Israel's own settlement policies, which steal more and more land from Palestinians in small and larger annexations on a yearly basis.
Palestinians don't have any land.
Rape, massacre, transfer
Q: Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or the Palestinians?
Morris: The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself.
According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?
About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.
According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?
Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
That is less than the homicide rate is some US cities.
Compared with the typical Arab propaganda that exaggerated
these to mythological proportions causing most of the Arab fleeing,
and in the context of Holocaust survivors and former Dhimmis frighting the war...
That's why you need all the propaganda,
in fact it's the least fatal conflict in the entire region, by a large margin.
So why punish?
Not a single Zionist ever shot a bullet,
before Arabs expelled the local Jews from all their holy cities.
For that, the response was actually much less than one would expect.
All that given, and Arabs were also voting for the 1st Israeli Knesset.
Where are the Jewish members of the Arab parliaments,
if ever, remains a question.
The land that we have bought (for the colony of Ghederal constitutes the "soul and spirit" (nefesh vi ruah)
of the [Arab] village [of Qatra]. The villagers borrowed from the French moneylender Polivar at such a
high rate that they were finally compelled to sell their lands at the loanshark's price. As long as Polivar
remained owner of the land, the fel laheen did not feel the full burden of their misfortune because he leased
it to them. But now that the fellaheen realize that our [Jewish] brothers work the land on their own, and will
not lease it ... the fellaheen are bare-how will they come by their daily bread? [15 November 1885, Muyal
to Pinsker, in Druyanov 1919,1:670-71]
The Ottoman fiscal and land reforms (of the second phase of tanzimat), which first took
effect in Palestine around 1870, soon resulted in the peasantry losing title to much of the land
they cultivated (Schumacher 1889; Post 1891). But life conditions hardly deteriorated: improved
physical security and opportunities provided by the emerging agricultural market more than
offset the cost of paying rent to absentee titleholders (Scholch 1984; Gilbar 1986; cf. Oliphant
1887). Then came the Jewish colonists. Exchanging meager savings for precious deeds in Zion,
they had left behind the alienating commerce of pogrom-ridden Eastern Europe to work the land
of Abraham and Isaac for themselves: "that is why, all of a sudden, many fellaheen had no land
to till; this affected their very existence and provoked the conflicts [at Petah Tikvah] that set our
(Arab] brothers against us" (4 April 1886, Hirsch to Pinsker, in Druyanov 1919,1:746-54, 761-
65). Many of these early colonists were genuinely surprised to find the children of Abraham's
half-forgotten son, Ishmael, still dwelling on their father's land. A few saw the Arabs as long-lost
brothers. Others dreamed the Arabs could be forced back to their desert banishment. The Arab
peasants, it appears, were similarly disconcerted.