May 5, 2008 at 05:32:42

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Sixty Years of Palestinian Displacement, Occupation and Suffering

By Stephen Lendman (about the author)     Page 3 of 5 page(s)

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-- the process began in December 1947, five months before the British Mandate ended; Britain did nothing to deter it; David Ben-Gurion led it from the 1920s to the 1960s; after ethnically cleansing Palestine he said: "We have come and we have stolen their country....We must do everything to insure they never do return." Ten years earlier he wrote to his son: "We will expel the Arabs and take their places....with the force at our disposal;"

-- other Israeli leaders expressed the same mindset; two were former prime ministers - Golda Meir said: "There are no Palestinians" and Menachem Begin and Nobel Peace Prize recipient called Palestinians "two-legged beasts" and said Jews were the "Master Race" and "divine gods on this planet;"

-- Labor Party leader Haim Herzog was more discreet in expressing disdain for the Arabs; in 1972, he said "I am not prepared to consider (Palestinians) as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."

Earlier in 1969, Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan described the 1947 - 49 success: "Jewish villages were built in place of Arab (ones). You do not know the names of these Arab villages (because they) no longer exist....There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Like other leading Israelis, Dayan expressed scorn for all Palestinians and told his Labor Party colleagues that they "shall continue to live like dogs...."

The Palestinian Holocaust

Alnakba.org recounts the toll. It lists the destroyed villages in 14 Palestinian Districts, including Gaza, Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth and Hebron. One was Deir Yassin in the Jerusalem District. On April 9, 1948, it was the site of an infamous Nakba massacre. Israeli soldiers entered the village, machine-gunned houses randomly and killed many inside them. The remaining villagers were assembled and murdered in cold blood. Included were children, infants, the elderly and women who were first raped. The total number killed is uncertain but best estimates place it between 93 and 120. In addition, dozens more were killed in the fighting that ensued, and many other villages met the same fate in the systematic cleansing plan - to seize as much Palestinian land as possible leaving the fewest number of Arabs on it.

In December 1947, Jews in Palestine numbered 600,000 compared to 1.3 million Palestinians. Ben-Gurion ordered them removed with commands like: "Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion." He meant depopulation; obliteration; homes blown up, burned or bulldozed; their inhabitants inside killed; shooting anything that moved, especially fighting-age men and boys who might pose a combat or resistance threat; and leaving behind rubble, a forgotten landscape and a proud history erased.

The Lifta ruins can be seen from Jerusalem. All that was left in Dayr Aban were piles of rubble, collapsed roofs and part of some standing walls. Only two houses remained in Barqa. One is deserted. The other is a warehouse. Jura became the city of Ashqelon. Its Jewish population is now about 117,000. The only Arab remains in al-Faluja are the village mosque foundations and fragments of walls. The Israeli town of Qiryat Gat now stands on land between al-Faluja and Iraq al-Manshiyya and on al-Faluja land as well. Hundreds of other Arab villages have similar stories. They were erased and replaced by Jewish-only development.

An eye witness to the Deir Yassin massacre recounts the horror:

"I was (there) when the Jews attacked....(They) closed on the village amid exchanges of fire with us. Once they entered the village, fighting became very heavy in the eastern side and later it spread to other parts, to the quarry, to the village center until it reached the western edge....The Jews used all sorts of automatic weapons, tanks, missiles, cannons. They enter(ed) houses and kill(ed) women and children indiscriminately. The (village) youths....fought bravely.

We had no aid or support....They took about 40 prisoners....After the battle was over, they took them to the quarry where they shot them dead and threw their bodies in the quarry....they took (other) prisoners and killed them....they killed the youths."

Other accounts spoke of shootings, bombs exploding and a mother being killed with her husband, son and brother. A nurse was shot dead as well as the daughter of a friend and her baby. "Whomever tried to run away was shot dead." It was cold-blooded murder.

After the battle, "the Jews took elderly men and women and youths, including four of my cousins and a nephew. They took them all. Women who had on them gold and money, were stripped of their gold. After the Jews removed their dead and wounded, they took the men to the quarry and sprayed them all with bullets." One woman watched her son shot to death. "They later poured kerosene on his body and" burned it.

The men were fighting. "Eyewitnesses were only women. The elderly men were (used) to remove the dead, Arabs and Jews." The Arab ones "were thrown in a well in the village center." It all happened five weeks before the State of Israel was founded. Arabs died and were displaced to make Plan D a success. It worked because western powers supported it, and Arab neighbors were indifferent. Their intervention held off until May 15, five and a half months after the UN partition. When it began, it was with an inferior force that was no match against Israeli superiority, despite popular myth to the contrary.

It recounts how an outnumbered and outgunned Jewish force prevailed against overwhelming odds. Pure rubbish. In fact, the Jews held a clear advantage. As long as the British stayed out (and they did), the outcome was never in doubt. Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq held off intervening as long as possible, then reluctantly stepped in with token forces. It was too little, too late, and, for its part, Jordan (with its potent military) stayed out entirely in return for most of the West Bank as a payoff.

Intervening Arab forces performed poorly. They overstretched their supply lines, ran out of ammunition, mostly used antiquated weapons, and had no effective command and control. It was a testimony to their lack of commitment, not their ability to fight had they wished to.

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