Israel/Hamas War Superthread

[Dill]

(01-01-2024, 03:34 PM)Bengalzona Wrote: But I'm going to get away from Benny for a moment and discuss a different view that I believe links back in to his writings that can help make sense of some of the things going on in the Mandate in 1947-1948. I'm sure you are very familiar with the My Lai (Son My) massacre in Vietnam in 1968. In my generation, it was a required reading part of the ethics and UCMJ training for officer cadets (and hopefully sill is). There are obvious parallels to that situation and the Deir Yassin massacre. At My Lai, a battalion-sized task force was ordered to close in on the village, burn the houses, kill the livestock, destroy food supplies, and poison the wells in order deny the enemy (VC 48th Local Force Battalion) access and refuge at the village (the village was suspected of supporting the VC).

I'll pause here for a moment to note that, as distasteful as this may sound to some folks, this (so far) is a military procedure. Clearing a village and then destroying it in order to deny the enemy access has been standard operating procedure for just about every army in the world at some point for the past several hundred years. The Soviets evacuated and razed thousands of miles of the entire western portion of their own country when they retreated from the Germans in 1941. In World War II, the order was often as simple as "clear the village". Nowadays, we also include it in our counter-terrorism/asymmetrical warfare playbook.

Skipping back to My Lai. Things went afoul, obviously. A stressed-out company which had just suffered 28 casualties due to mines and booby-traps in the prior weeks before was led into an orgy of murder and rape by a "dumber-than-a-hoe-handle" butterball lieutenant and vague operation orders from his equally dumbass captain. In the aftermath, the story got publicized and some people back in the U.S. felt bad about it. 2LT Calley was the only soldier court martialed for the massacre, but the sentence was commuted by Nixon. The U.N. police never showed up to arrest soldiers and hold war crimes trials a la Nuremburg or Kosovo. Funny how that works, eh.

So, let us look at Plan Dalet. Plan Dalet was the final part of a four-part plan by the Haganah to accommodate their goal of securing a Jewish state and began on April 2, 1948. In late 1947, Jewish and non-Jewish populations were inter-mixed. The main concept of the plan was a plan to link up command. communications, and support between Jewish majority areas for mutual protection from a promised offensive by regional Arab forces. To create those link-ups and secure them, it was realized that a large number of villages with primarily Arab occupants would need to be addressed. These villages fell into two main categories: villages which were along the defensive fortification system and villages which were not, but were within the partition plan border or in a strategic position just outside the border (see Plan Dalet, Section 3 (b) for reference). In the former category, a search and control operation would be mounted, the population expelled, and the village destroyed. In the latter category (the majority of villages, the procedure was to first determine if there was any resistance. If there was resistance, then any armed resistance would be destroyed and the villagers expelled. If there was no resistance, the the village would be searched and a garrison would be temporarily left, eventually transitioning to the village's own administration with a just a regional Jewish liason officer.  

This looks to me like pretty straight forward military plan to occupy an area and prepare for its defense, the type of plan with the same logic and military procedures we have been using here in the U.S. for decades. And I don't see this as a plan of mass expulsion or ethnic cleansing. As Benny Morris wrote:

"The essence of the plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the territory of the prospective Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the future State's borders before, and in anticipation of, the invasion [by Arab states]. 

You've put a heap on my plate, B, so I'll have to chew it in small pieces--starting with the analogy between My Lai and Deir Yassin.

1. Your analogy raises the issue of "military necessity," which is recognized in the laws of war, and can include the transfer of civilians from battle space and destruction of hard structures and material which could advantage an enemy. I agree this is the law, though My Lai doesn't seem the best example of legal "clearing." The question is whether this doctrine can be applied to Deir Yassin--was there legitimate grounds for clearing this and surrounding villages--and by extension to the 529 other villages so cleared.

