1948 жылғы Палестина соғысындағы қырғындар мен жаппай өлтірулер

Overview of massacres in the 1948 Palestine war

Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and unarmed soldiers. The historiography of the events has been revisited by the New Historians, starting in the 1980s as well as by Palestinian scholars.

After about 30 years of conflict in Mandatory Palestine between Palestinian Arabs, the British authorities and Palestinian Jews, the British decided in February 1947 to terminate the Mandate and, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (II) recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan of partition of Palestine. The vote was rejected by the Arab parties, and was immediately followed by a civil war between Palestinian Arabs who were supported by the Arab Liberation Army against the Palestinian Jews, while the region was still fully under British rule. The day after the vote, Arabs launched attacks against the Jews, killing 126 of them during the first two weeks and 75 were massacred in a refugee camp in Aden as a retaliation. In Jerusalem, attacks targeted Jewish businesses and residents of Jewish neighborhoods, some of whom were stabbed in the street or murdered on buses. Jews were also attacked in Arab neighborhoods. In the Kibbutz of Gvulot, six Jewish teenage girls were murdered. In major cities, snipers (including mercenaries) fired at Jewish pedestrians and traffic. The Carmel Market was also attacked and grenades were thrown in the Jewish quarters. Across the country, Jewish cars were the target of stone throwing, while the consulates of Poland and Sweden, which voted in favor of partition, were attacked. In December 1947, one of the striking images remains the attack on the new Mamilla Mall. The death toll on the Arab side is unclear, but according to Benny Morris, it might have been slightly higher or much higher than the Jewish one. In his book, Morris mentions an estimate of 12,000 provided by Haj Amin al Husseini in 1950. According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres. Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta lists 33 massacres, half of them occurring during the civil war period. The main massacres and attacks against Jewish civilians were the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre where 39 Jews were killed by Arab workers after Irgun members had thrown a bomb into the crowd and the Kfar Etzion massacre where around 120 150 residents and defenders were killed by Arab irregulars, according to some accounts with the participation of Arab Legion soldiers. The Hadassah medical convoy massacre, with 80 deaths, included the mass killing of medical personnel by Arabs. According to Rosemarie Esber, both Israeli archives and Palestinian testimonies confirm killings occurred in numerous Arab villages. Morris said that the "worst cases" were the Saliha massacre with 60 to 70 killed, the Deir Yassin massacre with around 112, the Lydda massacre with around 250, the Tantura massacre with between 40–200+, and the Abu Shusha massacre with 60–70. In Al Dawayima, accounts of the death toll vary. Saleh Abd al Jawad reports 100 200 casualties, David Ben Gurion gave the figure of 70–80. Saleh Abd al Jawad reports on the village's mukhtar account that 455 people were missing following the al Dawayima massacre, including 170 women and children. On 4 January 1948, the Lehi detonated a lorry bomb against the headquarters of the paramilitary al Najjada located in Jaffa's Town Hall, killing 15 Arabs and injuring 80. During the night between 5 and 6 January, in Jerusalem, the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel that had been reported to hide Arab militiamen, killing 24 people. The next day, Irgun members in a stolen police van rolled a barrel bomb into a large group of civilians who were waiting for a bus by the Jaffa Gate, killing 20. Another Irgun bomb went off in the Ramla market on 18 February, killing 7 residents and injuring 45. On 28 February, the Palmach organised a bombing attack against a garage in Haifa, killing 30 people. From 1 February 1948, supporters of Amin al Husseini organised, with the help of British deserters, three attacks against the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Using car bombs aimed at the headquarters of the Palestine Post, the Ben Yehuda Street market and the backyard of the Jewish Agency's offices, killing 22, 53 and 13 Jewish people respectively. During the first months of 1948, the railway between Cairo and Haifa was often targeted. On 31 March, it was mined near Binyamina, a Jewish settlement in the neighborhood of Caesarea, killing 40 persons and wounding 60. The casualties were all civilians, mostly Arabs. Although there were some soldiers on the train, none were injured. The Palestine Post and the New York Times attributed the attack to Lehi.

