated that the IDF should take prisoners where possible (rather than kill them); ‘unjustified killing of civilians will be regarded as murder . . . Torture of placid civilians will be dealt with sharply; Arab populations must not be expelled except with special permission from the Front Combat HQ.’ The appendix ordered commanders of brigades and districts to issue ‘special orders’ to all units in this connection. All battalion commanders were instructed to sign a special form declaring that ‘they had received these orders and would abide by them’. The brigade and district commanders were ordered to react to any infringement publicly and with extreme severity. Similar orders reached all large IDF formations during the winter. 167"

Conclusion

"The primary aims of operations Yoav and Hiram were to destroy enemy formations – the Egyptian army in the south and Qawuqji’s ALA in the central Galilee – and to conquer additional territory, giving the Jewish State greater strategic depth. The operational orders, as in nearly all IDF offensives, did not refer to the Arab civilian population."

"Hence, when the offensives were unleashed, there was a ‘coalescence’ of Jewish and Arab expectations, which led, especially in the south, to spontaneous flight by most of the inhabitants. And, on both fronts, IDF units ‘nudged’ Arabs into flight and expelled communities.

However, there were major differences. In the south, the OC, Allon, was known to want ‘Arab-clean’ areas along his line of advance; such had been his policy in Eastern Galilee in April–May and in Lydda-Ramle in July. His subordinates usually acted in accordance. Moreover, the nature of the battle in the south, involving two large armies and the use of relatively strong firepower affected civilian morale. "

"In the Galilee, the picture was far more circumstantial and complex. There, there was no clear IDF policy and Carmel displayed hesitancy and ambivalence. And Carmel’s officers sensed this. Previously, Carmel – in Haifa and Acre in April–May and in Nazareth in July – had left thousands of Arabs in place. And the Galilee, with its patchwork of communities, including many Druse and Christians, was different. In October, different communities, like different IDF officers, acted differently. Druse and Christian villages by and large offered no or less resistance and had no, or less of a, history of anti-Zionist militancy and, hence, expected, and received, ‘better’ treatment. Muslim villages often had a history of pro-Husseini activism and, in 1948, often resisted and expected, and received, worse treatment. In mixed villages, such as Tarshiha and Jish, Christians remained while Muslims fled."

"To the foregoing must be added the ‘atrocity factor’, which played a major role in precipitating flight from several clusters of Galilee villages and from Dawayima in the south. In the north, the atrocities appear largely to have been premeditated rather than spontaneous outbreaks of vengeful impulses by undisciplined troops; company OCs, and perhaps battalion OCs, gave the orders. They appear to have felt that they were carrying out the wishes of Northern Front HQ. The atrocities were largely limited to Muslims.

This said, about 30–50 per cent of the Galilee pocket’s inhabitants stayed and were left in place during and immediately after Operation Hiram.

From the Arab side, there were several factors that generated greater ‘staying power’ in the Galilee than in the south. Firstly, the traditional non- belligerency toward the Yishuv of the Christians and Druse meant that they had less fear of Israeli conquest. Secondly, before October 1948, the war had not severely affected the lives of the inhabitants. There had been little Haganah/IDF harassment and, in most places, no major food shortages. And the presence of Qawuqji’s troops may have been less irksome (except in the Christian villages) than that of the Egyptians in the south."

"Together, operations Hiram and Yoav and their appendages precipitated the flight of roughly 200,000–230,000 Arabs."

Chapter 9: Clearing the borders; expulsions and population transfers, November 1948 - 1950