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 65