Re-writing history and accusing Israel of “Ethnic cleansing”

Arab Palestinians attack Jewish Palestine 1947-8




Three days after the Arab rejection of the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, Jews everywhere in Palestine came under Arab attack, encountering a near total British indifference.

Under the command of the Haganah, convoys were organized to supply besieged areas and settlements with food and water. The initial convoys to Gush Etzion, located on the road between Jerusalem and Hebron, consisted of open pickup trucks, since the British had insisted that armored vehicles would aggravate the Arabs. The convoys were accompanied by official Mandate Police guards (Notrim), in uniform.

On December 11, 1947 the first such convoy was ambushed . There were 18 people in the convoy. Ten of the defenders were killed, four injured and four escaped.

On December 14, another person was killed in a subsequent attack on a convoy.

On January 5, 1948, it was decided to evacuate mothers and children from the entire Ezion Block (a cluster of four Jewish kibbutzim between Hebron and Bethlehem).

On January 13, 1948, local Arab militants ambushed a small convoy returning to Jerusalem. Two Jews were killed, one of them a medic who had come to the aid of a wounded man.

January 14, 1948, about 600 irregular Arab trainees, led by Abdul Khder El-Husseini, attacked the Etzion Block. In addition to the attackers, thousands of Arab youth from the sturrounding villages gave logistic aid. The attack was repulsed by an effective defense. Three Jewish defenders were killed.

January 16, 1948: The Massacre of the 35. After the attack of January 14, the Block commander required much needed supplies. Thirty-eight Haganah personnel set out on foot, commanded by Danny Mass. Three were sent back because of injuries. They were detected by a shepherd boy whom they did not harm but who sounded an alarm. A large group of armed Arabs blocked their way. The battle lasted all day. The last defender was killed at about 4:30 PM. According to British soldiers who witnessed the aftermath of the attack, the Arab attackers mutilated the bodies of the defenders by cutting off their genitals and putting them in their mouths.

By late March, 1948, while the British were still in charge of security, the situation along the main roads had deteriorated steadily, and the Haganah’s General Staff began to fear a collapse in Jewish West Jerusalem with its 90,000 people, a sixth of the country’s Jewish population. Early in the civil war, the Arabs recognized the Yishuv’s main vulnerability: the roads that linked the main urban centers to one another and to clusters of rural settlements.

As early as December 31, 1947, Haganah intelligence had reported, “The Arabs intend, within the next few days, to bring to a halt to all Jewish traffic on the roads.” By late March, this Arab goal was practically complete.

Gradually, during the first months of 1948, Arab militias and volunteers had concentrated on attacking Jewish supply convoys, especially those making the perilous climb up the hills to Jerusalem. In March, Arab firepower and methods of operation proved highly effective. The last weeks of March 1948 were disastrous; the Haganah lost much of their armored truck and car fleet and dozens of troops.

First came the convoy ambushes, all mainly in the Jerusalem area. On March 18, convoys were ambushed at Bab-el-waad and Har-Tuv; on March 24, at Atarot and Saris, where a total of 26 defenders died and 18 vehicles were destroyed.

Until the end of March 1948, the Haganah — the defense arm of the Jewish Agency — had strictly abided by the Zionist leadership policy of maintaining a large Arab minority in the emergence of a Jewish state.

Yisrael Galili, Ben-Gurion’s deputy and political head of the Haganah, had ordered all brigades that the Haganah was to respect “the rights, needs and freedom… without discrimination” of the Arab communities in the Jewish areas of the UN partition.

(Exceptions were to be made only in the event of clear military necessity.)

Then came two great disasters.

March 27, 1948: The Nabi-Daniel Convoy. Thousands of local armed Arab militants leaped down on a 50-vehicle convoy heading back from the isolated Etzion Block to West Jerusalem. The attackers managed to bring the convoy to a standstill, pouring heavy fire on the 186 Haganah defenders. By the following morning, the situation of the Jews was desperate. Haganah spotter planes, dropping the occasional grenade on the militiamen, did little good. At last, a British armored column got through and negotiated a ceasefire. The Haganah men were forced to abandon all their vehicles and hand over their arms. The Haganah lost 15 people, 10 armored cars, 4 buses, and 25 armored trucks. Seventy-three people were wounded.

The British High Commissioner of Palestine, General Alan Cunningham, understood the significance of what had occurred. “It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Yishuv and its leaders are deeply worried about the future. The intensification of Arab attacks on communications… has brought home the precarious position of Jewish communities, both great and small, which are dependent on supply lines running through Arab-controlled country,” he reported to London on April 3, 1948. “In particular, it is now realized that the position of Jewish Jerusalem, where a food scarcity already exists, is likely to be desperate after 16th May, 1948… The balance of the fighting seems to have turned much in favor of the Arabs.”

Within two weeks of the Nabi-Daniel Disaster, Arab militiamen had completely resealed the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road and had reinstated the siege of Jerusalem. This was a pivotal moment in which the Haganah finally shifted to the offensive, committed now to do whatever it took to open the road to Jerusalem.



For the first time, the Haganah deployed a brigade-sized force, and they succeeded in clearing a swath of enemy territory.




Fighters of the Irgun and Lechi actively demanded to participate in the action. They took on the evacuation of the village of Deir Yassin where they encountered stiff resistance. At the outset, they lost 6 fighters; 42 others were wounded. In the exchange, armed Arabs engaged in house-to-house fighting; among the many Arab casualties were women and children. False rumors of a massacre incited the widespread flight from rural Palestine.

