Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (44 page)

A group of American correspondents who attended a press conference given by the Irgun and Stern Gang were told that it was “the beginning of the conquest of Palestine and Transjordan.”
²⁷

In America Rabbi Silver was later quoted as saying, “The Irgun will go down in history as a factor without which the State of Israel would not have come into being.”
²⁸

Nearly 30 years later, in an article for
The American Zionist
, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem expressed his concern about the failure to understand the major significance of terrorism in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty. He wrote: “
Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was
.”
²⁹
(Emphasis added).

It was Begin himself who would give the most vivid description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin served the Zionist cause. In
The Revolt
he wrote (empasis added):

Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah, was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem.
In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces... The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa... All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting
“
Deir Yassin
”
.
³⁰

The Jewish Agency disassociated itself from the atrocity at Deir Yassin and condemned it. Ben-Gurion cabled his personal shock to Transjordan’s King Abdullah. And the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem took the extraordinary step of excommunicating the participants in the attack. But... The Jewish Agency posted leaflets descriptive of the massacre in many Arab villages. Loudspeaker vans toured Arab Jerusalem broadcasting in Arabic “
Unless you leave your home, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate!
”
³¹

Not reported at the time—and not admitted for many years later —was the brilliant way in which the Haganah and the Palmach especially played the Deir Yassin terror card to speed up the Arab exodus while the fate of Palestine was still in the balance so far as the United Nations was concerned.

The truth about how the Palmach capitalised on Arab fears—that what had happened at Deir Yassin would be the fate of all who did not abandon their villages—was eventually told by Yigal Allon, the Palmach’s commander and a future deputy prime minister of Israel. In his book on the history of the Palmach,
Sefer ha-Palmach
, he described how he had resorted to “psychological warfare” to “cleanse” the Upper Galilee of its Arabs. He wrote (emphasis added):

I gathered all the Jewish
mukhtars
who had contacts with the Arabs in different villages, and I asked them to whisper in the Arabs’ ears that a great Jewish force had arrived in the Galilee and that it was going to burn all the villages of the Huleh (the Lake Huleh region). They should suggest to those Arabs that they flee while there was still time
.
³²

It was a tactic, Allon added, that “attained its goal completely.” It was also a tactic repeated elsewhere in Palestine in the countdown to Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence.

There was one and only one time when General Macmillan deployed his forces to check the Zionist advance before Britain abandoned the Arabs of Palestine. That was in the port of Jaffa, just up the road from Tel Aviv.

The operation to empty Jaffa of its Arabs was conducted mainly by the Irgun, re-invigorated by its triumph at Deir Yassin. As it happened Macmillan intervened only because he was ordered to do so by a very angry British Foreign Secretary. Bevin was stung by mounting Arab criticism of Britain’s refusal to act. I imagine he was also deeply ashamed. At a point he gave General Macmillan a direct, unequivocal order “to bloody well put troops in there and get Jaffa back for the Arabs.”
³³
(In May 2003 declassified British documents of the period revealed that Bevin was targeted for assassination by a Zionist terrorist cell in London).

As usual it was too late. By the time British troops had secured Jaffa, 65,000 of its 70,000 Arab inhabitants had fled.

The total number of Arabs who fled in terror prior to Israel’s declaration of independence was about 300,000. But that was only Phase One of the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. (As we shall see, the total number of Arabs who were dispossed of their land and their rights by, mainly, Zioniost terrorism and ethnic cleansing, was in excess of 700,000).

Though Zionist terrorism and the use Allon’s Palmach made of the fear it inspired were the prime causes of the first Arab exodus, there was also a fateful Arab contribution to the panic on the Arab side so eloquently described by Begin.

When the Arab Higher Committee received news of the slaughter at Deir Yassin, its senior officials agonised for hours about whether or not to make public what had happened. They knew that if they did the consequence would be at least a measure of panic on their side which, at best, would be demoralising and, at worst, might lead to many of their people fleeing. From this perspective the case for not broadcasting the truth about Deir Yassin was overwhelming. But there was another consideration.

The two officials who took the decision to go public with the news—Hussein Khalidi, the Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee and Hazem Nusseibi—were intelligent, sensitive and responsible men. They were also well informed about the true state of affairs in the neighbouring Arab countries. And because they were well informed, they were afraid that the Arab armies, despite the war talk of Arab leaders, would not come to Palestine’s aid if and when a Jewish state was declared. As Nusseibi would later say, they took the decision to broadcast the news of the slaughter at Deir Yassin because “
We wanted to shock the populations of the Arab countries into putting pressure on their governments
.”
³⁴

By taking that decision for the best of reasons they unwittingly played into Zionism’s hands. The fear inspired by making public the truth about what happened at Deir Yassin helped to guarantee that Allon’s “whispering campaign” would be effective beyond his own best expectations.

There was to come a time when Nusseibi would admit that broadcasting the news was “a fatal error”. With the benefit of hindsight that was obviously true. And there are today few if any Arabs who would dispute that verdict. But in the circumstances of the time was any other decision possible?

As it happened, the slaughter at Deir Yassin was not the only reason for the growing fear of the Palestinians that Zionism would not be defeated unless the Arab armies intervened when Britain’s Mandate expired and the British were gone.

Though nobody (Arab or Jew) was aware of it until the day after the slaughter at Deir Yassin, Abdul Khader was dead.

