The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

By the end of May, much of Palestine was in Zionist hands, though Jordan was still holding on to the West Bank. The Consultancy discussed a future campaign against Jordan as early as May 11, but they decided to prioritize cleansing operations during the summer. Since the tacit agreement between the Zionists and King Abdullah had effectively neutralized Jordan and its army, the 1948 war in Palestine became the “Phony War,” in the words of the Arab Legion’s English Commander-in-Chief Glubb Pasha. The commitment of the Arab governments of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq to the plight of the Palestinians was limited. Some of the Arab forces in Palestine did initially protect the areas allocated to the Palestinians by the UN, but they soon started suffering from supply chain and coordination issues, and Israel’s cleansing operations continued largely uninterrupted.

In the first titled section of the chapter, “Days of Tihur,” Pappé discusses the Hebrew term tihur (“purifying”), which was used “frequently and explicitly” after the Zionists declared the Jewish State of Israel on May 14 (150). With Plan Dalet ongoing, the main concern of Ben-Gurion and the members of the Consultancy became fighting the Arab armies while continuing to “transfer” the Palestinians out of their territories.