PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 67
1. See the books by Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Pub-
lications, 2006 and by Nur Masalha, The Pal-
estine Nakba, Decolonising History, Narrating
the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, London &
New York, Zed Books, 2012, on the central
role played by the massacres and the strategy
of ethnic cleansing in the exodus of 750,000
Palestinians in 1948.
2. Laurence Louër, To Be an Arab in Israel,
London, Hurst, 2007.
3. See Ted Swedenburg, “The Role of the
Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt
(1936–1939)”, in Edmund Burke III and Ira
Lapidus, eds, Islam, Politics, and Social Move-
ments, Berkeley, University of California Press,
1988, pp. 169–203.
4. Poland was invaded in September 1939.
5. The goal of the Italian air force was to bomb
the areas controlled by the British in the Near
East: the Palestinian refineries and ports were
specifically targeted.
6. On the National Liberation League in Pales-
tine, a party founded in 1944 by Arab members
of the Palestinian communist party, see Johan
Franzén, “Le Yishouv et le ‘yishouvisme’”,
Revue d’ études palestiniennes n°104 (2007): the
author explains that ‘The official communist
position on the Zionist project in Palestine at
the beginning of the British Mandate was one
of reserved hostility. But this proposition was
to change between 1940 and 1947 (…) In 1947,
Jewish colonization is justified on the basis that
the Jewish proletariat in Palestine would become
a socialist avant-garde and would raise the polit-
ical level of the Arabs.’ On the same subject, see
the thesis by Laurent Rucker, “L’URSS et le
conflit israélo-arabe, 1941–1956”, Paris X, 1999.
7. Ari Shavit, “Survival of the fittest” (inter-
view with Benny Morris), Haaretz, January 8,
2004.
8. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Pales-
tine, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2006,
p. 285.
9. On May 13, 1948, the Haganah undertook
a military operation in western Galilee, known
by the name of Ben-Ami, which aimed to take
Acre, which at that time had 12,000 inhabit-
ants, as well as the coastal plain up as far as the
Lebanese border. Acre fell before the Carmeli
brigade on May 18 and 19. The majority of the
population fled and, of the 5000–6000 people
who stayed, many were refugees from Haifa.
10. An armed Zionist force in the Palestinian
mandate, Irgun, the whole name of which is
Irgun Zvai Leumi (Hebrew for “national mil-
itary organization”), is sometimes designated
by its initials IZL, pronounced Etzel. Close to
the nationalist right wing, its objective was the
construction of a Jewish state on both banks of
the Jordan, which would include modern-day
Jordan. Etzel was created in 1931 after seceding
from Haganah. After 1948, most of its mem-
bers became part of the regular army.
11. See John B. Quigley, Palestine and Israel:
A Challenge to Justice, Duke University Press,
Durham, 1990, p. 83. See also the article by
Jonathan Cook, “Why Israel has silenced the
1948 story of Nazareth’s survival”, on the
website mondoweiss.net (https://mondoweiss.
net/2016/01/silenced-nazareths-survival/) Jan-
uary 2016, in which he explains that ‘Nazareth
was not only an anomaly, it was a mistake. It
was supposed to be cleared of its Palestinian
population, just like other Palestinian cities
now in Israel.’ He tells how Commander Ben
Dunkelman, a Canadian Jew at the head of the
Seventh Armoured Brigade of the Israeli Army,
did not obey the order to empty Nazareth. The
town surrendered. The following day, he was
relieved of his command.
12. In 1948, 158,000 Palestinians had re-
mained within the new Israeli state. They
would receive Israeli citizenship in the 1950s.
13. The Women’s International Democratic
Foundation includes 163 associations, over two
million women in the world today. They speak
in the Knesset and in the United Nations.
14. Marius Schattner, Histoire de la droite
israélienne, de Jabotinsky à Shamir, Ed. Com-
plexe, 1991, p.108 and following, on the subject
of the alliance between Ben-Gurion, Stalin and
Hitler, which provides the backdrop for the de-
velopment of the Jewish Agency.
15. Gabriel Gorodetsky, “Aux origines du
soutien soviétique à Israël”, Le Monde Diploma-
tique, February 2016.
16. Interview with Yukhavit and Benyamin
Gonen, June 13, 2018. In the 1970s, it was
strictly forbidden for an Israeli, whether Arab
or Jew, to be in contact with members of the
PLO, under penalty of imprisonment. That had
not stopped Benyamin Gonen, who was a mil-
itant in the Communist Party, from meeting
Yasser Arafat. One of these meetings occurred
in 1973 at the World Festival of Communist
Youth in Berlin.
17. This Intifada happened about 30 years be-
fore the event known as the First Intifada, be-
tween 1987 and 1993, in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, which was the uprising of the Pales-
tinian people against Israeli military occupation.
18. An application, iNakba, launched in 2014
by the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Hebrew for “they
remember”), makes known the names of Pal-
estinian villages which have been destroyed or
depopulated since 1948, based on the book of
Walid Khalidi, All that Remains: the Pales-
tinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by
Israel in 1948, Washington D.C., Institute for
Palestine Studies, 1992. The number of these
villages, on the ruins of which the Israelis have
often built anew, varies according to the sources
between 418 and 530.
19. 1953 was the year that the law was passed
on the acquisition of property with a view to
legitimizing expropriations.
20. A dunum is a unit of measurement dating
from Ottoman times, equal to 919.3 m 2 , but
during the British Mandate in Palestine (1917–
1948), the metric dunum, measuring 1000 m 2 ,
was adopted.
21. According to the sources.
22. Tzefira Yonatan, an actress and musician
known in Tel Aviv, was the first wife of Nathan
Yonatan, who was a writer and poet born in
Ukraine. In 1945, the couple settled in a kib-
butz, Sarid, built on the site of the Arab village
of Khuneifis. Two children were born there,
Lior and Ziv. Lior was killed in 1973 in Sinai
during the Yom Kippur War. Meeting with
Tzefira Yonatan, June 14, 2018 in the kibbutz.
23. Elisabeth Marteu, “La sphère associative
palestinienne en Israël”, in Jalal Al Husseini
and Aude Signoles, eds, Les Palestiniens entre
État et diaspora, Karthala, 2012, explains that
for a long time, certain Palestinian associations
in the West Bank and Gaza refused any sort of
official cooperation with Israeli associations,
even if they were Arab. The Movement of Dem-
ocratic Women of Nazareth had contacts with
the General Union of Palestinian Women (the
female faction of the PLO, founded in 1965),
but relations were never made official and activ-
ities never led to joint activities.
24. Women in Black was created in 1988 by
Israeli women against the occupation of lands
beyond the green line. In the early 2000s,
10,000 people across the whole world rallied in
their name.
25. A meeting took place in 1990 in Brussels,
Belgium, at the end of which this movement
was created. Samira Khoury was part of it.
26. Thirteen young Palestinian demonstrators
were killed in Nazareth and in Galilee.
Samira
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