The Establishment of Israel: The Part of the Story You Have Not Heard

On May 15,1948, the Zionist leadership publically proclaimed Israel as their independent Jewish State. As many celebrate the 60 Anniversary of Israel where Jewish people finally achieved statehood they neglect to acknowledge the severe cost to the Palestinians that this came at. They do not grieve for the Palestinians that have been grieving ever since; as many have become impoverished refugees in the neighboring areas with no citizenship anywhere. Because in the days leading up to May15, 1948 and in the days after the ethnic cleansing had begun and it was Brutal. They refer to this day al_Nakba which means the catastrophe in Arabic. To them this day symbolizes the end of their livelihoods and way of life.

In 1947, the United Nations had set up a Special Commission on Palestine(UNSCOP) that recommended the land known as Palestine up to that point be divided into an Arab and a Jewish state. Fifty two percent would be allocated for a Jewish state, forty two percent would allocated for a Palestinian state and Jerusalem would under international control When the UN voted on this partition Plan in November 1947 it was ratified. At this point Jews owned six percent of the land in all of Palestine. The Jewish population had grown from around 26,000 before 1882 (Answers.Com, Yishuv) to 610,000 in all of Palestine. In the area the UN had assigned for a Jewish state there were around 500,000 Jews. As the waves of Jewish immigrants came to build their Jewish state land was bought that Palestinians had been living on and passing down to their kin for generations from absently landlords that were part of the Ottoman Empire but did not live in Palestine. This was due to a taxation system implemented by the Ottoman Empire that forced many Palestinians to allow wealthy Arabs living outside of Palestine to take title of their land. Many Palestinians were displaced in this process which started in the 1880's. When the partition was recommended between 400,000 and 500,000 Palestinians lived in the part of Palestine that was designated for the Jewish state. In all of Palestine there were around 1.3 million Palestinians.(Segev, p 496)

The Palestinians that had been living in Palestine for generations knew that that this plan would cause them to lose much of the land they had rights to and had built there livelihoods on. They also knew that once power was transferred into Jewish hands those living under Jewish rule would become a marginalized minority and possibly dispossessed . These people also felt that they had a unique national identity with strong ties to the land.

In march 1948 a plan was finalized by David Ben-Gurion and his advisors. Ben-Gurion was a Zionist leader who led the effort to form an independent Jewish state in Palestine. He became Israel's first prime minister. The Plan was called Dalet and the goal of it was to ethnically cleans as many Palestinians as possible from the land the UN had voted to allocate for a Jewish state. The plan stated these goals could be achieved through destroying villages by setting fire to them, bombing and placing mines in them. The plan focused on areas that were densely populated that would be difficult to control. The other option in this plan was through mounting combing and control operations. This included encircling villages and conducting searches in them. When armed resistance appeared it was to be liquidated and the population of the village was to be expelled from the newly created Israeli boarders(Pappe, p 39). When this plan was circulated the Jewish Brigade commanders were given a list telling them which villages to target and what they were suppose to do in the villages (Pappe, p 83).

One of the villages that was targeted on April 9th, 1948 was Deir Yassin. Under the the plan the Irgun and Stern Gang (Lechi) which were part of the Jewish forces carried out the operation. The Hagana which was also part of the Jewish forces was unwilling to carry out the operations because they had signed a non-aggression pact with the village. Ninety three or more Palestinians were massacred. Their bodies were beaten and women were raped and them killed. Of the 93 people massacred 30 were babies. (Pappe, p 90)

On may 22, 1948 Jewish soldiers entered the village of Tantura. They went into the villagers houses and massacred them and massacred villagers that were outside. The Alexandria brigade killed between 110 and 230 Palestinians. Muhammed Nimr al-Khatib testified “The Jews gathered all the women and children, in a place where they dumped all the bodies, for them to so their dead husbands, fathers and brothers and terrorize them”(Pappe, p 137)

On October 28, 1948 the 89th Battalion of the 8th brigade entered the village of Dawaymeh near Hebron . When a soldier from the brigade described the killing of villagers that had taken place he said “as babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped and burned alive in houses and men stabbed to death” (Pappe, p. 196). 145 Palestinians were murdered and more than 450 went missing. 170 of those that went missing were women and children.

These are only three examples of the atrocities that were perpetrated against Palestinian villagers by Jewish soldiers. There were many other atrocities perpetrated against Palestinian villagers that were similar in nature between the 1948 and 1949. These horrors live in the collective memories of the Palestinians and played a major part in them fleeing into lands bordering Israel. These refugees were not allowed to return once the fighting stopped. A law was passed by the Israeli government in 1950 called the Israeli Absentees Property Law that declared all land that the Palestinians had fled from to be the property of the state. The Israeli government also designated those Palestinians who fled to be a “hostile population” and killed as “terrorist” if they tried to sneak back into their villages. (Learner, p. 18)

There was an Arab liberation army that sent some troops to Palestine to help Palestinians resist the partition plan and change over to Jewish control. But on May 15, 1948 when British troops had left Palestine and their mandate to secure it was over, the Zionist Leadership declared Israel to be an independent Jewish State. After the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign had began and Israel was declared an independent Jewish state armies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan attacked the army forces from the newly proclaimed Jewish state. A major reason for the attack was probably to prevent more massacres by Jewish forces like the ones listed above.

In 1949, there was an armistice agreement made between Israel, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. The end of the Arab Israeli war had come. 500 Palestinian villages, town and tribes had been ethnically cleansed. According to the UN, 711,000 Palestinians were made refugees (Morris, p 297-298). Many Palestinians who were made refugees could not register so the number is probably higher. Currently, the number of Palestinian refugees stands at 7 million.(Morris, p 186)

Answers.Com. Yishuv. 16 May 2008 http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/

Lerner, Micheal. “Israel 60 Years Later.” Tikkun May/June 2008

Morris, Benn, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-2001, Vintage Books, New York: 2001(1999)

Papped Ilan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, One World Oxford: 2007(2006)

Segev, Tom, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, Henry Holt and Company, New York: 2000 (1999)