According to historians, whether deliberate or otherwise, the massacres did have a strong impact on the exodus of the Palestinian Arab population. For example, the Deir Yassin massacre is considered to have generated more panic among the Arab population than all other previous operations together and to have caused a mass flight of Palestinians in numerous areas, partly because the actual events at Deir Yassin were greatly embellished by the media. Additionally, the Deir Yassin massacre became a strong argument for the Arab states to intervene against Israel. Arab League chief Azzam Pasha stated that 'The massacre of Deir Yassin was to a great extent the cause of the wrath of the Arab nations and the most important factor for sending [in] the Arab armies'.

Starting in the 1980s a group of revisionist Israeli historians have challenged the Israeli historical narrative. Israeli New Historians have pointed at accounts of killings and massacres.

After the Partition vote, some Arab leaders threatened the Jewish population of Palestine. For example, they spoke of "driving the Jews into the sea" or ridding Palestine "of the Zionist Plague". While Benny Morris considers the real picture of the Arab aims to be more complex, notably because they were well aware they could not defeat the Jews, Gelber, on the other hand, regards these public statements as 'meaningless' and judges that the 'actions [of their armies] imply that the aims of the Arab invasion were decidedly limited and focused mainly on saving Arab Palestine from total Jewish domination'.

During the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine before the war, the criterion of "purity of arms" was used to distinguish between the respective attitudes of the Irgun and Haganah towards Arabs, with the latter priding itself on its adherence to this principle. But if it "remained a central value in education" it was "rather vague and intentionally blurred" at the practical level. In 1946, at a meeting held between the heads of the Haganah, Ben Gurion predicted a confrontation between the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab states. Concerning the "principle of purity of arms", he stressed that: "The end does not justify all means. Our war is based on moral grounds" and during the 1948 War, the Mapam, the political party affiliated to Palmach, asked for "a strict observance of the Jewish Purity of arms to secure the moral character of [the] war". When he was criticized by Mapam members for his attitude concerning the Arab refugee problem, Ben Gurion reminded them the events of Lydda and Ramla and the fact Palmach officers had been responsible for the "outrage that had encouraged the Arabs' flight made the party uncomfortable." During the Civil War, the Haganah operatives had been cautioned against harming women and children but the Irgun and Lehi were less observing this distinction, while "Palestinian Arab militias often deliberately targeted civilians." In contrast to Morris, the Jewish inhabitants of the Old City were expelled and 600 of them were killed, while the Jewish villages were evacuated by the inhabitants before being destroyed. Atrocities committed by the Arab armies includes women being dismembered in Nitzanim in June, 14 Jewish civilians killed while supplying an orphanage in Ben Shemen Jewish combatants captured by Arab militias, were frequently tortured and mutilated in particularly violent ways. Pregnant women have also been found disembowelled. With regard to massacres perpetrated by the IDF at the end of the war and particularly during Operation Hiram, Morris and Yoav Gelber consider that lack of discipline cannot explain the violence. Gelber points out the "hard feelings [of the soldiers] towards the Palestinians" and the fact that the Palestinians had not fled like in former operations. According to the analysis of Gelber, based on a counting of the inhabitants, the refugees, the POW's and the deaths, there were no people missing and therefore no massacre could have occurred. Ilan Pappé considers that the testimonies of former Alexandroni soldiers and Palestinian refugees prove, on the contrary, that at least 200 unarmed Tantura villagers were killed, whether in revenge for the death of Israeli soldiers due to sniper shots or later when they were unjustifiably accused of hiding weapons.