The Arabs in Jerusalem, expecting the imminent entry of the Jordanian Legionnaires and anxious to avenge the alleged Jewish “massacre” at Deir Yassin, were primed to carry out their ultimate goal of wiping out the Jewish population of Jerusalem.

On April 13, a convoy of two Haganah escort cars, two ambulances and two buses set off for the hospital in the early morning. At approximately 9:45, the leading vehicle was hit by a mine and the convoy came under attack by Arab forces spraying machine gun fire. British forces were slow to come to the convoy's assistance. One of the first men on the scene was Major Jack Churchill, who offered to evacuate members of the convoy in an APC. His offer was refused, suspecting the British of helping the attackers and in the belief that the Haganah would come to their aid. When no relief arrived, Churchill and his 12 men provided what cover fire they could against hundreds of Arabs. The Army unit tried to arrange a cease fire, returning at 3.00pm with heavier weapons. It was then that the first of the buses was set on fire. At 5.00pm the Army ‘laid down smoke’ and began retrieving the survivors, by which time one bus was burnt out and a second on fire.

Following the massacre, Churchill oversaw the evacuation of 700 patients and staff from the hospital.

Casualties

Seventy-nine people many of them Doctors and nurses; were killed by gunfire during the fighting or were burnt when several vehicles were set alight. Twenty of them were women. The bodies were so badly burned that only 31 were identified. The unidentified remains were buried in a mass grave in Sanhedria Cemetery. Twenty-two victims were declared missing. For many years the number of casualties was thought to be 78, but recently it was confirmed that there were 79. One British soldier died in the attack.

Palestinian Arab irregulars carried out a horrendous, bloody massacre of a convoy of doctors and nurses on the way to Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Eighty people were killed.

During the next several weeks the focus of the fighting switched to the country’s urban centers.

Under orders from the Haganah, the Etzion Block continued to interfere with Arab transport, including supply to the Jordanian Legion, by firing on the road to Jerusalem. The British continued to supply the Legion through this road, and its commanders, including British commander Glubb Pasha, ordered two attacks even before the end of the mandate, while British were still nominally responsible for order in Palestine. The first, accompanied by a British armored unit was repulsed by the defenders on May 4th. The second and final attack began on May 12, 1948. Legionnaires were accompanied by thousands of Arab irregulars. They had already carried out a bloody massacre on the convoy of doctors and nurses going to the Hadassah hospital, killing 79. It did not take great foresight to understand that they would commit a similar massacre in Kfar Etzion village. The attackers came with about 20 armored vehicles, including six armored cars with two pound cannon, half tracks and several “sandwich” vehicles captured from the Haganah at Nebi Daniel.

On the 13th of May, the defenders of Kfar Etzion surrendered to the Arab Legion. The Legion honored the surrender, though Arab irregulars continued to fire for some time. The defenders gathered in front of the school and put down their weapons. They were photographed by someone in a kaffiyeh (Arab headdress) and European suit. Then, an armored car, apparently belonging to the Legion, approached and opened fire on the defenders. Other Arab attackers opened fire with submachine guns and grenades. The Arabs were screaming “Deir Yassin.”

About 50 defenders escaped to the cellar of an old German monastery that was within the grounds and tried to defend them-selves from there. The Arab attackers finished them off with hand grenades and blew up the building. Only about five Jews managed to survive. One of the survivors, a woman, was taken to a field and raped by two Legion soldiers. Her life was later saved by an officer. Of the 157 Jews who died in the final battle for Gush Etzion, about 128 were massacred by the Palestinian Arab irregulars and the Jordanian Legion.

On May 14th, Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel.

On May 16th, 1948, the Jordanian Arab Legion attacked Jerusalem from the east and the Egyptian Army from the South and 5 Arab armies attacked every Jewish settlement in the new state.

Responding to David Ben Gurion’s desperation and concern for the besieged Jews of Jerusalem, the Haganah high command proposed “Tochnit Dalet” (Plan D). The plan was to secure the Jewish population of Jerusalem and its suburbs by neutralizing the attacks from the irregular militants hiding in the villages surrounding the road to Jerusalem. However, this plan did not materialize until June 1967 when Israel’s armed forces repelled the Jordanian Army and liberated the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem.

Some of today’s self-proclaimed “scholars,,especially Ilan Pepe and Rashid Khalidi, have been trying to denote plan D as evidence of “ethnic cleansing.” It is preposterous and offensive to suggest that people who were desperately fighting for their lives conceived of such hatred or evil intent as was being launched against them by the Arabs of Palestine. It is no myth that 1256 Jews were killed in 5 months. Even before the first Arab villages were evacuated in April 1948, 924 Jews had already been killed in the previous four months. Yet, in an attempt to rewrite history these and other Self hating Jews and Arab pseudo “historian” choose to present every massacre of Jews (and as you can see there were many), only as a “response” to Deir Yassin.

Today, despite the wars that had befallen the State of Israel, more then 1,850,000 none-Jews (mainly Muslim and christian Arabs) live in Israel proper and are legitimate Israeli citizens. For the most part they still live in their own towns and villages; enjoying full religious freedom and exercise the rights to vote and be elected to the Israeli Knesset ( Parliament). While they do not have to serve in the Israeli armed forces ; many choose to do so voluntarily!
None of these elementary rights of citizenship have, to the best of our knowledge, been accorded to Palestinian living in any of the Arab countries in the region.
So much is to be said about the veil accusations against Israel for ever enacting a policy of "Ethnic cleansing".