These are real Jaffa oranges, being gathered in the groves of Palestine for shipment to Britain.
Images from another time when Palestinians still worked their land.
Few Palestinians, if any, could imagine they were to become victims of what would later be known as: 'ethnic cleansing'.
After 30 years of British rule the question of Palestine was referred to the United Nations.
The UN now became the forum for conflict. Talks focused on dividing Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state.
JEWISH AGENCY SPOKESMAN AT THE UNITED NATIONS.
We thank the Assembly of the United Nations for granting the Jewish Agency for Palestine a hearing. When we speak of a Jewish state, we do not have in mind any racial state or any theocratic state, but one which will be based upon full equality and the rights of all inhabitants without distinction of religion or race and without domination or subjugation.
November the 29th, 1947.
The UN General Assembly met to devise a plan for the partition of Palestine.
DR SALMAN ABU SITTA FOUNDER OF ATLAS OF PALESTINE 1948.
This is a map of the land. As you can see, the Jews owned no more than 5.5% of the total area of Palestine.
United Nations Resolution 181 divided Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state with Jerusalem being an internationalised city.
The Jewish state would be granted 56% of the land.
The city of Jaffa was included as an enclave of the Arab state.
The land known today as the Gaza Strip was split from its surrounding agricultural regions making the proposed state all but impractical in the eyes of many Palestinians.
The draft resolution was presented for voting.
The resolution of the Special Committee for Palestine was adopted by 33 votes, with 13 against, and 10 abstentions.
The US, led by President Truman made this resolution a reality and paid for it through bribery and pressure on member state representatives. Some former UN envoys, like those from Liberia, the Philippines, and Guatemala have admittedin their memoirs that the US put pressure on them or their countries to vote for the resolution instead of abstaining or voting with the Arabs.
1947 - Arab newspapers ran a 'name and shame' list of the countries that voted for the UN partition plan. And Arab protesters took to the streets.
It was unthinkable in the United Nations or any other place in the world that a national liberation movement would share the land with a settler community by dividing it. What was important for the Zionists in the United Nations partition resolution was that it provided Israel with international legitimacy but they didn't care for the borders and that didn't stop them from thinking how to dispose of the Palestinians.
They wanted to lay down the principle of a Jewish state first. Once this principle was accepted by the international community, they started working on the details.
So transferring the Palestinians was a direct result of the idea of a Jewish state in a place with no Jewish majority on the ground. The issue was straightforward: a Jewish state implies transfer.
Following the partition resolution, Britain announced it would end its mandate in Palestine on May the 14th 1948.
Outraged by the vote for partition, the Arab League decided to prepare the Palestinians for an armed resistance.
Some 3,000 volunteers, some from across the Arab world, were sent for training in Syria.
A figurehead for the struggle was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni.
From his refuge in Lebanon he felt confident the Palestinians with the help of the Arab countries could prevail.
Hajj Amin al-Husayni left Palestine in 1937. He was away for 11 years. He wasn't aware of the situation on the ground. People here following the military preparations of the well-armed Jews. They watched their kibbutzim and settlements and wondered what they could do against them.
Palestinians began to organize local committees for self-defence.
By the end of 1947, groups of young men were travelling to Damascus, Beirut and Cairo to acquire weapons and receive military training.
When the British were preparing to leave Palestine, we didn't have weapons. My father gave me money and I bought a gun with only three bullets for 100 Palestinian liras.
They bought a few rifles, and a few young men trained with them.
Early 1948.
Despite the presence of the British, the Jewish Agency led by David Ben Gurion asserted increasing military and administrative influence in Palestine.
Jewish paramiltary forces included the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
During the first half of 1948, their numbers swelled to as many as 40,000 men and women.
On the other side, there were as few as 3,000 Palestinian irregulars.
This was the remnants of the fighting force smashed by the British after the Arab revolt in 1936.
There were also an estimated 4,000 volunteers from the region, known as the 'Arab Liberation Army' - led by an Arab nationalist called Fawzi al-Qawukji.