On his return almost empty-handed from Damascus, and after he had ordered Irekat to waste no time in mounting a counter-attack to drive the Haganah out of Kastel, Abdul Khader sat down and wrote what was to be his last letter to his wife, Wajiha, in Cairo. With it he enclosed a poem he had written in Damascus to his eight year-old son, Feisal. (When the son died of a heart attack at the end of May 2001, he was the Palestinian Authority’s Minister for Israeli-occupied Jerusalem).

This land of brave men
Is our ancestors’ land.
On this land
The Jews have no claim.
How can I sleep
When the enemy is upon it?
Something burns in my heart,
My country is calling.
³⁵

The words of the poem and what happened immediately after he had sealed the envelope make me wonder if Abdul Khader had a premonition of his death. In the light of the great truth he had worked out for himself, it might even have been that he went looking for death with honour.

He summoned one of his lieutenants, Bajhat Abu Gharbieh. This man, a schoolteacher, was later to say that he had never seen his chief so bitter. “
We have been betrayed,
” Abdul Khader told him.
³⁶

Then, with the anger in his voice becoming more intense, the leader of the Palestinian resistance movement gave Gharbieh an account of his visit to Damascus and the refusal by Safwat, and so the Arab League, to provide the Palestinians with the weapons and ammunition they needed to conduct their struggle against the Zionists without having to rely on Arab intervention. With great bitterness he described the last thing he saw in Syria. It was a warehouse full of arms at Al Mazah Airport for his rival, Fawzi el Kaukji. (He was the Arab League’s puppet guerrilla leader and he has his context in the first chapter of Volume Two of this book).

After repeating that they had been betrayed, Abdul Khader said to the schoolteacher: “They (the Arab states as represented by the Arab League) have left us three choices. We can go to Iraq and live in disguise. We can commit suicide. Or we can die fighting here.”
³⁷

Mention of the need for disguise in Iraq was a reference to the fact that Britain still had a military presence there. The implication was that if Abdul Khader gave up the struggle in Palestine and sought refuge in Iraq, he (and others of his known associates) would be arrested by the British if they were not disguised.

In theory the frontline Arab states had achieved their independence —Iraq in 1921, Egypt in 1922, Syria in 1943, Lebanon in 1944, and Transjordan in 1946. In reality these independent Arab states were still utterly dependent on Britain and France for, among other things, their supply of weapons and ammunition and the development of their armed forces and intelligence services. And that meant Britain and France—Britain with Egypt, Iraq and Transjordan—had great arm-twisting ability in their dealings with key Arab leaders, the Hashemite Faysal in Iraq and the Hashemite Abdullah in Transjordan in particular.

The great truth Abdul Khader had worked out for himself, and which he was conveying in essence to the schoolteacher Abu Gharbieh, was that Britain did not want the Palestinians to be capable of defending their own interests. Britain wanted the destiny of the Palestinians to be controlled by those it thought it could manipulate and control—the leaders, mainly through the mechanism of the Arab League, of the Arab states. (As we shall see, Abdul Khader was right. Effectively the Palestinians were betrayed by their Arab brothers at leadership level).

After he had conveyed his innermost thoughts and fears to Abu Gharbieh, Abdul Khader refocused on the present. Whatever the future might hold, he said, the absolute priority of the moment was the recapture of Kastel. He was intending to throw more of his men at the Haganah and he was going to lead the attack himself.

The hundred or so Arab fighters who had remained engaged at Kastel after Irekat’s enforced departure from the battlefield had not made any progress, but under the command of the Hebron shepherd, Abu Dayieh, they were keeping Gazit’s force pinned down.

Abdul Khader arrived with reinforcements including four British Army deserters. In Damascus he had asked Safwat to let him have a canon. In the absence of it Abdul Khader was intending to improvise with four mortars. They were to be operated by the British deserters.

In all Abdul Khader had about 300 men to commit to the attack. The omens were good because the Jews holding Kastel were, had to be, on the point of running out of ammunition.

Abdul Khader positioned most of his men directly in front of the village under the command of Abu Dayieh. The others, in two groups, were posted to the flanks.

The Arab attack on Kastel began at ten o’clock on the evening of Wednesday 7 April, a whole day and a few night hours before the Irgun and Sternist attack on Deir Yassin.

After an hour or so of heavy shooting the Arabs had driven Gazit’s men from the first row of houses and were barely 100 yards from the Haganah’s most strategic position—the house of the village
mukhtar
. Under cover of the mortar fire, an Arab placed a large olive oil can close to the house. It was packed with explosives. In the house Gazit’s sergeant major, Meyer Karmiol, called for help. Gazit worked his way to the front of the house and discovered the olive oil can and its unlit fuse. Karmiol’s cry for help had obviously disturbed the Arab bomber and caused him to back off before he could light the fuse.

Gazit returned to his command position and, minutes later, he heard Karmiol make a challenge in English, “Who’s there?”

The reply in confident, commanding Arabic was, “It’s us, boys.” Then, as Gazit watched, Karmiol raised his Sten gun and swept the slope in front of the house with a burst of fire. Gazit observed an Arab, silhouetted in the moonlight, fall to the ground.

At dawn the Haganah was still entrenched. And the first news Abu Dayieh received from his eastern flank was bad. A small party of Jewish reinforcements was moving up the hill behind Kastel. It was led by the Palmach’s Uzi Narciss, the original conqueror of the Arab village. He was bringing Gazit’s beleaguered men 50,000 rounds of ammunition, treasure from the Haganah’s latest smuggling operation.