What Ethnic Cleansing? 2

So what happened to Safad? Here's the account in Nafez Nazzal's study, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948 (1978):

"Although 200 to 250 men of Safad were armed with various kinds of rifles and 35 to 50 rounds of ammunition each, very few had any systematic military training; they depended greatly on the Arab forces positioned in the city. Nevertheless when the Zionists attacked 'Ein ez Zeitun, the Arab [volunteer] forces refused to join in the fighting and would not permit the militia to join the villagers in defending themselves, assuring everyone that Shishakli and his men would repulse an attack on the city, and that the task of the Arab forces in Safad and the militia was to defend the city. The people of Safad became discouraged and lost confidence in their forces. 'Issa 'Abid al-Khadrah, a merchant and a member of the Safad militia, recounted:

'We could not defend the city, nor did we count on the Arab forces to protect it. Rumours spread that the Jews had been given 'Ein ez Zeitun... The fall of this village left the city besieged from the south, east and north. We felt that the Arab forces did not try to prevent this situation... If Sari Fnaish and his men did not protect 'Ein ez Zeitun, what would make you think he would protect Safad... what interest would they have in defending Safad but not 'Ein ez Zeitun?'

"The decisive battle for Safad began on the night of May 9-10. The Palmach opened heavy artillery fire on all positions occupied by by Arab forces in the city. Their use of the homemade mortar, the Davidka, which produced a great deal of noise, left the people of Safad in a state of shock. Usamah al-Naqib, a member of the militia reported:

'On the night of the attack, the responsible Arab commanders: Shishakli, Sari Fnaish, Ihsan Kamlamaz (trainer of the local militia); were out of the city. We did not have a unified command. Everyone fought on his own... We were unaware of what was happening in the other quarters of the city. Rumours spread that the ALA [Arab Liberation Army] had begun to withdraw... The people of Safad began to flee in panic. We could not find out what was happening... It was raining hard. We knew we could not sustain the defence of our city alone and so by midnight decided to retreat. We heard that the city fell to the Jews by the morning.'

"The fall of Safad on May 10, 1948 was a great shock to the Palestinians in Galilee. The villagers of the Hula Valley were disheartened and terrified; a great number of the villagers in Eastern Galilee began to flee. Almost all of the villages surrounding the city of Safad were now evacuated."

In Michael Palumbo's The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland (1987), you can read about the sickening murder of a group of Arab POWs by a hoe-wielding  Israeli intelligence officer (pp 114-15). On page 115, you'll also find the admission of Yigal Allon, Commander in Chief of the Palmach, that his aim with regard to Safad and its surrounding villages was "to cleanse the Upper Galilee and create a continuous strip of Israeli territory in the region," and that he wanted to do this before May 15.

In Ilan Pappe's more recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), we learn that while the Palmach had 1,000 well-trained troops, the Arab volunteer force was only 400 strong, only half of whom were armed with rifles (p 97). Then there's this revelation on p 98: "The Palmach troops drove most of the people out, only allowing 100 old people to stay on, though not for long. On 5 June, Ben-Gurion noted dryly in his diary: 'Abraham Hanuki, from [Kibbutz] Ayelet Hashahar, told me that since there were only 100 old people left in Safad they were expelled to Lebanon."

The likes of journalists such as Michael Bachelard need to ponder and understand this simple fact:

"In virtually every war of modern and ancient times civilians have been forced to flee to escape the fighting, taking refuge elsewhere until, with the cessation of hostilities, they could return to their homes. [But] what occurred in Palestine during the war of 1947-49 was an exodus of a fundamentally different character. It involved the systematic expulsion of most of the Arab population from its homes, and its exile from Palestine, as part of a premeditated scheme to transform radically the demography of the country in fulfilment of the colonial ideal of Zionism - making Palestine 'as Jewish as England is English.' This colonial settler nature of Zionism - the substitution of one people for another by force of arms - and the tragic situation it has created in Palestine over the past half century, is at the heart of the current conflict in the Middle East, although this essential fact has unfortunately been obscured by Israeli and much Western scholarship on the Palestine question." (From Rashid Khalidi's  foreword to Nazzal's book cited above, p IX)

But Bachelard not only clouds the reality of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he goes on in his pathetic piece on Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp to broadcast the following Israeli propaganda trope: "We are in a concrete room inside a concrete jungle, behind concrete walls administered by an unyielding Lebanese state that believes these people to be a demographic problem, and so is adamant that these men, and their families, will never become citizens."