2. My Lai isn't just an example of "clearing," but also of rogue behavior--rape and massacre of innocents. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the juxtaposition to My Lai suggests that what happened at Deir Yassin was a similar breach of protocol--a kind of one off that doesn't really characterize Haganah goals (the IDF did not exist yet, and Irgun had not been organizationally absorbed into its single command). 

The way to assess "1" is to determine, first, what the  ultimate goal and extent of the "clearing" was, and the way to assess "2" is determine how common village massacres were and their relation to operational goals. And in this case, especially, to the goals of Plan Dalet. 

You are correct that clearing Deir Yassin (and two other villages in the vicinity) was part of the effort to secure the coastal road into Jerusalem. But the driving of villagers from their homes, which had begun the final week of Nov. '47, and continued into late fall of '48, was ultimately intended first to alter the demographic of the Jewish Partition, and then of the territory taken from the Arab Partition. Another consideration was that, under the UN proposal, all those Arabs would not only be citizens but own most of the land. When villages were emptied of Palestinians, they were then either permanently destroyed or given over to Jews or, in a few cases, Druze and Christian refugees from other destroyed villages. Those that were not destroyed were given Hebrew names, and most Mosques and churches were destroyed or converted to something else--the goal being to erase the Arab presence/history altogether.  Hundreds of villages thus secured did not "resist," and so it was quite beyond the STATED goals of plan Dalet. In some cases, Palmach or Irgun went in at night and dynamited homes with families in them, driving out those who still lived by morning.  On this score, one of the primary criticisms of Morris is that he doesn't draw the conclusion regarding "ethnic cleansing" that his own work demonstrates, though he does agree that the expulsion of inhabitants from Lydda (also accompanied by masscre) and Ramle (now renamed "Lod" and "Ramla") was to induce "civilian panic" and flight--intended to be permanent.

A final point to be made with regard to "military necessity" is that once the war was over, Israel kept the land and homes thus taken, distributing all to Jewish immigrants through auctions and the like.  Home furnishings in places like Jaffa and Haifa were simply turned over to Jewish families, along with the homes and apartments. And the former owners/citizens of the Jewish state were not allowed to return. Both the US and the UN demanded that the expelled Arab citizens be expelled after the war, and Ben Gurion refused. That was not from military, but political necessity. Remember that Ben-Gurion wanted a "viable" Jewish state, an ethnic state, which he thought could never be secure if Arabs made up 47% of the population and owned most of the land.

The frequency of massacres is another touchy question. The IDF touts a "Purity of Arms" doctrine and has for 70 years tended to dispute any and all accusations it has wantonly killed civilians. Accusations of violation are often treated as "blood libel" and straightforward anti-semitism. As of 1969, the Israeli state denied that even Deir Yassin was a massacre, though "official" Israeli history has been in retreat ever since. The definition of "massacre" is also in question, with Israeli sources tending to call it a "battle" if any shots were fired in self defense.  Morris lists but 20 massacres. Pappe says 35 with 6 still being investigated. Palestinian historians like Jamal go as high as 70. If we go by historians like Pappe and Rashidi, as well Morris to some degree, then Deir Yassin is only exceptional in the attention it has received. It was not even the largest massacre (Morris puts Lydda at somewhere between 250-1700), but the most famous because the Irgun went to great lengths to publicize it, welcoming European and US reporters to a briefing and upping the number killed at 254 (to increase panic), though not mentioning the killing of children and rape. (The question of rape, at Deir Yassin and elsewhere, deserves as separate post.) 

As you note in the remainder of your post, documentation of military actions by the UN was very difficult. My goal here is just to raise questions about the assessment of historians like Gelber, who seem to adhere to closely to the written document of "D" and not how it was actually, routinely implemented. The Jewish Agency and the Hagenah's Consultancy of course are not going to write out orders for massacre, and if Pappe is correct (he had access to the records) they argued bitterly about expulsions and the harshness of methods, but then tended to accept everything that worked to clear Arabs from land the new state wanted to control.