In terms of fighters, the Palestinians were outnumbered and outgunned.
A small group of Zionist leaders and military commanders met regularly on a weekly basis from Feb 1947 to Feb 1948, for a whole year, planning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They didn't decide about it in a day. They had a weekly meeting and each week they became more and more convinced that this was the right way forward.
In the first week of 1948 hostilities picked up.
There were two bomb attacks against Palestinian targets.
The first, a car bomb destroyed the old Ottoman government house in Jaffa, it killed 26 people.
The second, the bombing of the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem killed over 20.
At Oxford University's Middle East Centre, we found an important document.
It contained details of a meeting on January 6th 1948 between the British High Commissioner for Palestine and David Ben-Gurion.
The High Commissioner enquired about reports that Haganah was responsible for the attack on the Semiramis hotel.
Ben-Gurion conceded this 'might be the case'.
And in a letter he sent two days later, Ben-Gurion confirmed Haganah's responsibility for the attack.
During the first three months of 1948, Jewish paramilitary groups carried out dozens of attacks on Palestinian cities and villages. Some operations were carried out by special units of Jews disguised as Arabs known as 'mistarivim'.
The Jews used to sneak into villages at night and plant explosives to blow up homes. So, we started to carry the rifle and take turns to guard the village.
The direct challenge to the United Nations and its powers of war prevention comes from Palestine. The definition of legal and illegal forces becomes daily more obscure. Haganah, the force first legally raised for the defense of Jewish settlements, appears to function hand in glove with Irgun Zvai, Leumi, the outlawed terrorist army.
The well-trained Jewish forces began to put their plans into action.
On February the 15th 1948, fighters from the Haganah and Palmach organisations attacked the village of Qisarya, near Haifa.
A young man called Yitzhak Rabin is believed to have been one of the field commanders in the assault Over 1,000 Palestinians were expelled from Qisaraya as the village was torched to the ground.
What the Zionists forces did, they targeted five villages on the coast and experimented with them to see whether it works. And they expelled the inhabitants of five villages under the eyes of the British soldiers who were there, or still there, until May 1948 and they found out that it was quite easy, that it didn't take much. There wasn't much resistance. The British didn't interfere.
Looking at how Palestinian villages fell, we can easily conclude that each village faced a planned military attack by the Zionist military organisations.
Certain Jewish officers realized that it was very easy to expel Palestinian farmers from their land. The objective of the Zionist movement was to have a Jewish state with the minimum possible number of Arabs.
March the 10th proved to be a fateful day.
The final meeting was on March 10, 1948, when they drafted the plan, Plan D or Plan Dalet, which finalized the last details about how to expel the Palestinians and dispossess them.
Ben-Gurion had given his clear instructions: cleanse, and expel as many Arabs as you can.
A diary entry from Ben-Gurion exposes the extent of the Zionist agenda.
He writes: "In each attack, a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the destruction of homes and the expulsion of the population."
The Palestinian and Arab fighters were determined to resist.
This newspaper from March the 16th 1948, reports that a Jordanian volunteer, a commander of the Haifa garrison, was trying to obtain weapons.
His name was Mohammad Al-Hunaity.
Al-Hunaity was killed in an ambush on the road to Haifa.
He had fought for Palestine and had paid the ultimate price.
Abd Al-Qadir Al-Husayni was the charismatic commander of Palestinian forces in the Jerusalem area.
He travelled to Damascus to plead for arms. He returned empty handed.
On the 6th of April, he wrote a letter to the Arab League, holding it responsible for leaving the Palestinians defenceless, and without arms.
Eventually, Al-Husayni had to sell his grandfather's land to buy weapons.
On April the 8th, he rushed to the defence of Al-Qastal, a village overlooking the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road.
Here Arab fighters faced heavily-armed Jewish forces.
Al-Husayni was an experienced commander having fought against the British during the 1936 Arab Revolt.