What an exercise in reality inversion is that!

No mention whatever that Israel, not Lebanon's concerns with disrupting its confessional balance, is the root cause of the Palestinian refugee problem as exemplified in Ain al-Hilweh and other Palestinian refugee camps throughout the Middle East.

A mere tweak of Bachelard's text suffices to illustrate the extent of his cover-up of this elementary fact: '... an unyielding Jewish state that believes these people to be a demographic problem, and so is adamant that these men, and their families, will never be allowed to return to their Palestinian homeland and become equal citizens with Israeli Jews.'

Better by far that Bachelard had never set foot in Lebanon than do propaganda service for apartheid Israel.

What Ethnic Cleansing? 1

Please tell me what is the point of 'journalism' such as this if not to keep readers in the dark and shield the apartheid state from the pariah status it so richly deserves:

"When the state of Israel was being formed in 1948, and a war with the Arab world raged, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes into neighbouring Lebanon and set up temporary camp." (The day I drank (bad) coffee with heavily armed militants, Michael Bachelard, The Sun-Herald, 11/11/18)

Nothing like the old passive voice to avoid the fact that Israel was created in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. And nothing like a hyped "war with the Arab world," to divert attention from the fact that that the campaign of ethnic cleansing began long before Arab League troops moved to put a stop to it.

Bachelard is either involved in self-censorship here, or is one of those who can see ethnic cleansing everywhere but Palestine.

The "heavily armed militants" with whom this late-sipper shared "(bad) coffee," were residents of Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon in south Lebanon, more than 95% of whose inhabitants originally came from the kaza of Safad and the surrounding area, in northern Palestine, according to French Middle East scholar Bernard Rougier's study of the camp, Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon (2004 French/ 2007 English translation).

The Palestinian city of Safad, now Israeli, and its surrounding villages, now in ruins, are situated in the eastern Galilee, so let's examine, shall we, what exactly went on there before any Arab armies arrived on the scene on May 15 when the British Mandate over Palestine officially ended.

Take, for example, the village of Ayn az-Zaytun, some 1.5 kilometres north of Safad, whose inhabitants cultivated olives, grain and fruit.

It was first attacked by Zionist forces as early as January 1948. Later, it was occupied by Palmach forces on May 1, 1948, as a prelude to the occupation of Safad.  These Zionist shock troops first unleashed a mortar barrage at 3 am, followed by a ground assault. After taking the village, they rounded up its inhabitants.

As Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi recounts in his exhaustive study All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied & Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992):

"The men... were taken away and the rest were humiliated and expelled while shots were fired over their heads, according to the villagers' testimony and Israeli sources. As for the men, some were later expelled and enabled to join their families, but 37 of them, selected at random, were taken captive. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, they were probably among a group of 70 people later massacred in a gully between  'Ayn al-Zaytun and Safad under orders from Moshe Kelman, the commander of the Palmach's Third Battalion. Morris reports that... after the prisoners were killed, and in anticipation of a Red Cross visit to the area, he ordered their hands to be untied, to conceal the fact that the killing had been done in cold blood.

"Several villagers attempted to return to their homes over the next couple of days but were fired upon by the Palmach; one of them was killed, according to Morris. As for the village houses, they were burned or blown up by Palmach sappers on 2 and 3 May. The destruction was carried out partly in order to terrify the inhabitants of Safad, who could watch the spectacle from nearby hills. The sight of the village being leveled had a demoralizing effect in the city, as well as in the surrounding villages of eastern Galilee." (p 437)

Continued in my next post...