Nadine Picaudou, author of The Historiography of the 1948 Wars, studied the evolution of Palestinian historiography on the 1948 war. She argues that the Deir Yassin massacre long remained the only one discussed 'as if it sufficed to summarize the tragedy of Palestinian victims'. She thinks that during the period for which 'collective memory conflated with Palestinian nationalist mobilization, one exemplary event sufficed to express the tragedy'. Referring to the study performed in 2007 by Saleh Abd al Jawad, Zionist Massacres: the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War, she writes that the massacres engaged Palestinian historians' concerns relatively late, but that when "Palestinians began to write their history, the issue of massacres inevitably became one of the relevant factors in accounting for the mass exodus." Picaudou underlines that "Palestinian historiography has retained the nakba paradigm, which reduces the Palestinians to the status of passive victims of Israeli policies, as [illustrated by] the limited attention accorded by researchers to the 1947–48 battles ( )". On 9 April, around 120 men from the Irgun and the Lehi attacked the village in the context of the Operation Nachshon. The poorly armed inhabitants showed unexpected resistance to the attack by fighting back. The assailants suffered four dead. Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine, visited Deir Yassin on April 11, 1948, and observed "a total of more than 200 dead, men, women, and children." After the fighting, some villagers were executed after being exhibited in the streets of Jerusalem. A group of prisoners were executed in a nearby quarry and others at Sheikh Bader. Historians estimate today the total number of deaths at 100 to 120. In 2007, Israeli military historian Uri Milstein published a controversial book, Blood Libel at Deir Yassin, in which he claims that the events of Deir Yassin were the result of a battle and not of a massacre. Moreover, he goes further and rejects the reality of the atrocities that followed the attack on the village. Nadine Picadou also nuances the events and considers that in the Palestinian historiography, "the massacre of Deir Yassin eclipsed the battle of Deir Yassin". that was protected by Haganah soldiers and armoured cars, tried to reach the enclave. Arab fighters had been informed by an Australian officer that the convoy's mission was to use the enclave to attack Arab quarters and cut off the road to Ramallah. A large Arab force then ambushed the convoy, and, in the fight, several vehicles were shot up, and couldn't withdraw. The battle raged for seven hours and British intervention was late in coming. 79 people from the convoy were killed, mainly civilians. Following the incident, Jacques de Reynier urged that in future all convoys be relieved of military escorts and placed under Red Cross protection. This was quickly agreed to. He also asked that the enclave be demilitarised under similar conditions, but this was refused by the Zionist authorities. While the whole event is usually seen as a massacre, Morris considers it to have been, rather, a battle, given that there was shooting between Arab and Haganah militia and targeted a supply convoy headed for Mount Scopus. He points out however that the death toll incurred by medical personal, who were unarmed, was massive

In July 1948, the Israelis launched the Operation Danny to conquer the cities of Lydda and Ramle. The first attack on Lydda occurred on the afternoon of 11 July when the 89th battalion mounted on armoured cars and jeeps raided the city "spraying machine gun fire at anything that moved". "Dozens of Arabs (perhaps as many as 200)" were killed. According to Morris, the description of this raid written by one of the soldiers "combine[s] elements of a battle and a massacre". fired against the occupying troops. Israeli soldiers felt threatened, vulnerable because they were isolated among thousands of hostile townspeople and 'angry [because] they had understood that the town had surrendered'. '[They] were told to shoot 'at any clear target' or, alternatively, at anyone 'seen on the streets'. The Arab inhabitants panicked. Many rushed in the streets and were killed. There is controversy among historians about the events that followed. According to Morris, at the Dahmash mosque some prisoners tried to break out and escape, probably fearing to be massacred. IDF threw grenades and fired rockets at the compound and several dozens Arabs were shot and killed. Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that there is a confusion between two mosques. According to them, detainees were only gathered around the Great Mosque, where no incident occurred and it is a group of 50 60 armed Arabs who barricaded in the Dahmash mosque. Its storming resulted in the death of 30 Arab militiamen and civilians, including elderly, women and children. Morris writes that the "jittery Palmahniks massacr[ed] detainees in a mosque compound." According to Gelber, it was a "bloodier massacre" than at Deir Yassin. Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that it was "an intense battle where the demarcation between civilians, irregular combatants and regular army units hardly existed."