PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem

1. According to sources. See Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, One- world Publications, 2006. 2. In October 1948, the repercussions from the Israeli army’s Operation Yo’av caused the population of the whole area to the west of He- bron to flee. At Al Dawayima, the tanks rolled into the town on Friday October 29, 1948. The soldiers killed the people in their houses, in the streets and even in the mosques, and then dec- imated the 35 families found hiding in caves near to the village. 3. The mukhtar is chosen by the council to rep- resent his village or his neighbourhood at coun- cil, and to fulfil the role of registrar (he records births and deaths and so on). 4. Rushdieh’s uncle saw them on the three roads that connected Al Dawayima to the neighbour- ing villages of Qubayba, Beit Jibrin and Ma- fkhar, as he later testified to the United Nations. 5. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2006. The author mentions the terms under which the Daleth Plan was enacted on March 10, 1948. 6. An eyewitness who survived the massacre later reported this to the mukhtar. 7. See Yoella Har-Shefi, “Another Deir Yas- in?” Journal of Palestine Studies, University of California Press & Institute for Palestinian Studies (Special Issue: The Palestinians in Is- rael and the Occupied Territories), vol. 14, n°. 2, Winter 1985, pp. 207–212. In 1948, the mukhtar, Hassan Mahmoud Hudeib, gave an interview to Yoella Har-Shefi, a journalist working for the Israeli daily newspaper Hada- shot, and together they went to the site of the massacre. In order to verify the old Palestinian man’s story Yoella returned to the spot to do some exploratory digging, and found human bones. She stopped searching, out of respect for the dead: the mukhtar had spoken the truth. 8. See the book by Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Washington DC, 1992. Using this book as a reference, the Israeli NGO Zochrot catalogued the villag- es that were abandoned in 1948 after having been attacked by Israeli forces. Qubayba had a population of 1230 and was probably attacked either by the Giva’ati unit or Har’el (Palmach). The attack caused the entire population to flee. 9. Beit Jibrin is a particular case, given its stra- tegic position on the front line between Israeli and Egyptian forces in 1948. The First Battal- ion of the Egyptian army had taken up posi- tions inside the village. According to the New York Times correspondent, in May 1948 thou- sands of the residents of Jaffa had fled towards Hebron and many had stayed and settled in this village. Like Qubayba, Beit Jibrin was occupied during Operation Yo’av. The aim of the opera- tion, together with Operation ha-Har, was to 74 Memories of 1948 occupy the whole of the south of the Jerusalem corridor after October 18, 1948, according to the Israeli archives quoted by Zochrot. 10. Until the early twentieth century, the keffiyah was the traditional headdress of the Bedouin, while the peasant farmers wore a scarf tied into a turban on their heads (which they still do in Egypt today). But in the 1930s, the peasants started to use it during guerrilla activities against Zionist groups and against the French in Syria. Subsequently, the keffiyah completely replaced the turban. 11. Those responsible for the massacre at Al Dawayima were the 89th battalion, command- ed by the founder of the Palmach, General Yitzhaq Sadeh. See the article by Yair Auron, “Breaking the Silence: The Poem That Exposed Israeli War Crimes in 1948”, Haaretz, March 18, 2016, for the condemnation of the mas- sacres by the Minister of Agriculture Aharon Zisling and the expressions of remorse of a few soldiers. 12. According to the Partition Plan drawn up by the United Nations in November 1947, He- bron was part of the Palestinian territory. 13. Later on, the mukhtar handed the list in to Ibrahim Qarishan, the Jordanian military governor of Hebron. 14. The historian Ilan Pappé cross-referenced several sources and concluded that 176 people died in the mosque, and 426 men, women and children were shot dead. The mukhtar’s state- ment, given under oath to the United Nations Commission for Conciliation in Palestine, gave the figures as 455 people, of whom 280 were men. To this figure must be added those who came from neighbouring villages to seek refuge in Al Dawayima, bringing the total to 560 dead. 15. The Arabic name for Jericho is Ariha. 16. The Unccp representative presented his report to the Arab Refugee Congress in Ramal- lah. The idea of setting up the Unccp was put forward by Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who had been nominated by the UN Security Council as mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict. After he was assassinated in September 1948, the UN General Assembly voted to set up the Commission, based on Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948. Its mission was to take on the conciliation role of the UN mediator. The Unccp is composed of three members of the UN General Assembly: the USA, France and Turkey. The record of the interview with Mukhtar Hudeib is available on the website of the online magazine Mondoweiss at http:// mondoweiss.net/2016/02/the-mukhtars-sworn- testimony-more-on-the-dawaymeh-massacre/ 17. On April 9, 1948, 254 women, children and old people were murdered by Zionist groups at Deir Yasin, a Palestinian village near Jerusalem (according to figures given by the Red Cross). This massacre took place while Pal- estine was still under British rule, and it played an extremely important psychological role in the Palestinian exodus. The official Zionist ad- ministration denied all responsibility. 18. In 1955, Amatzya, a moshav (an Israeli agri- cultural cooperative, made up of an association of several individual farms), was established on the site Al Dawayima. Today an Israeli settle- ment has been built over part of the ruins of Al Dawayima. In 2010, bulldozers began levelling the ground to build houses for orthodox Jew- ish families which had been evacuated in 2005 from Gush Katif in the Gaza strip. 19. The testimony given by Mukhtar Hudeib was corroborated by that of an Israeli soldier who witnessed the massacre. He wrote a de- tailed letter to Eliezer Peri, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Al HaMishmar, on Novem- ber 8, 1948, in other words just ten days after the event, but his letter was not published. In it he explains how, at Al Dawayima, men who were educated and cultured became murders. He blames this on the logic of destruction and expulsion that was instilled in their brains, jus- tifying the brutality of the massacre (children’s skulls smashed, women raped and burned alive in their houses…) and making light of the col- lective murder of the Palestinians. See http:// mondoweiss.net/2016/02/barbarism-by-an-ed- ucated-and-cultured-people-dawayima-mas- sacre-was-worse-than-deir-yassin/ The letter was eventually published in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz in an article by historian Yair Auron, on February 5, 2016, 68 years later. According to Auron there were many eyewit- nesses, but none of the Israeli soldiers who took part in the massacre were ever tried, in spite of the overwhelming evidence. They were all granted amnesty in February 1949. The Israeli writer Amos Keinan, who also participated in the massacre, confirmed the facts in an inter- view that he gave towards the end of the 1990s to Palestinian actor and cinematographer Mu- hammad Bakri for his documentary 1948. 20. According to Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Pub- lications, 2006, p. 196, the United Nations report of June 14, 1949, said: ‘The reason why so little is known about the massacre which, in many respects, was more brutal than the Deir Yasin massacre, is because the Arab Legion (the army in control of that area) feared that if the news was allowed to spread, it would have the same effect on the moral of the peasantry that Deir Yasin had, namely to cause another flow of Arab refugees.’ 21. After May 1948, David Ben-Gurion inte- grated the Zionist militias into the body of the Israeli Defence Forces. He was therefore direct- ly responsible for them from that point on, and could no longer say that he opposed the actions

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