Free The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

were erased from the face of the earth by the time the truce ended on 8 July 1948.
    All in all, the level of preparation the military command was engaged in during June for the next stages showed a growing confidence in the Israeli Army’s ability to continue not only its ethnic cleansing operations, but also its extension of the Jewish state beyond the seventy-eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine it had already occupied. Part of this confidence was due to the significant reinforcement of its air force. At the end of May, theIsraelis were only disadvantaged in one area: air power. In June, however, they received a sizable shipment of new aeroplanes to supplement their rather primitive machines.
    Operation ‘Yitzhak’ was launched on 1 June 1948 to attack and occupy Jenin, Tul-Karem and Qalqilya and capture the bridges on the Jordan River. As we saw, Jenin was attacked the previous month, but the Iraqi contingent guarding the city and its environs had successfully defended the area. 5 Although Israeli air operations were primarily limited to raids along the state’s borders at this time, in the military archives one can find orders for the arial bombardment of Jenin and Tul-Karem, as well as other villages on the Palestine’s border. From July onwards, aeroplanes were used remorselessly in the cleansing operations, helping to force the villagers into a mass exodus – and indiscriminately targeting anyone unable to take cover in time.
    At the beginning of June, Ben-Gurion was content to focus on the long march into the upper Galilee, driving his troops up to the border with Lebanon. The Lebanese army was 5000 strong, of which 2000 were stationed on the border. They were supported by 2000 ALA volunteers, most of them stationed around the city of Nazareth and the rest scattered in small groups among the dozens of villages in the area. Under the charismatic command of Fawzi al-Qawqji, the volunteers continued as best they could to defend the villages and show some resilience in the face of the looming Israeli offensive. But they were hampered not only numerically and by their inferior military skill, but also by the poor quality of their weapons and lack of ammunition.
    One of the ALA battalions was the Hittin battalion. The commander at one point sent the following message to al-Qawqji: ‘The battalion’s equipment is not usable because of the amount of dirt in it. This includes rifles, machine guns and vehicles.’ The commander also complained that there was only one logistic supply line from Syria, which was often blocked, and even when the supply lines happened to be open, there were other problems to overcome. At one point he received the following telegram: ‘In reply to your telegram asking for cars to remove supply from Tarshiha to Rama, we have no fuel for the cars so we cannot reach you’ (sent on 29 June and intercepted by the Israeli military intelligence).
    Thus, in the absence of any regular Arab troops the Galilee lay wide open for an Israeli assault. But as early as June, and increasingly over the following months, the villages themselves were beginning to offer the advancing troops more resistance, which is one reason there are stillPalestinian villages in the Galilee today, unlike Marj Ibn Amir, the coast, the inner plains and the northern Negev.
    The desperate courage of the Palestinian villages, however, also accounts for the brutality of the front. As they progressed, the Israeli troops were more determined than ever to resort to summary executions and any other means that might speed up the expulsions. One of the first villages to fall prey to this strategy was the village of Mi’ar, today the location of several Jewish settlements built in the 1970s: Segev, Yaad and Manof. The irony is that part of the land taken by force in 1948 remained uninhabited for decades, and was even cultivated by Palestinians living nearby until it was re-confiscated in the 1970s, as part of what Israel calls ‘the