The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

liked the Sa‘sa operation for the way it had ‘caused the Arabs to flee’.

attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings.

is a war aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community,’ never referring to the passivity of the Palestinians or the provocative nature of Zionist actions.

If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included.

-Gurion spelled out what collateral damage meant: ‘Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.’5

There was no need, stressed Ben-Gurion, to distinguish any more between the ‘innocent’ and the ‘guilty’ – the time had come for inflicting collateral damage.

admitting candidly in the 1960s that: ‘If it had not been for the open [Zionist military] preparations which had a provocative nature, the drift into war [in 1948] could have been averted.’)

These were people whom they themselves had first invited to come and stay with them back in the late Ottoman period, who had arrived wretched and penniless from Europe, and with whom they had shared a thriving cosmopolitan city – until that fateful decision by the UN.

went into one of the city’s Arab neigbourhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya, expelled its people and blew up its houses. This act could be regarded as the official beginning of the ethnic cleansing operation in urban Palestine.

between men and women: in their next meeting, the Consultancy decided that such a separation was an unnecessary complication for future operations.