He was killed in the battle of Al-Qastal.
His funeral drew a large crowd of mourners; his death was a severe blow to Palestinian morale.
Jewish forces were gaining the upper hand.
They began to seize areas that the UN partition plan had allotted to the Arab state.
In this land grab, little discrimination was made between fighters and civilians. At dawn on April the 9th 1948, a combined force of Irgun and Stern Gang fighters moved into the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem.
The result was a massacre. Over 100 Palestinians were killed;including women, children and the elderly.
The village of Deir Yassin was just 3 km away from the office of the British police commander in Jerusalem. He was told about the massacre and responded: 'it is none of our business.'
British troops began their withdrawal a month before the date set for the end of the mandate.
As soon as they moved out of an area, Jewish fighters moved in.
There was a British army camp. This camp was the reason for the fall of our village and our expulsion. During night, the British handed the camp over to the Jews. Palestinians from the neighbouring villages went to occupy the camp next morning and were shocked to see the Jews had already taken over.
The Jews were stationed inside the camp. When the Arabs approached, the Jews started shooting. Some were killed and some wounded. The wounded crawled to the fields but those who died remained there on the ground.
Britain gave its weapons, armoured vehicles, and tanks to the Jews before they departed.
On April 16. The British forces in Tiberias urged the people to leave.
Only a small number of fighters were left in Tiberias and they were all killed.
On April the 18th, the British army withdrew from the city of Tiberias.
Before leaving, they forced some 5,000 of the city's Arab inhabitants to evacuate their homes.
The following day, Jewish forces seized Tiberias.
April the 21st.
By noon, the last British troops completed their withdrawal from Haifa.
That afternoon, the city was stormed by thousands of Haganah fighters.
Some Palestinians and the Arab volunteers - stayed to defend their homes.
After two-days of street battles, 60 of the defenders had been killed. The rest withdrew from the city.
From Haifa heading north to Lebanon came right past our entrance gates and it was a sad sight to see many poor Arabs some on pick up trucks, cars, beds on the tops, some on foot: a never ending stream of Arabs coming out of the city. The Jews drove a lot of the Arabs out of Haifa, very sad sight.
There is no doubt about that; we had the arms to do it. Fifty thousand Arabs were forced to flee their homes in Haifa never to return.
Today a memorial stands in the city.
Erected by the Israelis, it commemorates what they call the 'Liberation' of Haifa.
By late April 1948, the city of Haifa had fallen to Jewish forces. The coastal town of Jaffa was now their next target.
The fighting in Jaffa, in the Jabalia area, was extremely tough because it was right next to Tel Aviv. Do you know who led the resistance there? It was a woman commanding the volunteers there. Her name was Mouhiba Khorshid. This should be written in history.
Although designated as part of the Arab state in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Jewish forces set their sights on Jaffa.
During the last week of April, bombing of the city intensified.
The city's inhabitants were forced to flee the shelling - by sea to Lebanon and by road to east Palestine and Jordan.
By May the 14th 1948, the Haganah had taken control of Jaffa. 70,000 of its inhabitants had fled.
The remaining males were transferred to central detention camps.
Detainees were forced to bury the corpses of fellow citizens rotting in the streets.
They were also forced to transport the contents of Arab homes, ransacked by Jewish fighters.
They brought trucks and took all valuables from Arab homes. They ransacked famous libraries. They took the books to the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The Zionist military organisations adopted a certain style of forced expulsions.
The village of Al Bassa was surrounded and shelled from three directions, while the northern side was left open for the people to flee In Al Bassa, as in other villages, the Zionists killed many people. as a result of the siege and the bombardment, thousands of terrified residents fled.
Those who couldn't flee, took refuge in the church.
After the Haganah entered the village, they took four boys and girls aged 14 or 15 from inside the church and killed them. The remainder were expelled.
The forced expulsion in this case was towards Lebanon, because the north direction was only open.
The same thing happened when refugees were driven towards Syria by only keeping the north-east route open. The same method was used to force people to the east towards the Jordan Valley.
This is how the refugee crisis was created by the Israeli military institution.
Half of the Palestinians who became refugees had already been expelled from their houses by May 1948, so I could say that out of the 530 Palestinian villages that were destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, half of these villages were demolished by May 15.
Ethnic cleansing is an ideology that wants to get rid of one ethnic group in it entirety from the place where it lives. The second stage of ethnic cleansing is to erase these people from their place in history, so it is also a cultural act of erasure, of wiping them out of history, out of memory. And the third stage is to make sure that they will never come back.
Although the British army was still present in Palestine, Jewish paramilitaries seized control of five major cities.
Some two hundred villages were destroyed.
Ahead of the full British withdrawal, more than 350,000 Palestinians were driven from their land.
May the 15th was the date set for the end of the British mandate.
Yet for the Jews, this posed a problem. The 15th fell on a Saturday, the Sabbath.
So celebratory announcements of the Jewish state were sent out a day earlier - on Friday May the 14th.
The British army hastened their retreat.
The Jews had been gearing up to take over.
On May the 14th, 1948, in this grand Jerusalem home, the last British High Commissioner of Palestine, Alan Cunningham, signed a document terminating the British mandate.
Over three decades, the British presence had helped pave the way for the realization of the Zionists dream.
In the morning, Cunningham inspected the guard of honour in front of his Jerusalem home. He then flew to Haifa.
From Haifa he sailed to Cyprus and the British flag was lowered.
From the time the British occupied Palestine in 1917, to when they left in 1948, the number of Jews is estimated to have multiplied ten times to half a million.
Meanwhile, as the British bid farewell to Palestine, Ben-Gurion arrived in Tel Aviv to ceremoniously declare the independence of the State of Israel.
The state of Israel was signed into existence at the stroke of a pen by 25 leading members of the Jewish community.
Behind Ben-Gurion hung a portrait of Theodore Herzl, author of the book "The Jewish State" published back in 1896.
The star of David was hoisted the very same flag that had been raised at the settlement of Rishon LeZion in 1885.
Since Zionism is a dynamic movement, they knew that there was no finality about the borders then; they knew that opportunities would arise in due course to take the rest of it, and they did this in 1967.
That was the thinking behind the Zionist movement, gradualthe building of a Jewish state and then the gradual expansion of the borders of the Jewish state.
Israel they have named their state and the new citizens of Israel cheered the men who signed the Jewish declaration of Independence. They leave the hall, Ben-Gurion first, then Golda Myerson, a woman member of the new Council of State, and the Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok. Chaim Weizmann becomes Israel's first President.
Minutes after the Tel Aviv ceremony the United States amended a document on what they had previously referred to as a 'new Jewish state'.
The new wording now read: the 'State of Israel.'
It was signed by President Harry Truman, and then announced by the U.S. representative to the United Nations.
The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new state of Israel.
A new state was born on the foundations of the British Mandate.
They accepted the legacy of British presence in Palestine. When they declared independence, they took the existing structure as it was. This shows the realism and pragmatism of the early Zionist leadership headed by Ben-Gurion. They took the basic state structure from the British Mandate and then put their own Zionist stamp on it.
Immediately after the declaration of the Jewish state in Tel Aviv, all the existing institutions continued to operate in West Jerusalem, whether banking, political or municipal institutions.
By May the 15th, with the last British troops gone Arab armies entered the country from the borders of Lebanon, Egypt and what was then called Trans Jordan Their declared objective: to liberate Palestine.
That day the New York Times ran the headline: "Jews in grave danger in all Moslem lands."
No more than 24,000 soldiers entered Palestine from all seven Arab armies. This was a tragedy. The entire Arab fighting force was less than one-third the size of the Jewish forces which were also well trained, equipped and ready to fight.
The Arab armies were neither equipped nor ready. There was no unified command under King Abdullah as planned. The Iraqi army received its instructions from Baghdad.
The Arab armies were in fact one of the most bitterly divided, disorganized and ramshackle coalitions in the history of modern warfare.
The Zionist organizations were equipped to take decisions unlike the Arabs. They had modern weapons, and even their own arms factories, while we didn't. The Zionists had world-wide connections. The US and Britain stood by their side and even the Soviet Union. We had no one. By all criteria, the battle was going in favour of the Zionist organizations.
Two days after the Arab armies entered Palestine the Israeli forces drew their focus on Acre.
The Jews occupied Napoleon's Hill. From there they started firing on the old city of Acre. We waited for the Arab forces to rescue us, but no one came.
Acre fell, and 10,000 of its inhabitants were expelled.
"We were betrayed by the Arab states. We didn't leave our land willingly."
Prince Abdul Ilah of Iraq ordered them to retreat, so they went back. Before they left, they took earth from the ground, and poured it on their heads in sorrow. They were shouting treason, treason.
The Jordanian army was commanded by the Englishman, Sir John Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha.
Over 40 other British officers also served in the army and held great influence.
Under British advice, King Abdullah of Transjordan agreed to a secret deal with the Jewish leaders to avoid clashes between the Jordanian army and the Jewish fighters in return for the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Such token resistance was the reason Glubb later called the 1948 war "the phoney war."
Glubb is a very complex character. He was not the simple minded soldier that he pretended to be; but he was a highly sophisticated politician who imposed on the Arabs, Britain's partition plan. There was a meeting between Ernest Bevin, the Labour government's foreign secretary and Tawfik Abu al-Huda, the Jordanian prime minister who was accompanied by Glubb Pasha who also acted as an interpreter. Bevin asked Abu Al-Huda 'what do you plan to do?' and Abu Al-Huda said 'we plan to send the Arab Legion to protect and keep the Arab part of Palestine', and Bevin said 'that seems the sensible thing to do but don't go and invade the Jewish part.
On second of May, they the British officers of the Jordanian Army and the officers of the Haganah met for the last time to find a solution for Jerusalem, but it did not work. But what else happened in that meeting was that they brought maps which showed where the Jordanian Arab Legion would stop and will not enter the Jewish state, and where the Arab Legion stopped is today the border of the West Bank. That is how the West Bank was actually created.
Glubb Pasha adhered to this agreement, and ordered his forces to evacuate the cities of Lod and Ramleh. On July the 10th, the Jordanian forces pulled out of Lod and Ramleh.
Clear of Jordanian forces the two cities were bombed by what was now the Israeli air force.
The Israeli army then moved in, commanded by Colonel Moshe Dayan
In Lod alone, over 100 Palestinians were massacred inside the Dahmash mosque.
More than 50,000 Palestinians were expelled from the two cities.
Walking without provisions in the summer heat, many died of exhaustion in what has since become known as the ‘Lydda Death March’.
Despite the presence of the Arab forces in Palestine, atrocities were still committed. Yet few are well documented.
Israeli historian Theodor Katz submitted a thesis claiming the Israelis had committed a massacre in the coastal village of Tantura.
“They closed all the four sides of Tant...o said that my rifle is somewhere next to my house was taken like this, with a rope, to his house by two or four people and the next thing was that the rifle came out and the man did not. And those who answered there on the beach that they had no rifle were directly shot in their head. Now this is not a Palestinian story. This is a story of a Jew who was a lawyer in the state of Israel many years.
The Palestinian men of Tantoura were taken to the cemetery and there they were put in lines and they were told to begin digging and whenever a line finished digging, they were shot and fell down inside.”
“There was no worry on the Zionist leadership’s side that the soldiers would fail to understand what was expected of them because they had already dehumanized the Palestinians in their thinking and perception long before the operations themselves began.”
The state of Israel was formed through blood and fire yet this was neither the start nor the end of suffering for the Palestinians.
Source : https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/PalestineRemix/search.html?search=1947#/19/195136
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